“There is no new thing under the sun.” Andrew Hargadon found this old insight to be right on target when he tried to understand innovation.

He’d seen innovation first-hand while working at Apple and IDEO, and began studying it as a graduate student at Stanford working with Professor Robert Sutton.

That research led to his 2003 book, How Breakthroughs Happen (Harvard Business School Press). In that book, Hargadon (associate professor of technology management at the Graduate School of Management, University of California at Davis) made two points:

First, innovation isn’t what happens when a solitary inventor works late into the night in the lab and comes up with something new and surprising. Instead, it’s what happens when people put old ideas together in new ways. Innovation is “an accumulation and recombination of existing ideas.”

Second, the fruit of this recombination has to be taken out of the lab and made the center of a wider network that brings in investors, the media, and potential customers. Good ideas will come to nothing if no one knows about or understands them.

The whole process is what Hargadon calls technology brokering.

The good news for companies that want to be more innovative is that they don’t have to depend on serendipity. There’s probably plenty of small-scale innovation going on in those companies already. What managers have to do is organize the technology brokering that will bring these small innovations into a larger network within the company.

CSC World: Your central idea is that innovation is about technology brokering, not lone geniuses. What do you mean by technology brokering?

Hargadon: Two things are important. First, most of the innovations that have had a profound impact were new combinations of old ideas. That insight came out of research that Bob Sutton and I did with IDEO. Then we asked ourselves why this recombinant innovation isn’t happening more often. That’s when the notion of technology brokering came up. Technology brokering is the strategy some individuals and firms have to organize networks around the recombinant process.

Edison, for example, didn’t invent the light bulb. He did improve it, but he didn’t do that alone, either. What he did do was build a network around the light bulb that brought other people, people outside his Menlo Park lab, into the venture.

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