Contents:
Innovation doesn't happen as described in the popular press. The Myths of Innovation.
There is a method for innovation. People love new ideas. Good ideas are hard to find. Your boss knows more about innovation than you. The best ideas win.
They also benefited from powerful friendships: Even if you do the opposite of every myth in the book, you may not be on your way to innovation. We are built for creativity. May 19, Krishna Kumar rated it it was ok. Entrepreneurs are drawn to new markets because they have at least as good a chance as anyone else, even if they have less funding or experience. While talking about creativity is very popular, actually being creative puts your social status at risk. Most successful innovations are not the most valuable or the best ideas, but the ones that appear on the sweet spot between what's good from the expert's perspective, and what can be easily adopted, given the uncertainties of all the secondary factors combined.
Innovation is always good. Altogether, they do not look for the "biggie," the innovation that will "revolutionize the industry," create a "billion-dollar business," or "make one rich overnight. They are almost bound to do the wrong things.
An innovation that looks very big may turn out to We understand the history of innovation. This is why terms like innovation system or innovation pipeline are absurd. The idea of an innovation portfolio, where a range of risk is assumed across multiple ideas, is more honest.
Many books on creativity are surprisingly uncreative lightbulbs should be banned from creativity book covers and make impossible promises. The myth we love new ideas. We are a conservative species: How accepting were your peers? Conformity is deep in our biology.
While talking about creativity is very popular, actually being creative puts your social status at risk. The history of breakthroughs is a tale of persistence against rejection. Much of what makes a successful innovator is their ability to persuade and convince conservative people of the merits of their ideas, a very different skill from creativity itself. Your problem is likely not your ideas, but your skills for pitching ideas to others.
The bigger the idea, the harder the persuasion challenge. The myth of the lone inventor.
But even people worthy of the title genius or prodigy like Mozart, Picasso and Einstein had family and teachers who taught them. Stories of mad geniuses who worked completely alone are rare.
Pick any master who you think worked alone and read some of their history: Learning to collaborate, and give and receive feedback , may matter more than your brilliance. The myth that good ideas are rare. If you watch any 6 year old child they will invent dozens of things in an hour. We are built for creativity. The problem is the conventions of adult life demand conformity and we sacrifice our creative instincts in favor of social status.
Good ideas are everywhere: A fallacy of workplaces is that senior staff are better at everything than the people who work for them. This is false in many ways, but creative intuition might be the most false. To rise in power demands good political judgement, yet innovation requires a willingness to defy convention.
In this new paperback edition of the classic bestseller, you'll be taken on a hilarious, fast-paced ride through the history of ideas. Author Scott Berkun will show. I wrote the bestselling book The Myths of Innovation to share the truths everyone should know about how big ideas really change the world.
Convention-defiers are harder to promote in most organizations, yet essential for progress. To assume senior staff are the best at leading change is a mistake.
The myth the best idea wins. We lionize winners and history blames losers for their fate, even if they did most of the same things the winners did See survivorship bias. Marketing, politics and timing have tremendous influence on why one idea or its competitors wins, yet these details are more complex than we want to hear and fade from history. The world of ideas is not a pure meritocracy and you need to act accordingly See related chapter excerpt.
The myth that problems are less interesting than solutions. The impatient run at full speed into solving things, speeding right past the insights needed to find a great solution. If you listen to how successful creators talk about their daily work, they spend more time thinking about the problem than the epiphany obsessed media would have us believe. The myth that innovation is always good.
How would you feel about an invention that ends your profession? What impact will an idea have 1,5,10, years from now? All innovation is change and all change helps some people and hurts others. Many horrible inventions were created with the best intentions and some horrible intentions led to some good consequences.