Most companies seem to screw it up once they leave the startup stage and enter the growth stage. Incentives schemes aren't designed to 'reward' failure, but zero risk-taking.
It seems to be that simple: If you WANT innovation, you'll get innovation.
What most people (at least those willing to climb the corporate ladder) want however is a career. And within a corporate incentive structure, career and failure don't go well together. Creating value out of nothing is way harder than simply not screwing up existing value. So it's obvious what you're gonna get.
Eventually, there is no such thing as 'corporate innovation'. There could be a thing called 'corporate sponsored innovation garage', or something similar. At least for new business development from the ground up.
The promising way to pull that off it seems is a blend of YC startup school tutoring, venture capital, [Google] X, the innovation culture of Tesla/SpaceX and access to cutting edge technology/people - baked into the right incentive structure.
IF innovation was repeatable, I'd bet on such a vehicle and allocate resources there.
I could retire if I had a Euro or 2 every time I have heard management say that mistakes are just lessons, experiments SHOULD fail now and again, and other such platitudes. Then reward the exact opposite type of workflow.
I agree with your analysis, and that of the original article, but I don't see it as a problem to be fixed. Companies have an incentive to provide a predictable cash flow to share holders, genuine innovation is often too risky for that. But that's fine, that's why we have start-ups with a different risk profile to do that instead.
Most attempts I've seen about fixing that by creating a "startup culture" inside a company have not really added more value compared to simply investing that money in a start up.
Innovation is an awful word because it means different things to different people.
In my experience, end of the day, “innovation” or “creating value” or “getting shit done” boils down to solving problems. It could be big problems like fundamental research or little problems like moving a desk in an office.
Either way, big organizations, private or public sector, create their own problems that are difficult to solve. Inefficient or dumb process sticks around until times are tough because the process gives someone power.
Innovation is an awful word because it means different things to different people.
Doesn't it just.
I approached someone in charge of innovation for a part of the UK's National Health Service. I offered some software (at no cost to them until they were content it met a need) based on a project I'd worked on in a different part of the public sector where the same idea had been successful. I was turned away, not because it wasn't actually innovative, but because to the NHS innovation meant funding deployment of commercially successful, mature software with existing customers and I didn't own the software from the previous project so I'd written a new (and improved) version.
It still puzzles me. I occasionally wonder how much time he must spend turning away people who have innovation ideas wondering why companies with mature products aren't calling his innovation department.
> Innovation is an awful word because it means different things to different people.
The word innovation is awesome at dedicating when someone is speaking bullshit.
When someone says the word innovation I assume they are a politician, marketer, salesperson, or in public relations. This causes me to listen to what they are saying more critically because I assume they as a professional attempt to persuade or influence people.
100% agree. People now use “innovate” and “invent” interchangeably. Typically they use the fancier sounding one because they want to impress people with their long words. They are not interchangeable though. Invention is the initial spark to the first version. Innovation is the polishing process of the next n versions. The iPhone 1 is an invention, and every iPhone after that is an innovation.
Now, the iPhone 1 didn’t do very much, and often there is far more value in the innovation than there was in the original invention. But you don’t get the innovation without first inventing something that didn’t previously exist.
Sadly, using words incorrectly swaps into thoughts, and affects reasoning. Because these words have been conflated, organizations are typically no longer able to reason about invention and innovation correctly, and are uninterested in inventing as a result. I would argue we see this in the lack of new underlying technological inventions after the 90s. It is like we have eaten our own seed corn. Very sad.
Interesting take. Seems legit from an entropy perspective.
Given that most corporations fail eventually no matter what, you might have a point there.
Maybe what I meant was the micro-level, not the macro-level evaluation. It might be easier for a given individual within a large corporation to play the game of 'keep the system running' and do well as compared to playing an active role in a small group of pirates that is building value from scratch which eventually can scale to a significant size.
From my experience this is not true. Once a company has a working businessmodel, a marketshare and predictable annual revenue stream plus some growth it seems the business is nearly bulletproof to an astounding amount of technical ineptitude. As long as the main value proposition of a succesfull product remains intact it's very hard to sink it.
I'm interested in this. Can you formalize your thinking here a bit more?
For instance, do you mean to say that, given the average company making $X net profit per month, it is harder to steer that company to grow to make $(X + Y) per month, than it is to start another company that makes $Y per month, from nothing?
Like sibling comment said, from a data-driven perspective that seems incorrect, but I wonder if your definitions of "value" or "difficulty" have some other nuance.
Large companies have more value than startups, so it takes more time to lose that value. Large companies also have expertise in value preservation and value creation. Startups usually only have expertise in value creation.
I’m not sure I 100% agree with the statement, but it’s an interesting perspective to try from time to time.
The most damaging part of this risk averseness is that it's pervasive throughout the engineering side of a large company, not just the business side.
I've seen a few big companies attempt to avoid the pitfalls you're describing. They set up some moonshot division consisting of "startups" and they do allow them to fail, but that's not enough. The problems are that they don't face the same financial pressures as startups, and they draw from the same talent pool as the general engineering pool of the company.
This is a problem because I don't think the article's premise goes far enough, big companies don't just drive out innovators, they convert them. They create a context where adding more bloat is seen as innovation, and then suck up enormous amounts of talent into this environment.
These "startups" I've seen look on paper like they have every chance to succeed. Financial institutions starting companies in the finance space for example, they have all the domain knowledge, it's right in their wheelhouse etc etc. But they don't seem to realise that they don't have the right kind of engineering talent. It's not that their devs are bad, they're just playing a completely different game. I think this is partly to blame for the whole "ageism" thing in SV as well. Somewhere along the track a big group of people realised (probably subconsciously) that there's a whole bunch of very talented senior engineers out there that are complete garbage at building something from scratch in an environment where you live and die by the quality of your software, because the majority of people work in places where their success and failure is just indistinguishable noise in quarterly profits. And for interviewers that aren't particularly good at surfacing that or don't even know what they're looking for, ageism is the easiest (and shittiest) way to filter most of that out and improve your odds
All these "startup within a big company" projects seem to follow the same rules as a modern trendy enterprise project. Big fuck off kubernetes clusters on the back end, a monorepo clusterfuck for the front end with more packages than pages in the app. Everything "scales", everything is perfectly set up to handle every possible use case, there's 8 kinds of tests, and a huge CI/CD setup, and all the tooling you could ever need. And then once that's all set up, in true waterfall fashion, the dev finally starts... at the same pace all the company's other projects run at.
