Leading for Innovation: And Organizing for Results

2.1. The Alchemist Study

Fleas are the creative individuals or groups. They include small independent businesses or community ventures. Elizabeth Handy and I recently studied twenty-nine typical flea individuals in London, England, who had started their own new ventures—theater companies, small businesses, design communities, and new social ventures. We called them The New Alchemists because of their ability to create metaphorical gold, either from nothing or from desperate situations, the equivalent of base metal. We were interested to discover what circumstances or dispositions shaped them, what influences or happenings made them what they were, and how their capacity for innovation, or alchemy, could be mirrored by others.

The first important ...