Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries

by Peter Sims

most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas—they discover them.

two basic types of innovators, which he calls conceptual and experimental.

The great advantage of working in this way is that when trying to do something new or uncertain, we rarely know what we don’t know. Most successful creators, from tinkering inventors to songwriters to novelists, understand this. Thomas Edison famously said, “If I find ten thousand ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is just one more step forward.”

entrepreneurial plans are “made and unmade and recast through action and interaction with others.” Sarasvathy’s work highlights that both approaches have their benefits. Both ways of working are valuable, but in different situations: When much is known, procedural planning approaches work perfectly well. When much is unknown, they do not.

The most productive creative people and teams are rigorous, highly analytical, strategic, and pragmatic. They do not, though, use a formulaic model that can be followed. The ways of thinking and doing that will be introduced in the rest of the book are not a protocol; they do not add up to a step-by-step process. Rather, they are powerful aides to being productively creative that can free the mind to discover and to develop those discoveries in a wide variety of situations, which each of us can draw upon and adapt to our own situations and challenges.