Liz Danzico kindly interviewed me about creativity and related things over at the AIGA website. Includes mentions of puppy torture, flashes of lightning, and ridicule for the book Who Moved my Cheese. Full interview here.

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Thanks to John Przyborski and Carrie Chisholm at CMU, last week’s lecture was videotaped and is now online at youtube.

This version of the talk is quite different from the version I did at Google almost a year ago, so it might be worth a spin even if you’ve seen that one before.

If you feel claustrophobic watching videos inside my site, here is the direct link to this video on youtube.

Posted in Myths of Innovation, On Tour | 2 Comments »

One question I hear often is “what can I do right now?”. Well, it turns out there are lots of things to do if you want to become an innovator, and in many cases it’s not very hard.

Check it out:

Essay #58 - How to innovate right now.

(Note: This essay was commissioned by the U.S. State department).

Posted in Essays, Innovation, Myths of Innovation | 1 Comment »

The paperback edition of Myths of Innovation is underway. Now is a great time to let me know of any typos, mistakes, oversights, factual errors, or anything else that should be cleaned up.

The current list of typos, research issues and corrections can be found at www.mythsofinnovation.com.

If you give me a typo or correction I don’t yet know about, I’ll send you a signed copy of the paperback edition when it’s out.

Please take a peek at the existing list before leaving a comment or sending a correction in - thanks!

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The folks at IdeaConnection interviewed me about Innovation mythology, the rate of change, and how progress happens. The book’s been out for six months, but there were some fun questions here I hadn’t heard before. Here’s an excerpt:

VB: One myth you talk about is the one that says today’s technologies are a logical and foregone conclusion of our past. Do you think the potential existed in the past, for our present to be a very different place? If so, could you speculate in what ways and why?

Scott Berkun:
If we believe that we have free will, and that we have the power to make choices in the present, then we have to believe people 20 or 100 years ago had the same freedom to make choices. We could have had steam powered cars: the first trains and automobiles were in fact steam powered. Many U.S. cities regret pulling out their networks of downtown cable cars, as now it’s prohibitively expensive to retrofit cities with much needed public transportation. The rise of both Microsoft and Google depended heavily on the mistakes of their early competitors and predecessors. Had Xerox, Palo Alto Research Centre, Atari, IBM, or AltaVista made one or two different decisions; we’d have a very different world.

You can read the full interview here.

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Tomorrow at 12pm EST I’ll be live on america.gov, answering any and all questions. Hope to see you there.

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As part of her Sunday business column on ideas, Janet Rae-Dupree quotes both me and the book a few times in Eureka: it really takes years of hard work.

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, creative thinking | 2 Comments »

This was a special talk for two reasons. First, as my opening story explains, I delivered a special surprise to someone in the audience. Second, the 9am crowd was surprisingly lively and helped me put on a good show.

The talk covers a few topics from The Myths of Innovation, including epiphanies, the problems with innovation history, and many true stories about how great innovations actually happened.

Podcast (70 minutes, 30mb), Slides and description.

(Skip to the 11:05 mark in the podcast to bypass intros).

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There’s a very good piece in Wired on how the i-phone was made. Unlike most coverage of the i-phone and Apple in general, this piece explores the early mistakes that were made, the rejections Jobs and Apple faced, and how they managed to pull off the deal with AT&T. It’s good stuff and avoids most of the easy myths around how innovation happens.

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A few weeks ago I posted about a comment lottery, an experiment in rewarding participation on the site - here are the randomly chosen winners:

Steve Myers
Kristi P
JKash
Elaine Nelson
James Shrenk
Keith Instone
Rob Grady

If you won, you should have an e-mail in your inbox asking for your address :)

Posted in Myths of Innovation, this site | 3 Comments »

The talk I did at Lunch 2.0 a few weeks ago at the F5 office in downtown Seattle is now online. You can watch the video, or download an mp3/podcast. It’s an interactive Q&A about innovation and invention, ~45 minutes.

Fun stuff, no slides, and some good questions. One factual error: I claim Swift had the patent for the light bulb, but it’s Swan.

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, On Tour | 1 Comment »

CMP Media runs the annual Jolt awards, the closest thing the tech sector has to the Oscars. They just announced this year’s finalists, and Myths of Innovation made the cut for books. O’Reilly’s Beautiful Code is in as well - Congrads!

You can see the full list of nominations here. Winners are announced at the SD West conference, March 2008. Anybody out there going? If I’m lucky enough to win, you can pretend to be me :)

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