The Economist’s double holiday issue has an interesting little article called The accidental innovator, which is all about Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger.com and Twitter.com. A few of my favorite quotes from it:

Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious. – This quote, and the underlying innovation process and corporate ohilosophy,  ties to the three insights that Williams accidently “stumbed on”, which are outlined in the opening paragraph of the article. Williams is by no means unique in these beliefs (basically you can’t really plan out the discovery of new ideas, if/when you do stumble on them they are very hard to explain to others, and with the benefit of hindsight all good ideas seem blatently obvious in retrospect), but they are worth repeating every now and again.

 “… in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways. Google values official brains—the credentialled, academic sort—whereas Mr Williams dropped out of university in Nebraska because he found the concept somewhat silly. He left Google after less than a year.” I find this interesting because, in the eyes of many, Google is the anti-bureaucracy, and certainly not the type of place where credentials would be more important then ideas.

“We have an itch that we scratch, and that becomes the thing.” – William’s concluding quote about the innovation process at his firm… there’s a lesson here for both individuals and massive organizations alike.