In this new paperback edition of the classic bestseller, youll be taken on a hilarious, fastpaced ride through the history of ideas. Author Scott Berkun will show you how to transcend the false stories that many business experts, scientists, and much of pop culture foolishly use to guide their thinking about how ideas change the world. With four new chapters on putting the ideas in the book to work, updated references and over 50 corrections and improvements, now is the time to get past the myths, and change the world. Youll have fun while you learn: Where ideas come from The true history of history Why most people dont like ideas How great managers make ideas thrive The importance of problem finding The simple plan (new for paperback) Since its initial publication, this classic bestseller has been discussed on NPR, MSNBC, CNBC, and at Yale University, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Google, Amazon.com, and other major media, corporations, and universities around the world. It has changed the way thousands of leaders and creators understand the world. Now in an updated and expanded paperback edition, its a fantastic time to explore or rediscover this powerful view of the world of ideas. Small, simple, powerful: an innovative book about innovation. Don Norman, author of Design of Everyday Things Insightful, inspiring, evocative, and just plain fun to read... Its totally great. John Seely Brown, Former Director, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Methodically and entertainingly dismantling the cliches that surround the process of innovation. Scott Rosenberg, author of Dreaming in Code; cofounder of Salon.com Will inspire you to come up with breakthrough ideas of your own. Alan Cooper, Father of Visual Basic and author of The Inmates are Running the Asylum Brimming with insights and historical examples, Berkuns book not only debunks widely held myths about innovation, it also points the ways toward making your new ideas stick. Tom Kelley, GM, IDEO; author of The Ten Faces of Innovation
[...]... fruition The makers of Mosaic and Netscape, the first popular web browsers, didn’t invent them from nothing There had been various forms of hypertext browsers for decades, and they applied some of those ideas to the new context of the Internet The founders of Google did not invent the search engine—they were years late for that honor As the founders of Amazon.com, the most well-known survivor of the late-’90s... understand their perceptions of innovation, unfiltered by the often stifling and occasionally self-defeating rigors of hard science 11 12 The most well-known version of the Eureka story comes in the form of a legend in Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture (Dover, 1960), 253–255 This book is the first pattern language of design in Western history, documenting the Roman architecture techniques of Vitruvius’... for two reasons The first reason is that it’s the reward for many hours (or years) of investment coming together In comparison to the simple action of fitting the puzzle piece into place, we feel the larger collective payoff of hundreds of pieces’ worth of work The second reason is that innovative work isn’t as predictable as jigsaw puzzles, so there’s no way to know when the moment of insight will... optics to put all of the bricks of that invention in there Any major innovation or insight can be seen in this way It’s simply the final piece of a complex puzzle falling into place But unlike a puzzle, the universe of ideas can be combined in an infinite number 10 Chapter 1 of ways, so part of the challenge of innovation is coming up with the problem to solve, not just its solution The pieces used to... want to believe that they’re true This begs the question: is shaping the truth into the form of an epiphany myth a kind of lie, or is it just smart PR? Even the tale of Newton’s apple owes its mythic status to the journalists of the day Voltaire and other popular 18th-century writers spread the story in their essays and letters An eager public, happy to hear the ancient notion of ideas as magic, endorsed... in? The only reason that last piece is significant is because of the other pieces you’d already put into place If you jumbled up the pieces a second time, any one of them could turn out to be the last, magical piece Epiphany works the same way: it’s not the apple or the magic moment that matters much, it’s the work before and after (see Figure 1-2) The magic feeling at the moment of insight, when the. .. like the legendary apple falling on Newton’s head to demonstrate the concept of gravity…it was a process of accretion (growth by gradual addition).6 No matter how many times he relayed the dedicated hours of debate over the Web’s design, and the various proposals and iterations of its development, it’s the myth of magic that journalists and readers desperately want to uncover When the founders of the. .. to solve a different problem The other great legend of innovation and epiphany is the tale of Archimedes’ Eureka As the story goes, the great inventor Archimedes was asked by his king to detect whether a gift was made of false gold One day, Archimedes took a bath, and on observing the displacement of water as he stepped in, he recognized a new way to look at the problem: by knowing an object’s volume... binary data If you eliminated any of these things from the history of the universe, the keyboard in front of me (as well as the book in front of you) would disappear The keyboard, like all innovations, is a combination of things that existed before The combination might be novel, or used in an original way, but the materials and ideas all existed in some form somewhere before the first keyboard was made... of a bull The idea of observation as the key to insight, rather than IQ scores or intellectual prowess, is best captured by something da Vinci—whose famous technological inventions were inspired by observing nature—wrote hundreds of years ago: Stand still and watch the patterns, which by pure chance have been generated: Stains on the wall, or the ashes in a fireplace, or the clouds in the sky, or the . School of Medicine the myths of innovation