The Fallacy of the Aha Moment & Overnight Success in Innovation

There's an idea in circulation that great innovations come from sudden moments of genius known as “aha moments”. However, as Harvard Business Review points out, this can be an oversimplification or exaggeration. It's true that ideas often occur when people are relaxed, exposed to different stimuli or distracted. But the stories of those ideas, such as Newton and the apple, can overshadow the years of hard work and action it took to make that inspiration into a reality. Despite the fable, there's no documentation to confirm that an apple ever landed on Newton's head, and his famous theory of gravity was developed over two decades. Similarly, while everyone remembers Steve Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC, Apple was already working on its Macintosh computer and its key innovations. And while Charles Darwin marvelled at species in the Galapagos Islands, his theory of evolution was built over many conversations with other researchers that took years to conclude. Also dismissed as a romantic falsehood is the idea that the Post-It note came about by accident; teams took almost a decade to devise the product, which initially failed to sell before becoming a phenomenon. Nespresso too was the result of many years of work, iterating on innovative ideas, before it became Nespresso. The key takeaway from these stories is that innovation must involve action and persistence to succeed. Otherwise it is little more than a romantic myth that can inspire but ultimately offer little practical advice.