Creative People Must Be Stopped (21 page)

Being well informed will also be the basis for taking positive action to influence the process, which is what the Virgin example demonstrates. Of course you may not be able to act at the federal level, but there are alternatives. For one, you can take an active role in trade, professional, and industry associations that will, through the coordinated efforts of members, have sufficient resources to lobby. You may also work to influence the public debate through newspaper editorials and participation in social groups. In fact, these actions, in addition to aiding your innovation, are those expected of all citizens of a democratic society who would move that society to a better place.

Show Society a Better Way

Beyond the distraction that regulation creates for innovators, it can also constrain them by requiring that new ideas be tested against old standards. Society creates rules and laws based on the situation at one time and place. Although it endeavors to set them in ways that can withstand the test of time, sometimes the situation may change so drastically that the rule no longer makes sense. A premier pharmaceutical researcher I once worked with told me about a dispute she had with the FDA over the protocols being used for a clinical trial. In her company, a group of some of the best and most innovative statisticians in the world had devised a way to set up and analyze clinical trials in a way that made them shorter and that improved the outcomes for subjects by determining sooner whether a drug was working or not. If the drug were found to work as expected, those patients on controls or on placebo drugs would benefit by being moved to the drug sooner. If it wasn't working as expected, the trial could end sooner, and the researchers would remove the subjects from possible harm sooner. Clearly this would be good for the patients and good for the company as well. However, the FDA had very particular rules about how the clinical trials were to be conducted and how the statistics had to be calculated in order to consider a trial as valid.

The work of innovation in this case was clear. Instead of “throwing away” their experiment and walking away, or spending yet more time on the math, the statisticians engaged in a “mutual education campaign” with their counterparts at the FDA, trying to bring them to a “more sophisticated statistical understanding” while allowing the FDA to teach them about the significant implications of allowing additional risk.

Even though the value may seem obvious and evident to an innovator, it may not be quite so obvious to other stakeholders. Beyond the problems of articulating our ideas to others without error and of providing proof that they work, conflicts based in divergent roles and values may be lurking below the surface. The smart innovator will try to seek them out. As the target of an innovation, the FDA did exactly the right thing. As an important regulator in society, its role is not to accept innovation but to ensure that innovations don't have the potential for generating unacceptable harm. These role differences will affect perceptions of values. Be sure you understand and acknowledge these up front.

Don't Let the Rules Distract You

In the documentary
Triumph of the Nerds
, which details the development of the early personal computer industry, one chapter describes the invention of the first spreadsheet program. Harvard Business School student Dan Bricklin dreamed up the idea of VisiCalc, and he convinced MIT graduate student Bob Frankston to code it. It was one of the killer applications, like email, that drove the PC industry to prominence during the 1980s, in particular because of its effect in the financial industry. Individuals could “run the numbers” at their desks and no longer needed to use their company's mainframes and computer experts to help them make business decisions. VisiCalc enjoyed a great deal of success for a time, but its inventors soon saw their thunder (and profits) stolen when their invention was copied by others, notably Lotus and Microsoft. The obvious question that this brings up is asked so often that Dan Bricklin posted the answer on a page in his Web site, titled “Why didn't we patent the spreadsheet? Were we stupid?”

He points out that whereas software is routinely patented now, software patents were rarely granted in 1979 when VisiCalc was revealed to the public. At the time, the designers consulted with a reputable patent attorney, who gave them, at best, a 10 percent chance of being granted a patent, and only then if they could hide the fact that it was software. Bricklin suggests that although they could have moved forward with the patent, despite the high costs and the low probability of success, it would have caused an immense distraction to creating and running their business. This would have also been exacerbated by an additional distraction: that of being ostracized from the software developer community. Patenting software was not only a legal issue; it was not considered a socially acceptable thing to do. The best software writers of the time all borrowed concepts and ideas from each other; it was part of the culture to give and to receive. To turn around and patent an idea that in all likelihood contained ideas developed by that community would not only have been wrong but also would have killed the sharing, camaraderie, and rapid growth that made VisiCalc possible in the first place.

Of course when society's controls are a direct constraint on your innovation, you need to center your attention on that constraint, as did Richard Branson. However, when the constraint is not critical, binding, or integral to adoption, becoming distracted by it may cause more harm than good. In any innovation there are going to be a number of issues that need to be resolved for the innovation to work. The point here is to focus on the critical ones first; if you don't get past the most critical showstopping constraints, accomplishing the rest will be meaningless anyway.

History Constraints: The Past Isn't Dead—It Isn't Even Past

The writer William Faulkner famously wrote that the past is never dead. As a native of the American South, Faulkner had an especially keen appreciation of the way yesterday's (and yesteryore's) experiences and decisions continue to shape—that is, constrain—the world of the present.

History's constraints are reflected in words like
standards, conventions, traditions
, and even
infrastructure
. I find it useful to break these down into three general types of constraints. First, there are the constraints of the
things
already in the world. Physical infrastructure, such as highways and copper telephone lines, falls into this category. Second, there are the constraints of existing
skills and practices
, such as using a keyboard or driving a stick-shift car. Finally, there are the constraints of prevalent
understandings
. These are the formal traditions and standards that we inherit and use to assert our identities and to make sense of the world, such as how we honor people who have died, how we decide who pays for a wedding, or even which side of the plate to put the fork.

Working with (or Around) Those Things Already in the World

Technological decisions and subsequent investments made to realize them can come forward from the past, as they require us to make particular design decisions about our innovations. For example, electric cars theoretically could be charged anywhere—you can probably see a number of power outlets from where you sit right now. But you probably would not want to charge your car where you are sitting. In fact, many of the places where you might like to conveniently charge your car, perhaps in front of your house or in your garage, may not have power at all or may have only a relatively low-power source. This lack of basic infrastructure, or the cost of adding it to your home or workplace, will certainly enter the equation if you contemplate buying an electric car.

