Title: The Evolution of Innovation: An Interview with John Seely Brown: John Seely Brown Talks with James Euchner about Where Innovation Management Has Been and Where It Is Headed
Abstract: John Seely Brown has been at center of many of most profound shifts in RD from emergence of sociotechnical approaches to technology design to increasing importance of social media; from innovation at edges of companies to growing emergence of innovation ecosystems across corporations. JIM EUCHNER [JE]: I thought that it would be interesting to talk about how RD use what you build. This gave us a tremendous grounding for many of things that we invented. Curiously, we may now be in another even more amazing moment, one that I like to call a Cambrian moment where ways of working, learning, organizing, innovating, and governing are being reconceived. Old institutions are stumbling; old, even digital, technologies seem like abacuses; old modes of innovating seem a bit archaic. But let's go back to old moment (mid-1970s), which I think was also extremely fertile and underdefined. I'd like to say that PARC was so creative because of our brilliance, but I think we have to calibrate those beliefs relative to what was happening at that moment in technological world. One factor was that computers and very large-scale integration (VLSI) were just coming of age, creating a gigantic sandbox to explore. Another factor that enabled us to do amazing things was that we were given an incredibly broad charter to become the architects of information. That charter was a broad narrative that oriented us, but didn't overconstrain us. A third factor that was critical in enabling PARC to be so great stemmed from Xerox having four other research centers, plus major development centers all over world. These centers were doing more predictable stuff, which gave PARC freedom to be unpredictable and gave us freedom to fail, fail, fail, and then periodically come up with some truly great ideas. If we hadn't had these other, more incrementally oriented research centers, we would never have been given freedom to pursue wild. That was reasonable back then. It may be reasonable again, but in a different way. JE: There were so many innovations that emerged from PARC, but Xerox only capitalized on them in more narrow ways. They invented technology but didn't create markets. Why was that hard? JSB: I think that's a complicated story and a long story, but it's often misunderstood. It's a whole interview in its own right. I'm just going to say two or three brief things on that. It may be a bit brash or macho of me, but I am fond of saying, We didn't invent products; our game was to invent industries. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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