The Innovator's Cookbook

What these buildings have in common is that they are shabby and spacious. Any change is likely to be an improvement. They are discarded buildings, fairly free of concern from landlord or authorities: “Do what you want. The place can’t get much worse anyway. It’s just too much trouble to tear down.”

what managerial practices affect creativity? They fall into six general categories: challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement, and organizational support.

do only one thing; otherwise it confuses people. Indeed, the greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say, “This is obvious! Why didn’t I think of it? It’s so simple!” Even the innovation that creates new uses and new markets should be directed toward a specific, clear, and carefully designed application.

Above all, innovation is work rather than genius. It requires knowledge. It often requires ingenuity. And it requires focus.

So in my particular case, a lot of my creative behavior has come from looking at technologies, new tools, and thinking, “You know what, this allows you to do something that nobody ever thought to do before.”

Ford planned the Edsel, the most carefully designed car to that point in American automotive history, to give the company a full product line with which to compete with General Motors. When it bombed, despite all the planning, market research, and design that had gone into it, Ford realized that something was happening in the automobile market that

“network of possible wanderings,” the intellectual space that she uses to explore and solve problems. The larger this space, the better.

an unexpected success: The New York Public Library wanted to buy a machine. Unlike the banks, libraries in those early New Deal days had money, and Watson sold more than a hundred of his otherwise unsalable machines to libraries.

For instance, whenever an industry has a steadily growing market but falling profit margins—as say, in the steel industries of developed countries between 1950 and 1970—an incongruity exists. The innovative response: minimills.