Previous    Table of Contents    Up    Next

Innovation Happens Elsewhere

Innovation happens everywhere, but there is simply more elsewhere than here. Silly as it sounds, this is the brutal truth: Regardless of how smart, creative, and innovative you believe your organization is, there are more smart, creative, and innovative people outside your organization than inside. In addition, the majority of elsewhere doesn't particularly care to make products in your space. But customers already using a product for real work are in a good position to offer suggestions about the directions in which that product should evolve. Even if such users don't have concrete suggestions, the ways that they use the product can provide hints about how to improve it. Remember, innovation comes from triggers, and the trigger does not have to be aware of what it is triggering. Just as a palm tree near the beach at sunset can trigger a poet's masterpiece without any thought whatsoever, a user using a product or mentioning a circumstance of its use can trigger a major product direction in a designer prepared to receive such a trigger.

As Henry Chesbrough points out, R&D spending profiles suggest that it is less and less common for innovative people to be found at large companies with virtual monopolies in specific technology areas. Not all the smart people work for you, you cannot afford to try to create all the innovations yourself, and you cannot provide enough triggers internally to find the stunning new product idea.

More and more the game is about being connected rather than about domination. The worst thing that you could do would be to allow "innovation happens elsewhere" to become "revenue happens elsewhere."

To succeed, companies need to find ways to use outside innovations and to become part of a distributed fabric of innovation through a combination of licensing and well-chosen gifts. Although the concept of a gift may not at first seem to fit well with free-market capitalism, it might when thought of in the context of collaborating with others to build common commodity-like infrastructure. If it makes business sense in that context, then perhaps it makes business sense in others.

This is what open source is all about: harnessing engines of innovation in software.