Malcolm Gladwell has a wonderful article in the New Yorker, In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare? that explores the genius phenomenon in innovation.  His main point: genius is often overrated, in that the ideas most geniuses credited with having were already out there.  And, corollary to that, it’s relatively easy to have a good idea if you just take smart people with diverse backgrounds and set them loose on an field or problem that few have focused on before:

Ideas weren’t precious. They were everywhere, which suggested that maybe
the extraordinary process that we thought was necessary for
invention—genius, obsession, serendipity, epiphany—wasn’t necessary at
all.

He illustrates this point with beautiful stories about Nathan Myhrvold’s dinosaur hunts, Bell and Gray’s coinciding patents for the telephone, and an old but timeless study by Ogburn and Thomas of 148 scientific discoveries that were arrived at by multiple people at around the same time.

In the end, Gladwell’s point is that the individual genius may not be the source of novelty–others were thinking the same thoughts–but that the individual genius is a concentrating force that brings these ideas together more frequently and effectively than ordinary smart people. So a genius can have the same ten ideas that it took ten other people to have one at a time…so it’s better to hire the genius than the other ten:

A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do;
he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The
genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient
source of insight.

But Gladwell of all people should appreciate that there’s more to an innovation than the idea.  ITNS: It’s the network… Most of the “great” ideas, whether the telephone, the electric light, or mass production, were around in various forms before Bell, Edison, or Ford got to them.  The same can be said for today’s geniuses: Gates, Jobs, Kamen, Page & Brin.  Ford had it right when he argued against his own ideas:

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. . . .  Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

What gives one person credit for the same ideas others also came up with is not the novelty of the ideas, but rather the ability of the “inventors” to execute–to create a lasting difference based on the unique set of connections they are able to build around that idea.  Ford invented nothing new, but nobody connected, so effectively, those existing ideas into a system of mass production that was as effective and (as important) influential in changing others.

So little of the conversation on innovation looks at the ability of “inventors” to execute.  To take actions that build on their ideas–whether that’s starting a company, attracting investors, hiring smart people, selling to customers.  There is a strange aversion, in writing on creativity and innovation, to these more blue-collar aspects of building great ideas. That’s a shame because there’s a lot of work being done backstage that nobody’s getting credit for.

There is a joke about George W. Bush–“he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple”–that applies to the study of genius as well.  Genius is often given credit for coming up with more ideas than others.  Missing from this description is the changes that take place around the genius after the first idea or two.  After that, they have often built themselves a very effective network for moving ideas from the margins and into the mainstream.  After a while, people began sending Yogi Berra his quotes.

Bob Sutton and I wrote innovation at IDEO Product Development as a process of brokering–of taking ideas from where they’re known and moving them to where they’re not.  IDEO’s diverse clients and broad-minded designers made the company extremely effective at seeing how ideas in one industry can be used in another.  While IDEO’s culture and creative designers are able to generate many It insights, it’s IDEO’s network–their access to new clients–that enables them to have the effect they do.

Not to put too tautological a spin on it, but a genius is someone who gets credit for having the ideas (much like Gladwell’s Tipping Point is credited with many of the ideas that 50 years of social network research developed).  There there is validity and value to this definition.  A famous mathematician was once chided for having gotten credit for a discovery others had made.  His response:

“Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered.”

Given how many people can have ideas, we should be less interested in what it takes to have an idea and more curious about how make a idea “stay discovered.”

Putting our money (and time and energy) where my mouth is, the Center for Entrepreneurship at UC Davis has created a program intended to foster the entrepreneurial interests and skills of university researchers.  Our central premise is that what’s missing in bringing great science- and technology-based businesses out of the nation’s university labs and into the marketplace is not financial but rather intellectual and social capital.

In other words, we’ve created a set of programs designed to provide the particular knowledge and networks that enable scientists and engineers to effectively move their research into the markets–where it can make a difference.

The Kauffman Foundation has funded us to open this program nationally (and now internationally), specifically for advancing the commercialization of green technology research, and we are excited to announce the 2nd annual program in July, 2008.

UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship Announces Second Annual Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy

Kauffman Foundation Named Founding Sponsor;
Applications Now Available Online

DAVIS, Calif., Feb. 5, 2008 – The University of California at Davis (UC Davis) Center for Entrepreneurship today announced the details of the second annual Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy.  The Academy will be held from July 7-11, 2008, at the Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences in Incline Village, Nev.  The Academy provides doctoral students, post-docs, and research faculty in science and engineering with the knowledge and skills that will enable them to move their research on sustainable technologies out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.  UC Davis is currently accepting applications for this exclusive event.  Applications are available at http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/green/apply.html.  All accepted students will receive scholarships to cover the program’s tuition and lodging.

The Founding Sponsor of this year’s Academy is the Kauffman Foundation, which strives to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation.  Additional sponsors include the Superfund Basic Research Program, Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization, Prequent, Inc., and the Sierra Angels.

“At the Kauffman Foundation, we are committed to helping universities move their technologies to the marketplace,” said Lesa Mitchell, vice president, Advancing Innovation, the Kauffman Foundation.  “UC Davis’ Center for Entrepreneurship is a great partner in educating innovators in science and engineering about the steps between the university lab and a business that has real impact on our society and our environment.”

The Academy’s five-day immersion program includes modules covering technology validation, market and financial strategies, and successful communication skills.  Participants will interact with faculty, investors, entrepreneurs, and industry executives to gain an understanding of the path from the university lab to the market and the resources that are available along the way.  Attendees will gain the knowledge and skills needed to recognize, develop, and communicate potential commercial opportunities arising from their research and the ability to tap the social networks linking them to the entrepreneurial community.

“After the success of the first Academy last year, we’re looking forward to bringing together another excellent group of students, faculty, and private-sector mentors this summer,” said Associate Professor Andy Hargadon, director, UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship.  “The Academy’s focus on commercializing green technology research will hopefully attract top researchers in this growing field.  The Academy will give them the tools they need to make a lasting environmental and economic impact with their research.”

About the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship The UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship serves as a nexus for entrepreneurship education and research — and as a springboard for entrepreneurial initiatives on the UC Davis campus.

To accomplish this, the Center brings science, engineering and business students and faculty together with experienced entrepreneurs, investors and corporate leaders in a highly collaborative environment that blends effective theory with hands-on participation and solution-driven innovation.  The Center is a Center of Excellence within the Graduate School of Management.

Under the direction of Associate Professor Andrew Hargadon, the Center provides researchers and MBA students with the necessary skills, resources and network support to turn their ideas into action.  Whether for profit or for social benefit — or both — the Center’s programs enable students to envision a better world and make it a reality.

For more information, please contact Nicole Starsinic, assistant director, at nstarsinic@ucdavis.edu or visit http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/

Adam Lashinsky wrote a must-read article on this week's Fortune (Google's biggest threat? Itself, 5/26) for students of innovation. A must-read because it provides a timely and necessary antidote to the causality-challenged study and writing about innovation. 

Since Google's IPO–the requisite proof positive of Google's genius–there have been countless articles dissecting the search companies innovative techniques for managing innovation (see for example, BW's How Google Fuels Its Idea Factory, 4/29).  Everything from the small groups free to develop (and launch) new applications to the free haute-cuisine to the 20% time programmers are expected to devote to their own pet projects. To anyone who has been around the valley for over a decade, these techniques should sound vaguely familiar.   

So here in lies the rub.  The problem of causality plagues a lot of variance-driven research.  Causality is, as it sounds, an attempt to clarify whether one action actually causes another.  How scientists study this causal relationship is by looking at how variation in one action (the independent variable) causes variation in another (the dependent variable).  Sounds simple. Until you want to study something interesting, like people. That's because you can't really tell whether the causal relationship goes in one direction or the other. 

Take, for example, teams, morale, and productivity.  You can find that happy teams are productive teams, and conclude that happy people create productive teams because they work better together.  This leads to one set of managerial recommendations around making your people happy.  Or you can find conclude (often more accurately) that productive teams create happy people because people like to do things they do well.  Now you get a completely different set of recommendations around managing people in teams.  Of course, because people aren't dumb, the causal relationship goes both ways many hot teams are caught in the positive feedback of doing well, feeling good, working harder, and doing better.

