One of the most often told stories about innovation is that of Alexander Fleming and his discovery of penicillin. Returning after a summer holiday in 1928, the solitary Scottish scientist noticed that a strange mold had contaminated the bacteria cultures he was growing. That single observation would change the world.
At least, that’s how the story is usually told. What really happened is that when Fleming published his findings, no one really noticed because what he discovered couldn’t have cured anyone. It wasn’t until a decade later that his paper was unearthed by another group of scientists who engineered it into the miracle cure we know today.
The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all because it arrives out of context. Great innovations not only change the world, the world changes them and while that’s going on no one really knows how things will turn out. That’s what nobody tells you about innovation. To do it well you need to learn to live in a state of confusion.
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When Jim Allison received a call from Dr. Jedd Wolchok, asking him to come to his office, he was puzzled at first. As a researcher, he rarely ventured into the clinical part of the hospital. Yet when he opened the door and saw his colleague sitting with a young woman whose emotion was clearly marked on her face, he immediately understood and tears began to fill his eyes.
A few months before, the woman had terminal cancer, but she had just been told that she was in remission. Today, more than a decade later, she remains cancer free and works as a fitness instructor. It was a breakthrough of monumental proportions and one that would make Allison world famous.
The field Allison pioneered, cancer immunotherapy, is now a major branch of medical science with thousands of people working to improve it and expand its use. Breakthroughs like of this magnitude are never routine, but they almost always share common attributes and we can learn a lot from how Allison overcame intense challenges to create a miracle cure.
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In 1993, advertising legend Jay Chiat announced his radical plans for the office of the future. His agency, Chiat/Day, was already a paragon of creativity — its legendary campaigns included Apple’s “1984” and “Think Different” campaigns — and its new LA office, designed by Frank Gehry was to be its monument.
The space was engineered to be playful; with decorations that included pieces from fairground rides and a four-story sized set of binoculars. Chiat also banished the traditional office cubicles and desks in favor of public spaces where executives could meet in impromptu places and brainstorm ideas.
It was a disaster. As Tim Harford explains in his book Messy, our desire for engineered spaces — even creative ones — can kill productivity and innovation. At the same time, disorder and disruption can help us to do our very best work. While this defies conventional wisdom, decades of research suggests that a messy desk may very well be a mark of genius.
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Everywhere you look today, it seems like we’re on the brink of a clean energy revolution. Electric car sales are estimated to have topped a million units in 2017. Wind and solar installations are booming with rapidly declining costs. Goldman Sachs predicts that $3 trillion will be invested in clean energy over the next 20 years.
Yet still there is a fly in the ointment. We need cheaper and more powerful batteries to make clean energy work and the current technology, lithium-ion, is unlikely to get us there. So we not only need new and better batteries, we need new and better battery chemistries and those don’t come around very often.
A new startup, Form Energy, thinks it’s found an answer from a surprising place, sulfur, which is a byproduct of oil refining and considered a pollutant. After decades of dependence on fossil fuels, we literally have mountains of the stuff, which makes it incredibly cheap. Ironically, we may have spent decades polluting ourselves into a green energy future.
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In Simon Sinek’s popular TED Talk, which remains one of the most viewed ever, he explains how great leaders, like Steve Jobs, the Wright Brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. succeed where many others failed because they put purpose first. “Start with why,” he says and then move on to the “what” and the “how.”
That’s generally good advice. The best way to build a great organization is to start with a clear mission rather than a plan or a product. Still, it overlooks another very important truth. Success eventually breeds failure and, when that happens, you must venture into the unknown where your purpose becomes unclear.
That’s a very different type of problem and we need to approach it differently. We have to explore, probe new spaces and make new connections. That’s the only way you will come across the unexpected, random pieces of insight that can take you in a new direction. Starting with the “why” is one path to success, but sometimes it’s better to start with the “why not?”
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Accountants tell us that numbers don’t lie, because for them numbers are the same as facts. Mathematicians see it differently though. They see numbers as abstract representations of reality that, when combined with other numbers, have an almost mystical ability to create patterns that unlock hidden truths.
In other words, as the great early 20th century numbers theorist G. H. Hardy put it, “A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.” Identifying these hidden truths can open up new possibilities and take us in new directions.
For example, the development of non-Euclidean geometry in the early 1800s paved the way for Einstein’s general relativity a century later. In much the same way, in David Stipp’s new book, A Most Elegant Equation, the veteran science writer describes how deep connections between numbers can help us bridge the gap between intuition and real world applications.
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A decade ago, Microsoft was considered a dinosaur. It had missed the shift to mobile, was out of step with consumer tastes and seemed too big and slow to adapt to a digital world that was moving at hyper-speed. Yet today, the company is thriving again, largely driven by a cloud business that is doubling every year.
This is not a new effort. In fact, it began in the early 2000’s, but was little noticed until recently. In much the same way, IBM’s Watson project, which is helping the venerable company overcome the disruption of its traditional business, began in 2005. Google has created its own moonshot factory, to pursue game changing technologies.
These are not ‘bet the company” initiatives, but sustained efforts to pursue grand challenges that can fundamentally change the realm of the possible. In recent years, we’ve come to associate the practice of innovation with speed and agility, but to what truly moves the needle can’t be achieved quickly or through mere iteration. We need to set our sights higher.
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One of the things I always get asked about from the companies I work with is how to manage their innovation resources. Should they bet big on an unproven, but possibly breakthrough idea? Or focus on improving the products that they already know their customers want? Or maybe leveraging existing resources into a new market?
This is an important question. As Steve Blank recently pointed out in an article in Harvard Business Review, it was the failure to deal with this issue that led to many of General Electric’s current problems. The company became so focused on “disruptive opportunities” that it let execution slip.
Fortunately, there is a good rule of thumb to follow called the 70-20-10 rule. Many point to a book called The Alchemy of Growth as its origin. Others say that it dates back as far as the 1950s. Whatever is the case, many organizations, Google among them, find it a very useful way to guide investment and it’s amazingly simple to learn and apply.
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A century ago, most Americans lived much like people in ancient times. As Robert Gordon explains in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, few had indoor plumbing, electricity or an automobile. Everyday chores, such as cooking a meal or washing yourself could take hours of backbreaking labor just to haul water and wood.
After 1920 things began to change. Productivity surged as never before or since as secondary shifts, such as electrical appliances, developing infrastructure and a retail transformation helped pave the way for social changes, like women in the workplace and suburban life. The digital revolution pales in comparison.
Yet today, we may be entering a new era just as transformative as a century ago. We’re on the cusp of revolutionary changes in computing architectures, manufacturing and how we power our economy. The enabling technologies, still nascent today, will begin to hit their stride soon after 2020, but if you want to compete effectively in a decade you need to begin to shift now.
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2017 was a strange year, for many reasons. Politically, of course, it revealed things below the surface of our society that few of us realized were there. In terms of technology it has been seemingly quiet, with no real blockbuster launches of new companies or products, but under the radar big things are brewing.
IBM announced a 50 qubit quantum computer, up from just 5 a few years ago, promising quantum supremacy in 2018, at least in the lab. The steady success of Amazon Alexa and Google Home point to a serious shift to voice interfaces. JCESR came up with four prototypes for next generation batteries.
These seem to lack the excitement of things like Twitter and Instagram, but their long-term implications are enormous. In a sense, 2017 has been a microcosm of what I try to do on this site, point to things that are going unnoticed by most, but have profound implications for the future. So here are the top posts of 2017, many of which have done just that.
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