I see correspondences between Schrage's ideas here and Gladwell's new book.

As we set out on new innovation initiatives, it is a good time to reflect on the illusions that drag our success rates so low.

The amount of money you spend on research and development has little to no correlation with the quality of any kind of innovation that you do.

You do nothing and you get paid for it. I've aspired to that business model all my life, you know, but it's not sustainable for reasons of competition and customer dissatisfaction.

They could have run an experiment to give them insight ... But they wouldn't do it! And the basic reason for not doing it was not that they couldn't afford to do it, but that they didn't want to know. You know, you're in real trouble as an organization when you won't conduct a cheap experiment to learn something important about your business, your profitability, and your customers. And that is the innovation challenge that organizations face. It has nothing to do with how much you spend, but about what assumptions you're prepared to challenge.

(This is a republication of an interview conducted in 2006 and previously recommended here.)

See also:

I think the future of advice is a cool topic because it turns out that there really are differences between advice and recommendations.

Finally:

Innovations that make us more attractive, more effective, and more desirable are more likely to diffuse than those that don't.