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Diane Thornton
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after
reading an early account of Art Fry’s
role in the birth of Post-its, I wrote him to suggest
3M make its sticky notepaper in jigsaw-puzzle sizes.
This way, puzzles—with their pieces held in place
by 3m’s
forgiving adhesive—could be safely moved from the
dining room table when more important activity, like
eating, required it.
Withered by family puzzlers accusing
me of losing vital
pieces any time I slid a half-completed picture onto
a scrap of plywood, I was hot to cut a deal. With Puzzle-its,
I’d at last be free of abusive enthusiasts, and possibly
even rich. No more “What happened to the Kremlin?” or “Where
the hell did Rhode Island go?!”
Fry never did write
back, a blow. My consolation prize was a free lesson
in the difficulties of trying to
think outside my own box to get some buzz going inside
another,
in this case 3M’s. Andrew Hargadon’s How
Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies
Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, 2003) deals with how
people, ideas and things occupying their conventionally
separate
worlds can mix it up in other worlds and power up recombinant
discovery.
If innovations are happy accidents waiting
to happen, Breakthroughs aims to help companies become
more accident-prone.
It is a roadmap across barriers inside and outside
companies and industries, folded into a how-to manual
for creating
new relationships and networks.
Continuous innovation
requires not just thinking outside the box, Hargadon
contends, but thinking inside someone
else’s. He cites Ford borrowing the idea of the assembly
line from meat packers; sewing machine manufacturers
lifting the idea of interchangeable parts from gun
makers; and
Reebok going into the medical supply world, via consultants
at Design Continuum, and fashioning IV bags into adjustable
blow-up splints for sports shoes.
The process requires
not just crossing traditional boundaries but mustering
support—colleagues, investors,
suppliers and, not least, buyers—to ensure innovations
succeed. Reebok had all its pieces so perfectly in
place that it could compress product development to
a blip in
time, ramp up mass production quickly and seize a huge
market overnight.
Teamwork is essential, as Hargadon, ’86,
MS ’90,
points out. The “muckers” who worked in Edison’s
famous Menlo Park, N.J., lab often had much more to
do with inventions he is commonly given credit for
than he
did. And as Einstein acknowledged, his theory of relativity
was possible only because others had laid the groundwork.
Innovating
and moving on is what business is about these days.
Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian long ago observed that Route 101 eclipsed Route
128 because Silicon Valley was essentially more fluid: talent moved in and out
of start-ups; ideas spread quickly. On the East Coast, companies kept things
bottled up, discouraging cross-fertilization and much notion of moving on. (Try
as it did to renew itself with workstations, Digital Equipment never got out
of the rut it dug for itself staying in minicomputers way past checkout time.)
But
differences between the coasts could be overstated.
Given today’s multicampus
operations and increased outsourcing, geographic distinctions that prevailed
before have blurred into insignificance.
Hargadon lays out strategies for enabling
innovation inside companies and for getting outside help, and talks about how
office politics
can play in the background.
He peppers the text with examples, often the same ones, unfortunately. The
story of how the pneumatic system in a toy water gun was
adapted in the design of a
medical tool keeps popping up like a rabbit in a carnival shooting gallery.
Breakthroughs gets repetitive. We’re constantly told
how Edison et al.
didn’t conjure up gems on their own or how recombining what exists achieves
revolutionary results faster than trying to invent from scratch. And of the value
of moving across disciplines—perhaps the mother of truisms. Still, as Hargadon
says, Hewlett-Packard, after crediting R&D breadth for its success, spun
off its instruments business anyway. Hargadon is at his best assessing how different
approaches foster or impede innovation, and one might wish HP had read him first.
Another
improvement would be a better index. Art Fry is discussed
but doesn’t
make it. Ditto for Stanford and other names. Many publishers long ago dispensed
with useful subject entries—the much-discussed Internet gets only one—and
now it looks like time spent indexing names is a drag on bottom lines, too. But
these gripes aside, Breakthroughs makes a useful addition to the corporate survival
kit.  | 
