Does innovation come about by luck or hard work? Is it a flash of inspiration or the result of careful management? Are innovators born or taught? In Closing the Innovation Gap, Judith Estrin provides the answers to these and other questions critical to our future. A technology pioneer and business leader, Estrin describes what will be required to reignite the spark of innovation in business, education, and government--ensuring our long-term success in the global economy.
Innovation does not occur in a vacum. It grows from the interplay of thre drivers of creative change--research, development, and application. Estrin calls this dynamic the “Innovation Ecosystem,” explaining how these communities work together to create sustainable innovation.
Closing the Inovation Gap covers:
- America's role as the primary driver of global innovation after World War II--explaining what worked, the subsequent decline, and how to regain traction
- The fundamentals required to nurture innovation, including five simple but important values for transforming your organization into a force for productive change
- How you can ensure that your business benefits from a thriving “Innovation Ecosystem”
- Examples from both established companies, start-ups, and research labs that illustrate the power of inovation in providing a decisive business advantage and foundation for growth
Leaders in busines and public service “must think beyond short-term financial results and understand the impact of globalization and an accelerated pace of change on future economic growth,” says Estrin. With Closing the Innovation Gap as your guide, business leaders will gain key insights into identifying thier needs, asking the right questions, testing new ideas, and successfully leading thier organization to the fronteirs of twenty first-century inovation.
EAN: 9780071499873
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Should I buy the Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy?
compelling wake-up call for America with actionable ideas
Judy Estrin has done a terrific job of tackling a difficult subject and making it digestible without `dumbing down' the issues or the proposed solutions. I also found it a very enjoyable read (although of course it is not a feel-good subject.) Ms. Estrin makes compelling points about the need to improve our educational system as well as fund basic research, bringing in relevant data and results of prior initiatives, as well as weaving in commentary from scores of other highly respected and knowledgeable people. This book is a wake-up call for America, with ideas for both bottom-up as well as top-down action. Highly recommended.
Greatest Business Book In a Generation
Not since Tom Peters wrote "In Search of Excellence" in 1983 has a book this good been written about how to achieve success in American business. In between, has been a succession of OTHER books containing one or two very basic ideas written in a creative way to fill up a book, written for a dumbed down audience, that could have been summarized in a sentence or two. THIS book breaks that mold and finally brings forward information about companies, most of whom are absolutely minting money, who achieved success through innovation, and what it takes to get there. And, like In search of Excellence, it's written in an intelligent style, yet one that anyone can understand.
The companies that had been successful since Tom Peters wrote his groundbreaking book understand what it takes to foster innovation and go about achieving it in a profitable manner. Among the many companies the authoro looks at, Pixar is investigated, as is Google, a seemingly one-hit wonder, that, in fact, had to bring many innovative concepts to the market before it was unable to unlock the billions in value it has today. Not only did Google have to solve a search problem, and keep people from gaming their system, they had to come up with a system to allow advertisers to take advantage of the search results (Google's Ad Sense System) and they also had to build an unparalleled computer network to gather, organize and bring back those amazingly accurate search results from among the vast internet in a blink of an eye (Google's so called "cloud computing system").
The understanding of the innovative processes led Pixar, Google and many others to continue to innovate to achieve their amazing financial success where other companies, ever driven to achieve quick results that could be flipped to another company for a quick, but tiny, profit, would have given up long before that process was complete. Both of those two companies were unsuccessful for more than 5 years before they finally unlocked the value they had been working towards.
This book pulls apart and analyzes the innovation techniques of companies large and small, both the successes and the failures, and what it took to learn from those failures, and even why failures are an important part of the innovative process. The author is probably the only person in America who could have written such a book because she has started and sold a number of companies, and has driven the process of innovation at other companies, and she knows just about every successful innovator in the technology industry for the last 30 years.
Not only are the successes analyzed, but so are the failures. Quicken had a string of failures in addition to their successes, and the author identifies what caused the difference between the successes and failures.
This book is not only a must read for engineering managers at every company, but also the business and finance people who can frequently lead them in the wrong direction by demanding the wrong results at inappropriate times, or failing to support a process that can take much longer than anyone expects.
Additionally, any politician and policy maker will want to understand this process. There hasn't been another Pixar or Google started in the last ten years. Why is that and what have the incentives done to the process of innovation in the country? All of that gets answered in this one book.
The book is the opposite of most other business books: instead of one or two very basic ideas spread out over the whole book and repeated endlessly, there are 5 ideas on every page, each supported before the author moves on. Where the other books are largely a waste of time for an intelligent person, this book is packed FULL of great ideas.
Only once in a generation do you get to have access to this much information in this short of a read. This is that book. What Tom Peters did a generation ago has now been duplicated by a book that dives into innovation the way Tom Peters picked apart the process of achieving excellence so many years ago. There was only one person who could have written it so well.
