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| Author | Melissa Schilling |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject |
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| Publisher | PublicAffairs |
Publication date | 2018 |
| Pages | 336 |
| ISBN | 978-1-61039-792-6 |
Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World is a 2018 book by Melissa Schilling, a professor at New York University Stern School of Business. The book was published by PublicAffairs, a division of Hachette Book Group.
Melissa Schilling develops cases studies of eight serial breakthrough innovators – Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, and Nikola Tesla – to identify commonalities in their capabilities, motives, personalities, and experiences. These characteristics are then integrated with the research on innovation and creativity to show how they might influence breakthrough idea generation and extreme persistence.
 | This section contains too many or overly lengthy quotations .(October 2018) |
The Financial Times reviewer wrote,
Quirky is a business book that lives up to its title. In part, Melissa Schilling has produced an entertaining and enlightening romp through the lives of eight "breakthrough innovators", exploring their remarkable abilities, personalities and motives ... The author deftly draws out some of the other quirky characteristics that these innovators shared. Perhaps the most significant was that, with the notable exception of Benjamin Franklin, they all had a sense of separateness, which created the space for original thinking ... The more intriguing point, with which Ms Schilling concludes, is that breakthrough innovation in science does not always come from people who have pursued a "typical" scientific path. That makes it all the more imperative to broaden educational opportunities, allow non-scientists to access scientific resources and expertise, and give free rein to the quirky. [1]
Joe Culley at The Irish Times writes, "Schilling's prose is clear and largely jargon-free, and the individual profiles are excellent." [2]
A reviewer in Strategy + Business writes,
The approach Schilling takes with Quirky is a variant of the case study method – instead of companies, the cases here are the lives of great inventors. She examines their lives to uncover the common personality traits and "foibles" that helped them see what others did not ...
Schilling has a nice eye for the telling detail, and shares the stories of these well-known innovators' lives with economy and precision. ...
Much of this model seems intuitively correct. But Schilling's sample size is so small that it's hard to know if the conclusions she draws from that sample about the nature of serial innovation would hold up to closer scrutiny ...
In fact, the real paradox of Schilling's work is that even though it looks at completely extraordinary people, it may be most valuable for what it tells us about how organizations can harness the innovative power of ordinary people. [3]
In Innovation & Tech Today, Charles Warner writes,
In Quirky, Dr. Schilling studies the minds, characteristics, innovations, and learning processes of eight women and men who represent cornerstones in American and global innovation over the past 250 years: Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, Nikola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Steve Jobs, and Dean Kamen. In so doing, she opens up the larger relationship between innovation and genius, while also pointing out some of the challenges in society and education today that might impact our future innovators. [4]
Stephanie Orellana writes,
Quirky is an entertaining read, and not only because it summarizes biographical information about several very interesting people and includes anecdotes about their own thoughts on their work and lives. The book also offers insights into aspects of these innovators' characters, personalities, and working styles that reveal both opportunities and challenges for those of us seeking to improve our innovation capacity. [5]
A reviewer in the International Journal of Innovation Management writes,
It's a bold and impressive book with some challenging ideas about how we might learn from these people despite their being different. Well-researched and rigorous in approach the book draws on a wealth of material so that each biographical sketch gives us a rounded view of the people involved. As mini-biographies they are fascinating – not to say sometimes a little disturbing. [6]
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, executive chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is one of the wealthiest people in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$190 billion as of March 2024, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $195 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.
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Ashlee Vance is an American reporter, writer and filmmaker. He wrote a biography of Elon Musk, titled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, that was released on May 19, 2015.
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Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life is a non-fiction book written by Richard Florida. The book advances Florida's previous work on the locational choices of people and businesses. He adds a dimension of environmental psychology by assigning psychological profiles to urban regions according to the dominant personality traits of the people who live there. For example, the New York metropolitan area and the ChiPitts area have the highest concentration in the United States of people whose dominant personality trait is neuroticism. The book ends with a ten step guide to choosing a location best suited to the reader's personality and life situation.
