In their thought-provoking book, Breakthrough, the authors, Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik write, “The future is invented not so much by a heroic loner or by a single company with a great product as by the capacity to combine science, imagination, and business. An innovation ecology includes education, research organizations, and government funding agencies, technology companies, investors, and consumers. A society’s capacity for innovation depends on its innovation ecology”.
The base for innovation
is scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is created by basic research,
largely at universities. But new technologies are created mainly at corporate
research centers. For example, after years of basic research in materials and
electronics, the transistor was created at Bell Labs.
Innovation is about the
future - what the customer will need in the future; what new products the
competitors may introduce in the market. As our earlier piece on Strategy –
Conjuring the Future mentioned, the future is unpredictable. The future
always brings surprises.
Success breeds a growing
market. It also breeds overconfidence in the existing successful product-range
and leads to a narrowing of focus and complacency about sustaining research to
foster innovation. Breakthrough innovations and technologies are often
disruptive causing problems for established successful companies because they
disturb their whole product line, their strong profitability, and what they assume
to be doing well at present. It is this reluctance of established companies to
embrace change that IS behind the success of many startups. The successful
companies “are reluctant to shoot themselves in the foot, although that is a
lot better than what will happen to them later”. One’s success itself becomes a
vested interest. While there are many vested interests in existing products –
the entire supply-chain, the market and so on, there are few vested interests
in innovation. “When a company gets good at making a particular product for a
particular kind of customer, some of its reactions become automatic. It
develops special ‘lenses’ for efficiently focusing on and seeing its customers.
The fault lies in the dependence on the lenses”. At the core of this dilemma is
the challenge of managing the costs and benefits of innovation and breakthrough
research.
Innovation is taking an
invention all the way to a product. The difference between basic research and
innovation is that one is driven by curiosity and the other by necessity. “If
basic research had a slogan, it might be ‘Follow your curiosity wherever it
leads you’. Basic research is about creating new knowledge. On the other hand,
if applied research had a slogan, it might be, ‘Focus on the important problem.
Don’t get distracted by your curiosity.’ Applied research is about using what
is known to solve problems”. There are breakthrough researches which are
neither basic nor applied. These are what are known as radical research
(neither basic nor applied), that is, “following problem to its root”
Another way of looking at
invention and innovation is: “What is possible?” concerns research, discovery,
and invention. “What is needed?” concerns business and social needs.
The person who comes up
with the applied ideas thinks differently than the scientist who lays the
foundation. The authors of Breakthrough give a characteristic example of
one of the great innovators of our time, Ted Selker. “Ted Selker has invented many
things, especially devices for interacting with computer systems. Selker is known
as a hyperkinetic wild man. His eyes sparkle, he talks rapidly, and his words
can’t keep up with his brain. He has more ideas in a day than many inventors
have in a decade. When we asked Selker how he picked problems to work on, his
answer was startling: ‘Actually, I don’t consider a problem interesting or
worth working on unless I have a customer who wants it solved. I want to start
with solving a real customer’s real problem’.” If Ted Selker had a lemma, it
might be, “Don’t start with a solution looking for a problem. Start with a
problem and then find a solution for it.”
In contrast the seeds of
invention are in curiosity. George de Mestral was a Swiss inventor and amateur
mountaineer. One day in 1948 he took his dog for a nature hike. Returning from
the hike, his clothing and his dog were both were both covered with burrs – the
rough prickly seed packages created by plants that cling to animal fur,
enabling them to hitch a ride to new places to grow. De Mestral was curious. He
took his clothing and the burrs to a microscope and observed that the burrs had
thousands of tiny hooks that clung to tiny loops in the fabric of his clothing.
He was fascinated by how the burrs clung to the cloth. Inspired to create a new
kind of fastener that worked the same way, de Mestral collaborated with a
weaver from a textile plant in France .
They created two materials: a nylon cloth with tiny hooks and another with tiny
loops. Patented in 1955, VELCRO is now a major product and used around the
world. Before de Mestral, millions of people had encountered burrs. Thousands
of field biologists with microscopes have had the means to see the natural
arrangement of hooks and loops. Most people simply remove the burrs with
annoyance but without curiosity and without seeing a possibility for invention.
George de Mestral found an invention where other people found just burrs.
De Mestral prepared his
mind to see an opportunity in nature’s engineering. At the age of 12 he
designed and patented a toy airplane. Having seen the frustrations of using
zippers he worked on improving them. His mountaineering and seeing nature’s
challenges trained his mind to seeing differently.
Whereas Ted Selker’s
approach was that of a ‘beginner’s mind’, De Mestral’s was the approach of the ‘prepared
mind’. The ‘prepared mind’ says “use your previous experience”. It works on
past experience, past preparedness to look at what is seen around differently.
On the other hand Ted Selker’s ‘the beginner’s mind’ is the opposite of the
prepared mind. The beginner’s mind says, “Discard your previous experience”. Cultivating
the beginner’s mind prepares the mind to break out of mindsets.
Invention is having an
idea; innovation is the other 99% of the work. From a business perspective,
innovation is “taking new technology and realizing its economic potential”.
Therefore, innovation has a ‘management’ perspective about it. Too much of the
wrong kind of management kills off innovation. The cognitive psychologist and
computer scientist Allen Newell observed, “People think that science is riskier
than it actually is. If you take a group of smart people and send them down
some path, they generally come back with some thing interesting. However, one
thing you can do, that prevents them from being successful, is to repeatedly
change their direction. Rapid direction changing prevents researchers from
sticking with a problem long enough to master the details and make progress”.
Therefore, for innovation to be a part of the organizational culture, a balance
has to be struck between managing down and managing up. Managing down involves
paying attention to the research group and creating an environment that enables
the group to be effective. Managing up requires understanding the perceptions
and the needs of upper management and responding to its goals and requests. Success
in managing up requires maintaining the confidence of higher management.
Success in managing down requires maintaining an environment in which
researchers have confidence that they can succeed. Such confidence is
undermined when directions are changed too rapidly. When changes in direction
are needed, what is called for is inspiration. Without inspiration
there is constant shuffling around. With inspiration, researchers will
build up, sustain, and focus their energies.
By V.K.Talithaya (vktalithaya@managementmasala.com)
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