And because all the other company's projects run at that pace, nobody notices anything is wrong. But if you do this, and you have any even remotely competent competition, you're going to get absolutely fucking poleaxed in features. Slow and steady might win the race but nobody has ever won the race after being shot in the foot with the starting pistol.
At some point this is a feature not a bug. If big companies could innovate then new companies would immediately be crushed every time they started to get any traction by the resources of the behemoths in the marketplace. Given the social and economic forces driving ever-increasing consolidation of wealth at the top, I'll take whatever counter-balancing forces I can get.
Corporations aren't really meant to be all that innovative. In practice corporations are designed to be extremely disposable. They can be unwound up on failure and spun up relatively easily. There isn't a rule saying that these companies can't innovate, but why should Cisco even be trying to write a teleconference client? There is no fault to be found that they didn't capitalise on what became Zoom.
Best of breed corporations are often characterised by a focus on key ideas and their variations - look at Apple, pretty much all their products are variants of an iPad at different sizes and different target audiences. Picking some other global Fortune 500s: Walmart and Amazon, profound dedication to logistics. DuPont knows chemistry, Boeing mastered turbulence and propulsion. A couple of big extractors that know how to claim resources from the natural world. These companies are all very innovative, but also profoundly focused. They will really struggle to cope with innovations that aren't in the area of their strategic edge.
It isn't a loss to anyone if the next trillion-dollar idea spins out as a new company instead of growing within an existing major. If someone has great ideas, we should invest in the person not in their employer. And they should stand to profit from their own success.
Corporations, in practice, aren't that. They are not disposable in practice. Large companies dominate their markets, expect to live forever, etc.
Innovations that don't happen within Google, microsoft, etc... those innovations don't happen.
This isn't an absolute statement. Innovations can happen outside and new companies can be founded. We went through a period in internet-based innovations where a lot of innovation happened outside of existing large corporations and became their own giant corporations. That's not a long term norm though. That reality was largely driven by really low capital costs. These days, new internet companies raise a lot more money... mostly to pay for advertising that goes to google and facebook, who control access to users.
More likely than innovation outside of existing companies gets bought into bigger ones.
Consider Tesla. Obviously Musk's abilities played a big part. So did his bank account, his ability to raise capital, etc. It takes that much force to innovate in that market from outside. Very difficult.
I think it's reasonable to ask why existing car companies couldn't pull off anything like it. There are incentive/incumbent reasons, but I don't think these are the whole story.
I agree that innovation should and could come from outside big corporations. But, the reality is that resources, market power and such are highly concentrated within large corporations. There isn't much space to operate outside of it. We can't expect a sub-1% section of an industry to do all the innovation... outside of rare examples like the internet circa 1995-2015.
Also, consider that tech giants are a lot more innovative than incumbents in other industries, largely because of the pressure from small companies and their relative youth. Trains, Planes, Cars, Roads, Banking, smelting, etc... these industries are not like that. Nothing at all happens outside of large corporations, innovative or otherwise.
> I think it's reasonable to ask why existing car companies couldn't pull off anything like it...
Usually I leave comments alone unless I agree or disagree, but this is a really easy one to answer - the entire Tesla experiment has been grossly unprofitable so far and there isn't any concrete evidence that any business should follow in Tesla's footsteps. They just posted their first measly profit after a decade with not much to show for it.
It may yet come good and it has been a good ride for shareholders, but if you want to know why nobody is rushing to innovate like Tesla it is because they have been leaking money like a drunken sailor.
There is a really important difference between companies which don't have enough margin to post a profit and companies that invest every bit of resource into capturing a new market.
They're not leaking money, that is the wrong metaphor. They're conducting an expensive land grab on 3 huge industries: Cars, Energy storage, and solar.
Assuming that is true, it doesn't really answer the question of why an existing player should be that innovative. Experiments by existing players are harshly critiqued, the division that does them is demoralized by other divisions that contribute to quarterly profits and any innovation that is useful is pretty easily copied by competition. Since every existing player has a patent portfolio of BS for the Texan kangaroo court, there wont be a good return in royalties. Running garbage through an oversized legal department while copying someone else is a better investment in R&D.
Because for the companies that don't, it is a threat to their existence. Teslas has opened their patents for anyone who wants them, and not one other company is keeping pace with their level of innovation. The entire ICE industry is now already obsolete. You don't think this should compell existing players to innovate?
If by innovation you mean try out Tesla's patents then absolutely.. I think Tesla opened their parents for PR reasons. The other companies stealing them and Tesla doing nothing would have been bad, Tesla getting countersued with bs even worse.
In so far as they have missed the transition from ICE to EV, they are all wrong. Tesla has such a huge lead on them, they probably will never catch up.
The MEB platform is part of a Volkswagen strategy to start production of new battery electric vehicles between 2019 and 2025.[3] In 2017, the VW Group announced a gradual transition from combustion engine to battery electric vehicles with all 300 models across 12 brands having an electric version by 2030.[4]
As of May 2018, the VW Group had committed US$48 billion in electric-vehicle batteries supplies[5] and announced plans to outfit 16 factories to build electric cars by the end of 2022.[6]
Tesla is plowing all their profits into R&D, and is well on the way to eliminating conventional car companies, dealership networks, power generation and transmission networks, the entire roofing industry, and will not stop there. Assuming they acquire spacex, they’re likely to own a big chunk of telecommunications, and mining operations moving forward. There’s also the Boring Company, which could take a big chunk of tunnel construction.
They’re also doing more to help the environment than any other corporation (and probably government) on earth.
More likely than innovation outside of existing companies gets bought into bigger ones.
What’s wrong with that? An “innovation” is not always a product. Sometimes it’s just a feature of a larger product.
Apple for instance acquires a company every couple of weeks according to Cook. Those companies’ innovations get integrated into an already successful product.
