James Laughlin argues innovation isn't a talent you're born with but a skill you can learn. Watching ordinary people do ethnography, rapid prototyping, and brainstorming changed his mind about who gets to be an innovator.
I didn't know there was a practice or a methodology around new idea generation and innovation. You know, I thought innovators are these kind of. They have a different DNA strand or an extra DNA strand. Right. It's not me. And when I saw people like me going into the field and going into the slums and ethnographically engaging and rapid prototyping and coming back and putting a bunch of stickies on the wall with ideas about how to revolutionize people's lives, I had no idea that people just like me are innovators. You know, I thought innovators some other class of product person. And so that was really transformative.
