The Great Man theory of invention–that for every great idea there was one man (history being as sexist as business, science, and politics) and one moment before which the idea didn’t exist and after which the world was never the same–is still alive and well. Despite the many of us who rail against it. Just when I think I’m preaching to the choir, something comes along to show me otherwise. In this case…Larry Schubert of ZIP Innovations sent along this notice:

As you may or may not know, ABC TV is creating a new prime time reality show called American Inventor. The show is being produced by Simon Cowell and others from American Idol, and the winning inventor receives a $1M prize.

There is a Bay Area casting call for inventors, designers or anyone with a good idea on Novemeber 17th in San Francisco. If you have any interest, please visit their website at www.AmericanInventor.tv for more detailed information.

Inventors have held the business media spotlight as American Idols since the days of Edison. So why not bring them into the mainstream market? This will be a great mirror onto the collective impression of how “inventors” should look, act, and if we’re lucky, sing and dance.

ABC News just posted a story (Volunteers Restore Net Access for Katrina Victims) that highlights two important points for me. Three if you count that my brother, Steve, brought many of these pieces together in a late night effort on the Thursday following Katrina’s damage (publicwebstations.com)/.

1. The power of the community to respond to disasters. Obviously, there are the front line responses–the bucket-brigades, etc…–that have largelly been replaced by emergency services (which have since been undermined by bad federal and local funding decisions). But there are also the crucial secondary responses–like getting displaced people their needed medicines, shelter, communication, clothing, and pension checks or other income. While there’s a lot of potential for tapping the community in reacting to front line responses (just look at the ham radios have always played, and now blogs are joining), there are some great examples of how the “open source” community is using its knowledge and experience of what’ss possible to bring help to people who need it. One of the ways that help came was in the form of an easy and cheap process for quickly providing web access to large numnbers of people:

In McKinney, Texas, about 10 volunteers were able to set up 25 public access terminals in a Wal-Mart store now serving as a hurricane relief center for victims from New Orleans. The Web center was established using PCs donated by Hotels.com, based in nearby Dallas, and a high-speed wireless Internet connection provided by the new Wal-Mart store located across the street.

We began receiving refugees this [Monday] morning around 10 a.m. By 10:30, we already had several people using the workstations to find relatives and loved ones,” wrote volunteer John Leidel, in an e-mail to ABC News. “They’re also being used to check the current news. Many of the people haven’t heard radio or seen television broadcasts for quite some time. They are seeing the pictures from the devastation for the first time since they were evacuated.”

Leidel, a software engineer, says that he and his fellow volunteers worked tirelessly throughout the weekend to set up the ad-hoc network. But he says the effort was well worth it.

“The medical station that has been set up inside was especially grateful. They have two of our stations in their area for checking in patients,” wrote Leidel. “All in all, this has become a wonderful success. As one of the incoming refugees put it, ‘This is the nicest place we’ve been [to] so far.'”

2. The power of recombinant innovation. The solution that worked in the Walmart in McKinney is a solution that could work anywhere there are outdated PCs sitting around (where in corporate America is that not the case?). These old PCs can be turned into simple Linux terminals, networked back to a single Pentium PC connected to the web. Each within about 5 minutes and all running off a single “server,” dramatically lowering the maintenance burden. It’s a combination of PCs and the old client-server model of computing, a combination of used hardware and open source OS and web browser, and a combination of new computers and web access with outdated machines taking up space in some backoffice in IT. It’s the equivalent of a geek bucket-brigade, strung out across the country, and creating the means for others to provide almost immediate access the web for both victims and responders

Steven Hargadon, a software developer in Sacramento, Calif., says he and fellow open-source programmers came up with the idea of open-source terminals based on their years of experience in networking computers running Linux, an open-source operating system that proponents say is just as capable as Microsoft’s Windows program.

“The technology is pretty simple and it’s been available for some time,” says Hargadon. “A working Web station would take no more than five minutes to set up, and requires no ongoing maintenance except in the case of hardware failure.”

