{"id":4136,"date":"2010-07-25T13:35:29","date_gmt":"2010-07-25T20:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=4136"},"modified":"2010-07-25T13:35:29","modified_gmt":"2010-07-25T20:35:29","slug":"book-the-myths-of-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2010\/07\/25\/book-the-myths-of-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Book: The Myths of Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I picked up a copy of The Myths of Innovation<\/a>\"\" by Scott Berkun. It’s a short little book, clocking in at 256 pages, paperback. The subject is, well, read the damn title of the book, silly! Berkun picks apart the many different myths that exist around innovation: epiphany, lone inventors, and many of the stories we tell ourselves after the fact about the messy process of innovation. It’s probably fair to say none of the insights provided by Berkun is all that shocking, but in a nice collected form you really get the point that we tell ourselves a lot of funny stories about innovation. My first thought upon reading the book was “oh, this book is for curmudgeons!” But upon reflection, perhaps this is exactly opposite. Curmudgeons will already know many of the myths and be curmudgeonly about them: it is the non-curmudgeonly among you who need to read the book \ud83d\ude42
\nBut one point that Berkun makes is something I heartily concur with: that laughter can be a sign that innovation is occurring (dear commenter who is about to comment on the causal structure of this claim, please reread this sentence.) As a grad student in Berkeley I participated in a 24 hour puzzle scavenger hunt around nearly all of the SF Bay Area. At each new location a puzzle\/brainteaser would be given whose solution indicated the next location in the puzzle hunt. At many of these locations we would start working on the puzzle and someone would suggest something real crazy about the puzzle “hmmm, I bet this has something to do with semaphore” because, well the chess board colors are semaphore colors. And we would all laugh. Then someone would think to actually check the idea that we all laughed about. And inevitably it would be the key to solving the damn puzzle. After a few stops, we noticed this and so anytime someone would say something we would laugh at we’d have to immediately follow up on the idea \ud83d\ude42 But this makes complete sense: insight or innovation occurs when we are, by definition, pushing the limits of what is acceptable. And laughter is often our best “defense” in these situations. Further laughter has a strong improv component: the structure of what is funny requires you to accept the craziness behind the joke and run with it. Who knows where a joke may take you (as opposed to this paragraph, which is going nowhere, and is about to end.)
\nFinally I wish every reviewer of papers and grants would read this book and especially the reviewers who said one of my grant applications was just too speculative for the committee’s taste \ud83d\ude09
\nAnd a note to myself when I get a bad review about something I really think is the bees knees: reread this book. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I picked up a copy of The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun. It’s a short little book, clocking in at 256 pages, paperback. The subject is, well, read the damn title of the book, silly! Berkun picks apart the many different myths that exist around innovation: epiphany, lone inventors, and many of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Book: The Myths of Innovation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[70,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}