“The Innovator’s Solution” is for larger companies to start a small independent team not beholden to the corporate structure. That’s basically what an M&A strategy is.
Nothing, at the particular level. Maybe nothing generally, unless you have issues with industrial consolidation.
Either way, you now have a more concentrated industry, with a larger share of resources in non innovative hands.
Also, don't rely too much on internet companies for your example. This is (was?) a sector with high, fast returns on innovation, low barriers to entry and low capital requirements. That's not the norm.
Apple isn’t an “Internet company”. It’s been around for over 40 years. It makes almost all of its money selling hardware and has the same challenges and long development cycles as any other manufacturer.
Also many of its most strategic acquisitions have been used to design and manufacture hardware from processors, biometric sensors, etc.
Yes I realize Apple doesn’t “manufacturer” anything. But its just a legal construct. More of a difference in degree than kind. It pours billions in its manufacturing partners.
Apple sells 300 million+ physical goods every year.
Well, Apple didn't start out making iPads in a garage. Amazon didn't start out renting web services along with books.
I think you're selling some of these companies short -- the thing they might seem focused on now was not the thing they initially got popular for doing. In other words, they innovated outside their expertise to stay relevant.
I don't think it is a failure of Cisco that they let Zoom slip out and become a new company. Even if I were a Cisco shareholder I don't know that I'd be that unhappy with management. I can just buy Zoom stock if I think they are on a winner - more than 75% of their market cap came into existence after the IPO.
I don't see who the loser is in this story. It isn't Cisco shareholders; they can be Zoom shareholders too if they want to be.
The problem only occurs if the assumption of inventing zoom was priced into the cisco stock. If Cisco is priced at a multiple of earnings then shareholders get a totally fine deal and can invest their leftover money into startups.
It’s not just that. Cisco shareholders lost as they should have had the value of webex as part of their existing shares. This is being lost as zoom takes over.
I'd have made more money buying Zoom at IPO than I would if I held Cisco at the same time but added Zoom to Cisco's market cap. There was a big opportunity here for investors.
Sure Cisco shareholders would have been better off if Zoom was an in-house project, but investors are really the ones who are supposed to be making the value calls on teleconference-or-routers market exposure style decisions. If I'm a Cisco shareholder I don't think management made a mistake. I think I made a mistake not becoming a Zoom shareholder.
"In practice corporations are designed to be extremely disposable."
Opposite - they are designed to be incumbent.
Once a product sticks, companies become 'operational' and not 'dynamic' which is to say they excel at customer, product, regulatory, lobbying, scale, RFPs, branding, little features that satisfy a range of customers. Everything done 'just well enough' but otherwise the entity has not reason to innovate.
Innovation is just a pile of risk to the system, when in fact, the 'incumbent corporation' is a 'cog' in that system so there's no reason to change it.
Not only is there little incentive to change, there is 'anti incentive' in many cases.
Also - innovators are really hard to identify, and that thing may not be part of the job anyhow. There are all kinds of creative innovators, with many kinds of specialisation, the Zoom case I'm not sure is very exemplary anyhow.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Bell Laboratories at all. They innovated a lot, and created a ton of stuff including Claude Shannon's paper and a lot of the technology today we use.
Boeing I would say has a lot to learn from SpaceX.
>If someone has great ideas, we should invest in the person not in their employer.
But what if the employer is investing? This talks about how corporations dismiss good ideas, but large ones like Bell fostered it. Not sure if Apple had some innovators leave, but if they did, I haven't heard of them.
Chris Lattner, Tony Fadell, and Scott Forstall probably count as innovators, and they all left Apple.
Bell Labs was a classic blue sky internal research outfit. Modern corporate culture can't quite handle the concept, so modern R&D is more constrained and "results driven."
There's a critical difference between implementing existing ideas and inventing completely new classes of ideas and devices - like the transistor, or information theory as a discipline.
Modern corps do a lot of the former, but not so much of the latter. Far less than Bell Labs used to.
I think it's in the nature of big companies to view everything as a process optimization problem and losing out on "innovators" is viewed as a gap in optimality that needs to be filled. An environment tuned to value extraction is inherently going to be hostile to exploration. Can't have your cake and eat it too, buddy.
I've given this some thought and developed a notion that I hope to actually implement. Critique welcome.
Large companies can identify innovators, or at least learn to do so. In some cases, it will be as obvious as the founders of companies they've acquired. In other cases, it may be simply polling the engineering and product management ranks and tracking down those who are considered innovative by their peers. Or, you may even make it egalitarian and offer developers a 'year of invention' after some number of years at the company.
One point I think is key is to create an environment that is conducive to innovation. Relaxed administrative obligations, flat organization structure and a budget. Nominal oversight and justification requirements. Then, a simple guideline: What is developed needs to be on a path to becoming a product or service the company could offer.
Innovators could be supported with HR for finding contractors or consultants to work with, purchasing for buying components or equipment, marketing and business development persons could be assigned to the program to help innovators with business plans, cost and pricing analysis, market research. The innovation organization could be placed in a work space with dedicated space for their project, and a common space to meet and collaborate with other innovators.
Rewards for successful products could simply be additional stock grants and recognition, or perhaps simply another tour of innovation.
The risks would be if the program were abused and budget misspent, or the innovator simply didn't do any real work, or went off the rails with their projects. Also, development projects could have many budget sizes from virtually nothing to multiple millions. Perhaps the business development partner could help with proposals to request additional budget, once prototypes were far enough along to be compelling.
A multi-billion corporation could easily allocate a few million to this type of environment and keep a dozen or so innovators busy. You'd only need one success every so often to make it worthwhile.
You're describing a skunk works. Skunk works have to be secretive and they must be supported by the highest levels of management. Otherwise lesser employees (who are not good enough to join the skunk works) will get jealous and make it their mission in life to destroy the skunk works. Eventually one or two of them will get enough political power to make it happen, and then the skunk works is toast.
I don't think it has to be secretive. I think it should be an objective that is out there for others to aim for with very public and open policies regarding qualifications and on-going membership. When you make something secretive and hide all the rules around it, you are much more likely going to wind up with salty employees when (not if) they discover its existence.
