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

3.10. Lesson 22: "No Experiments Are Useless"

Early in his inventing career, Edison made extensive use of a new class of venture capitalists, men of business who were willing to invest, not in going concerns or even in start-up companies, but in experimental research itself. Nevertheless, even among this willing group of financial pioneers, Edison often found himself having to defend the work in which they had invested. To one venture capitalist he endeavored to explain the poor performance of a perforator for an automatic telegraph system he was working on as something of "no consequence," because "it was an experiment as I told you before, not made to show but to Satisfy me that I was all right." When this same investor carped that some of ...