This book by Andrew Hargadon talks about why some companies are more innovative than others. The strategy focus should not just be “where we are going” but “how to get there”. General insights:
- Creative innovations often come from combining other ideas
- Creativity often occurs within the context of a community of people searching for solutions to a problem
- Tension/trade-off between exploitation and exploration – but this tension does not have to be. Companies can innovate during the process of exploiting existing knowledge and resources.
Chapter 1
- We need to recognize the “networks” that lead to innovation. Not traditional networks, but networks linking people, objects and ideas, all connected to or influencing in some way the final innovation.
- Technology is the arrangement of people, objects and ideas to accomplish a particular goal. In other words an innovation is not just an object — it requires the (possibly specialized) people that use this object.
- Breakthroughs cause these networks experience a shift. Objects, ideas and people can become obsolete. Good inventors are just well connected.
