5.9 Implications for managing innovation

A thorough discussion of the management of innovation lies far beyond the scope of this book--it would take us into more detailed studies of R&D labs, corporations, government agencies, foundations, and would involve many different types of managers. The innovation process cannot be described by the sorts of flowchart models so frequently pandered by consultants (Bucciarelli, 1994), nor can the task of managing innovators be reduced to a list of dos and don’ts that will cover the wide range of management situations. But we should be able to discuss a few myths, recalling that myths always embody truths:

1) Innovation depends primarily on selecting creative people. There is an obvious element of truth to this--if you can select someone who is creative from the start, it makes your job as a manager much easier. That is why I spend so much time thinking about ways of producing students who could become discoverers, inventors--and creative managers of discovery and invention. A remark like "waste equals food" will be enough of a spark for someone who is prepared to understand and act on it.

But Terese Amabile’s research on R&D firms suggests that the scientists in these labs view the environment as having more effect on creativity than personal characteristics . This was probably a relatively homogeneous sample of intelligent people; still, Amabile’s points out the essential role of the environment. Even if a manager selects creative people, he or she can turn them off quickly--witness cases like William Schockley’s first corporation: he hired the best minds in the burgeoning transistor business, but couldn’t manage them .

Participants in Amabile’s study mentioned characteristics that stimulated and inhibited creativity. Here they are in order of importance, with those high on the list having the highest priority

The inhibit and stimulate lists are in agreement on several categories:

(a) Autonomy was preferred by these scientists over constraints on what they could do. The case of TrueVoice is instructive. Duane Bowker and Jim James chose the project, but they were operating within a larger constraint: that projects be of commercial value to AT&T. The kind of freedom that produced the discovery of the background radiation of the Big Bang no longer existed at Bell Labs after the break-up. So in their case, there was a mixture of freedom and constraint that is typical in entrepreneurial situations.

(b) Sufficient resources & time: This is kind of a ‘motherhood and apple pie’ issue. What constitutes sufficiency? Students working on my active learning modules never thought they had enough time--but I found that giving them more time produced no better results. Similarly, the entrepreneur Steve Wallach , when interviewed by a group of my students, said tight deadlines and scant resources can even stimulate creativity.

(c) Open communication vs. red tape and infighting: The Manhattan project is a classic example. Military officers at Los Alamos wanted to organize decision-making along military lines; civilian scientists preferred more flexible organization that facilitated open communications. The group that eventually developed the implosion method was initially hampered by bureaucratic infighting between a scientist and a military officer. George Kistiakowsky, an outsider brought in to advise this project, worked with Oppenheimer and others to completely reorganize this effort, sidelining the two original project leaders. This kind of bureaucratic flexibility bruised egos, but made possible a successful, all-out crash program to develop a successful implosion method . Scientists still had to deal with a fair amount of red tape and barbed-wire regarding their relations to those outside of Los Alamos. These security precautions completely failed to protect against the successful espionage of Klaus Fuchs and others .

Standard operating procedures are another inhibitor of creativity. These procedures exist to automate decision-making, which is fine in some situations, but not in cases like the dropping of a bomb on Nagasaki, a decision that should have been reviewed at a higher level. But once the first bomb was dropped, the decision to make further drops was handed-off to subordinates. The date of the second drop was picked because of weather, only three days after the first--too little time for the Japanese to process what happened at Hiroshima.

(d) Encouragement versus apathy: This is another ‘motherhood and apple pie’: it seems obvious that encouragement would be better than apathy. But how does one show encouragement? For the most part, inventors and discoverers are motivated to the point of obsession, but they can be seized by doubts and also by a feeling that their vision is not appreciated by others. Like all generalizations, this one holds for only some inventors or discoverers. Edison never had any doubts, at least in public; the only kind of encouragement he seemed to need in the early part of his career was money. In later years, he delighted in the adulation of Henry Ford and others, but these were not managers. Edison himself managed his own career. After all, he was director of the first R&D lab.

