Creative People Must Be Stopped (19 page)

Using the Results

Note the total number of statements that you rated as “Highly Descriptive.” If you have rated more than six of them this way, then working on industry constraints will be a productive effort. Now that you have identified the specific constraints, you can take action. You may wish to turn back and reread the description of the problem and of the specific strategies for addressing that constraint. You may also find that strategies are obvious given the symptom you have identified. For detailed instructions on working with your assessment results, use the steps outlined in Appendix A, Using the Assessment Results, to determine if these constraints are a significant impediment for you in your organization and to develop strategies for overcoming them.

Later, after completing assessment for the other chapters, you will be able to compare constraints and see if one of the other levels poses a greater challenge for you overall than do these industry constraints. Of course you need to recognize that industry constraints are created by interactions among many different participants in that industry and may therefore be difficult to change. Still, this framework can help you understand and anticipate the actions others are likely to take in response to your firm's innovation efforts.

Summary

An industry is a natural grouping of rival organizations and their suppliers around the markets they serve as they produce the goods and services that customers consume. The process of innovation is the primary tool organizations can use to drive the development of products and services that satisfy the needs of customers in that market. However, the three stakeholder groups (that is, rivals, suppliers, and customers) are affected by the competition in different ways, and this can lead them to adopt divergent orientations toward the value of using innovation as the primary tool of competition. As well, even when innovation is the desirable response to tough competition, it can also exact a high cost for those who are charged with producing it. In response to this cost and because of the inherent differences in interests, industries may unintentionally constrain innovation otherwise produced by the firms within. The following chart offers a recap of the constraints discussed in this chapter, along with some strategies for overcoming or living with them.

Chapter Reflection: Industry Constraints

It can be helpful to reflect on your insights about industry-level constraints and the process of diagnosing them in your industry. You may wish to consider these questions:

• What evidence is there for the existence of the constraints you named?
  
• How important are these industry-level factors compared to the individual, group, organizational, societal, and technological constraints you have identified?
  
• What constraints were overlooked because of your limited view into the industry and the market?
  
• Would others agree with the need for changing your strategy for competing in the industry?
  

CHAPTER 6

Why My Innovation Means You Have to Change

Societal Innovation Constraints

Figure 6.1

At the time he conceived it, Dean Kamen believed that the Segway Personal Transporter would literally change the world. Early specifications said that the machine—code-named
It
—would weigh about eighty pounds, move at a top speed of 12 mph, and have an eleven-mile range. Despite the rather low ceiling on its speed and range, Kamen envisioned the Segway replacing noisy, smelly, polluting automobiles, especially in cities, by providing convenient transportation to all points within its range, and, because it could be driven to mass transit stations and taken aboard buses and trains, to all points beyond. At an expected price of around $9,000 for the commercial version and $5,000 for the consumer model, the invention, Kamen felt sure, would soon have the world beating a path to his door (and leaving on a Segway).

Of course, it never happened. The people who have ridden the Segway will tell you the ride is thrilling and fun. The problem is that there aren't very many such people, certainly nowhere near the forty thousand new riders per month that had once been anticipated. Why not? It doesn't seem that the Segway fell afoul of any of the constraints we have considered so far. The machine exists and does exactly what it is designed to do, so individual and group constraints did not prevent the idea from coming to fruition. Nor were there any obvious organizational constraints. Segway Inc. was well funded, initially with over $80 million provided by Kleiner-Perkins, so the organizational resources were ample. I have seen, and I am sure you have too, a number of tourist outfits that allow you to rent a Segway by the hour, so the problem doesn't seem to lie in producing, distributing, or servicing the device. In fact, Kamen's organization is well known as a competent invention house.

So why hasn't Kamen's dream been fulfilled? What kind of constraint was overlooked in the development of his innovation?

Can We Choose to Change Society?

