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innovation

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  • Intrapreneurship

    The characteristic of 3M that enabled it to attain such diversity in its product line is a policy of what has generally come to be called "intrapreneurship". The basic idea is to allow employees of large corporations to behave within the company as they would as individual entrepreneurs in the outside world.

    ...It is 3M's policy (and that of other enlightened companies) to allow its engineers to spend a certain percentage of their work time on projects of their own choosing, a practice known as "bootlegging".

    Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
    1. ​​Cannibalize yourself​​
    • innovation
    • work
  • My job is simply to design gadgets that I like

    Inventors are people who not only curse, but who also start to think of what can be done to eliminate the bother...When I see something that I don't like, I try to invent a way around it. My job is simply to design gadgets that I like.

    Jacob Rabinow, The Evolution of Useful Things
    1. ​​The iPod​​
    2. ​​You and your user are one​​
    • innovation
  • To read things that are not yet on the page

    My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated the make great products. Everything else was secondary...the products, not the profits, were the motivation.

    Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

    Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs
    • products
    • innovation
  • A new gestalt

    The innovator has a systems mind, one that sees things in terms of how they relate to each other in producing a result, a new gestalt that to some degree changes the world.

    Michael Maccoby, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray
    • innovation
    • systems
  • Upstream, Downstream

    Image from antonhowes.substack.com on 2021-02-04 at 7.42.32 PM.png

    To truly increase innovation, I think we need policies focused on what goes on even further upstream, before much of the supply of new inventors is inevitably siphoned off into distractions, dead ends, and failure. Most policies inevitably have a marginal effect, but a slight expansion of the incoming swell of potential inventors can have a much greater impact than fiddling with the incentives of the few hundred who’ve already somewhat made it to the final trickle. Increase the strength of the flow upstream, and everything downstream flows the faster too.

    Anton Howes, Age of Invention
    antonhowes.substack.com
    1. ​​Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation​​
    • innovation
  • 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?

    Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises
    1. ​​Beauty in flight​​
    • flight
    • humanity
    • innovation
    • morality

    Jiro responds: "I just want to make beautiful airplanes."

  • The Innovation Funnel

    A Comic by Tom Fishburne
    marketoonist.com
    Image from marketoonist.com on 2022-06-11 at 6.28.06 PM.jpeg

    Most 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.

    • innovation
    • ideas
    • novelty
  • Celebrating Steve

    A Video by Steve Jobs
    www.youtube.com
    Screenshot of www.youtube.com on 2021-10-09 at 9.13.58 AM.png

    When 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.

    • life
    • innovation

    "To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Steve’s passing, this short film is a celebration of his life and his extraordinary vision."

  • Traditional companies are losing because they mismanage software engineers

    An Article by Emma Watterson
    ewattwhere.substack.com

    Innovation 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.

    1. ​​Steve Jobs​​
    • innovation
    • software
    • agile
    • management
  • Withered or seasoned?

    An Article by Robin Sloan
    www.robinsloan.com

    The 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.

    • innovation
    • technology
    • games
  • Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation

    A Research Paper
    www.nber.org

    We 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.

    1. ​​Upstream, Downstream​​
    • invention
    • innovation
    • childhood
  • Age of Invention

    A Series by Anton Howes
    antonhowes.substack.com

    I’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.

    1. ​​Upstream, Downstream​​
    • invention
    • innovation
    • history
    • industry
  • The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation

    An Article by Courtney Hohne
    blog.x.company
    Image from blog.x.company on 2020-12-22 at 2.03.22 PM.png

    What 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
    1. ​​v0.crap​​
    • words
    • innovation
  • Ancient magicians as innovation consultants

    An Article by Matt Webb
    interconnected.org

    The 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.
    1. ​​Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview​​
    • magic
    • innovation
  • The Small Group

    An Article by James Mulholland
    jmulholland.com

    Lying 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.

    1. ​​Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees​​
    2. ​​Mutual appreciation​​
    3. ​​Scenius​​
    4. ​​Tossing an idea around​​
    • teamwork
    • creativity
    • innovation
    • collaboration

    I also think of artist collectives like Robert Irwin's early work at the Ferus Gallery. But it also seems that you can't just get any 12 people together and have it work as a truly creative SMALL GROUP – most startups I feel would not necessarily fit this description. Probably the members need to be doing the same kind of work, not just working on the same thing.


See also:
  1. invention
  2. teamwork
  3. creativity
  4. collaboration
  5. magic
  6. flight
  7. humanity
  8. morality
  9. words
  10. history
  11. industry
  12. childhood
  13. technology
  14. games
  15. systems
  16. products
  17. software
  18. agile
  19. management
  20. work
  21. life
  22. ideas
  23. novelty
  1. Anton Howes
  2. Steve Jobs
  3. James Mulholland
  4. Matt Webb
  5. Hayao Miyazaki
  6. Courtney Hohne
  7. Robin Sloan
  8. Michael Maccoby
  9. Emma Watterson
  10. Henry Petroski
  11. Jacob Rabinow
  12. Tom Fishburne