Great Innovation Needs an "Engine"

http://bit.ly/4TOBsW

Rowan Gibson writes a great piece about nurturing innovation. Innovation is not just about coming up with ideas. You need an infrastructure to assign resources and lead those ideas toward commercialization.

Gibson likens great ideas to spark plus. Worthless without a car around them. The car is also worthless without the spark plugs.

"...Imagine you typed a few words into Google, pressed the search button, and nothing happened. Have you ever thought about how Google manages to deliver all those results in the blink of an eye? The reason we call it a search 'engine' is that behind Google's simple and playful user interface is an incredibly complex system comprising half a million servers, racked up in clusters at data centers all over the world, all working together to scan billions of websites at breakneck speed. Without the back end of Google - without that engine - all we would have is a lovable logo on a clean white web page. Similarly, organizations are finding out that without the back end of innovation, all they get is a lot of ideas at the front end which end up going nowhere. ..."

Gibson points out that Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, worked at Hewlett-Packard and pitched an idea for a personal computer. HP had no infrastructure to deal with such an idea, so Wozniak left HP and spent some time innovating in a Palo Alto garage with Steve Jobs.

http://bit.ly/4TOBsW