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Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond
book

Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond

by Alan Axelrod
February 2008
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h 1m
English
Jossey-Bass
Content preview from Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond

3.4. Lesson 16: Appreciate Your Ignorance

Just as he made use of success as well as failure—the first provided data on what worked, the second yielded equally valuable information on what did not work—Edison found that knowledge and ignorance were of comparable if not equal value. Whereas knowledge pointed the direction in any given research project or experiment, saving time and effort by allowing the experimenter to focus only on the most likely approaches, ignorance opened the mind by obliging the ignorant experimenter to try every conceivable approach. To be sure, this was labor-intensive and time-consuming, but it also multiplied the possibilities of making new, unexpected discoveries.

Ignorance both invited and necessitated pure empiricism—the ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780787994594Purchase book