If you are in an organization filled with vindictive employees, I recommend terminating them all if you have the power, or finding a new place to work. Not everyone can be part of the A-team. Trying to constantly appease those who feel entitled to the highest levels of the software engineering ivory tower will never end in a good outcome for the organization and will dis-incentivize those who actually bust their ass every day.
> If you are in an organization filled with vindictive employees, I recommend terminating them all if you have the power, or finding a new place to work.
Finding and terminating toxic employees is the single best thing every company should do to improve its health, but few do. Probably because some of the most toxic people are very skilled at looking good to their superiors while causing huge amounts of damage.
> vindictive employees, I recommend terminating them all
I think that's not how it'd work. Instead, those vindictive people would be managers, and they'd be the ones that provided you with information, and based on what they said, maybe statistics they show, it'd seem like obviously good ideas to scrap those projects
> I assumed like many that Kodak had a bright future ahead because they had a world-renowned brand and excellent scientists and engineers. What many at the time didn't yet recognize was that there was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100 thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff. There were certainly no senior managers willing or able to sacrifice the golden goose of film to pursue something entirely different.
Highly creative people generally rank low on conscientiousness. Organisations as they grow need ALL their employees to be conscientious: organised, punctual, goal-oriented, accountable - to not just to control outcomes but maintain cohesiveness.
Organisation culture stifles those type of people.
For an organisation to keep their innovators they need to be siloed away in an autonomous 'Skunk Works' where they can be free from the bureaucracy required to run a company.
The one thing that corporations are extremely good at is destroying all the initiative and add so much bureaucracy to the development that you loose interest to improve / inovate as you are paifully aware that this will bring in more documents, jira tickets, endless "bicycle shed" discussions, endless covincing of managers that only care about their schedule (which you will corupt by "unknowns"), endless politics as there is always some architect/team lead that "must be the smartest" (and typically those comming to those positions are excelent in navigating buereaucracy and politics and are rarly inovators as those endanger manager schedules, adding risks, ...) and so on.
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
At the end you just figure out it is not worth it , do what you are paid for and you inovate at home.
If those inovations become a startup you just leave.
I used to infuriate one development manager by going on a streak of productivity where I'd generate a mass of code over a matter of days, and then go quiet while I was thinking, trialing and tinkering with the next project - this was in a role where I had some latitude to do that. I'm not sure if other's thought I was slacking off at those times and complained, or it just messed with him because his burn-down charts would always look like a cliff face.
I struggle with the same pattern and worries myself, though mostly internally. My position affords a lot of latitude for it (I replaced the previous lead dev 10 years ago when the company was 5 people). It seems to be (and is said to be) okay with others as long as I communicate even as little as, "I'm deep in the weeds on this and probably will be for the next 2-3 weeks."
I worry about the optics of it, but at least have confidence that other developers can see the end result is solid for the total amount of time invested. Smooth workflow for everyone is the other major concern, but again we're lucky to be working on our own system and not beholden to external deadlines.. and I guess lucky to have enough want-to-dos in the backlog that no one is ever without something useful to work on.
We do create a bit of expectation of every developer having at least some tasks each week that are picked up and some that are completed, and it's tempting to just game that a bit to put up some numbers on the weeks where I'm figuring out how to do what I'm about to do.
When it comes to smoothing out a burn-down chart, the trick is the break up the tasks in a way that allows for each to be completed in full according to how you work on them. It may go against the logical or functional division of the project but it helps you mark stuff as done.
For JIRA in particular, also avoid creating sub-tasks if you're burn-down is tracking at the task level - as you have to complete all subs for the main task to be complete.
> Highly creative people generally rank low on conscientiousness.
Are you sure about that? I would rather assume that highly creative people often rank low on "tolerating bullshit" instead of having a low conscientiousness.
Usually, that bullshit is tantamount to defrauding the investors by taking salary without creating business value, or screwing over the customers by forcing them to upgrade to a substandard version of the product.
Saying refusing to play along is not “conscientious” is classic corporate double speak.
I’ve definitely similar elsewhere. In fact, the article points out that people that “can’t cut it” at corporate culture often go on to create the best companies.
Conscientiousness can be broken down further into 5 factors: two of which correlate with openness to experience: industriousness and achievement. Creatives tend to be low on the other three: order, dutifulness, and deliberation.
Probably safe to say dealing with other people's bullshit gets in the way of industriousness and achievement and leads to low agreeableness. ;)
Explanation for your downvotes: GP's description is not a generalisation or pseudo-psychological, but reflects the current standard model of personality in psychology. http://enwp.org/OCEAN_model
You may also have been thinking of Myers-Briggs which is pseudo-scientific nonsense and quite worthless given the ease it can be gamed when answering the questions.
I'm pretty sure the big 5 model was developed from data directly, not from a pre-existing theoretical model. I.e. they just made big personality tests and then checked how many factors there seemed to be, and it came out to 5.
Wow... you nailed it. I was formulating this exact same thought the moment I read this comment. Big companies have so much bullshit the repell creatives.
I am the kind of person to submit 30 ideas to internal innovation challenges. I was an innovation intern for a bank. I have won many innovation awards from competitions they hosted to find ideas.
How many of those ideas got out of the page/prototype stage? 0.
Because it seems like the important thing for many is to seem innovative. After that part has been done, interest disappears.
Everyone would rather you excite them with a new idea. So much of this "innovation" stuff is about media and being trendy.
I distrust those activities. I feel it is sometimes an IP grab by the company, which wants to give its staff fewer reasons to leave and start new (competing or not) companies. Once an idea is recorded and time stamped internally, it is effectively dead for use by anyone leaving the company. Or at least has an elevated risk. You don’t even have to be the one who submitted the idea to end up being hung up by the fact that your previous day job can claim a stake (even a weak one due to not having acted) in all these related ideas.
My perspective is a bit different. I have thousands and thousands of ideas. I can never meaningfully act on most of them.
So why not turn them into a couple hundred bucks for a page or two of writing?
I have some ideas I quietly research and do not reveal that I may want to turn into a startup one day, but those are just a few of all of them.
