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Alan Turing’s impact on chemistry

Turing showed how chemical reactions can create patterns. If you mix the ingredients he specified, they can separate into quasi-ordered patches of different composition. Turing’s theory of chemical pattern formation, now vindicated experimentally, looks like the best candidate for explaining a variety of puzzles in biological development, from the spontaneous differentiation of some tissues to the formation of pigmented markings and the patterns of leaves on plant stems. And his spontaneous patterning scheme is relevant beyond chemistry and biochemistry: it has been invoked to explain how sand ripples form, how ants dispose of dead bodies, how termites build their nests, and why crime is focused in ‘hotspots’.

Breaking symmetry

Born in London in 1912, Alan Turing is popularly known for his cryptographic activities at Bletchley Park during the second world war, in particular for his role in cracking the Enigma code used by the German navy. This sensitive wartime work left the authorities particularly alarmed when Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual activity, still a crime at that time. The fear was that he would be vulnerable to blackmail, and he was commanded to undertake a course of ‘corrective’ hormone therapy. Although Turing is said to have borne this cruel sentence with ‘amused fortitude’, the shame and the physical effects seem to have driven him to take his own life in 1954 by biting into an apple laced with cyanide – although there is some evidence that his death might have been accidental.

Turing’s mathematical prowess was combined with an inventiveness of mind that made him a pioneer of artificial intelligence and the theory of computation. It was essentially a mathematical question that led Turing to think about chemical patterns. He wondered how a ball of identical cells in the early stages of an embryo’s growth can develop into an organism with different features, so that some cells become limbs, some eyes, and so forth. The appearance of an organism’s body plan is called morphogenesis, and it seemed to be an example of spontaneous symmetry-breaking: from uniform to differentiated.

Turing proposed that an embryo becomes patterned into regions with different anatomical fates by chemical substances called morphogens (literally ‘shape-formers’), which diffuse through cells and tissues. He was deliberately vague about what morphogens are – they could be hormones, perhaps, or genes, the chemical nature of which was still at that point poorly understood. The key point is that they diffuse and react with one another: his scheme is what is now known as a reaction–diffusion system. Turing showed how, under certain theoretical conditions, interacting morphogens could give rise to dappled patterns made up of blobs of different chemical composition.

He realised that his scheme had broad ramifications for biology. It might, for example, account for animal markings and for the arrangement of leaves and florets in plants, called phyllotaxis. However, it now transpires that this mechanism isn’t necessary for symmetry-breaking of a fertilised egg. Instead, the symmetry is disrupted from the outset by maternal proteins diffusing from one side of the embryo. Yet, as chemist Patrick De Kepper of the University of Bordeaux in France points out, the real triumph of Turing’s paper was to show that ‘no vitalist principle is required for biological development – ordinary physical and chemical laws could do the job’.

It wasn’t obvious from the dense mathematical discussion in Turing’s paper what the key ingredients of his process were. That became apparent in 1972 when developmental biologists Hans Meinhardt and Alfred Gierer at the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research in Tübingen, Germany, devised a theory of biological pattern formation without knowing about Turing’s work. They showed that stationary chemical patterns can result from two interacting ingredients – equivalent to Turing’s morphogens – if they have specific characteristics. One is an ‘activator’, which is autocatalytic and so introduces positive feedback. The other is an ‘inhibitor’, which suppresses the autocatalysis of the activator. Crucially, they must have different rates of diffusion, the inhibitor being faster. In effect, this means that the activator’s self-amplification is corralled into local patches, while the inhibitor prevents another such patch from growing too close by. When a referee of their paper pointed Meinhardt and Gierer to Turing’s work, they found that his equations can describe just this situation.

‘The basic principle we discovered helped tremendously to understand Turing’s paper,’ says Meinhardt. ‘It also made it more straightforward to understand more complex patterning systems in biology.’ Philip Maini, a specialist on pattern formation in biology at the University of Oxford, UK, agrees: ‘I don’t believe much had happened between the 1952 paper and 1972, when Meinhardt really got stuck into the problem.’

Computer calculations of the activator–inhibitor scheme revealed that there are two generic types: spots and stripes. In both cases, the pattern features all have roughly the same size and spacing. In theory, a Turing pattern can be a perfectly ordered lattice of spots or array of stripes, but in practice, random defects interrupt this perfection, producing a quasi-regular pattern. Straight away it’s obvious why Turing’s theory looked like a good candidate for explaining the zebra’s stripes and the leopard’s spots.

Making waves

In one of those coincidences that crop up so often in science, experimental evidence for spatial patterning from a combination of chemical reaction and diffusion was being discovered at the very time that Turing was laying down the theory. In the Soviet Union during the 1950s, the chemist Boris Belousov stumbled by chance across a cocktail of reagents that oscillated back and forth between two states. As they seemed to violate the second law of thermodynamics, Belousov’s results were dismissed, and he was barely able to publish them. But in the 1960s they were explored by Anatoly Zhabotinsky, a biochemistry graduate student in Moscow interested in the rhythmic character of glucose metabolism. He found a variation of Belousov’s mixture that switched back and forth between red and blue.

The oscillations are another consequence of a fine balance between rates of reaction and diffusion in an autocatalytic process. The Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction switches between two branches involving different reaction intermediates, each of which can exhaust itself by runaway feedback and thereby create the conditions for the other branch to take over. Left to its own devices, the oscillations eventually die out as the intermediates capitulate to the final products – which is why there’s no real threat to thermodynamic laws. But if the reaction is carried out in an unmixed solution, the switch doesn’t happen everywhere at once but propagates as a regular series of pulsed chemical waves, creating striking patterns.

