The Yin and the Yang of Corporate

In the hunt for innovation, that 1)elusive path to economic growth and corporate prosperity, try a little jazz―music that requires a lot of 2)artistic innovation―as an 3)inspirational 4)metaphor.

That’s the message that John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments―and who is also a jazz pianist―delivered in a performance and talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Jazz, Mr. Kao says, demonstrates some of the tensions in innovation, between training and discipline on one side and 5)improvised creativity on the other.

In business, as in jazz, the interaction of those two sides, the yin and the yang of innovation, fuels new ideas and products. The mixture varies by company. Mr. Kao points to the very different models of innovation represented by Google and Apple, two 6)powerhouses of Silicon Valley, the world’s 7)epicenter of corporate creativity.

The Google model relies on rapid experimentation and data. The company constantly refines its search, advertising marketplace, e-mail and other services, depending on how people use its online 8)offerings. It takes a 9)bottom-up approach: customers are participants, essentially becoming partners in product design.

The Apple model is more edited, intuitive and 10)top-down. When asked what market research went into the company’s elegant product designs, Steve Jobs had a standard answer: none. “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he would add.

The Google-Apple comparison, Mr. Kao says, highlights the “11)archetypical tension in the creative process.” Google 12)speaks to the power of data-driven decision-making, and of online experimentation and networked communication. The same Internet-era tools enable 13)crowdsourced 14)collaboration as well as the rapid testing of product ideas―the essence of the 15)lean start-up method so popular in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

The benefits, experts say, are most apparent in markets like Internet software, online commerce and mobile applications for smartphones and tablets. “The cost of creation, distribution and failure is low, so it takes relatively little time, money and effort to float 16)trial balloons,” says Randy Komisar, a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Stanford.

That style of innovation is being applied well beyond Google’s products and Internet start-ups. The National Science Foundation, for example, is embracing the formula to try to increase commercialization of the university research it finances. Last fall, the foundation announced the first of a series of 17)grants for what it calls the N.S.F. Innovation Corps. The 21 three-member teams received a 18)crash course at Stanford in lean start-up techniques, and have been given $50,000 each and six months to test whether their inventions are marketable.

The lean formula, with its emphasis on constantly testing ideas and products with customers, amounts to applying “the scientific method to market-opportunity identification,” says Errol B. Arkilic, program director at the foundation.

Yet while networked communications and marketplace experiments add useful information, breakthrough ideas still come from individuals, not committees. “There is nothing democratic about innovation,” says Paul Saffo, a 19)veteran technology 20)forecaster in Silicon Valley. “It is always an elite activity, whether by a recognized or unrecognized elite.”

Successful innovation, Mr. Saffo observes, requires“an odd blend of certainty and openness to new information.” In other words, it is a blend of top-down and bottom-up discovery.

Open innovation isn’t a new idea. It flourished, in its way, even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fields like electricity, 21)pharmaceuticals and communications, big corporations including 22)General Electric and 23)Dow Chemical routinely monitored the research beyond their walls, and bought or licensed promising work, especially the inventions of university scientists. The result, Mr. Nicholas says, was a thriving“ecosystem of private and corporate innovation.”

A century later, the corporate labs at G.E. are trying to quicken the pace of innovation―but this is long-cycle innovation, since G.E.’s power generators, jet engines and medical-imaging equipment last for decades. The company is opening a software center in Northern California to make its machines more intelligent with data-gathering sensors, wireless communications and predictive 24)algorithms. The goal is to develop machines, such as jet engines or power turbines, that can alert their human 25)minders when they need repairs, before equipment failures occur. Such smarter machines, the company says, are early arrivals in what it calls the Industrial Internet.

To 26)tap outsider ideas, G.E.’s research 27)arm has made investments with 28)venture capital funds in clean-energy technology and health care, and it works with corporations, government labs and universities on hundreds of collaborative projects. “We’re much more externally focused and connected to the outside world than we were several years ago,” says Michael Idelchik, G.E.’s vice president of advanced technologies.

Apple’s smartphones, tablets and computers typically have 29)life spans measured in years instead of decades, with new models introduced regularly. But like G.E., Apple is in the hardware business, where innovation cycles are 30)beholden to the limits of materials science and manufacturing.

