I'm David Pensak, author of "Innovation for Underdogs , how to make the leap from what if to now what." I'll warn you first that I'm not a webmaster or designer, so you won't find this to be a flashy site.

What you will find is is sound advice and tips from a lifetime of successfully innovating across many many fields. I created this website to provide my readers and students with a frequently updated resource to help them meet their own innovation goals, but you're more than welcome to read the content, contact me if you want more information and check out my book if you are so moved.

I am a devout believer in the importance of innovation and thoroughly convinced that we all have the potential to come up with great ideas, which solve important problems.   The difficulty is that as we have grown up (and during our professional lives) we have been told over and over that the only right answer is the one, which our teachers or supervisors want.   This is a bad situation because it undermines your confidence in your own judgment and makes you defer to authority without questioning it.   I'm not by any means advocating insurrection or civil disobedience, rather a set of process which enable you to make sure you are actually solving a relevant problem and that you have come up with one or more solutions which actually solve it.

First off, I am dogmatic about this because I was blessed with growing up with mentors ranging from my father (who held some of the critical patents on television) to scientists like Einstein and a host of faculty from Princeton University (neighbors and parents of friends) who took the time to help me learn to ask more questions than the proverbial “Why, Daddy?” and at the same time be as curious and explorative as a child should be.   It is in thanks for their legacies that I have codified what I learned from them and from my own experiences in 30 years at DuPont.

I could try and tell you that I would reveal to you the “secret” of innovation.   Your response would rightly be “why is or was it a secret”.   Being innovative isn't membership in some mystical “society”, often characterized by having a PhD or being in senior management.   Being innovative is nothing more than looking around, asking a series of questions which depend on the answers to previous questions, working methodically towards a consistent set of solutions, and facing the realities of the commercial world.   Coming up with good innovations and turning them into successes takes hard work and discipline.

The best way to teach something is to show how others have done it, but not by a simple recitation of history (probably half the people on the planet know that Apple succeeded with iPod and that Ford failed miserably with the Edsel).   In the lectures I give and the courses I teach (plus of course in my book) I try to show you not only the what, but also the how and the why.

Let us be realistic about it.   The human brain has not changed much in the last ten thousand years but as a species we are coming up with more and more innovations (separate from inventions – an important distinction).   We are certainly not like computers which get bigger and faster with each passing year, yet innovations are coming bigger and faster than ever before. Why?  

The answer lies in our ability to look at our surroundings like a jigsaw puzzle and our learning to find new and different ways to put the pieces together.    It has been claimed that in a typical Sunday newspaper we have as much information as the average person during the Middle Ages encountered during their entire lifetime.   The pace of information growth is getting faster and faster.   Our brains are at the precipice of getting overwhelmed with quantity, quality handling of information is getting harder and harder.   We need to develop and embrace new disciplines of learning and organizing if we are going to go forward.

Innovation comes from just three sources – a need, dissatisfaction, or a curiosity.   While innovation has many definitions, the one I like best is 'the application of already known information to well defined existing problems'.  Invention requires discovering heretofore-unknown facts and properties but innovation does not.   Boiled down, innovation is just repurposing what is already known.   The crux of the matter is that the information may be known to others but not to you.   This means that you have to methodically determine what you don't know as it relates to what you perceive as an opportunity and either research it or find people who already know what you do not.  When lumped together you can, and should, go through an iterative process of narrowing down your problem and then generalizing it to make sure you are solving the maximal part of the problem and perhaps a broader one than you had initially considered.

Then comes a hard part.   Don't leap to a solution.    If you do, then you are already throwing away a lot of what you have worked so hard to cobble together.   Try and determine what the characteristics of a solution should be – a skeleton, if you will, rather than putting flesh on before the bones.

I've used these methodologies myself and have a bunch of products and developments to show for it.   More importantly, I've taught this material to groups ranging from elementary school children to senior corporate and government executives.   It is geographically neutral and has worked around the world, from Thailand to Jordan and everywhere in between.

About Me: My undergraduate school was Princeton University and I went to Harvard University for graduate school.   Then I spent 30 years at DuPont, retiring in 2004 to teach and write my book.   I've taught courses at Wharton Business School and the University of Delaware.   I've lectured at major corporations and all over the world.  A lecture I gave at Microsoft Research, November 16, 2006 as part of their Speakers Series can be viewed by double clicking:
mms://media-wm.cac.washington.edu/msr/13963/asf/13963.asf
or if you paste the link into your browser you can see the movie streamed from The Research Channel.

Jordan Business Magazine said some nice things about me, which you can read here .
Click here if you are masochistic enough to see my full CV.

If you want a presentation, which gives a 100,000-foot view of my perspective on innovation, click here.

If you are curious where the title of the book came from click here.  

To learn more about the book (and perhaps purchase a copy) click here.
(Any royalties that accrue from you purchasing the book via this site are being donated to the Ronald McDonald House)

To contact me, click here.

If you are media and want more information, click here.

If you are interested in having me consult or teach, click here.