Luis Perez-Breva
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035354
- eISBN:
- 9780262336680
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035354.001.0001
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Innovation
Society celebrates innovation after the fact. It is a revisionist exercise, and little is said about how to innovate. Aspiring innovators are told to get a big idea and a team and build a ...
More
Society celebrates innovation after the fact. It is a revisionist exercise, and little is said about how to innovate. Aspiring innovators are told to get a big idea and a team and build a show-and-tell for potential investors. But that conflates innovation, entrepreneurship, publicizing an idea, and fundraising; it does not clue aspiring innovators on how to begin. Innovating shows how actually to get started and innovate for impact and scale—a skill you can practice and master through learning. It is a doer’s approach for the explorers of our time, developed over a decade at MIT and internationally in workshops, classes, and companies. It shows innovating does not require an earth-shattering idea; indeed, no thing is new at the outset of what we only later celebrate as innovation. It takes only a hunch, and anyone can do it. By prototyping a problem and learning by being wrong, innovating can be scaled up to make an impact. The process is empirical, experimental, nonlinear, and incremental: give a hunch the structure of a problem; use anything as a part; accrue other people’s knowledge and skills in the course of innovating; systematize what is learned; advocate, communicate, scale up, manage innovating continuously, and document. Questions outlined in the book help innovators think in new ways. It is even possible to create a kit for innovating.Less
Society celebrates innovation after the fact. It is a revisionist exercise, and little is said about how to innovate. Aspiring innovators are told to get a big idea and a team and build a show-and-tell for potential investors. But that conflates innovation, entrepreneurship, publicizing an idea, and fundraising; it does not clue aspiring innovators on how to begin. Innovating shows how actually to get started and innovate for impact and scale—a skill you can practice and master through learning. It is a doer’s approach for the explorers of our time, developed over a decade at MIT and internationally in workshops, classes, and companies. It shows innovating does not require an earth-shattering idea; indeed, no thing is new at the outset of what we only later celebrate as innovation. It takes only a hunch, and anyone can do it. By prototyping a problem and learning by being wrong, innovating can be scaled up to make an impact. The process is empirical, experimental, nonlinear, and incremental: give a hunch the structure of a problem; use anything as a part; accrue other people’s knowledge and skills in the course of innovating; systematize what is learned; advocate, communicate, scale up, manage innovating continuously, and document. Questions outlined in the book help innovators think in new ways. It is even possible to create a kit for innovating.
Luis Perez-Breva and Nick Fuhrer
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035354
- eISBN:
- 9780262336680
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035354.003.0011
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Innovation
You can create the conditions for innovating anywhere and make it a continuous process. You can build an engine for innovating that yields impact, strategic insight into new problems, and increased ...
More
You can create the conditions for innovating anywhere and make it a continuous process. You can build an engine for innovating that yields impact, strategic insight into new problems, and increased efficiency, and “configure” it to produce new products, companies, causes, policies, inventions, innovation kits, identify talent and resources, or develop professional innovations. This can be in a corporation, a research/academic organization, or generally. Your innovating advantage is that your organization itself can be an innovation prototype.Less
You can create the conditions for innovating anywhere and make it a continuous process. You can build an engine for innovating that yields impact, strategic insight into new problems, and increased efficiency, and “configure” it to produce new products, companies, causes, policies, inventions, innovation kits, identify talent and resources, or develop professional innovations. This can be in a corporation, a research/academic organization, or generally. Your innovating advantage is that your organization itself can be an innovation prototype.
Luis Perez-Breva and Nick Fuhrer
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035354
- eISBN:
- 9780262336680
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035354.003.0001
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Innovation
At its genesis, no thing about an eventual innovation is new. It is only in hindsight that the stories of innovations become streamlined, linear accounts of success. Actual innovating, like learning, ...
More
At its genesis, no thing about an eventual innovation is new. It is only in hindsight that the stories of innovations become streamlined, linear accounts of success. Actual innovating, like learning, is a highly nonlinear process. To get started, all you need is a hunch about a real-world problem; a set of parts and access to a community of people to render the problem tangible; a strategy to engage in trial and error; and an appetite to learn by being productively wrong first. You learn about the problem as you bring together those people and parts. At the beginning, there is an abundance of paths forward and no “best” path is defined. The path is full of choices, not formulas, and there are many potential outcomes.Less
At its genesis, no thing about an eventual innovation is new. It is only in hindsight that the stories of innovations become streamlined, linear accounts of success. Actual innovating, like learning, is a highly nonlinear process. To get started, all you need is a hunch about a real-world problem; a set of parts and access to a community of people to render the problem tangible; a strategy to engage in trial and error; and an appetite to learn by being productively wrong first. You learn about the problem as you bring together those people and parts. At the beginning, there is an abundance of paths forward and no “best” path is defined. The path is full of choices, not formulas, and there are many potential outcomes.
