Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors

Building value in our global economy increasingly demands creating new opportunities and solving new problems. In a nutshell, that's what inventors do. Just as software has driven growth and opened new markets over the past generation, invention is poised to become the X-factor for the future. With a foreword by former Microsoft research chief Nathan Myhrvold, this groundbreaking book takes us inside the laboratories and inside the minds of some of today's leading inventors to demystify the critical process by which they imagine and create.

Evan I. Schwartz argues that invention has remained steeped in myth and misunderstanding. We tend to view invention as a byproduct of accidental discovery or supernatural genius rather than what it truly is: a focused quest fueled by a special creativity latent in each of us. Juice juxtaposes the stories of classic inventors with a new breed of innovators, such as hypersonic sound inventor Woody Norris, genomics pioneer Lee Hood, mechanical whiz Dean Kamen, and business systems inventor Jay Walker. Schwartz reveals the brilliant strategies—including pinpointing problems, crossing knowledge boundaries, visualizing results, applying analogies, and embracing failure—that today's inventors use to journey beyond imagination and bring back ideas that can change the world.

Evan I. Schwartz is a contributing writer for MIT's Technology Review and a former editor at Business Week. He is the author of "The Last Lone Inventor," "Digital Darwinism," and "Webonomics."