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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

4.5. Lesson 29: Build an Invention Factory

When Edison established his laboratory–workshop complex at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in the 1870s, his objective was to rationalize and regularize the process of invention, to take it out of the realm of hit-or-miss inspiration and luck, and to create what he called an "invention factory." The industrial revolution had already passed into its first great maturity. Mass production of all sorts of goods was a well-established fact. What Edison now perceived was that invention itself—hitherto regarded as the product of more or less whimsical inventive "genius"—could be incorporated into the industrial mass-production process.

Menlo Park, the invention factory, was itself a great invention, but, like most ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780787994594Purchase book