Inventing the Future: What Would Thomas Edison Be Doing Today?

By Sarah Miller Caldicott

Thomas Edison holds over a thousand patents in his name, including the electric light bulb, the phonograph, and motion picture camera. He is considered among the world's most prolific inventors, with a work ethic and vision for the future that helped change the modern world. And with all of the advances in current technology that he helped to invent, just imagine: What Would Thomas Edison Be Doing Today?

Author Sarah Miller Caldicott, a great-grandniece of Edison and expert in his methods, sets out to answer just that. Inventing the Future is a well-researched, intriguing look at how Edison would innovate today using new technology, and how modern day thinkers can adapt his proven innovation methods to their advantage. It also includes 7 steps anyone can take to start thinking like an innovator, and offers a hands-on view of how creativity and risk-taking come together to design powerful concepts that create new markets.

Learn the strategies needed to remove innovation barriers, begin driving the breakthroughs of the future, and change the way you do business. Stimulate your ability to imagine what's possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Oct 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781118219867

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Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Miller Caldicott. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN: 978-1-118-21986-7 (ePub)

ISBN: 978-1-118-21987-4 (eMobi)

This ebook is dedicated to Dr. Paul Israel and the staff of The Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. Your tireless efforts have transformed the world's ability to understand the timeless innovation methods of America's greatest inventor and innovator.

Introduction

What does it take to inspire innovation in twenty-first-century organizations? What are the qualities of a successful innovator? These are important questions that many businesses are asking following the dramatic economic downturns experienced in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Heralded by many as the fourth economic revolution in human history, we find ourselves standing awkwardly in the Innovation Age. Following the epic shifts of the Agrarian Age, the Industrial Age, and the Information Age, the Innovation Age commenced a few years after the turn of the millennium—the same window of time that I awakened to an extraordinary innovation twist in my family tree.

At age six, I learned that I was a great grandniece of Thomas Edison. For more than forty years, I spoke to no one about my unusual heritage. Other than stories exchanged among relatives, I lived with this unique legacy silently, never mentioning my Edisonian roots even to my closest friends or associates. What value could there be in revealing it?

But when US innovation momentum stumbled at the door of the twenty-first century, alarm bells rang in my head. Somehow, the fifty years of innovation successes the nation had enjoyed from 1950 to 1999 seemed to evaporate. Rather than firing on all cylinders at the dawn of the new millennium, it felt like we had suddenly lost our innovation mojo. With the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, the subsequent recession, plus the tragedies of September 11 and the Iraq war, it seemed our willingness to take risks, to dare, and to invest in new ideas had been severely hobbled. The entrepreneurial and creative spirit that had always been a signature of our country—all the way back to Edison's time and well prior—seemed dangerously weakened.

Most pivotal in my desire to peel back generations of family history and explore its unique connection to Thomas Edison, however, was news arriving in the fourth quarter of 2003 that China for the first time had surpassed the United States as the primary recipient of foreign investment. Never before had more money flowed into another nation than into the United States. Chilled by China's relentless growth and resource consumption, and realizing that the word innovation had barely been uttered in Washington, DC since the start of the new century, I threw down the gauntlet. It was time to break my silence. I was determined to learn what Edison's timeless innovation success could teach us about becoming innovators that are more effective today.

Hearing stories about Edison's inventions as a child was one thing, but plumbing the depths of his massive innovation empire was unfamiliar territory. In spring 2004, I stopped into a bookstore and bought a copy of Edison, A Life of Invention, which happened to be on display. Never realizing until well into the first several chapters that the author was the world's leading expert on Thomas Edison—Dr. Paul Israel of Rutgers University—it suddenly occurred to