There’s been much discussion over recent years as to why Microsoft has had such a low to non-existent strike rate in developing breakthrough innovations.Certainly it’s not for want of trying, nor for want of resource. In fact, it’s twenty years since Bill Gates first decided to pour megabucks into R&D. Currently that budget is running at $9 billion a year. But two decades on, aside from a stream of incremental innovations, there’s little to show for all that investment.
Currently the company has high hopes for its Kinect system. But was that really what Gates had in mind when he started on this great creative Odyssey – a games controller?
The fact that Apple has been so successful in creating and introducing one blockbuster after another, has led inexorably to their overtaking Microsoft in market value last year.
Lack of breakthroughs – disruptive innovations – is certainly not confined to Microsoft. My experience is that many large, established corporations have the same problem. And they usually know it and take steps aimed at remedying the situation.
Nearly always they assume that they understand what needs to be fixed – and get on with fixing it. Without noticeable effect.
In reality, there are many possible blockages and barriers, some of them behavioural, often attitudinal, occasionally at organisational, strategic, skills and process levels. And it’s critically important that the right issues are diagnosed and the right treatment prescribed.
“Stunningly arrogant,” as Microsoft has been described, may or may not be the source of their problem. They need to know which it is before spending more time and effort trying to fix it.
In major companies that I know well, the wrong diagnosis, coupled with the wrong treatment, has led to the problem being redoubled.
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