Thinking About Innovation: How Coffee, Libraries, Western Movies, Modern Art, and AI Changed the World of Business

By Roger D Smith

Thinking About Innovation is a comprehensive exploration of the dynamic forces of change that have shaped our history and continue to dictate the evolution of business landscapes. This essential volume for leaders and innovators offers a deep di

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modelbenders LLC
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781938590115

Roger D Smith

Roger Smith, Ph.D., has over 30 years of experience creating leading-edge software applications in healthcare, defense, and education. He served as an executive Chief Technology Officer for AdventHealth Systems; U.S. Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO-STRI); and the Titan Division of L3Harris Corp. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, a Doctorate in Management, an MBA, an M.S. in Statistics, and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics. He has received service awards from the US Army, Association for Computing Machinery, Society for Computer Simulation, and AFCEA.

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Foreword

In 2008 the Editor of Research Technology Management asked if I would be interested in writing a regular column on a topic of interest to industrial research managers. As a practicing CTO I was regularly challenged to solve specific problems within our projects, identify ways to optimize our business practices, and search for competitive advantages that would differentiate us from the competition. This made me an avid reader of books on leadership, change management, creativity, and innovation. For the column I needed to combine lessons from these books, real problems from within the company, and experiences from creating new solutions. All of this had to be done without revealing proprietary information about our internal business strategies, and it had to be done on a publishing schedule.

That column has now run for over ten years and has become the most popular item in the journal. During that time I changed jobs several times, but remained in a technology leadership position like Technical Director, VP of Technology, Chief Scientist, or Chief Technology Officer, the latter being the most common. Through my 12 years in a CTO-like role I have constantly struggled to stimulate innovation at work and to describe or prescribe new practices in the RTM column.

Those columns and several additional papers are collected here for the benefit of other leaders who are faced with similar challenges. From experience I know that no two companies or leaders face exactly the same problems. But the ideas in these chapters will inspire and equip you to handle your unique situations more effectively.

I remain … A CTO Thinking About Innovation.

Preface

The Sect of Innovation …

It is customary for books on innovation to offer a definition of the term somewhere in the opening chapters. But, by now, every reader has seen the few leading definitions and will likely skip over their repeated appearance. Readers typically come to a book on innovation with their own internal definition of this broad and somewhat vague term. In fact, many of them consider it a form of innovation to fiercely maintain a personally unique and even contradictory definition of innovation. Therefore, I will refrain from attempting to explain what innovation is, assuming that the reader already has a working definition that they are quite happy with.

Through the 1990’s and 2000’s the cult of innovation grew very robustly. Today, there are at least 3,000 business books on the subject of innovation with nearly 300 being added each year. It seems that the members of the innovation cult have a voracious appetite for innovative ideas about innovation. The flock and their priestly gurus aggressively proselytize the concept with the hope of winning millions to the cause. Those being inducted into the faith read the scriptures on innovation and become concerned for the soul of their business. Should they refuse to convert to innovation-ism, they fear that the entire organization will be disrupted and left on the trash heap of history. So most accept the faith, and work to incorporate its doctrines into their daily business practices.

By the second decade of the 21st century, every leader, executive, manager, academic, student, and aspirant has heard of innovation and has added it as an adjective to their professional profile, resume, and mission statement. Inwardly, we all fear that we might not be changing fast enough and some super-innovator will emerge from behind, zoom past us, and snatch away our promotion, raise, or business.

Definitions from the Inspired Book of Innovation:

Innovation 1:1—A new idea, method, or device (Merriam-Webster.com)

Innovation 1:2—The process by which an idea or invention is translated into a good or service for which people will pay, or something that results from this process. To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. (BusinessDictionary.com)

Innovation 1:3—The creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a new idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself. (Wikipedia.org)

I expect that most readers of this book are not hearing about innovation for the first time, but rather are seeking new and stimulating ideas on the subject which will help them maintain an open, inquisitive, and creative mind.

Business practitioners will probably come to this book having already read the excellent works of Clayton Christensen, Henry Chesbrough, Eric von Hipple, Andrew Hargadon, CK Prahalad, W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne, Richard Leifer, Edward Roberts, and others.

Academic researchers will have read the papers of Burns & Stalker, Utterback, Rogers, Tushman, Katz, Leonard-Barton, Sharif, and dozens like them.

All of these works have inspired and directed the ideas and practices presented in this book. All of those authors have made a difference in the business practices and academic writings of hundreds of people, including my own.

