Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours.
Much like the seasons outside, life inside the cardboard mansion is slowly changing. No longer do we have to stare at a landscape of boxes, but are instead forcibly treated to a 1970’s décor the likes of which the world has not seen since, well, the 1970’s. Yes, we have torn down layers upon layers of wallpaper (for anyone about to do the same, get a wallpaper steamer; it will save you a year in an asylum), eventually reaching the original choice made by the first owner. Needless to say, it is… …something.
Given our eleven-month-old daughter’s penchant for running and climbing, one would have thought that such work would perhaps become a bit of a pain in the hole. In fact, quite the opposite has happened. Rather than restricting her to a different part of the house, we showed her how to take old wallpaper off the floor and put it into the bin. Within a second, she understood, and beamed with pride from being allowed and trusted to help.
Kids, man. They get you right in the feels.
Anyway.
Before we begin, I thought I would, once more, briefly address the subscription alternatives and their benefits.
Above all else, paying for this newsletter is a display of appreciation, and one for which I am genuinely extremely grateful (it literally keeps the endeavor going). But I will also always keep giving you perks back; we have workshops coming up, there are the additional analyses every week, complimentary access to Strategy in Polemy, and, for those who choose the founder option, a signed copy of my upcoming book the moment it is finished. And much more is to come.
At the same time, I want to ensure that free subscribers are not feeling left out. Consequently, starting next week, I will unlock all archived posts one year or older. This will provide access to discussions on strategic frameworks, measurement, budgeting, and more. I hope that you will like them.
Now. Back on topic.
As promised previously, we are today going to embark on our journey into innovation in a broad sense. It appears a natural continuation from the topic of insights; ultimately, new ways of looking at the world should also lead to new ideas, strategies, solutions, and products. However, while insights can be gained by the individual, innovation is rarely anything but multi-stranded, be it through collaboration, competition, or identical contextual constraints.
I know that this goes against common wisdom, so I will elaborate.
The myth of the sole inventor
For various reasons, human beings adore reductionism. We want to believe that there are single causes for highly complex events, that all businesses can be put in pre-labelled boxes, that there are one-size-fits-all approaches just waiting to be discovered – and that innovation, by and large, is a one-person game. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone, and Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. We have all heard the stories.
The only problem, as Mark Lemley demonstrates in The Myth of the Sole Inventor, is that they are more fiction than fact.
Various forms of technologies for separating fibers from cotton seeds had been around for thousands of years before Whitney improved upon them (at the same time as others, such as John Barcley). To steal a line from Derek Thompson, the modern cotton gin was thus a eureka moment that multiple inventors experienced nearly simultaneously and was expedited by competition.
Turning electrical signals into sound was a problem many were working on in parallel to Bell (e.g., Philip Reis, who had designed a transmitter, and H. L. F. van Helmholtz, who had built a receiver). Although he was the first to patent a product which combined the previously discovered pieces, it was a matter of some dispute; the patent application was filed on the same day as an identical one from Elisha Gray. The latter only lost in court after the Patent Office declared that "while Gray was undoubtedly the first to conceive of and disclose the [variable resistance] invention, as in his caveat of February 14, 1876, his failure to take any action amounting to completion until others had demonstrated the utility of the invention deprives him of the right to have it considered”.
Electric lighting had existed long before Edison, as had incandescent light bulbs. His contribution was the discovery of a certain kind of bamboo that had a higher resistance to electricity than the standard carbonized paper, thereby producing light more efficiently. Highly valuable, certainly. Equivalent to inventing the product, hardly.
Many, many more examples are available. Innovation, it turns out, is rarely a matter of a lone genius sitting in an office, staring at a problem old as time itself, and suddenly solving it in a moment of divine inspiration. Rather, innovation more or less emerges. Almost all new technologies are simultaneously or nearly simultaneously invented by two or more teams working independently of each other on a common ground. The big leaps forward come when new adjacent possibles open up; market demand shifts, cheaper material become available, an existing technology is repurposed, and so on.
(That is not to say that there are not exceptions to the rule, but they are often the result of serendipity rather than a conscious effort to invent. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because his housemaid forgot to throw out old bread; Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanized rubber when an old batch was accidentally left on a stove. But they are indeed exceptions.)
By the same token, corporate innovation is seldom down to any one person. Steve Jobs did not invent the iPhone, for example; he had a team of people working on it.
The same is also true in strategy. Corporate success rarely comes down to any one strategic plan. Instead, a lot of employees try a lot of things, interpret the strategy in their own unique ways, and overcome contextual challenges. Over time, a path emerges, ideally in a set direction.
If anything, a deliberate strategic plan actually makes things more difficult. Anything that falls outside of the plan – which serendipitous events inevitably will – has the potential to be missed or ignored. Innovation, be it strategic or otherwise, thus often dies not because of a lack of inspirational sparks at fortuitous moments, but a lack of oxygen.
Of course, not all events will be beneficial, and the blinkers’ problem persists; we fail to see what we do not expect to see; we do not find what we do not look for. This presents an obvious danger (as we know not least from previous and current financial crises). A missed opportunity may become a gain for the competition; a missed risk may turn into a loss from which one cannot come back.
Understanding where and when to draw the proverbial line becomes instrumental.
But I digress.
The larger point is that innovation, of whatever kind, is not a discontinuity, but an incremental step in an ongoing process – extensions of existing knowledge – usually taken by a number of actors at roughly the same time. This present an obvious challenge in strategy, particularly in highly competitive contexts.
Next week, we will therefore start looking at what one can do to manage it, create resilience, and improve adaptability. As we shall see, if we do it properly, we should better our chances of not just discovering new strategic paths and revenue streams, but also avoiding the potential calamity that unfortunately lies in the imminent future.
Until then, I leave you to ponder how innovation is handled within your organization, and wish you the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and upwards,
JP
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