How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth about How Companies Innovate

WE'VE ALL READ about the "lone geniuses" of invention: Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, Henry Ford. But while this heroic notion of innovation is alluring, is it true? Not according to Andrew Hargadon. He argues that breakthroughs are the result of occupying a unique position in a networked landscape across which ideas, people, and artifacts travel and recombine in new ways. Inventors "borrow" existing ideas from an arena, and then bring together the physical artifacts and the people necessary to apply those ideas elsewhere. This process, which Hargadon calls "technology brokering, " has been the force behind numerous celebrated inventions. He takes readers behind the scenes--from Edison's Menlo Park lab to IDEO--to illustrate strategies for sourcing, nurturing, and exploiting ideas in new ways for new markets.