For example, my winning capstone project idea during my banking internship was in the mental health space. I have won other prizes in the professional mental health space as well. My interest in ever being in that space beyond ideation is 0 so I am not giving away anything that has other value to me.
Yeah me too. It’s a curse... wish I could focus on just one more often. Things I’ve “invented” in my mind only include mesh networking in 1997 (people thought I was crazy... why would someone share their bandwidth?). Actually submitted that one internally to a company that had the wherewithal and positioning to do it, a multi billion dollar idea, and they said “nope.” That company is now barely a wisp of a shadow of the behemoth it once was.
I’m of the school of thought that it’s the doing that counts, and I respect it when someone brings things past a finish line.
Anyway nice that you’ve found a fun and rewarding outlet for some of yours.
same, I wrote a nosql in 2004 it used XML on the api because json wasn't even a thing back then and I didn't even realize it was innovative it just felt the right solution for a customer's problem
I did the same and invented MapReduce a few years before the Google paper. I had a different fault tolerance model because the programs only needed a half dozen machines to run to completion, but the programing model was the same.
It was so obviously the only way to handle datasets larger than RAM that I assumed it was common knowledge.
I reinvented database query execution engines and an informal relational algebra on top of SQL a few years later. That thing was basically a JSON service API, except it used a home grown XML RPC layer (it was closer to modern approaches than the XML RPC standards being pushed at the time).
Since then, I’ve developed an appreciation for good marketing people.
For me, the biggest survival filter is when I price things out.
Almost invariably I find the product idea to be more expensive then I consider a reasonable price.
The next stage of death is the marketing. I've gone through about 25 marketing books, careful notes, annotations, etc, and honestly it's still the most common place of death. Money helps a lot here. So if you want that then go back to stage 1 and see if the price still works.
Then the things that pass that have logistics hurdles in the facilitation of the demand. There's delays, quality slippage, customer relations, it's not easy. You may get caught with a large stock and demand slips and you have to figure out storage, that's an additional cost on things that haven't even sold yet. Ackk.. The details are where the death is.
Innovation exists outside of all of this. Every now and then I hear about someone that went from innovation to product, experienced zero of these issues and just sailed in on easy street.
Those people are just lottery winners by another name. Screw them, that's not common reality. The world has randomness, it can be favorable, luck is something very real.
The hard knock strategies to modest success where you're not worrying yourself to sleep every night don't make sexy stories but it's the 99%. Expect nothing less.
My experience while working at a massive company was similar. Lots of talk about innovation. They were even willing to fund the ideas.
What kills most of it is the execution, and I'm not talking about the tech side, I'm talking about working within the hidebound structure of a massive organization and all the rules created for the current business.
Need to tweak a policy slightly so you can actually execute? Get ready for a 6 month slog arguing for the change with legal, compliance, finance, etc. I remember working on an innovative idea were were partnering with an external firm on. Took 8 months just to get the ok to proceed.
This one was a smaller regional (50 billion CAD) bank that swaps between seeing the writing on the wall (oblivion in a globalising world) and periodically firing the innovation team.
There is so much to improve and none of it seemed to ever happen.
It's possible you were the addict rather than the dealer. :(
What's the easiest way of keeping you at the company rather than going to innovate somewhere else? Make it as easy as possible for you to get your next "hit" of innovation dopamine.
(I'm being cynical - this isn't necessarily what your employer was doing, but it could have been.)
I worked with a customer who was a little too dim to appreciate how manipulative he was being. Remember, it’s the boss who puts you into that position. Only they have to understand what you’re doing, and not even that well.
Realizing that about him made it feel worse somehow.
Another great example of an innovator who was not rewarded is Shuji Nakamura, who invented the blue LED, which led to a lot of other successful products including the white LED and the bluray disc platform. Nakamura was not rewarded by his company, went on to win a Nobel prize with collaborators from his company. Nakamura left the firm, sued the firm and basically walked away with nothing. He's now an academic at an American university.
There is a reason companies don't encourage internal innovation.
It has nothing to do with managers, HR, or what not.
Say you have 100 innovators in your company. Everyone comes to you with an idea, as an SVP or a Director, can you agree to all of them? You obviously pick and choose. And how can anyone say a new product / service by a company is not the result of an internal innovator?
Alternatively, in the safe environment of a company, as in the innovator is getting capital and resources from the company finances, I think it is more likely that people are more free to give out ideas, even crappy ones. It's easy for a good idea to get lost in the noise.
Ultimately, what is the solution to this? I guess you have to fundamentally change the structure of companies itself.
In the given example, if Cisco were to transfer the innovator to another division, give him some money, on the same terms and conditions as a VC, perhaps it would have borne fruit.
Essentially, it's easy to see companies, once a certain size, are effectively hard wired to move at a slow, glacial pace and focus on sustainability, rather than fast and fail innovation.
> In the given example, if Cisco were to transfer the innovator to another division, give him some money, on the same terms and conditions as a VC, perhaps it would have borne fruit.
Cisco actually has a program like this. They maintain right of first refusal to acquire the resulting company, and call them spin-ins.
I think the problem is that they won’t fund things that directly compete with one of their own products, even when their existing offering is terrible.
To do that, they’d have to admit the product is terrible, and that upper management isn’t competent enough to fix it.
>Say you have 100 innovators in your company. Everyone comes to you with an idea, as an SVP or a Director, can you agree to all of them?
Yes, actually you can, as long as you control the parameters around how the idea is tested. We used to do a full 2-week sprint once out of every 16 weeks just to prototype people's ideas. In order to pitch the idea the only constraint was that it needed agreement from someone knowledgeable in that area that a prototype could be accomplished in <= 2 weeks.
Is this actually happening? Are ideas being pitched at a high rate? As at every company I know of that has held an internal innovation competition, interest is quite low.
That is having too many expectations. You should go into this expecting them to give you a small bonus. That is it. You don't have some idea you value at under $1000?
It depends. I am someone with a lot of ideas and I will never follow up on 95% of them on my own accord. Having it on the resume + the $200 bucks is more than enough for an idea that would otherwise just rot in my notebook.
Zoom is a particularly good example because it shows the same cycle the "chat" space has been stuck in since 1993 or so.
