Powerful ideas bring people together, often without managerial intervention, to solve apparently…

Powerful
ideas bring people together, often without managerial intervention, to solve
apparently unsolvable problems in unexpected ways. Sending a man to the moon by
the end of the 1960s, the Manhattan Project, and the race to create the silicon
chip were all compelling causes that inspired and helped organise research in
both government and the private sector that did not have a formal structure of
gate-keeping and carefully calibrated resource allocation. What characterised
them 3 and what’s most useful for large corporate organisations 3 was the use
of an ambitious goal to motivate and
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Powerful
ideas bring people together, often without managerial intervention, to solve
apparently unsolvable problems in unexpected ways. Sending a man to the moon by
the end of the 1960s, the Manhattan Project, and the race to create the silicon
chip were all compelling causes that inspired and helped organise research in
both government and the private sector that did not have a formal structure of
gate-keeping and carefully calibrated resource allocation. What characterised
them 3 and what’s most useful for large corporate organisations 3 was the use
of an ambitious goal to motivate and drive research. In each case, the people
involved in the project saw it as a ‘must-complete’ task. The search for a
solution was the prime motivation, and it played to the natural curiosity and
persistence that distinguishes many scientists and engineers. Some of the most
successful corporate innovators have used precisely this type of cause to
create a highly productive R&D organisation. Intel engineers, for example, are
constantly motivated by the shadow of Moore’s Law to create faster, higher
capacity silicon wafers. Danaher Corporation’s focus on the ‘breakthrough goal’
of creating low-cost infra-red detectors for a new, ‘invisible’ market in
predictive and preventive maintenance netted the company the 2003 NASA Product
of the Year award and a spike in sales to new customers. And Sun Microsystems
was similarly inspired by an ambitious belief 3 that the future of computing
was to be found on the internet, not just the hard drive of a PC 3 to create
the now ubiquitous Java language.

In the 1980s
and early 1990s, when Al Giacco was the CEO of Himont, then the world’s largest
producer of polypropylene, he instilled a sense of a great cause to transform
this fast-growing but historically low-margin business into a high-tech
producer of high-value engineered materials. Giacco quantified the cause and
made it tangible by setting an ‘impossible’ goal for his organisation: each
year, commercialise two wholly new applications of polypropylene in which
Himont would have a significant, proprietary lead-time advantage. Giacco and
his senior team did not prescribe what those new applications should be;
instead, they simply provided the funding and autonomy to researchers who
understood they had to create meaningful results, year after year. Not all
causes need to be articulated by corporate leadership, nor do they need to be
on the scale of the Apollo mission. Often, innovation is driven from the bottom
up, by engineers or scientists dedicated to the cause of discovering a
breakthrough medicine, perhaps, or simply a more convenient product for
consumers-like 3M’s Post-It Notes. In each case, the sense of an important goal
that has significance beyond the company’s bottom line helps drive the research
agenda and signals to researchers that their capacity for innovative thinking
is valued.

QUESTION

What does
this illustration tell you about narrow, numbers-based metric for innovation?

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