innovation
My job is simply to design gadgets that I like
To read things that are not yet on the page
A new gestalt
Upstream, Downstream
I choose a world with pyramids
Which would you choose: a world with pyramids? Or without?
Humanity has always dreamt of flight, but the dream is cursed. My aircraft are destined to become tools for slaughter and destruction. But still, I choose a world with pyramids in it. Which world will you choose?
The Innovation Funnel
A Comic by Tom FishburneMost organizations use some version of an innovation funnel to bring ideas to life. It starts with lots of ideas at the front end and then launches whatever survives all the way to the back end.
Yet this Darwinian process of bringing ideas to life doesn’t necessarily lead to survival of the fittest ideas. If we’re not careful, the innovation funnel leads to survival of the safest ideas.
Organizations are good at spotting risks. In an effort to improve success rates, organizations tend to put sharper teeth in the funnel.
As ideas run the organizational gauntlet, they can get pruned, sheared, shaped, and watered down beyond recognition. On the way, they can lose the essence of the idea. They may lose their point of difference and reason for being.
Celebrating Steve
A Video by Steve JobsWhen you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and you're meant to just live your life inside the world and try not to bash into the walls too much...but life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact – and that is, that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.
Traditional companies are losing because they mismanage software engineers
An Article by Emma WattersonInnovation is messy, and frankly Anti-Steve [Jobs] can’t figure out why you wouldn’t just tell people the right thing to build and skip all the trial and error that comes with innovation. Anti-Steve and his board of directors that keep him in place fundamentally believe that they know what needs to be built. Or at least that they can hire the messiah that will come down off the mountain and tell everyone what to build. There is no such messiah.
Withered or seasoned?
An Article by Robin SloanThe Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.
This is the reason a Nintendo console never has the fastest chips or the beefiest specs of its generation; instead, its remixes components in an interesting and generative way. Think of the Gameboy’s monochrome screen, the Wii’s motion controller, the Switch’s smartphone form.
[Gunpei Yokoi] is talking about reliability and predictability, in performance and supply alike. He wants the components to be boring, so their application can be daring.
Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation
A Research PaperWe directly establish the importance of environment by showing that exposure to innovation during childhood has significant causal effects on children's propensities to invent. Children whose families move to a high-innovation area when they are young are more likely to become inventors. These exposure effects are technology-class and gender specific.
Age of Invention
A Series by Anton HowesI’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the lives of the individual innovators who made it happen. I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers. My research explores why they became innovators, and the institutions they created to promote innovation even further.
The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation
An Article by Courtney HohneWhat we’ve learned from 10 years of moonshot taking about choosing your words wisely — and the many benefits of doing so:
- v0.crap
- Tiger Beetle Moments
- Killing our projects
- In the fog
- The Altimeter
- The Icebergs
- Headwinds & Tailwinds
- Chaos Pilots
- Patiently impatient, responsibly irresponsible, passionately dispassionate
Ancient magicians as innovation consultants
An Article by Matt WebbThe Codex Justinianus (534 AD), being the book of law for ancient Rome at that time, banned magicians and, in doing so, itemised the types:
- A haruspex is one who prognosticates from sacrificed animals and their internal organs;
- a mathematicus, one who reads the course of the stars;
- a hariolus, a soothsayer, inhaling vapors, as at Delphi;
- augurs, who read the future by the flight and sound of birds;
- a vates, an inspired person - prophet;
- chaldeans and magus are general names for magicians;
- maleficus means an enchanter or poisoner.
I happen to have spent my career in a number of fields that promise to have some kind of claim to supernatural powers: design, innovation, startups…
It’s not hard to run through a few archetypes of the people in those worlds, and map them onto types of ancient magician.
- Those like Steve Jobs (with his famous Reality Distortion Field) who can convincingly tell a story of the future, and by doing so, bring it about by getting others to follow them – prophets.
- Inhaling the vapours and pronouncing gnomic truths? You’ll find all the thought leaders you want in Delphi, sorry, on LinkedIn.
- Those with a good intuition about the future who bring it to life with theatre, and putting people in a state of great excitement so they respond – ad planners. Haruspex.
- Those who have the golden mane of charisma: enchanters. Startup founders.
- People with a great aptitude for systems and numbers, who can tell by intuition what will happen, from systems that stump the rest of us. We call them analysts now. MBAs. Perhaps the same aptitude drew them to read the stars before? Mathematicus.
The Small Group
An Article by James MulhollandLying somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends, the SMALL GROUP is a repeated theme in the lives of the successful. Benjamin Franklin had the Junto Club, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had The Inklings, Jobs and Wozniak had Homebrew.
Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.
The skill of perception
The newborn baby and the [blind man suddenly gifted with sight] do not have to learn to see. Sight is given to them. But they do have to learn to perceive. Perception is learnt and learnt slowly. Skill is required for perception as for speech. We are largely unaware of the skill we exercise. None of the things we have to learn to perceive are self-evident, or, apparently, instinctively evident. No doubt, however, we have an instinctive aptitude for this learning, and once we have learnt we cannot easily see as though we had not.
As Ruskin says, one has to strive, if one is to see with the 'Innocent Eye'.