Jay Sorensen
创始人Java夹克
Portland, Oregon
Don’t underestimate the value of luck. I used to go to one of the first gourmet coffee bars in Portland. You could pull right up to the drive-through, and they would hand you coffee in a paper cup with a napkin around it. This was 1991. One morning, I spilled the coffee in my lap. I didn’t get burned badly, but I thought, Maybe there’s a better way of doing this.
I don’t think of myself as an inventor. But at the time, I was in real estate and on the verge of going broke. So I started playing around with paper. I saw some embossed paper on a paper towel, talked to some paper converters, and sat down at my kitchen table and started wrapping insulated sleeves made from waffle-textured chipboard around paper cups.
星巴克那时正在双重拿起。我知道咖啡不是一种时尚，我坚信星巴克将成为球员。我们进行了九个月的谈判，我愿意给他们独家交易，但是有一些我不想见面的要求。现在，我想拥有星巴克帐户吗？好，当然。但是我已经意识到我会与他们息息相关，这几乎是我们没有得到的祝福。
因此，我们直接去了当地的咖啡店。如今，我们的大客户要么是分销商或国民帐户，例如边界和Nordstrom。但是咖啡店是收养的关键。有时，我会收到店主的电话，他们很沮丧，因为如果他们有一天将夹克放在杯子上，而下一个则没有将夹克放在杯子上，那么顾客就会生气。我的回答是：您要花费四美分，以使您的客户满意。这是您不能低估的另一件事。
Suna Polat
技术企业家，婴儿护理和女性护理
Procter & Gamble
Cincinnati, Ohio
More than two years ago, A.G. Lafley, our CEO, issued a challenge to have 50% of the company’s innovations come from external sources. In the past, we pretty much had a “do it ourselves” culture. But to really innovate better, faster, cheaper, we had to move toward a more open model of innovation. It’s my job–along with 50 or so other employees with the same position–to find ideas.
I think a lot about diapers. Baby Stages of Development launched in 2002, and it’s based on the basic consumer insight that the needs of mom and baby change as the baby grows. Our diapers are designed according to those stages, from newborn to toddler. The other challenge was to create a breathable material for diapers. We started thinking about ways to come up with that for the outside film of the diaper. It was an engineering contradiction: a material that allows water vapor molecules to go through but not liquid. We ended up collaborating with a professor at the University of Massachusetts.
Back in 1990, Procter & Gamble was looking for a way to make diapers cheaper. We found the expertise at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the people who work on nuclear bombs. So in a way, we’ve always looked to the outside for ideas. Now it’s just official.
Bruce Mau
Founder
Bruce Mau Design Inc.
设计工作室
安大略省多伦多市
To invent anything, you have to be removed from the world. In order to have the capacity, the liberty, to imagine something better, you need to step outside of it for a while.
My advice is to encourage invention and ideas, and then edit. It’s about proliferation and promiscuity on the one hand–and then later, rigorous, tough-minded editing. Dean Kamen, the inventor, calls the process “kissing frogs.” You might make 100 things and turn one of them into a prince.
What’s truly sane about that approach is that the frog that you make today doesn’t have to be beautiful. There’s no need to get hung up on a “good idea.” Later on, the process of choosing–making sure a good idea doesn’t get lost–becomes largely intuitive. In my experience, it has to be.
But product invention isn’t just about the product. It’s also about the relationship, the flow, the information that surrounds that product. If you say that the actual object is the thing, then you’re missing the point of what it means to invent in today’s world.
的确，考虑一下新产品，您首先必须自行考虑它。但是不久之后，您必须强迫自己进行心理翻转，并了解这确实不是离散的。例如，汽车制造商不想向您出售汽车。他们想向您出售10辆汽车。因此，他们将向您出售那辆车的关系，沟通和经验。汽车是产品，是更大流动的一部分。对于发明家来说，真正的挑战是了解它如何适合更大的环境。
马克·斯特菲克
Research fellow and manager,
Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Palo Alto, California
We live and work in what I call an “innovation ecology,” a collection of people and organizations whose joint contributions make breakthroughs possible. It includes universities, government funders, venture capitalists, designers, marketing departments, and corporate labs. The challenge is to bring ideas together.
What not to do: Fill a room with people from a single discipline. Or get a bunch of people from many different disciplines, and throw them all together. Either everyone has the same background, so it’s hard to come up with big, surprising ideas, or people are so different they can’t understand one another.
Something magical happens when you bring together a group of people from different disciplines with a common purpose. It’s a middle zone, the breakthrough zone. The idea is to start a team on a problem–a hard problem, to keep people motivated. When there’s an obstacle, instead of dodging it, bring in another point of view: an electrical engineer, a user interface expert, a sociologist, whatever spin on the market is needed. Give people new eyeglasses to cross-pollinate ideas.
对于每项发明，都有两个基本问题：什么可能和需要什么？来回的是两个问题的舞蹈。您必须将足够熟悉的方程式的人汇集在一起，足以彼此了解并共同探索问题。对于热爱发明的人来说，这就是行动所在。
我们现在正在与公司赞助商合作，探索他们感兴趣的战略挑战和技术方向。团队随着问题的范围和可能性的范围而变化。团队很小。早期，他们必须足够小（到六人到六人）才能快速运行并违反一些规则。
但是他们是球队。有一些关于一些小东西的孤独的发明者的可爱故事 - 其中一个是“在电视上看到的”小工具，这确实很有趣又美好。这不是我在说的突破。这是关于使突破成为生活方式。
David M. Lederman
Chairman and CEO, Abiomed
Danvers, Massachusetts
It’s my mission to build artificial implantable hearts. When I began thinking about the idea more than 30 years ago, the country had the will to achieve things that the world said were not achievable. A man had just landed on the moon. I wanted to do something important and life changing.
没有幻想这会很快。没有其他进入临床实践的医疗设备具有如此漫长的发展阶段。我们开始时不存在一些必要的技术。我们没有足够能量的电池来为机械心脏供电，因此患者可以自由地走动。1977年，我们估计需要20年的时间才能融合所需的技术。我们是对的。
一路上，我们创建了较少的技术。我们的团队开发了一种运动内气球泵，人造心脏瓣膜和心脏辅助系统，已被数百万患者使用。就像降落在月球上，这导致了钢筋编码的发展一样，建立人造植入的心脏是最初的任务，但这并不是唯一的任务。无论发明如何，您都必须开放并准备好潜在的副产品。
You also have to be prepared for setbacks. The first attempt is seldom successful. It’s an indication of what you need to do so that the second attempt is better. There’s no straight path. We’ve had to return to fundamentals and work very hard to keep up with scientific advances. Some of us spent seven years simply learning how blood clots.
如今，abiocor已植入11例患者。从某种意义上说，我们降落在月球上。我们着手为只有不到一个月的生活的患者提供两个月的合理生活。一名男子在他去世前17个月幸存下来。坦白说，我们没想到这么快就取得了成功。我们也没有预料到这一成功会带来更高的期望。那是最大的挑战。