What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [59]
Bureaucracies, task forces, org charts, and formal processes do not breed innovation. They kill it. When I came up with the idea for Entertainment Weekly magazine at Time Inc. in 1984, it was rejected out of hand because the company’s top editor did not think one magazine could possibly serve people who liked movies, TV, books, music, and video. People who watch TV, he said, do not read books. Six years later, my proposal arose again from the dead-idea file. After I made prototypes aplenty and we tested the idea exhaustively and made business plans galore, a task force was assembled for the express purpose of trying to kill it. You could say they were there to perform due diligence or you could say they were there to cover the bosses’ asses. In any case, the magazine finally started. After an astounding $200 million investment—not all of it my fault—Entertainment Weekly became a franchise that brings in a few hundred million dollars a year. Innovation happens in spite of the structure of organizations.
In 2008, I joined a seminar on innovation at the World Economic Forum at Davos. It was a highly formatted hour, with the entire room sitting in a circle (making the moderator dizzy). They had us write down the technology we loved most. Then we compared notes with a neighbor and came up with some neat invention out of this mashup. We heard a few cute ideas and then, thank goodness, a scientist in the room put a stop to it. This, he said, is not how innovation is made. Scientists start with a problem and then try to find a solution. I’ll show in a later chapter on the Google.org foundation, “Google Power & Light,” that Google’s founders approach invention in that order: first find the problem, and then create the solution. Beware the cool idea.
Of course, innovation and ideas do not come only from within. Remember Michael Dell saying that a company cannot be built on the ideas of a few people. “Ideas come from everywhere,” Mayer told Stanford’s students. When Google got into mapping, she said, it found engineers in Australia “who were just amazingly good at mapping interfaces” and then hired them. Google bought other products and ideas this way, leading to platforms for blogging, feeds, Google Docs, and advertising systems. Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, told the BBC’s Peter Day on his In Business program in 2007 that Procter & Gamble now relies on ideas and solutions not invented there but “proudly found elsewhere.”
Day went on to report on the solutions platform InnoCentive, where scores of companies post problems with offers of rewards for solutions from independent inventors, scientists, and tinkerers, whom InnoCentive calls “solvers.” The problems range from the profound (a $1 million reward to find “a biomarker for measuring disease progression in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis [ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease]”) to the scientifically geeky (“near complete conversion of phenol compounds into non-volatile or insoluble products in an aqueous solution”) to the prosaic (a large company wanted “bakeable cheese technology” for snack products; another offered $5,000 for “novel approaches to gently and effectively clean a baby;” and the Rockefeller Foundation offered $20,000 for the design of solar-powered internet routers).
No matter where the ideas come from, innovation is, of course, all about people,