Quirky

by Melissa A Schilling

  After a couple of years the results were showing clearly at Green Cargo: absenteeism and turnover were down, and profitability was up. People came into work in the morning more energized and left in the evening feeling more satisfied that they had done a good job. As Csikszentmihalyi notes,

  The general principle is to find out what your people like to do. Then you give them an opportunity to do that, within the goals of your organization. That’s simply allowing their intrinsic motivation to become profitable for the organization.… Most people would jump at the opportunity to do what they’re really good at, and they would perform better and maybe even make more money, which often brings in more revenue for the company. What’s essential is that you get to know your workers. You have to know what they’re good at and what they’re not good at. Then you have to discover how each person’s skills can be connected to the challenges of your company. It may be that you don’t need more salespeople. Then people with those skills should be encouraged to find a job elsewhere.… We love to do what we’re good at. It’s the expression of ourselves.12

  Increasing access to technological and intellectual resources. One of Benjamin Franklin’s great insights was that public libraries would give a much wider group of people access to the knowledge obtainable from books, leading him to establish America’s first lending library. There was a similar motivation behind Google’s ambitious project, started in 2002, of scanning books with the intention of making all of the world’s books available online—the ultimate library, accessible from your own home. Books that were still in copyright would be accessible for a charge, earning royalties for their copyright holders, and if those copyright holders could not be found (so-called “orphan books”), royalties would be held for five years in their name. In 2004 Google started scanning; every weekday trucks full of books would pull up to Google scanning centers, where human operators would feed them into machines that could digitize them at a rate of a thousand pages per hour.13 In 2007 Marissa Mayer, then Vice President of Google Product Search, predicted the entire project would be complete by 2017 (though of course it would need constant updating). One aspect of the project anticipated as the biggest benefit to both consumers and authors—access to the massive repository of out-of-print books that are otherwise invisible and abandoned—turned out to be its Achilles heel. A legal settlement that would have given Google the right to digitize the world’s out-of-print books would have also handed it, in essence, a monopoly on out-of-print books. Authors, publishers, and other critics filed objections with the US Department of Justice, which turned down the settlement. By 2017, the company had scanned thirty million volumes—an impressive repository nearly as large as the Library of Congress’s thirty-seven million volumes—but only snippets of most could actually be viewed because solutions to the copyright conundrum had yet to be worked out.14

  In academia a new development is unfolding that is gradually making large numbers of published academic articles available to the public for free. Most academics have two primary jobs. They teach courses for their institutions, and they conduct research that is published in articles and books. At many universities and other research institutions, articles are the primary currency for obtaining tenure, raises, and respect. An academic’s “market value” is often very closely linked to the number of articles she has published in journals deemed the most important in the field and to the impact (usually measured in number of citations) of those articles. Some fields also reward academics for publishing books, but usually only if those books also have “scholarly impact.” This is what “publish or perish” means. Academics do not typically publish to make money because journals usually do not pay for articles and most academic books generate little income. They publish to achieve impact, which, in turn, earns them tenure, higher pay, and the respect of their peers. They want people to read, talk about, and cite their publications. This means that academics, by and large, want their work widely distributed to both other academics and the public at large. Most top journals share this interest—after all, journals become “top journals” by having a high impact factor (being widely read and cited). Thus, as digital distribution has become widely available and inexpensive, many journals are beginning to offer authors the option to pay a fee to make their work available through an “open access” model. For a fee of a few thousand dollars, the full text of an author’s article is made available to any person with a Web browser. This has, unfortunately, raised some ethical questions about the for-profit academic publishers. The top five for-profit academic publishers are responsible for over 50 percent of the academic articles in the natural and medical sciences, and they have very high profit margins—higher than Apple’s margins, in fact.15 Will payments to publishers to have one’s scientific work disseminated become the new payola? A sting carried out by the prestigious academic journal Science found that more than half of 305 online journals were willing to publish deliberately faked research for a fee, despite the fact that the research contained fatal flaws that should have been obvious to “anyone with more than high-school knowledge of chemistry.”16 That is a disconcerting turn of events, but in the long run, rating systems will presumably evolve that help the consumers of academic articles sort the wheat from the chaff, and we will have open access to high-quality science, an outcome that would make Benjamin Franklin very happy.

  So what more can we do? Accelerating the pace at which articles and books are made available online to everyone, free or at low cost, is a start. As illustrated above, we also have to be careful that we do this without undermining the incentives or infrastructure for ensuring the quality of material that is produced or the reader’s ability to ascertain that quality. Publishers, editors, and reviewers all serve very valuable functions in helping to screen potential articles and books, selecting those with the most potential and helping to improve them prior to their publication. In our rush to get rid of the barriers to accessing articles and books, we should be careful to avoid doing more harm than good.

