innovation

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

Take a coniferous forest. The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy. The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years. The... See more

P&G used to have somebody in charge of what they called commercial innovation, which is broadly defined as selling your product in different ways, without fundamentally changing the product itself.

Rail travel is a great example of an industry that is ripe for commercial innovation.

In Germany they have the BahnCard. A 25, 50, or 100 BahnCard are... See more

Never forget that time Mckinsey told AT&T that cell phones would be a “niche” market and it ended up costing the company $12B+. https://t.co/HMoLD5jJNe