Secrets of innovation from the Inventor's Hall of Fame
The U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office inducted fifteen new members of its National Inventor's Hall of Fame last month. Its thirty-eighth class included such notables as Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the co-inventor of Aqualung diving equipment, S. Donald Stookey, the inventor of glass ceramics, and Ralph Bauer, the inventor of home video games.
However, none of the fifteen inductees were more warmly welcomed than the 3M Corporation's Spencer Silver and Art Fry. Spencer accidentally invented a "low-tack" or weak adhesive by accident in 1970, Fry made the connection between Spencer's idea and easily removable hymnal markers in 1974, and 3M launched the Post-It note in 1980.
The rest is history. Although the development process took 12 years and thousands of team meetings, the Post-It remains one of the top-five office products on the market today. Thus did their apparent failure become a stunning and continuing success.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, there were relatively few mad scientists in the group. Most of this year's Hall of Fame inductees were scientists and engineers who had the time, freedom, and funding to invent. They may have worn pocket protectors, but they were not nerds.
This year's inductees were all leaders of a kind--they took risks, made connections, and built coalitions. Although several operated entirely on their own, most needed strong leadership at the top. That's where their leaders provided the protection, resources, and encouragement for natural innovation.
Natural innovation may seem like an oxymoron. After all, innovation is often described as an act of great heroism and controversy. No doubt it often is. But it need not be a 24/7 struggle against the odds.
Any organization, no matter how moribund, can create innovation once--just hire a fire-or-else executive nicknamed "Chainsaw." The real trick is to innovate twice. Strong leaders must create the conditions to do so, even if that means an annual award for failures.
First, strong leadership is essential for risk taking. Organizations often mouth the right words about trial and error, but create trials for error when the failures occur. Strong leaders build the firewalls against this backlash, even to the point of celebrating mistakes. And they confront the inevitable "we-tried-that-before" commentary, which seems to be the primary job description for roughly one out of five employees.
Second, strong leadership is an underpinning of "patient imagination," which is a variation of patient capital. Although new ideas are almost always ignited by market potential, rare is the innovator who produces the mythic Apollo 13 "square-filter-in-a-round-barrel," crisis-driven breakthrough.
Neither did this year's Hall of Fame inductees. They tended to do their best work at work, not in basements or lonely garages. Their minds were always on, but their hands were at work in well-funded, market-oriented laboratories.
Third, strong leadership is the core of user-centered innovation. Innovation is often driven by the notion that a good idea sells itself, but leaders know better. The more they engage potential users, the greater the probability that the idea will disrupt the market.
Finally and most important, strong leaders are also at the heart of the collaboration needed for successful breakthroughs. Although five of this year's fifteen inductees were individuals, the rest were part of two-, three-, and even four-person teams. And once they had their idea in hand, project teams often took over, shaping and reshaping the idea to make it more effective and marketable.
Business-school scholars Jasjit Singh, Matt Marx and Lee Fleming described the pattern in the conclusion of their January 2010 article for Management Science. Based on their analysis of more than a half million U.S. patents, they concluded that the lone-wolf inventor is less likely to create successful breakthroughs than collaborative teams both inside and outside existing organizations.
Translated into baseball terms, Singh, Marx and Fleming show that "collaborative creativity" produces more hits, steals, extra bases, runs, and homeruns. Collaborative creativity also produces fewer errors, strike outs, missed signals, and runners-left-on-base.
This is not to say lone wolves always fail, but they just do not do as well at bringing ideas to fruition. At least in innovation, a home run is the coin of the realm, no matter whether it just clears the foul pole, barely reaches the stands, lands in the upper deck, flies over the Green Monster, or spins through eternity as in Robert Redford's film, The Natural.
The leader's job is to make everyone an innovator, whether they work in a laboratory, incubator, marketing department, or on the factory floor. Leaders are innovators, too. They must constantly survey the horizon for new opportunities, teach their organizations when to say "yes," and protect the teams that work so hard to imagine new futures. And they must give their inventors faith in the possible. Without it, no one will take the leap.
By
Andrea Useem
|
April 29, 2010; 6:03 AM ET |
Category:
Innovation
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Posted by: bmgleason | April 30, 2010 9:18 PM
Actually, my sister-in-law's dad invented Post-It notes at 3M. The two men listed and honored were his bosses at the time.
That's pretty much how it works--and has throughout human history.
Posted by: chunche | April 30, 2010 8:47 PM
Problem with math:
"Although five of this year's fifteen inductees were individuals, the rest were part of two-, three-, and even four-person teams."
1*5 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 14, so the 15th person (who must have been in a group) was on the "2", "3", or "4" person team (i.e. there either wasn't a 2, a 3, or a 4 person team).
Importantly though, is the number of inventions. 5 were created by individuals, just 3 by teams (assuming the sentence I quoted was otherwise correct).
----
"This is not to say lone wolves always fail, but they just do not do as well at bringing ideas to fruition."
...
"They tended to do their best work at work, not in basements or lonely garages. Their minds were always on, but their hands were at work in well-funded, market-oriented laboratories"
Due to the ways companies operate, there are probably far more people working on teams (more importantly, far more teams) than there are lone wolves, so the (possible) fact that innovations are more likely to come from teams doesn't imply that a given team is more likely to succeed than a given individual (the converse of a true statement is often false).
I'm not saying teams are bad, just that the logic is.
Posted by: buckdharma | April 30, 2010 6:51 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.
@BUCKDHARMA There isn't a mathematical mistake, just a typo. The original article that is linked at the top (about the induction ceremony) lists 16 inventors, not 15.