Perhaps the greatest creation of Thomas Edison may have been his invention factory. His Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory was the worldís first R&D facility. He built it for the ìrapid and cheap development of an inventionî and delivered on his promise of ìa minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.î In six years of operation, it generated more than 400 patents.
Rather than focusing on one invention, one field of expertise, or one market, Edison created a setting that enabled his inventors to move easily in and out of separate pools of knowledge, to keep learning new ideas and to use old ideas in novel situations.
They used old ideas and materials in new ways. The phonograph blended elements from past work on telegraphs, telephones, and electric motors.
In 1820, H.C. Oersted, a Dane, discovered that a wire carrying an electric current was surrounded by a magnetic field. In 1825, W. Strugeon, an Englishman, wound a live wire around an iron bar and created an electromagnet. In 1859, H. van Helmholtz, a German, discovered he could make piano strings vibrate by singing to them. Later L. Scott, a Frenchman, attached a thin stick to a membrane; when he spoke to the membrane, the other end of the stick would trace a record of his voice sounds on a piece of smoked glass. Then, in 1874, a Scotsman from Canada, working in Cambridge MA, put these elements into one instrument. The instrument was the telephone and the man was Alexander Graham Bell. The only thing Bell contributed was a fresh synthesis; there was no new discovery.
An example of a modern invention factory is IDEO. IDEO has developed thousands of products with companies in dissimilar fields such as medical instruments, furniture, toys and computers. IDEO fosters an atmosphere conducive to freely expressing ideas, breaking the rules and freeing people to design their own work environments.
In innovation there is talent, there is ingenuity, and there is knowledge. But in the end, innovation requires hard, focused and purposeful work. If diligence, persistence and commitment are lacking, then no amount of talent, ingenuity or knowledge will produce results.
Resource:
Hargadon, Andrew and Robert I. Sutton; Building an Innovation Factory, Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000
Lawrence, Paul R. and Nitin Nohria, Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, Jossey-Bass 2001.
