The interests of the innovator aren't perfectly aligned with the interests of the corporation.
"You can be one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn't mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market," the tech writer Harry McCracken recently wrote. "They're really different, and few companies have ever been successful in both." He was talking about the decision by the networking giant Cisco Systems, this Spring, to shut down its Flip camera business, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Gary Starkweather, and his compatriots at Xerox PARC who invented the Xerox 9700 laser printer, weren't the source of disciplined strategic insights. They were wild geysers of creative energy. Xerox was a multinational corporation, with shareholders, a huge sales force, and a vast corporate customer base, and it needed to consider every new idea within the context of what it already had.
Starkweather had to pit his laser printer against lesser ideas in the contest of commercialization at Xerox. And, the instant he did, Xerox canceled the competing projects and gave him the green light. The reason Xerox invented the laser printer is that it invented the personal computer (and needed a way to transmit the results inside the computer to paper). Gary Starkweather's laser printer made billions for Xerox. It paid for every other single project at Xerox PARC, many times over.
There is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. The psychologist Dean Simonton says, "The more successes there are, the more failures there are as well"---meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult.
You might think of consumption as a fairly passive activity, but buying new products and services is actually pretty risky, at least if you value our time and money. It's hard to know in advance whether a new product will be useful: behavioral research shows that we're surprisingly bad at forecasting our needs and desires, which is why our homes are cluttered with unused gadgets and exercise equipment. On top of that, new products often still need the kinks worked out, so early users serve, in effect, as beta testers. It's common for consumer-electronic products to be much more expensive and much less powerful in their early versions compared with later models.
Nathan Myhrvold, formerly a senior executive at Microsoft, argues, "Innovation is an unruly thing. There will be some ideas that don't get caught in your cup. But that's not what the game is about. The game is what you catch, not what you spill."
Sources: "Creation Myth" by Malcolm Gladwell and "Innovative Consumption" by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011