  There’s more we can do, however. Consider Jobs, Curie, and Musk, who were able to tap the expertise of people, not just articles and books. Jobs needed Wozniak and others to help him implement his vision. Curie needed Pierre to show her ways to measure tiny electrical currents. Musk hired the best rocket scientists he could find to help make his dream of reusable rockets a reality. We foster innovation by creating ways for people with ideas to gain access to those with the expertise needed to refine or execute those ideas. We want, in other words, to create ways for people to more easily access the intellectual resources available in other humans. If we can create expertise pools and consortia for sharing intellectual resources and also create incentives to share the physical assets of science such as laboratories and equipment, we might be able to achieve significantly more from our current investment in science, while also opening up science to those without science careers.

  The idea of opening up science is especially important to consider. The innovators studied here show that breakthroughs often come not from highly trained specialists in a field, but instead from outsiders who may be trained in other fields or who have relatively little training at all. For example, Kamen never completed an undergraduate degree and had no medical training whatsoever, yet he created the first portable kidney dialysis machine, the first portable drug infusion pump, the iBot mobility wheelchair, and several advanced prosthetic limbs. Musk has only undergraduate degrees in physics and economics, yet he personally designed a prototype for a reusable rocket that is currently revolutionizing the space industry, built an electric car manufacturing company that has been far more successful than anyone ever imagined (and put pressure on other automakers to develop electric vehicles of their own), and is currently building battery systems that are intended to enable people to capture and store solar energy to run their homes.

  Outsiders are important to innovation; they often operate in fields where they are highly motivated to solve problems in which they are
personally invested. They often look at problems in different ways from those who are well indoctrinated in the field, and they may question (or ignore) assumptions that specialists take for granted. This does not mean that specialized training is unimportant for innovation—specialized scientists account for a very large portion of both incremental and breakthrough innovation—but it means that we do not want to foreclose the opportunities that can arise from enabling nonspecialists to engage in science.

  Science has become increasingly professionalized over the last century. Years of training and highly specialized equipment create large barriers between the ordinary citizen and the scientific discovery process.17 However, a grassroots movement has started to emerge whereby individuals volunteer time, money, and equipment to make the scientific process and resources more accessible to the public. This movement goes by the name of “citizen science” or “community laboratories.”18 Some forms of citizen science engage the public in collecting data in fields such as meteorology, animal populations, and astronomy and then submitting the data to traditional scientists. Other efforts involve creating lab spaces where the public can engage in experimentation, building models, and learning processes typically accessible only to well-established researchers. Examples include BioCurious (in Sunnyvale, California), Genspace (in Brooklyn, New York), and BOSSLAB (in Somerville, Massachusetts). At Genspace, people can sign up to take courses where they learn to genetically modify yeast or grow leather-like textiles out of fungus, or they can pay a monthly fee to have round-the-clock access to Genspace’s lab space and equipment to conduct their own experiments.

  Unfortunately, these citizen science efforts tend to be underfunded, and many collapse before they become well-known because they fail to raise enough funding to obtain a critical mass of resources necessary to do meaningful work. This is an area where a modicum of government or foundation support could go a long way. Creating grants specifically targeting citizen science initiatives could help these organizations gain the critical mass they need to attract participants and donors.

  CAREFULLY STUDYING BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATORS reveals the ways in which they were special in their capabilities, their personalities, their resilience, and their motives. It also reveals that they benefited from situational advantages conferred by time, place, and social networks. However, studying breakthrough innovators also gives us insight into how we can nurture heterodox thinking and creativity, and how we can inspire the kind of effort and persistence that is necessary for creative ideas to come to fruition. It also gives us ideas for how we can catalyze situational advantage. Overall, then, understanding what makes breakthrough innovators special simultaneously reveals that there is much we can do to nurture the innovation potential that lies within us all.

  Dean Kamen with the DEKA prosthetic arm, 2009. Photograph by Connor Gleason.

  Albert Einstein in his office at University of Berlin, 1920.

  Photograph originally appeared in Scientific Monthly, photographer unknown.

  Albert Einstein, 1921.

  Photograph by F. Schmutzer.

  Albert Einstein and his second wife, Elsa, 1921.

  Photograph by Underwood and Underwood.

  Elon Musk at unveiling of Dragon v2 inside SpaceX, 2014.

  Photograph by Dimitri Gerondakis.

  Elon Musk with Model S at the Fremont Tesla factory, 2011.

  Photograph by Maurizio Pesce.

  Nikola Tesla retouched photo, circa 1893.

  Photograph by Napoleon Sarony.

  Nikola Tesla, double exposure photo in his Colorado Springs laboratory, 1889.

  Photograph by Dickenseon V. Ailey.

  Marie Curie, 1898.

  Photograph by Underwood and Underwood.

  Marie Curie in mobile X-ray unit, 1915.

