“Invention often occurs not because a person tries to be original, but because the person attempts to do something difficult. Necessity, the saying goes, is the mother of invention. I would add: not only necessity, but the sort of commitment that leads some people to put ‘unreasonable’ demands on themselves and their products.” –D.N. Perkins, The Mind’s Best Work
MEDIA
More Progress Faster with James Pethokoukis and Don Watkins
Why is progress important—and what’s holding it back? American Enterprise Institute economic policy analyst James Pethokoukis explains how he thinks about economic growth, how he avoids the trap of confirmation bias, and why the world needs optimistic science fiction.
James Pethokoukis, a columnist and an economic policy analyst, is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He also runs the Substack "Faster, Please!" for people who are pro-economic growth, pro-tech innovation, and who see the value in a pro-progress culture.
Ingenuism’s Winners Part II – Silicon Valley Examined 11
On the Silicon Valley Explored podcast, Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins continue their discussion of Ingenuism’s winners. This week they focus on the biggest winners: transformative platforms such as the internet, smartphones, and modern data analytics.
INSIGHT
Innovation by design: Lessons from 3M
By Don Watkins and Robert Hendershott
3M produces more than 55,000 different products, ranging from lithium ion batteries to dental fillings to touch screens to masking tape. So what does it specialize in? Innovation.
According to Larry Wendling, a vice president in charge of corporate research, “We’re an unusual company. We have no niche or particular focus. Basically, all we do is come up with new things. It doesn’t really matter what the thing is.”
So what can we learn from 3M about the nature of innovation?
Lesson 1: Make innovation an explicit strategy
Innovation doesn’t happen automatically, and it doesn’t happen simply by urging employees to be innovative. 3M puts its money where its mouth is: it spends an unusually high 8% of its gross revenue on R&D.
But not only that. The demand for innovation is built into the very structure of its goals. For example, 3M has what it calls its Thirty Percent Rule. As Harvard Business Review notes:
Employing the Thirty Percent Rule, 30% of each division’s revenues must come from products introduced in the last four years. This is tracked rigorously, and employee bonuses are based on successful achievement of this goal.
Lesson 2: Reward success…but make room for failure
Innovation involves risk. If you seek to invent something new, you will fail—again and again. 3M understands this and celebrates stories about breakthrough products that came out of seeming failures.
For example, in 1974, 3M engineer Arthur Fry attended one of 3Ms Tech Forum events and heard a presentation about an attempt to create a strong adhesive for building airplanes. What the adhesive team ended up coming up with was a glue so weak it could barely hold one piece of paper to another.
“It seemed like a dead-end idea,” Fry said. “I quickly put it out of my thoughts.” But he didn’t put it totally out of his thoughts. A few weeks later he found himself in church, where he sang in the choir. He had a habit of marking that week’s hymns with pieces of paper and these pieces of paper had a habit of falling out, leaving him frantically searching for the right page when it came time to sing.
His first thought was that the weak glue might make for a good bookmark. No one seemed particularly excited by this, but eventually he realized the pieces of paper could be used to jot notes on. Soon he had invented the Post-It note.
But making room for failure isn’t enough. You have to celebrate and reward success. 3M has this at the core of its culture. In many companies, the only way to gain promotions after a while is to move into management. 3M takes a different approach. It has a dual career ladder HBS describes this way:
Scientists can continue to move up the ladder without becoming managers. They have the same prestige, compensation, and perks as corporate management. As a result, 3M doesn’t lose good scientists and engineers only to gain poor managers, a common problem in the manufacturing sector.
Lesson 3: Foster connection and collaboration
I mentioned the Tech Forum that gave rise to the Post-It note. This internal meeting is part of 3M’s policy of horizontal sharing—making sure that researchers within the company know what others are working on. Many of its breakthrough inventions have come from taking one concept and applying it to a different domain.
For example, its first breakthrough product was created in 1925 by a 3M sandpaper salesman named Dick Drew who noticed that many of his autobody clients kept running in to a problem. They had to tape up pieces of paper during two-tone paint jobs, but when they would peel off conventional tape, it would ruin the first layer of paint. Drew realized that the adhesive used to make sandpaper would be strong enough to hold up the pieces of paper without ruining the first layer of paint. The result was masking tape.
As journalist Jonah Lehrer explains:
The benefit of such horizontal interactions—people sharing knowledge across fields—is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process. . . . [O]ur breakthroughs often arrive when we apply old solutions to new situations; for instance, a person thinking about sandpaper when he needs something sticky.
An even more aggressive form of encouraging connection comes with its policy of rotating engineers among divisions. According to Lehrer:
A scientist studying adhesives might be transferred to the optical-films department; a researcher working on asthma inhalers might end up tinkering with air conditioners. Sometimes these rotations are used as a sudden spur for innovation. If a product line is suffering from a shortage of new ideas, 3M will often bring in an entirely new team of engineers, sourced from all over the company. “Our goal is to have people switch problems every four to six years,” Wendling says. “We want to ensure that our good ideas are always circulating.”
