Many of us grow up with an image in our minds of inventors tinkering away in their garages coming up with the next great product or innovation. We can hold up examples of great men and women who have succeeded this way: Ruth Wakefield with her Toll House cookies and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs with the home computer come to mind.
But the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of innovations, and arguably the greatest innovations, are the result of team work. The Walkman, produced by Sony in the late 1970’s, was designed by a team of engineers. Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad product lines, each praised as major innovations in its own category or as a category creator in its own right, were developed not merely through the vision of one man, but by combining deep funding from one of the world’s greatest companies and the talent of a large, diverse, and creative development team.
Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, a product that utterly dominated its category for four years through the innovative and creative use of existing graphic and web technologies, could only have been produced through the close collaboration of graphic artists and developers specializing in database and client-server programming. Amazon.com is a business based on idea sharing between software engineers who created and maintain the platform on the one hand and, on the other hand, supply chain managers who conceive of the operational paradigms that increase profit margins. The heroes in these success stories include, in addition to the many hard working code slingers and graphic designers, the management teams that hire them, coordinate them, and get them to work together.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen started out as inventors-in-the-garage business people, and they are to be admired for what they accomplished at that stage in their careers. They should, however, be even more admired for making the transition to being leaders of large teams because it was the large teams that continued the process of innovation that kept their various enterprises ahead of the competition.
From the earliest stages in its existence, the innovation that sets one business apart from other businesses must be more than just a new technology or a new process. The innovation must fit within the operational, distribution, and financial contexts of the business and within the purchasing paradigm of its customers. Technology driven enterprises often lose track of context, and the success of companies like Microsoft and Apple derives not purely from technological innovation itself but from the way that innovation is implemented as a business. The best leaders of innovative technology companies are able to gradually give up the control they exercised over technology development yet retain the business smarts and direction that allowed them to turn early technology innovations into successful businesses.
The modern inventor-in-the-garage has no choice but to team with business people, including operations, production, finance, and sales & marketing professionals, if she wants to see broad acceptance and financial return from her innovations.