Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success from Thomas Edison's Lab

Foreword

I first met Sarah following a speech she delivered in 2011 at a high-level innovation leadership conference hosted by Kraft. I was immediately struck by the relevance of her teachings. As a cofounder of Brightidea, a company that focuses on tools to harness innovation, I was captivated by Sarah’s presentation. Her understanding of innovation practices used by Thomas Edison, and the links between those practices and today’s urgent need to continually innovate, sheds light on how some of the world’s most revolutionary inventions came to be. And critically, how Edison’s practices might be successfully contemporized and translated today.

In Midnight Lunch, Sarah brings Edison’s timeless collaboration formula to the fore. She advances our understanding of the rapidly changing innovation environment by providing deep insight into Edison’s proven collaboration processes. Importantly, her teachings allow innovation practitioners to apply those proven practices in the digital era. Sarah notes that Edison emphasized collaboration as a discovery learning process, which served as the backbone of his innovation efforts. Rather than adopting a classroom-focused or task-focused orientation, collaboration for Edison was highly hands on, experiential, and project-driven. His teams learned through interaction with their colleagues, allowing them to unlock their own innate creativity and enhance ideas through collaborative adaptation. Sarah shows us how to inject Edison’s undeniably brilliant ...