During the pandemic, connection and collaboration became a challenge. As 3M’s Senior Vice President of Innovation and Stewardship, and Chief Technology Officer John Banovetz explained:
[A] big part of our model is collaboration and a big part of that collaboration is the informal, serendipitous connections that you make at the watercooler, having a cup of coffee with someone, seeing someone in the hall. When you're not physically there, you lose that. I think a lot about how to continue those one-off random connections that happen as part of the collaboration and innovation process.
One thing 3M did was to expand how it thought about collaboration.
The biggest change [since the pandemic] has been to our collaboration model. We've done more external collaborations than ever. For example, we’ve had great collaborations with Ford Motor and Cummins Engines—with Ford on designing a powered air-purifying respirator, and Cummins to increase the production of high-efficiency filters for personal protective equipment. It has been great to learn from them, partner with them, and really collaborate with them.
The pandemic has changed how we think about innovation. We've gone from being somewhat insular to being very open to connecting with external companies; from a place where 3M has the technology, the capabilities, the ability to solve the problem on our own—to a model where there are partners who can teach us some things and help us move even faster.
Lesson 4: Foster experimentation
Google is famous for giving its engineers time to work on independent projects—a policy that led to Gmail among other inventions. But that ideas wasn’t original. It started at 3M.
Under its 15% rule, 3M encourages researchers to spend 15% of their workday on speculative new ideas. Internally, they call it the “bootleg hour.” 3M’s former chairman William McKnight explained it this way: “Encourage experimental doodling. If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.”
And that’s not the only way 3M gives them room. 3M recognizes that sitting at a desk and looking busy is often incompatible with creative thinking. As a result, it developed its flexible attention policy. In Lehrer’s description:
Instead of insisting on constant concentration—requiring every employee to focus on his or her work for eight hours a day—3M encourages people to make time for activities that at first glance might seem unproductive. Are you struggling with a difficult technical problem? Take a walk across campus. (When I visited 3M, in the late winter, the fields were full of grazing deer and employees strolling in their puffy winter parkas.) Are you stuck on a challenge that seems impossible? Lie down on a couch by a sunny window. Daydream. Play a game of pinball.
Innovation on demand
3M is a company that’s discovered something profound: it is possible to specialize not in any particular field, but in the process of invention itself. And by doing so, it has illuminated some of the key ideas that fuel human ingenuity.
QUICK TAKES
Mammoth task ahead
So you want to start a start up. And you ask yourself: what is it customers really want? It doesn’t take long for you to reach the answer. Woolly mammoths, obviously.
A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth.
The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct.
“This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for eight years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the tools for reviving mammoths. “It’s going to make all the difference in the world.”
I confess that my first thought was that Colossal would send interns out to the Arctic to try to find preserved Mammoth DNA. Well, no, not exactly. It turns out that scientists have already learned to reconstruct genomes of extinct species using DNA fragments from fossils. The plan is to use that knowledge to edit elephant DNA and make what the New York Times calls “mammoth-like elephants.”
Dr. Church, who is best known for inventing ways of reading and editing DNA, wondered if he could effectively revive an extinct species by rewriting the genes of a living relative. Because Asian elephants and mammoths share a common ancestor that lived about six million years ago, Dr. Church thought it might be possible to modify the genome of an elephant to produce something that would look and act like a mammoth.
So maybe you’re wondering: how is anyone going to make money from this? The Times wondered that, too. And I was impressed with Colossal’s answer:
Mr. Lamm predicted that the company would be able to spin off new forms of genetic engineering and reproductive technology.
“We are hopeful and confident that there will be technologies that come out of it that we can build individual business units out of,” Mr. Lamm said.
In effect, Colossal is borrowing from NASA: do something scientifically pathbreaking—and have confidence it will give rise to practical applications.
Facebook glasses
Facebook is coming out with its version of Google Glasses, Ray-Ban Stories, which I’m tempted to mock except that Facebook became Facebook when it took an idea others had pioneered and did it way better.
According to Zuckerberg, the glasses will capture photos and video, let you listen to podcasts, and take calls. So basically it’s a face phone. Zuck thinks this is a first step towards a “future when phones are no longer a central part of our lives.”
Maybe. But if there’s one thing I lose and break more than my phone, it’s my sunglasses.
I’m not one to bet against Zuckerberg, but I will say: don’t count me in as an early adopter.
This is why I watch baseball when I’m supposed to be working
Neckar’s Notes has an outstanding interview with Gary Hoover, founder of the American Business History Center, that includes some great insights about the history of business and what we can learn from that history. Sample:
Innovation primarily comes from combinatory thinking. Often from seeing two things everybody else sees every day but putting them together in a new way.
Thus, the more subjects you are interested in, your potential for ideas goes up geometrically. Six interests may seem to be three times as big as two interests. But six interests yield nine times as many possible combinations as two interests. . . .