  Photographer unknown.

  Thomas Edison, 1922.

  Photograph by Louis Bachrach, restored by Michel Vuijsteke.

  Thomas Edison and phonograph, 1877.

  Photograph by Levin C. Handy.

  Steve Jobs, 1984.

  Photograph by Norman Seeff.

  Steve Jobs with Bono at unveiling of new iPod, 2004.

  Photograph by Paul Akuma.

  Steve Jobs with iPhone, 2010.

  Photograph by Matthew Yohe.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my editor, John Mahaney, whose suggestions have vastly improved the book. I would also like to thank Joe Porac, Erwin Daneels, Becky Schaumberg, Joe Magee, and the participants at seminars held at New York University, Stanford University, University of Southern California, University of California Irvine, Norwegian School of Economics, Rutgers University, Baruch College, University of Michigan, Karolinska Institute, IESE (Barcelona), SciFoo, Winter Strategy Conference, Carnegie School Organizational Learning Conference, and the Academy of Management Conference for their many helpful comments and feedback. Thanks to my family and friends for their patience and support.

  MELISSA A. SCHILLING is the John Herzog Family professor of management and organizations at New York University’s Stern School of Business and one of the world’s leading experts on innovation. Her textbook, Strategic Management of Technological Innovation (now in its fifth edition), is the number-one innovation strategy text in the world and is available in seven languages. Professor Schilling is also a coauthor of Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach, now in its twelfth edition and one of the leading strategic management textbooks in the world.

  Professor Schilling’s doctorate in strategic management is from the University of Washington, where her dissertation research analyzed technology standards battles in high-technology industries. She sought answers to questions such as “How and why are dominant technologies chosen in ‘winner-take-all’ industries?” and “How do managers make the difficult choice between protecting their technologies with patents or copyrights, versus rapidly disseminating them to build support for their technologies?” This work positioned her on the forefront of research on innovation strategy, with expertise in industries such as smartphones, computers, software, and video games. Dr. Schilling subsequently expanded her research to include other high-technology industries such as biotech, renewable energy, and electric vehicles. Her articles on innovation, creativity, alliances, and modularity have appeared in leading journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Research Policy, and Harvard Business Review.

  Praise for Quirky:

  “A fascinating journey through the minds, experiences, and ideas of breakthrough innovators, Melissa Schilling’s Quirky is an exceptionally rewarding marriage of biography and social science that will change the way you think about winners and winning.”

  —Ron Adner, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, author of The Wide Lens

  “We all benefit from the work of few giants who massively changed the world. What sets them apart? Melissa Schilling has written by far the best book on this topic I’ve ever read, weaving together spellbinding stories about seven amazing mega-innovators with serious, grounded science. Read it and then and give a copy to a friend, and you just might unleash two more world-changers.”

  —Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT, coauthor of The Second Machine Age and Machine | Platform | Crowd

  “Quirky is an interesting and well-crafted journey through the lives of those ‘quirky’ women and men who transformed the world through innovation. Melissa A. Schilling compares the lives of Edison, Musk, Einstein, Curie, and many others through themes of creativity and originality, effort and persistence, and situational advantage.”

  —David Brin, NASA advisor, astrophysicist, and award-winning author of The Postman, The Transparent Society, and Existence

  “Melissa A. Schilling masterfully derives powerful and fresh insights for invention and innovation based on her careful analysis of some of the top inventors in our economic history. A
nyone interested in the history of science, innovation, and increasing the flow of useful knowledge around the world will find this an invaluable resource.”

  —Henry Chesbrough, University of California, Berkeley, author of Open Innovation

  “I love this book because it makes me think about thinking. Schilling very strongly makes the point that in a society where broad statistical approaches in education and science seem to point us toward some mediocre median, that the big innovations—the industry and civilization-changing innovations—still generally come from cranky individuals who are determined that their way is the better way. How do you make another Tesla, Curie, Jobs, or Musk? Schilling tells us how.”

  —Robert Cringely, author of Accidental Empires, Triumph of the Nerds, and Nerds 2.0.1.

  “Quirky is… well, quirky! A compelling multi-case study of amazing innovators. Yet while these people are breathtaking in their ingenuity, Schilling also wisely blends in sharp insights for the rest of us to step up our own innovation ‘game.’ Bravo!”

  —Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, S.W. Ascherman Professor of Strategy at Stanford University and coauthor of Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World

  “The clarion call to be innovative sounds loud and clear, but how to respond to this call is far less clear. Schilling provides us with not a recipe, but the fundamental ingredients as illustrated by the lives of an extraordinary set of diverse innovators. The key to her secret sauce is a ‘distance’ that provides the perspective to think differently, the passion to bring an insight to fruition, and the good fortune of context to facilitate these elements. A captivating read with inspirational biographies and valuable lessons to help light that innovative flame.”