It's interesting how big companies like Xerox and Bell invested a lot into the future (PARC, Bell Labs) and even created new inventions that we use every day. How do such forward-thinking companies grow irrelevant?
These history changing works come from very small groups of people within the company, who usually only stick around when the environment enables their work to thrive. Oftentimes, a single fantastic key manager who protected all the engineers/designers/researchers from infighting/politics/etc. leaving is enough to completely obliterate that team, and kill any chances the company had at replicating the successes the group built up.
Alan Kay said it best:
"I don’t run CDG, I visit it. [Xerox PARC founder Robert] Taylor didn’t want to hire anyone who needed to be managed. That’s not the way it works. I have people on my list who are already moving in great directions, according to their own inner visions. I didn’t have to explain to these people what they would be working on, because they already are."
So there really are two prerequisite things to great innovation:
- populating your group with people who are at the very top of their game
- finding someone with the right balance of hard/soft skills needed to both be respected by these brilliant researchers, and to act as an interface between them and the rest of the company politics/bureaucracy/etc (for a startup, that'd be investors/boardmembers/etc.) and make sure they stay on track.
Each of these things is crazy hard, and accomplishing both is exponentially so. Which is why these brilliant teams only appear every once in a while, and even then are still likely to fail.
Because there's a difference in creating/inventing something and successfully bringing it to market. It's a different skill set and mindset. Apple needed Woz to create and Jobs to market.sell.
Steve Jobs' biography is also a good starting point. He describes how Xerox had a lot of interesting patens and ideas around graphical user interfaces (before they were cool), but they didn't manage to make it a nice user experience. The idea was there, the execution not. Which is often a problem with researchers and their poor software engineering skills. They create amazing things that don't work.
I was thinking about this after I posted my comment. I think it's not that they, as you say, "create amazing things that don't work"; it's that what they create "works" good enough for them. They solve a problem and it works for them; but, they don't think about how others will use it and whether it works for them. In the recent LibreOffice thread, the Microsoft ribbon menu is mentioned -- I thought the old menu was fine; but, their user testing found people liked the ribbon.
I'm going to make the controversial claim that such research centres could only be so groundbreaking because they were, by conventional standards, extremely badly managed. Only by getting the right group of people together and letting them play with whatever they want, with a loose budget, do you get results like that. This lassitude is of course completely incompatible with hitting quarterly targets, or the painstaking work of taking a prototype to a product.
Neither was really subject to any kind of market pressure too.
Interestingly this pattern doesn't work with pure research: the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton hosted Einstein, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, but there is little important work done in there.
Things that computers are gradually making irrelevant, no? Can a copy machine eventually supplant computers? Of course not. Copy machines don't have a fraction of the functionality of a computer obviously.
They start chasing the Quarterly Earnings Report. It takes a strong leader to not get caught up in the rat race to beat last quarter and actually invest in projects long term.
Alan Kay said it best:
"I don’t run CDG, I visit it. [Xerox PARC founder Robert] Taylor didn’t want to hire anyone who needed to be managed. That’s not the way it works. I have people on my list who are already moving in great directions, according to their own inner visions. I didn’t have to explain to these people what they would be working on, because they already are."
https://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xer...
So there really are two prerequisite things to great innovation:
- populating your group with people who are at the very top of their game
- finding someone with the right balance of hard/soft skills needed to both be respected by these brilliant researchers, and to act as an interface between them and the rest of the company politics/bureaucracy/etc (for a startup, that'd be investors/boardmembers/etc.) and make sure they stay on track.
Each of these things is crazy hard, and accomplishing both is exponentially so. Which is why these brilliant teams only appear every once in a while, and even then are still likely to fail.