But back to Google. The company becomes wildly profitable. As they do, they begin to implement a series of management practices that they read or saw that makes people innovative: free food, massages, 20% free time.  Then someone comes along and sees these practices and concludes, naturally, that they are the source of all that innovation.  We all read the same things about Yahoo, Silicon Graphics, and Apple (3M made the 20% rule famous, though in practice when you work 60 hrs a week, 20% is more like your Saturday).

So are these practices really the answer to creating an innovative workplace?
Lashinsky was actually writing about how entrepreneurs were leaving Google to start their own companies because working weekends to create a new application for a search company that has money to burn and applications to spare may not be the best recipe for innovation. 

In other words, no matter what the scientists, journalists, and pundits say about their "innovative" management style, the entrepreneurial rats at Google who are leaving the ship see something else.  Something that is missing from the new and successful Google. Something they would like to return to in order to be successful themselves.

And think about it–did the haute cuisine dining room precede or follow Google's rise to dominance in search?  If it did, we would be seeing more VCs insist their first $1M in goes to building the four-star cafeteria.

I worked at Apple in the early 1990's. When I got there we were at 55% gross margins and when I left we were at 15%.  Was I the cause?  I hope not.  Either way, I got to see how Apple's "innovative" management decisions in the 1980's came back to haunt them in the form of impossibly-high manufacturing costs, impossibly-scalable perks (Friday beer busts, morning bagels, massages, first class travel and accomodations), and impossibly-complex product proliferation.  Three years later, I wandered the halls of Silicon Graphics and saw the same decisions waiting to bring them down. 

The next time someone points out an organization's innovative innovation practices, think hard about whether those practices were there when the real innovation took place.  Then think about where you've seen them before, and what happened to those companies.   

One of the hallmarks of histories of innovation is how quickly the origins of new technologies are lost, and how easily radical changes slip into longstanding customs. How quickly, in other words, we forget. 

It’s surprising to my students that the internet (as we know it) is only 14 years old–counting, as I do, by the emergence of Netscape, which triggered the rapid diffusion of servers and users. More surprising to us professors is that some of those students are younger than Microsoft Word. So quickly we forget what life was like before these changes.

It’s with this perspective somewhere in the back of my mind that I watched as the Stanford Women’s basketball team defeated top-seeded University of Connecticut, 82-73, to reach the NCAA finals. It was a great game played by two great teams. It was made meaningful (bloggable) by a couple of emails I received during the game but didn’t read, of course, until the final buzzer.

The second note was a blog post by Mariah Burton Nelson which described her early days playing basketball at Stanford in the from 1975-1979: Escaping from Roble.  An elite high-school athlete, she started playing at Stanford when the team had no uniforms and played in the student gym.  The men, of course, had Maples Pavilion.  It was during her tenure, and through her commitment as well as others, that they took the first steps forward. Now look at them–two national championships and on their way to the finals again.

30 years ago, women were just getting the chance to play the game (as we know it). By contrast, Dean Smith was in his 15th year of coaching at UNC.  Now look at them.  Which brings me to the first note I got, A good jest from a colleague that drove home how far they’ve come:
"Stanford, where the men are men and the women are champions."

Go Cards!

A very nice article in the New York Times today about Edison and the ways in which technological history gets (re)written by the victors: Edison….  In this case, Matt Richtel describes a voice recording recently discovered that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by 2 decades:

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville has certainly been obscure, at least until now. Researchers say that in April 1860, the Parisian tinkerer used a device called a phonautograph to make visual recordings of a woman singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” That was 17 years before Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph, and 28 years before his technology was used to capture and play back a piece of a section of a Handel oratorio.

Of course, it follows a similar pattern with Edison’s light bulb, the patent for which was turned down as too similar to one filed almost 40 years earlier (in 1845) by J.W. Starr. 

Insightfully, Richtel recognizes that "Whom we credit with an invention often has less to do with who came up with an idea, and more to do with who translated it into something usable, accessible, commercial."  This is, after all, the definition of innovation: the exploitation of a novel idea. 

