Amar Bose & The Importance of Prioritising Curiosity

To innovate is to do something new, making it a pretty tricky concept to quantify: What does it look like? How long will it take? How much will it cost?    

True innovation renders these questions unanswerable – much to the annoyance of the bods in suits! After all, most businesses operate on quantifiable resources, so pouring cash into research projects that may come to nothing doesn’t seem to make great business sense.   

But Amar Bose, founder of the Bose corporation, chose to prioritise extensive research over short term gains, and adopted a creative, curiosity-led approach. He believed that creative freedom in research was the root of innovation, and would ultimately lead to better products with more long-term benefits. Bose’s game-changing noise-cancelling headphones are a case in point.