‘The wave-like spread is comparable with the spread of an infection or of a forest fire,’ explains Meinhardt. Essential to the pulsed activity of the waves is the fact that once a wavefront has passed through it, a region enters a ‘refractory’ period during which it can’t support another wavelike excitation – in the forest fire analogy, this is the time taken for trees to regrow.

These chemical travelling waves are different from Turing’s stationary patterns, but the general principles of reaction and diffusion are the same. What differs are the relative rates by which the ingredients diffuse. The connections between the two systems first began to emerge in the late 1960s from the work of Russian-born chemist Ilya Prigogine and his coworkers at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. Reaction–diffusion patterns, which Prigogine referred to as ‘dissipative structures’ because they are sustained by dissipation of energy in a non-equilibrium process, formed a central component of the work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics that earned Prigogine a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1977.

Slow motion

In the early 1970s, De Kepper began to work on these systems. He and his colleagues found a way to sustain an oscillating chemical reaction a controlled distance away from thermodynamic equilibrium, using a so-called continuous stirred tank reactor to allow a constant throughflow of reactants.

In the 1970s, many groups working on oscillatory chemical reactions were dreaming of producing Turing patterns,’ De Kepper explains. But although some occasionally claimed success, the patterns always turned out to be something else. Yet De Kepper stumbled upon them almost by accident. He was investigating an oscillating reaction called the chlorite–iodide–malonic acid (CIMA) reaction, which shares some ingredients with the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, and in 1985 he and his colleagues had begun to look at spatial patterns in this mixture. They didn’t expect to find actual Turing structures – but in 1990, when they saw a band of spots appear in a strip of gel into which the reagents had diffused from opposite sides, they recognised them for what they were because De Kepper’s colleague Jacques Boissonade had already predicted a genuine Turing structure of this kind using computer calculations in 1988. The discovery ‘was very exciting’, says Maini. ‘By that stage, research on the subject was beginning to wane, but this gave it a great boost.’

The reason why these patterns appeared in the CIMA reaction was explained a year later by Irving Epstein and István Lengyel at Brandeis University in Waltham, US. The autocatalytic positive feedback in the CIMA reaction is mainly controlled by iodide ions. But the reaction uses starch as a colour indicator for iodine formed in the reaction, and iodide can become bound to iodine and starch, forming a large complex that diffuses slowly through the gel. This slowing down of the diffusion of the ‘activator’ is what brings the reaction dynamics into the regime for Turing patterns to form. De Kepper happily admits that this turned out to be a stroke of pure luck. Three years ago, he and his colleagues Judit Horváth and István Szalai described a general method for creating Turing structures in oscillatory reaction–diffusion systems by using the same trick of retarding the positive-feedback agents by complexation.

In the wild

Growing Turing’s spots and stripes in the lab is one thing – but are they really found in biology? In the 1980s, Meinhardt and mathematical biologist James Murray at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, worked independently to show that Turing’s theory offered a plausible explanation for a wide range of animal pigment patterns, from zebras to giraffes to seashells. The idea is that the morphogens turn on or off genetic pathways that stimulate the production of pigments – in mammal skins, the pigment melanin, which generates colours from tawny to black.

More recently, Maini and his colleagues have shown that two coupled activator–inhibitor processes can produce the broken ring markings characteristic of jaguars, while Maini’s collaborator Sy-Sang Liaw at the National Chung-Hsing University in Taiwan has demonstrated that a Turing scheme implemented on the curved shells of ladybirds can produce patterns looking very much like those seen in nature.

The clinching proof that animal pigment patterns are indeed Turing patterns would be to identify the morphogens involved. Although no one has succeeded in doing that, there are other types of biological pattern for which we do seem to be closing in on the likely biochemical agents underlying the process. In 2006, Thomas Schlake and his coworkers at the University of Freiburg in Germany found evidence that hair follicles in mice are arranged by a process of activation and inhibition. They proposed that a protein called Wnt is the activator of follicle formation, while proteins belonging to a class known generically as Dkk act as inhibitors of Wnt. Schlake and colleagues showed that genetic mutant mice that produce Dkk proteins in abnormally high amounts develop follicle patterns that match those predicted theoretically from Turing-style activator–inhibitor models of the diffusion and interaction of Wnt and Dkk.

Meanwhile, Meinhardt has collaborated with ornithologist Richard Prum at Yale University, New Haven, US, to show that the periodic barbs of bird feathers can be explained if the protein product of a gene called Sonic hedgehog (Shh) – a common patterning gene in many species – behaves as an activator while the bone morphogenic protein 2 is an inhibitor. Through the interaction of these components, the uniform epithelium of the developing feather bud becomes divided into a series of stripe-like ridges that prefigure its break-up into distinct barbs. And very recently, developmental biologist Jeremy Green of King’s College London, UK, and his collaborators have shown that the regularly spaced ridges of the mammalian palette seem to be arranged by a Turing-type reaction–diffusion mechanism involving the proteins Shh and fibroblast growth factor as the inhibitor and activator respectively.

Sand, cemeteries and crime

The generic Turing stripes resemble ripple patterns in wind-blown sand. This may be no coincidence. Meinhardt suggests that, at root, the formation of these sand patterns is akin to an activator–inhibitor system. The mounds and ridges of sand are formed by deposition of wind-blown grains. As a ridge gets bigger, it enhances its own growth by capturing more sand from the air. But in doing so, it acts as a sink, removing sand from the wind and suppressing the formation of other ripples nearby. The balance between these two processes establishes a roughly constant mean distance between ripples.

