Research labs are an old idea. Edison’s Menlo park lab in the 1870s had most of the elements innovation labs and R&D groups try to emulate today. But that doesn’t stop companies today from starting from scratch, assuming they’re the first to try. In researching the book the Myths of Innovation I studied how research labs in established companies work, and why they fail.

Here’s why in simple terms:

• Ideas are easy. It’s not hard to find interesting ideas. They’re everywhere. Many corporate R&D (research and development) groups and universities know how to develop an idea into a prototype. But developing a prototype into a complete, and marketable product is much harder. A research lab at a large company could discover perpetual motion and it would still be hard to get release it as a product.
• Creating an R&D group, or Innovation Team, alienates everyone else. This is the killer – the limits of sociology kills innovation more often than the limits of technology. The jargon is technology transfer, which means “how do we get ideas from the R&D group into products?” Product teams are very busy with their own projects and have little natural interest in wanting to follow someone else’s plans. R&D, by design, sets goals unapproachable for product team’s 3/6/12 month horizons and wonder why they’re ignored 90% of the time, while product teams look at R&D and think they’re insane (10 year horizons? Will we be alive then?). Managers love to couch this problem with jargon like “innovation pipelines” and “invention waves” but they’re missing the real challenge – they don’t see the problem as sociology. R&D groups and product teams naturally resent each other, primarily because the leaders of each group have very different belief systems about what is valuable. Until those issues are addressed little else matters: great ideas will go nowhere.
• R&D never has a service arm. One obvious way to build camaraderie with product teams is to dedicate 10% of R&D as a service to Product team engineers. What problems are too big for release schedules, but too tactical for typical R&D ambitions? That’s the sweet spot where technology transfer starts and grass roots level bonds can be made. Any R&D manager who invests in closing the culture gap buys trust that will help when R&D has a breakthrough idea that ordinarily would scare product teams. The problem is that R&D ego would see this role as a concession to product team “superiority”, which is why its never been done.
• The politics are broken. Conflicts start at the VP level. R&D is directed at satisfying VPs, and R&D managers bet that when they deliver a great innovation the VP, or CEO, will do the radical shift from old ideas to new ones. There are often big egos at work in anyone interested in leading an innovation lab and the hubris is hard to hide. They underestimate how hard politically these moves are and how rarely they happen. VPs may have the most power but often that means they are least likely to adopt change since they have the most to lose (it’s likely rising middle managers on product teams that are at the leverage point of power, ambition and risk taking, not their boss).
• Everyone wants to feel creative. Would you want to be told to only work on other people’s ideas? Any R&D group faces the challenge of being in the ivory tower: they’re resented as soon as they walk in the door, especially if they throw their PhD’s and research pedigrees around at engineers with different values. Innovation is a social process that smart motivated people want to participate in – if you propagate the belief that only special people in special roles can do it, something is broken (see questioning VPs of Innovation).
• At the end of the day someone has to make the bet. Good R&D minimizes risk but never eliminates it. It produces explorations and potentials, but someone has to say “I’m betting my successful and profitable division on new thing X”. That’s a hard thing to say: I’ve never said it, have you? Most R&D managers despite their confidence have never said it either and part of why they’re “in research” is their lack of aptitude or interest in business thinking. In the end every failed R&D effort has a Product VP, or CEO, who was unwilling to take the risk, either for good reasons (the ideas were not worthy) or bad (they didn’t believe or didn’t have the the courage). No one likes to risk their career based on someone else’s bet.

References:

• This Booz-Allen report evaluates R&D spending and supports the notion that pure R&D matters less, in a business context, than transfer.
• Mark Stefik’s book Breakthrough: Stories and Strategies of Radical Innovation was the best R&D management book I found. It’s interview-centric to a fault and not the typical list of do’s and don’ts found in most management books – it attempts to provide a framework for how leaders of R&D should think about innovation with many supporting stories.
• There is a shortage of good books on managing R&D – trade secrets or unwillingness to write about failure? Who knows. The closest thing to a recommended reference I found was The human side of managing technological research edited by Ralph Katz, a collection of papers that covers performance, process, invention and human nature.
• The primary reason research labs fail is that successful innovation depends on variables beyond our control – you can do everything right and still not deliver the breakthrough everyone expects – a theme explored in depth in the Myths of Innovation.

 

You know a big word is in trouble when it’s used repeatedly (inconcievable!) – it means the person saying it doesn’t know what it means or isn’t saying anything at all.

In a recent Ford TV ad, the word innovation is used once every 8 seconds, a sure sign that the i-word has seen better days.

Today the word innovation is a common placeholder – Instead of saying “we are smart”, “we are good” or “we are willing to try new ideas”, messages that can be examined for truth, the word innovation is thrown down ambiguously, as if it were a replacement for having a message, or stating one clearly.

The goal of my upcoming  bestselling book, The Myths of Innovation is to bring honor back to the word by exploring the history of true innovations, and demystifying the breakthroughs of the past and the present.

