Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond

3.6. Lesson 18: Embrace Problems

Edison welcomed failure. He embraced it. He was rarely able to predict everything that would go wrong with a design he had sketched until that design had been prototyped by his machinists and shop men and had, in some way or other, come up short. As he made the rounds of his shop floor, his men would tell him what had gone wrong, and Edison would immediately set about searching for solutions.

The inventor extended his embrace of problems to products that had already been marketed and sold. He always carefully analyzed customer complaints and used them as the basis for incremental improvements. These innovations on the original inventions were often in themselves patentable, and thus Thomas Edison racked up his ...