The Practice of Innovation …

My career as an innovator began long before the term was widely used or revered. I emerged from college (the first time) with degrees in mathematics and statistics and found myself conducting research into new applications of national security systems. As a mathematician I was expected to create new algorithms to describe the physical and conceptual behavior of aircraft, weapons, and their targets on the ground. I was an innovator and did not know it yet.

In the late 1980s’ and early 1990’s all mathematicians and scientists who could type were swept into the ranks of computer programmers, both eagerly and against their wills. The demand for computerization of every aspect of the world turned most scientific jobs into full-time or part-time programming jobs. In this role, I found myself creating computer software to describe the behaviors of systems in the real world that had never before been captured in a computable form. I had been swept into yet another form of innovation.

My success in creating software and in writing business proposals to capture new clients led to multiple promotions through Senior this and Director that, until I found myself with the title of Chief Technology Officer. A review of the literature revealed that there had been very little work to define what a CTO was and what one was expected to do. But, the dot.com era called for a C-suite position for the geniuses who created the products, so every company had to have one. While exercising my CTO responsibility to identify new technologies that could have a substantial positive or negative impact on our business, I also exercised the responsibility of every Ph.D. to conduct research and publish new knowledge. In my case, I chose to spend a few years researching and defining the role of the CTO. Perhaps this made me a double innovator for a short time.

Finally, I arrive in the executive ranks with the responsibility to lead parts of the organization into the undefined and unknowable future, showing both confidence and insight to inspire the crew to new achievements. We can either be innovative or imitative with our products and services. The former promises recognition, financial reward, and organizational success. The latter threatens stasis, poor financial margins, and a slow decline. So we struggle to convince everyone that we must innovate or die, when in truth many would often rather die than innovate.

Insights on Innovation …

After 20 years of practicing innovation in science, technology, management, and leadership I believe that I have learned a few principles of successful innovation. The wisdom that I have gained from dozens of books and papers on the subject has also guided my practice and perspective on this important topic. The essays in this book illustrate many of those beliefs and experiences. There are a few key characteristics of innovation that aspiring practitioners should be aware of as illustrated in the essays. To insure that those characteristics are not missed, I will express some of them succinctly here.

• Innovation is always wished for, but generally not welcome when it arrives.

• Innovation generally occurs at the edges where two disciplines intersect.

• Innovation is difficult to sustain in any organization, either large or small.

• Innovation is driven by personal passion, talent, and initiative.

• Innovation is birthed by the young and old alike, age is not a barrier.

• Innovation is threatening when first met face to face.

• The birth of an innovative idea can be very messy, ugly, and terrifying.

• Innovation is appreciated only after it passes through its adolescent phase.

PART I

Innovation Culture

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Chapter 1

The Elixir of Innovation

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In his famous diaries, Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century London author, described his daily repast: Each morning he would break his fast with a pint of beer or ale. At mid-day, he would lunch on meat, bread, and a pint of either beer or wine. On the way home in the evening, he would stop for ale or hard liquor. Dinner included at least another pint of beer.

Pepys’s menu was not unusual. Entire countries were awash in an alcoholic stupor. In the majority of the population, this continuous sotting of the brain engendered a lethargy of body and mind that suppressed productivity and dulled creativity. Even a hundred years later, the effects were evident; Benjamin Franklin describes the situation as he found it in the London printing house to which he was apprenticed in 1725:

I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of beer. On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered to see, from this and several instances, that the Water-American, as they called me, was stronger than themselves, who drank strong beer!

We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.

Europe found its solution to this problem in 1652, with the introduction of a wondrous new elixir that came to London in the hands of an Armenian named Pasqua Rosee. Rosee opened a new kind of pub in St. Michael’s Alley, serving a Turkish brewed beverage known as kaweh, a word that translates as strength and vigor. Today, we are more familiar with the English adaptation of that word, coffee. From that single café, the new drink, previously little known in Europe, grew rapidly in popularity: there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses in England by 1675, just 23 years later. This was an expansion on the order of Starbucks’ growth in the 1990s.

Pasqua Rosee himself benefited from the new business, most likely opening multiple houses in London and other parts of England. In 1672, he became an international franchiser when he opened the first coffeehouse in Paris. Rosee enjoyed a citywide monopoly on the business across Paris for 14 years, until his first competitor opened in 1686.

