The two most important things to know about innovation are: (a) that most new ideas are bad ones, and (b) that separating the rare good ideas from the many bad ones among new ideas is ordinarily impossible. A good deal of effort has been expended in trying to develop some reasonable procedures for the early identification of good ideas. Most such procedures involve applying existing knowledge to identify errors, but what distinguishes truly innovative new ideas is precisely that they violate some aspects of existing knowledge, so are particularly vulnerable to early rejection. Although numerous people have proposed ways of dealing with this dilemma, I think it is fair to say that no one has demonstrated a procedure with any significant reliability.
Click to Add the First »