innovation

A yearning for innovation requires real exploration. It requires a persistent search to try (and fail) to move your understanding forward with a new tool, a new technique, a new insight. Sadly, the first innovation often isn’t even all that helpful, but may well provide a path to ones that are. This is an idea that Steven Johnson of Where Good... See more

The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked... See more

Went down a rabbit hole for cross-industry innovations (when one industry borrows from another). Here are 8 gems. 1. James Dyson made a bagless vacuum after seeing how sawmills used cyclone force to eject sawdust. https://t.co/jre4FCdaVj

That right there is the recipe for genuine innovation:

• Embrace uncertainty and the fact one doesn’t know the future.


• Understand that people are inventing things — and not just technologies, but also use cases — constantly.


• Remember that the art comes in editing after the invention, not before.