where ideas for innovations come from ...

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on September 8, 2003

The Economist quotes a research how fruitful ideas for innovations are. The main passage:

" When the team plotted the success-to-failure rate of the six different idea factors, the two worst by far turned out to be trend following and mental inventions. Both produced three times as many failures as successes. By contrast, need spotting produced twice as many successes as failures. Market research generated four times more, and solution spotting seven times more successes than failures. But the clear winner in the innovation stakes was "taking advantage of random events ("random events" were serendipitous moments when innovators stumbled on something they were not looking for but immediately recognized its significance)", which generated 13 times more successes than failures."

There was something crossing my mind today .....