Slow Innovation: Good ideas take a long time to perfect

Reading David Hoffer's article about Innovation

Innovation takes a long time — longer than most businesses realize or even want to admit. Richard Luecke, the author of several books from the Harvard Business Essentials series, defines innovation as “the embodiment, combination or synthesis of knowledge in original, relevant, valued new products, processes or services.” Within this “synthesis of knowledge” is a twisting vortex of new ideas that have to be extracted, implemented, and exploited in order to become real innovations. In other words, identifying new ideas is only the first step in a long process. Bringing them to market and then dominating that market is an entirely different matter.

Take the music industry. Edison’s cylinder phonograph was invented in 1877, and the first wax cylinders were mass-marketed in the 1880s. This technology lasted until the 1910s, at which time disc records became the medium of choice for at-home music listeners. After that, the cylinder business petered out, but it took 30 years for flat discs to mature and develop into the dominant player in the industry.

More recent innovations in the recording industry are better known. Vinyl lasted for 80 years before it was challenged (meekly, some say) by cassette tapes and 8-track cartridges in the '70s and '80s. Real change, however, came in the 1990s with compact disc (CD) technology. Now digital music recordings are challenging the CD’s dominance, but MP3 technology didn’t simply appear in the late '90s. According to many accounts, that technology began life in the 1970s. Here again is another 30-plus-year innovation cycle.

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Innovation isn’t only about new technology. In fact, it’s mainly about culture. Humans are by nature habitual animals, and it takes a lot to move us off of our habits. Technology may be advancing quickly, but that doesn’t mean humans have the interest or the aptitude to adopt it right away.

For example, Swiss inventor George de Mestral invented Velcro in 1941 after noticing the burrs of a burdock had small hooks that caught on his clothing during a hike. Yet it took him nearly 10 years to develop the invention, several more to get the patent (1955), and even longer to sell the product to some pioneering early adopters, including NASA and one or two sporting-equipment companies. So while Velcro was a brief moment of invention, the process of establishing it as part of the culture took much longer.