The Myths of Innovation

I’m currently in the middle of reading The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun in which the author makes the case that it’s iteration, observation, and obsessive dedication that lead to great ideas and not out-of-the-blue eureka moments. Though I find myself murmering “well duh” to many of the book’s conclusions, Berkun has put together an interesting read. For example:

“persons with low associative barriers may think to connect ideas or concepts that have very little basis in past experience or that cannot easily be traced logically.” Read that last sentence again: it’s indistinguishable from various definitions of insanity.

He touches on something that I find to be of the utmost importance: spending ample time defining / framing the problem to be solved. Those of us in the design field might know this by another name: the creative brief…

Their starts are ordinary: in the cases of DNA (Watson and Crick), Google (Page and Brin), and the computer mouse (Englebart), the innovators spent time framing the the problem, enumerating possible solutions, and then began experimenting.

And in chapter 4 (where I am in the book) Berkun lays out interesting perspectives about the chilly reception with which new ideas are met…

“The love of new ideas is a myth: we prefer ideas only after others have tested them. We confuse truly new ideas with good ideas that have already been proven, which just happen to be new to us. …We reuse ideas and opinions all the time, rarely committing to the new.”

…

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats” - Howard Aiken

…

And lastly, we’ll end this post on this note:

“People are unlikely to be as interested in your ideas as you are.”