The feedbacks involved in replication, competition and predation might set up Turing-type patterns in animal communities. Spanish physicist Ricard Solé at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and his coworkers think that this might account for the patchiness of zooplankton in the sea and the phytoplankton on which they graze. And Guy Theraulaz of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse and coworkers have found that certain Mediterranean ants pile the dead bodies of other ants into ‘cemeteries’ that can be considered Turing structures. The French researchers suspect that similar mechanisms might underlie many other aspects of habitat formation and grouping, such as nest construction, in higher organisms.

Perhaps even human communities, orchestrated by social feedbacks on behaviour and movement, organise themselves into Turing patterns. That’s the implication of a theory developed by US mathematician Martin Short at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues, to explain the well attested phenomenon of crime hotspots: districts in which the crime rate is anomalously high. Short’s model of ‘diffusing’ criminals and potential victims produces hotspots due to the competition of local activation (crime breeds more crime) and long-ranged inhibition (policing).

It’s hard to guess where Turing’s patterns might turn up next. The idea that he hatched 60 years ago, as it were literally from a fertilised egg, has proved astonishingly fertile, as it turns out to be one of nature’s universal pattern-forming strategies.

In The Time of Peace

T was said : “when roll of drum and battle’s roar
shall cease upon the earth, O, then no more
The deed—the race —-of heroes in the land.”
But scarce that word was breathed when one small hand
Lifted victorious o’er a gaint wrong
That had its victims crushed through the ages long;
Some women set her pale and quivering face
Firm as a rock against a man’s disgrace ;
A little child suffered in silence lest
His savage pain would wound a mother’s breast;
Some quiet scholar would flunge his gauntlet down
And risked, in Truth’s great name ,the synod’s frown;
A civic hero in the calm realm of laws,
Did that which suddenly drew a worlds applause;
And one to the pest his young lithe boy gave,
That he a thousand thousand lives might save.

The eight essentials of Innovation

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”- Steve Jobs

In this engaging presentation, McKinsey principal Nathan Marston explains why innovation is increasingly important to driving corporate growth and brings to life the eight essentials of innovation performance.

Innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimizing their existing businesses. To be sure, there’s no proven formula for success, particularly when it comes to innovation. While years of client-service experience provide strong indicators for the existence of a causal relationship between the attributes that survey respondents reported and the innovations of the companies we studied, the statistics described here can only prove correlation. Yet we firmly believe that if companies assimilate and apply these essentials—in their own way, in accordance with their particular context, capabilities, organizational culture, and appetite for risk—they will improve the likelihood that they, too, can rekindle the lost spark of innovation. In the digital age, the pace of change has gone into hyper speed, so companies must get these strategic, creative, executional, and organizational factors right to innovate successfully.

ASPIRE

President John F. Kennedy’s bold aspiration, in 1962, to “go to the moon in this decade” motivated a nation to unprecedented levels of innovation. A far-reaching vision can be a compelling catalyst, provided it’s realistic enough to stimulate action today.

But in a corporate setting, as many CEOs have discovered, even the most inspiring words often are insufficient, no matter how many times they are repeated. It helps to combine high-level aspirations with estimates of the value that innovation should generate to meet financial-growth objectives. Quantifying an “innovation target for growth,” and making it an explicit part of future strategic plans, helps solidify the importance of and accountability for innovation. The target itself must be large enough to force managers to include innovation investments in their business plans. If they can make their numbers using other, less risky tactics, our experience suggests that they (quite rationally) will.

Establishing a quantitative innovation aspiration is not enough, however. The target value needs to be apportioned to relevant business “owners” and cascaded down to their organizations in the form of performance targets and timelines. Anything less risks encouraging inaction or the belief that innovation is someone else’s job.

For example, Lantmännen, a big Nordic agricultural cooperative, was challenged by flat organic growth and directionless innovation. Top executives created an aspirational vision and strategic plan linked to financial targets: 6 percent growth in the core business and 2 percent growth in new organic ventures. To encourage innovation projects, these quantitative targets were cascaded down to business units and, ultimately, to product groups. During the development of each innovation project, it had to show how it was helping to achieve the growth targets for its category and markets. As a result, Lantmännen went from 4 percent to 13 percent annual growth, underpinned by the successful launch of several new brands. Indeed, it became the market leader in premade food only four years after entry and created a new premium segment in this market.

Such performance parameters can seem painful to managers more accustomed to the traditional approach. In our experience, though, CEOs are likely just going through the motions if they don’t use evaluations and remuneration to assess and recognize the contribution that all top managers make to innovation.

Choose

Fresh, creative insights are invaluable, but in our experience many companies run into difficulty less from a scarcity of new ideas than from the struggle to determine which ideas to support and scale. At bigger companies, this can be particularly problematic during market discontinuities, when supporting the next wave of growth may seem too risky, at least until competitive dynamics force painful changes.

Innovation is inherently risky, to be sure, and getting the most from a portfolio of innovation initiatives is more about managing risk than eliminating it. Since no one knows exactly where valuable innovations will emerge, and searching everywhere is impractical, executives must create some boundary conditions for the opportunity spaces they want to explore. The process of identifying and bounding these spaces can run the gamut from intuitive visions of the future to carefully scrutinized strategic analyses. Thoughtfully prioritizing these spaces also allows companies to assess whether they have enough investment behind their most valuable opportunities.

