Innovation And Invention

There is no question in my mind that with appropriate management, we can improve the levels of innovation and creativity within organizations. There is no magic here. Innovative people are no more ‘born’ than Olympic gold medallists or virtuoso musicians. Yes, some of us are gifted with more initial aptitude, but as music and sports show, the ‘natural’ or the ‘child

prodigy’ frequently does not graduate to the top level. Hard, focused and appropriately- directed work trumps natural talent in virtually every case. The question is,

where to focus? Let us start by looking at the anatomy of the beast.

One key lesson that I took away from Lester Thurlow’s book, Head to Head, is the observation that, “Innovation in process trumps innovation in product.” Thurlow was contrasting the research investment strategies between the U.S. and Japan in the post-war years. His observation was that the U.S. took a materialistic approach to their investment, focusing on products, while the Japanese focused on process. His observation was that while the U.S. invented DRAM, the VCR or the LCD, it also incurred the highest up-front costs, while the Japanese reaped the primary profit due to their superior processes of manufacturing and distribution.

Today, we have a comparable example

in Apple and Dell. Apple is now below

Acer in PC market share, but they have

beautiful, design-intense systems. Dell’s

computers, on the other hand, are boring

and have virtually no technical or design

innovation. But Dell’s process has given

them a dominant market share. Some business

publications (e.g., Fast Company, Jan.

2004) have come to the dubious conclusion

that this says that innovation may not be all

that it was cracked up to be. Of course,

what...

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level position? Do you have a Chief Design

Officer reporting to the president? My

view is that if you do not, you are not

serious about design or innovation.

Furthermore, you are telegraphing this fact

to all of your employees, along with a clear

message that they need not be either. As a

result, you might as well fire all of your creative

people, since you are setting them up

to fail anyhow.

As an executive, of course you have to

have creative and innovative ideas. But at

the top of the list should be ones that reflect

(a) how important innovation is to the

future of your company, (b) the role of

design in this, (c) a recognition that innovation

cannot be ghettoized in the research or

design departments, since it is an overall

cultural issue, and (d) an awareness of the

inevitable and dire consequences of ignoring

the previous three points..