One of today's hottest trends is fostering innovation. It's real important! There are books, conferences, certified experts and all sorts of things. Let's do two things: (1) look at the origins of today's acknowledged tech leaders; and (2) see how those tech leaders innovate today.
What would we find if we looked at the origins of some important organizations that took the market by storm, grew rapidly and became part of the modern landscape? Did they come from people following the popular methods for fostering innovation? Let's look at some big, successful tech companies, and find out how they got started. There are two possibilities:
- It came out of some large organization that followed modern innovation methods. Or its founders were avid readers of books on innovation, certified innovation trainers, attendees of innovation conferences, or otherwise showed that they were nurtured by innovation thinking.
- It was started by one or two people who set out on a mission without any of #1 and kept marching forward until they got it done, perhaps with the help of VC's (venture capitalists).
I've already discussed the cases of Microsoft, Facebook and Oracle here. Their founders not only lacked training in "innovation," they were all college drop-outs! How could they have possibly founded three of the largest, most successful and valuable tech organizations? Must have been luck, I guess.
Maybe they're the exceptions! Maybe most of the rest fit comfortably into the mold of #1! Let's look at a few:
- Apple. Jobs and Wozniak. College drop-outs.
- Amazon. Bezos. Princeton grad, worked in finance, hedge funds. Jumped on a vision.
- Dell. Michael Dell. Started in his dorm room, dropped out.
- Google. Stanford grad students, dropped out. VC backing.
Why all the college drop-outs? In each case, a founder who was already obsessively good at something saw a related opportunity (sometimes with a buddy), dove in to make sure he didn't miss the opportunity, and made it more important than anything else. Including "education."
A pattern seems to be emerging here. It's not looking good for theory #1.
Now that these companies are big and successful, surely they are great at innovation, right? They must have certified innovation experts just crawling the halls, and a good fraction of the staff out attending innovation conferences, right? They must be just cranking out innovations left and right!
They try, in various ways. But it turns out that these great companies aren't any better than any other large organization at innovating -- and you can see it by all the acquisitions they do! They have HUGE resources -- how could some scrappy bunch of nobodies possibly come up with something they couldn't invent themselves?
Well it happens. It's happening right now, in AI. Look at who's doing the acquiring:
Facebook alone has made more than 50 acquisitions, most of them since 2010.
How about Google, who are supposed to be the smartest and most innovative of all? They've acquired more than 180 companies. Someone figured out the ten most expensive buys:
And the grand total is ...
Now, that's innovation for you. Just ask your boss for a multi-billion dollar budget, and you'll be able to innovate like Google!
Until then, remember, there really is a better way to approach making your company better, even if it is unlikely to win any awards for "innovation."