Similarly, Einstein seems to have had no real manager, and therefore needed no encouragement of this sort. His ‘annu mirabilis’ was 1905, when he wrote three papers that shook the foundations of modern physics while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. He had a small group of colleagues with whom he exchanged ideas, but he was not part of a major university or R&D facility until after 1905 .

Gardiner Hubbard was Alexander Graham Bell’s principal backer, future father-in-law and the closest thing he had to a manager. Hubbard’s way of ‘encouraging’ Bell was to remind him that Elisha Gray and others would be getting ahead if he didn’t move quickly to patent a system of multiple telegraphy.

On March 1st of 1875, Bell went to visit one of the truly great men of American science, Joseph Henry, the Director of the Smithsonian Institution. Bell described his telegraph researchers to date. What most intrigued Henry was Bell’s description of an unusual musical sound he had obtained from a coil of wire. Henry wanted to see a demonstration immediately. Bell saved the elderly gentleman a carriage ride by promising to bring the experiment to him the next day.

Overall, Henry thought Bell had the ‘germ of a great idea’ and when Bell complained about his lack of electrical knowledge, Henry told him to "Get it!" A few days later, in a letter to his parents, Bell said, "I cannot tell you how much those two words have encouraged me" .

Joseph Henry’s firm advice was a kind of back-handed encouragement: to say "get it" implies "you can do it". Similarly, the Eagle team at Data General would give its new employees daunting open-ended tasks because they didn’t know enough to see them as impossible .

Amabile’s list of inhibiting factors includes both unclear goals and too much control over projects by management. Perhaps this gets at the kind of balance Kaelin had to strike in the Fluckiger case, between adherence to a set of goals reflected in a protocol and allowing employee autonomy. A related factor on the good side is project management in determining work assignments. This item is hard to square with the fact that too much control is an inhibiting factor and also with employee autonomy.

Finally there is an emphasis on challenging work and an urgent need for a solution, both low on the list of factors that stimulate creativity. They get us into our next point, about motivation.

(2) Creative people are primarily motivated by intrinsic rewards. Terese Amabile’s research suggests that, "People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and personal challenge of the work itself--and not by extrinsic motivators such as tangible reward, evaluation concern, deadlines, and external dictates" . Amabile’s emphasis on intrinsic motivation is a mythic oversimplification that contains an important element of truth. I hinted at this under the previous point when I talked about how inventors are motivated to the point of obsession but still need to be encouraged.

Einstein is perhaps the archetype of the intrinsically-motivated discoverer, working without any visible external rewards in the Swiss patent office when he made three of his greatest discoveries. Edison, in contrast, is considered the archetype of the shrewd inventor who thought always about tangible, monetary rewards. But even Edison pursued projects in part because of the pure joy and delight. His attempt to develop a profitable system that would use magnetism to separate iron from rock was certainly motivated by profit, but it was animated by delight; he referred to the mine he build as his ‘baby’ and virtually lived at it for ten years . He was so wrapped up in this exciting work that he missed the improvements in mining technology made in places like the Great Lakes; his techniques for recovering iron from low-grade ore could not compete, efficient though they were.

For most inventors and discoverers, there is a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motives. Indeed, a sociologist might ask how one can distinguish between the two, since intrinsic motives frequently reflect the internalized values of others. The stuents in my summer course for gifted studentrs had not grades or prizes to motivate them, and yet they worked with more energy and enthusiasm than most of the University students! However, they did have extrinsic motivation in the form of peer pressure. They had also internalized a perception of what it meant to be gifted, and wanted to fulfill that role.

Consider Bell. He was intrinsically motivated to solve the problem of transmitting speech, but this intrinsic motivation certainly reflected, in part, his father’s emphasis on teaching elocution and developing new methods for teaching the deaf. In other words, he had internalized his father’s values. He also wanted fame and fortune and knew those would come to anyone who developed a system of telegraphy. These two motivations fueled his research into a speaking telegraph.

There is a similar mix in the case of ethical inventors like Al Rich and entrepreneurs like William McDonough. They want to do well by doing good. One might refer to the ‘doing good’ part as an intrinsic motive, but the doing well part shows their concern with external rewards as well.

