When people think on innovation and creativity, they tend to think big. And there's been no one bigger on our minds in those departments lately than Steve Jobs. For everyone intimidated by Jobs' formidable accomplishments, Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorkeroffers a bit of a revisionist spin: Jobs was a tweaker.
In The Tweaker, Gladwell writes, "Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him… and ruthlessly refining it." Jobs himself admitted that his gifts were more combinatorial than generative, "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Stepping into the time machine, Gladwell cites an article by the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr to explain why the industrial revolution began in England. Britain, they say, had a "human-capital advantage—in particular, … a group they call 'tweakers.' They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work."
http://cheaptalk.org/2011/11/07/joel-mokyr-northwestern-economist-and-steve-jobs/
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