OWP liVe Report

94

Once I knew it all, or did I?

O P I N I O N

BILL FISCHER IMD Professor of Innovation Management

Of the four key ideas inmy career, only one remained true in the end, saysProfessor Bill Fischer. Few things havemoved theworld so successfully in our times as good ideas: ideas about technologies, about customers, about businessmodels, even ideas about ideas. So it goeswithout saying, therefore, that all of us should bewondering: “Howgood are my ideas?” But justmaybe, however, we should also be asking: “Howperishable are my ideas?” Recently, when I was asked to conduct a retrospective ofmy 50-year-career in innovation (including industry and government R&D, in big firms, startups and academics), I was surprised to learn just howperishable the very ideas that I considered foundational at the beginning of my career turned out to be at the end. Looking back over the years, therewere four key ideas that I relieduponover and over again:

Innovationused to be a funnel A second foundational ideawas that the innovation journey could be represented as a funnel, beginningwith a trumpet mouth for gathering good ideas, followed by an ever-narrowing path, where internal financial screens culled out less-promising ideas so that a few“best” ideas could go to market. Popularized by a futureDean of theHarvard Business School, thismodel offered the illusion ofmanagerial control overwhat was otherwise amessy experimental process. Today, in aworldwhere “outside-in” has become themantra for strategy, we recognize that the linearity and sequentiality of the funnel is perversely inside-out, slow, andwhere learning only takes place at the end of the journey; none of which is desirable.

Change patternswere predictable in the formof S-curves This has a long academic heritage includingKondratieff/Schumpeterian logic and scores of empirical economic analyses.When I began as an engineer, we usedS-curves to appraise the functional performance of a technology.

"We need to knowmore, and to havemore different perspectives. ”

Today, S-curves aremore associatedwith technologists, as they represent not only the evolution of a device, but periodic upheavals in the industry that creates these devices. In fact, it seems tome that S-curves no longer represent technologies at all, but the customer experiences that an industry creates, which opens up the definition of both innovation and industry toway beyond what we traditionally assumed.