Closing the Innovation Gap (Part 4)

From Closing the Innovation Gap by guest author Judy Estrin

Patience and Trust

Patience is a mandatory condition if innovation is to thrive, and it doesn’t have to be a passive process. Innovators need to be comfortable with abiding ambiguity for a time instead of jumping on the first idea or solution that comes along. They also require active patience: the tenacity to overcome technical obstacles and to champion their bold new ideas in the face of disbelief. Because of the persistence of Genentech’s scientists, a drug called Avastin received FDA approval for treatment of colorectal cancer in 2004 — 15 years after the initial research began.

You can have patience and still do business with a sense of urgency. Leaders and financial backers need to have the patience to let ideas ripen. If they sense impatience, employees either will not take the time to try something new or will take the quickest path rather than the best. Projects and companies that might have produced great products and profits can be shut down as a result of lack of patient capital. In the late 1990s, 3Com was in a battle with Cisco for market share in the networking market. But the 3Com board demanded a faster path to profitability. “So we pulled out of the enterprise business,” recalls 3Com’s chairman Eric Benhamou, “thus setting the company back five to ten years.” The result was that few people today remember 3Com, while Cisco grew to dominate the networking market.

The timeframes and measurement techniques that are appropriate for development efforts are not the same as those for research projects. “There are periods where you can’t tell whether an individual thread is going to succeed,” says David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT who was instrumental in the development of the Internet. “You can’t have some bean counter always looking over the wall with their clipboard saying, ‘How are you doing?’”

As a company leader or financial backer, you must trust your people and the innovation process. Only with this foundation will employees and executives allow themselves to be vulnerable, take risks, and have the freedom to create. When trust erodes, horizons get pulled in as innovative potential is sacrificed to meet demonstrable milestones.

Innovators must trust themselves enough to push through obstacles and realize their vision of what could be, while still being open to new ideas and relentless self-assessment. Best Buy’s Kal Patel calls this state of mind “living in the world of self-confidence and self-doubt.” You have to both believe in your vision and be open to not believing at the same time, because trust without sufficient questioning can lead to disaster.

Each of the companies that I cofounded developed products that pushed the edge of technology and targeted markets that did not yet exist, like many startups do. Our early investors and employees had to trust in our vision. We, in turn, had to trust our small, select teams, giving them the freedom to execute the steps necessary for us to realize our dream. Entrepreneurship is all about trust.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Closing the Innovation Gap
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