Breakthrough: Stories and Strategies of Radical Innovation review

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 19 Jan 2005

Where does innovation come from? This is the question addressed by Mark and Barbara Stefik, the former being an inventor and research fellow at one of the US's most famous and respected research institutions -- Xerox PARC. So many technologies we use every day were invented there: Ethernet, laser printers, screen fonts, personal computers with graphical interfaces. Mark Stefik himself came up with some key ideas in implementing digital rights management, while his wife and co-author Barbara Stefik is a pscyhologist in private practice. In Breakthrough, the pair try to answer the central question by interviewing Mark's PARC colleagues past and present, as well as other researchers and research managers, and examining the stories of some key innovations.

'Invention,' the Stefiks write, 'is having an idea; innovation is the other 99 percent of the work'. Managing innovation, they go on to say, isn't easy. And that's the point: you need to learn from the experience of those who have been successful at it.

The Stefiks talk about several types of research. Basic research, typically funded by universities and governments, aims at increasing fundamental knowledge. Radical research, typically carried out in corporately funded labs, addresses specific problems and is the source of most of the breakthroughs discussed in this book. Product development is the most specific and incremental, and comes very late in the process, after the breakthroughs have been made.

The authors also distinguish between closed and open innovation. Closed innovation, which dominated technology companies' work through much of the 20th century, was the province of a single company that would seek to hire the best technical people in an industry. The assumption that spending the most on research and development would assure continued industry leadership served Xerox, IBM and AT&T well for quite a few decades. Open innovation -- the technique IBM adopted in creating the PC -- is today's model of collaborating with industry partners and adopting technologies developed by start-ups. The downside is that standardisation can become a barrier to innovation.

One thing that strikes you on reading this book is how many great technologies were invented at PARC, but only brought to market when the inventors moved elsewhere -- Ethernet networking, laser printers and screen fonts are examples. As Mark Stefik notes in his epilogue, in 2000, when it became apparent that Xerox was in trouble, PARC began reinventing itself as a research company. Stefik was chosen to direct one of PARC's six laboratories, and writing this book was part of his efforts to understand what was happening to industrial research and what decisions he should make.

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