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

5.9. Lesson 41: Think Bigger

Edison was a keen observer who always studied the details—and yet he made it a practice to think on the largest possible scale, often conceiving the big picture before paying any attention at all to the details. The invention of the incandescent electric light would be a labor of details, especially in the long, painstaking, and exhaustive search for a perfect filament, but the idea of creating a practical electric light did not begin with the filament or even with the entire bulb and filament assembly. These developed inseparably from Edison's initial vision of a lighting—or power—system. From the very beginning, Edison saw the incandescent light as just one part of this system, which, he believed, would ultimately ...