The Innovator's Spirit

Discover the Mindset to Pursue the Impossible

Chuck Swoboda

• Publisher: Fast Company Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781732439160
• eBook ISBN: 9781732439177
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

2021 Axiom Business Book Award Winner in Business Intelligence/Innovation
Innovation isn't optional—it's imperative

Everyone wants to create new products and services, find new customers and markets, stay ahead of the competition, and work smarter instead of harder. Yet with all the focus and attention on innovation, the term has become an overused buzzword rather than a real, tangible concept. If you want to seriously pursue innovation—you need to strip away the hype.

Real innovators need to transcend the existing ideas, rules, and patterns to discover exciting new outcomes. They must step outside the best practice box and get their hands dirty. The spirit of a true innovator is rooted in wanting to do something that has never been done before, to solve problems that have never been solved, and to run through walls and leap over tall buildings to get there.

In The Innovator’s Spirit, author Chuck Swoboda—retired chairman and CEO of Cree, a company that fundamentally changed the way people experience light and drove the obsolescence of the Edison light bulb—explains that innovation is fundamentally about people and shows his readers how to develop a mindset of  creativity, risk-taking, and hard work. He also instills in them a belief that there is always a better way.

CHAPTER ONE

Solve Problems That Create Value

“Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.”

—Dean Kamen

YOU’VE DECIDED YOU WANT TO uncover your innovator’s spirit. That’s the first step. However, before you start on this journey, we need to get calibrated on what innovation really means. It may not be what you think.

For example, how would you react if I told you that Apple, the company that brought us the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone—all of which I own—isn’t innovative? Does that sound like blasphemy? Aren’t Apple and innovation synonymous? At one time they were. But not anymore.

Let me explain.

I interviewed hundreds of people in my time at Cree who thought they wanted to join our company because we were considered a cutting-edge and innovative organization. I would often ask them, “Why are you interested in innovation?” The answers often included wanting to be a part of something new and exciting. While that is certainly part of the innovation experience, I also knew that there was a fair amount of pain and suffering that went along with the fun parts.

But rather than throwing cold water on the conversation right off the bat, I’d take a step back. We needed to make sure we were talking about the same thing. So I would ask the person, “What is innovation?”

What I’ve found in asking this question not only in interviews, but also at social functions (yeah, I’m that guy) and in classrooms, is that you get a wide range of answers, and many times people use the words invention and innovation interchangeably. But there’s a world of difference between the two concepts—and it’s critical to understand that difference if you want to uncover your innovator’s spirit.

An invention, by definition, is something new—something that’s never been seen before. An innovation, on the other hand, especially a disruptive one, is something new that also creates enormous value by addressing an important problem. In other words, inventions are rather common and can often collect dust while innovations change the world. Why is this distinction important to make? Because inventing something is relatively easy compared to what it takes to solve a problem and create real value.

Which brings me back to Apple—which was once perhaps the most innovative company in the world. It’s breathtaking to consider the impact that introducing the first iPhone had—and how many industries it disrupted overnight. It also changed people’s lives because it solved a problem they didn’t even know they had: to be connected anytime and anywhere to a handheld computer. But Apple doesn’t innovate anymore. They only invent.

Around the time I was writing this book, my wife and I were talking about what I might get her as a birthday gift. I noticed that her iPhone was at least five years old. I figured that she would love one of the newer models. But when I brought up the idea, she wasn’t really interested.

“Why don’t you want a new phone?” I asked her.

“I just don’t see any real benefit to getting a new one,” she told me. “The new features like facial recognition just don’t matter to me.”

The thing that finally convinced her to get the upgrade was that her old phone didn’t last as long on a charge anymore. The newer model would have a longer-lasting battery.

This is exactly Apple’s problem in a nutshell. There’s a reason that the company’s sales have plateaued after a decade of incredible growth: The iPhone is no longer innovative. While market saturation has partially contributed to this trend, I believe the main reason is that Apple has become focused on inventing new features that clearly don’t deliver the same value or solve problems in a way that motivates consumers to upgrade their phones. They’ve lost their innovator’s spirit.

