
Debunking The Myths of Innovation - danw
http://lifehacker.com/software/book-recommendation/debunking-the-myths-of-innovation-289069.php
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ardit33
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.

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zach
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.

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mnemonicsloth
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.

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dood
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.

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ahsonwardak
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.

