Innovation – is going over a barrier – is risking your reputation, is challenging the way things are going. Most innovation stories I have read about during the last years are about personal risk. So, most of the innovators had nothing to lose. They had been outside or down the hierarchy leather.
One of the real big innovations, that changed society in the last century have not been technical innovations, but music. After the terrible second World War, these negative emotions and fears where but into a corset of “being perfect”. The happy family-syndrome of Doris Day. Into this nice world arrived the beats of Rock and Roll. It did threaten the status quo, it was coming from the black community, from Jazz and Boogie-Woogie. Negros had wild emotions and this music was challenging the national sex-behaviour, the moral. As long as it was black it could be banned – but than the rhythm swept over to the white community with Bill Haley and Elvis Presley and started a kind of freedom that inspired the Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
This example is well documented in various videos and shows the tension in society and in the feet of the youth. See lovely expressions of this in youtube (a wonderfull innovation by the way) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=m7o9g7QOjIo and http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OIvwNAqGKBY&NR=1 and http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Px2xroO2xow&feature=related
Many would call this a revolution, not an innovation, but the concept behind it is the same: You have the raw material (all black blues and Jazz music), you have the technology (studios and record companies) and you had a market (the young people’s need to break out). The key to it was the white musician, who could transform it. Today we have similar situations with similar logic. What you need is knowledge (the existing music of the blacks) technology (studios to produce the records, radio stations) the pioneering experience (the clubs in the cities, where the fever could spread and created a need) and a protagonist (a hero, a person that did it, the catalyst).
A lot of ideas did not become an innovation, because the underlying structure of the old system did block the new system to spread. The cost of system transfer is to high and the value for the individual to low. The key-board of your computer is one example. The railway system and its use is another. Even new technology in phones and TV standards are challenging. Who has the power to change the whole system? Will the customer buy new TV-Sets and phones, if the old technology is replaced?
There has been technology that was simply ignored by customers.
Often, we missed one piece of the puzzle and the idea does not fly. Imagine the Tata car. There is raw material (the knowledge how to build cars), there is the technology (how to build cheep cars) and there is the enormous Indian market (to buy cheep cars). Why did it not happen in other countries? Because, they did not look for cheap. They looked for similar or me-too. China has copied the standard of Volkswagen with Chery and created the cheapest small car in the world. Chery competes on markets that are developed. India needs products that are made for their Indian conditions and not for safety regulations made by the EU. The production and technical input is related to the money Indian consumers can pay. They did not downsize an existing standard, they build up a car from scratch, from a three-wheel-idea, driven by the thought: What is the minimum you need? The new in Tata-Car is the focus on the need in new markets, not on only what is technical available. Read the great Interview with Ratan Tata: Making of Nano. http://tatanano.inservices.tatamotors.com/tatamotors/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=116&Itemid=169
It is a way of thinking. The German motor engineers, I am working with, do not have the feeling that Tata cars will have an impact. They told me: “These cars will never go through the technical check up in Germany and that is, why they will not sell. No threat.” That might be true. But: If Tata makes this car work for India, it will also sell in similar customer environments in Asia and also in China, Russia. This can easily get 70 % of the world market. If the big International producers cannot sell their products in these markets because of price, they will not grow and use the economic of scales. They might even shrink and play a minor game in the niche. Innovation is competition of thoughts, products and customer satisfaction. Often it is not even rational. From my learning: It is not the big player that innovates. It is the outsider (like Tata). Sometimes the big players buy the concepts if they are ready for market, all what happens in the pharma industry right now. It will also happen in the car industry and others. It is breaking down barriers of standards, of behaviours and believes.
Some asked me: Do women drive Innovation? I think yes and I will name some of them. But – our world likes to see an innovator as a real benchmark and competitor.
The press follows this principle. That is why a lot of products have a father rather than a mother. I started to look behind the stories.
The Pill – contraceptive. Some believe that Schering, who has now the biggest production of this product, is the innovator. No. They bought the patent in the 50ies.
Others than, find Dr. Gregory Pinkus in the US, who created the first pill. He is also not the real innovator. He found the drug – but he had not the idea to find it. He got the order to find it 1951 by two women, who wanted the product. They financed the research to find a contraceptive that is as easy to take as the Aspirin pill. These ladies risked there freedom for that, as to research on contraceptive was illegal in the United States at that time. They did it and the product came out in the 50ies on a secure market: Costa Rica and later Australia, far away from the morale-juries. Anne Mc Cormick the biologist and financer and Margaret Sanger, the driving force behind the project. http://frontpage.uwsuper.edu/psychology/358/thepill.htm. But you hardly find this information, not in Wikipedia not in other libraries …
But there is a great book The Pill, written by Bernad Asbell in 1995. http://www.allbookstores.com/book/9780679411000/Bernard_Asbell/Pill.html He was not known to be a feminist, but he taught writing at Yale and Clark Universities before joining the faculty at Penn State in 1984 as an associate professor of English, retiring in 1992. But like this story, it is hard to find information about women and Innovation. There are some pages (http://womenofinnovation.ning.com), but most of the material is about women at home, women in health care and medicine, here and there are some women as pilots and engineers. What you find are women as entrepreneurs, when they make their own company. But this is another issue – women in SME and money. This is from a blog:
Women are, and will become, an even greater force in the economy as societies, companies and national governments focus on ways to increase women’s engagement in science and technology, knowledge creation, knowledge transfer and the digital future. A 2007 study by McKinsey and Company entitled “Women Matter” highlighted an important fact: Europe can expect a shortfall of 24 million people in the active workforce by 2040. But, if there is a greater effort to bring more women into the workforce, the shortfall could be only 3 million. http://kalley.blogactiv.eu/2008/08/20/women-and-innovation-%E2%80%93-an-answer-to-the-european-economic-malaise/
Women's contribution to innovation, a forum in Canada http://www.cipo.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/cipointernet-internetopic.nsf/en/wr00526e.html Women and innovation was an issue in several countries, specially Canada and the US. There are some collections like this: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/women/index-e.html
At our congress in Lisbon, we like to discuss the field innovation from various points of view, men and women, scientists and entrepreneurs. Hopefully with some new insight, hopefully with some energy to make thinks happen, hopefully with the insight, that only teams of women and men together will create some new things, people in the world need and can pay for.
Claudia Schmitz
EWMD President
EWMD International ev.
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