For a while IRC was cool, then it was CUSeeMe, then there was Paltalk, and ICQ, and AIM, and Microsoft Messenger and Skype and Lync and Skype for Business and Google Talk and Facebook Messenger, and...
If you look at them closely you can find some improvement (e.g. Zoom has a server that makes the "Hollywood Squares" view of all the participants) but if you look at them broadly they don't seem to have gotten better over time, they've just locked people in, stagnated, then something new comes along. It's hard to see how Facebook Messenger is different from AIM except for what it is locked in to.
If the EU really wanted to show some leadership it would put an outright ban on proprietary chat programs and force them all to use open protocols. Think of it as a part of a "computer user's bill of rights". Every time somebody wants me to download some new chat app I want to throw a hammer through a screen like that Apple 1984 ad.
This is a tough problem for companies. At my last job there was an "advanced concepts" group which had a lot of freedom and latitude, but they had a poor reputation for not really producing anything useful. The few things they did produce had to basically be redone since the quality of engineering wasn't ready for production.
I'm not sure how to fix that, since lack of freedom wasn't the problem! It probably is just making sure that the right people are leading.
I also don't know how to reduce other engineering groups more focused on practical projects resenting the innovation group working on more fun, low stress projects. That is a hard political problem.
Valve had the same problem people there are free to join or start any project they like but it just resulted in projects being started but being scrapped half way through
as an innovator, I stayed at a company which was extremely resistant to innovation because nobody had any idea how few hours I was working for a decade. So while they resisted all my innovations for that decade, I was spending most of my time doing everything I wanted to outside of work.
I worked remotely, very few hours per day, and nobody knew how few hours I worked because I was still the person they gave all the hard problems to and ripped through all my tasks quickly.
But any innovations put forward were rejected through political games played by non remote employees. On some meta level I was fine with that because while they saw those as petty wins I was living a life of freedom working less than half the day.
Since then I realized the same level of freedom could be had with people who care to leverage innovation instead of striving to fight it. Life was very good, now it's great.
It jumped right out at me and I had to login and reply right away - because my experience is the same as yours, verbatim, for the first part!
I'm presently as you mentioned: fully remote, fixing the hard problems so they keep me well rewarded, doing it part time and enjoying the freedom, the org is political and non remote with culture issues stifling true innovation .. its striking in its similarity I feel like we could be work twins!
I would love to talk to you about the next level, what it is for you and also how you got there. If I can, how can I get in touch with you?
The company I work for drives me nuts with this. We do tons of research and innovation on the software side of things. But because hardware takes longer we almost never do any research or try out anything risky because we are always the critical path on the schedule.
The funny thing is, whenever we have hackathons, hardware teams always end up winning because someone has been sitting on a cool idea that they would never have the time to investigate during their normal job duties.
We have definitely lost a couple of our good people because of this attitude.
Mature companies can become vehicles for protecting management/investor wealth. This forces them to act far too conservative. Management starts to see it like we might see our mortgage or savings.
As such, they want to build a “fortress” to protect the current business model. Innovation- even internal innovation - can upset the apple cart.
Making things worse, executives running a mature company are often very operations oriented. They’re not the same mentality of a founder (who are conversely often terrible at streamling operations!).
Big companies have their own roadmaps, managers have their own agendas. There is no resources for innovative weirdos. Especially in the world ruled by bookkeepers. In my experience not much technical guys make it into middle management. And you can explain 100 times simple technical improvement in the simplest words to a bookkeeper. He will not get it!!! Instead engineers will play another session of design thinking to check innovation box on somebody’s checklist.
This is exactly what happened to Lightwave (a revolutionary 3D animation software). Management refused to allow the engineers to address pressing concerns so the chief engineer left to create another company whose products modo has now eclipsed Lightwave
https://youtu.be/DiOX-D2B8LE
If you have an idea of sufficient merit what would incentivise you to give it up to your employer versus quitting and trying to do it yourself? I realise that startups aren't for everyone but the alternative seems far less appealing and doesn't guarantee you any control over how it's executed (and very likely none of the reward).
This is a dilemma I struggle with currently. I have several product ideas that I can either run 100% on my own, or I can try to convince my current CEO that we should start building these out and selling them to our existing client base.
The advantage of starting your own path is that you get 100% autonomy over every decision and every client that you take on. This can give you an incredible uplift because nothing is ever in your way from an organization/people/politics angle.
The disadvantage is that you have to rebuild all that corporate boilerplate in order to establish name/brand/reputation/process/etc. You also don't have many constraints acting upon you when starting from zero, and you can wind up making piles of decisions that roll-up into disaster.
I think the best course of action would be to present your ideas to executive leadership. If you can secure some equity share in the organization or products you propose, this is easily the fastest and least stressful way to get them to market. Being able to reuse your same HR, marketing & sales teams can save you potentially years of headache.
If your current organization is gigantic or otherwise inflexible, you are probably best suited building out your project on your own time, incorporating LLC over the weekend, etc. One day you just put in your notice and move on with your dream.
- “Golden handcuffs” - $BIGCO / $RECENT_IPO accidentally pays way above market because the stock appreciated since the person was hired.
- “Benching” - $BIGCO hires an army of senior people at significantly above market rate to do work that should go to a recent grad. They can’t attract competent recent grads, and can’t retain senior engineers at market rate.
- “Resting and vesting” You did a bunch of quality innovative work, but corporate culture changed and the opportunities to pursue new projects dried up before your stock vested.
Since quality engineers get bored quickly, and most good ideas have a short shelf life, why not pitch them to management while you’re twiddling your thumbs?
Any organization (not just a corporation) has to have a lodestar; a “shared vision.”
In some cases, this is a “boat anchor,” preventing the organization from moving forward, but in many cases, it is the thing that holds it together, and allows it to continue its existence; albeit, at a humble scale.
Sometimes, a “boat anchor” is necessary.
Not all organizations are about continuous growth, or even innovation. They may be a “do one thing, and do it well” type of shop, where growth and innovation can actually be harmful.
