Whether you're digging a ditch or designing an aeroplane, innovation makes the task more efficient and competitive. So how do we drive innovation?
Innovation is much discussed in Australia. I did a Google search of the term and got one and a quarter million hits on Australian sites alone. It seems that every politician and everyone in business has an opinion on how to drive innovation.
There are a huge number of theories involving funding, patent law and corporate support, but my personal experience in business and engineering has taught me that innovation is dominated by a single factor: the establishment of stimulating challenges.
Set an engineer an ordinary challenge and you will see an ordinary design emerge. Set an engineer a stimulating challenge and you will see an innovative design emerge. Think about the world of personal music players, the kind that nearly every young person carries in their pocket so that they can listen to music when they're walking, driving or, perhaps, attending lectures.
For a long while improvements to these music players involved reducing their size and increasing their robustness, but the user interface made it difficult to select songs or control the order in which they played. Then along came Apple with the iPod which totally redefined the user interface, making it easy to choose songs by artist or title, easy to control the playback order and easy to download songs to the computer and transfer from there to the iPod.
You can imagine the original scene back at Apple headquarters. In my mind's eye I see Steve Jobs, legendary head of Apple, challenging a small gathering of engineers and marketing folk to develop a music player that would revolutionise the concept, be simultaneously powerful, reasonably priced, simple to use, able to interact intelligently with a host computer, magnificent looking, completely different and, above all, a joy to use.
"Don't be constrained," I bet Jobs would have said. "To start with, pretend there are no design limits." Quite an extraordinary challenge, wouldn't you agree? And the engineers rose to the challenge and produced the iPod, a product that revolutionised music players, created a new culture and became a booming business for Apple.
The group of engineers at Apple who created the iPod were not unique. I would be willing to bet that if you took a group of engineering graduates and gave them the same challenge, and the necessary resources, they could do just as well. Their product would be different, but great nevertheless.
What does this have to do with leadership? The ability to set stimulating challenges is the most important characteristic that a leader can have.
Setting a challenge goes way beyond delegation; it is delegation on steroids. If by delegating a task you merely instruct an employee what to do, all you will get back is what you could have done yourself. If instead you set a challenge that will stretch your employee's talent, imagination and skill set, you will get back a product that goes beyond what you could have done yourself and will lead to new, competitive opportunities for your company or organisation.
The best personal example I ever had of the importance of setting challenges was when my Californian company, which for years had been making scientific devices and software for neuroscientists who studied how brain cells worked, was in the mature stage of product development, refining existing products rather than making completely new ones.
We already had 60 per cent of the world market in this niche area, so our growth prospects were severely limited. We needed to expand into a new field. Fortunately, a colleague at nearby Stanford University identified an opportunity for us in the emerging field of genomics.
A crucial tool in this field was the DNA microarray, also known as the gene chip or the bio chip. The genetic data could only be read from these chips by using an extremely sensitive, fluorescence scanner. There were a number on the market, but they were all big, slow and expensive.
We had a couple of remarkably brilliant engineers on staff: Yuri and Bruce were like two stallions that had been kept in the barn for too long. They were rearing and neighing, ready to burst through the gates to explore the forests and plains.
I was excited about the prospects for us in genomics and I set Yuri and Bruce the challenge of building something that would make us a name in this new market, despite the fact that we were entirely unknown in the field and had no experience making fluorescence scanners.
Yuri and Bruce immediately assembled a team and led them in the rapid development of a machine that used a novel laser-scanning mechanism and was cheaper, faster and better looking than the existing competition. This one product led our company out of its traditional market and started us on a new expansion path that defined much of our success for the next few years.
Yuri and Bruce didn't need to be micromanaged in order to be successful, they simply needed to be challenged and supported.
Alan Finkel, a neuroscientist and philanthropist, is the Chancellor of Monash University in Melbourne and one of the founders of Cosmos. This is an edited extract of his address to a Monash University Engineering Faculty Leadership Dinner in November 2007.
The Power of Mind
Recently i was reading a book about Cognitive Psycology. Cognitive psycology deals with the high level processings of mind which made human the superman. It is the study of mental imagery,learning, attention,thinking,memory,conciousness etc..I read the book completely.After some days i ralized that i remember almost all the topics of the chapter about memory.I remember the names of scientists,on whom they done research,in which year they done the research etc..But the matter is that i cannot remember more than 50% of other chapters.while going deeply to the subject i found that while reading about the conciousness my conciousness is increased, while learning about attention my level of attention increased a lot.what it means? The power of your mind is very high but you dont know that.You have to find out the tune of your mind. You have to trust it.You also can do miracles by using your super computer which is in your skull.