The Myths of Innovation 103
cgjherr writes "Ah, the technology history book, normally I'm not a fan. The writing is aloof and dry. The topics are vague, the history misinterpreted, and the lessons presented too vague to be applicable. And don't get me started on the illustrations, which are all too often pyramids with the authors perched at the top looking down on the lowly reader at the base. Thankfully, this book, "the myths of innovation" breaks all of these rules. It's an engaging, fun and quick read. The history is interesting, and the lessons presented are practical. I particularly like the author's tone. It's witty and light. Which makes this a very fast read, one that leaves you wanting even more by the end." Read below for the rest of Jack's review.
The myths of innovation is about how innovation happens in the real world in companies, universities and garages around the company. The first two chapters really draw the reader in by showing the twin fallacies of the epiphany moment and the historically clean line of innovation. Learning that innovation doesn't just come as a flash, and that lots of successes have come out of copious failure encourages us to try to innovate, and to keep trying even when we believe we have failed.| The Myths of Innovation | |
| author | Scott Berkun |
| pages | 176 |
| publisher | O'Reilly |
| rating | Excellent |
| reviewer | Jack Herrington |
| ISBN | 0596527055 |
| summary | The history of innovation with lessons learned |
This short book (147 pages of content) is presented in ten short chapters. The first two show you how anyone can be an innovator. You can think of those as the debunking chapters. The third chapter is where the author starts helping you to build some techniques to innovate. He presents how there are some reasonable methods to spur innovation and shows examples from Apple, Google, Edison, Craiglist and more.
In chapter four he shows how to overcome peoples fears of innovation and overcome the common problems with the adoption of new technologies. Chapter five, "the lone innovator", debunks the legend of, well, the lone innovator. It sounds good, and plays into our noble story of the hero, but it's not common in reality. Chapter six talks about ideas and surveys where innovators have found the ideas that they start out with. Of course, where you start is often not where you end but that's ok, since innovation is a lot more about failure than it is about success.
Chapter seven covers something I think most of us can relate to, which is that managers aren't often the innovators. Chapter eight talks about how we believe that the "best ideas always win" but that's least often the case. This sounds pessimistic, but it's actually an interesting study in how the biggest product with the most feature isn't always the best for the customer. Chapter nine, "problems and solutions", talks about framing problems to constrain the creativity and innovation. The final chapter, "innovation is always good", is at the same time the most amusing and disturbing. It covers innovations from the automobile to DDT and presents that innovation, no matter what, is always good. Agree or disagree the points are well presented.
As I say I really enjoyed this book. It's an easy read that is hard to put down. What's more it's really motivating. After reading this book you will want to dig right back into those crazy ideas lurking around in the back of your mind and give them another shot. With this book, you will have a few more tools at your disposal to turn your ideas into reality.
You can purchase The Myths of Innovation from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Expensive (Score:2)
I'll wait and hope it comes around to Safari (it's an O'Reilly book).
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And if you're a hardcore book reader, or at least a hardcore fan of a specific book series, you will re-read them many times and flip through them occasionally for your favorite bits, or for reference in a book discussion... so you need something that lasts.
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Thin period (Score:1)
Then again the Mythical Man Month is almost twice as much, so I guess perhaps the price is not out of line as I thought (though the hardcover part is still odd).
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Recent releases (both fiction and nonfiction) turn up in the warehouse stores for less than that.
No, I won't. (Score:5, Funny)
No, I won't. Remember...
They're all LONE innovators (Score:1, Funny)
Re:They're all LONE innovators (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes and no. Innovative ideas tend to happen inside environments that are conductive to them. i.e. I may come up with a brilliant idea, but that's only after having bounced 50 related ideas off my coworkers. For some types of innovation, you may even need access to equipment and tools before you can develop the idea in the first place.
As for execution, is an idea really innovative if you can't execute it? The best someone can do in that situation is write a paper and hope someone else spends the resources. To effectively execute an idea, you pretty much always need infrastructure to support its development. The "lone innovator" tends to lack that infrastructure, and is thus usually unsuccessful in his attempts to execute.