During this process, companies should set in motion more projects than they will ultimately be able to finance, which makes it easier to kill those that prove less promising. RELX Group, for example, runs 10 to 15 experiments per major customer segment, each funded with a preliminary budget of around $200,000, through its innovation pipeline every year, choosing subsequently to invest more significant funds in one or two of them, and dropping the rest. “One of the hardest things to figure out is when to kill something,” says Kumsal Bayazit, RELX Group’s chief strategy officer. “It’s a heck of a lot easier if you have a portfolio of ideas.”

Once the opportunities are defined, companies need transparency into what people are working on and a governance process that constantly assesses not only the expected value, timing, and risk of the initiatives in the portfolio but also its overall composition. There’s no single mix that’s universally right. Most established companies err on the side of overloading their innovation pipelines with relatively safe, short-term, and incremental projects that have little chance of realizing their growth targets or staying within their risk parameters. Some spread themselves thinly across too many projects instead of focusing on those with the highest potential for success and resourcing them to win.

These tendencies get reinforced by a sluggish resource-reallocation process. Our research shows that a company typically reallocates only a tiny fraction of its resources from year to year, thereby sentencing innovation to a stagnating march of incrementalism.¹

Discover

Innovation also requires actionable and differentiated insights—the kind that excite customers and bring new categories and markets into being. How do companies develop them? Genius is always an appealing approach, if you have or can get it. Fortunately, innovation yields to other approaches besides exceptional creativity.

The rest of us can look for insights by methodically and systematically scrutinizing three areas: a valuable problem to solve, a technology that enables a solution, and a business model that generates money from it. You could argue that nearly every successful innovation occurs at the intersection of these three elements. Companies that effectively collect, synthesize, and “collide” them stand the highest probability of success. “If you get the sweet spot of what the customer is struggling with, and at the same time get a deeper knowledge of the new technologies coming along and find a mechanism for how these two things can come together, then you are going to get good returns,” says Alcoa chairman and chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld.

The insight-discovery process, which extends beyond a company’s boundaries to include insight-generating partnerships, is the lifeblood of innovation. We won’t belabor the matter here, though, because it’s already the subject of countless articles and books.² One thing we can add is that discovery is iterative, and the active use of prototypes can help companies continue to learn as they develop, test, validate, and refine their innovations. Moreover, we firmly believe that without a fully developed innovation system encompassing the other elements described in this article, large organizations probably won’t innovate successfully, no matter how effective their insight-generation process is.

Evolve

Business-model innovations—which change the economics of the value chain, diversify profit streams, and/or modify delivery models—have always been a vital part of a strong innovation portfolio. As smart phones and mobile apps threaten to upend old-line industries, business-model innovation has become all the more urgent: established companies must reinvent their businesses before technology-driven upstarts do. Why, then, do most innovation systems so squarely emphasize new products? The reason, of course, is that most big companies are reluctant to risk tampering with their core business model until it’s visibly under threat. At that point, they can only hope it’s not too late.

Leading companies combat this troubling tendency in a number of ways. They up their game in market intelligence, the better to separate signal from noise. They establish funding vehicles for new businesses that don’t fit into the current structure. They constantly re-evaluate their position in the value chain, carefully considering business models that might deliver value to priority groups of new customers. They sponsor pilot projects and experiments away from the core business to help combat narrow conceptions of what they are and do. And they stress-test newly emerging value propositions and operating models against countermoves by competitors. Amazon does a particularly strong job extending itself into new business models by

addressing the emerging needs of its customers and suppliers. In fact, it has included many of its suppliers in its customer base by offering them an increasingly wide range of services, from hosted computing to warehouse management. Another strong performer, the Financial Times, was already experimenting with its business model in response to the increasing digitalization of media when, in 2007, it launched an innovative subscription model, upending its relationship with advertisers and readers. “We went against the received wisdom of popular strategies at the time,” says Caspar de Bono, FT board member and managing director of B2B. “We were very deliberate in getting ahead of the emerging structural change, and the decisions turned out to be very successful.” In print’s heyday, 80 percent of the FT’s revenue came from print advertising. Now, more than half of it comes from content, and two-thirds of circulation comes from digital subscriptions.

Accelerate

Virulent antibodies undermine innovation at many large companies. Cautious governance processes make it easy for stifling bureaucracies in marketing, legal, IT, and other functions to find reasons to halt or slow approvals. Too often, companies simply get in the way of their own attempts to innovate. A surprising number of impressive innovations from companies were actually the fruit of their mavericks, who succeeded in bypassing their early-approval processes. Clearly, there’s a balance to be maintained: bureaucracy must be held in check, yet the rush to market should not undermine the cross-functional collaboration, continuous learning cycles, and clear decision pathways that help enable innovation. Are managers with the right knowledge, skills, and experience making the crucial decisions in a timely manner, so that innovation continually moves through an organization in a way that creates and maintains competitive advantage, without exposing a company to unnecessary risk?

Companies also thrive by testing their promising ideas with customers early in the process, before internal forces impose modifications that blur the original value proposition. To end up with the innovation initially envisioned, it’s necessary to knock down the barriers that stand between a great idea and the end user. Companies need a well-connected manager to take charge of a project and be responsible for the budget, time to market, and key specifications—a person who can say yes rather than no. In addition, the project team needs to be cross-functional in reality, not just on paper. This means locating its members in a single place and ensuring that they give the project a significant amount of their time (at least half) to support a culture that puts the innovation project’s success above the success of each function.

Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure end-user involvement throughout the development process. At many companies, marketing’s role is to champion the interests of end users as development teams evolve products and to help ensure that the final result is what everyone first envisioned. But this responsibility is honored more often in the breach than in the observance. Other companies, meanwhile, rationalize that consumers don’t necessarily know what they want until it becomes available. This may be true, but customers can certainly say what they don’t like. And the more quickly and frequently a project team gets—and uses—feedback, the more quickly it gets a great end result.

Scale

Some ideas, such as luxury goods and many smartphone apps, are destined for niche markets. Others, like social networks, work at global scale. Explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it. The seemingly safer option of scaling up over time can be a death sentence. Resources and capabilities must be marshaled to make sure a new product or service can be delivered quickly at the desired volume and quality. Manufacturing facilities, suppliers, distributors, and others must be prepared to execute a rapid and full rollout.

For example, when TomTom launched its first touch-screen navigational device, in 2004, the product flew off the shelves. By 2006, TomTom’s line of portable navigation devices reached sales of about 5 million units a year, and by 2008, yearly volume had jumped to more than 12 million. “That’s faster market penetration than mobile phones” had, says Harold Goddijn, TomTom’s CEO and cofounder. While TomTom’s initial accomplishment lay in combining a well-defined consumer problem with widely available technology components, rapid scaling was vital to the product’s continuing success. “We doubled down on managing our cash, our operations, maintaining quality, all the parts of the iceberg no one sees,” Goddijn adds. “We were hugely well organized.”

Extend

In the space of only a few years, companies in nearly every sector have conceded that innovation requires external collaborators. Flows of talent and knowledge increasingly transcend company and geographic boundaries. Successful innovators achieve significant multiples for every dollar invested in innovation by accessing the skills and talents of others. In this way, they speed up innovation and uncover new ways to create value for their customers and ecosystem partners.

Smart collaboration with external partners, though, goes beyond merely sourcing new ideas and insights; it can involve sharing costs and finding faster routes to market. Famously, the components of Apple’s first iPod were developed almost entirely outside the company; by efficiently managing these external partnerships, Apple was able to move from initial concept to marketable product in only nine months. NASA’s Ames Research Center teams up not just with international partners—launching joint satellites with nations as diverse as Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden—but also with emerging companies, such as SpaceX.

High-performing innovators work hard to develop the ecosystems that help deliver these benefits. Indeed, they strive to become partners of choice, increasing the likelihood that the best ideas and people will come their way. That requires a systematic approach. First, these companies find out which partners they are already working with; surprisingly few companies know this. Then they decide which networks—say, four or five of them—they ideally need to support their innovation strategies. This step helps them to narrow and focus their collaboration efforts and to manage the flow of possibilities from outside the company. Strong innovators also regularly review their networks, extending and pruning them as appropriate and using sophisticated incentives and contractual structures to motivate high-performing business partners. Becoming a true partner of choice is, among other things, about clarifying what a partnership can offer the junior member: brand, reach, or access, perhaps. It is also about behavior. Partners of choice are fair and transparent in their dealings.

Moreover, companies that make the most of external networks have a good idea of what’s most useful at which stages of the innovation process. In general, they cast a relatively wide net in the early going. But as they come closer to commercializing a new product or service, they become narrower and more specific in their sourcing, since by then the new offering’s design is relatively set.

Mobilize

How do leading companies stimulate, encourage, support, and reward innovative behavior and thinking among the right groups of people? The best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibers of their culture, from the core to the periphery.

They start back where we began: with aspirations that forge tight connections among innovation, strategy, and performance. When a company sets financial targets for innovation and defines market spaces, minds become far more focused. As those aspirations come to life through individual projects across the company, innovation leaders clarify responsibilities using the appropriate incentives and rewards.

The Discovery Group, for example, is upending the medical and life-insurance industries in its native South Africa and also has operations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and China, among other locations. Innovation is a standard measure in the company’s semiannual divisional scorecards—a process that helps mobilize the organization and affects roughly 1,000 of the company’s business leaders. “They are all required to innovate every year,” Discovery founder and CEO Adrian Gore says of the company’s business leaders. “They have no choice.”

Organizational changes may be necessary, not because structural silver bullets exist—we’ve looked hard for them and don’t think they do—but rather to promote collaboration, learning, and experimentation. Companies must help people to share ideas and knowledge freely, perhaps by locating teams working on different types of innovation in the same place, reviewing the structure of project teams to make sure they always have new blood, ensuring that lessons learned from success and failure are captured and assimilated, and recognizing innovation efforts even when they fall short of success.

Internal collaboration and experimentation can take years to establish, particularly in large, mature companies with strong cultures and ways of working that, in other respects, may have served them well. Some companies set up “innovation garages” where small groups can work on important projects unconstrained by the normal working environment while building new ways of working that can be scaled up and absorbed into the larger organization. NASA, for example, has ten field centers. But the space agency relies on the Ames Research Center, in Silicon Valley, to maintain what its former director, Dr. Pete Worden, calls “the character of rebels” to function as “a laboratory that’s part of a much larger organization.” Big companies do not easily reinvent themselves as leading innovators. Too many fixed routines and cultural factors can get in the way. For those that do make the attempt, innovation excellence is often built in a multiyear effort that touches most, if not all, parts of the organization. Our experience and research suggest that any company looking to make this journey will maximize its probability of success by closely studying and appropriately assimilating the leading practices of high-performing innovators. Taken together, these form an essential operating system for innovation within a company’s organizational structure and culture.