Similarly, potential adopters of the Segway soon found that the existing infrastructure of roads intended primarily for automobiles and of sidewalks intended primarily for pedestrians left them very few places to ride, and still fewer useful ones.

The Inertia of What People Already Know

Innovations may also run into obstacles in the form of the “infrastructure” of people's existing knowledge and skills. Consider that heinous invention the QWERTY keyboard, which is named after the top row of letters on the left-hand side. There are numerous alternative keyboard arrangements that are easier to learn and much more efficient for entering text into a computer. Yet the keyboards in common use around the globe all display the QWERTY layout, which was first designed by Christopher Sholes in 1868.

Sholes's layout—a definite innovation at the time—was created to address the problem of jamming, a common and frustrating occurrence in the alphabetically arranged mechanical keyboards of the day, which also limited the typing speed that could be achieved. His solution was elegant, and manufacturing rights for the Sholes-Gidden Type Writer were sold to E. Remington & Sons, a well-known sewing machine and armaments company at the time. Remington began production and marketing of its typewriters in 1873.

But even then there were other possible options. In 1893, George Blickensderfer designed a typewriter intended to compete with Remington. His layout had the most commonly used letters in the bottom row, which provided a more efficient typing experience. Further, because he used a ball as the type head (an innovation that reappeared decades later in the IBM Selectric), his typewriter did not have the jamming problem that the Sholes layout had solved. The Blickensderfer design had everything a successful innovation should have. It was faster, lighter, and cheaper. So, with a more effective and efficient solution available, why did people stick with QWERTY? It seems to me that the short twenty-year advantage that the QWERTY design had in the market had created a skill base of sufficient size that there was too much history to overcome. And now, with more than a century of additional experience behind us, the idea of a wholesale change to a more efficient and more ergonomic layout is downright laughable.

The Persistence of Historical Standards

History is also the source of many of the expectations that we bring to new products or services. Traditions about how things should look, how they should be made, or how they should behave can also act as constraints.

Some of these expectations take the form of accepted standards against which new versions of the product or service are judged. Inventor Thomas Edison worked tirelessly to perfect his phonograph so that recorded music could meet the standard set by live performance—the only way anyone had ever heard music performed in all of history. Ultimately he was able to give demonstrations in which performances by singers on a darkened stage alternated with recordings of themselves, while audiences were challenged to tell the difference (“The History . . .,” n.d.). (Decades later, the Memorex company used a similar ploy to market its audiotapes in memorable television commercials that asked, “Is it live or is it Memorex?”)

Incidentally, the Great Innovator himself was by no means immune to expectations conditioned by history. Despite his pioneering role in reproducing sound (and also in helping create motion pictures), Edison was dismayed when silent movies began to be replaced by “talkies.” “There isn't any more good acting on the screen,” he complained. “They concentrate on the voice now; they've forgotten how to act” (Clark, 1977, p. 237).

The Edison and Memorex tales were relived again when CDs made their appearance in the early 1980s. At the time, I happened to be working in a very high-end stereo store. When the first CD players arrived, they were rare and very expensive. Partly because it was fun and partly because it made us feel like experts, my coworkers and I made a game of teaching customers how to hear the “important differences between CDs and vinyl,” especially when records were played on one of the excellent but traditional turntables we had in stock. With the lack of true high-performance CD players in that early stage of the technology, people shopping in a store that catered to audiophiles were easily and happily convinced that the technology they already knew and identified with was superior. Twenty years later, the wheel turned again, and the same arguments began to be heard about the relative fidelity of CDs and MP3 recordings.

The ways we cook, eat, and dress, and in fact all the ways we live our lives are potentially subject to being compared or valued through traditional views. When we propose an innovation, our potential adoptees will look at and assess it, not only in functional terms but also in terms of what it signals about their role in society.

Overcoming History Constraints

Not only is the past not dead, but it also continues to create an obligation for innovators. Even when we choose not to conform to the dictates of history, we should acknowledge the power that
what came before
can have on the willingness of society to accept our proposals for change.

Leverage the Existing Infrastructure

Earlier I mentioned the need to supply power to electric cars as an example of an infrastructure constraint. Electric car makers have coined the term “range anxiety” to describe the uneasy feeling people have about adopting electric cars, despite the facts that fewer than 10 percent of people in the United States drive more than one hundred miles a day (the current target range on production electric cars) and that many U.S. families (particularly ones in a position to consider such a purchase) already have at least one other car that can travel farther. Nevertheless, the decision is a hard one because our sense of convenience (and personal safety) is constrained by decisions made long in the past.

Ignoring my proposal of supplying a very long extension cord, one maker of electric cars has been looking for places in the power infrastructure that will favorably support recharging the car. For example, both restaurants and most retail spaces have industrial-strength feeds of the type of three-phase 480-volt power required to charge a car in a relatively short time. These are also the exact kinds of places that people are likely to drive to and where they are likely to spend some time once they are there. Alliances or partnerships with those kinds of establishments can help them become more attractive to the electric car owners while easing the cost of infrastructure development for the car makers. Although the cost of developing and maintaining alliances is certainly not negligible, it is certainly going to be far less than creating the required infrastructure from scratch. As I noted earlier, digital cameras were also able to enjoy spectacular adoption rates as all the ancillary equipment needed to edit, store, and print their photographic output was already present for adopters in the form of personal computers, hard disks, and printers.