Apple’s physical world is far different from Google’s realm of Internet software, where writing a few lines of new code can change a product instantly. The careful 31)melding of hardware with software in Apple’s popular products is a challenge in 32)multidisciplinary systems design that must be 33)orchestrated by a guiding hand―though it will no longer be the hand of Mr. Jobs.

Yet Apple has also repeatedly displayed its openness to new ideas and influences, as exemplified by the visit that Mr. Jobs made to the Palo Alto research center of 34)Xerox in 1979. He saw an experimental computer with a point-and-click mouse and graphical on-screen 35)icons, which he adopted at Apple. It later became the standard for the personal computer industry.

In 2010, Apple bought 36)Siri, a personal assistant application for smartphones. At the time, it was a small start-up in Silicon Valley that originated as a program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the 37)Pentagon. Last year, Siri became the talking question-answering application on iPhones.

Apple product designs may not be determined by traditional market research, focus groups or online experiments. But its top leaders, recruited by Mr. Jobs, are tireless seekers in an information-gathering network on subjects ranging from 38)microchip technology to popular culture. “It’s a lot of data 39)crunched in a 40)nonlinear way in the right brain,”says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business.

Apple and Google pursue very different paths to innovation, but the gap between their two models may be closing a bit. In the months after Larry Page, the Google co-founder, took over as chief executive last April, the company eliminated a diverse collection of more than two dozen projects, a 41)nudge toward top-down leadership. And Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s C.E.O., will almost surely be a more bottom-up leader than Mr. Jobs.

企业创新：谷歌之阳，苹果之阴

创新是通往经济增长和企业繁荣的一种难以把握的途径，在寻求创新的道路上，不妨尝试从爵士乐（一种强调艺术创新的音乐）中汲取灵感。

这是企业和政府创新顾问约翰・高对外传达的信息。约翰・高也是一位爵士乐钢琴家，曾在今年的瑞士达沃斯世界经济论坛上表演钢琴演奏并发表讲话。高先生说，爵士乐体现了创新过程中的一些矛盾张力，一方面讲求训练和规则，另一方面则讲求即兴创造。

正如爵士乐创作一样，商界创新中的阴阳互动，为创意及新产品的问世提供动力。至于这种互动，不同的公司表现各不相同。高先生道出了以谷歌公司和苹果公司为代表的两种截然不同的创新模式。这两家公司均是硅谷的两大动力源泉，而硅谷又是世界企业创新的中心所在。

谷歌型的创新模式依赖于快速的试验和数据。该公司依据人们对其在线产品的使用现状，不断完善其搜索引擎、广告市场、电子邮件等服务。它采取的是一种自下而上的方式：顾客是参与者，实质上成了产品设计中的搭档。

苹果公司的创新模式则更精编细选，更凭直觉，也更倾向于自上而下。当被问及是什么样的市场研究催生了其公司精致的产品设计时，史蒂夫・乔布斯有一个标准答案：没有。“消费者不需要知道自己想要什么，”他会补充说。

高先生称，谷歌公司与苹果公司的对比突出了“在创新过程中的典型张力”。谷歌公司证明了数据驱动决策、在线实验和网络通讯的威力。与谷歌相似的一系列互联网时代的工具使集群式外包合作以及快速检测产品成为可能，而这两种方法恰恰是硅谷和其他地方盛行的精益创业模式的精髓所在。

专家说，这种方法的好处在如互联网软件、在线商务以及智能手机和平板电脑的移动应用程序等市场上最为明显。斯坦福大学创业学科讲师兰迪・高米沙说：“由于设计、分销以及失败成本较低，所以相对来说，尝试这种模式所花的时间、金钱和精力较少。”

应用这种创新风格的已远远不只是谷歌公司的产品和互联网初创公司了。例如，美国国家科学基金会正试图运用这个模式，帮助其资助的大学研究课题提高商业化程度。去年秋天，该基金会宣布其系列计划中的第一个资助项目，为“国家科学基金会创新军团”提供创意基金。这21支创新队伍 （每队三人）参加了由斯坦福大学举办的精益创业速成班，并各获得五万美元基金及六个月的时间去测试其研究成果是否有销路。

