Innovation Is a Team Sport

Innovation is a team sport! I use these words often in Agile and management coaching. Often though, someone will challenge me on this. I’ll hear “no, invention and innovation just happens;” or “innovation involves a single person, you know, like when a lightbulb appears over their head.” It’s that cartoon image of innovation that seems to trap people into believing that there is something random or even lucky about innovation.

But let’s take that metaphor for invention and innovation, the light bulb, for starters. The invention of the light bulb is generally credited to Thomas Edison, that much most people know. But what led to this invention? How exactly did this life-changing innovation come to be?

Edison (and others like Tesla) envisioned generated electricity as the power of the future. They saw electricity in homes and factories providing light, heat, and motion (for running looms and other factory equipment) that would enable those factories to run 24 hours-a-day making better use of the investment made in them. But Edison hardly invented industrial light. Arc-lights, and even carbon filament lights of many kinds had been around since the beginning of the 19th century. In this sense, much of Edison’s innovation was around perfecting a device (making it affordable, efficient, and bright) rather than inventing it from scratch. And what of the invention itself, no one knows who thought up carbonized tungsten in a vacuum tube as the ultimate incandescent light. We do know that Edison had a large team working together, looking at many materials; in fact, the first Edison bulb patent used carbonized bamboo for the filament. Like most innovations the invention of the light bulb was not an instantaneous event. No, it was the work of a dedicated team building on the work of other teams, all orchestrated by a leader. The story of most innovations is similar.

So when looking for innovation in your business, I would not bank on forehead slapping, light bulbs snapping on over people’s heads, or even the dropping of raw rubber onto a hot stove (the invention of vulcanized rubber is also filled with incomplete lore) to fuel your innovations. Instead, look to create the outcomes you seek (like keeping factories open at night), build a team and provide them with the tools and freedom they need to innovate, and take into account what’s gone before.

What are your experiences with innovation?