The innovation machine

Two gurus look at the perspiration side of innovation

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There is an inexpensive source of high quality innovative ideas available which most companies don't use: their own employees. Even people who are normally the type to do everything the standard way will come out with great ideas that suit their organisation very well. The one and only thing that managers have to do is to get the brainstorming session flowing (emails asking for ideas don't count in this respect). It REALLY IS as easy as that. I only discovered this "secret" by accident, and I am surprised that something so cheap and so effective is not more widely discussed.

The native


You are getting it fundamentally wrong.

Large corporations are not really innovative, per se. Rather, they buy innovative start-ups, thus making the whole company appear creative.

Take Google. The only thing creative it made was the search engine. Everything else, it brought. For example, I use Google docs. But Google brought Google Docs; it did not make it. Recently, Google brought the innovative website Avark, thus making Google Corp more creative.

Thus, much creativity is happening in start-ups, which are then brought by corporations. I expect this trend to continue.


Or put another way, if each of the letters of the word i-n-n-o-v-a-t-i-o-n were allocated an importance in the process the "i" would represent the idea and the remaining "nnovation" would represent the sweat and tears of making the idea a reality. A summary of the article would look something like this:
i = glamour
nnovation = hard work and boring

i = letting your workers loose
nnovation = ensuring employee accountability

i = unpredictable and uncertain
nnovation = efficiency, which leads to predictability and repeatability

i = reject constraints, break all the rules, ask for forgiveness rather than permission, skunk works
nnovation = corporate establishment feels mocked so starves "i" of resources. "i" misses point of actually being part of corporate establishment by not fully utilising "nnovation" resources to boost idea.

G&T see the i+nnovation process as:

i+nnovation = balance is required between company men and outside rule breakers
i+nnovation = integrated with rest of company, share staff, maximise resources available, avoid skunk works
i+nnovation = innovation machines should be managed using customised rather than generic metrics

Have a look at the this great cartoon by Tom Fishburne -


I spend 100% of my time creating innovative ideas because I have no job yet. What else is there to do?

D. Sherman

If the results weren't so predictable and painful, this repeated navel-gazing by the business management types regarding innovation would be humorous. In a nutshell, the decline of innovation in American industry smoothly parallels the rise of professional managers. Although there are several contributing factors, it's Harvard Business School that's killed innovation. The professional manager is taught that product specifications are written by professional marketing experts, based on their astute analysis of customer needs, at which point the marketeers write a specification that details exactly what the product is supposed to do and how much it should cost. They then toss it over the wall to "engineering" which draws up the plans and schematics that they they toss over the next wall to "manufacturing". In the early days 1980s, the two walls existed within the same plant. Nowadays they may be oceans rather than walls. Nonetheless, the idea that marketing writes specs that engineers implement is the key element of the dominant business model and it's why we have virtually no innovation. Yes, I know everyone can name some tech company that hacked some clever code recently, but we wouldn't be having this discussion if American industry was still turning out innovative world-class products on a regular basis.

How did they do it in the old days? A lot of times the company was run by one man, who started it when he was young and built it into a large enterprise, partly because he personally knew his customers, understood his market, and had a good gut feel for what was needed. Customer will rarely tell a focus group that they want anything very innovative, because they can't imagine it until they see it. Nobody wrote to Texas Instruments in 1970 and said, "Please build a pocket calculator.", and nobody in 1880 wrote to Studebaker asking them to build a gasoline-powered carriage. Customers will usually tell focus groups and marketeers that what they need is a new product that is pretty much like the old product, only cheaper and perhaps sturdier and maybe with one or two modifications to its features. You don't get innovation by asking customers what they want. You get it by offering them what they didn't know they wanted until they see it. During it's glory days, Hewlett-Packard's innovation in test and measurement equipment was based on a "next bench" philosophy of product definition. Engineers designed new test equipment as it it was going to be used by the guy on the next bench over. This was perhaps a special case because the engineers were the customers, but it meant that products were designed based on a combination of what would be really useful to the users and what is now possible based on new technology (microprocessors, more stable references, faster synthesizers, etc) that wasn't available last year. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard trusted their engineers enough to let them definin the next class of innovative products.

Nowadays, the MBA types inherently distrust and dislike engineers. Engineers, like tax preparers, are a necessary evil, but they do all they can to keep customers from actually speaking to an engineer within their company (if they even have in-house engineering), and they work with the bean-counters to contract out as much engineering as possible, which means that their company no longer has any unique technical skills. It also means that they have locked out all possibility of an engineer having one of those "Aha!" moments when he's listening to the customer and he realizes that what the customer really is trying to do and really needs is something quite different than what he's asking for. For example, 30 years ago, customers said they wanted a portable oscilloscope, when what they really wanted as an automated network cable analyzer. A marketeer would listen to that customer and write a specification for a cheaper, smaller oscilloscope, whereas an engineer would listen to what the customer is really trying to do, realize that an oscilloscope is not really the best tool for the job, realize that it's now possible to put a lot of software into a portable instrument, and would then come up with the idea of a dedicated cable tester, which also has the advantage of allowing the customers to hire less-educated technicians to install network cabling.

Until MBAs start getting comfortable with engineers, or companies buck fashion and stop hiring all those Harvard Business School types with their product development methodologies guaranteed to produce boring products that nobody wants on time and on budget, American companies will be increasingly relegated to the roles of raw materials and parts suppliers (built to foreigners' specs), distribution and sales, and military contracts (also a top-down specification process, but the customer pays the development costs).

Peter Sellers

“In Vienna there was sperm in the air!” in 1938? The same year that Hitler walked in and took Austria over without a shot being fired? Interesting.

Royal Ugly Dude

Let's review: skunk works are out and innovation machines are in? Of course. The difference being one doesn't thumb their nose at their corporate benefactors. And one "brings in people from the outside" (whatever that means).

Viktor O. Ledenyov

Innovation by imagination is moving force behind the progress in our increasingly competitive World!




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