CLIPPINGS

Many traditional companies have formalized the process of brainstorming, reducing it to an activity often characterized as the untrained leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary. However, many, if not most, successful innovations come from the “wrong” places—nonconformists with an obsession, individuals stumbling on new discoveries by accident, people finding new uses for products intended for different markets, and so on. After twenty‐five years of studying IBM, General Electric, Polaroid, and Xerox, James Brian Quinn of the Amos Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College found that not a single major product had come from the formal planning process.