Adaptive Path MX 2007: How Companies Innovate
[By Scott Berkun]
Does innovation mean:
- Being first?
- Being better?
- Winning?
Is success without innovation worse than failing?
Progress > Innovation
Success > Innovation
Chronocentrism: the belief that what is going on right now is the most important thing ever.
If you look at history almost every civilization was the best it had ever been done.
Innovation is not new, it is one of the oldest concepts we have. The idea of toolmaking is millions of years old. All the things that were in the world when we got here were innovations in their time.
There is knowledge in understanding how this works. Look at stained glass. There was some guy who had some idea. Can you imagine how this conversation when with a priest at the church? Church design cycles were longer than people's lives.
You can dissect anything around you and ask what must it have been like to make this thing a reality, to make it so successful that it became an assumed part of the world.
Look at a soda can. Someone invented this. Cans predated manufactured can-openers by decades. When you drink a Coke ask who made this thing that came to you.
Soda was invented as a medicinal thing. It was sold by pharmacists and then they started adding flavors.
There are fantastic stories behind each and every thing around us.
If you accept that innovation is old, one thing comes with is mythology. We have ideas about creation, about how invention happens.
Prometheus decided that he wanted to give people fire. He went to Zeus and stole it to give it to people. Think Karen Armstrong's writing on mythology.
Go to Rockerfeller Center and you'll find Prometheus there representing something important. This reflects what we as designers can do, we can bring good to the world through creative acts.
All creatives see themselves this way, they have power to bring to people.
Look at Newton. This is another myth about how ideas are formed, they are given by God. It puts the burden on external forces. If you look at science you see this myth again and again. It externalizes the burden of being a creator and lets it happen because of divine force or the muses or whatever. Anyone can discover, they just have to be in the right place.
The true story is that Newton worked on his theory for fifteen years. Even if the apple thing happened it is a mere footnote to what really happened. He stood on the shoulders of giants.
So corporations.
3M: Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing. How does this company get to make Post-It notes?
Bunch of guys get together in the early 20th century. Mining is big so they wanted to mine stuff that would be abrasive and could be used to grind stuff down. They ended up mining the wrong stuff. They couldn't sell it and decided to go into sandpaper manufacturing. This was a new and growing market. Slowly they developed a successful business.
One of the engineers at the sandpaper company. He wants to go to a company using his product to see how the product is being used. He sees them trying to do two-tone painting. There is a problem he can solve. He goes to his boss and asks if he can do it. This guy doesn't listen and builds a prototype and shows it to his boss again. Boss says no again. He has to decide if he's going to do it or not. He builds another prototype and his boss says yes and thus masking tape was born.
It outpaced sandpaper. So this was cool? How do they do it again? This led to Post-It notes. The secret lies in this: mistakes will be made but if the person is essentially right the mistake will be smaller than the mistake made by management when they quash independent thinking.
[ Find William McKnight, CEO of 3M, quotation from 1948 on this subject]
Second example. Look at the space program. One myth of innovation is that big organizations can't innovate. They need someone leading the show who gets it.
The space program happened because the President put his reputation on the line to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. This took 500,000 people to accomplish. This is one of the biggest projects in human history and it worked.
All the components were engineered by corporations and it worked.
We like to talk about the chaos in innovation in disasters. Look at Apollo 13. Most of the stories about innovation fit the model that ideas come from special places that there is no mess, no chaos, a flash of brilliant insight. But the truth way more often approximates what happened in Apollo 13, an endless series of impossible challenges with lot's of missteps.
[Look at From the Earth to the Moon episode 5 about the design of the lunar lander]
Most of the design of the lander was human factors design. How can you see out the window, where do site, etc.
So part 3, lessons.
Look at the history of the computer mouse. Look at Thomas Edison, he gets credit on his own but really he had a huge shop of innovators. His self-promoting played into the myth even though he also talked about the collaboration of his lab.
So how does innovation happen:
- delegate responsibility
- allow people to do their jobs in their own way
- expect mistakes to be made
- reward initiative to create growth
- succeed in holding these values above all others
Think about 20% time. Google deserves credit for having this spirit but 3M had this first because they understood that innovation comes from the periphery.
The failure of Taylorism is that it takes power over how work is done away from workers.
Use these principles within. Let your own team make mistakes, give them room, delegate. Start with yourself.
Key points:
- innovation and design are ancient
- we can learn from history and mythology
- organizations of any size can innovate
- innovation is simple, but hard: delegate, expect mistakes, reward initiative
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