I know, because I worked in a company like that. They found a product line that was crazy profitable, and it changed the company culture quite drastically. For many years, the company grew like a wildfire. The focus became “blurred.” Lots of money poured in, but I feel like the company may have “lost its soul,” so to speak. The original “lodestar” was never sufficiently replaced with a new focus.
Then, the bottom fell out of the market, and the company suffered an implosion. They contracted back to their “roots,” where a conservative mindset took over.
Will they survive? I’m not sure, but over a century, they did weather numerous disasters and roadblocks (like having a lot of their assets turned to kindling in war). I sincerely wish them well. Despite my frustrations there, I have nothing but respect for them. I learned many important values that I never would have learned at other organizations.
But they are like a cactus; ideal for the harsh conditions of a desert. They are not well-suited for temperate rainforest, where so many other plants thrive.
Innovation and risk-taking was difficult (not impossible) at that company, and many of my efforts to introduce change never bore fruit. It was my decision to remain with them, despite that.
Basically, some organizations are just not places where innovative staff can thrive. They are stony, dry soil; ideal for cactus, but not for redwood trees. That is not always a bad thing.
In those cases, the innovators either have to accept that they will have to live within great constraints, or they will need to move on.
Midway the article talks about risks and incentive, and that not all innovators will want to leave the nest. I'd say though, if you're already in a place where you're internally innovating, by virtue of the fact that you've already deigned to challenge internal culture, practices, or product roadmap, you're the type to take high-payoff risks. There should be a strong positive bias for leaving among internal innovators.
Probably the only reasonable way for a company to be able to take profit from these innovators is to make it easy to spin out with a favorable equity position.
> Creating a billion dollars of incremental value at a startup yields untold riches for the entrepreneurs behind the venture. Creating a billion dollars of incremental value within a large corporation may be recognized, but the rewards are nowhere near the same level as a startup.
Isn't this the most obvious reason? If you have an idea and the capabilities to develop it for your own gain, why would you do it so the shareholders of your old company can buy a new yacht, while you struggle to buy an apartment?
Because the risks are different. Most startups fail and founders often lose money. At a big company, the risk of failure still comes with a fulltime salary.
I don't think this has anything to do with the particular reward structure at one company or whether this or that company encourages it. It's a structural problem.
Unless innovators are rewared with equity in the innovation (not the broader company - the reward needs to be tightly coupled with the power of the innovation), there's no incentive to produce extremely successful innovations. You won't be rewarded for outliers. That's all there is to it.
It is worth noting that a project that would raise internal criticism would often have a reasonable chance of success as a startup in its own right. Investors are generally more rational than colleagues.
Not saying i had the best work life balance, and ive learned my lesson of not wasting air time on deaf ears...
I was so enthusiastic after graduating .. i adopted the product, made it upgradable (8 year old repo, 1 programmer before me who was a sysadmin) - made it into a modern 12 factor app, before i even knew what that was.
One thing i learned is that innovators dont belong in certain environments .. those innovators didnt belong where they were .. and that was their wake up call, at least, it was mine.
Now i found a work place that appreciates me energy, and took me in as a fullstack dev and im so thankful, and careful. Im sure some devs there cant hear what i have to say. I learned, to speak less. Do more. Hobby? Ill make my own. A work place needs me to make it better - not to have me judge it .. its not easy thing to balance or properly execute if you Want to keep your soul.
For my next job, I was careful, it took me 4 months of interviews that tried to pitch a junior/mid and secretly wanted a senior .. but eventually, i found a home.
But sometimes its really necessary to wake up, and see that your efforts are being wasted, and move on. Left them better than i found them, and but i neglected myself and it was a valuable lesson in self care and the significance of my own time.
Another important lesson is growing beyond having milk teeth .. we should look around, and see where we are, and what kind of people are there ... are we making enemies, or injecting spirit?
Its no easy, those devs didnt belong in those companies to begin with. It was a life lesson to all involved.
It feels very different once you escape a toxic environment. It's as true for us as engineers as it is for victims of domestic violence or any other sort of toxic relationship.
Not sure there is a solution for this. To create a money machine like Cisco is extremely difficult and valuable. It is natural that the culture becomes more conservative, plus large orgs are conservative by necessity and bureaucratic. Also, most innovators won't put in max effort when they dont have full control and are under tremendous pressure. In a big rich org like Cisco, the comfy status quo is always whispering to you.
This article is confused in its examples. The Nespresso story was posted yesterday.
Cisco is pretty explicit about the model: its not uncommon that someone quits to develop a promising technology (and even someone else quits to develop an alternative approach). If one or both fail, or come in second, you VP an get your job back. While if one succeeds Cisco can buy the company.
This allows them to provide bonuses for developing something new without screwing up their comp system and allows smart people to develop new stuff even if there are institutional biases.
For many years they were an acquisition machine for this reason. Really the opposite of today’s “Acquihire” model.
That is precisely what Steve Jobs explains quite well in his biography. He says, if Apple does not invent the next big product, someone else will. So, why not cannibalize our existing product with new ones than let someone else do it? But, not all companies are Apple and not all products are the same. So, it really depends if companies what to take the risk.
Still, there are some expectations from customer that limit the product's innovation. Let's take Iphone, from the first version to latest one customers expect a slim phone with touch screen.
Customers want "this product but better", that the innovation will be limited around that product's initial characteristics.
Of course another line of product can be independently developed, but it's riskier as customers may or may not want that kind of product.
Certainly agree. Except for the watch, Apple has made existing products way better than how they were initially introduced. In fact, pictures taken using the iPhone are almost as good as a high end digital camera, if not with a DSLR.
Having that said, I think the new product innovation has ground to a halt after Steve Jobs, mainly because of the overall mindset of the company changing from a services centric one from a product centric one. Their focus has gone onto News, Music, Storage, Cloud and other service areas. Macs and Phones continue to get refreshed but are too pricey for the quality they offer, which is why they have not been able to make a dent outside EU, US and China (or in other words, emerging markets).
I really don't see this as a problem, the current org already has a focus on a product it innovated and the innovator leaving for their own venture allows themselves and fellow risk takers to capture more value for their idea, thus distributing wealth across a broader spectrum. This is how it should be. Had said innovator brought their product to fruition under the current corporate umbrella they would get a bonus and promotion at best. Meanwhile the product would not be the corporations core focus or competency and would most likely be diluted to help push their core product.