THE WAR OF THE CURRENTS

I was speaking to a group of college students several years ago describing the approach to innovation that we took at Cree and I explained that Thomas Edison was one of our role models. Upon hearing my reference to Edison, a young man in the audience shot up his hand in protest and proceeded to tell me that Nikola Tesla was the real innovator, because all Edison did was put his name on other people’s ideas and commercialize them. It was an interesting perspective—maybe one that you share. Edison and Tesla each have hundreds of patents—thousands, in the case of Edison—registered in their names around the world. Tesla was certainly a visionary, and it is true that Edison was not a lone genius; he did work with a team of engineers. I was taken aback by this student’s challenge. Was he right? But then I realized that this student was confusing the distinction between invention and innovation. Both Edison and Tesla were obviously incredibly talented inventors, but it made me want to look a little closer to understand who was the true innovator.

One of the areas that their work overlapped was in the field of electricity. In the 1880s, there was even a so-called War of the Currents as Tesla, the inventor of alternating current (AC), and Edison, who created direct current (DC) electric power, vied to see who could power the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and, ultimately, the world itself.¹ Edison and Tesla, via the industrialist George Westinghouse, who had licensed Tesla’s technology, submitted bids to see who could showcase their technology not just to the attendees of the fair, but to the rest of the world.

When the bids from the two parties were assessed, Westinghouse, using Tesla’s alternating current, was the clear winner. Not only had Westinghouse’s bid come in lower than Edison’s, the technology also had the advantage of using fewer transformers since they could send electricity farther along transmission lines than the lower-voltage DC technology.

Thanks to this high-profile victory, AC power would soon become the standard that continues to power much of the world’s electrical grid to this very day. (It should be noted that DC power, which is used by computers and electric vehicles, is making a bit of a comeback. It’s also a bit curious that the largest electric vehicle company, which is based on DC power, would be named after the inventor of AC technology. But why let facts get in the way of a good marketing story?)

So, based on this story, who was the true innovator: Tesla or Edison? It may seem obvious that it was Tesla. But the real answer is that in the case of AC versus DC power, neither Tesla nor Edison was the real innovator—it was Westinghouse. He was the one who saw the potential of the invention and used it to create real value for people by cost-effectively bringing electricity into their homes.

But you need to look further back in time to realize that Westinghouse’s innovation, or even Tesla’s invention, would not have been relevant without an earlier innovation by Edison: the light bulb. The light bulb was the “killer app” of its time and electricity was just the platform.

THE INNOVATOR OF MENLO PARK

When you look at the list of Edison’s inventions—which ranged from the phonograph and cinema projector to an iron ore separator and a cement maker—the one that really helped him make his mark as an innovator was the incandescent light bulb. What’s interesting is that Edison didn’t actually invent the first light bulb: It had been originally patented in England in 1841. But it was far from a practical lighting solution—just about every home at the time used candles, oil, or gas. Edison wanted to find a way to make a light bulb that was both affordable and could remain lit for hours. While he had already earned the nickname “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” named for the New Jersey town he lived in, Edison entered a race in 1878 with some twenty other inventors to come up with a better bulb, which meant a commercially practical bulb.

What made Edison an innovator and not just an inventor was that he was always thinking about the market for his products even as he continued his work to perfect them. It was never good enough for Edison to simply create something new; he wanted to ensure that there would also be a customer who valued it. As he once said: “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.”²

So even as he and his twenty-person team, whom he called “muckers,” worked to crack the code of perfecting a workable filament for their light bulb, he was already thinking about how he would announce his breakthrough to the world. Rather than toil away in solitude, the thirty-one-year-old Edison created the Edison Electric Light Company to bring investors into his project. His pitch wasn’t that he was just creating a better light bulb, but that he was really creating a new lighting “system” that would soon electrify entire towns.

In October 1878, Edison and his team finally struck upon their winning solution—a carbon filament that could burn from thirteen to forty hours at a time.³ It had taken more than twelve hundred experiments, and $40,000, to find a workable solution.⁴ But that was nothing new to Edison, who once reportedly said: “I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.”⁵

That would prove to be just an opening act. On December 21, 1879, Edison ran full-page ads in the New York City newspapers announcing his “triumph in electric illumination” as well as the news that he would unveil his new creation on New Year’s Eve. The news spread and when the big day arrived, thousands of people boarded special trains to make the twenty-mile trip to Menlo Park from New York. When they arrived at Edison’s campus, many wearing their very finest formal evening wear, they were dazzled as several bulbs blazed atop wooden poles lining the roadway to Edison’s lab. As they entered the room, twenty-five blazing electric bulbs illuminated the room. The spectators were among the first people in the world to see the soft glow of incandescent light.⁶ One attendee even called out to Edison, asking him: “How did you get that red-hot hairpin into that bottle?” There were then gasps when Edison, wearing a dirty lab coat, demonstrated how the bulbs could remain lit even when submerged in water. People began begging Edison to allow them to buy bulbs for themselves—even if they had no way yet to power them. Edison had identified a problem that customers valued.

