17 Feb 10 Innovation – mutation or big bang theory?

Innovation is a new way of doing something or “new stuff that is made useful”. It may refer to incremental and emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.

And it is this definition which made me wonder how one looks at innovation in different places. When it is incremental it is more like mutation within an organisation. An idea that goes through a change between silos due to exchange of ideas, inspiration from other areas, problems reaching or expanding customer base or just accidental discovery. More often than not incremental change doesn’t require inventing anything new. It is often just a matter of combining and recombining capabilities across disciplines, organizations, and sectors. These capabilities are usually kept under wraps and difficult to access. And opportunities in areas like healthcare, education, energy etc needs more opening up of these so more cross pollination and mutation might occur for us to see better solutions. Data sharing is one of the most important aspects of this mutation as it is with biological process of mutation.

The Big bang innovation is revolutionary changes that result from radically different way of thinking a problem and it’s probably solutions. Each big bang innovation is followed by an era of mutation with small changes until another big bang innovation happens in the area. One of the best examples of big bang innovation is invention and commercialisation of microchip or integrated circuits by Robert Norton Noyce who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel giving Silicon valley it’s name. Ever since Moor’s law has made sure small innovation or mutation keeps innovation alive.

While there is nothing new in what I have discussed above. The biggest question facing those entrepreneurs, itching to build a new product, disrupt the norm, innovate and scale an organisation, is what kind of product to build and what kind of innovation to work on. Big bang innovations are very difficult and one sees a lots of failures. And the small innovations resulting from mutations are mistaken for big ones – typically how a feature is mistaken for a product. A clear understanding of the two will help the founders decide how to build the company, size it, raise funding, build, scale, target customers and look at possible exits. More often the big bangs take deep pockets and longer to succeed as they need mass adoption to succeed too – Google, Ebay, Amazon being typical examples. Mutations more often last for a short time, and target small niche markets thus surviving by being acquired quickly. Small changes caused by need, combination of disparate products/services and being in a risky environment where they can become obsolete quickly.

Google is probably the best example of a big bang which has a great ecosystem for mutations so they survive for a long time to come – just as biological organisms do. Other such examples are Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and Amazon – all big bangs who now are in constant mutation mode to make sure they survive the hostile environment they live in.

Before one starts on the entrepreneurship journey one needs to know what innovation they are working on. So what innovation are you? Big bang or mutations – remember there cannot be many big bangs

Tags: Amazon, Ebay, entrepreneurship, Facebook, Google, innovation, Microsoft, mutation, start-up, Twitter