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?