Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors [Hardcover]

I've read many books on innovation and this one was the best I've read. Schwartz engrosses you by weaving past and present, across domains as varied as agriculture and e-commerce, isolating the common techniques that great inventors use to overcome the obstacles to innovation. The book is a great combination of science history and management insight.

You might see Harvard B-School as the publisher and think "ugh, dry business tome, better wait for the digest version" :-) That couldn't be further from the truth!! Without spoiling it, I'll simply say that there are great personal stories and wonderfully light moments. He has a style that is engaging and he switches between stories like a good film director. As an entrepreneur, I found myself sympathetically rooting for each of the innovators profiled, including several I had never heard of.

I think it will appeal to:
- business executives (e.g., leaders of product teams, who having read Clayton Christensen, are now striving to stimulate innovation in their organizations)
- science history buffs (e.g., fans of James Burke's works such as Connections and Pinball Effect)
- fans of his previous books (e.g., Last Lone Inventor about Philo Farnsworth's invention of television)

In short, the author cracks the mystery that is "innovation" through a series of in-depth looks at the people, places, and circumstances that led to their inventions. Highly recommended!!

Schwartz brilliantly explains "the creative fuel that drives world-class inventors" while explaining, also, that each of them followed a process by which to create possibilities. More specifically, by pinpointing problems to be solved, recognizing what are usually interconnected patterns, "channeling chance" (i.e. serendipity), eliminating or transcending boundaries, detecting barriers inorder to remove or overcome them, recognizing and applying appropriate analogies, visualizing probable results, embracing each failure as a learning opportunity, "multiplying insights" as they reveal themselves, and at all times "thinking schematically" (i.e. cohesively). Yes, that's a mouthful but essentially what the process of invention involves. It bears striking similarities with how the human mind functions. Here is a brief excerpt from Schwartz's Prologue:

"The brain's hundreds of billions of neurons, or nerve cells, fire signals across tiny gaps known as synapses. These neurotransmitter signals travel across billions of pathways, often making new connections along the way. One of the mind's many astounding feats is that this network of neural circuits can operate and grow while consuming only a quarter of the electrical power that drives a modern microprocessor, or about twenty watts. This internally produced electricity is our juice." All of the inventors whom Schwartz discusses in this book channeled this "juice" the right way. By making new and unexpected connections, they produced that special form of creativity known as invention.

According to Nikola Tesla (the inventor of alternating current), "cognitive LEDs" (i.e. the electrical energy of invention) races through both the mind and heart. In common parlance, this is often referred to as a "rush": forces of intellectual and emotional energy achieve together what Joseph Schumpeter once described as "creative destruction." This is precisely what Schwartz has in mind when noting that by "isolating a problem in a new way, by redefining it, by focusing it down to something more specific than meets the average eye, the inventor constructs a new possibility where none was thought to have existed."

Among the inventors whom Schwartz discusses, those of greatest interest to me are Woody Norris, Alexander Graham Bell, Jay Walker, Lee Hood, Carl Crawford and Kevin King, Dean Kamen, and Ron Katz. Here are brief excerpts about four of them:

Woody Norris: He "was engaging in a common habit of inventive engineering: taking a technology of technique that works in one domain -- in this case Dopler radar detection of aircraft or weather patterns -- and then repurposing it for a new problem space. Was Norris the first inventor to think of this basic idea of diagnostic ultrasound? Hardly. But he imagined the possibility without knowledge of other efforts. Throughout history, most epochal inventions have been born in a rush of nearly simultaneous discovery." (page 18)

Alexander Graham Bell: After a series of partially successful experiments, Bell became convinced that he had "found a way for [begin italics] continuous [end italics] patterns of electricity to carry almost any type of sound over wires....Bell's method, however, was anything but a linear progression -- the first problem leading to a second, leading to a third, and so on. Instead, his diverse investigations led to an explosion of puzzles, a simultaneous eruption of new possibilities that sent him down parallel paths that he eventually connected." (page 24)

Jay Walker: He has defined challenges in a unique way which provides a competitive advantage. For example, he conceived Priceline.com as an intricate system which enables consumers to trade off flight preferences (i.e. non-stop flights, departure and arrival times) for lower prices; it also enables airlines to unload unsold tickets (i.e. "excess capacity"). "In recent years, he has been averaging about one hundred patent filings annually. With more than two hundred fifty issued patents and more than six hundred pending," Walker and his colleagues at Walker Digital continue to focus on specific target areas of opportunity. For example, they wonder why current slot machines are lackluster and why winning is based on mere chance. "Why isn't skill a factor in winning at slots?" Re current generation cash registers, "Why do cashiers give customers their change? Why not find a systematic way to offer additional products in lieu of money?" (page 43)

Lee Hood: "The ultimate system is the biological system. That the human body is a system of systems has been known for ages." So what's new? Hood and his associates are convinced that the history of medicine has been about diagnosing and treating disease. The future, by contrast, is all about predicting and then preventing disease. "If you ask me what the technology of the future will be in biological medicine," Schwartz quotes Hood asserting, "it is utterly clear: microfluidics coupled with nanotechnology." Hence his vision of "capturing an instantaneous genetic health snapshot of an individual, to see whether any genes are mutating and whether any cancers might be forming in the near future." To obtain tremendous amounts of information from tiny samples of blood, "you create groups of microscopic robots, essentially reducing an entire laboratory to the size of a fingernail."(page 201)

The work of these and other inventors demonstrates what Schwartz calls "the cycle of thinking strategies: creating new opportunities, pinpointing new problems, recognizing new patterns, detecting new barriers, and so forth." This is a never-ending process. If conducted with rigor, it is also ever-expanding because each new solution creates all manner of new problems which, in turn, create all manner of learning opportunities which, in turn, facilitate new solutions which, in turn....

In his Epilogue, Schwartz devotes substantial attention to Ashok Khosla who sees three proven models that can turn poor nations into rich ones: copycatting, piggybacking, and leapfrogging. Khosla is currently focused on India's rural poor, the 70% of the population who have been "untouched" by global outsourcing. He is an archetypical example of the inventor as entrepreneur with a social conscience and a determination to help as many people as possible to escape the cycle of poverty. To achieve that admirable objective, Khosla practices the same "cycle of thinking strategies" as do all other world-class inventors. For example, he recognized that poor people need places to live; ways to produce their own clothing locally, to cook food, to purify water; and cheap renewable energy. "Borrowing ideas he has seen all over the world," Khosla has invented a series of new products to meet those basic needs. All can be produced with locally available materials. He has also devised a franchising system by which local dealerships can distribute new technologies and train people to use them.

I agree with Schwartz that there has never been a prior time when the need for inventions was greater, inventions which can alleviate and eventually eliminate the world's problems in areas such as healthcare, nutrition, and education. It is Schwartz's expressed hope that those who read this book will be better prepared to "turn on the juice" of their own inventiveness. "We know that brainstorms are electrical, and you need to have many of them if you want to change the world.... So, let's turn on the juice and see what shakes loose."

Juice is basically a collection of anecdotes that seeks to describe the invention process. Various individuals are highlighted, showing the thought processes, the constant drive, the problem-framing and problem-solving abilities that are necessary to make useful innovations. However, I found myself wanting to know more in many of these cases. Oftentimes an inventor has an idea and then spends 10 years working to make it a reality. In my mind, what happens in those 10 years is key. But Juice seemed to gloss over these periods. Also, most of the examples used in the book are well known and well documented, so some more original cases would have been good. In the end, the book was interesting and engaging, and an easy read, but could use more substance.

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