The Not-So-Secret Word Is Innovation

Editor's Note

December 2004 / January 2005 By: Bob Cochnar Volume 2 Number 6

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Suddenly, or so it would seem, we've discovered innovation as panacea—the magic bullet that will solve all of America's problems and ensure for us a golden future. A new book on the subject (They Made America, Little Brown) by Harold Evans has been receiving glowing reviews and probably for good reason. Evans doesn't confuse inventors with innovators.

Innovators, he says, aren't the brainy people who conceive an idea, but the practical, rolled-up-sleeves types that turn the invention in a product that changes the world. Or, at least, a better product than any that went before it.

Thus, Alexander Graham Bell, who thought he invented a machine that would be used to develop the voice and lungs rather than a device for long-distance conversation, wasn't an innovator. Theodore Vail, the founder of AT&T, saw and took advantage of the potential of the telephone; he was an innovator.

The Council on Competitiveness is about to release its National Innovation Initiative, the result of a year-long study. In its vision statement, the Council said "innovation fosters the new ideas, technologies and processes that lead to better jobs, higher wages and a higher standard of living. For advanced nations no longer able to compete on cost, the capacity to innovate is the most critical element in sustaining competitiveness."

And so it seems more than appropriate that TechComm (which bills itself as the National Journal of Technology Commercialization) devote the better part of this issue to innovation. After all, nothing can be more innovative than a prescient individual who takes an idea from a national laboratory and transforms it into a marketable product.

In this issue, Taffy Kingscott, IBM's director of innovation policy (and how many companies are charged with innovation?) issues a stark challenge: "Where we once optimized our organizations for efficiency and quality, we must now optimize our entire society for innovation."

Our national energy labs are, of course, incubators for innovation as several articles in this issue make plain. One measure of their success can be seen in the annual R&D 100 Awards. (See page 17); the labs snared about a third of them. Other innovation hotbeds, because of the synergistic aspects, are the nation's science and technology parks (the article is adjacent to this column).

Norman Augustine, the retired chairman of Lockheed Martin and co-chair of the advisory committee of the National Innovation Initiative, observes that the country as a whole isn't doing especially well in the innovation arena (page 23). Federal funding of basic research, for example, which is the primary source of funding, has been reduced in recent years from 2 percent of GDP to less than 1 percent, which is an alarming trend.

Augustine proposes a 10-point plan that, he says, "would help assure that innovation in America prospers and that we do not continue to eat our seed corn." It won't be cheap, he allows, "but the jobs it would create, the boost it would give the economy, the additional tax receipts it would generate, would in all probability more than offset its cost."

Are you an innovator? "The principal quality of an innovator," Harold Evans writes, lies less in the cortex than in the epidermis. An innovator without a thick skin will fail, because anyone advocating change is invariably pursued by swarms of stinging naysayers."

So, to paraphrase a Biblical injunction, "be fruitful and innovate." And enjoy this issue of TechComm.