Category Archives: experiments
When Was the Last Time You Were Wrong?
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The Jenga Theory of Creativity
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I think I actually made yesterday’s post on simplicity too complex. Here’s another try. Earlier this week I edited two different papers for journals. My main contribution was that I cut 2,000 words out of each. I also wrote about 400 words in each, but it was the cutting that helped the papers. This reminds […]
The Most Important Innovation of All Time
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What is the most important innovation ever? There are plenty of candidates. Fire, the telegraph, electricity, and the internet would all have to be candidates. There’s another one though, that has had an enormous impact on every single one of us. And surprisingly, it’s not a whiz-bang piece of technology. It’s a simple process innovation. […]
Learning From Failure
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There’s No Such Thing as a Good Idea…
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Experimenting is a key part of innovating. In his new book REAMDE, Neal Stephenson has a great description of learning through experimenting: Much like a teenager who starts playing a new video game without bothering to open the manual, he tried things and observed the results, abandoning whatever didn’t work and moving aggressively to exploit […]
Innovation When All You Have is a Noodle
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Most of the inspirational innovation stories that we hear are about technology firms like Google, Amazon and Apple. This sometimes makes it difficult to help people find the connections to their work if they are in less sexy industries, like mining, education or government. However, innovation is just as important in those industries as well. […]
Two Great Innovation Quotes
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First up, from John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money: The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. As I’ve said before, when you’re innovating, you have to break connections before you can make new ones. This is a big part of […]
Ideas Are Something You Do
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Here is today’s exercise in connecting up ideas. First off, there’s this summary of the TEDGlobal conference from Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter: Then, there’s this quote from Seth Godin at the 99% Conference: What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do for a living is ship. Godin expands on that […]
Anything You Want by Derek Sivers – “Experiment. Go!”
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Experimenting is the key to innovation success. The new book Anything You Want by Derek Sivers is worth a read (there’s tons of information about the book, and some great videos here). The book tells lessons that Sivers learned while running his website CDBaby. My first thought in reading the experiences of one person is […]
When Should You Give Up on an Idea?
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Braden Kelley posted a great transcript of a talk from Jeff Bezos of Amazon recently on Blogging Innovation. Here is one of the sections that I thought was really interesting: If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. […]
Data Changes Everything
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I was talking with a friend tonight over dinner about the PhD that she is starting. One of the suggestions that I made was to get through the literature review and research design phase as quickly as possible. The reason for this is that data changes everything. PhD students share a common problem with inventors […]