So after Hargadon saw Katrina’s destruction, he collaborated with other Linux colleagues online to develop a special version of the software that can be easily copied onto blank CD-ROMs. Also included in the package was a customized version of the free Firefox Web browser which contained links to disaster relief information, news Web sites, and free e-mail services offered by Yahoo and Google.

The software is freely distributed on Web sites geared toward Linux developers and will work on computers as outdated as PCs with Pentium 2 microprocessors and no hard drives.

As is the case with so many disasters, our responses as a community show what potential we have for supporting each other in times of crisis. And they make us wonder why that never happens when the crisis is slow, lengthy, and under the radar–like public school education. The same solution that is providing web access to stranded victims of Katrina could just as quickly and easily bring internet access (and email, word processing, etc..) to a school near you.

Imagine what else could be done… Then, like Steve, go do it.

In thinking more about the mousetrap problem, it seems that the the most successful innovations actually draw their value not as stand-alone inventions but rather as products or processes that connect users to broader networks of existing products and services that were previously inaccessible or unassembled.Â

The Apple iPod is a great example. It has been called a better mousetrap–design and business critics have praised it clean lines and ease of use. But what I think gives the iPod its real value is the network behind it: the music software, the ability to buy new music online, the clean connections to computer hardware, even the music itself. Importantly, there’s nothing technically new about it.  I made this argument in an article in The Design Management Review (Winter, 2005):

…Behind its clean form and ease-of-use lies a network that connects hardware (Mac or PC), software (iTunes), music distributors, and even artists in ways that no other competitor has matched. Â
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The iPod’s truly inspired design lay in first seeing the value of this new network, and then creating a venture which brought it all together. While each piece of the overall system adds value, together they create an offering that defies replication, let alone commoditization. Companies will keep knocking off bits of the system—online music stores, digital players, jukebox software—but few can recreate the entire network Apple put together. Sony, with their own Walkman experience, PC group, music labels, and vast distribution had the best chance yet, to date, they’ve failed. And what did Sony learn from the process? That integrating the different resources of their own organization— from the design of the box to the software to the digital content management—was too difficult a task. In fact, Sony just created a new venture, Connect Co., dedicated solely to bridging their product and media businesses. Â
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Like the iPod, new products and services will increasingly have to draw their value from the networks that surround and support them. And the design process will have to address this entire venture, not just the box: what it looks like, what value it brings to each participant, and how it evolves.

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There was nothing new about each of the original pieces of the iPod network. Mp3 players were already on the market, as were the software programs for managing your digital music. And Napster provided free (albeit illegal) sharing of music. Apple’s innovation was creating the network that brought all those pieces together for the user. This much was apparent when the cover of Fortune showed Steve Jobs and Sheryl Crow yucking it up. That image was more telling of the value proposition that lay in the network than the thousands of product-porn shots of the little chrome and white iPod.  What’s the most beautiful design feature in the iPod? Ultimately, my money is on the digital rights management technology that made the music executives decide to join the network. It’s the same DRM that will, soon, entice the movie and television executives to join as well.

John Helferich brought up a great example–or challenge–in thinking about an innovation as a network (see his comment): RFID. Walmart made a heap of announcements about how their suppliers needed to begin using RFID, but almost immediately there was push back: the cost to Walmart for the tags and readers–relative to its revenues–was nothing compared to the costs to individual suppliers.  RIght now it’s a great technology and there are lots of hardware, software, and systems providers out there pushing their products. But the real solution will break through when someone figures out a design that benefits not just the Walmarts of the world but also the CPGs, distributors, smaller retail shops, and who knows who else (maybe the end users?). RFID looks still like a fragmented network in which all the gains have been designed to go to just a few of the nodes.Â

One thing I have learned in the last few years of traveling the country, talking to people in companies about their innovation process, is that there is no shortage of good ideas. The problem lies instead in their collective ability to know a good idea when they see one and execute on it.

