After reading an early account of Art Fry’s role in the birth of Post-its, I wrote him to suggest 3M make its sticky notepaper in jigsaw-puzzle sizes. This way, puzzles—with their pieces held in place by 3m’s forgiving adhesive—could be safely moved from the dining room table when more important activity, like eating, required it.
Withered by family puzzlers accusing me of losing vital pieces any time I slid a half-completed picture onto a scrap of plywood, I was hot to cut a deal. With Puzzle-its, I’d at last be free of abusive enthusiasts, and possibly even rich. No more “What happened to the Kremlin?” or “Where the hell did Rhode Island go?!”
Fry never did write back, a blow. My consolation prize was a free lesson in the difficulties of trying to think outside my own box to get some buzz going inside another, in this case 3M’s. Andrew Hargadon’s How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, 2003) deals with how people, ideas and things occupying their conventionally separate worlds can mix it up in other worlds and power up recombinant discovery.
If innovations are happy accidents waiting to happen, Breakthroughs aims to help companies become more accident-prone. It is a roadmap across barriers inside and outside companies and industries, folded into a how-to manual for creating new relationships and networks.
Continuous innovation requires not just thinking outside the box, Hargadon contends, but thinking inside someone else’s. He cites Ford borrowing the idea of the assembly line from meat packers; sewing machine manufacturers lifting the idea of interchangeable parts from gun makers; and Reebok going into the medical supply world, via consultants at Design Continuum, and fashioning IV bags into adjustable blow-up splints for sports shoes.
The process requires not just crossing traditional boundaries but mustering support—colleagues, investors, suppliers and, not least, buyers—to ensure innovations succeed. Reebok had all its pieces so perfectly in place that it could compress product development to a blip in time, ramp up mass production quickly and seize a huge market overnight.
Teamwork is essential, as Hargadon, ’86, MS ’90, points out. The “muckers” who worked in Edison’s famous Menlo Park, N.J., lab often had much more to do with inventions he is commonly given credit for than he did. And as Einstein acknowledged, his theory of relativity was possible only because others had laid the groundwork.
Innovating and moving on is what business is about these days. Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian long ago observed that Route 101 eclipsed Route 128 because Silicon Valley was essentially more fluid: talent moved in and out of start-ups; ideas spread quickly. On the East Coast, companies kept things bottled up, discouraging cross-fertilization and much notion of moving on. (Try as it did to renew itself with workstations, Digital Equipment never got out of the rut it dug for itself staying in minicomputers way past checkout time.)
But differences between the coasts could be overstated. Given today’s multicampus operations and increased outsourcing, geographic distinctions that prevailed before have blurred into insignificance.
Hargadon lays out strategies for enabling innovation inside companies and for getting outside help, and talks about how office politics can play in the background. He peppers the text with examples, often the same ones, unfortunately. The story of how the pneumatic system in a toy water gun was adapted in the design of a medical tool keeps popping up like a rabbit in a carnival shooting gallery.
Breakthroughs gets repetitive. We’re constantly told how Edison et al. didn’t conjure up gems on their own or how recombining what exists achieves revolutionary results faster than trying to invent from scratch. And of the value of moving across disciplines—perhaps the mother of truisms. Still, as Hargadon says, Hewlett-Packard, after crediting R&D breadth for its success, spun off its instruments business anyway. Hargadon is at his best assessing how different approaches foster or impede innovation, and one might wish HP had read him first.
Another improvement would be a better index. Art Fry is discussed but doesn’t make it. Ditto for Stanford and other names. Many publishers long ago dispensed with useful subject entries—the much-discussed Internet gets only one—and now it looks like time spent indexing names is a drag on bottom lines, too. But these gripes aside, Breakthroughs makes a useful addition to the corporate survival kit.
JOEL McCORMICK writes on technology and finance, primarily from Asia.
