THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Invention

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it. ” - Alan Kay

TOPIC OF THE DAY

Necessity, not Scarcity, is the Mother of Invention

Bravo for companies that are starting to focus on innovation again! It's about time. But even with this renewed attention to innovation, some managers keep projects resource-starved, in the belief that scarcity drives creative invention. Although ingenuity can sometimes spring up when means are scarce, managers beware: It is a dangerous miscalculation to think that starving innovators will feed innovation.

Consider the case of electronic ink. A hefty percentage of the people reading this post will have used an Amazon Kindle or some other e-ink-based reader within the past 24 hours. The story of e-ink's creation would have resonated with Plato, who said that necessity is the mother of invention. Here, the idea's spark came not from scarcity but from an unmet need striking a fertile mind. The inventor, physicist Joe Jacobson, was lounging on a beach one day, when he finished the book he was reading and realized he hadn't brought another.
Read on...

LATEST ARRIVALS

Statistics for Business: Decision Making and Analysis Robert A. Stine