One of the most important rewards for scientists and inventors is priority. The team that designed the Eagle computer for Data General is an example (Kidder, 1981). The Eagle team was doing a kind of ‘skunkworks’, or underground operation, not officially sanctioned by the company. A competitor team in North Carolina was the one officially charged with creating the next generation of Data General computers, and the company had sent its ‘best’ engineers down there. So the team that remained behind in Massachusetts worked underground and overtime, spurred in part by the desire to show that they could do more with less. They were too young and inexperienced to know when they were given an impossible task, so they forged ahead. Their reward was the promise that they would get to ‘play pinball’ again and work on a project of similar scope and autonomy. In this case, challenging work was a stimulus to creativity. It was also a problem that needed an urgent solution. Competing companies were coming out with newer, faster machines; if Data General didn’t, the company would probably fail.

The Massachusetts team succeeded in getting their product out first. Similarly, the skunkworks that produced the Sidewinder missile was working against an official team, and had the satisfaction of beating them in open competition .

A concern with priority inevitably involves deadlines. Bell’s primary backer Gardiner Hubbard continually confronted his future son-in-law with deadlines, forcing Bell to submit the patent that made him famous and also to demonstrate a prototype of his speaking telegraph at the Centennial in 1876. Both the Eagle and Sidewinder teams were racing competitors, and so had to set Draconian deadlines.

This kind of competition is just as prevalent in science. The story of the discovery of the double helix reads like a race, with Watson and Crick constantly looking over their shoulders at the competition and using their results whenever possible. The great Devonian controversy was bitterly competitive. De la Beche had a strong economic incentive--his job was on the line--but for Murchison, the reward was credit for making a major discovery.

Is the desire for priority an intrinsic or extrinsic reward? It is extrinsic in the sense that it is awarded by one’s fellows. Herbert Simon gives an entertaining account of the politics that go into receiving a Nobel Prize . Edwin Armstrong battled Lee de Forest for many years because the former wanted to be named the sole inventor of radio . Armstrong initially won in court, but kept the case alive because de Forest was not obligated to pay his legal fees. Was this greed, or a desire to make it clear to everyone that de Forest had no real claim to the invention?

As Freud said, human motives are overdetermined. Does a scientist seek a grant for the money or the prestige or out of scientific curiosity? Obviously, all of the above. The scientist needs the money to keep the lab alive. Considerable prestige and salary typically accrue to the top grant-getters at most institutions, who can move their labs to a competitor institution in a manner analogous to a ball team moving to a new city if the stadium and resources aren’t right. Last but not least, the problem has to be interesting to the point of obsession.

My colleague W. Bernard Carlson likes to tell about how Willis R. Whitney used to walk around one of the first research and design laboratories at General Electric, asking whether the research scientists were having fun . This is the same kind of ‘fun’ Joseph Campbell refers to as ‘following your bliss’. Bliss is the state of ecstasy that Csiksenmihalyi refers to as ‘flow’ . I enjoy reading articles about entrepreneurs in the Wall Street Journal. Many of the best are in their sixties or even seventies: they are starting companies because it is the most fun they’ve ever had, not because they need the money any more. This last sense of ‘fun’ comes closest to Amabile’s ‘interest, enjoyment and satisfaction’. But a behaviorist would remind us that fun can be learned, to--we tend to like the activities we are rewarded for. With the right kind of encouragement, managers can create the conditions for bliss. As Amabile says, "under certain circumstances, certain types of extrinsic motivation can add to rather than detract from creativity. We believe that investigations of such synergistic combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation will y8ield some of the most exciting new insights--and new questions--about creativity in the coming decades" .

3) Innovation means freedom from intellectual constraints, as well as extrinsic ones. The truly creative person thinks ‘out of the box’, blowing up the constraints imposed by others. Kepler is a classic example: he discarded the perfect circle constraint. But in fact Kepler still kept a broader constraint: that the planetary orbits observed some harmonic relationship centered on the sun.