“精益”模式强调不断借助客户考察创意及产品，相当于运用“科学的方法去识别商机”，美国国家科学基金会项目部主任埃罗尔・B・阿奇里克说。

然而，尽管网络通信和市场考察添加了有用信息，但突破性的创意仍然来自少数个体，而不是大众。“关于创新，没有民主可言，”硅谷资深技术预报员保罗・萨夫如是说，“创新始终是精英活动，无论该精英是不是为人所知。”

萨夫先生指出，成功的创新需要“在对待新信息时有一种既确定又开放的奇特融合”。换句话说，这是一种自上而下和自下而上的探索的融合。

开放式创新不是一个新概念。早在19世纪末和20世纪初，它就以自己的方式蓬勃发展。在像电力、医药和通信等领域，包括通用电气和陶氏化学在内的大型企业也经常密切监测其企业外部的研究，买进一些有前景的研究成果或者获取其专利权，特别是大学研究人员所取得的研究成果。尼古拉斯先生说，这最终形成了一个欣欣向荣的“由私人发明和企业发明共同组成的生态系统”。

一个世纪之后，通用电气公司的实验室正在努力加快创新步伐――但是这是长期的创新，因为通用电器公司的发电机、喷气式发动机和医疗成像设备能持续使用数十年。该公司将在北加州成立一个软件中心，旨在使自己的机器设备凭借数据收集传感器、无线通信和预测算法变得更加智能化。该公司的目标是使诸如喷气式发动机或动力涡轮机这样的机器可以在设备出现故障前提醒看管机器的人进行维修。该公司称，这种智能机器是所谓的工业互联网的早期产品。

为了挖掘公司外部的创意，通用电气公司的研究部门已经将风险资本基金投入于清洁能源技术和卫生保健事业，还与其他公司、政府实验室以及大学有着数以百计的合作项目。“与几年前相比，我们更专注于与外部世界的联系，”通用电气公司先进技术副总裁迈克尔・艾德奇克说。

苹果公司的智能手机、平板电脑和电脑的使用寿命通常是几年而非几十年，新型产品也层出不穷。但像通用电气公司一样，苹果公司从事的也是硬件业务，硬件的创新周期要受制于材料学和制造业的发展。

苹果公司的实体世界与谷歌公司的互联网软件领域截然不同。在互联网软件领域里，只需编写几行新的代码就可以瞬间改变一种产品。苹果公司广受欢迎的产品体现了硬件与软件的精心融合，是跨学科系统设计的一种挑战，必须由一个引导者来指挥――虽然这个引导者已不再是乔布斯先生。

然而，苹果公司也反复展现了其对新观念和新影响的开放态度，从1979年乔布斯先生到施乐公司位于帕洛阿尔托的研究中心参观的例子可见一斑。当 时，乔布斯看到了一台有着点击式鼠标和图示屏幕图标的实验电脑，他将这些应用到苹果公司的产品当中。后来，这成了个人电脑行业的配置标准。

2010年，苹果购进了Siri，一种智能手机的个人助理应用程序。当时那也只是硅谷一家刚创立的企业，源于由美国国防部高级研究计划局资助的一个项目。去年，Siri一跃成为苹果iPhone的语音回复应用程序。

苹果公司的产品设计也许没有由传统的市场调研、小组讨论或在线实验来决定。但是，由乔布斯先生亲自招募来的苹果公司高层领导都是信息收集网络上孜孜不倦的探索者，从微芯片技术到流行文化等各个领域均有涉猎。“这需要右脑以非线性方式处理大量数据资料，”麻省理工学院数字商业中心主任埃里克・布林约尔夫松如是说。

苹果公司和谷歌公司追求截然不同的创新途径，但是二者创新模式的差别也许会有所缩小。在谷歌联合创始人拉里・佩奇去年四月接任首席执行官之后的几个月里，谷歌公司取消了二十几个类别各异的项目，实现了领导方式上自上而下的微调。而苹果公司的首席执行官蒂莫西・D・库克，与乔布斯先生相比，将绝对是一位更自下而上的领导者。