Debunking The Myths of Innovation

I hate to say it but I found The Myth of Innovation not a good read at all. It is very amateurestic (Scott routinely cites wikipedia), very fluffy, and with lots of childish notes.

Scott came at my company and gave a speach/presentation, and what he had to say in person was much more interesting that what he wrote down on the book.

I hope his next book is better, and gives more insight to us. Don't dumb it down for the users Scott. your speach was 10 times more interesting.

The worst part of it is that I was stuck with it in a remote beach between Albania and Greece, with nothing else to read.

This is a good read, although what was most interesting about it for me was the inescapable feeling I was reading a weblog.

I actually didn't get that feeling with Joel or Paul's essay compilations. But in this book he has footnotes which are URLs, name-checks blog favorites like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and has chapters of long-blog-post length. Not a bad thing, just something I found unusual.

A Really important set of ideas, but I wouldn't want to learn them from this book. The author seems to think you can take two entire academic sub-specialties (History of Science, History of Technology) and cram their collective information into one trade paperback.

Societies are cagey and unpredictable about how (hell, if) they assimilate new technologies. Studying those processes takes more intellectual commitment than you get from a book you might find on the "Management" rack by the checkout at Kinkos.

I'd recommend Thomas Misa's Leonardo to the Internet as a good starting point.

The google tech talk from the book tour: [http://youtube.com/watch?v=m6gaj6huCp0]

I watched it a couple weeks ago; fun and fairly informative, but not terribly impressive. I highly recommend Connections [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35837] for an insightful examination of the history of innovation.

To me, this blog post is a "duh!" moment. Of course, it's true, there are a number of factors that influence an apparently revolutionary discovery. It's similar to topics covered in Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop. Let's also not forget luck. That's another determining factor.