Innovation Demystified: The Messy Truth Behind the Myths

In the corporate imagination, innovation is often portrayed as a sudden lightning bolt—a flash of insight, a eureka moment, a solitary genius having a breakthrough. These myths are reinforced by popular accounts of iconic inventions. However, as Reeves and Goodson caution in Like: The Button That Changed The World, “maybe the biggest mistake made by big, long-established corporations attempting to manage innovation processes is that they read and believe the accounts of famous inventions that portray the process as purposeful, linear, and disciplined.”

Such narratives are not just misleading—they are counterproductive. They encourage corporate leaders to structure and streamline the innovation process in ways that seek to eliminate risk and make it more efficient and predictable. “When they turn their hands to exploration—trying to discover the new new thing—their approach by long habit is to try to structure and streamline the innovation process. But their attempts to de-risk it and make it more efficient, predictable, and straightforward ignore the basic facts of a process that is inherently messy and serendipitous.”

The development of the “Like” button—the seemingly simple feature that reshaped the dynamics of social interaction and online engagement—is a perfect example. It did not emerge from a strategic playbook, nor did it result from an isolated stroke of brilliance. Instead, it was the outcome of iterative, collaborative work by a team trying to solve a very human, very specific problem: how to enable users to express appreciation or agreement without the friction of writing a comment.