Before I started reading this book, I was quite skeptical. I thought that reading about how innovations and breakthroughs happen would be a bit like reading about earthquakes in the sense that it’s possible to quite accurately tell how they happen but an entirely different thing to make them happen. I thought it’d be an interesting book but one that would offer little practical help in trying to actually make breakthroughs happen in real life.
I’m happy to report I was wrong in my preconceptions. Very wrong. Andrew Hargadon’s How Breakthroughs Happen: Technology Brokering and the Pursuit of Innovation is an excellent book that provides invaluable advice to all companies that are involved – or think they are involved – in innovation. It contains so many so important lessons that it’s quite impossible to do them justice in a short review such as this. Hargadon has managed to write a clear, practical and concise book on a topic of crucial importance to many companies.
When one thinks of innovation, images of genius inventors usually spring to mind. At this point we’re already hopelessly lost – not only is the myth of a lone inventor just that – a myth – but truly revolutionary innovation has rarely much to do with invention. How Breakthroughs Happen once and for all puts the myth of the lone inventor at rest; by finding out how great “inventors” like Edison, Ford, Jobs and Gates in reality worked and how they really came to “invent” what they did reveals how their innovations were really conceived. Did Edison invent the light bulb? No, he didn’t. But he did “bring together previously disparate people, ideas, and objects from his network of past wanderings in a way that launched a revolution.” When looked at more closely, all things created by “lone inventors” were very much a team effort of recombining existing technologies. Unfortunately, the lone inventor concept makes for good stories; of these, it is noted:
Worse than simply being incomplete and inaccurate accounts of what happened, however, these simple stories distort our ideas of how to pursue innovation, how to manage it, and even how to make sense of when it happens again. Every “modern-day Edison” who graces the cover of Times and Newsweek touting his or her invention, every business guru who insists we abandon the past to embrace the future, and every manager who insists upon demonstrating his or her individual genius takes us one step further away from understanding and emulating the successful innovations of the past.
Which brings us to the other key point, invention != innovation. William Gibson has said that “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed”, a quote also used in this book that turns out to be very true. The breakthrough innovations, be they the transistor or the light bulb or some of the more modern innovations that are discussed in the book, are rarely if ever comprised of something new. Innovations take what has been developed elsewhere – mature technologies, ideas, concepts and people from elsewhere – and recombine them in new ways to form something new, even radically new. It doesn’t mean these technologies or ideas are not improved in the process, but it does mean that very few – if any – actual “inventions” as they are usually understood needs to happen to make a breakthrough innovation.
How does one go about capturing and recombining the ideas and technologies from various industries? First, after putting aside your ego and any “not invented here”-syndromes there are, start moving across different worlds. But one cannot get so deeply involved in these other worlds as to take on their inherited conceptual limitations; in all industries, knowing how to combine a set of available resources in a particular way to achieve particular ends soon starts to feel like the only way to do that. It’s this mindset that people or companies moving among worlds have to avoid. The idea is to know a little about a lot of things and the strategy to achieve this is called technology brokering. There are many aspects to this, but here are a couple of quotes from the book that to capture the core idea:
This strategy involves bridging distant worlds. By working in a range of different industries or markets, firms are in a better position to see when the people, ideas, and objects of one world can be combined in new ways to solve the problems of another. For these companies, innovation isn’t a process of thinking outside of the box so much as one of thinking in boxes that others haven’t seen before.
[...]
Sitting between these worlds [...] means not being inside any one of and hence not being fully accepted by any one. The benefit of this discomfort lies in the freedom from the binding (and blinding) ties of any one small world. One foot on the platform, the other on the train. Such isolation is sometimes bitter, as Einstein said, but that is the cost of remaining independent of others’ customs, opinions, and prejudices. Technology brokering entails finding your discomfort zone.
On a personal note, I couldn’t help but noticing that the concept of technology brokering goes against the current trend in most companies – that of relentlessly focusing on your core competence, outsourcing pretty much everything else. Now if your competence is in a smallish area or just one or two lines of business (like it in most cases is), this creates problems. You lose all interdisciplinary communication and the vast benefits it brings. Setting up innovation laboratories that are filled with experts from a tightly constrained field just won’t work (even I’ve seen that it won’t work). If you don’t communicate across seemingly completely irrelevant people and fields, you lose a great deal of innovation potential. It’s all too easy to dismiss mingling with other industries and other disciplines as irrelevant, but preventing or discouraging that might be one of the biggest mistake your company has ever made.
As for the review of the book, I can only repeat what I already said – it’s an invaluable read to anyone and any company who either is or thinks they are involved in the innovation game. It not only offers fascinating insight into some of the past innovations and how they came about, but it also gives actionable advice on how to go about fostering innovation.
I’ve only very briefly touched on a couple of points in this review, but there are many more essential lessons in the book itself. For example, one crucial area is the importance of a good teams. Another is the enormous damage that misaligned company incentives can cause. Yet another is the importance of a community and building industry support around a new idea or technology. But let’s not get into those here; if you work in an area dealing with innovations, read this book. It certainly changed and improved my understanding of the innovation process. Of course I also liked the book because it reaffirmed some of my ideas, like the usefulness of being interested in lots of widely different things.