When he opened his Paris coffeehouse, Rosee may not have been thinking of anything larger than expanding his own personal wealth, but his business had huge effects—it arguably became a pillar of the nascent French Enlightenment. Rosee’s house was one of the meeting places for French Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, who is credited with creating the first modern encyclopedia in that coffeehouse.

But certainly, caffeine cannot not singlehandedly transform a country into an innovation machine. If it were that simple, every country would just import stimulants to trigger the creation of new ideas and new businesses and buoy their economies. It was certainly important that France’s great thinkers weren’t wine-addled, but coffee, and the coffeehouses in which it was served, provided other important supports, nourishing individual creativity in less obvious ways by providing a community and a culture that sparked ideas and supported innovation

Community and Culture

Coffeehouses provided both the meeting places that brought great minds into contact—allowing their ideas to collide and grow with unprecedented productivity—and the fuel for their discussions. Suddenly, intellectuals across the continent, chemically stimulated by coffee, were engaging in vigorous political discussion, advancing philosophy, and creating new schools of art—and entire new industries: the insurance industry was born with the creation of Lloyd’s of London in a coffeehouse in 1688, the London Stock Exchange formed in one in 1698, and Sotheby’s and Christie’s were each formed in coffeehouses, in 1744 and 1759, respectively. Similarly, Wall Street (the New York Stock Exchange), which was famously started under a buttonwood tree in 1792, found its first home inside the Tontine Coffee House just a few months later.

Lloyd’s of London is a particularly interesting case. Edward Lloyd was originally a coffeehouse owner. Located near the Tower of London, where shipping businesses converged, Lloyd’s Coffeehouse became a meeting place for ship owners, merchant exporters, and sailors. Presiding over this convergence of people with a common need gave Lloyd insight into the need for a more comprehensive way to insure ships and their cargo. Thus, Lloyd transformed himself from a coffeehouse proprietor to a broker, connecting those with a need for insurance and those with the financial means to provide it. Over time, he built Lloyd’s of London into an insurance market within which wealthy individuals and businesses could offer insurance to the shipping industry. This market approach to pooling resources and spreading risk proved more stable than any individual insurance company, whose limited resources put it at constant risk of being wiped out by a few large losses.

From a certain perspective, the meeting place may have been more important in sparking Lloyd’s innovation than the coffee itself. But the coffee provided both the reason for assembly and the fuel for long hours of discussion and problem solving. The wealthy virtuosi, who were expected to pursue learning for its own sake, might meet and exchange ideas at a salon or a scientific society meeting. But the merchants and craftsmen, shrewd innovators with a keen sense for a practical opportunity, had only the coffeehouses.

Other times and places also saw coffee-fueled bursts of innovation. In the 1960s, American folk music, and artists like Bob Dillon and Joni Mitchell, found a place to mature and build a following in coffeehouses. Those coffeehouses nurtured the social revolution that would come to define the period, and remake American society.

Similarly, the explosive wave of innovation that put Silicon Valley on the innovation map in the 1990s erupted almost symbiotically with the emergence of Starbucks and Pete’s Coffee & Tea, and their new dedication to coffeehouse culture.

Conclusion

Often, innovation is not driven by the brilliant insights of a single person or small group. Rather, it emerges from the clash of many ideas that occur in a social space, like a coffeehouse. In cases like those cited here, that productive exchange is enhanced by the chemical stimulant of the coffee itself, the social stimulant of the coffeehouses, and the cultural stimulants engendered by people’s encounters in the coffeehouses.

With these historical cases in mind, we might ask ourselves, where is the coffeehouse in my company? What am I doing to create and nourish an innovation community where I work? Are the chemical, social, and cultural stimulants needed for innovation accessible to everyone in my company?

Originally Published in Research Technology Management, Jan-Feb 2015

Chapter 2

Leonardo: Bridging the Gap

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The history of science is filled with the lives and legends of men and women who have made huge leaps forward in our knowledge and understanding. These people have made contributions that reverberate for centuries and their names have become synonymous with the science and the ideas that they created:

Copernicus, 1514: The sun does not move. The earth is not in the center of the circle of the sun, nor in the center of the universe.

Galileo, 1609: A large magnifying lens should be employed to study the surface of the moon and other heavenly bodies.

Isaac Newton, 1679: Every weight tends to fall towards the center by the shortest possible way.

Charles Darwin, 1856: Man does not vary from the animals except in what is accidental.

These are the names we have attached to each of these world-changing ideas, but none of the quotations came from the men who are credited with the concepts they describe. In fact, all are from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), predating by decades or centuries the great men who would fully define the ideas.

How can any single person