In Wellington last week I dropped past Webstock, and caught Scott Berkum presenting on innovation. He talked about the myth of innovation – or how the eureka moment actually takes years of prior effort. What I found most interesting was his linkages between innovation and the early explorers. How are they similar? Here’s a quick list :

• they head off into the unknown
• the time scales for their discoveries are largely unpredictable
• there’s long periods of boredom before the discovery takes place
• people think they’re a little mad to challenge paradigms (“Of course the world is flat”)
• when they report their discoveries, eventually people think it was common sense that the discovery should eventually happen (“Of course the world isn’t flat” and “Of course iTunes was the reason the iPod was so successful”)

The other interesting part of Scotts talk was his link to the innovation culture that used to exist at 3M, and how it was driven from the top (my emphasis):

“As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.

“Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.

“Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.”

This is company that produced masking tape and Post-It notes – neither of which was on any corporate strategic roadmap, but which was devised by coal-face employees.