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The Evolution of Innovation: An Interview With John Seely Brown
The Evolution of Innovation: An Interview With John Seely Brown
JSB: I think that’s a complicated story and a long story, but it’s
often misunderstood. It’s a whole interview in its own right.
I’m just going to say two or three brief things on that.
It may be a bit brash or macho of me, but I am fond of say-
ing, “We didn’t invent products; our game was to invent in-
dustries.” It’s not surprising, if you’re going after inventing an
industry, that you would invent many components of that John Seely Brown, codirector of the Center for the Edge, believes that
industry and wait for the market to gel. That just kind of hap- the next phase of technology development must emerge from a funda-
pened, quite honestly, because we wanted to build an imag- mental understanding of how work gets done.
ined world for ourselves. Using the technologies that we built
ourselves kept us grounded when there was no clear market
disruptive innovation—is that we invented a lot of things
yet established for much of what we did. So the mouse, GUIs,
that did not fit the big business and big sales force delivery
the bitmap display, the laser printer, the Ethernet, distributed
mechanisms of Xerox or the three-year customer guaran-
computing, the document protocols defining Interpress,
tee that had that become part of our brand. Little personal
Smalltalk—all these are complements to each other that en-
desktop printers/copiers/scanners or personal computers
abled us to implement a new kind of knowledge workscape
would sell for a couple of thousand dollars and don’t usu-
that stemmed from a unifying version of how groups of
ally last for three years. You can’t easily put products like
knowledge workers might want to work.
that through the kind of worldwide sales force Xerox had.
That’s why I was saying we were given the chance to cre-
There was a complete mismatch between Xerox’s sales
ate an imagined world. It was a world that we’d imagined by
channels and many of the individual technologies that we
ourselves and, to some extent, for ourselves, because we
were creating inside Xerox PARC.
considered ourselves leading-edge knowledge workers: if we
There was another factor that was important. In the early
invented tools for ourselves, we assumed that there would
‘80s, Xerox was being challenged from Japan, Inc. In a rela-
be, eventually, a market there when the rest of the world was
tively short period, we dropped 30 to 40 percent of market
ready to focus on knowledge work rather than on just busi-
share—and that’s almost a “going out of business” sign. East
ness processes. If you see it from that point of view, many
Coast Xerox came to PARC and said, “Please help us reinvent
things that we invented were all part of an imagined ecosys-
our light-lens copier business and push back against the
tem, and they would play together sometimes in unexpected
stream of products coming in from Japan.” And we did, and
ways.
that’s, in part, why Xerox exists today. In fact, one of the
Another thing that put PARC ahead was that we often
high-end copiers Xerox developed at that time had three lev-
went to the root of a problem; we didn’t just pick off the easi-
els of Ethernetworking inside the machine, 30 processors, a
est solutions. When you go to the root of a problem, you of-
fantastic bitmap display, a very sophisticated feedback pro-
ten solve tough problems that have secondary consequences.
cess control system, and even an AI engine for predicting fail-
These often turn out to have more value than the idea you
ures, enabling a total recalibration of the machine every six
were pursuing in the first place.
pages. The end result was a new level of consistently high
A simple example of that is printer technology. PARC had
image quality that enabled Xerox to stop the erosion of our
to invent new technologies in order to drive our printers in market. And soon thereafter Xerox took back its market
faster and more economic ways, and that led to a lot of work share.
around a class of solid-state lasers, moving thus from the gas- So that’s what was happening in the background.
based lasers that had been used to solid-state lasers. These
lasers—I was not part of that team—later were dramatically
enhanced and became part of a spin-out that eventually got
sold for $41.5 billion.
“We didn’t invent products; our game
So, when people say things didn’t pay off at PARC, they
are looking at only part of the story. If you talk to the CEO was to invent industries.”
of Xerox, that was never a comment he made or a feeling he
had. What was true—and this ties into Clayton Christensen’s
www.TheInovoGroup.com