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

8.5. Lesson 69: Work the Problem

Edison's secret for productivity was really quite simple. He never stopped working. When he came up against a wall in the course of developing an invention, he worked the problem. In 1904, for example, he found that some cells of his newly developed storage batteries exhibited—spontaneously, it seemed—an unexplained loss of capacity to hold a charge. Because the batteries were already in production, he called a temporary halt to manufacturing—he did not want bad batteries poisoning the market for his product—and he devoted two laboratory rooms, staffed by eighteen experimenters, to solving the problem. This special unit worked day and night until the source of the problem was discovered and corrected.

Because ...