Innovation by Getting Into Another Box
Creativity theorists encourage people to “get out of the box.” The theory is that while you are inside a self-imposed box, you will not invent anything new. So get out of that box. Yet an opposing theory, posed by Andrew Hargadon in How Breakthroughs Happen, suggests that getting out of the box is not as important as hopping into a different box. Hargadon goes on to suggest that innovations and new technologies come from a confluence of people, ideas, and objects from different boxes. “This book puts forth a counterintuitive proposition: that these entrepreneurs and inventors are no smarter, no more courageous, tenacious, or rebellious than the rest of us—they are simply better connected,” Hargadon writes.
It’s about networks. Breakthrough innovations cause new networks to happen. Whole groups of people, ideas and objects form new relationships overnight. These networks, the webs of significance we ourselves have spun, shape who we are and what we think. Hargadon calls these “networks of possible wanderings.”
Let us look at some examples. “The Internet grew out of an initial combination of computers, networking technologies, and communication protocols, to which optical fiber, network servers, local networks, mail servers, modems, personal computers, desktop applications—such as e-mail, and Web browsers—have been added.” (Hargadon, p. 9) Items from many boxes combined to create the Internet.
Another advanced technology—for its time— was the telegraph, the Victorian Internet. The first telegraph (1774) was a set of 26 conductors. New ideas about electricity and insulating wire were added. In 1837, Samuel Morse had dots and dashes. Then, an operator was added. Finally, Edison sent the messages further and faster. Clearly, without these innovations many years earlier, the Internet as we know it today would never have been conceivable.
The Mall
Merchants have clustered together ever since they started laying out arrowheads on animal skins, so defining what constitutes the first modern shopping center has been a matter of fierce debate. We’ll define it as retailers gathering in a unified site operated as a single unit— with lots of free parking. And we’ll go with J.C. Nichols, who in 1922 built the Spanish-style Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Mo. (still thriving). Shopping centers truly exploded in the 1950s and 1960s as downtown stores opened branches, then picked up and moved there altogether. The mailing of America began in Edina, Minnesota in 1956, and the nation’s largest, the 4.2 million-square-foot Mall of America, stands just two miles away in nearby Bloomington. Now, we have “festival marketplaces” like Faneuil Hall in Boston; “vertical malls” like Water Tower Place in Chicago; “power centers,” anchored by a Home Depot or Toys “R” Us, and factory outlet malls like Sawgrass Mills in Florida. All, of course, have plenty of parking.
As Hargadon concludes, “invention finds its distinctive feature in the constructive assimilation of pre-existing elements into new syntheses, new patterns, or new configurations of behavior.” The steamship was, according to most textbooks, invented by Robert Fulton in 1807. The original idea was proposed in 1543. Commercial efforts began in 1707. “The components of both the steam engine and the ship’s design drew from a continuous and incremental line of technological predecessors, each improving on the last. (Hargedon, p. 32)
How about the Reebok Pump athletic shoe? One designer had created inflatable splints. Two others had worked on medical IV bags. Several others had worked on diagnostic instruments. The result: inflatable air bladder with mini pumps, tubes and valves.
Two of the most famous combinations of boxes emerge from Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Edison’s system of electric lighting combined elements of the telegraph, the arc light, and the existing gas lighting industry. Edison’s mimeograph pen borrowed the mechanics of high-speed telegraph repeaters. (Hargedon, p. 24)
Henry Ford sent two of his top engineers to the stockyards in Chicago. They found that the stockyards processed pigs in an assembly line fashion. The carcasses slid down the line and pieces were cut off and processed in sequence. Henry Ford allegedly stated: “What is good enough for pigs is good enough for cars.” Soon afterwards, assembly lines were born. (Hargedon, p. 43)