Re:They're all LONE innovators (Score:4, Insightful)
See, I have to disagree. Take the Nintendo Wii as an example. Motion sensors exist in the PS3. They exist in Gameboy games. They exist in PC Joy[sticks|pads]. So why is the Wii so innovative?
The answer lies in its execution. It's a balls-to-the-wall embracing of an immature technology because someone, somewhere had the idea that the market was ready for it. Once the initial concept was sketched out, you can bet that dozens of ideas were tossed around to come up with the Wii Remote we see today. Some of it was driven by necessity (e.g. "We need to support classic games, so what if we made it an NES controller when turned sideways?") and some of it was probably driven by thoughts about how to utilize the ideas already developed. (e.g. "We added the IR to deal with the dead reckoning drift, but what if we also used it as a mouse cursor?") The resulting package is highly innovative, even if the individual ideas are not. (Or at least, "mildly" innovative.)
Innovation simply doesn't develop in a vacuum.
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Virtually all innovations are incremental improvements. Creating a new way for the internal combustion engine to work would be very innovative, but is just an incremental improvement on our current engines. A new drivetrain with less loss of horsepower from the cranshaft to the wheel would be a great innovation, but would still just be an incremental improvement on our current cars.
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See, that's the thing - it's not a contest between whether or not it is incrementation or innovation, but rather between whether it's a disruptive innovation or an incremental innovation.
It is innovative - make no mistake. However, what is important is not how it is innovative but *why* it is innovative.
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Which is why your opinion counts for zilch. Innovation is about bringing new things (physical objects, business models, whatever) to market and turning them into market-accepted ideas, however new-ness isn't measured by a narrow reductionist view, it's measured in its totality.
The Playstation Eye Toy and Motion Club was an afterthought, in product planning terms. The reason the Wii is innovative is that it took a low-cost console design and a motion contro
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I can really see people answering surveys like "well, I don't care at all for games, but I would if the controller could be held in a single hand and I could just mimic the desired actions instead of pressing random buttons".
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http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/may2 0 07/id20070518_332210_page_2.htm [businessweek.com]
Buxton takes pains to distinguish sketches from prototypes, which are more detailed, more expensive, and more focused on testing or proving a single idea. If sketching is about asking questions, prototyping is abou
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Defeats/Prevents the purpose... (Score:2, Insightful)
I truly believe inventors or true innovators are not made but born. Anyone can learn to do something but only people with a knack or talent will do it well.
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Beliefs like that lead one down the road of mediocrity.
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Sometimes, that's exactly where one should go!
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Seconded. I'm not a brilliant programmer because I was born coding. I'm not a brilliant programmer because I have a "knack" or "innate talent." I'm a brilliant programmer because I spend all of my time studying and doing it; I work very hard to draw distinctions other people miss, and I seek out feedback and seek to always improve.
The GP's suggestion that some people are just "naturally" good at some things shows a startling lack of understanding abo
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In any case, to the contrary, there is a Scientific American article [scientificamerican.com] that addresses the topic, and even
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(Going off-topic a bit further)
I'm having trouble beleiving that you are a brilliant programmer but have no innate talent.
In practice, you either find programmers with innate talent, but no *exposure* to programming who work hard and eventually demonstrate their relative brilliance, or you find programmers with no innate talent, but a desire for compensation or recognition who believe they are brilliant, but are churning out craptastic code.
There are many levels between the two, but as a general rule, yo
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"I think most really good programmers are humble in describing their ability to absorb and integrate the concepts necessary to be able to come up with programming solutions. Some don't realize that the same traits that make them respond that way end up leading them to discover things that others might miss.
Time and effort, of course, is a part of becomming a brilliant programmer, but without some inate ability, all the time and effort in the world won't help. So, I would say:
Those people who you
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That said, innate talent does exist. Google for the video of the guy who learned Icelandic in a week (he got to be that smart after an epileptic attack, apparently). However, innate talent is rare and unpredictable and although it rises to the top on occasion (military geniuses throughout history, both good an
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Those people who you hear about who are "naturally talented" fall into one of two categories: 1) They are talented and spent a lot of time and effort getting that way, you just fail to see the time and effort -- you are just seeing the "end product."...
