Week 11 Reading Reflection

The first thing that surprised me right away was Pisano's statement that the reason for failure in innovation and in it's continuous success is that there is a lack of innovation stagey. I would not have guessed this as our textbook is constantly describing all these different strategies for every area of innovation that studies have found for its success.
Nothing in this reading was confusing. I really enjoyed the reading and thought it was well-written because the author separated all of his different ideas into short subcategories, and continuously explained what he points were through real life examples that people knew of or could relate to. This allowed the article to become interesting as it connected to my real-life knowledge, as well as allowed me to thoroughly understand what Pisano was trying to explain. If I had to choose one confusing part, the section on "Managing Trade-Offs" and about crowdsurfing was a little bit confusing because it wasn't as short and simple as the other parts of the article, and I'm not really sure if I understood why you should sometimes use this method and sometimes not.
In the case when the author talked about his time he spent working with a contact lenses company, I am curious to know if we were ever to be in a similar situation how we would know if we were wasting our time and how we could find the root of the problem before spending all this time and money on a failed innovation, as the contact lenses company did. I also am curious how you can know when you're innovation has gone too far from a population's open-mindedness. How do you know if you're product is pushing the limits of their imagination too far to the point that they won't want to risk it? Is this as easy to discover via surveys, or is it much bigger and trickier than this?
As much as I do think Apple and/or Steve Jobs are definitely innovators to look up to, I don't know if I agreed with the author's argument that crowdsourcing doesn't always work. I think Steve Jobs was a true genius, innovator and risk-taker, which most people aren't and I think it's rare for the choices he made to actually work. The author brings up a rather well-known quote from Steve Jobs in which he commonly said that people don't know what they want, but I think it's still important to utilize crowd-sourcing before introducing something just to get an idea for where your crowd will be in accordance to the liking of your product. Sometimes it's good to smart with something small that population might only slightly realize they want, and build up from there to things, as Jobs says, that they don't even know they want.