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The view from inside the box

June 17, 2005

First story:

You’ve probably never have heard of Washington Wentworth Sheffield, but you’ve almost certainly been relying on his invention ever since you were a child. He’s the guy who, back in 1892, created the toothpaste tube. Up to then, toothpaste had been sold in porcelain jars. A family would buy one, and every morning and evening mom, dad and all the little ones would stick their respective toothbrushes into it. Sheffield, a dentist, was disgusted by the unsanitary practice. Having seen flexible metal tubes used for food, he decided to find out if people would buy toothpaste dispensed the same way. He was soon a very wealthy man.

Second story:

Seventy years ago, a young truck driver named Malcom McLean found himself sitting on a New Jersey dock all day, waiting for a gang of slow-moving longshoremen to get around to unloading his rig. As the hours wore on, his annoyance turned into inspiration. He began to wonder whether there wasn’t some way to speed the process of transferring cargo. Instead of unloading his trailer, box by box, and then reloading everything, box by box, into the hold of a ship, why couldn’t the whole trailer be hoisted directly onto the ship’s deck? Why couldn’t you fashion a type of container that could be carried with equal ease by trucks, trains and ships? Two decades later, McLean's company, Sea-Land, launched the first containership, the Ideal X, on a voyage from Newark to Houston. The world would never be the same.

Moral:

When companies want to think "outside the box," they often form high-powered brainstorming teams filled with creative thinkers. Usually, those teams fail. Either their pie-in-the-sky ideas go nowhere, or they end up proposing modest improvements that pull in a little more money but fall well short of the breakthroughs they set out to achieve. The stories of Washington Wentworth Sheffield and Malcom McLean indicate a possible reason for the failures. True breakthroughs seem to come not from teams but from individuals and not from professional innovators but from regular people who get frustrated or annoyed by some problem while pursuing their regular jobs. It's the individual closest to a problem, in other words, that's most likely to come up with a great new idea for solving it. So if you really want out-of-the-box thinking, find the poor sap who's suffering the most from being stuck inside the box.

Posted by nick at June 17, 2005 11:14 AM

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Comments

What is poor's sap motivation to propose his/her idea to the employer? With a partner in a think tank you've got very precise contracts about that matter! But now McLean's the rich guy not his employer (what's justice in my eyes, but working against nick's suggestions)...

Posted by: fortuna at June 17, 2005 11:44 AM

Actually, McLean finally started his own company because existing firms resisted his idea for 20 years - it was too disruptive of the status quo. So you've not only got to find the guy with the idea but you have to take him seriously - and be willing to shake things up.

Posted by: Nick at June 17, 2005 02:02 PM

"Democratized Innovation" (Von Hippel, 2005) For anyone who would like to read a free book on this topic. I enjoyed it and there are also some neat charts and diagrams.

http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ.htm

Posted by: Nino at June 17, 2005 03:47 PM

If you would like to recall that slogging it out in the box may not be as fun as looking at someone else's box. Granted, being inside the box, brings to the forefront the basic problems confronting the specific issue but the "insider" needs to feel that the ownership of the problem lies with him/her. The gain is for the "insider" to accomplish some small task/resource that has a benefit to the one looking out over the edge of the box. Innovation is the need to accomplish something for a gain somewhere else. The only thing here is some gains are bigger than others i.e. the boxes are just bigger!

Posted by: David Landers at June 19, 2005 06:00 AM

The problem is entrenched interests. These will always get in the way of true innovation because it inevitably upsets their current revenue stream. And, as we all know (or should), companies will do everything in their power to protect current revenue streams.

If I work for Blockbuster and say that video on demand is a preferred and desirable method to deliver movies, I will be summarily thumped upside the head because it is too disruptive to their current cash cow. They will slowwwwly move to it and try to control the process the whole way, which benefits no one.

TRhe same thing for movie studios who have discovered DVD rental income. Don't hold your breath for that Qwest commercial nirvana where you can watch any movie, anywhere, any time. The technology and know is readily available. The will is missing.

Posted by: ordaj at August 5, 2005 11:30 AM

I just wanted to clarify a few things. Washington Wentworth (my great great grandfather) did not invent the toothpaste tube, he invented toothpaste in 1850. His son (my great grandfather) Lucius Tracy, invented the toothpaste tube in 1892. Thanks for the moral. I know that both Washington and LT would appreciate it!

Posted by: pkyle3 at October 31, 2006 06:59 AM

The view from inside the box

June 17, 2005

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