18 December 2007 | IT Week

In praise of Do It Yourself

Bringing in outsiders to help big firms innovate doesn’t guarantee success

Presenting some ideas to a very familiar UK service provider last week, I found few besuited representatives of the client at its head office. Instead, I encountered several articulate, savvy hired guns, 30-something experts in the user interface who had their own desks on the nineteenth floor, but were not directly on the payroll. None wore a tie.

They were progressive in outlook, but how much clout did they have, even if they agreed with my proposals? Over lunch, they conceded that though they had the ear of the marketing and branding people, the client’s IT department was a dictatorial law unto itself. They were keen for the client to adopt social networking as a means of reaching out to customers. But the IT department was unlikely to sign up to that.

Later on in the week I encountered more IT hipness. Here young IT funksters talked up the ‘conversation economy’. Anyone, they said, can come up with a great innovation: employees, suppliers, customers, you name it. Therefore the job of the corporation was to bring the philosophy of MySpace and Facebook to its website so as to solicit, in conversations, the brilliant thoughts of all its stakeholders. Best emulate IBM, whose InnovationJam sessions have brought 56,000 employees, customers, suppliers and – inevitably – family members to make 37,000 separate online posts on innovation.  (1)

Well, perhaps anyone can come up with a great innovation; but to be a technical expert with a proper budget for R&D, rather than an a blogger with time on your hands, might give you just a bit of an edge. Yet the fact is that the doctrines of ‘open’ and user-led ‘democratising’ innovation, pioneered by America’s Henry Chesbrough and Eric Von Hippel and now reinforced by the vivid successes of social networking in consumer markets, have triumphed quite widely.

In the process, they have absolved many a firm from its responsibility to lead innovation itself. Don’t think labs and professionals in white coats. Instead, think slender-hipped consultants who are on the premises but have no real power. Or think networked boffins engaged in world-beating experiments in their garages.

For proof of my gloomy prognosis, look at the UK government’s recently published 2007 R&D Scoreboard. There you’ll find that while BT spends a respectable 5.5 per cent of its sales revenues on R&D, the figure for both Vodafone and BAA is 0.7 per cent. BP? It spends 0.2 per cent of revenues on research. Royal Mail? Less than 0.1 per cent.  (2)

In the old days, conservative British firms would show hopeful outside innovators the door with the dismissive slogan ‘Not invented here!’ Today, a leading civil servant with a brief to encourage UK innovation would rather that we open our doors to all and sundry, and shout the slogan ‘Never invented here!’.  (3)

The best innovation must always come from somewhere else, right? I think not. It’s time British firms rejected this complacent approach to R&D.

(1) ‘One year later, innovation still “Jamming”’, 21 November 2007, on http://www.ibm.com/news/us/en/2007/11/2007_11_21.html

(2) http://www.innovation.gov.uk/rd_scoreboard/downloads/2007_rd_scoreboard_data.pdf

(3) Quoted in ‘The love-in’, The Economist, 11 October 2007.