This article reminded me of a book by Ed Catmull (one of the founders of Pixar) called Creativity, Inc. The book is essentially about how Pixar has worked to foster creativity in a company where their business model pretty much relies on it. There are also some interesting Steve Jobs tidbits as well. I didn't really like the second half of the book, but the first half was fantastic!
From my personal experience, I think the major thing that always stymied creativity for me was office politics. Having to constantly watch your back for someone with a knife can really drain your energy from just, you know, doing a job you otherwise enjoy.
Zoom didn't succeed at Cisco's failure. It wasn't Cisco's lunch that was eaten. Zoom succeeded because the founder left and organized a venture. A new organization, a new culture, new leadership, and so so much luck contribute to the outcome.
Only thing Cisco could have done better was establish a venture capital division to fund work beyond its internal controls. Yet, they would probably only fund ideas by top performers and this in itself wouldn't ensure greater success because metrics, politics and culture driving employees performance do not imply excellence or deficits.
Is there a bit of survivorship bias in this? You hear these stories about how some big company poo-pooed some employee's idea, only for that employee to run off and turn it into the next big thing, but you never hear about all the ideas that never quite worked out.
I not saying big corporate environments don't stifle innovation but maybe there's some sanity in not investing in every "innovative" idea?
If you innovate, you have to have the freedom to fail, often repeatedly. Most companies (large or small) do not tolerate failure, especially the repeated kind.
I heard the opposite, where people like those who tried and failed, which is why trump's failures were seen as good. Its better to try and fail than never try.
> Three reasons companies lose their best innovators.
> 1. They fail to recognize and support the innovators
> 2. Innovation becomes a herculean task
> 3. Corporations don’t match rewards with outcomes
While the paragraphs under point 2 do discuss risk and the paragraphs under point 3 do discuss rewards, I'm not sure this article belongs here.
Risk and Reward.
Large corporations are able to pay people by doing things at scale; with sufficient margin at sufficient volume to justify continued investment. Risk is minimized by focusing on ROI.
Startups assume lots of risk and lots of debt and most don't make it. Liquidation preference applies as the startup team adjourns (and maybe open-sources what remains). In a large corporation, that burnt capital is reported to the board (which represents the shareholders) who aren't "gambling" per se. "You win some and you lose some" is across the street; and they don't have foosball and snacks.
How can large organizations (nonprofit, for-profit, governmental) foster intrapreneurial mindsets without just continuing to say "innovation" more times and expecting things to happen? Drink. "Innovators welcome!". Drink water.
"Intrapreneurial." What does that even mean? The employee, within their specialized department, spends resources (time, money, equipment) on something that their superior managers have not allocated funding for because they want: (a) recognition; (b) job security; (c) to save resources such as time and money; (d) to work on something else instead of this wasteful process; (e) more money.
Very few organizations have anything like "20% time". Why was 20% time thrown off the island to a new island where they had room to run? Do they have foosball? Or is the work so fun that they don't even need foosball? Or is it worth long days and nights because the potential return is enough money to retire tomorrow and then work on what?
... Is acquiring innovation and bringing it to scale a top-down process? How do we capture creative solutions and then allocate willing and available resources to making that happen?
If you look at what a company really is from a different perspective, then it makes complete sense that an internal innovator cannot exist inside any established organization. Let’s examine how any company came to be: it first started with a few individuals with a shared project, who maybe managed to obtain resources beyond their own resources, for example by raising external capital. With these resources, they create a product or service, and more importantly look for customers. They may not find customers immediately, but through a long and painful trial and error process, they will try many different recipes before they actually discover the recipe to find customers. Companies who can’t find enough customers will die. Initial capital is just delaying this fatal outcome. During this first phase till initial success, the organization is very fluid. The company strategy can be completed changed, the product can be completely changed, the production process can be completely changed … basically anything can be completely changed. A newly established organization is fluid and can reconfigure itself quickly, because it is still small, and more importantly it has nothing to lose doing so.
After a recipe to some initial commercial success has been painfully discovered, then the only strategy that make sense is to replicate it to grow the company. The initial recipe will be scientifically and meticulously improved, optimized, refined and scaled in all its components. Possibly by deploying additional capital, because the investment is now much less risky. This is what professional managers do. They perfect the execution of a recipe and balance risks doing so. Because now, as an established company with many shareholders, thousands of employees, suppliers, customers … the company has so much to lose by doing anything risky. Any established company must be risk averse or it will quickly disappear.
Fast forward a decade or more of commercial success optimizing the same recipe with a risk-averse mindset, which still has room for some internal innovation but only of the incremental type, then any company is no longer fluid but solid. If it’s a public company obsessed with short terms returns, then it’s a very dense solid. It is also a large organization by now, with many gatekeepers to company resources. An internal innovator would have to convince all of these gatekeepers for any significant new endeavor. This is clearly impossible unless the internal innovator is the CEO of the company. That's why companies lose their best innovators. That’s why significant innovation cannot be produced inside large companies, but it can nevertheless be brought in via acquisitions ... sometimes from ex-employees who left to start their own company!
What you see as an established company today, you can also see as a “fossil of its past successes”. That’s why an established company cannot be an innovation machine in my opinion. This was not always the case in the past. It’s probably a consequence of contemporary professional management, with too much emphasis on short-term, low risk and immediate returns.
It seems to be that simple: If you WANT innovation, you'll get innovation.
What most people (at least those willing to climb the corporate ladder) want however is a career. And within a corporate incentive structure, career and failure don't go well together. Creating value out of nothing is way harder than simply not screwing up existing value. So it's obvious what you're gonna get.
Eventually, there is no such thing as 'corporate innovation'. There could be a thing called 'corporate sponsored innovation garage', or something similar. At least for new business development from the ground up.
The promising way to pull that off it seems is a blend of YC startup school tutoring, venture capital, [Google] X, the innovation culture of Tesla/SpaceX and access to cutting edge technology/people - baked into the right incentive structure.
IF innovation was repeatable, I'd bet on such a vehicle and allocate resources there.