2016 March 6 by
Greg Satell
On December 9th, 1968, a research
project funded by the US Department of Defense launched a revolution. The focus
was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource rich banana republic, but
rather to “augment human intellect” and the man driving it was not a general,
but a mild mannered engineer named Douglas Engelbart.
His presentation that day would be so
consequential that it is now called The Mother of All Demos.
Two of those in attendance, Bob Taylor
and Alan Kay
would go on to develop Engelbart’s ideas into the Alto,
the first truly personal computer. Later, Steve Jobs would take many elements
of the Alto to create the Macintosh.
So who deserves credit? Engelbart for
coming up with the idea? Taylor and Kay for engineering solutions around it?
Jobs for creating a marketable product that made an impact on the
world? Strong arguments can be made for each, as well as for many others not
mentioned here. The truth is that there are many paths to innovation. Here are
nine of them.
Rule 1: Innovation
Is Never A Single Event
Alexander Fleming
discovered penicillin in 1928, but it wasn’t until 15 years later, in 1943,
that the miracle drug came into widespread use. Alan Turing
came up with the idea of a universal computer
in 1936, but it wasn’t until 1946 that one was actually built and not until the
1990’s that computers began to impact
productivity statistics.
We tend to think of innovation as arising
from a single brilliant flash of insight, but the truth is that it is a drawn out
process involving the discovery of an insight, the
engineering a solution and then the transformation of an industry or field.
That’s almost never achieved by one person or even within one organization.
Rule 2: Innovation
Is Combination
The reason that Fleming was unable to
bring Penicillin to market was that, as a biologist, he lacked many of the
requisite skills. It wasn’t until a decade later that two chemists, Howard Florey
and Ernst
Boris Chain, picked up the problem and were able to synthesize
penicillin. Even then, it took people with additional expertise in fermentation
and manufacturing to turn it into the miracle cure we know today.
This isn’t the exception, but the
norm. Darwin’s theory of
natural selection borrowed ideas from Thomas Malthus,
an economist and Charles
Lyell, a geologist. Watson and
Crick’s discovery of DNA was not achieved by simply plowing
away at the lab, but by incorporating discoveries in biology, chemistry and
x-ray diffraction to inform their model building.
Great innovation almost never occurs
within one field of expertise, but is almost invariably the product of synthesis across domains.
Rule 3: First, Ask
The Right Questions
Too often, we treat innovation as a
monolith, as if every problem was the same, but that’s clearly not the case. In
laboratories and factory floors, universities and coffee shops, or even over a
beer after work, people are sussing out better ways to do things. There is no
monopoly on creative thought.
But that leads us to a problem: How
should we go about innovation? Should we hand it over to the guys with white
lab coats? An external partner? A specialist in the field? Crowdsource it? What
we need is a clear framework for making decisions.
As
I wrote in Harvard
Business Review, the best way to start is by asking
the right questions: (1) How well is the problem defined? and (2) How
well is the domain defined? Once you’ve asked those framing questions, you can
start defining a sensible way to approach the problem using the innovation
matrix.
Clearly, no one method can suffice. Look at any great innovator, whether it is Apple, Tesla or Google, and you’ll find a portfolio of strategies. So the first step toward solving a difficult problem is asking the questions you need to define your approach. To paraphrase Voltaire, if you need to solve a problem, first define your terms.
Rule 4: There Is No
Optimal Size For Innovation
When most people think about
innovation, they think about startups. And certainly, new firms like Uber,
Airbnb and Space X can transform markets. But others such as IBM, Procter and
Gamble and 3M have managed to stay on top for decades, even as competitors rise
up to challenge them and then, when markets shift, disappear just as
quickly into oblivion.
While it’s true that small, agile
firms can move fast, larger enterprises have the luxury of going slow. They
have loyal customers and an abundance of resources. They can see past the next
hot trend and invest for the long term. There’s a big difference between
hitting on the next big thing and developing it consistently, generation after
generation.
Rule 5: Leverage
Open Innovation To Expand Your Capabilities
When Microsoft launched Kinect for
the Xbox in 2010, it quickly became the hottest consumer device ever,
selling 8 million units in just the first two months. Almost immediately,
hackers began altering its capabilities to do things that Microsoft never
intended. Yet instead of asking them to stop, it embraced
the hackers, quickly releasing a software development kit to
help them along.