The Tesla Fremont Factory is an automobile manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, United States, operated by Tesla, Inc. The factory originally opened as General Motors' Fremont Assembly in 1962, and then was operated by New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), a joint venture of GM and Toyota from 1984. The joint venture ended when GM entered bankruptcy in 2009. In 2010, Toyota agreed to sell the plant to Tesla at a significant discount. The plant is the only production site for the Model S and Model X and also produces the Model 3, and Model Y.
Logology is the study of all things related to science and its practitioners—philosophical, biological, psychological, societal, historical, political, institutional, financial. The term "logology" is back-formed from the suffix "-logy", as in "geology", "anthropology", etc., in the sense of the "study of science". The word "logology" provides grammatical variants not available with the earlier terms "science of science" and "sociology of science", such as "logologist", "logologize", "logological", and "logologically". The emerging field of metascience is a subfield of logology.
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The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution is an overview of the history of computer science and the Digital Revolution. It was written by Walter Isaacson, and published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster.
The Boring Company (TBC) is an American infrastructure, tunnel construction services, and equipment company founded by Elon Musk. TBC was founded as a subsidiary of SpaceX in 2017, before being spun off as a separate corporation in 2018. TBC has completed one tunneling project that is open to the public, as well as multiple test tunnels.
Neuralink Corp. is an American neurotechnology company that is developing implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), based in Fremont, California, as of 2024. Founded by Elon Musk and a team of seven scientists and engineers, Neuralink was launched in 2016 and was first publicly reported in March 2017.
Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster is an electric sports car that served as the dummy payload for the February 2018 Falcon Heavy test flight and became an artificial satellite of the Sun. A mannequin in a spacesuit, dubbed "Starman", occupies the driver's seat. The car and rocket are products of Tesla and SpaceX, respectively, both companies headed by Elon Musk. The 2010 Roadster is personally owned by and previously used by Musk for commuting to work. It is the first production car launched into space.
Soren Marcus Kaplan is an author, consultant, and speaker on the subject of innovation and innovation culture in organizations. He is an Affiliate at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, founder of the consulting firm InnovationPoint, co-founder of the software company Praxie.com, and is a columnist for the Innovate column of Inc. Magazine.
Melissa A. Schilling is an American innovation scholar and professor. She holds the John Herzog Family chair in management and organizations at NYU Stern, and she is also the Innovation Director for Stern's Fubon Center for Technology, Business and Innovation. She is world known as an expert in innovation, is the author of the leading innovation strategy text, Strategic Management of Technological Innovation, and is a coauthor of Strategic Management: Theory and Cases. She is also the author of Quirky: The remarkable story of the traits, foibles, and genius of breakthrough innovators who changed the world. She and her work have been featured in NPR's Marketplace, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur, Inc., Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, CNBC, Scientific American, and USA Today, among others. She also speaks regularly at national and international conferences as well as at corporations on strategy and innovation.
Jean-Michel Lemieux is the former chief technology officer of Shopify.
Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors is Edward Niedermeyer's non-fiction book about Tesla, Inc., published in 2019. The book traces Tesla's inception along with episodes and controversies from the first fifteen years of the company under the leadership of Elon Musk. In it, Niedermeyer uses original research, anonymous insider accounts, and industry analysis to explore "Tesla's attempt to merge Silicon Valley arrogance with automotive industry standards". The Wall Street Journal noted that the book's sources have "refused to be quoted out of fear of Mr. Musk". The book devotes a significant portion of its contents to a cultural account of the ongoing "confrontation" between Tesla's fans and its skeptics.
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Linette Lopez is an American journalist who focuses on U.S. politics and economics, and writes columns for Business Insider. As a senior finance editor, she has investigated companies involved with public-facing controversies, and is most widely known for her coverage of Tesla, Inc. A regular contributor to Marketplace produced by American Public Media, Lopez teaches as an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has also been a frequent commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and Real Time with Bill Maher.
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