Innovation

These are the best posts I've written within the realm of innovation.

• Forced to innovate: under a period of great stress, they came up with many modern operations techniques. These constraints on resources fueled a period of incredible innovation.
• The entrepreneur's Keynesian beauty contest: it is more interesting to me how the Keynesian Beauty Contest manifests itself in the startup world. In particular, this shows up when entrepreneurs are deciding what opportunity to pursue and thus what type of company to start.
• Integrative thinking: integrative thinkers don't have to generate new ideas, like an inventor. Rather, they can take complementary ideas and form new thoughts that can be incremental or evolutionary in nature -- and they can form these new thoughts with minimal effort.
• Non-consensus right: it's irresponsible to casually say that competition is always a form of validation, and that lack of competition means something is stupid.
• Lead users: At the start of something really new, there is no proven market. So lead users have a need and they built it. It's like the users hack it together!
• The serendipity of meetings: there always has to be a balance between taking meetings and getting work done in the traditional sense, but it's worth not skewing too far towards not taking meetings, since that means losing out on the power of serendipity.
• When creative sparks strike: as I've become more self-aware, I've made sure to repeat these instances such as traveling often, longer showers, and open space before sleep that make me more likely to have a creative spark.