Preview: Stories of Innovation for the Millennial Generation
Foreword
Since the beginning of the development of language people have created and told each other stories. The point of stories is both entertainment and education and very often stories have a moral, a judgement about the goodness or badness of human action or behaviour.
Stories are also a very effective way of diffusing memes – behaviours or ideas that spread across a culture or society from person to person and vehicles for transmitting societal or cultural practices, concepts or ideas. In learning any subject the retention of the content is always an issue, with the half-life of retention of factual content being quite short. Stories are very effective ways of enabling students to retain knowledge longer. In this book Professor Formica uses fictional stories to convey both innovation lessons and to help students retain the lessons. I encourage you to read these learned fictional stories from one of the master innovation storytellers of our times. Generous sprinklings of Latin and Greek references connect us to core principles distilled and learned over centuries.
Fact can sometimes be stranger than fiction. Perhaps these stories will inspire you to turn your fiction into fact and to bring into being new innovations which can improve all of our lives.
Martin Curley
Vice President
Director, Intel Labs Europe
Preface
Stories of Innovation for the Millennial Generation make a virtue of anachronism and counter-intuitive context – so, in one chapter, we have Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver, refigured as two start-up entrepreneurs, discussing the benefits of innovation networks. These are innovative stories for innovative people; the book itself emerges from a disruptive and transforming creativity. If we can borrow the long sight of Lynceus, the Argonaut, whose symbolic special gift sets him at the core of Stories for the Millennial Generation and gives it its subtitle, we should use it to gaze into the past as well as into the future. The true innovator works with connections that others cannot see.
John Edmondson,
Director, IP Publishing Ltd
Editor, Industry and Higher Education
Independent Scholar in Victorian Studies
London
June 2013