Lines from Sonnet

Others abide by our question. Thou art free.

we ask and ask – thou smilest and art still,

Out topping- knowledge. For the loftiest hill

Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,

Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,

Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling place,

Spares but the cloudy border of his space

To the foil’d searching of his mortality;

And thou who didst the stars and sunbeams know,

self-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honoured, self-secure,

Didst stand on earth unguess’d at —Better so!

All pains the immortal spirit must endure,

All weakness which impairs, all grief which bow,

Find their sole voice in that victorius brow.

The problem with the Genius

Some leaders seemed to drain intelligence and capability out of the people around them. Their focus on their own intelligence and their resolve to be the smartest person in the room had a diminshing effect on everyone else. For them to look smart , other people had to end up looking dumb. We’ve all worked with these black holes. They create a vortex that sucks energy out of eveyone and everything around them. When they walked into the room the shared IQ drops and the length of meeting doubles. In ccountless settings, these leaders were idea killers and energy destroyers. Other people’s ideas suffocated and died in their presence and the flow of intelligence came to an abrupt halt around them. Around these leaders, intelligence flowed only one way : from them to others.

Other leaders used their intelligence as a tool rather than a weapon. They applied their intelligence to amplify smarts and capability of people aroud them . People got smarter and better in their presence. Ideas grew , challenges were surmounted, hard problems were solved. When these leaders walked into a room, lightbulbs started switching on people’s heads. Ideas flew so fast that you had to replay the meeting in slow motion just to see what was going on. Meetings with them were idea mash up session. These leaders seemed to make everyone around them better and more capable. These leaders weren’t just intelligence themselves- they were intelligence multipliers.

Perhaps these leaders were understood that the person sitting at the apex on intelligence hierarchy is the Genius maker not the Genius.

Art of Stoicism

Long the secret weapon of history’s great figures , from emperors to artist and activists to fighter pilots,the principles of Stoicism have shone brightly through the centuries of philosophy for doers. Tested in the laboratory of human experience over the last two thousand years, this timeless knowledge is essential to navigating .

“For philosophy doesn’t consist in outward display, but in taking heed to what is needed and being mindful of it.” – Make character your loudest statement.

” Those who receive the bare theories immediately want to spew them, as an upset stomach does its food. first digest your theories and you won’t throw them up. otherwise they will be raw , spoiled , and not nourishing. After you’ve digested them , show us the changes in your reasoned choices, just like the shoulder of the gymnast show their display their diet and training, and as the craft of artisans show in what they’ve learned.” – show , not tell what you know.

” How much better is to be known for doing well by many than for living extravagantly? how much more worthy than spending on sticks and stones is it to spend on people?”

“The raw material for the work of a good and excellent preson is their own guiding reason , the body is that of the doctor and physical trainer , and the farm the farmer’s.”- your mind is an asset that must be worked on most – understood best.”

“Get laid down to this law: if you want some good, get it from yourself”

“Let us also produce some bold act of our own -and join the ranks of most emulated.”

“The greatest portion of peace of mind is doing nothing wrong. Those who lack self control live disoriented and disturbed life”- guilt is worse than jail.

” Those obsessed with glory attach their well being to the regards of others, those who love pleasure tie it to feelings, but the one with true understanding seeks it only in their own actions……..Think on the character of the people who wishes to please, the possession one means to gain, and tactics one employs to such ends. How quickly time erases such things , and how many will yet be wiped away.”-Our well-being lies in our own action.

“Silence is the lesson learned from the many sufferings of the life.”

“The person who follows reason in all things will ahve both leisure and a readiness to act -they are at once both cheerful and composed.”

“Let each thing you would do , say or intend be like that of a dying person.” – don’t mind me , I ‘m only dying slow.

Always listen to those who get technology

After you pick the industry,then it’s time to pick the company. When you do, listen for the people who truly get technology. These are genius-level smart creatives who see, before the rest of us, where technology is going and how it will transform industries. Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw that chips and computers were getting cheap and that software would be the key to the future computing, so they started Microsoft. Chad hurley saw that cheap video cameras, band -width, and storage would transform how video entertainment is created and consumed, so he cofounded You Tube . Reid Hoffman knew that the connecting power of the web would be vital to professionals, so he started Linkedin. Mark Benioff based salesforce.com on that principle and didnot waver during the dot-com meltdown. Steve Jobs foresaw computer as consumer accessories and it took over two decades for the technology and market to catch up to him .

How do you know if someone gets it? It helps to look at their history. Often , they are playing with technology and entrepreneurship long before they think of it as a career. Reid Hoffman got his first job ( at age twelve) by presenting a copy of a computer game’s manual marked up with his suggestions for product improvements to to one of the game devolopers. Marc Benioff sold his first computer program (“how to juggle”) and started a company making games for the Atari 800 when he was fifteen . Larry Page built a printer out of legos. ( it was dot matrix, but still.)

These are the famous examples , but there are many others, people may not be as well known but brim with insights. They are the ones navigating the best waves in the best places. Find them and hook in.

Creative problem-solving in the face of extreme limits

0:11 When you grow up in a developing country like India, as I did, you instantly learn to get more value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have. Take Mansukh Prajapati, a potter in India. He has created a fridge made entirely of clay that consumes no electricity. He can keep fruits and vegetables fresh for many days. That’s a cool invention, literally. In Africa, if you run out of your cell phone battery, don’t panic. You will find some resourceful entrepreneurs who can recharge your cell phone using bicycles. And since we are in South America, let’s go to Lima in Peru, a region with high humidity that receives only one inch of rainfall each year. An engineering college in Lima designed a giant advertising billboard that absorbs air humidity and converts it into purified water, generating over 90 liters of water every day. The Peruvians are amazing. They can literally create water out of thin air.

