John Seely Brown Talks About Knowledge Flow

The following is an abbreviated version of an article that appeared in the Spring/Summer 2002 edition of CSC World.

How Does Your Knowledge Flow?
An Interview With John Seely Brown

Innovation has become a business buzzword lately. There are whole companies claiming not just to produce innovations but actually to be innovative organizations. Still, turning creative inventions into workable innovations remains one of the most difficult challenges facing business.

To get real insight into innovation, we went to someone who has made a study of it. After more than two decades at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), including 10 years as director, John Seely Brown knows innovation from the inside.

He has seen how innovation has -- and famously hasn’t -- happened. The key, JSB tells us, is how and where knowledge flows. Knowledge flows easily within a skunkworks, but it might take "operational judo" to get it to flow to other parts of a company. Even then, coordinating all those parts to turn an invention into an innovation requires as much creativity as the original invention.

As for whether there can be innovative organizations ... well, that’s still an open question.

CSC: You’ve defined innovation as the implementation of invention. Hard as invention may be, it seems to be easier than implementation. Why is that?

JSB: There’s an inherent tension between emergent practices -- the creation of new ideas -- and formal authorized processes. So there are many examples of skunkworks that shunt people off to the side to give them the chance to do very creative things. But then they have a hard time reintegrating the inventions back into the company.

CSC: So the problem is knowledge flow?

JSB: Yes. Knowledge flows very easily within communities of practice, face-to-face groups of people who coordinate with each other in the course of their work. In small organizations, these communities can bring different specialties together, such as engineering, design, and marketing.

But in larger organizations these specialties tend to separate into their own communities. When that happens, the communities develop different ways of working, even different vocabularies, and they no longer understand each other. Knowledge still flows easily within specialties, but not across them.

CSC: Can you give us an example?

JSB: I’ll give you two, both from Xerox PARC. When we came up with a good idea, we often didn’t take it directly to the company. Instead, I used to engage in what I called operational judo. First, we got customers turned on to the idea by showing it secretly to them. That helped us make improvements by learning from customers.

Once we got customers behind the idea, we unleashed them on the other parts of the company. We did that because we knew an idea from a customer would have greater credibility than one that came directly from us.

We had our own prejudices, too. In the 1980s, we thought we were the ones who had all the creative juices that God had meant for mankind to have. We used to think of marketing people as these poor, brain-dead suckers on the East Coast. It was almost beneath us, unless we were eating lunch, to spend time with these guys. But when we started creating our own businesses, we began to realize that these guys were bringing as much creativity to the table as we brought.

CSC: OK, I can see why innovation doesn’t happen. But it also happens. How does that work?

JSB: There isn’t any one way.

But one way that’s very interesting to me is industry clusters. When companies in a single industry cluster together, knowledge that gets stuck inside one company can leak out to others where it may flow more freely.

Everyone knows that Apple was able to make very good use of Xerox PARC inventions. That happened when knowledge that got stuck within Xerox flowed down the road to Apple. Clusters give knowledge more places to flow.

In a cluster, you’re constantly rubbing shoulders with your competitors. I can barely sit down to lunch in Silicon Valley without overhearing something interesting. You’re constantly aware of progress being made. Conversations reveal this, the questions you get asked reveal it.

The social milieu allows you to constantly benchmark yourself against the competition. A constant bootstrapping is going on, which drives the excitement, and keeps you moving ahead faster and faster.

CSC: Which must help knowledge flow across communities of practice within companies.

JSB: It does, but that’s not all. Clusters also have shadow industries. Here in Silicon Valley, if I want to start a firm, there are lawyers that specialize in doing that, design houses that can design products very fast, foundries that will build the product, marketing consultants to position the product, PR firms, communication firms. I may need a dozen components, and they’re all right here, available on demand.

CSC: Can there be such a thing as an innovative organization?

JSB: I don’t know. What I’m not sure of is if we can turn this whole game around by considering innovation part of the job of everybody in the corporation.

Meaning in our lives comes from innovating. If you invent something - even if it’s just finding a better way to work at the loading dock - you feel good. The way to keep an organization fertile and energetic is to create a workscape in which people are free to invent and learn.

CSC: What do you see as management’s role?

JSB: Middle managers have to be innovators. That turns the system upside down, because middle management wouldn’t be there to direct the troops but to help them. The speed of change is real. Today, you have to be in an environment that helps you see things differently. Corporations that don’t get it will die. A lot of major corporations will die because they don’t get it.

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