The danger in pursuing "inventors" is that, while historians might be interested solely in understanding the facts of what happened when, too many others are interested in replicating the feats of these "inventors." If all we care about is who came up with the idea first then we miss invaluable lessons about what it takes to translate that idea "into something usable, accessible, commercial," which is the bigger challenge.

That’s the ratio: the number of scientists equal to one politician in the
struggle to define and affect climate change. At least according the
Nobel Peace Prize committee.

To be clear:

On October 12th, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to both Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), half going to each.

Al Gore on one side of the scale and, on the other, the 2,500 researchers from 130 nations who worked for two decades to create,
in the words of
the committee, “an ever-broader informed consensus
about the connection between human activities and global warming.”

To be fair, Gore was not alone.  Anyone who’s seen An Inconvenient Truth,
will know he had his trusty Apple Powerbook running a very cool set of Keynote slides (and among the green, this may have done more for Apple’s sales than the
iPod.  But that’s not the point).

It’s not fair to blame the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for this ratio.  The more frightening prospect is that they may be right.

America has made a decided tip towards acknowledging climate change, exploring solutions, and taking action.  Not all of it good, but getting off the pot should in itself count for something. Did we reach our tipping point because the scientists finally discovered climate change?  No.  That was 20 years ago.  Instead, it was because the scientists and others (I’m talking to you, Al) finally convinced the rest of the world of this reality.

The more important question is why, in the eyes of the committee, could 2500 of the leading scientists only get halfway towards making their ideas make a difference?

This is the more frightening prospect.  Science as it’s currently practiced has its faults, but I know of no better way to advance our understanding of the world than the American university system.  The problem is what we do with that understanding.

If a scientist discovers something startling in the rainforest and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a contribution? If he or she publishes a paper in Journal of Startling Rainforest Discoveries, and the other 20 scientists working the same field read it, but no others, does it make a contribution?

America spends approximately $48B on funded research by universities in this country and yet so little of it  makes a difference outside of the individual fields in which the work is guided, conducted, peer-reviewed, and published. In other words, we have created a market (actually many small, disconnected markets) where scientists answer only to other scientists in their fields and nobody is held accountable for whether that research reaches a broader audience.

Our attempts to understand and affect climate change are at a scale that we, as a society, are not used to. Global cooperation and coordination of this scale has arguably only happened during the great wars.  And then, the challenge of developing a shared understanding of what was happening, what was needed, and by whom, was easier. Not easy, but easier.  Mobilizing the resources to mitigate climate change will require big bets.  Bets that need to be well-informed.  Recent investments in Hydrogen and ethanol are good examples of what happens when science gets taken for a ride (albeit a nicely funded ride) by special interests and politicians alike.

So what can we do?  I am putting my money (or at least a lot of my time) on what I think is one of the few crucial levers we have: increasing the ability of scientists to make their research make a difference.

Frederick Terman, grandfather  the Silicon Valley, once remarked (before transforming Stanford’s School of Engineering into the powerhouse it is today) that the field of radio was dominated by businessmen who knew a little about science.  He asked what would happen to the field if it was led by scientists who knew a little bit about business.  Hewlett-Packard, Varian, and many others were businesses that emerged from the School of Engineering were examples of the impact that scientists can have when they assume the mantle of leadership in business.

Until scientists understand that they have a obligation to see their research through to its impact on society, and the skills and connections to do so, they will always equal 1/2500th of a politician. With or without a powerbook.

Great advice by Casual Fridays on the micro-details, boots-on-the-ground, life-in-the-trenches reality of innovation–the act of actually mentioning your idea to others for the first time: 7 Reasons No One Likes Your Ideas. For example:

1. You took a leap, but didn’t build a bridge.
Our minds wander down paths and make leaps from one idea to the next very quickly. Your idea makes perfect sense to you because of the path you followed internally. If you don’t take everyone else down that path, it probably won’t make sense to them.

and

5. You tossed an egg instead of a bird.
You tossed it out there too early. Given time, it would have flown…

Should be required reading for anyone involved in anything creative.