This book reviews the leading figure of Thomas Alva Edison, joining both the inventor and the innovator facets of the genius, and connecting both in a kind of a successful chain conceived in a way where the role of the ‘inventor’ was to create new ideas in his laboratory in order to supply to the ‘innovator’ for manufacturing and marketing them into new technologies ready to be used by ordinary people.

The author also remarks how Edison’s creativity and hard-working inspired very much confidence on investors, business partners, employees and consumers, boosting his credibility to obtain enough funds to continue and expand his researching new activities.

In fact, DeGraaf’s book shows how innovation is not simply a linear process from laboratory to market, where an idea turns clearly into a prototype, and that prototype is next put into production to be finally manufactured to consumers.

Instead of that, DeGraaf shows how Edison’s innovation methods were based on a social process involving the interaction of inventors, manufacturers, marketers, consumers, and investors in a kind of complex network very familiar now to present corporations. In addition, DeGraaf also shows how this strategy was quite successfully to Edison in many occasions but also failed in some any others. For example, it is described how Edison’s phonograph clearly failed to be brought to a mass-market consumer product in favour of Victor Talking Machine’s. Edison expected consumers to appreciate his focus on technical quality, so he approached music selection to be played in his phonographs as a technical problem too, instead of a marketing issue, as Victor did.

Available from Amazon.com in hard copy (244 pages).