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Focus

Execution is key

Companies sometimes struggle to exploit the ideas that emerge from their research divisions. In another new book, The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble blame the mismatch between innovation, which is inherently non-routine and uncertain, and companies’ operational needs for the repeatable and predictable. Execution, they argue, is the key.

You can see their point: all three of the great 20th-century corporate research labs – AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, IBM’s Watson Research Center and Xerox’s PARC – provide examples. AT&T, banned by an antitrust settlement from entering the computer business, gave away both the UNIX operating system and the C programming language to universities.

Xerox saw no market for its pioneering graphical, mouse-driven personal computer – until Steve Jobs famously copied it at Apple. And by the late 1980s, IBM – famous for inventing DRAM, disk drives, the programming language Fortran and much more – was failing at technology transfer. In the 1990s, as Director of IBM’s research division, James McGroddy began the effort to reverse this trend.

“Our goal has two legs,” he said in 1991.“One is to be famous for our science, and the other is to be a vital part of IBM, and that really means vital, like the heart that keeps you alive.” In order to work, he added, “it’s got to be tangled in”.

Ari Juels, Chief Scientist and Director of RSA Laboratories, cites a personal example to show how many factors have to go right for an idea to succeed. While reading David Kahn’s book The Codebreakers, Juels was struck by the possibilities of deploying techniques used by telegraphers in the Allied underground in World War Two in one of RSA’s products.

“But [because of] timing, the personalities I interacted with, and perhaps my lack of salesmanship, I couldn’t get it adopted,” he says. “Then, 10 years later, a need was found in that same product for exactly this type of technology.” Of course, in 10 years the idea could easily have been forgotten, or Juels could have moved on. “The suitability of the idea was a function not just of the technological environment in which it was to be deployed, but of many external business factors as well.”