Don’t Fail Like Edison Did
Tales of successful innovation are told – as good stories ought to be – in linear fashion, with the focus on a single triumphant hero. For example: Edison realized the potential for creating light with electricity, tested a wide variety of light-bulb filaments, and finally came up with one that worked well.
The implication is that innovation proceeds in a neat, orderly progression, from our hero recognizing the need, to testing solutions, and finally, rolling out the best one and smiling all the way to the bank.
Not so fast! The reality of innovation is very different from the historical depiction of it. Innovation is messy and wasteful, and it rarely moves in a straight line from problem to solution. The history of the light-bulb illustrates the gap between how we like to recall innovation, and how it really happens.
While Edison and his lab played an important role by contributing a design that made it into commercial use for a time, the fact is that Edison did not invent either the modern incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. Edison’s light bulb design, a thin piece of carbon in a vacuum, is not in use today. Our bulbs are either based on the tungsten filament patented by Willis R. Whitney in 1903, or the mercury vapor light patented by Peter Cooper Hewitt in 1901. Edison is not the father of modern light-bulbs, he is more like a first cousin twice removed.
[wcm_restrict]Edison and his contemporaries were inspired by the work of Humphry Davy, an English scientist who, in 1800, showed that a piece of carbon would glow when electricity was sent through it. If anyone was truly at the beginning of the invention of the light-bulb, it was Humphry, but history does not remember it that way – probably because his invention just happened to be called the ‘electric arc,’ which does not have anything in common with our modern names for electric lights.
If we don’t use Edison’s light bulb design, did we even need Thomas Edison? Yes and no. We needed lots of inventors, creating choices and giving society opportunities to gain experience through real-world applications over a long period of time. And we needed the cross-pollination of ideas between these many inventors.
Edison is, of course, also credited with electrifying our modern world. This is as much of a myth as the light-bulb story. Yes, Edison’s firm did win early contracts to set up electric grids in various cities, but his direct current (DC) system proved far less efficient than Nicola Tesla’s alternating current (AC). Westinghouse and other contractors relied on Tesla’s AC patents to displace Edison’s system and electrify the nation. Edison found himself on a side branch of both the light-bulb and the electric grid.
Perhaps the smartest thing Edison did was to help build General Electric – which incorporated Edison’s initial firm along with others through mergers. General Electric was a great investment because it took a plural approach to light bulbs, using any and all good designs and patents to produce successful bulbs for commercial use. It hardly mattered that it did not commercialize Edison’s filament. The point was to produce something that would sell well.
Edison is a brilliantly famous inventor. However, often the less-luminary innovators are more likely to collaborate and cross-pollinate, and therefore to find their way to the central stream of innovation as it evolves in its messy, multi-faceted way.
For my money, I’d rather model my efforts on inventors nobody recalls today, but whose patents proved to be the ones society built upon. They got to see their royalties grow exponentially. I’d rather bet on growing royalties than a growing reputation. However, it might just be possible to get the credit and the profits by remembering that everything you learned about famous inventors is a myth, and by following three simple rules of real-world innovation:
1. Don’t stop after your first design is done. Develop (and if possible, patent) multiple designs. There is always a pack of candidates, so no single approach is all that likely to emerge as the hands-down winner. Improve your odds by taking more than one approach. When it comes to innovation, the old adage about eggs definitely applies: Don’t put them all in one basket. A plural strategy works best.
2. Coin a catchy name or term. Branding is really the key to getting credit in most cases. If you insist on giving your invention a complex or technical name, know this: History is not all that likely to give you the credit you may feel you deserve. So talk to a branding or naming expert if you can’t come up with something catchy yourself. The person whose name sticks to an innovation is almost always the one who gets the credit.
3. Collaborate. Don’t fall prey to the myth that innovations arise from the lone genius working in isolation. In fact, it takes many creative people, approaching from different directions, to break through all the mental and practical barriers and bring something new to its full fruition. If you reach out to share ideas and learn from others, you are more likely to find and work on the main trunk, rather than be relegated to a side branch as the innovation grows and develops.
In reality, innovation is a messy process with redundancy and variations on themes. It’s impossible to predict which design will emerge as the main commercial success. Even recognition is not enough to insure ultimate success. Model your approach on the reality of how innovation occurs, not the neat, heroic version in our history books.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]
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About the Author
Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies
“Many of life’s failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.”