Like Microsoft, many firms today are embracing
open innovation to expand capabilities. Cisco outfoxed Lucent not
by developing technology itself, but by smartly acquiring startups. Procter
& Gamble has found great success with its Connect and Develop program and
platforms like Innocentive
allow firms to expose thorny problems to a more diverse skill set.
As was the case with Alexander
Fleming and penicillin, most firms will find that solving their most important
problems will require skills and expertise they don’t have. That means that, at
some point, they will need to utilize partners and platforms to go beyond their
own internal capabilities of technology and talent.
Rule 6: Disruptive
Innovations Require New Business Models
When Chester Carlson
perfected his invention in 1938, he tried to market it to more than 20
companies, but had no takers. It was simply far too expensive for the market.
Finally, in 1946, Joe Wilson, President of the Haloid Company, came up with the
idea of leasing the machines instead of selling them outright. The idea was a
rousing success and in 1948 the firm changed its name to Xerox.
The tricky thing about disruptive
innovations is that they rarely fit into existing business models and so the
value they create isn’t immediately clear. Kodak made money by selling film, so
was slow to adopt the digital cameras that the company
had itself invented. Yahoo’s business was focused on
keeping users on its site, so passed on the chance to acquire
Google.
Rule 7: Innovate
The Core – The 70/20/10 Rule
Many people think of innovation as
discarding the old to make room for the new, but as Bain & Co.’s Chris Zook
points out in Profit
From The Core, smart companies realize that the
bulk of their profits will come from current lines of business.
Take Google for example. Yes, it
pursues radical innovation, like self-driving cars, at its Google X
unit, but its continual improvement of its core search
business is what made it the world’s most valuable company. That’s why Google,
as well as many other innovative companies, follow the 70/20/10
rule.
The premise of the rule is simple.
Focus 70% of your resources in improving existing technology (i.e. search), 20%
toward adjacent markets (i.e. Gmail, Google Drive, etc.) and 10% on completely
new markets (i.e. self-driving cars).
Rule 8: In The
Digital Age, We Need To Use Platforms To Access Ecosystems
It’s no accident that the people who
would make the vision Engelbart presented at “The Mother of All Demos” a
reality actually attended the event and knew Engelbart personally. In those
days, it was difficult, if not impossible, to actively collaborate across time
and space. Today, however, we can use
platforms to access ecosystems of technology, talent and
information.
Take Apple’s App Store. It is, of
course, a highly effective way for Apple’s network of customers to access
functionality on their phones, but it also allows the firm to access the
talents of literally
millions of developers. It’s hard to imagine any single
enterprise, no matter how efficient or well organized, pulling off that kind of
scale.
In a networked world, the surest path
to success is not acquiring and controlling assets, but widening
and deepening connections.
Rule 9:
Collaboration Is The New Competitive Advantage
When we look back to the great
innovations of the past, it hard not to wonder how it could’ve gone differently.
What if chemists had picked up on Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in weeks
rather than years? How many lives could have been saved? Was there really no
one who could have helped develop Engelbart’s vision of the personal computer
outside of Northern California?
And now, the problems we seek to
solve are significantly more complex than in earlier generations. That’s one
reason why the journal Nature recently
noted that the average scientific paper today has four
times as many authors as one did in 1950. At the same time, knowledge has been
democratized. A teenager with a smartphone today has more access to information
than a highly trained specialist a generation ago.
Today, there are a variety of major
efforts, such as the JCESR
at Argonne National labs to develop next generation batteries, the National Network for Manufacturing
Innovation and the Center for
Applied Cancer Science at MD Anderson that are forging a
more collaborative approach. Increasingly, we’re finding that to solve really
tough problems, we need to work harder to
integrate people with diverse talents.
Take a slightly broader view and it
becomes clear that innovation today goes far beyond research labs, Silicon
Valley pitch meetings and large corporate initiatives. We all have something to
offer and can add to the world’s knowledge in a way that may differ in degree, but
not in kind, to the giants of the past.
– Greg
Update: A
reader, Mauro Toselli,
prepared this really cool sketch of the “9 Rules.” Check it out!(click to
enlarge)
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