Innovation is the often-arduous process that links discovery and invention. It requires a collaboration of minds, and it demands patience for failure.
Take the picture phone, introduced by Bell Labs in the 1960s as a technological innovation poised to revolutionize the way people communicate. It didn’t; it was a spectacular flop.
And that, says Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (The Penguin Press, 2012), is simply part of the process. “There’s always friction when you’re traveling beyond what’s known,” Gertner said. “You’re inevitably going to hit setbacks and failures. For the transistor team (at Bell Labs), failure was an inherently deep part of trying to understand what they were doing.”
Gertner’s book, his first, has garnered glowing reviews as a seminal work on both Bell Labs and the nature and causes of innovation, a topic described by The New York Times reviewer Walter Isaacson as “one of the most critical issues of our time.”
Gertner’s edited insights on innovation are excerpted from an article by Laurence Léveillé, “Structures, not formulas, lead to disruptive innovation,” that originally appeared in the Chautauquan Daily.
Innovation vs. invention: The term innovation encompasses a full process that starts with a new idea and continues through development and (for technologies) manufacturing, through to introduction in the market. “Invention is quick but true innovation, making something revolutionary, is long and really kind of painful,” Gertner said. “Processes that are very long and difficult endeavors can go through periods low in hope but can emerge, in the end, as something very important, and very hopeful, too.”
The source: “There isn’t one model for innovation, I really believe that. There are all kinds of innovation — technological, social, and certainly corporate or business-oriented innovation. But I think they all arise from creative impulses, and they all plough new ground — their terra nova. I think the metric for innovation is, ‘does it have scale and does it have impact? Does it make something? Does it replace something that already exists with something that’s better, or cheaper or both?”
The next big innovative thing: “The tide of information has become almost unmanageable, so I’m waiting for somebody to invent a way to actually manage my email, or my own information, so it doesn’t overwhelm me so 
much. So there’s that. Big data is a term that gets thrown around a lot; it seems to have great promise. A company like IBM is doing really interesting things with big data, like managing traffic or energy use in some cities around the world. By looking at vast amounts of data, they can come up with alternate plans for traffic and save cities millions of dollars, and save in pollution as well. That’s a very real, tangible example of how computer analytics can make things better. That’s a tremendous advance.”
Competition and innovation: “I don’t think there’s too much evidence that huge breakthroughs come from competition. If we look at the history of great leaps — whether it’s the origins of the Internet, the transistor at Bell Labs, or some of the big pharmaceutical advances of the early 20th century — a lot of them come from scientists pursuing deep curiosities or solving problems. I don’t think they came from people engaged in competition. Competition is incredibly good at getting us state-of-the-art consumer innovations and products. But the real breakthroughs, these disruptive things, come about from scientists pursuing knowledge.”
The importance of fun: “I think the guys at Bell Labs had a lot of fun. Unstructured time can be very valuable. If we look at the history of innovations and when big breakthroughs happen, they don’t necessarily happen when you want them to happen — they can happen in unstructured times. William Shockley actually came up with some of the earlier concepts for nuclear power while he was taking a shower. When you’re trying to go into something that is not known, when you’re on a path that has no real model, when you enter that creative realm, structure and diligence can help, but they’re not the only thing that helps. Our minds need a rest, and sometimes good ideas happen when you least expect them.”
John Gertner is a contributor at The New York Times Magazine, where he writes about business, technology, and society. Gertner’s photo is by Leslie de la Vega.