Who gets the credit: the innovator or the implementer?

2010/07/24 in Innovation by peg | View Comments

Who should get the credit? The person to came up with the idea? Or the person to did something with it?

I’m with the implementers. Thomas Edison might be remembered for the lightbulb, but Samuel Insull‘s hard work enabled everyone to have one in their homes. We also forget that it wasn’t even Edison who invented electric light (though you could argue that he perfected it). Edison was one of many who happened to have the same good idea. Insull changed society forever.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Recent

Planning should not require a Gantt chart

2010/09/03 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy

There’s a standard slide in my bag of tricks which finds it’s way into a surprising number of presentations. It’s a simple slide, one allowing me to explore the idea of planning as a spectrum of possible methodologies rather than treating planning as an either-or choice: either be bottom-up reactive, or requiring us to engage [...]
Innovation [25-08-2010]

2010/08/25 in Innovation, Mailing List

Another week and another collection of interesting ideas from around the internet. As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated. The 50 worst inventions [Times] Times has a go at naming their top 50 inventions that didn’t quite work out as intended. And the winner is… [The Economist] Offering a cash prize to encourage innovation [...]
Basketball as an innovation metaphore

2010/08/19 in Innovation

I just realised that the approach to basket ball described by The no-stars all star, from the NY Times, is a nice model for innovation (whatever that is). I’ve been struggling for a while to understand how to define innovation other than retrospectively (isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing). We can pin down invention, customer need, [...]
Think “in the market,” not “go to market”

2010/08/18 in Business-Technology

A friend of mine[1] made an astute comment the other day. We need to think about “in the market” models, rather than “go to market” models. I think this nicely captures the shift we’re seeing in the market; businesses are moving away from offering products which (hopefully) will sell, and adopting models founded on successful [...]
I’ve already told you more than 125% of what I know

2010/08/06 in Business-Technology

Bob Sutton has an interesting post on the limits of expertise: I have already told you more than 125% of what I know. As he points out: I think that those of us who are alleged to have expertise in certain topics can easily fall into this trap as we try to be helpful to others, [...]