Oh, please. You're honestly telling me that you don't think people are naturally talented at things? You must be out of your mind. Let's put it this way: during high school, I was considered to be excellent at math. I competed in bunches of math competitions and won, I always scored high on every test, and so on, and so forth. Now, I must admit, that during those 4 years, I never (literally, never) opened a math textbook outside of class. I never studied, I hardly paid attention. I'm just being h
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I think of myself as a good programmer. But I find it difficult to think of myself as naturally brillia
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It's not rocket science, it's a new way of thinking about problems and their solutions.
Some people are born with it, others are taught it. The results are essentially the same for all but the most esoteric and rare cases.
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BUzzwords aside, the core idea, innovation is not a unique quality, is still something I've yet to see scientifically refuted. I've seen the dumbest and most me-too PHBs come up with GOOD patentable stuff with TRIZ. If that's not an endorsement, I don't know what is.
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Lots of people come up with new ideas. Can you take your new idea and create a profitable business with a marketable product? Being a smart and creative person doesn't mean that you can build a business. You probably can't learn to be smart and creative, but you can learn the techniques of starting a business.
Evolution or Intelligent Design? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not about mimicking someone, but about preferring to stand on the shoulders of giants -- even if said giants are just other people standing on other shoulders. Innovation does involve something new being added. It is also not merely adding something for the sake of adding something - it can't be "Embrace and Extend". What was there before has to have a definite, identifiable, significant limitation or flaw and the new solution has to have a definite, identifiable, significant remedy that is genuinely unique and quite possibly inspired.
There is almost nothing in the world that didn't have a predecessor. Modern writing evolved from early phonetic syllaberies which evolved from symbols representing words/ideas which evolved from pictures representing entire scenes/concepts. Each stage came from something older, but each stage required a truly amazing intellectual leap.
Now, I personally draw a distinction between innovation and invention. To me, "invention" can only really refer to the first step in any such chain. All other steps are innovative, but they are not inventive. To me, an invention can have no true precursor. There may be something that an inventor uses as a source of inspiration, some personal Muse, but the source cannot be a true predecessor. The most it can be is inspiration.
Inventions, by my definition, are extremely rare, and are almost certainly invented by individuals. Innovations, by definition, are the work of not only the innovator(s) but all predecessors as well. As such, they are by definition not the work of individuals.
Also by my definition, inventors are very much a breed apart. The way most people think precludes them from ever inventing anything - they simply cannot imagine something from scratch, they can only imagine in derivative terms. Nothing wrong with that, and for most of life it is infinitely preferable. To think totally outside the box, totally in non-derivative terms, requires a brain that has some combination of higher-functioning autism, schizo-effective disorder and borderline personality disorder, and is yet functional enough in the real world to do anything meaningful.
Inventors are almost never successful, rarely have more than one true invention in their entire life, and historically have either descended further into madness, died young as a result of that illness, and/or died in abject poverty as a result of that illness. These days, you will most likely find true inventors living homeless on the streets, suffering from alcoholism and terrible ill-health. They will not be living in the condos of Silicon Valley, sipping champagne for breakfast. The reason there are more artistic inventors than technological inventors is that the homeless can usually scrounge chalk or paints far more easily than they can chip fabrication plants.
Countries that tend to provide better services for those who can barely function in life are frequently cited for having an extraordinary number of true inventors. This isn't because they really have more, it's because their inventors are more likely to live long enough and have the means to circulate their ideas. Countries known to provide only limited or non-existent help are known for their innovators (who are often world-class) but almost never for true invention. Generally, no country can afford to fund both inventors and innovators, and almost nobody tries.
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Just to add to this, Schumpeter, the grandfather of innovation, distincts between innovation and invention as well. From the Capitalist Process (1939):
Re:Defeats/Prevents the purpose... (Score:5, Interesting)
He laughed at the person, because it is not the ideas that he was lacking in - it was the time and effort of executing those ideas that was hard.
Similarly, ideas are dime a dozen. Even *good* ideas are easy to find. Don't believe me? Just work on an area for a few months and you'll find yourself coming up with unique solutions and new ideas to solve existing problems that you (or people known to you) face.
