Successful Innovation Depends More on Will than on Intellect

(p. 9) The odysseys of [Lasseter, Catmull, Smith and Jobs], and of Pixar as a whole, bring to mind the observation of the maverick economist Joseph Schumpeter that successful innovation “is a feat not of intellect, but of will.” Writing about the psychology of entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century, a rime when the subject was unfashionable, he believed few individuals are prepared for “the resistances and uncertainties incident to doing what has not been done before.” Those who braved the risks of failure did so out of noneconomic as well as economic motives, among them “the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising one’s energy and ingenuity.” In Pixar’s case, at least, the resistances and uncertainties were abundant–as was the will.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

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