1:35 For the past seven years, I have met and studied hundreds of entrepreneurs in India, China, Africa and South America, and they keep amazing me. Many of them did not go to school. They don’t invent stuff in big R&D labs. The street is the lab. Why do they do that? Because they don’t have the kind of basic resources we take for granted, like capital and energy, and basic services like healthcare and education are also scarce in those regions. When external resources are scarce, you have to go within yourself to tap the most abundant resource, human ingenuity, and use that ingenuity to find clever ways to solve problems with limited resources.

2:28 In India, we call it Jugaad. Jugaad is a Hindi word that means an improvised fix, a clever solution born in adversity. Jugaad solutions are not sophisticated or perfect, but they create more value at lower cost. For me, the entrepreneurs who will create Jugaad solutions are like alchemists. They can magically transform adversity into opportunity, and turn something of less value into something of high value. In other words, they mastered the art of doing more with less, which is the essence of frugal innovation.

3:16 Frugal innovation is the ability to create more economic and social value using fewer resources. Frugal innovation is not about making do; it’s about making things better. Now I want to show you how, across emerging markets, entrepreneurs and companies are adopting frugal innovation on a larger scale to cost-effectively deliver healthcare and energy to billions of people who may have little income but very high aspirations.

3:51 Let’s first go to China, where the country’s largest I.T. service provider, Neusoft, has developed a telemedicine solution to help doctors in cities remotely treat old and poor patients in Chinese villages. This solution is based on simple-to-use medical devices that less qualified health workers like nurses can use in rural clinics. China desperately needs these frugal medical solutions because by 2050 it will be home to over half a billion senior citizens.

4:28 Now let’s go to Kenya, a country where half the population uses M-Pesa, a mobile payment solution. This is a great solution for the African continent because 80 percent of Africans don’t have a bank account, but what is exciting is that M-Pesa is now becoming the source of other disruptive business models in sectors like energy. Take M-KOPA, the home solar solution that comes literally in a box that has a solar rooftop panel, three LED lights, a solar radio, and a cell phone charger. The whole kit, though, costs 200 dollars, which is too expensive for most Kenyans, and this is where mobile telephony can make the solution more affordable. Today, you can buy this kit by making an initial deposit of just 35 dollars, and then pay off the rest by making a daily micro-payment of 45 cents using your mobile phone. Once you’ve made 365 micro-payments, the system is unlocked, and you own the product and you start receiving clean, free electricity. This is an amazing solution for Kenya, where 70 percent of people live off the grid. This shows that with frugal innovation what matters is that you take what is most abundant, mobile connectivity, to deal with what is scarce, which is energy.

6:05 With frugal innovation, the global South is actually catching up and in some cases even leap-frogging the North. Instead of building expensive hospitals, China is using telemedicine to cost-effectively treat millions of patients, and Africa, instead of building banks and electricity grids, is going straight to mobile payments and distributed clean energy.

6:32 Frugal innovation is diametrically opposed to the way we innovate in the North. I live in Silicon Valley, where we keep chasing the next big technology thing. Think of the iPhone 5, 6, then 7, 8. Companies in the West spend billions of dollars investing in R&D, and use tons of natural resources to create ever more complex products, to differentiate their brands from competition, and they charge customers more money for new features. So the conventional business model in the West is more for more. But sadly, this more for more model is running out of gas, for three reasons: First, a big portion of customers in the West because of the diminishing purchasing power, can no longer afford these expensive products. Second, we are running out of natural water and oil. In California, where I live, water scarcity is becoming a big problem. And third, most importantly, because of the growing income disparity between the rich and the middle class in the West, there is a big disconnect between existing products and services and basic needs of customers. Do you know that today, there are over 70 million Americans today who are underbanked, because existing banking services are not designed to address their basic needs.

8:04 The prolonged economic crisis in the West is making people think that they are about to lose the high standard of living and face deprivation. I believe that the only way we can sustain growth and prosperity in the West is if we learn to do more with less.

8:22 The good news is, that’s starting to happen. Several Western companies are now adopting frugal innovation to create affordable products for Western consumers. Let me give you two examples.

8:35 When I first saw this building, I told myself it’s some kind of postmodern house. Actually, it’s a small manufacturing plant set up by Grameen Danone, a joint venture between Grameen Bank of Muhammad Yunus and the food multinational Danone to make high-quality yogurt in Bangladesh. This factory is 10 percent the size of existing Danone factories and cost much less to build. I guess you can call it a low-fat factory. Now this factory, unlike Western factories that are highly automated, relies a lot on manual processes in order to generate jobs for local communities. Danone was so inspired by this model that combines economic efficiency and social sustainability, they are planning to roll it out in other parts of the world as well.

9:27 Now, when you see this example, you might be thinking, “Well, frugal innovation is low tech.” Actually, no. Frugal innovation is also about making high tech more affordable and more accessible to more people. Let me give you an example.

9:42 In China, the R&D engineers of Siemens Healthcare have designed a C.T. scanner that is easy enough to be used by less qualified health workers, like nurses and technicians. This device can scan more patients on a daily basis, and yet consumes less energy, which is great for hospitals, but it’s also great for patients because it reduces the cost of treatment by 30 percent and radiation dosage by up to 60 percent. This solution was initially designed for the Chinese market, but now it’s selling like hotcakes in the U.S. and Europe, where hospitals are pressured to deliver quality care at lower cost.