Along the way I’ve learned some easy ways to diminish innovation hype:

1. Challenge the word. Never allow the word to be used in conversation without asking “what do you mean by innovation?”. If it’s not clear to you as a listener how the word is being used, the speaker probably doesn’t know either: call them on it.
2. Pick your meaning. Innovation is frequently used to mean one of: something new, something better, something new and better, or something that will win. If that’s what you mean, say that instead. If you’re not sure what you mean, say that, or just keep quiet.
3. Avoid compound usage. As soon as you’re throwing hyphens around you know you’re in trouble. Innovation is a strong enough word to stand alone. Replace incremental Innovation, with improvement. Disruptive innovation with big change. Never have a slide or diagram that depends on multiple uses, with different meanings, of the same word (tip: you can use the words incremental and disruptive on their own – they’re grown up words too).
4. Remember Edison. Most great innovations took place before there were business books on the subject. Edison didn’t need an innovation pipeline or an innovation infrastructure to invent the phonograph or perfect electric lights, and you don’t either. Somehow Da-Vinci, Tesla, and Picasso innovated without using the word: you and your company can too. Edison laughed at the hype-mongers, cursing rule makers and secret seekers, preferring to work hard at creating things rather than just talking about it.
5. Competence trumps innovation. If you suck at what you do, being innovative will not help you. I don’t care how innovative Burger King might be, their food sucks. Business is driven by providing value to customers and often that can be done without innovation: make a good and needed thing, sell it at a good price, and advertise with confidence. If you can do those 3 things consistently you’ll beat most of your competitors, since they are hard to do: many industries have market leaders that fail this criteria. If you need innovations to achieve those 3 things, great, have at it. If not, your lack of innovation isn’t your biggest problem. (See Good Beats Innovative Nearly Every Time)
6. Call bullshit. Asking for examples kills hype dead. Just say “can you show me your latest innovation?” Most people that use the word don’t have examples – they don’t know what they’re saying and that’s why they’re addicted to the i-word. Keep pressing and most hype-philes concede what they’re doing isn’t new. The fastest way to detect BS is to look at facts and at the present. True innovators rarely need the word: they just show their work.

I had a blast speaking at Adaptive Path’s MX conference recently about the Myths of Innovation book. I had the closing slot which can be tough, but the crowd was great and gave me a chance to have some fun (podcast of this talk is coming)

One highlight was being interviewed by Sarah Nelson, a design strategist for AP.

To give a taste, and stumble into the postmodern idiocy of quoting someone quoting me:

SN: One of the things I’ve been wondering about is the idea of “source of innovation” within a company. Do you think it’s actually possible to create an environment in which innovation occurs?

SB: I think that you can create an environment, and it’s very simple… whoever has power over a budget, and whoever has power over what features are included in a product or go up on the website, they enable innovation by saying “yes.” That’s really the fundamental thing that they have to be willing to do.

When someone shows up with an idea — “Hey, why don’t we change the navigation system from this older design to this new design I’ve been thinking of? Can I get some money to go and prototype this?”

All that has to happen is the person with power says, “Yes, I will give you a week to go and prototype that and we will review it when you have the prototype, and then we’ll consider actually making those changes.” And once everyone witnesses the person in power saying “yes” to a new idea, then they’ll be comfortable bringing another idea, or a third idea. And then all of a sudden, you have an environment that is very receptive to new ideas and innovations.

Sounds obvious, but as I explain in the book these environments are rare.

Link to the full expletive free interview.

In the parade of mis-represented research that is modern journalism, we have this short article from MSNBC, titled “Do meetings make us dumber?“.

The article starts with:

People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests.

Which people are these exactly? Articles, and research, treat people as uniform, while we all know the goodness or badness of meetings depends on who is there. If you had a conference call with Bono, Einstein, Dostoevsky, and Susan Sontag, I guarantee the meeting wouldn’t make you dumber.

While folks of their caliber aren’t clambering to join our meetings, it does stand that who controls the invite list holds the fate of the meeting in their hands.

And doesn’t the goal of a meeting impact the quality of what happens? As the articles states:

Scientists exposed study participants to one brand of soft drink then asked them to think of alternative brands. Alone, they came up with significantly more products than when they were grouped with two others.

Wow. I can’t think of a task more inspiring for creative thinking than listing brands of soda, can you? Isn’t that what Mozart, Walt Whitman and the Beatles did?

How can anyone think this is representative of what goes in in “creative” meetings, or is a viable, as science, to use in comparison to how people make decisions, or work in groups, in real life?

Two points of refutation:

1. The value of meetings hinges on who is running the thing. A good facilitator can convert most meeting horror shows into productive and near-fun experiences if given the power to do their thing.
2. There are well known techniques for creative thinking and tactics any meeting leader can use to minimize the negative effects of groups, while amplifying the positive ones. Good facilitators know these things.

The notion of group behavior harming creative thinking has a long history – the term groupthink coined in 1972, and it offers a more useful analysis that the MSNBC or the research study.

For reference:

– How to run a brainstorming meeting

(Link from Flee)