Innovation Essay

Pass the Pixie Dust

Carl Erickson

Published in the July 20-26, 2006 issue of Business Review Western Michigan.

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Innovation is the magic pixie dust of our age. Amazon lists nearly 12,000 books on the subject. Companies that master it are more profitable. Globalization demands it of all countries. Sprinkle a little innovation on a company or a team and everything works better. Hey, could you please pass the pixie dust?

We work in a highly competitive, rapidly globalizing industry. It’s an industry with a horrible reputation for missing deadlines, blowing budgets, and creating unreliable products. If you haven’t figured it out yet, we develop software. More specifically, we develop software for other companies’ products. Our software is found all over the world thanks to our globally competitive partners in the automotive, aerospace, and color measurement industries.

Our company is highly innovative. We’ve pioneered agile development practices in west Michigan. We publish papers and present at conferences and workshops. And yet we don’t have any products of our own. Our form of innovation isn’t about better mousetraps, it’s in the process of building better mousetraps. Process innovation is all about answers to questions like: how do we work together effectively? how do we know what to build? how do we know it works reliably? how do we do the most for the least? how do we do it better next time? In Thomas Friedman’s flat world, process innovation in high-tech services is a key competitive advantage.

I think we’ve figured it out. Like those funny little creatures that occasionally float across the lens of your eyeball when you’re staring absently into the distance, the pixie dust of process innovation isn’t something you can see directly. And you can’t just apply it or make it happen. Innovation at our company happens because people care. (Around the office this attitude goes by the more colloquial “give a shit.”) Our developers care personally whether a client’s project succeeds. We insist that the customer define success. We want the customer to know what we’re doing, who’s doing it, and why. We hate spending customer money on pointless, ineffective formality and documentation. We’re offended by the idea of building software that can’t be tested. We hate the unpredictability of non-automated, trivial work. We’re tired of old, inefficient computer languages. In short, we care deeply about our projects and our process.

People who don’t care are satisfied with the status quo. They don’t feel any pressure, they don’t seek ways of doing things better, and they don’t innovate. Innovation is a natural response to the combination of attitude and circumstance. It doesn’t require a team of savants. It happens in a context in which people want to improve what they do.

People who care, innovate.

Republished by Permission