10:27 But the frugal innovation revolution in the West is actually led by creative entrepreneurs who are coming up with amazing solutions to address basic needs in the U.S. and Europe. Let me quickly give you three examples of startups that personally inspire me. The first one happens to be launched by my neighbor in Silicon Valley. It’s called gThrive. They make these wireless sensors designed like plastic rulers that farmers can stick in different parts of the field and start collecting detailed information like soil conditions. This dynamic data allows farmers to optimize use of water energy while improving quality of the products and the yields, which is a great solution for California, which faces major water shortage. It pays for itself within one year.

11:16 Second example is Be-Bound, also in Silicon Valley, that enables you to connect to the Internet even in no-bandwidth areas where there’s no wi-fi or 3G or 4G. How do they do that? They simply use SMS, a basic technology, but that happens to be the most reliable and most widely available around the world. Three billion people today with cell phones can’t access the Internet. This solution can connect them to the Internet in a frugal way.

11:45 And in France, there is a startup calle Compte Nickel, which is revolutionizing the banking sector. It allows thousands of people to walk into a Mom and Pop store and in just five minutes activate the service that gives them two products: an international bank account number and an international debit card. They charge a flat annual maintenance fee of just 20 Euros. That means you can do all banking transactions — send and receive money, pay with your debit card — all with no additional charge. This is what I call low-cost banking without the bank. Amazingly, 75 percent of the customers using this service are the middle-class French who can’t afford high banking fees.

12:29 Now, I talked about frugal innovation, initially pioneered in the South, now being adopted in the North. Ultimately, we would like to see developed countries and developing countries come together and co-create frugal solutions that benefit the entire humanity. The exciting news is that’s starting to happen. Let’s go to Nairobi to find that out.

12:51 Nairobi has horrendous traffic jams. When I first saw them, I thought, “Holy cow.” Literally, because you have to dodge cows as well when you drive in Nairobi. To ease the situation, the engineers at the IBM lab in Kenya are piloting a solution called Megaffic, which initially was designed by the Japanese engineers. Unlike in the West, Megaffic doesn’t rely on roadside sensors, which are very expensive to install in Nairobi. Instead they process images, traffic data, collected from a small number of low-resolution webcams in Nairobi streets, and then they use analytic software to predict congestion points, and they can SMS drivers alternate routes to take. Granted, Megaffic is not as sexy as self-driving cars, but it promises to take Nairobi drivers from point A to point B at least 20 percent faster. And earlier this year, UCLA Health launched its Global Lab for Innovation, which seeks to identify frugal healthcare solutions anywhere in the world that will be at least 20 percent cheaper than existing solutions in the U.S. and yet more effective. It also tries to bring together innovators from North and South to cocreate affordable healthcare solutions for all of humanity.

14:23 I gave tons of examples of frugal innovators from around the world, but the question is, how do you go about adopting frugal innovation? Well, I gleaned out three principles from frugal innovators around the world that I want to share with you that you can apply in your own organization to do more with less.

14:41 The first principle is: Keep it simple. Don’t create solutions to impress customers. Make them easy enough to use and widely accessible, like the C.T. scanner we saw in China.

14:55 Second principle: Do not reinvent the wheel. Try to leverage existing resources and assets that are widely available, like using mobile telephony to offer clean energy or Mom and Pop stores to offer banking services.

15:11 Third principle is: Think and act horizontally. Companies tend to scale up vertically by centralizing operations in big factories and warehouses, but if you want to be agile and deal with immense customer diversity, you need to scale out horizontally using a distributed supply chain with smaller manufacturing and distribution units, like Grameen Bank has shown.

15:38 The South pioneered frugal innovation out of sheer necessity. The North is now learning to do more and better with less as it faces resource constraints. My hope is that we transcend this artificial North-South divide so that we can harness the collective ingenuity of innovators from around the world to cocreate frugal solutions that will improve the quality of life of everyone in the world, while preserving our precious planet.

16:17 Thank you very much.

Should You Offer Continuing Education to Your Employees?

Maybe an employee dropped it off anonymously in the company suggestion box a few weeks ago. Maybe one of the new bright-eyed
employees stopped you one morning while you were on your way to get coffee. Or maybe Janeen from Accounting asked about it.
For whatever reason, you have continuing education for your employees on the brain. And you cannot stop thinking about it.

On one hand, you think it is a great idea. It can boost the company’s internal intelligence level while increasing company
morale and encouraging employees to stick around. On the other hand, you think it is expensive and will cut in to productivity during the workday.

Baloney! Offering continuing education to your employees is the best choice you could make for you, your company, you
employees and your customers. Just think about it: you could offer a customer service training to all of your staff who
have direct contact with customers. The staff learns important lessons and techniques for amazing customer service and in
turn, your clients are happy. That means they will be more likely to do repeat business with you and your company makes more
money.

Then, you look better in the eyes of YOUR boss. And who does not want that?

Or, all of your IT staff goes through a continuing education course on the importance of the new software the company is
using. The IT staff learns the ropes of the software and even learns a few little tricks to keep the software running
effectively and smoothly. In turn, your products go out on time and customers are happy. Again, that means they will be
more likely to do repeat business with you and your company makes more money.

And again, you look better in the eyes of your boss. So tell me again why you think continuing education is a bad thing?