May 2007
Intermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h 44m
English
Content preview from The Myths of InnovationBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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How innovations gain adoption (the truth about ideas before their time)
One frequent saying in innovation circles is "an idea ahead of its time." What a strange phrase. How can an idea be ahead of its time? How can anything be ahead of its time? It makes no sense. What people mean when they say this is one of two things: they think the idea is cool but not necessarily good, or they're trying to get you to buy it. But it's a lousy pitch. How often do the things we imagine from the future work out in the present? Personal rocketships? Cars that fly? Nuclear-powered everything? The odds of cool ideas from sci-fi movies gaining adoption are poor, and it's far from a compliment to have something labeled "ahead of its time." [83] People don't slave away on insanely difficult work, sacrificing the pleasures of life, with the singular hope that, on their deathbeds, after everything they've done has been ignored, they will be told they were "ahead of their time." To be told your idea is ahead of its time is innovation pity, not praise.
But more importantly for us, this phrase exposes myths about how innovations do gain adoption in the world. First, it assumes technology progresses in a straight line (as covered in Chapter 2). To be ahead of its time implies than an idea has a time, marked in red at the universal innovation headquarters, waiting for people to catch up to it: an entirely inaccurate, innovation-centric view of how people live.
In Diffusion of Innovations, Everett M. Rogers writes: ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.