The Power of Anomaly

a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

Anticipating what people want is something innovators are often good at;

Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the s

Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis of the sources of new opportunities.

One of the best ways to probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you is to look for anomalies—something that the theory cannot explain.