The Reality of Innovating

Peter Drucker was right: Innovation is what creates wealth. Innovation had better create wealth because it's so damn hard to do. The purpose if this chapter is to explain the principles of innovation that I learned in the trenches of Apple, the three companies that I started, and the dozens of companies that I've advised.

Traditional ways of thinking should not limit your creation of innovative solutions. To help prevent this, here is an excerpt from "Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking" by Matt May. Matt is the author of The Elegant Solution: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way (Free Press, 2006) and one of the world's leading authorities on Toyota and innovation.

Because of all the writing, speaking, and pontificating about innovation, you might believe that we truly understand it. This is wishful thinking. In the following interview, Scott Berkun explores the romantic notions of how innovation occurs.

For entrepreneurs the most important real-world question is, "What makes an innovation stick?" Luck is a reasonable though not very useful answer. To figure this out, I interviewed Chip and Dan Heath, because they wrote Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House, 2007). Chip is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Dan is a consultant at Duke Corporation Eduction.

Much as I put engineers on pedestals, they do frequently lie. Perhaps lying is necessary to create great innovation, because so many people tell you that what you want to do can't be done or isn't wanted by people. As long as you know when they are lying, you'll be fine.