This chapter, grounded in the perspectives of sociology and anthropology, moves up a level of analysis as we examine how a society—acting through politics, norms, ethics, laws, regulations, and other forms of social control—interprets, values, and ultimately adopts or limits the creative options available to an aspiring innovator.

At times society deliberately, openly thwarts changes it perceives as threatening. For example, the announcement in 2002 by Dr. Brigitte Boisselier of the birth of the first cloned human—which, if true, would certainly represent an innovation—was met first with skepticism and then, more to the point here, with general revulsion. Beyond vilifying Boisselier's company, Clonaid, in the media, the United Nations General Assembly took up the issue and developed a declaration wherein “Member States are called upon to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life” (United Nations, 2005). The European Union, the U.S. Congress, and a number of states also enacted bans on human cloning.

Societal constraints can also act in more subtle ways to deter the innovation. Witness the ongoing struggles in the digital age around intellectual property and the efforts to devise laws either to liberalize the control of information or to give greater protection to the “owners” of the property.

In days of old, fighting men on the island of Britain used a form of punishment in which the culprit, stripped to the waist, had to run between two rows of men who whipped and beat him as he passed by. Our expression “run the gauntlet” derives from this practice, which provides an apt analogy to the way innovations may be buffeted this way and that by the societal forces surrounding them. In particular, new ideas must run the gauntlet of societal constraints concerning three major areas:

• Values and identity:
  the beliefs that a society holds collectively and uses as a basis for judging its members, and the sense of self that individuals construct from those beliefs
  
• Social control:
  the formal and informal ways that society guides behavior and holds members accountable for adherence to its values
  
• History:
  the obligations created by the beliefs and actions of a society in earlier times
  

Is it possible to survive the gauntlet and change society? Of course. By definition, a new idea requires some level of social change to succeed. But the more societal constraints an innovation challenges, and the more powerful or entrenched they are, the less likely the idea is to make it. This chapter will help you understand the kinds of constraints operating at this level and suggest ways of responding to them.

Values and Identity Constraints: I Like Who I Am

I had occasion to note in the chapter on groups that we experience some kinds of constraints simply because we are social animals. The same truth applies to our participation in a society. We express who we are and what we value through our behaviors and the material objects with which we live our lives, such as our food, dress, cars, homes, and gadgets. We also interpret the behaviors and possessions of others through the lens of our values as we relate to and judge them. To the extent that members of a society seek belonging and esteem, choices of behaviors and possessions will be influenced by societal values. Innovations that conflict with our sense of identity or with the ideals of society will face significant constraints on the path to adoption.

Societal Values and Ideals

The values a society expresses through its laws are usually readily discernible. When governing bodies act to “protect human dignity” and “prevent harm” by human cloning, the values underlying these laws are evident. But it is not always the case that the underlying values are clear. It may be that some important values are not obvious and evident; they may not be formally expressed the way they are in laws. When I discuss the Segway story in my classes, I start by putting a picture of Dean Kamen riding a Segway on the screen. He's wearing a helmet and a huge grin along with his trademark jeans, work shirt, and boots. This causes people to laugh out loud. When I ask them why this is so funny, participants cannot seem to put their finger on it. Finally someone gives voice to the common feeling by offering, “I wouldn't want to ride that thing if it made me look like that!” “What do you mean?” I ask. “Well, I would look like a nerd—I mean, what a dork!”

A short lesson from the older of two young persons in my household taught me that dorks are people who don't share normal social values and who, therefore, don't seem to care what other people think of them. This leads them to engage in behaviors that are considered laughable, embarrassing, and socially reprehensible by those who do adhere to the dominant values. I was also pointedly informed that such socially awkward behaviors might include playing Ping-Pong or being an electronics hobbyist in one's spare time—or riding a Segway.

