Boston, MA. Leo Baldwin, futurist and inventor, described the nature of innovation in an address to attendees of The Vision Show Wednesday morning. Baldwin holds 50 U.S. patents finding use in applications ranging from breweries to silicon fabs. Baldwin, who recently joined Amazon as principal engineer, prefaced his comments by saying the presentation was his own, not necessarily reflecting Amazon’s view of the topic.
Three factors drive innovation, he said: an idea must be novel and useful (many ideas are fun but not useful), and there must be a reasonable way to implement it. He said that in a previous stint at Amazon, the idea was floated to make a flexible Kindle reader. That might be fun—the Kindle mimics paper, which is flexible. But many people given a sheet of paper look for a way to support it in a comfortable reading position—bending it slightly, perhaps, or supporting it on a magazine or clipboard. Further, the e-ink used in the Kindle would not perform well in a flexible display. The concept was novel, but not necessarily useful or realizable.
He then asked, why innovate? The short response, he answered, is “innovate or die.” Sears should have been Amazon, he said. After all, the company had mastered the information superhighway of its time: catalogs, the telephone, and the postal service. The company failed to adapt and is shrinking.
To innovate, said Baldwin, “Be open to new ideas—that’s the first battle.” A corollary is, “Let go of old ideas.” Also, “reward failure.” That’s not to say “reward incompetence,” he emphasized, but it is appropriate to reward people who take a calculated risk at a moonshot project.
He then commented on diversity: gender, ethnicity, and age, of course, and going beyond legal requirements. An innovative team needs young people with new ideas and older people (who have already made mistakes) to guide them.
An innovative team should also be diverse with respect to work style. An innovative team needs relational thinkers (messy-desk people) as well as hierarchical thinkers (clean-desk people). The former (people like Einstein) will generate the big, breakout ideas; the latter will be innovative at the margins, handling tasks like generating a bill of materials, handling version control, or making gradual process improvements.
Further, he said, don’t tailor the team to your problem (another way of emphasizing diversity). Don’t precategorize the problem. Don’t assign only software engineers to software problems and hardware engineers to hardware problems. A problem that might at first seem to be a software problem might in fact be better solved using an FPGA. A problem that might lend itself to cloud computing may be better solved using a local DSP or ASIC, or vice-versa.
In addition, he advised providing the necessary resources to solving the problem (which should go without saying), and (less obvious) don’t embed a solution in your problem. A CEO, he said, might see a presentation on lasers and then specify a package tracking solution using lasers. The problem, Baldwin emphasized, is to develop a better package tracking solution. Lasers may or may not be a part of the optimal solution—that’s up to the innovation team to determine.
Finally, he noted the importance of serendipity (an example of the benefits of rewarding failure). He cited a project he was involved in 15 or so years ago involving axial lighting for a machine-vision system. The initial approach wasn’t successful. But what he learned was ultimately useful in developing a successful project he described in an article in Photonics Spectra.
In conclusion, he said, if you want to promote innovation, foster diversity of every kind, and let people play to their strengths. Your messy-desk big-idea person may not be the ideal person to complete a bill of materials. Turn that task over to a clean desk person, and let the big-idea person move on to the next challenge.