Riding the Innovation Wave: Learning to Create Value from Ideas by John Bessant

Author:John Bessant [Bessant, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787149793
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

A third option is emerging that begins to bridge these two worlds and, importantly, one which offers a complete innovation system rather than just the ideation front end. This uses online collaboration platforms with increasingly high levels of functionality.

Back in 1714 the British Navy faced a problem — they kept losing their ships. Whilst they were able to build and sail some of the finest vessels in the world, and use them to defend a growing empire around the world, they were unable to tell at a given point in time exactly where they were. That was embarrassing for the gentlemen in the Admiralty but much more serious for the captains and crew actually on the ships; not being able to navigate exposed them to all kinds of danger. A number of tragic accidents resulted, in one case involving an entire fleet of ships running aground on rocks as they tried to return home to the safety of Plymouth harbour.

The reason for this concern was simple; whilst it was possible to measure latitude accurately the same was not true of longitude, and without the two it was impossible to ‘fix’ a ship’s position. The problem lay in the simple fact that there were no reliable clocks available that could be carried on board. In response to this growing challenge the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act which established an innovation contest, putting up a prize of £20,000 (which in today’s money would be worth around €3m), to be awarded to anyone who could build a reliable portable chronometer. The winner, after a long search, was a man called John Harrison and his design is still to be seen in the Royal Naval Museum in London.

Across the Channel in 1869 the French Army had a similar concern, this time to do with provisioning troops for long marches. Their challenge lay in finding a substitute for butter, which had a tendency to go rancid after a few days; once again the problem became the focus for another innovation contest with a prize of 12,000 francs (about €150,000 today). The winner in this case was Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, the man who gave the world margarine, a product still found in various forms on supermarket shelves today. He was following in glorious footsteps — the contest had originally been set up by Emperor Louis Napoleon 3rd in 1795 as an annual attempt to draw out good ideas — another notable winner in 1809 was Nicolas Appert who invented the world’s first food canning process.

These examples highlight a challenge in innovation. It’s all about turning ideas to value — and it makes sense at the ‘fuzzy front end’ to open up the challenge of idea suggestion to as many people as possible. The trouble is that organizing innovation contests to do that takes a great deal of effort in attracting ideas, organizing them and making decisions about them. In the past this meant you needed a sponsor at the level of the king of England or the emperor of France and a whole organization working for them to run the contest.

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