Innovation is often confused with invention. The two notions are complementary but different. The act of inventing means to design, create, and build new products or processes.
Innovation starts with creative ideas that ultimately are translated into inventions, services, processes, and methods. Not everyone can be an inventor, but anyone can be an innovator.
The Baron Way
Ron Baron heads a popular mutual fund company in New York City called the Baron Capital Group. The fund family has seven hundred thousand investors and $16 billion under management. Baron is an interesting guy. He’s superwealthy (Baron purchased a home estimated at more than $100 million), and his annual investment conferences feature performers such asJohn and Rod Stewart. Baron grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and he has something else in common with another Asbury success story by the name of Bruce Springsteen: both have a grueling work ethic. Baron was able to turn $1,000 from shoveling snow and scooping ice cream into $4,000 by investing in the stock market.
Baron says his mantra is to invest in people, not buildings. “I recently read a commencement address that Steve Jobs made to Stanford’s 2005 graduating class,” Baron told the four thousand investors attending his annual conference on October 23, 2009. “I found it especially touching and on point regarding the sort of people in whom we invest,” he said.4 Baron recounted the story that Jobs told regarding the period of time when he resigned from Apple after a falling-out with the board, an event that left Jobs devastated. “The only thing that kept me going,” Jobs said, “was that I loved what I did. The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
Baron closed with this thought: “It is our experience that the very best executives are the ones who are the most passionate about what they do . . . like Steve.”
Over the last decade, Baron mutual funds have consistently outperformed the overall stock market, an accomplishment that very few funds can match. Baron’s “gift” has been an uncanny ability to judge executives. That gift really comes down to character evaluation, judgments largely based on whether an executive and his or her management team have the passion to make their vision come true. That’s “the Baron Way.”< from the book of The innovation secrets of Steve jobs>
If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome. © Michael Jordan
