AFT World Wide - Industry News

Tending the Seeds of Innovation

Great companies are not necessarily the most technologically innovative ones. As business author Jim Collins points out, IBM grew from a small business housed in a single building to one of the largest corporations in the world, but it wasn't because of its product innovation – its computer technology lagged well behind competitors such as Burroughs in the early 1960s. Rather, it was largely a social invention, the development of a highly professional sales force that boosted the company past its competitors.

Similarly, it was Diner's Club, not American Express, that invented the modern credit card. American Express didn't introduce its first card until eight years later, but being a follower rather than a leader didn't stop it from becoming a very successful company.

The seeds of innovation, whether they lead to a revolutionary product or social invention, often lie unnoticed or underappreciated until some visionary sees them in a new light. Take the printing press with movable type, perhaps the most influential invention ever. Invented by Johann Gutenberg in 1456, the printing press made the mass publication and circulation of literature possible. But few realize that Gutenberg's first press, which employed a heavy screw to force a printing block against the paper, was derived from the presses used by farmers to make olive oil.

Consider another highly influential invention, the airplane. Many people had been feverishly working to develop a flying craft before the Wright brothers came along. Yet, even as latecomers, the Wrights were able to pass them. Their very first craft in 1900 was considered about equal to the best that had been built up to that time. The Wrights' 1902 glider was the first truly effective heavier-than-air craft, and in 1903, the brothers created their first powered craft, which successfully flew on December 17, 1903.

Many feel the key to the Wrights' rapid progress was that they truly did their homework, conducting painstaking research of what others had already done before they seriously tried to build their own craft. They read everything they could get their hands on, and were unusually adept at judging the worth of the ideas they encountered. As they read, they identified hard facts while discarding widely-held superstitions in the field that held others back. By carefully integrating bits and fragments of knowledge scattered through the literature – available to anyone who cared to read it – the brothers sprang ahead.

So we see that innovation requires the vision to use familiar elements in new ways, and that many times this requires unusual persistence. This brings us to the invention of the Pina Colada. The popular drink, based on common ingredients, was created in 1954 by Ramón "Monchito" Marrero, a bartender at the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico. It took him three months of experimentation to perfect the recipe, which he then continued to serve at the hotel for another 35 years. The cocktail is influential in its own way, as it was named Puerto Rico's official national drink in 1978.

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