Thomas Edison's Five Competencies
of Innovation

By David Clark, New Business Development Manager, the Malco Design & Deliver Group

A new book by Michael Gelb and Sarah Caldicott, Innovate Like Edison: The Five-Step System for Breakthrough Business Success, highlights five central competencies that helped inventor Thomas Edison throughout his highly-successful life.

In today's hyper-competitive marketplace, breakthrough innovation often can be stimulated by looking to the past. Here are the five Edison competencies, and how they apply to current best practices in new product development:

1. Solution-centered mindset. Edison's ability to use visualization and apply tangible processes to his concepts helped bring them to fruition. You can better grasp your ideas by doing the work up front to understand your customers and markets, and using an iterative process to direct customer needs from ideas to completed solutions.

2. Kaleidoscopic Thinking. Edison consistently visualized issues from multiple angles, allowing him to solve problems that befuddled others. By applying the best practices of today's new product development process, you will be able to view problems from different directions to arrive at solutions.

3. Full-Spectrum Engagement. Edison believed in engaging the full spectrum of development stages to navigate processes with the least amount of friction. Using iterative processes, creating product check points, and identifying critical failure points early on are all development stages that will help you complete your project with minimal friction.

4. Master-mind Collaboration. Edison is famous for assembling the best minds around him to form productive teams. One of the best practices of new product development is to involve potential customers as early as possible. This involvement promotes a "meeting of the minds" that delivers results exponential to the talents of you and your customers.

5. Super-value Creation. Edison knew that an innovation without value did not satisfy the customer. At the Malco Design and Deliver Group, the super-value that we deliver is products that can be manufactured in the real world. This means that they can be manufactured at an affordable price with a level of quality that will reflect well on your brand.