Of course, becoming overly invested in the ways that others look at the world is problematic; when one is engaged in creative problem solving, ignoring social norms is a smart strategy for getting to new ideas. But people can also become enamored with their own ideas, forgetting that the values they hold, which cause them to judge an idea as great, may not be widely shared. Boisselier, who claimed to have cloned the first human, was also a bishop in the Raelian Movement, an atheist UFO religion. Her immersion in that role and the associated values may have led her to become unaware of the potential backlash against her announcement of a successful cloning attempt. After all, cloning is a central tenet of the Raelian religion's views. This suggests that although individuals may intuitively know what a society holds as ideal, the fact that they are embedded in that society (and in subsocieties within) makes it difficult to develop an actionable understanding of held values.

Conflicting Values

Knowing the values that members of a society hold is helpful, but we may still run into a problem of
conflicting
values. Not only may different segments of society have different value systems, as exemplified by the cloning example; values may conflict within a single value system. Consider our society's grappling with the ecological effects of our consumption behaviors. Such social ideals as sustainability, fair trade, and appropriate technology are based on widely shared ideas of human rights. These ideals have provided broad avenues for new innovations, drawing people both as employees and investors. Companies supporting these ideas also see the value reflected in public measures of their goodwill.

However, there are also people who will oppose these innovations the moment they come into conflict with some other value that these individuals hold more strongly. For example, although the multiple adverse ecological impacts of open-pit coal mining are regrettable and irreversible, you are unlikely to get the support of a fourth-generation coal-mining family for shutting down the coal-fired power plant in their town and switching to wind, solar, or nuclear power instead. Although they may agree in principle that it's a good idea in the long run, there is just too much at stake for them in the here and now.

Tightly Held Social Identity

The ways in which we see ourselves and others see us are based in part on the roles we occupy in society and how society views those who share important characteristics with us. These roles can have a constraining effect, especially when adoption of an innovation means you have to change or abandon a role that is not only deeply internalized but also externally valued and enforced. For example, the court reporter I described in Chapter Five who opposed automated court transcription systems viewed her role as essential to the function of delivering their “day in court” to people who feel wronged in our society. In her eyes, replacing her with a machine not only devalued her skills but also threatened an important value in our society: equal access to justice.

People whose social values contrast with those of the dominant society may not want to change them. They may actually like who they are and revel in being viewed as quirky or as misfits, particularly if they find other like-minded people and band together in subcultures of alternative values. Teenagers, for example, often don't want to feel that others, particularly adults, can share or even understand their values. This leads them to reject many innovations that are designed or marketed to them in clumsy or patronizing ways.

Of course these relationships among values, roles, and identity are difficult to predict or disentangle. But matters only become more complex when members of a pluralistic society hold multiple, potentially divergent roles as they transition from one value system in their society to another. On the one hand, assimilation is desirable, as it creates the identity a person needs to thrive in the new society; on the other hand, assimilation may require a person to let go of a valued role in his or her society of origin. The United States, with its ideal of equality, offers people the opportunity to improve their social status regardless of race, gender, or social class. Yet the same ideal dictates that no special rights be given to a “first born son,” this being a highly valued and entitled status in many traditional societies.

Innovators may inadvertently force people into feeling as though they have to make a choice among their multiple identities. Nick Tan (2011) expresses this tension in his review of a video game for the Xbox 360 titled Homefront. This FPS (first-person shooter) game is set in “the American backyard” and built on the premise that a fictional Korean People's Army has invaded the United States; the shooter's (that is, player's) job is “answering the call of resistance to protect humble apple pie from the supposed threat of kimchi.” Tan can't get past the characterization of the enemy as being Asian; for him there is tension in “a story of a patriotic Korean-American who experiences the Racial Wars firsthand, defending his family and himself against discrimination [here in the United States], and is then drafted into the military to defend his country.” This tension involving identity was also apparent in a controversy about another video game, Medal of Honor, by Electronic Arts. EA came under intense pressure from the public and the military because the game allowed players to assume the role of “the Taliban” to fight against American forces. They changed the name to “the Opposing Force” in response.