How to establish and then sustain a healthy innovation ecosystem
If I fully understand Judy Estrin's key points (and I may not), there are at least two "gaps" that need to be reduced, if not closed: between where innovation in the US once was and where it is now as well as between where innovation in the US is now and where it could (and should) be. One of the important - and most useful -- terms on her book is "innovation ecosystem." In an Introduction that really should be read 2-3 times before embarking on the first of eight chapters, Estrin observes that "Biological ecosystems that sustain life are models for the organizations, people, and forces that enable innovation. Life flourishes because of a dynamic interaction between communities of living organisms and their environment...In Innovation Ecosystems, the collaborative organisms include scientists, product developers, businesspeople, service providers, and customers, all of whom participate in one or more of three communities: research, development, and application. Ongoing- sustainable innovation results from interactions between [and among] these communities at an organizational, national, and global level."
Contrary to appearances that suggest that the American Ecosystem is stable and secure, Estrin asserts, "we are rapidly losing our advantage." Who are "we"? America, of course, but the
"we" could also refer to the reader and her or his associates in the same organization or to everyone on Earth. So it can be argued that, in fact, there are three (rather than two) "gaps" to be reduced, if not closed, and the third exists on a global basis. That is, there is an innovation gap between what is now being achieved worldwide, and, what could be achieved if communication, cooperation, and (most important of all) collaboration between and among nations were more effective and productive.
Others have their own reasons for holding this book in such high regard. Here are three of mine. First, Estrin makes it crystal clear early on and frequently thereafter that she does not have all the right answers. One of her objectives, rather, is to raise many of what she considers to be the right questions about innovation initiatives in research, development, and application, then to provide her own answer to each. Questions such as these:
1. What is a healthy Innovation Ecosystem?
2. How to establish one? How to sustain it?
3. Meanwhile, how to accommodate immediate and short-term needs?
4. What is "green-thumb leadership" and why is it essential to sustainable innovation?
5. What will an "enormous global transformation require"?
As indicated earlier, Estrin provides her own responses to these and other questions, supplemented by real-world examples of noteworthy initiatives at companies such as Pixar, FedEx, Cisco Systems, Genomic Health, eBay, Apple Computer, Google, Intel, and Procter & Gamble.
I also appreciate the fact that Estrin conducted in-depth interviews of more than 100 of the most important authorities in the field of innovation, then included hundreds of observations and opinions from those interviewed. Here's one of several that caught my eye:
"We have no formal procedure. No one has ever had to write a proposal. Anyone can propose a new project or project area at any time. First, we're in brainstorming mode, when all you have to do is build the idea. Then we get critical and evaluate the idea along several dimensions, like risk-reward ratios and how much technology headroom there is. If we do it, will anybody care? If something looks like it's in the sweet spot, and resource requirements are reasonable, we say `Yeh, go do it.'" Peter Hart, Ricoh Innovation Group; group senior vice president, Ricoh Company (Page 121)
These specifics are important to serving Estrin's purposes. Although she offers or cites numerous theories and hypotheses, she is a tireless empiricist as she focuses on what is and isn't happening as well as a relentless pragmatist who is determined to know what does and doesn't work...and to understand why.
Here's the third of several reasons that I hold this review in such high regard. In the eighth and final chapter, she shifts her attention to "Next-Generation Innovators" and the importance, now, of improving the development of young minds. She poses four questions "about the future of education," offers brief comments on the issues each question raises, and then suggests that to find the best answers to these questions, "we will need to try a variety of approaches, ensuring that we collect the right data to assess and adapt while not stifling learning by applying metrics of questionable value. Agreeing with the ancient African proverb that "it takes a village to raise a child," Estrin notes that education does not begin and end in the classroom. "Young people's attitudes are profoundly influenced by the culture at large, and there, too, forces working against the development of future generations of innovators are in play." Quite true.
Perhaps if we view Earth as a "village" rather than as a planet, and perhaps if we can somehow tackle various challenges together, global collaboration can achieve and then sustain an Innovation Ecosystem within which there will continue to be necessary changes "at both disruptive and incremental levels" and meanwhile remember that "failure can be just another step toward success" and that if everyone involved is determined "to honestly self-assess and learn from every experience." Judy Estrin offers a bold vision in this book, to be sure, but also offers a wealth of information and insights to make that reality for us, perhaps, but certainly for generations to come.
Intelligent and compelling wake-up call
This is a profound and well-written wake-up call about research and innovation, and what it takes to really come up with the new products and ideas that make history and industry. The author uses her wide experience and inside knowledge of major companies to make an excellent case of what we need to do now to restore US competitiveness. It comes as a surprise to learn how the US has been systematically dismantling the structures that made it the leading innovator in the world. It is a pleasure to read, and helps you understand that developing new things is not so much a matter of luck as a function of the right institutions, attitudes and values.
Accepting The Challenge
"Closing the Innovation Gap" reads wonderfully -- so well, that I was able to finish reading this book in one weekend! The author has a chatty style that makes me think I am hearing the author speak the words on the page. More importantly, there is a serious message here, one we need to heed. The United States must decided it can afford to support and sustain innovation, an engine that drives the economy.
Prof. Richard N. Zare
Department of Chemistry
Stanford University
