Book Review: The Mystery Of Collective Innovation

By Zheng Lei

Innovation is not based on the consensus of all, innovation is unusual. However, the reality is that many new ideas have been wiped out or ignored before they come to the ground. We can study how innovation grows from three aspects: individual innovation, market innovation and social innovation. They correspond to public spontaneous innovation, enterprise and industry innovation, and national innovation in turn.

"The origin of innovation: a history of scientific and technological progress" focuses on the case and mechanism of market innovation. Its main point of view is that innovation is progressive, is the reorganization of existing knowledge and technology, and benefits from decentralized management and bottom-up trial and error. With regard to national innovation, the author cites many examples to argue that the innovation advocated by British economist mazucato mainly comes from the government's special support for mission oriented research and development. For example, before 1940, the U.S. government did not provide a large amount of public subsidies for R & D activities, and the airships funded by the British government were far inferior to the similar products developed by private institutions. However, the OECD reviewed the factors that promoted economic growth from 1971 to 1998 and found that it was the amount of R & D funded by the private sector rather than that by the public sector that had a positive impact on the economy. One possible explanation is that government funding for research causes researchers to give priority to government projects, which is inconsistent with giving priority to the needs of industries or consumers. For example, Egypt, Rome, Osman, Habsburg, the British Empire and Russia are all samples of centralized empire that are not good at innovation. Printing, for example, was banned for 300 years by the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal Dynasty. After 1400, it was quickly adopted in Europe, which completely changed the political and economic development of Western Europe.

I agree with the view that technological innovation promotes social and economic development, but I believe that the factors that really affect the role of innovation come from society, including the social structure of innovation, the structure of industry and market, and the incentive for individual innovation. Innovation promotes the adjustment of social structure, especially in the initial stage of the new KangBo cycle, which has the strongest driving force for innovation, the social environment has a high degree of acceptance of innovation. However, the nature of society has the inertia of human nature, especially after the formation of vested interest class, the society is more and more opposed to change and inhibit innovation. The government has a great influence on the formation of social structure. It may not be necessary for the government to directly participate in innovation. However, the government's intervention will help to break up the rigid social structure and create a better environment for market innovation and mass innovation.

The main body of innovation is obviously enterprises and individuals, and a good example of personal innovation is open source software. Unfortunately, with the expansion of enterprise scale and the maturity of operation and management, it has become inefficient in innovation and unwilling to take the risk of innovation. Some big companies realized many years ago that it is difficult to rely on internal R & D to bring innovation needed by competition for themselves. For example, the proportion of internal innovation of P & G company is about 35%, and it needs to obtain innovation from outside.

For the innovation management of enterprises, Safi Baher, the author of phase change, puts forward a set of convincing methodology. As a Ph.D. in physics, he explained group innovation behavior from the perspective of "phase transition".

In the enterprise, most new ideas will be regarded as "fantasy" and hidden. Only a few people will persist until they are rediscovered, and some of them have even made remarkable achievements. What's puzzling is that creative ideas can also be killed in institutions that are considered innovative. People may not know the idea of Apple's mobile phone and app store, which was first proposed by several Nokia engineers in 2004. At that time, they wanted to invent a new type of mobile phone with internet access, large color touch screen and high resolution. In order to cooperate with this mobile phone, they also proposed to establish an "online application store". But Nokia's decision makers rejected the proposal, and three years later, the idea was realized by jobs.

The author thinks that the key to this problem is that the organization is constantly changing. At different time points, each mechanism is in a specific state, which is similar to the concept of "phase" in physics. In the process of transformation, the structure of the organization will change, and a rigid team can be changed by human intervention.

Can an organization accommodate innovation and be good at mass production of mature products? In physics, there is a word called "phase separation", which means that water and ice exist at the same time at zero centigrade. An enterprise may also maintain the state of compatible innovation and normal operation through appropriate adjustment. There is a successful case. The predecessor of at & T was bell telephone, which later established "Bell laboratory" through reorganization. The laboratory has successfully launched a series of innovative theories and contributed eight Nobel Prize winners. But Bell laboratory is not a pure academic research institution, but a successful industrial laboratory. By creating a mechanism that conforms to the "dynamic equilibrium" of physical phase transition, Bell laboratory's innovative achievements have become the new products of at & T, and made it one of the largest companies in the United States. And "phase separation" plus "dynamic balance" is the secret of business organization to achieve innovation.