Inventology
Pagan Kennedy Eamon Dolan Book/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 270 pages, $27
Back in the '70s, Scott Burnham was a technician working for a company that made guitar cables and accessories. While soldering parts one day, he accidentally attached the wrong resistor to a circuit board. The circuit suddenly produced a haunting moan — so lovely and eerie that Burnham realized it would make a fantastic guitar-pedal sound. He created the Rat, a pedal that quickly sold tens of thousands of units. This is the type of story that crops up a lot in Pagan Kennedy's new book, "Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World." After talking to dozens of inventors, she finds that their breakthroughs frequently involve an element of luck — though, as Louis Pasteur observed, luck favors the prepared mind.
Kennedy also argues that inventors are often polymathic connectors who are able to bring together knowledge from several fields. In her most surprising chapter she examines InnoCentive, a website where companies post problems they cannot solve. The people most likely to solve problems on InnoCentive are outsiders to the problem's field. Why? Because when we're insiders, we suffer from déformation professionnelle, or industrial groupthink. You get stuck in your discipline's intellectual ruts. The inventors whom Kennedy profiles invariably have fingers in many pies: The person who brought us the sippy cup understood both the physics of nozzles and the messiness of toddlers.
NEW YORK TIMES
