The Innovator's Cookbook

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 fifty years after the turn of the century, shipbuilders and shipping companies worked hard both to make ships faster and to lower their fuel consumption. Even so, the more successful they were in boosting speed and trimming their fuel needs, the worse the economics of ocean freighters became. By 1950 or so, the ocean freighter was dying, if not

In business, originality isn’t enough. To be creative, an idea must also be appropriate—useful and actionable. It must somehow influence the way business gets done—by improving a product, for instance, or by opening up a new way to approach a process.

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

The good news is that recent years have seen considerable progress in identifying important variables that affect the probability of success in innovation. I’ve classified these variables into four sets: (1) taking root in disruption, (2) the necessary scope to succeed, (3) leveraging the right capabilities, and (4) disrupting competitors, not cust

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

Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose.

To understand the differences between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, imagine a business problem as a maze. One person might be motivated to make it through the maze as quickly and safely as possible in order to get a tangible reward, such as money—the same way a mouse would rush through for a piece of cheese. This person would look for the sim

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