Einstein is another classic ‘out of the box’ thinker. But like Kepler, he did not remove all constraints. In coming up with his theory of special relativity, he began with a new constraint: that the laws of physics should be invariant for all observers. He took into account the constraint that the speed of light was constant for all observers, regardless of their motion relative to one another. The result was an extraordinary set of conclusions, including the famous E=MC². Einstein was more concerned with the constraints posed by his hypothesis-space than with results in the experiment space: witness his famous "Then I would feel sorry for the dear Lord" quote. This is not to suggest that he ignored data, but the one time he allowed an empirical result to change his theory was his infamous ‘cosmological constant’ he created to correct for the fact that General Relativity predicted an expanding universe. Subsequent research revealed the spectral red-shifts that pointed to an expanding universe . .

The point is that both Kepler and Einstein worked within constraints that they created. Going back to our second generalization in Chapter 2, they transformed the problem by transforming the constraints.

Similarly, inventors and designers create constraints when there are too few in the environment (Bucciarelli, 1994), to make the problem space they are working in manageable

. When confronting the problem of transmitting speech, Bell, imposed a whole set of constraints on himself, including focusing his search in the hypothesis space, in part because of his limited electrical knowledge and resources. Susan Lyons needed an environmental framework to constrain her possible choices. De Castro, the President of Data General, constrained the Eagle team by insisting that the new machine have ‘no mode bit’, meaning that it would have to run software from the older generation Data General machine without having to be switched into a special mode.

5.9.1 Generalizations about Managing Innovation

There is no algorithm for managing innovation, just as there is no algorithm for doing it. The first step is to realize that management can be helpful: rewards, deadlines and constraints are part of the creative process. To return to our earlier generalizations, managers can :

1) Help establish the importance of a problem. For example, the story of Climatex Lifecycle is more than that of a compostable fabric. William McDonough touts it as an example of a second industrial revolution. In this way, he serves the role of a manager or facilitator who makes a problem even more significant by the way she or he frames it.

2) Assist in finding and transforming data and devices. Here a manager can supply a combination of resources and contacts. The two are intimately linked. The director of a successful research laboratory usually writes the largest and most important grant proposals, and has the connections to know what questions the referees will ask. The director typically will also be in the closest touch with what competing laboratories are doing.

Similarly, the manager of a small start-up has to have the connections to know where to raise cash and also know what the competition is doing. For example, Gardiner Hubbard found the funding to hire Watson and also kept a close eye on Elisha Gray. Recall that it was Hubbard who managed to file Bell’s patent application just before Gray arrived at the patent office.

3) Create the necessary balance between flexibility and stubbornness through the use of teams. Most individuals cannot manage the perfect balance between the stubbornness necessary to promote a theory or invention and the flexibility to recognize when it is no longer feasible. A manager can create this balance by encouraging skeptics as well as promoters of a new idea within the organization. The trick is to keep this kind of criticism constructive. An evolutionary epistemologist might argue that the best idea would emerge from a Darwinian struggle in which the proponents and the skeptics were engaged in a life-or-death struggle over limited resources. Certainly, some managers think this is how their organizations ought to operate. Unfortunately, the skills it takes to win this kind of battle are frequently only tangentially related to the quality of the ideas. In other words, organizations like this tend to select for social skills, not intellectual ones. Admittedly, this is a fuzzy boundary; network-building is part of invention and discovery.

But organizational survival is a different goal than trying to create a market for a new technology. To survive, you don’t want to become wedded to a project until it has clearly succeeded; then grab all the credit you can. To create a market, you need the wholehearted commitment to a vision which is creatively modified as new allies are recruited. Aramis, the system that would have combined the efficiency of mass transit with the freedom of the automobile, attracted allies for all the usual reasons. For patriots, a chance to show France could develop and implement the most advanced public transportation in the world, for engineers and scientists, a chance to get research funds, for politicians on the left, a chance to embrace a ‘high-technology’ project that would benefit workers . What seems to have been missing is an inventor or entrepreneur who was wholeheartedly obsessed with implementing the technology--the kind of hero or champion that loved the idea, that had to see it realized.

