Suggested Reading

by Andrew Hargadon

Engineer and social scientist Andrew Hargadon contends that our romantic notions about innovation as invention are actually undermining our ability to pursue breakthrough innovations. Hargadon argues that breakthroughs are the result of occupying a unique position in a networked landscape across which ideas, people, and objects from past technologies travel and are creatively recombined in new ways that spark new technological revolutions. Inventors “borrow” existing ideas from an arena, and then bring together the physical artifacts and the people necessary to apply those ideas elsewhere. This process, which Hargadon calls “technology brokering, ” has been the force behind numerous celebrated inventions. “How Breakthroughs Happen” takes readers behind the scenes—from Edison’s Menlo Park lab to IDEO—to illustrate strategies for sourcing, nurturing, and exploiting ideas in new ways for new markets.