What was clear, though, was that Edison’s vision of combining the light bulb with a distribution system that could power entire nations would soon become a reality. It would be just three years later that Edison would open the first commercial power station in the nation on Pearl Street in New York City. As the share prices of the Brooklyn Gaslight Company began to collapse, shareholders in the Edison Electric Light Company saw the value of their investment skyrocket from $100 a share to more than $4,500 a share.^7,8 The idea that electricity could be provided as a utility was now possible.

BENEFITS DRIVE INNOVATION—NOT FEATURES

One of the key takeaways from the Edison and Tesla story is that just because you invent something amazing, that doesn’t guarantee in any way that it will become an innovation. I know because I’ve been there.

When we were developing a new product, our goal was to create an innovation. But that’s far easier said than done. One of the ways I would try to focus our team on this concept was to ask: “What are the benefits?” Invariably, the team would rattle off a list of features that the new product had. Our Lighting team would often tell me that it was more efficient or had better light quality. Our LED business would tout that the new product was brighter than the previous version. The team would be proud of their answers until I said something like “Those are great features, but what are the benefits?” It would generally take a minute or so for someone to recognize that they had fallen into the trap that most inventors face. Inventors see the features; they see what is new. But customers don’t pay for features; they pay for benefits. It’s those benefits that create the value and ultimately define an innovation.

In the case of our lighting business, the benefits were that you could see better and the lights saved you money. For LEDs, the benefit of brighter LEDs was that they used less power, which enabled battery-based products to run longer. Innovators see benefits and find ways to help the customer see them as well. Edison, by lighting up the night on New Year’s Eve in Menlo Park, let his future customers see the benefit of electricity in action.

While I understand that benefits drive innovation, I’m also an engineer at heart. I enjoy developing new technology and I am not immune from falling into the features trap. A lesson I learned on my own journey to uncover my innovator’s spirit involved a contract Cree signed to provide a super-high-end computer monitor to a major computer manufacturer—one that was well known for its innovative products. This company was so secretive we were not allowed to mention it by name, so we simply referred to it as the “fruit company.” It wanted us to build an LED-powered backlight for a monitor that could display color schemes that would exactly mimic whatever the final use would be. If you needed to see what a four-color magazine advertisement looked like, for instance, the backlight would adjust for printing. If you wanted to see what the color looked like on a documentary film you were making, the backlight would adjust to film so the monitor could get the color just right. Whatever the medium, this monitor needed to deliver. In short, the client wanted the greatest monitor the world had ever seen.

It was exactly the kind of challenge we relished tackling: making something that seemed impossible a reality. The client had a difficult problem and was asking us to help solve it. Unfortunately, we got caught up in the features the fruit company was asking for instead of looking beyond its requests and resolving the key innovation questions we had left unanswered. If we solved this problem, would the benefit create real value for their customer? And if so, how much value would it create?

Even though we hadn’t answered those questions, we embarked on the project anyway. The fruit company was considered the most innovative company in the world at that time, so we figured that they must know what they’re doing. We called our new backlight system “ColorWave.” And it was glorious. I had one of the test monitors on my desk, and photos looked better on that screen than they ever could on any piece of paper. I had no doubt it was the world’s best computer monitor. It was an incredible piece of technology. It had all the features the client demanded. And it was a failure. Why? Because it was too expensive. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for THE INNOVATOR’S SPIRIT
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: It’s Personal
• CHAPTER ONE: Solve Problems That Create Value
• CHAPTER TWO: Lead, Don’t Manage
• CHAPTER THREE: Embrace the Brutal Truths
• CHAPTER FOUR: Find a Way to Win
• CHAPTER FIVE: Get Your Hands Dirty
• CHAPTER SIX: You Create the Future
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Solve the Customer’s Problem
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Do What They Say You Can’t
• CHAPTER NINE: Be Unafraid of Failure
• CHAPTER TEN: Go Beyond Best Practice
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: Don’t Wait for Perfection
• CHAPTER TWELVE: Focus the Mind
• CONCLUSION: The Journey Continues
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX
• NOTES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR