'Innovation In a Flash' Is a Myth

An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times article spells out what most of us probably already knew: real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition. The article looks at the origins of new ideas, and attempts to dispel the myth that 'Eureka' moments create change. Comments author Scott Berkun, 'To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation. Everything results from accretion. I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.'"

Re:quoting NOT Newton

[Petrushka]

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.

peter drucker

[Anonymous Coward]

Peter Drucker wrote about this way back in 1984 in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The paperback edition is about 250 pages and he devotes about a page and a half to the 'flash of brilliance' innovations. The rest of the book is his attempt to categorize different methods of innovation and rank them in order of greatest change of success to least change of success. The 'flash of brillance' innovations rank last, of course.