Serendipity and accident matter: the best ideas will not come from where you expect to find them.
Much more at the link
It’s not a tumor…anymore
Here’s a problem I desperately want to see solved:
California-based startup Bionaut Labs has developed a nanobot about the size of a grain of rice that's designed to transport medication to the exact location in the body where it's needed. If you think about it, the conventional way to deliver medicine makes little sense: A painkiller affects the entire body instead of just the arm that's hurting, and chemotherapy is flushed through all the veins instead of precisely targeting the tumor.
"Chemotherapy is delivered systemically," Bionaut-founder and CEO Michael Shpigelmacher says. "Often only a small percentage arrives at the location where it is actually needed."
Thankfully, there are people hard at work solving it:
But what if it was possible to send a tiny robot through the body to attack a tumor or deliver a drug at exactly the right location?
Several startups and academic institutes worldwide are working to develop such a solution but Bionaut Labs seems the furthest along in advancing its invention. "You can think of the Bionaut as a tiny screw that moves through the veins as if steered by an invisible screwdriver until it arrives at the tumor," Shpigelmacher explains.
Maybe not as video friendly as Parkour robots, but still incredibly cool.
There is no Great Stagnation
This made me laugh way too hard.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
A few weeks ago I praised D.N. Perkins’ The Mind’s Best Work for giving us an inside look at creative thinking. In Imagine, Jonah Lehrer covers similar territory—only he extends his analysis from the individual to teams, organizations, and entire societies.
Lehrer agrees with Perkins’ key insight: that creativity is not something distinct from more familiar mental activities.
Ever since the ancient Greeks, people have assumed that the imagination is separate from other kinds of cognition. But the latest science suggests that this assumption is false. Instead, creativity is a catchall term for a variety of distinct thought processes. (The brain is the ultimate category buster.)
Creativity is made up of everyday mental activities like research, observation, daydreaming, and judgment. But Lehrer goes further and looks at how creativity works when people interact. “[B]ecause the act of invention if often a collaborative process—we are inspired by other people—it’s essential that we learn to collaborate in the right way.” He devotes the second half of the book to answering the question, “why some teams and companies are so much more creative than others.”
Importantly, we have to understand that group collaboration is not a simple sum of individual creative efforts.
Sometimes a creative problem is so difficult that it requires people to connect their imaginations together; the answer arrives only if we collaborate. That’s because a group is not just a collection of individual talents. Instead, it is a chance for those talents to exceed themselves, to produce something greater than anyone thought possible. When the right mixture of people come together and when they collaborate in the right way, what happens can often feel like magic.
Why is this? What makes collaboration so powerful? One reason why is that groups can combine different kinds of expertise. This becomes increasingly valuable as specialization increases. “While the most cited studies in fields used to be the product of lone geniuses—think Einstein or Darwin—[one researcher] has demonstrated that the best research now emerges from groups.” One data point: scientific papers with at least 1,000 citations are six times as likely to come from teams of scientists.
Nor is it only collaboration that yields benefits. Connection more broadly, Lehrer argues, is increasing innovative insights. For example, he tells the story of drug company Eli Lilly, which started to hit roadblocks in the late 1990s. Its scientists were hitting roadblocks they couldn’t conquer.
The company decided to do something radical: in 2001, it made the problems public and offered a monetary reward for anyone, anywhere on earth who could solve them.
A few weeks passed. The InnoCentive site was mostly silent; [Eli Lilly VP Alpheus] Bingham thought his pilot project had failed. But then, after a month of nothing, a solution was submitted. And another. And another. “The answers just started pouring in,” Bingham says. “We got these great ideas from researchers we’d never heard of, pursuing angles that had never occurred to us. The creativity was simply astonishing.”
Bingham continues:
“They’d post the stuff they couldn’t solve, put up a little prize money. Like us, they didn’t expect any useful answers. But then they’d often get the solution from some researcher living halfway around the world. It was thrilling. We felt like we’d accessed this great pool of talent.”
One of the most interesting chapters comes at the end where Lehrer investigates a puzzle: “human geniuses aren’t scattered randomly across time and space. Instead they tend to arrive in tight, local clusters.” Think ancient Athens or 15th century Florence.
Lehrer uses the story of Shakespeare to illustrate his conclusion: concentrated pockets of genius create supportive environments for ingenuity to flourish. It’s not that some places get lucky and give birth to an excess number of geniuses. Instead, the culture “allows people to create in new ways. The result is a surplus of geniuses, an outpouring of talent so extreme we assume it can never happen again.” This, he thinks, is what happened in Silicon Valley.
I do not agree with all of the lessons Lehrer draws about how to encourage innovation and how to stifle it. But what’s valuable is that his is one of the few books that attempts to integrate ingenuity at the individual level with ingenuity at the organization and system level. And that is key to understanding how creativity works.
Until next time,
Don Watkins
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