On that note, cultures and environments that encourage innovation by letting folks come up with and work on new ideas will always succeed. I do not know about geniuses, but I have seen that even the most mediocre, average person can come up with fantastic ideas under the right circumstances and under the right environment (and the right tutelage).
There is nothing wrong in mimicking something else - if you can do something better than someone else can, then by all means go ahead. It is the end result that matters, not the uniqueness of the idea.
Ideas are worthless if you can't do something with them.
One of these things is not like the other (Score:2)
It's interesting that you start by talking about good ideas - but later specify unique ideas. "Good" and "unique" are not synonyms.
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So by unique solutions, I did not mean that they were necessarily universally unique, but rather unique to your skills and abilities (i.e. something *you* would not have thought of before) and new ideas to the problems they are facing (once again, not necessarily universally new but rather new to you and to the people you work with). These would be things you'd not have thought of before,
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And I'm not French. Don't post if you have nothing to say.
As anyone employed by a company can tell you (Score:5, Funny)
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According to Edison, who was himself a businessman owning a research lab, "genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration." But even this is a misrepresentation in my opinion. There are obvious ideas, like the electric
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A really nice book on the evolution of our tech (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.amazon.com/Tools-Thought-History-Mind-
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A historical review on the "History of Innovation",was that "Internet" thing even listed in the original printing?
I hear it's going to be HUGE!
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Sound's fab (Score:3, Funny)
So basically it's like something someone told you quickly at the pub and you'll want to buy a decent book to find out anything substantial? Might give that a miss.
TWW
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Well, it is!
Plus, I'd been typing all day and was starting to lose it.
TWW
First innovative post (Score:1)
Ah, the Slashdot review (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, the Slashdot review. Normally it is well written. The first sentence isn't misleading. The reviewer gets straight to the point. There is no confusing turnabout within the first paragraph. But this is not that review.
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Not enough monkeys (Score:4, Insightful)
"Chapter five, "the lone innovator", debunks the legend of, well, the lone innovator. It sounds good, and plays into our noble story of the hero, but it's not common in reality."
In my experience each and every innovation can trace its roots back to one key insight in the mind of one person. The group can help, support, enhance and develop that insight, but without it and that key individual - there is nothing.
It doesn't matter how many monkeys you have, you're still not producing Shakespeare.
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There really is a growing field of innovation studies, and a related discipline of distributed cognition. I recommend Ed Hutchin's "Cognition in the Wild" as an introduction to the latter.
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This is either trivially true, inasmuch as every thought occurs first in an individual mind, and for a sufficiently small quantum of innovation it will be just one person who first has that insight and acts on it; or it is trivially false, because most of what is thought of as "innovation" is a collection of such individual insights.
In my experience as an innovator and inventor there are quite di
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The same thing occurs with good innovations. The best innovations I've seen were when someone walked up to a whiteboard and five of us critiqued his idea, trimmed and added to it until it was a truly gre
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What is this book about? (Score:3, Insightful)
Already skeptical... (Score:1, Interesting)
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As far as I know, Italy didn't see an increase in cancer mortality in cities that were sprayed. Now, the stuff might have side effects on animals, but let me tell you: after visiting Africa
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Best ideas always win? (Score:1)
The consensus there see
grammar (Score:1)
Ah, the poor mis-used "to" - always getting stuck in for the Johnny-come-never "too"
"...presented TOO vague to be applicable."
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He should've said this:
"The topics are vague, the history vague, and the lessons presented too vaguely to be applicable."
That way he could have gone for three and been even more engaging! Uh, and this guy is reviewing books? This is middle school stuff, if not grade school... like mixing up "then" & "than" as we often see here.
Saw the Author's Presentation at ETech (Score:2)
A good history of technology -- free download (Score:1)
Kessler is a former electrical engineer who now heads a hedge fund. Along the way he has written several books on technology and Wall Street. This book starts with Blaise Pascal and ends up in the modern electronic stock market, with stops along the way at the steam engine, cannon building, railroads, the tra
The biggest myth is Patents (Score:2)
Future Hype (Score:1)