Thomas Edison's Secret for Exceptional Creativity Still Works Today

Thomas Edison’s “innovation factory” turned out more than 1,000 patents. Modern leaders can steal his formula for maximizing creativity at work. EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM @ENTRYLEVELREBEL Illustration: Getty Images Imagine a lab where cutting-edge innovation happens. Do you picture people in spotless lab coats? Complex math on white boards? Furrowed brows and scholarly debate? All these can be part of the innovation process. But at Thomas Edison’s legendary “innovation factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey, creativity was mostly accompanied by mess and fart jokes. The 1989 book Working at Inventing described the culture at Menlo Park in detail (you can read it for free online if you’re curious). “Informal and democratic, the atmosphere in Edison’s laboratory was a far cry from the insistence on discipline and order found in contemporary factories,” it reports. Modelled on the workshops of skilled European craftsmen and their apprentices, Edison’s labs were “

Thomas Edison’s “innovation factory” turned out more than 1,000 patents. Modern leaders can steal his formula for maximizing creativity at work. EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM @ENTRYLEVELREBEL Illustration: Getty Images Imagine a lab where cutting-edge innovation happens. Do you picture people in spotless lab coats? Complex math on white boards? Furrowed brows and scholarly debate? All these can be part of the innovation process. But at Thomas Edison’s legendary “innovation factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey, creativity was mostly accompanied by mess and fart jokes. T