Visionary versus Competitive Innovation

My father taught me to race a small sailboat on a lake in northern Wisconsin. One of the cardinal rules of racing is to always “cover the boat behind you,” assuming, of course, that you are not the last boat in the fleet. This means that when the boat following you changes direction to find clean air, you should change course in parallel with them. If they find better air, you will also.

There was another rule I learned later, after many seasons of racing. It came from the expert lake sailor Stuart Walker, who observed that there are always two winds on a lake. He said, “Pick one and stay with it.” Walker observed from all his years of racing experience that the wind direction next to the shoreline typically differs a few degrees from the wind direction out in the middle of the lake. If you go from one to the other you can lose out, due to the lull in between.

Paying attention to the competition is one thing. Reading the wind is another. Sometimes you have to choose one or the other.

These rules and choices apply to innovators too as colleague and veteran innovator, Carol O’Neill, senior vice president at Spartech, reminded me recently. Thank you, Carol, for referring us to “The Creative Monopoly,” an article by David Brooks published in the New York Times. It is a must read. (nytimes.com/2012/04/24/opinion/brooks-the-creative-monopoly.html).

Mr. Brooks does a riff on a course Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal) is teaching at Stanford. One of the core points of the course is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. When that confusion extends into the realm of innovating, innovating can suffer at the hand of competition. “Competition has trumped value-creation,” Brooks says, and this undermines innovation.

My own experience facilitating invention and R&D-driven innovating efforts over the past 30 years resonates with and confirms Brook’s conclusion. Steadily over those three decades, innovating efforts seem to have become more competitive and less visionary. Increasingly innovators are focusing on “adjacencies.” Adjacent opportunities, theoretically, are arenas where risks appear hedged by an entirely rational pursuit of improvements in value already established and validated for existing customers. Focusing on adjacencies carries the reassurance that in the risky endeavor of innovating, one can minimize the risk by staying close to the customer and just ahead of the competition. Covering the boats behind you. 

As more companies take this more rational and less risky approach, fewer established companies are looking to create new value for people and create new customers, markets and initiate “monopolies” in the process. Now it seems that looking for the new winds, whether in the center of the lake or along the shorelines, is an innovating strategy being left to the entrepreneurial start-up.

What if you are in the boat behind, or see a wind on the other shore? You may have the incentive not only to think differently, but also act differently, and break away from the pack. It’s risky for sure. But if you see a new wind, it just may be worth it. If you fail, you will have learned a valuable lesson—perhaps that is the real value that cannot be taken away.   

In his book, Birth of the Chaordic Age, Dee Hock, the founder of VISA, said in his wonderful story of the company’s creation “what is possible cannot be determined by opinions: only by attempt.”                 



This article by Lanny Vincent was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in May 2012. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd.