Value for Wednesday of Week 36 in the season of Fulfillment

Being Resourceful and Innovative – Discovering and Inventing

Innovation is the final test of creativity. It is creativity in action, with results.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. [Winston Churchill]
A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance. [attributed to Gary Hamel]
Any good music must be an innovation. [attributed to Les Baxter]

RESOURCEFULNESS and INNOVATION as PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES

Though scholars define it in various ways, resourcefulness essentially is creativity in action. “Learned resourcefulness refers to a set of coping and problem-solving skills that facilitate the monitoring, control, and change of dysfunctional or unpleasant events.” Resourcefulness is of particular interest in settings ranging from family relationships to entrepreneurship,

“All innovations start from a creative moment . . .” It is taking the available resources, using them to the fullest and thereby finding an answer or invention or a new discovery that was previously unseen. “-fulness” is key: the answer was available all along but by making fuller use of the resources their potential becomes realized in innovation.

“Innovations require people to change behaviors . . .” They must be willing to fail. Motivational psychologists have found that “an innovation has to be considered possible and necessary, feasible and viable.” Per one study, “psychological factors reflecting goal orientation are the most important for interpreting individual innovativeness.”

Scholars have identified “evolved psychological mechanisms” of innovation, and have looked to animal behavior to understand this better. Like all social phenomena, innovation and innovation systems evolve.

INNOVATION as a SOCIAL GOOD

“Collective creativity and innovation are key determinants of various important outcomes ranging from competitiveness of an organization to GDP growth of a country.” Innovation is of special interest to business leaders and entrepreneurs, because innovation leads to economic growth. Business schools focus on it, for that reason. “In advanced nations, producing standard products using standard methods will not sustain competitive advantage. Companies must be able to innovate at the global frontier.” Cultural factors, including politics, are important in how societies approach innovation. Though we may think of creativity as an individual virtue, innovation often occurs in teams.

Leading scholars have noted the connection between imagination, innovation, and creativity; and wondered why researchers have not paid more attention to the connection among the three. A “literature review of the creativity and innovation (revealed that) there were more studies and research within individual creativity and team creativity and less in organizational creativity.” “Organisational survival is rooted in the ability to innovate. Organisations must innovate, as otherwise, they perish, particularly in a business environment framed by constant change, such as during periods wrought by the Global Financial Crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“Processes of innovation intricately weave together the common warp of individual processes of change (e.g., cognitive elements of awareness, memory, and learning) with the ever-flowing weft of social phenomena (e.g., social networks, cultural meaning, contagion, word of mouth, and impression management) and technological progress (e.g., customization, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things).”

The human capacity to innovate also poses dangers. Innovation led to nuclear weapons. It has also led to digital technologies, including the computer and artificial intelligence, the latter of which poses extreme dangers to human societies and people individually.

Real

True Narratives

Great inventors and discoverers:

Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (Three Rivers Press, 2008). (The Johns Hopkins University Press is publishing Edison’s complete papers.)
Maury Klein, The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity and the Men Who Invented America (Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
Alan W. Hirschfeld, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday (Walker & Company, 2006).
Kirkpatrick Sale, The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream (Free Press, 2001).
Amir D. Aczel, Pendulum: Léon Foucault and the Triumph of Science (Atria, 2003).
Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (Wiley, 2003).
Lloyd Steven Seiden, Buckminster Fuller's Universe (Basic Books, 1989).
Ben Marsden, Watt’s Perfect Engine: Steam and the Age of Invention (Columbia University Press, 2004).
John Man, Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World With Words (MJF, 2002).
Michael Lemonick, The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos (Atlas, 2008).
Jeanne Bendick, Archimedes and the Door of Science (Franklin Watts, Inc., 1962).
Sherman Stein, Archimedes: What Did He Do Besides Cry Eureka (The Mathematical Association of America, 1999).
C. D. Andriesse, Huygens: The Man Behind the Principle (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
C. Michael Mellor, Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius (National Braille Press, 2006).
Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse (Da Capo Press, 2004).
Joel N. Shirkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (MacMillan, 2006).
Constance McLaughlin Greene, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (Little Brown, 1956).
Suzanne Guy and Donna Lacy, The Music Box: The Story of Cristofori (Brunswick Publishing Corp., 1998).
Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (Knopf, 2010).
William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope (William Morrow, 2009).
Kristin Sterling, Mary McLeon Bethune: A Life of Resourcefulness (Lerner Publications, 2007).
Mark Kurlansky, Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man (Doubleday, 2012): a biography of Clarence Birdseye, inventor of frozen food methods, “'a foodie in reverse,’ a man who ‘loved food, loved to cook, . . . ate wild local food and artisinally made products . . . but who dreamed of making food industrial.’”
David N. Schwartz, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi Father of the Nuclear Age (Basic Books, 2018): “. . . the sudden death of his beloved brother . . . precipitated an intense lifelong privacy and a personal and scientific strategy of quantifying the world”.
Richard Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough of Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (Doubleday, 2011): Lamarr partnered with composer George Anthiel to develop a weapons system. “What drew Rhodes to the twin story of the Bad Boy of Music and ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ was their invention of a radio-controlled “spread spectrum” torpedo-guidance system, for which they received a patent in 1942.”
Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (Penguin Press, 2012): “. . . a well-researched history of bell Labs, filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons.”
Edmund Morris, Edison (Random House, 2019): “His archive runs to five million pages, including the pocket notebooks he carried everywhere to record the ideas that came in torrents, and the brutally frank letters he wrote about the failures of immediate family members he otherwise studiously ignored. Were it left solely to Edison, he would have locked himself away in his lab, emerging every few months to announce yet another miraculous discovery.”
Katie Booth, The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness (Simon & Schuster, 2021): “Booth’s descriptions of Bell’s passionate courtship of his student Mabel Hubbard, who belonged to a much higher social class, are as stirring as a romance novel, and her narrative of his work on the telephone reads like a thriller.”
David A. Price, Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age (Knopf, 2021): “Price, a prolific historian who has a degree in computer science, argues that Bletchley also should be known for developing the first genuine computer, and so initiating the Information Age.”
Frank Close, Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass (Basic Books, 2022): “At a basic level, Higgs’s theory belongs to a fundamental and puzzling question: Where does the mass of the universe come from? Using the known rules of physics, from electromagnetism to quantum mechanics, Higgs raised the possibility of an unstable subatomic particle that, through a series of fizzing interactions, could lend mass to other particles. He predicted this particle would be a boson — a notably massive subatomic particle that helps hold matter together — and that it would exist in an energy field that enabled the interactions.”
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Scribner, 2022): “. . . the latest work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist, recounts our evolving understanding of the body’s smallest structural and functional unit — and its implications for everything from immune therapy and in vitro fertilization to Covid-19.”
Wikipedia list of inventors

Histories of innovation and invention:

Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (Viking Adult, 2011).
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead, 2010).
Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge, How to Think Like a Neanderthal (Oxford University Press, 2011). “Homo sapiens had the gift of innovation, and that proved decisive.”
James Kaplan, Irving Berlin: New York Genius (Yale University Press, 2019): “As long as there are hearts to swell, ‘Always’ and ‘How Deep Is the Ocean’ will swell them. The introduction of ragtime into America’s musical consciousness will forever have ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ as its soundtrack.”
Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 2014): “The digital pioneers all loathed authority, embraced collaboration and prized art as much as science.”
Tom Standage, A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021): an “eminently readable history of 5,000 years of human movement — movement undertaken not by foot or by feather, but by way of the wheel, the profoundly simple device that is currently believed to have been invented in what is today Poland or Ukraine about 3500 B.C.”
Lindsey Fitzharris, The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “. . . Gillies, at least as he is presented here, was innovative, buoyant and relentlessly hopeful. He had to be — how else would he even think to fashion a nose by taking a patient’s rib bones and attaching them to the patient’s shoulder to build new cartilage, for grafting onto the face?”

Other narratives on resourcefulness:

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Metropolitan Books , 2017): “Harvesting from the West an inestimable treasure of experiences and observations, these adventurers then refined this raw material into reminiscences, novels, diaries, letters, reports and tales of adventure, both actual and imagined.”
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Papercup: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little, Brown & Company, 2014): “. . . skillfully rendered are the stories of American and British officials who scored defeated Germany for Nazi scientists and their research.”
Charles Seife, Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrty (Basic Books, 2021): “ Seife succeeds in serving up something of the flavor of those difficult and rather esoteric ideas, which are the heart of Hawking’s contribution to science, in a way that won’t give general readers indigestion.”
James Curtis, Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life (Knopf, 2022): “How Buster Keaton Turned Slapstick — and Movies — Into Art”. Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (Atria, 2022), “contextualizes Keaton’s achievements in a way that Curtis does not.”
Fred Hogge, Of Ice and Men: How We’ve Used Cold to Transform Humanity (Pegasus Books, 2022): “. . . the Steinbeckian pun of a title itself does tells us what to expect: This book is funny and quirky and full of well-told stories and irreverent asides. Hogge wants us to have a good time, and he seems to be having one himself.”
Sally Adee, We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds (Hachette Books, 2023): “. . . the electrome has no mass at all, nor any weight; it is simply the electricity that courses through your body and its 40 trillion cells, and which transmits encoded signals through and between everything, head to toe.”
Alexa Hagerty, Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023): “. . . she allows readers to accompany her on her journey and learn, along with her, what it means to exhume the dead and get them to speak from the other side of a mass grave into which they have been cast, supposedly never to be found, never again to be touched by human hands.”
Kenneth Miller, Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep (Hachette Books, 2023): “Scientific progress often arises from a meeting of determination and happenstance. This has been especially true of sleep science, a field that struggled, for most of the 20th century, to be taken seriously, and so frequently attracted people with perverse resolve and maverick brilliance.”
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Black Box: Writing the Race (Random House, 2024): “. . . the Harvard scholar shows how African American writers have used the written word to shape their reality despite constraints imposed on them from outside.”

Technical and Analytical Readings

Michael Rosenbaum, “Self-control under stress: The role of learned resourcefulness”, Advances in Behaviour Research and Therapy, Volume 11, Issue 4, 1989, pp. 249-258.
Jaclene A. Zauszniewski, “Theoretical and Empirical Considerations of Resourcefulness”, Journal of Nursing Scholarship, Volume 27, Issue 3, pp. 177-180, September 1995.
Jaclene A. Zauszniewski, Abir K. Bekhet and Elizabeth Bonham, “Psychometric Testing of the Children's Resourcefulness Scale”, Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, Volume 23, Issue 3, pages 181–188, August 2010.
Jaclene A. Zauszniewski, Chien-Yu Lai and Sukuma Tithiphontumrong, “Developing and Testing of the Resourcefulness Scale for Older Adults”, Journal of Nursing Measurement, Volume 14, Number 1, 2006 , pp. 57-68(12).
Jaclene A. Zausniewski, et. al., “Predictors of Resourcefulness in African American Women”, Journal of Aging and Health, October 2005 vol. 17 no. 5 609-633.
Jaclene A. Zauszniewski, ChaeWeon Chung, Hsiu-Ju Chang and Karen Krafcik, “Predictors of resourcefulness in school-aged children”, Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 2002, Vol. 23, No. 4 , Pages 385-401.
Anne D. Simons, et. al., “Predicting Response to Cognitive Therapy of Depression: The Role of Learned Resourcefulness”, Cognitive Therapy and Research, Volume 9, Number 1, 79-89, October 2007.
Diane Mavers, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, “Semiotic resourcefulness: A young child's email exchange as design”, August 2007, Volume 7, No. 2, pp. 155-176.
Michael Rosenbaum and Noami Palmon, “Helplessness and Resourcefulness in Coping With Epilepsy”, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Volume 52, Issue 2, April 1984, pp. 244-253.
M. Rosenbaum and S. Benyosef, “The more I know about the war the more I fear? : Information seeking and resourcefulness during the gulf war in Israel”, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 1995, vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 205-224.
Gordon L. Flett, Paul L. Hewitt, Kirk Blankstein and Sean O'Brien, “Perfection and learned resourcefulness in depression and self-esteem”, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 12, Issue 1, pp. 61-68.
Michael Rosenbaum and Karin Ben-Ari, Learned Helpless and Learned Resourcefulness: Effects of Non-Contingent Success and Failure on Individuals Differing in Self-Control Skills, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 48, Issue 1, January 1985, pp. 198-215.
Serap Akgun and Joseph Ciarrochi, “Learned Resourcefulness Moderates the Relationship Between Academic Stress and Academic Performance”, Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology, 1469-5820, Volume 23, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 287 – 294
Serap Akgun, “The Effects of Situation and Learned Resourcefulness on Coping Responses”, Social Behavior and Personality, Volume 32, Number 5, 2004, pp. 441-448.
Michael P. Carey, Kate B. Carey, C. L. M. Carnrike Jr., and Andrew W. Meisler, “Learned Resourcefulness, Drinking and Smoking in Young Adults”, Journal of Psychology, Vol. 124, 1990.
David Edwards, Creating Things That Matter: The Art and Science of Innovations That Last (Henry Holt & Company, 2018): “Our current system for innovating, Edwards says, ‘is falling short of addressing today’s challenges.’ He offers a new model for creating things that can be hopeful, helpful — and commercially viable.”
Pagan Kennedy, Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016): “It turns out that the people most likely to solve problems on InnoCentive are outsiders to the problem’s field.”

Technological progress, the fruit of resourcefulness and innovation on a grand scale:

Michael Belfiore, The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World from the Internet to Artificial Limbs (Smithsonian Books, 2009): “The heroes of (this) book work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, a secretive arm of the United States government. And the revolution they’re leading is a merger of humans with machines.”

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Filmed at “the world’s largest garbage dump, near Rio de Janeiro,” Waste Land chronicles the lives of “pickers,” who make their living salvaging recyclable materials from the refuse and serving the cause of environmentalism in the process.
Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone: chronicling a ska-punk rock band that found a way to be successful despite internal and external obstacles
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story recounts how an internationally famous actress, widely known for her physical beauty, discovered a method in technology that aided the Allied effort in World War II, and then led to many of the communications technologies we have today.

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

It was thought that he must, in the past, have lived a country life, since he knew all sorts of useful secrets, which he taught to the peasants. He taught them how to destroy scurf on wheat, by sprinkling it and the granary and inundating the cracks in the floor with a solution of common salt; and how to chase away weevils by hanging up orviot in bloom everywhere, on the walls and the ceilings, among the grass and in the houses. He had "recipes" for exterminating from a field, blight, tares, foxtail, and all parasitic growths which destroy the wheat. He defended a rabbit warren against rats, simply by the odor of a guinea-pig which he placed in it. One day he saw some country people busily engaged in pulling up nettles; he examined the plants, which were uprooted and already dried, and said: "They are dead. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing to know how to make use of them. When the nettle is young, the leaf makes an excellent vegetable; when it is older, it has filaments and fibres like hemp and flax. Nettle cloth is as good as linen cloth. Chopped up, nettles are good for poultry; pounded, they are good for horned cattle. The seed of the nettle, mixed with fodder, gives gloss to the hair of animals; the root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow coloring-matter. Moreover, it is an excellent hay, which can be cut twice. And what is required for the nettle? A little soil, no care, no culture. Only the seed falls as it is ripe, and it is difficult to collect it. That is all. With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle!" He added, after a pause: "Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators." [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume I – Fantine; Book Fifth – The Descent Begins, Chapter III, “Sums Deposited with Laffitte”.]

Novels:

Laura Vaccaro Seeger, First the Egg: A Children’s Book (Roaring Brook Press, 2007) “This is a book about transformations . . . from egg to chicken, seed to flower, and caterpillar to butterfly. But it’s also a book about creativity - as paint becomes picture, word becomes story . . . and commonplace becomes extraordinary.”
David Wiesner, Sector 7 (Clarion, 1999) “tells the story of a small boy on a class trip to the Empire State Building who is transported by a friendly cloud to Sector 7, a great cloud factory high in the sky. Once there, they conspire with clouds that are bored with their shapes and long for a new way to express their individuality.”
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (MacMillan and Company, 1868): “Alone on a desert island, Crusoe manages to survive thanks to his pluck and pragmatism. He keeps himself sane by keeping a diary, manages to build himself a shelter, and find a a way of salvaging useful goods from the wrecked ship, including guns.”
Gaëlle Bélem, The Rarest Fruit: A Novel (Europa, 2025): “Edmond Albius made his discovery in 1841, when he was only 12 years old. It was . . . just one act in the ‘tragicomedy’ of a Black child adopted, then exploited, abandoned and finally rescued in adulthood by the white planter whose horticultural knowledge he absorbed without benefit of formal schooling. Told he must be content with toiling as a gardener rather than studying to be a botanist, Edmond ‘makes do with what he has and what people deign to give him.’” The novel is a fictional account of how a boy discovered “how to hand-pollinate vanilla orchids, allowing the wider world to experience a flavor that had been lost since the 16th century . . .”

Poetry

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

In contemporary “classical” music, several organizations and record labels are devoted to new music emphasizing creativity. These include:

Bang On a Can All-Stars, with its playlists;
Tzadik label, with its long list of releases;
Kairos label, with releases by Ensemble Modern (its playlists), Ensemble Recherche (its playlists), and many others; and also releases of music by composer Beat Furrer (his playlists);
New World Records label, featuring works by Christian Wolff (his playlists), David Tudor (his playlists), and Alvin Curran (his playlists);
Cantaloupe Music, a label launched by members of Bang On a Can – its artists include Nadia Sirota (her playlists); Sō Percussion (its playlists); Julia Wolfe (her playlists); Nico Muhly (his playlists); Tyondai Braxton (his playlists); Vicky Chow (her playlists); and Nadia Shpachenko (her playlists); and
Alarm Will Sound, a chamber ensemble with a substantial set of releases in new music.

Franz Joseph Haydn is widely credited with the invention of the string quartet, which has become among the most popular forms of classical music. He came upon the form by accident, when a nobleman requested a composition for the musicians he had available: two violinists, a violist and a cellist..Haydn composed seventy-seven string quartets under fifteen opus numbers, changing chamber music forever. Haydn’s string quartets retain the divertimenti style through Opus 17 but Opus 9 marks leap forward from the earlier works, allowing us to hear the master’s invention of string quartet in progression.

Op. 9 (1769) (approx. 134’) (list of recorded performances):

Quartet No. 11 in D minor, Op. 9, No. 4, FHE No. 16, Hob. No. III:22 (approx. 23’);
Quartet No. 12 in C Major, Op. 9, No. 1, FHE No. 7, Hob. No. III:19 (approx. 23’);
Quartet No. 13 in G Major, Op. 9, No. 3, FHE No. 9, Hob. No. III:21 (approx. 19’);
Quartet No. 14 in E♭ Major, Op. 9, No. 2, FHE No. 8, Hob. No. III:20 (approx. 21’);
Quartet No. 15 in B♭ Major, Op. 9, No. 5, FHE No. 17, Hob. No. III:23 (approx. 26’);
Quartet No. 16 in A Major, Op. 9, No. 6, FHE No. 18, Hob. No. III:24 (approx. 22’).

Op. 74 (“Apponyi” quartets, set 2, 1793) (approx. 80’):

Quartet No. 57 in C Major, Op. 74, No. 1, FHE No. 28, Hob. No. III:72 (approx. 21-32’) (list of recorded performances)
Quartet No. 58 in F Major, Op. 74, No. 2., FHE No. 29, Hob. No. III:73 (approx. 22-23’) (list of recorded performances)
Quartet No. 59 in G minor (“Rider”), Op. 74, No. 3, FHE No. 30, Hob. No. III:74 (approx. 24’) (list of recorded performances)

Op. 77 (“Lobkowitz” quartets, 1799) (approx. 62’):

Quartet No. 66 in G Major, Op. 77, No. 1, FHE No. 13, Hob. No. III:81 (approx. 24’) (list of recorded performances)
Quartet No. 67 in F Major, Op. 77, No. 2, FHE No. 14, Hob. No. III:82 (approx. 27’) (list of recorded performances)