Innovation moves the world forward.
The latest gadgets, medical breakthroughs, advances in space travel -
are all products of innovation that collectively impact our everyday lives.
But for such an important concept, innovation is really hard to quantify.
What does it look like?
How long does it take?
How much does it cost?
The problem is that ‘to innovate’ is to do something new.
If something’s new, it’s unknown -
and that makes these questions all but unanswerable.
Innovation is a creative endeavour -
a messy, unquantifiable process of trial and error, false starts,
dead ends, sudden inspiration, and crazy, long-shot, potentially impossible ideas.
This is fine - the indefinable nature of creativity is part of what makes it fun.
But for companies who want to innovate, it represents a problem.
Business operates on quantifiable resources,
and on the face of it,
pouring cash into research projects which might never go anywhere
doesn’t seem like great business sense.
The upshot is
that the kind of creative, curiosity-led research which cultivates innovation
can often be very near the bottom of companies' priority lists
...and budget sheets.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
And when it comes to the importance of prioritising research,
while also running a successful company,
there are few better examples than that of Dr. Amar Bose.
Born in Philadelphia in 1929,
Amar Bose developed a zeal for electronics as a child,
spending hours teaching himself to repair broken train sets and radios.
As he got older this interest intensified,
culminating in the 1950s with his admission to MIT -
one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
But while it was his passion for all things electronic
which led him there,
it was ultimately his love of tinkering
- curiosity-led research in its purest form -
which would come to define his life’s work.
You see, Amar Bose loved music.
But in the 1950s, the audio quality of
even top of the range radios and turntables left a lot to be desired.
He dreamt of a ‘high-fidelity’ audio system,
one which could reproduce music so clearly as to be
indistinguishable from the original source.
And so during his time at MIT,
he put his curiosity and his love of research to work -
secretly using the acoustics lab at night to pursue his dream.
In 1964, with a decade of research under his belt, he founded the Bose corporation.
Today, Bose is famous for their industry- leading and groundbreaking work in audio.
But I think the most important lesson that we can learn from Dr Bose’s work
has less to do with his specific innovations,
and more to do with the innovation- friendly environment he cultivated.
Years of creative research taught Amar Bose the value of curiosity
and of the liberty to follow it wherever it leads.
He believed that creative freedom in research was the root of innovation,
and would ultimately lead to better products with more long-term benefits.
He considered this a central pillar of his company’s success,
but he also knew that the value of this approach wasn’t obvious to many others -
particularly investors or shareholders, who so often think
in terms of the next two quarters, rather than the next two decades.
And with this in mind,
year after year Amar Bose refused to float his company on the stock market,
opting to forgo the short term cash injection this would have offered,
in favour of maintaining control
and protecting his company’s dedication to curiosity-led research.
He knew that many saw this approach as risky, or even foolhardy,
and is quoted as saying
he would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs.
But his strategy paid off.
Bose’s noise-cancelling headphones, released in 1989,
were over ten years in the making,
a research and development period many companies would balk at.
But today, those headphones are flagship products,
easily justifying their decade-long R&D phase,
and vindicating his long-term approach.
However as he grew older, Dr. Bose was faced with another problem -
how could he ensure that once he was no longer around to oversee the company,
the creative environment he’d nurtured would continue?
His approach was the exception, rather than the rule,
and without him it seemed inevitable
the company would eventually revert to a more traditional path.
After years of pondering he found a solution -
one as simple as it was unprecedented.
In 2011, Amar Bose gifted a majority of shares in the Bose Corporation to MIT.
The gift came with the condition that the shares could never be given away or sold,
and that while the university would benefit from a quarterly dividend,
they would have no say in the operations of the business.
This gave those running the company the freedom to prioritise innovation
and focus on long term results, without having to answer to
outside investors with their eye on the short term -
thus preserving Amar Bose’s legacy.
For me, this story is the living embodiment of a sentiment expressed
by former dean of MIT, Vannevar Bush:
“Scientific progress on a broad front
results from the free play of free intellects,
working on subjects of their own choice,
in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”
This is precisely the attitude that Dr. Bose took to innovation,
and his story can act as both a warning
against living by the bottom line of a quarterly result,
and as a powerful reminder of what can be gained
when we prioritise our curiosity,
and stop trying to quantify the unquantifiable.