Closing the Innovation Gap (Part 1)

[This Thanksgiving weekend I’m featuring excerpts from the first chapter of Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy by renowned entrepreneur and guest author, Judy Estrin. According to Estrin, innovation comes from the interplay of three drivers of creative change: research, development and application, what she calls the “Innovation Ecosystem”. More information about the book is available on Amazon.]

The Core Values & Questioning

People often overestimate the a-ha! factor in the invention process. That process starts with creating the right kind of environment. “The rare thing is not coming up with ideas. It is creating that soup where lots of people are coming up with ideas, and having a system that translates them into something effective,” says Danny Hillis, a former Disney Imagineer and co-founder of Applied Minds, an R&D consulting firm that calls itself the “little Big Idea company.” The soup starts with some common ingredients, a set of human attitudes and beliefs that are so critical that I call them the five core values of innovation: questioning, risk taking, openness, patience and trust.

If pushed to an extreme, any one of these values can actually serve to stifle innovation. Trust without questioning is blind. Too much patience can create an environment in which nothing happens. Risk taking must be tempered by questioning so that it does not become reckless. Questioning without trust can become merely judgmental. When all five values are in balance, they work together to create the capacity for change that enables innovation to thrive.

Innovators naturally ask why or how something works, or if something can be done in a new way. This curiosity is encouraged by giving them room to explore. David Culler, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley, describes this kind of inquisitiveness as “stubbing my toe on the same spot often enough that I say, ‘What is this?’ Then I look down and find that what I’m tripping on is just the tip of a very big rock below the surface.” Innovation can also be driven by curiosity about things that don’t exist. “Once, when my three-year-old son was learning to read road signs,” says Culler, “he asked me, ‘Dad, why aren’t there any ‘go’ signs?’ Kids see these things. What else are we not seeing?”

The only way to get beyond mere incremental improvements is to question the status quo. When Tesla Motors introduced its flashy red electric sports car in 2006, it made a big splash. People lined up to place orders for a car that hadn’t even been built yet. The Tesla was not the first electric car to hit the market, but its reception was different because the company’s co-founder, Martin Eberhard, was willing to take a new approach. All of the prior efforts to market electric cars had prioritized affordability to reach the broadest possible market. “They made horrible little cars that nobody wanted to drive,” says Eberhard. Instead, Tesla decided to launch with a high-end model that was outright cool to create desirability for the product concept; later it would figure out how to make a more affordable version. Whether the company is successful over the long term or not, Eberhard’s willingness to buck the trend has created positive, disruptive changes in the electric-car industry.

The way that leaders ask questions impacts motivation and behavior, setting the tone for the whole organization. Questions can be inquisitive or judgmental. They can convey interest or impatience. Asking “Why did you….?” conveys judgment, not trust. Similar information can be gleaned by asking “Can you explain….?” The types of questions critical to managing an ongoing project – “When will this be done? What are the milestones to measure progress or success?” – can also suppress new ideas. Research projects often consist of a set of open-ended questions or hypotheses being investigated without a clear outcome or end date. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask what the researchers are working on and how they plan to move forward. Leaders also need to be open to be questioned by others and themselves.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Closing the Innovation Gap
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