Innovating Innovation. David Morey

      Dance like no one is watching.

      —Mark Twain

      The Wizard of Menlo Park, holder of more than a thousand patents, Thomas Alva Edison, left us an important clue to his extraordinary creativity: Build a workshop, not a laboratory. We will dig into this in a moment. It is a big part of what makes Edison such an extraordinary model of innovating innovation. Laboratories are for geniuses. Workshops are for mere mortals who like to build things. The symphony was to Mozart what the laboratory is to a scientific genius—a place where creativity just happens naturally. No wonder Mozart pisses off a working-class musical innovator like Billy Joel. Mozart is not human, so how can a mere mortal emulate him? Beethoven, on the other hand, struggled for every one of the “mere” nine symphonies he wrote, pounding them out in the chaos of his distinctly untidy combination living quarters and workshop. Billy Joel, then, found him human, a fellow creative convict sentenced to hard labor.

      As for Edison? Like Billy Joel, he continually riffed on the work of others. God created light. Edison just figured out a way of subdividing it to make it more useful. Sir Humphrey Davy invented the first electric light, an arc lamp. Commercially, it was all but useless. Edison riffed on it until it became not only useful, but the “killer app” around which he created the first electric power utility, including generators, power grid, and a metering system to allow for equitable billing. Subdivided, light became a fungible commodity. This was no work of poetic inspiration but, rather, the product of a workingman’s sweat.

      Behold Billy Joel. You can see him as an artist deserted by creative inspiration back in 1993. Or, you can see him as a performer who managed to subdivide inspiration, commoditize it, and deploy it over fifty years and counting. He may have never made his peace with Mozart, the supernatural natural, but he saw in the example of Beethoven a reason to struggle and sweat.

      For us ordinary innovators, working men and women who get our daily bread by creating on demand, it is to Billy Joel and Beethoven and Edison that we look. Let the likes of Albert Einstein admire Mozart. Einstein pisses me off. Try to reverse engineer Einstein’s process of deductive reasoning that produced his famous “thought experiments,” and you will find them almost useless as objects of emulation. The imperative “Think like Einstein” makes as little sense as asking a man to give birth to a child. He is just not built that way. Like Mozart, Einstein is too gifted, rare, and natural to help those of us in urgent need of an idea.

      But then there is Beethoven. Work the problem. Wrestle the music out of the idea. Or Edison. Find the 1 percent inspiration that drives the 99 percent perspiration needed to innovate something. Edison, like Beethoven, walked as we walk. The exhaustive historical record around his process of invention paints a clear picture of how the Wizard of Menlo Park operated.

      Edison first opened shop in Newark, New Jersey, but his genuine innovation in the business of innovation came in 1876, when he built what some historians call his industrial research laboratory in what was then the semi-rural village of Menlo Park, New Jersey. In fact, “laboratory” is a misnomer. It is well worth a visit to Dearborn, Michigan, where Henry Ford established Greenfield Village, an outdoor museum of American history and culture. He dismantled Edison’s Menlo Park facility, inside and out, transported the pieces to Greenfield Village, and meticulously reconstructed it there. Today, visitors walk through the building. While there are bottles of chemicals, beakers, and flasks—the furnishings of a nineteenth-century lab—the overall look of the place is that of a workshop. When you examine period photos of the place in action, you see men in shop aprons, not lab coats. The credentials they hold are not PhDs, but experience as master machinists, telegraphers, metalworkers, and industrial tinkerers. They are technologists, and Edison gathered them in his workshop to execute a mission: streamline, systematize, and regularize the processes of invention and innovation. Plant, nurture, and harvest ideas. Do not let a single one die of neglect. Just purge the enterprise of the vagaries of hit-or-miss inspiration and luck.

      Edison called what he built an “Invention Factory,” and there was nothing else like it—and would not be, probably, until Bell Labs (today called Nokia Bell Labs) was established in 1925 in New York City, and later distributed across several New Jersey locations. Until Bell Labs, Edison’s Invention Factory was the only dedicated private R&D facility in the world. Yet, as radical as the idea was, its true brilliance lies in the fact that it is a far less radical departure from Edison’s own era than it might seem. As always, Edison built on existing models. He innovated rather than invented. He never conjured up something from nothing. He was Beethoven, not Mozart—Edison, not Einstein.

      Active during the height of the Industrial Revolution and the early years of modern mass production, Edison borrowed from an approach that was certainly on the retreat, the pre-industrial tradition of individual craftsmanship. His Invention Factory was staffed by uniquely skilled craftsmen and apprentices, workers who could diligently execute Edison’s orders and conduct trial-and-error experiments in innovation while, at the same time, contributing their own wisdom and instincts. Edison wanted craftspeople and problem solvers, not cogs. An indispensable feature of the Invention Factory were notebooks and pencils laid out on the work benches at the start of every day and collected at the close of business. Edison asked his workers to write down any observations and ideas that occurred to them as they worked. He was anxious to capture every thought, every insight. Not a minute of the imaginative brainpower for which he was paying should be lost.