Innovation renovation
How the bottom line has knocked profitable innovation from the core of many companies
Where have all the innovators gone?
Fortunately, that’s a question that
has not yet been raised about the supply of creative entrepreneurs in the
United States. The U.S. is well known as a
fertile breeding ground for brilliant ideas
and masterful execution.
That reputation is now in peril, says Judy
Estrin, author of “Closing the
Innovation Gap.” The same
nation that produced game-changing products and services in virtually every sector
of the economy could go the
way of the dinosaur if it
doesn’t correct the forces
that threaten its extinction.
Innovation doesn’t happen in
a vacuum, Estrin explains.
Much like our physical environment, which relies on a
complex web of dependent
relationships, innovation
needs the right proportions
of policy, funding, education,
leadership and culture in order to sustain
itself within what Estrin refers to as the
“innovation ecosystem.”
When we were right
Enlightened national leadership made
possible the prodigious technological
advances of the mid-20th century by nurturing the core values of questioning, risk
taking, openness, patience and trust, says
Estrin. Positive payback came in the form
of such successes as space research and
NASA, powerful telephony think tanks like
Bell Labs, and that legendary semiconductor incubator, Silicon Valley.
Where we went wrong
By the ’80s, economic pressures took
hold, skewing these core values so that
companies began to worship a new master, the bottom line. Long-term goals
were the norm of research in the ’50s and
’60s, Estrin explains. Now short-term
goals are the rule, and companies once
run by scientists and technologists who
understood their core business are being
run by professional managers with little
sense or respect for their companies’
products and services.
Today, our national research community
is suffering from neglect, she says. Applied
research that focuses on practical or useful applications has its place but
not to the exclusion of what is
known as basic research.
Why it matters to you
Raised by scientists who
encouraged her love of science,
Estrin has repeatedly made
Fortune’s list of the 50 most
powerful women in American
business. Using that background, she talks knowledgeably and intimately about the
early days of Silicon Valley,
since she lived there as a student at Stanford University, then became a
member of the iconic Zilog Corp. and
eventually co-founded three technology
companies.
While Estrin states that she doesn’t
want to be an alarmist, she provides
enough evidence that should make even
the most casual readers pause. With so
much media attention focused on global
warming, unstable financial markets and
a war happening every day somewhere
around the globe, the issues she examines are often relegated to the back
pages of newspapers, if they are printed
at all. Thanks to her exhaustive research
skills, evident in the huge list of interviewees published at the end of her book,
readers of “Closing the Innovation Gap”
will grasp that Estrin’s observations are
not just based on personal musings or
scant anecdotal evidence. She has
repeatedly gone to the mountain where
some of the most brilliant innovators
live, returning with a powerful warning
that only the tone-deaf could choose to
ignore. When the rubber meets the road,
Estrin says, it’s all about creating conditions once again for sustainable innovation that we can proudly bequeath to the
next generation.
Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting
the Spark of Creativity in a Global
Economy By Judy Estrin
McGraw Hill ©2008, 254 pages, $27.95
(ISBN: 978-0-07-149987-3)
