Leading Matters by Hennessy John L

Author:Hennessy, John L. [Hennessy, John L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

7

INNOVATION

The Key to Success in Industry and Academia

“To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.”

Isaac Asimov

We’ve all heard the old adage that the only thing constant is change. Thanks to innovation and the digital revolution, the speed of change has increased. In Silicon Valley, we have felt that acutely for a half century. Now the rest of the world is feeling it, too, and we see no indication of that pace slowing anytime soon.

While we’re all feeling the effects, the nature of change isn’t monolithic. It differs, for example, between the commercial world and the academic world. I have experienced these differences firsthand, having worked in both worlds, at Stanford and in the tech industry. Across my career, I’ve seen a pretty full palette: from starting a company and cold selling a new idea to investors, to helping take a company public, to serving on the board of several organizations that have shaped the technology landscape, to backing start-ups as an angel investor, and from the everyday work of a university faculty member to leading an institution with several thousand faculty members, tens of thousands of students, a multibillion-dollar annual budget (the total revenue of the university and its hospital subsidiaries would put it in the Fortune 500), and an endowment of tens of billions (total assets roughly equal to Costco’s).

Despite the central role of innovation and change based on innovation, in both academia and industry, these two worlds operate very differently. A failure to recognize that difference can be dangerous. Run a company like a university, and you risk oblivion; run a college like a company, and you will likely face a faculty mutiny. Nonetheless, both types of institutions must innovate to survive.

Freedom to Innovate

Much of the difference between academia and industry has to do with time horizons and risk-taking. In my experience, in the university you see more “far out” innovation driven purely by curiosity or serendipity. Why? Generally speaking, academics are not up against a deadline, rushing to market to beat the competition, nor are they at risk of losing their business if they fail to do so. Indeed, academics are not trying to design and fabricate a complete solution; instead they are striving to advance a field or to demonstrate a new idea. So they have the leisure of following curiosity, even allowing serendipity to happen. Rather than pressing toward next quarter’s income statement or next year’s product, the academic time horizon opens the door to fundamental research, work that can change the world. In fact, a revolutionary contribution in the future is much more highly valued than an incremental contribution today.

Three decades ago, when we started the MIPS project at Stanford, we knew we were in a new era of miniaturization, thanks to semiconductors and Moore’s Law, and we knew that a wealth of opportunities were opening up. Intel and Motorola had both shown that one could take an established minicomputer architecture and shrink the design down onto one or two chips. This new chip—the microprocessor—was already transforming the tech world.

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