When it comes to innovation, it seems, many people are obsessed with the idea of building the better mousetrap. This usually translates to the single, free-standing, IP-protected and revenue-generating product or service that will enable them to hit their promised growth targets for the coming year(s). Managers use this ideal when they search for blockbuster ideas and they use it again to evaluate any ideas that they have. And why not? We all remember Emerson’s famous line: “build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”

What few know, however, is that this advice is wrong. Jack Hope wrote a great article (“A better mousetrap,” American Heritage, October, 1996) exploring the quote, and the facts, surrounding mousetraps and inventions. Emerson’s advice, it turns out, is wrong because since the US patent and trademark office opened in 1828 it has issued over 4,400 new mousetrap patents. Out of some 400 new patent applications each year, it awards out roughly 40 new ones. And yet only two dozen have made any money and only two designs have ever dominated the market. The most common mousetrap design is the snap trap, which was patented in 1897. The second is the glue trap, which hit the market in the 1970’s (Incidentally, the second reason this advice is wrong is that Emerson never said it. He said, “If you sell better wood, better grain, …” Nothing about innovation. A journalist rewrote those relatively unremarkable lines 7 years after his death, and that’s when they took off). As the numbers show, better mousetraps apparently don’t amount to much.

And yet, despite this history, managers dream of developing better mousetraps–the innovations that will take the world by storm. Innovations to which the world will beat a path. How big a problem is this? I would postulate three major mousetrap traps:

Mousetrap #1: Believing an innovation will, if good enough, create its own market.
In fact, the more revolutionary a new product or process, the more unlikely it will take the world by storm. Consider the Segway personal transporter. It cost over $100M to develop. It was built from scratch and its “inventor,” Dean Kamen, promised it would do to the automobile what the automobile did to the horse and buggy. It was designed, in other words, to be a better mousetrap. Kamen and his crack team of engineers labored magnificently in their laboratories to develop the Segway (first code named “It” and the “Ginger”) but to what end? When this glorious piece of engineering was released to the public amid great fanfare, there was no effective distribution, no complementary products or services, no dedicated sales force. It wasn’t even clear that cities would allow their use on sidewalks. Kamen had promised sales in the hundreds of thousands of units. After two years, a software glitch forced them to recall all of the Segways in use…all 6,000. The world, once again, was not in the path-beating mood. But at least the Segway team got their product out the door.

Mousetrap #2: Requiring that any single innovation support the growth projections for the next year.
Here the folly of rewarding for A while hoping for B shows itself. If the only projects that will get funded are those that promise overnight benefits, then companies will find themselves quickly pursuing a portfolio of projects that are either (a) based on necessarily unrealistic projections or (b) underwhelming imitations of existing the company’s existing brands and products. The Apple Newton is a great example of the former…CEO Sculley had pitched it as the next revolution in computing. In the first year, it sold around 60-80,000 units, not bad for a brand new product and category, but nothing like millions promised. And as examples of the latter, just consider what passes for innovation in the retail sector: the same brands dressed up with new colors or new flavors. This trap is much more insidious than the first because it is based on the belief that there is a new idea out there somewhere that can take the world by storm. As I and others have argued before, the ideas that tend to take the world by storm are not new ones, but rather old ones put together in just the right way. And yet the fact that an idea has already been tried, either internally or by the competition, is often seen as proof that it’s not a better mousetrap.

Mousetrap #3: Insisting that any innovation is perfect before it gets out the door.
The more “perfect” an innovation is before it’s released into the wild, the more likely that it will fail. In part, this is because the development team, with its intimate familiarity with the underlying possibilities, doesn’t want to compromise and as a result overshoots the market completely (the Newton team fell for this one as well, and probably the Segway team too). And this is because Pareto was a product designer too: the time and money it takes to perfect the remaining 20% probably comes out to about 80% (as they say, great is the enemy of good). And finally, perhaps most importantly, this is because the more a team of developers commits to making something perfect, the less able they are to respond quickly when the market reacts in unexpected ways. In psychology, its called escalation of commitment: the more effort you put into a project, the more likely you are to remain committed despite overwhelming evidence that you’re on the wrong course. In innovation, the sooner you can release a product (and the less sure you are that it’s perfect), the more likely you’ll be able to learn from customers what you got right and what you missed, and come out with rev 2.0.

So what can be done about these traps? That’s the million dollar question.