Juice
The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
Building value in our global economy increasingly demands creating new opportunities and solving new problems. In a nutshell, that's what inventors do. Just as software has driven growth and opened new markets over the past generation, invention is poised to become the X-factor for the future. With a foreword by former Microsoft research chief Nathan Myhrvold, this groundbreaking book takes us inside the laboratories and inside the minds of some of today's leading inventors to demystify the critical process by which they imagine and create.
Evan I. Schwartz argues that invention has remained steeped in myth and misunderstanding. We tend to view invention as a byproduct of accidental discovery or supernatural genius rather than what it truly is: a focused quest fueled by a special creativity latent in each of us. Juice juxtaposes the stories of classic inventors with a new breed of innovators, such as hypersonic sound inventor Woody Norris, genomics pioneer Lee Hood, mechanical whiz Dean Kamen, and business systems inventor Jay Walker. Schwartz reveals the brilliant strategies—including pinpointing problems, crossing knowledge boundaries, visualizing results, applying analogies, and embracing failure—that today's inventors use to journey beyond imagination and bring back ideas that can change the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The inventor's creative drive is usually regarded as an inimitable fluke found only in geniuses, but what if it were a mindset anyone could cultivate and exploit? Schwartz (The Last Lone Inventor) believes that it is, and lists a series of principles illustrated by the work of various inventors, from historical figures like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison to modern examples like Dean Kamen, the developer of the Segway. Though these tales are amiable and straightforward, the lessons he draws from them are overwhelmingly generic, along the lines of spotting opportunities others have overlooked and taking advantage of happy accidents. Meanwhile, stories about researchers turning algae into an alternative fuel source or creating speakerless sound systems that use ultrasonic waves for pinpoint audiocasting make invention look like something that occurs under unique circumstances or requires a high degree of specialized knowledge. Readers who are strictly interested in true tales of science, however, may be attracted by the diversity of Schwartz's role models.
