Day / September 15, 2006

by Roger Dennis

Harnessing the ‘lunatic’ fringes inside a corporation

They look like lunatics - but they make millions (errr..they don't work for TI)
They look like lunatics – but they make millions (errr..they don’t work for TI)

Fortune Magazine has a great article about how Texas Instrument harnesses the power of the fringes to generate new ideas, and explore opoortunities that would otherwise be ignored.

It reveals how a senior TI manager – Gene Frantz – has an interesting role : “searching for and encouraging all manner of lunatics and visionaries.”

The article goes on :

Frantz is the dean of an informal and amorphous group of TI engineers (and their peers and contacts outside the company) who call themselves the Lunatic Fringe. They are senior people who have been given free rein to follow their curiosity wherever it goes.

“There’s this continuum between total chaos and total order,” Frantz explains. “About 95% of the people in TI are total order, and I thank God for them every day, because they create the products that allow me to spend money. I’m down here in total chaos, that total chaos of innovation. As a company we recognize the difference between those two and encourage both to occur.”

By embracing the fringes TI has had some notable successes that it would have otherwise have missed on. As the article points out :

…today’s wacky idea can turn out to be tomorrow’s billion-dollar industry. (…) Think of this virtuous cycle – curious, open-minded engineers finding pockets of innovation around the world, which in turn inspires further innovation back at HQ – as an extremely effective opportunity-detection system.

This is a type of loose and free open innovation, the sort of which P&G is currently embracing. TI finds ideas in a myriad of places and showcases the good ones, whether internal or external. It would only work for a large organisation, but when it works, and it’s ingrained in the culture, it works well.

(via The Business Innovation Insider) and Corante

Update : Gene Frantz also blogs for TI. His latest posting is here

by Roger Dennis

Technology at escape velocity?

Wave Crest

I was listening to an interesting podcast from Supernova 2005 about Reinventing Media (if you want a partial transcipt check out the Strange Attractor blog)

While the panel discussion was interesting, the bit that raised my interest was a question from the floor from a guy called Greg Allen. Part of his query involved the notion that technology has now reached escape velocity.

That’s a powerful idea, and a concise way of summing up the rate of exponential change that Ray Kurzweil talks about. It seems that we’re about to reach critical mass with the convergence of many technologies.

I’m currently working on a large project for a massive global European company looking at how the world is going to look in twenty years based upon where technology is taking us. Almost every field I look at – from transport to healthcare – there are massive advances happening every couple of years. It’s no longer a doubling rate of change.

One of the key themes is the massively increased understanding of the nano world. It’s easy to think that nano relates simply to pure technology, but it seems that the further you delve into a field the more the key advances are at the molecular level.

However to anchor this post, and to stop it hitting an all time high on the breathless hype meter, consider the following quote :

We live, as it were, upon the front
edge of an advancing wave-crest

Now try and guess the date of that quote. It’s very relevant becuase it reflects the idea that this is not the first itme in history that people have felt this way. It’s not from the 90s, not even the 60’s. But 1904. The author is William James.