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50 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

and size could justify. He investigated and found an old man
who had, in effect, reinvented the fast-food business by system-
atizing it. Kroc bought his outfit and built it into a billion-dol-
lar business based on the original owner’s unexpected success.
A competitor’s unexpected success or failure is equally important.
In either case, one takes the event seriously as a possible symptom of
innovative opportunity. One does not just “analyze.” One goes out to
investigate.
Innovation—and this is a main thesis of this book—is organized,
systematic, rational work. But it is perceptual fully as much as con-
ceptual. To be sure, what the innovator sees and learns has to be sub-
jected to rigorous logical analysis. Intuition is not good enough;
indeed, it is no good at all if by “intuition” is meant “what I feel.” For
that usually is another way of saying “What I like it to be” rather than
“What I perceive it to be.” But the analysis, with all its rigor—its
requirements for testing, piloting, and evaluating—has to be based on
a perception of change, of opportunity, of the new realities, of the
incongruity between what most people still are quite sure is the real-
ity and what has actually become a new reality. This requires the will-
ingness to say: “I don’t know enough to analyze, but I shall find out.
I’ll go out, look around, ask questions, and listen.”
It is precisely because the unexpected jolts us out of our precon-
ceived notions, our assumptions, our certainties, that it is such a fer-
tile source of innovation.
It is not in fact even necessary for the entrepreneur to understand
why reality has changed. In the two cases above, it was easy to find
out what had happened and why. More often, we find out what is hap-
pening without much clue as to why. And yet we can still innovate
successfully.
Here is one example.
The failure of the Ford Motor Company’s Edsel in 1957 has
become American folklore. Even people who were not yet born when
the Edsel failed have heard about it, at least in the United States. But
the general belief that the Edsel was a slapdash gamble is totally mis-
taken.
Very few products were ever more carefully designed, more care-
fully introduced, more skillfully marketed. The Edsel was intended to
be the final step in the most thoroughly planned strategy in American
business history: a ten-year campaign during which the Ford Motor
Company converted itself after World War II from near-bankruptcy