Invention Centers

Alan Kay:

Invention centers are 20 to 40 people doing odd things. Innovation is the process of taking something that’s already been invented and packaging it nicer.

Problem-finding is about how to get something out of almost nothing in some new area. You're by definition not doing something incremental. There’s a lot of playful stuff going on. The probability of a good idea is pretty low. Most of the ideation that happens [in an invention center] are things that get rejected, which is normal in this line of work. Very few people understand that.

Later:

The shortest lived group at Xerox PARC was "Office of the Future," because Xerox executives would not leave them alone.

I chose the most innocuous name for my own group, the Learning Research Group. Nobody knew what it meant, so they left us alone to invent-object oriented programming and the GUI.

So weird that something like CDG is backed by SAP.

(via Avdi Grimm)