4) Recognize that writing, visualizing and building are integral parts of discovery or invention. Therefore, instead of assigning technical writers to do the writing for the scientists and patent attorneys to do it for the inventors, create opportunities for them to collaborate closely. These other specialists are valuable additions to a project that can complement a scientist or inventor’s style. For example, an inventor who is most comfortable with building prototypes needs the right sort of specialist to help her translate her prototype into a set of claims. But the technical writer needs to work intimately with the inventor or discoverer because the hypothesis or invention will often be transformed in the course of preparing it for dissemination.

I think this is especially true for proposal writing, whether the proposal is for a research grant or funding for an entrepreneurial start-up. Proposal-writing is a license to dream, to think as boldly as possible about what one is doing. Professional proposal writers who know the format required by an agency or the rhetorical expectations of investors can be useful collaborators, provided they keep the invention or discover team focused on articulating their vision as well as the specifics of what they intend to do. The proposal stage is also a good time to think about long-term impacts, about whether the world will be a better or worse place if this potential discovery or invention is made.

5) Provide the vision that connects various enterprises within a laboratory or a start-up company into a network, each part of which can potentially facilitate the others. The right kind of network also spreads wide enough so that at any given time, at least one project or technology will be ‘hot’: fundable or marketable. Managers can help establish creative networks, based on complementary cognitive styles and disciplinary backgrounds.

The ethical dilemmas presented in the last chapter suggest another generalization:

6) Adopt an ethical framework and a process for communicating this framework throughout one’s organization. Like other aspects of management, there is no algorithm for ethical decision-making, but one can establish principles and heuristics. Examples in the environmental area include the McDonough/ Braungart protocols and The Natural Step.

I suspect the prevailing model in business is that ethics interfere with competitiveness. In contrast, I hope products like Climatex Lifecycle illustrate how ethical concerns can give one a competitive advantage, can even become the ‘secret weapon’ that allows a small company to create a new market.

Another standard myth is that regulations invariably interfere with creative entrpreneurship. Certainly, some kinds of regulations do. Ethical managers can and should fight for is the right kind of regulations, ones that level the playing field so that all companies have to meet the same standards, but each is free to exercise maximum creativity in reaching the goal. An example is the no-emission zones pioneered by cities like Chatanooga. This kind of regulation does not say how the goal is to be achieved, it merely gives companies an incentive to compete creatively for the opportunity to put their businesses in the zone. A company can get ahead of its competitors by anticipating the direction regulations will have to take, over the long term, and getting there early, exceeding all current regulations. One of our current research projects involves looking carefully at how one can show the impact of this kind of long-term ecological perspective on a company’s bottom line.

5.9.2 Leadership style and innovation

Studies on leadership styles have focused on three alternatives: autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire , where the former is dictatorial, the latter hands-off, and the democratic either consults with everyone before reaching a decision or leads a discussion that produces a consensus. No one style is superior to the others in all situations. But on unstructured problems a consultative or fully democratic style is best . Unstructured problems are ones that do not fall nicely into existing categories, and therefore call for maximum creativity. Indeed, creative people often turn problems everyone else thinks of as routine into unstructured problems. That is the nature of a paradigm shift. So democratic leadership is most likely to encourage creativity.

This style of leadership is even more important , when the team must share an ethical framework that cannot be reduced to an algorithm. The leader may the prime mover behind the vision, but it has to be endorsed by everyone, and everyone can contribute suggestions on how to translate ideals into practice.

A complementary essential characteristic for a leader of innovators is to be willing to take joy in the accomplishments of others and give credit wherever possible. Gary Tabor, a leading environmentalist, refers to this as the servant-leader, the one who leads from behind. Being a servant leader requires humility, a sense of humor and an ability to step into the shoes of others. It also implies keeping one’s eyes on the prize, putting goals like environmental sustainablity ahead of one’s ego. It means keep the administrative scutwork out of the way of the creative team as much as possible--the memos, reports and other documents that justify the team’s existence, the parts of the grant proposal that are not creative, the daily details of budgets and trivial correspondence. It does not mean becoming a martyr and sacrificing one’s career for the benefits of others, nor does it imply tolerating prima donnas who want to hog all of the credit, but it does mean letting others think they are the real leaders from time-to-time.

This page was last edited: Wednesday, July 14, 1999