The Strange Death of American Innovation
December 14, 2011 by Kevin Michael Gray
Today's featured article comes from inc.com and highlights the foundation in which corporate America was built upon; hard work and innovation. Some of my favorite places to visit in my spare time are antique stores and vintage flea markets. While sifting through metallic treasures of the past more often than not you will find stamped in a discrete location the inscription 'Made in the U.S.A.' If you pick up any given item in the store today you will find the inscription 'Made in China' or 'Manufactured in Taiwan.' The art of manufacturing has since been replaced with the art of entitlement and outsourced labor. Surely we might be able to save a couple dollars by out-sourcing the 'labor work' but at the end of the day the innovation suffers because the quality control process is broken up. What are your thoughts? Tweet about it @seedingideas Read the featured article below.
One of my favorite quotations is from Thomas Edison, who said the "value of the idea lies in the using of it." I never understood it as deeply as a student, but now running a car company in America today, I see the brilliance of Edison's simple aphorism shining through.
Innovation—the art of coming up with something that, moments before, was not there—is a mercurial process. Just look around today at the country's fastest-growing companies, you see a new kind of CIO springing up. Not the "information"-warden-type CIO, but rather, a Chief "Innovation" Officer. It's a sign that corporations and governments are wringing their hands and sharpening their focus, all on the hunt for new ideas.
But to those who have run labs and shops before, they know that perhaps there is more to this hunt than wizardry. In fact, innovation may be as simple as knuckling down with an idea and making something over and over until it comes out right.
Edison himself is known to have said that he never made a discovery, but rather that his inventions were the product of experimentation and elimination. In the creation of electric light he said, "I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory." As it turns out, the very light you are reading this article by can be attributed to a man who tried thousands of ways to make it—only to find one that worked.
So what's the big deal? Is it any great revelation that you need to make in order to innovate? Why don't we just all break out our paper and glue sticks and get down to innovating?
