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- August 21st, 2007
- 3 Comments »
- Innovation
Innovation quote of the day
“It often happens, with regard to new inventions, that one part of the general public finds them useless and another part considers them to be impossible.
When it becomes clear that the possibility and the usefulness can no longer be denied, most agree that the whole thing was fairly easy to discover and that they knew [it] was significant.”
- Abraham Niclas Clewberg-Edelcrantz, an inventor of the optical telegraph
Despite how simple this observation is, it’s clear to me that anyone who wants to innovate needs to understand this pattern and expect to confront it again and again in their work.
Chapters 2 (on history of innovation) and Chapters 4 (on the human nature of change) from The Myths of Innovation summarize the research I found on both understanding and overcoming the pattern.
A free version of chapter 4 can be found here (3MB PDF).
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That’s a great quote. Reminds me of an experience I had with a patent. At my company, we have patent review boards where you take your patents and they decide whether to pursue it (involving legal, etc.). A couple colleagues and I submitted a fairly simple GUI technique, and they said, “This is so obvious, I’m sure it’s been done before.” We replied, “You’d think so, but we can’t find any example anywhere where it’s been done.”
Result: They rejected the patent on the grounds that even though no one could think of an example where it had been done, it was “obvious” and therefore must have been done before.