Edison and Turning Ideas into Action

For several years I have been talking with participants in innovation workshops around the world about the American inventor, Thomas Edison, and recommending that they study him - his ways of thinking and his methods.

Luckily, Mr Edison will be with us at the last of a short series of innovation masterclasses – “Turning Ideas into Action” – at Cass Business School in London on Thursday 11 November. http://bit.ly/9JfYAc

While Edison’s reputation as an inventor of genius, perhaps the greatest the world has known, is secure and acknowledged throughout the world, his pioneering role - as the father of innovation management - is less widely recognised or understood.

This situation was substantially of his own making, the result of his consistent management of his personal “brand” – a term from a later era, but one which he would have understood well. Edison the Great Inventor bestrode the media of his era, personally creating and managing his reputation as a genius and becoming as a consequence a major celebrity in his own lifetime.

In reality he managed multiple parallel project teams from quite early in his career – teams consisting of brilliant and diverse talents, working together to solve problems and find new solutions. He and his teams often worked by trial and error, assessing sometimes thousands of different possibilities before arriving at an ideal solution.

“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century,” the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “was the invention of the method of invention.”

So, over a century later, why are there such intractable problems in turning ideas into action?

Searching for flaws

At last week’s Brand Renovation Masterclass at Cass Business School, our guest speaker David Walker talked about the need to use testing and research not as stop/go indicators, but rather as springboards to improving the innovation or renovation.

It put me in mind of the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper. Popper totally rejected the commonly-held notion of scientific method – that research leads to knowledge and that knowledge leads to ideas or hypotheses.

Popper held that the only reason for conducting research is because you have an idea in the first place (however sketchy it is) – and the purpose of research is to test the idea rigorously, so that it can be improved. In short, in research we are not looking for confirmation of the concept, rather trying to identify flaws, so that they can be problem-solved.

As he put it: “Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.”

So often, in the commercial world, managements want the warm and comforting feeling from the data that they are backing a winner – and end up going to market with an innovation that does not work in practice in some way or other because there are still issues that need to be addressed.

And in academia, I often seem to read papers that apparently have no idea behind them at all. Often the work is prefaced by a question to be answered, where no one has interrogated the idea behind the question. The result is usually just to add to the bottomless pit of never-to-be-seen-again “knowledge”.

A useful way of thinking about all this is to focus at each stage on the question, “What’s our BEST CURRENT THINKING?”, and go forward from there.

Views?

Do not fear mistakes

“Do not fear mistakes,” said the great American jazz trumpeter, Miles Davis. “There are none.”

(I usually have “Kind of Blue” in my car. Desert island music.)

It reminds me of what the inventor, Buckminster Fuller (he of the geodesic dome), wrote on a related theme: “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”

So many successes emerge (sooner or later) from so-called mistakes and failures.

The strangulating undergrowth of IP law

A paper given by Dr Lucy Montgomery of Queensland University of Technology at last week’s Cultural and Creative Industries Symposium (at the House of Lords in London) started me thinking again about the whole business of intellectual property law and its negative role in our society now.

German historian, Eckhard Höffner, argues that Germany’s Great Leap Forward in the second half of the nineteenth century – from agrarian society to one of the world leaders industrially – sprang from the country’s lack of copyright laws. Thus ideas and knowledge spread quickly, spawning continuous innovation and entrepreneurial activity.

The same situation – lack of effective intellectual property constraints - applied to the USA in the same period and to Britain’s own leadership of the Industrial Revolution in the previous half century (although, as Höffner points out, the introduction of copyright law in Britain in 1710 did have something of a crippling effect, even then).

Now, of course, Europe and America are both enmeshed in IP laws of all kinds, all intended to protect (and enrich) originators, but at the same time placing comprehensive barriers in the path of innovative scientists, engineers, artists, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs and companies.

In the twenty-first century, the economic survival of the West in the face of intense competition from the East will depend on Europe’s and America’s ability to innovate. At the moment, the game is being played on a very uneven playing field.

