xvi-xvii economist Joseph Schumpeter described the economic, sociological, and organizational impacts
of innovation and its "winds of creative destruction." Those winds sweep away both old ways of doing things and the
enterprises and institutions that cling to them.
xvii-xviii Many managers, technical professionals, and scholars see innovation as a process... That
process begins with a creative act: recognition of an opportunity... Opportunity recognition may also originate from
a scientist's or engineer's technical insight.
p.76-77 Innovative companies must eliminate unpromising ideas as quickly as possible, before they absorb
significant resources. Even those that pass the opportunity recognition tests... must be screened to identify the strongest
and most promising. Learning more about an idea always involves costs... So the quicker they can kill off the ideas... the
less their costs will be. Quick kills have the virtue of making more resources available for the handful of ideas that
have real merit... Product developers and academics have long used the idea funnel as a metaphor for the idea-filtering
chore just described.
p.143 The first thing one can do is objectively assess the situation.
p.153-154 Portfolio management is a methodology widely used by both corporations and individual
business divisions to create a proper mix of... projects... it is often helpful to "map" ongoing projects onto a two-dimensional
matrix like the one in figure 10-1. Here the horizontal axis indicates the potential payoff of projects in the portfolio...
The vertical axis indicates rising levels of technical and/or market challenge, which are associated with greater uncertainty
of success. Each circle represents a project, and the size of each circle reflects the magnitude of resources dedicated
to it.
p.168 Within every individual, creativity is a function of three components: expertise, creative
thinking skills, and motivation.
