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11

Principles of Innovation

I

All experienced physicians have seen “miracle cures.” Patients suf-
fering from terminal illnesses recover suddenly—sometimes sponta-
neously, sometimes by going to faith healers, by switching to some
absurd diet, or by sleeping during the day and being up and about all
night. Only a bigot denies that such cures happen and dismisses them
as “unscientific.” They are real enough. Yet no physician is going to
put miracle cures into a textbook or into a course to be taught to med-
ical students. They cannot be replicated, cannot be taught, cannot be
learned. They are also extremely rare; the overwhelming majority of
terminal cases do die, after all.
Similarly, there are innovations that do not proceed from the
sources described in the preceding chapters, innovations that are not
developed in any organized, purposeful, systematic manner. There are
innovators who are “kissed by the Muses,” and whose innovations are
the result of a “flash of genius” rather than of hard, organized, pur-
poseful work. But such innovations cannot be replicated. They cannot
be taught and they cannot be learned. There is no known way to teach
someone how to be a genius. But also, contrary to popular belief in
the romance of invention and innovation, “flashes of genius” are
uncommonly rare. What is worse, I know of not one such “flash of
genius” that turned into an innovation. They all remained brilliant
ideas.
The greatest inventive genius in recorded history was surely
Leonardo da Vinci. There is a breathtaking idea—submarine or helicop-
ter or automatic forge—on every single page of his notebooks. But not
one of these could have been converted into an innovation with the tech-
nology and the materials of 1500. Indeed, for none of them would there
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