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Obstacles to analyzing innovation in business, science and invention
Sorting out patterns of innovation in the worlds of business, science and invention is even more complex than in the arts. In part, that’s because basic data analysis hasn’t been done, or even conceived. Also, innovation in these fields involves additional complexities:
- In some cases, the time it takes to accumulate fundamental knowledge and come to grips with a complex field means that even conceptual innovators don’t make their breakthroughs until their thirties. They spend their twenties acquiring the knowledge of the field. (In age, they’re similar to conceptual film makers, who also must take time to learn the ropes and who also must gain the trust of studios and producers.)
- An individual inventor or researcher often gets the primary public credit for a breakthrough even though the achievement is the work of two or more people or a group of people. For example, Thomas Edison is typically credited for whatever the researchers in his laboratory achieved. Similarly, Bill Gates is credited for what he and Paul Allen achieved.
- In art as well as science and technology, every innovation depends on the ground-laying achievements of others, but in technology and science a crucial preliminary step may have been achieved by a competing researcher just a few weeks earlier at a distant university or at the next laboratory bench.
- A business innovator often must be a leader of an innovative group. Their abilities as corporate leaders and communicators on top of their conceptual genius helped Edison, Gates and Steve Jobs remain active in innovative enterprises even after their youthful breakthroughs faded into the past.
More frequently, leadership skills are acquired with age, complementing the growing mastery of an experimental innovator:
- Henry Ford founded Ford Motor Co. at age 39 and, with plenty of expert advice and many factories’ examples to draw on, he geared up its assembly lines when he was in his late 40s.
- Sam Walton was 44 when he launched the first Wal-Mart in 1962. It was an innovative variety of discount store, but so too were the first K-mart, Woolco and Target stores, which also opened in 1962. The success of Wal-Mart depended on what Walton had learned about efficiency, employee motivation and customer satisfaction earlier in his retailing career.
- Ray Kroc, who was 52 when he incorporated McDonald’s, could rely on years of experience in restaurant equipment sales when he began to create his unprecedented worldwide fast-food empire on the basis of the innovative food-preparation techniques that he acquired from the original McDonald brothers.
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