A More Beautiful Question

Why do children stop asking questions? This was one of the questions that innovation expert Warren Berger set out to answer, along with why certain new, flexible start- up businesses were doing better than established companies staffed with MBA graduates.

Many businesses think they’re innovative. They’re not. They don’t have the time or space to consider the buyers or how changes in the wider world affect their markets. Internally, they’re too hidebound by ‘how we’ve always done things,’ or appeasing those who shout the loudest, for any truly authentic innovations to take place.

A More Beautiful Question is about the startling beauty of invention, and also creating something genuinely useful; it examines the origins of new developments and technologies from companies like Nike, Patagonia, Netflix and Airbnb, showing that not only does a genuine customer need have to be met, but that need has first to be identified by someone putting themselves in the customers' shoes.

Sometimes innovations come from personal experience, such as the amputee athlete who invents the first flexible prosthetic foot; sometimes they come out of a combination of compassion and tenacity, as in the extraordinary story of Jack Andraka, the high school student who invents a portable and non-invasive test for cancer.

One of the book’s other themes is the richness of ideas that comes when people of different backgrounds and cultures work together; unsurprisingly, the problem of why lower- income children ask less questions in class is more effectively addressed by a partnership of an Ivy League man and a Hispanic woman from the projects than it would have been by two Ivy League men.

Berger's book emphasises the importance of abandoning your own mindset for another's, asking yourself what Jay-Z or JK Rowling would do if faced with the problem you are trying to solve- in short putting questions before answers, where- in a more beautiful world- they should be.

Aspiring inventors and entrepreneurs; you can read the first chapter in one of the links below.