The Eureka Method: How to Think Like an Inventor


Book Description

Fuel your "Eureka!" moments and become a successful inventor Envision breakthrough new products using the proven methods and applied reasoning techniques of today's successful inventors. The Eureka Method: How to Think Like an Inventor lays out a systematic approach to innovation. Discover how to look at social developments and trends to find new ways of combining and improving existing technologies and systems. Plain-language examples of real-world patents, products, and inventors illuminate each point along the way. Find out how to: Gain regular flashes of inspiration based on your understanding of the inventive process Improve and expand existing products in ways that fill social needs Fuse elements from different products into new and useful combinations Discover new opportunities by side-stepping rules and gaming the system "Futurize" your inventions and prevent them from becoming obsolete Identify emerging regulations and use them to your creative advantage Learn about comprehensive patent applications that protect your rights




The Eureka Method: How to Think Like an Inventor


Book Description

Fuel your "Eureka!" moments and become a successful inventor Envision breakthrough new products using the proven methods and applied reasoning techniques of today's successful inventors. The Eureka Method: How to Think Like an Inventor lays out a systematic approach to innovation. Discover how to look at social developments and trends to find new ways of combining and improving existing technologies and systems. Plain-language examples of real-world patents, products, and inventors illuminate each point along the way. Find out how to: Gain regular flashes of inspiration based on your understanding of the inventive process Improve and expand existing products in ways that fill social needs Fuse elements from different products into new and useful combinations Discover new opportunities by side-stepping rules and gaming the system "Futurize" your inventions and prevent them from becoming obsolete Identify emerging regulations and use them to your creative advantage Learn about comprehensive patent applications that protect your rights







Driving Eureka!


Book Description

Transform the art of innovation into a reliable system! System Driven Innovation enables you and everyone on your team to use innovation to work smarter, faster, and more creatively. It transforms innovation from a random act to a reliable science. This new mindset ignites confidence in the future. It enables the creation of bigger and bolder ideas—and turns them into reality faster, smarter, and more successfully. With this new mindset, innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day becomes the norm. The rapidly changing world becomes a tremendous opportunity to achieve greatness. Innovation Engineering defines innovation in two words: Meaningfully Unique. When a product, service, or job candidate is Meaningfully Unique customers are willing to pay more money for it. This links to the two simple truths in today’s marketplace: If you’re Meaningfully Unique life is great! If you’re NOT Meaningfully Unique you’d better be cheap. Innovation Engineering is a new field of academic study and leadership science. It teaches how to apply the science of system thinking to strategy, innovation, and cooperation. Research finds that it helps to increase innovation speed (up to 6x) and decrease risk (by 30 to 80%). Innovation Engineering accelerates the creation and development of more profitable products and services. However, the bigger benefit may well lie in its ability to transform organizational cultures by enabling everyone to work smarter every day. What makes Innovation Engineering unique is that it’s grounded in data, backed by academic theory, and validated in real-world practice. Collectively, it’s the number one documented innovation system on earth. Over 35,000 people have been educated in Innovation Engineering classes, and more than $15 billion in innovations are in active development. In his book Driving Eureka!, best-selling business author Doug Hall presents the System Driven Innovation scientific method for enabling innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day. It’s the essential resource you need to enable yourself—and your team—to innovate, succeed, and do amazing things that matter, on a daily basis.




Eureka!


Book Description

Presents poems describing inventors and their inventions, including the invention of the printing press, dishwasher, and velcro.




Where Good Ideas Come from


Book Description

In this book, one of our most innovative, popular thinkers, Steven Johnson, takes on one of life's key questions: where do good ideas come from?




Snowflake Bentley


Book Description

In this Caldecott Medal–winning picture book, the true story of Wilson Bentley and his singular fascination with snowflakes is rendered in rich prose and gorgeous artwork, perfect for the holidays, snow days, and everyday. Wilson Bentley was always fascinated by snow. In childhood and adulthood, he saw each tiny crystal of a snowflake as a little miracle and wanted to understand them. His parents supported his curiosity and saved until they could give him his own camera and microscope. At the time, his enthusiasm was misunderstood. But with patience and determination, Wilson catalogued hundreds of snowflake photographs, gave slideshows of his findings and, when he was 66, published a book of his photos. His work became the basis for all we know about beautiful, unique snowflakes today. This biographical tribute to a very special farmer is the perfect holiday gift or snow day read.




Sparks of Genius


Book Description

Discover the cognitive tools that lead to creative thinking and problem-solving with this “well-written and easy-to-follow” guide (Library Journal). Explore the “thinking tools” of extraordinary people, from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Mozart and Virginia Woolf, and learn how you can practice the same imaginative skills to become your creative best. With engaging narratives and examples, Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools such as observing, recognizing patterns, modeling, playing, and more. Sparks of Genius is “a clever, detailed and demanding fitness program for the creative mind” and a groundbreaking guidebook for anyone interested in imaginative thinking, lifelong learning, and transdisciplinary education (Kirkus Reviews). “How different the painter at the easel and the physicist in the laboratory! Yet the Root-Bernsteins recognize the deep-down similarity of all creative thinking, whether in art or science. They demonstrate this similarity by comparing the accounts that various pioneers and inventors have left of their own creative processes: for Picasso just as for Einstein, for Klee just as for Feynman, the creative impulse always begins in vision, in emotion, in intuition. . . . With a lavishly illustrated chapter devoted to each tool, readers quickly realize just how far the imagination can stretch.” —Booklist “A powerful book . . . Sparks of Genius presents radically different ways of approaching problems.” —American Scientist




The Alchemy of Us


Book Description

A “timely, informative, and fascinating” study of 8 inventions—and how they shaped our world—with “totally compelling” insights on little-known inventors throughout history (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction) In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines 8 inventions and reveals how they shaped the human experience: • Clocks • Steel rails • Copper communication cables • Photographic film • Light bulbs • Hard disks • Scientific labware • Silicon chips Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. She describes how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep; how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas; how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway’s writing style; and how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid’s cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies. Ramirez shows not only how materials were shaped by inventors but also how those materials shaped culture, chronicling each invention and its consequences—intended and unintended. Filling in the gaps left by other books about technology, Ramirez showcases little-known inventors—particularly people of color and women—who had a significant impact but whose accomplishments have been hidden by mythmaking, bias, and convention. Doing so, she shows us the power of telling inclusive stories about technology. She also shows that innovation is universal—whether it's splicing beats with two turntables and a microphone or splicing genes with two test tubes and CRISPR.




Inventing the World


Book Description

An epic cultural journey that reveals how Venetian ingenuity and inventions—from sunglasses and forks to bonds and currency—shaped modernity. How did a small, isolated city—with a population that never exceeded 100,000, even in its heyday—come to transform western civilization? Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith Small, the author of the groundbreaking Our Babies, Ourselves examines the the unique Venetian social structure that was key to their explosion of creativity and invention that ranged from the material to social. Whether it was boats or money, medicine or face cream, opera, semicolons, tiramisu or child-labor laws, these all originated in Venice and have shaped contemporary notions of institutions and conventions ever since. The foundation of how we now think about community, health care, money, consumerism, and globalization all sprung forth from the Laguna Veneta. But Venice is far from a historic relic or a life-sized museum. It is a living city that still embraces its innovative roots. As climate change effects sea-level rises, Venice is on the front lines of preserving its legacy and cultural history to inspire a new generation of innovators.