India, China and other Asian countries have limited frameworks of intellectual property law, and what exists is scarcely enforced. The West, on the other hand, constantly extends the tentacles of IP restriction.

Europe and America, thinking that they have the moral and intellectual high ground, expend their energies nowadays seeking to persuade countries in Asia to adopt Western standards. There is little evidence that this strategy is working (or will ever work).

What is needed is a complete re-think. The West should start to dismantle the strangulating undergrowth of IP law, freeing up innovators and artists, entrepreneurs and organisations alike, to compete again on a global stage on an equal footing.

THE SUN DOES NOT MOVE

One of the earliest major art exhibitions that I went to in London was of Leonardo da Vinci’s extraordinary drawings from the royal collection. It was at the recently opened Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace and the year was 1969. I have the modest catalogue (nothing like today’s glossy doorstops) open in front of me now.

I don’t think that I’d previously taken in the amazing range of Leonardo’s interests, inventions and speculations. Human anatomy, engineering, animals and plants, dragons and other beasties, weapons, astronomy, not to mention a multitude of studies for his major paintings – continuously recorded both in a series of notebooks and on loose sheets.

Buried in one of Leonardo’s notebooks, amongst a series of mathematical calculations, is the single line, written in large letters: “IL SOLE NO SI MUOVE” – “THE SUN DOES NOT MOVE”.

The implication of the observation is clear. The sun does not revolve around the earth, rather the earth revolves around the sun. He wrote the line a whole century before the great astronomical breakthroughs of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.

Perhaps Leonardo did no more with his revolutionary thought, leaving it buried in the notebook, not sharing it with anyone, because he feared the consequences. After all, when Galileo started to disseminate this discovery in 1615, he was tried for heresy.

Self-censorship (springing from fear of the consequences of sharing an unusual idea with senior management) is one of the major reasons that breakthrough innovations are stillborn. That is why the creation by management at all levels of a climate of openness, of speculation, of absurdity even, is so important.

How is it in your workplace?

11/10

At the new Brand Renovation Masterclass at Cass Business School on 7 October http://bit.ly/cNPhQl , I’m being joined by the wonderful Dr David Walker, who leads the successful innovation consultancy, Happen.

We were colleagues for several years, and, thinking about the forthcoming event, it came back to me that David and I together achieved the rather remarkable result of scoring an average of 11.3 recurring out of 10 when we asked for feedback from the group we had just trained together in creativity and innovation at Unilever in the Netherlands.

I’d love to say that this kind of thing happens frequently, but no such luck. The team had clearly managed to escape from the constraints of logical thinking.

Happened to you?

Renovating Skoda

What do you call a Skoda with a sun roof?
A skip.
What do you call a classic Skoda?
A Lada.
How do you double the value of a Skoda?
Fill the tank.
Why do Skodas have heated rear windows?
To keep your hands warm when pushing.
What do you call a Skoda in winter?
A freezer.
What do you call a Skoda at the top of the hill?
A miracle.
“Do you have a windscreen wiper for my Skoda?”
"Sounds like a fair swap."
How do you overtake a Skoda?
Run.
What do you call a Skoda with twin exhausts?
A wheelbarrow.
How is a Skoda similar to a baby?
They never go anywhere without a rattle.

These familiar jokes are now totally from that foreign country, the past. In fact, Skoda turned around both the quality of the product, and the reputation of their brand, to become the car manufacturer with the highest level of repeat purchase in Britain.

Join us and learn more at the Brand Renovation Masterclass at Cass Business School on Thursday 7 October http://bit.ly/cNPhQl

Trawling for ideas

Credit to Britain’s Chancellor (Finance Minister), George Osborne, for this initiative:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11255037

Archie Norman and Allan Leighton pioneered this highly people-centred search for good new ideas very successfully - the “Tell Archie” programme - at ASDA.

Hope Osborne gets similar results (and credit).

So many organisations could up their game (and motivate their people) by transforming their tired “staff suggestions” schemes.