Getting a job in Thomas Edison's laboratories in the late 19th century was an opportunity as exciting as being hired by Steve Jobs or Bill Gates today. One of the most significant factors driving Edison's innovation success was his commitment to creating diversity - both in his laboratory and in his manufacturing operations. Edison's ability to stay at the leading edge of science and technology for over 40 years was due in large part to his ability to harness the power of diversity in four key ways:
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Formation of multi-disciplinary teams
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Diversity of learning styles
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Cross-training
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Ethnic diversity
Whether you adopt diversity in any one of these areas - or focus on them collectively - the results will yield a positive multiplier effect on your innovation efforts. Large organizations like IDEO and Apple, as well as small and mid-size firms like Menlo Innovations, Gravity Tank, and WMS Gaming have seen success by driving innovation through diversity.
Diversity of Expertise: Multi-disciplinary Teams Open New Thought Pathways
We can look to Edison's Fourth Competency of Innovation, Master-mind Collaboration, for clues on Edison's hiring practices and career direction for his employees. It was common for Edison to reassign individuals who came to him holding one core area of expertise to an area outside their primary domain. (See Out of The Box to read how an electrical engineer became a successful chemist for Edison.)
Edison believed innovative solutions could be generated faster if individuals from diverse disciplines were brought together and challenged each other's thinking throughout the product development process. For example, Edison's dedication to forming multi-disciplinary teams ensured that diverse perspectives from chemistry, physics, acoustical science, mathematics, and other disciplines could come together in a single project team. Today, rather than fostering diverse project teams, we often see disciplines "silo-ed" together, with engineers working only with other engineers, or designers working only with other designers. Edison drove success by breaking this pattern.
Management science as well as neuroscience today tell us that this diversity of perspective is critically important to rapid trouble-shooting in the development phases of any new product or service. By ensuring that his teams were drawn from multiple disciplines, Edison eliminated counter-productive options sooner, yielding significant competitive advantage. Today, IDEO routinely brings together project teams with individuals drawn from anthropology, economics, design, and business, with extraordinary success.
Diversity of Learning Styles: Model the Workplace to Leverage Your Wiring
Edison was a kinesthetic learner. He engaged his mind most powerfully when taking things apart and putting them back together. Edison indulged this aspect of his brain's wiring by placing workbenches and machining equipment inside all his major laboratories, allowing rapid prototyping to take place. Rapid development of ideas into three-dimensional concepts was key to innovation success in Edison's operations. Today, we see product development firms like Gravity Tank adopting this practice, even sometimes engaging clients in the prototyping effort.
Edison's workplace was also highly oriented toward visual learning. The master innovator used drawings of his ideas not only to protect his intellectual property, but to disseminate instructions to work teams. Visual expressions of ideas cut across the boundaries of language which existed both in Edison's labs and manufacturing facilities. The power of "Expressing Ideas Visually" is a crucial part of Edison Innovation Competency #2, Kaleidoscopic Thinking. Pixar, a successful movie animation company, has adopted visual expression of ideas as a core communication practice, reducing written memos to a bare minimum.
Auditory learners reveled in Edison's desire to share his learning via free weekly lectures he offered to employees during the lunch hour. These lectures often resulted in vigorous verbal exchanges during which employees debated with Edison himself. Edison inspired an "environment of open exchange," a critical part of Master-mind Collaboration. Auditory learning was stimulated throughout the laboratory through team debate. Today, WMS Gaming, headquartered in Chicago, drives successful development of new casino slot games by physically clustering teams together in work stations that offer access to sensory stimulation - kinesthetic, visual, and auditory. Game designers have found they deliver better gaming concepts faster by having ready access to all these modes of expression.
Diversity of Organizational Experience: Thou Shalt Be Cross-trained
In addition to his bent for multi-disciplinary teams, Edison also cross-trained employees who were en route to his elite inner circle of innovation leaders. Edison believed his First Circle innovation team needed diverse experiences both inside and outside the laboratory to maximize their effectiveness, prompting his organization to grow in new directions.
For example, Edison sent Charles Batchelor - his right-hand experimenter - to Paris for nearly three years to build an electrical power facility in advance of a major electrical power exposition there in 1881. Batchelor's duty was not only to draw global attention to the nascent electrical power industry at the Paris Exposition itself (Edison invented the incandescent electric light in 1879), but to establish additional power facilities in Europe following the exposition. This meant Edison sacrificed access to one of his most valued innovation leaders in order to build European demand for his light bulb manufacturing operations, a strategy which ultimately proved successful.
As well, Samuel Insull, also a First Circle member, not only handled Edison's personal finances in his role as Secretary starting in 1881, but also served years later as a General Manager at the Edison General Electric Company, overseeing the Schenectady, NY factory which churned out the world's first light bulbs and electrical power equipment.
Edison believed these diverse experiences would augment the expertise of these men, and enhance their ability to develop products that could offer practical benefits to consumers. The shifting roles of Batchelor and Insull meant that other employees stepped in to fill their positions, allowing them to be cross-trained. A similar strategy is employed today at Menlo Innovations a small software development company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Founder Rich Sheridan routinely "switches up" paired combinations of software developers, expanding employee familiarity with software code and its diverse applications.
Ethnic Diversity: Create an Innovation Melting Pot
What happens when you bring together a Swiss watchmaker, a British textiles expert, an American mathematician, a German glassblower, an Irish electrician, and an African-American patent draftsman? Answer: you develop a leading edge innovation organization. These diverse talents were represented by immigrants who worked in Thomas Edison's laboratories. Ethnic diversity was present everywhere in Edison's operations. And it is no less important today. For more on this subject, read Pulitzer-prize winning author Sir Harold Evans' account of how America rose to global innovation prominence in The American Century and They Made America by harnessing diversity.
Bring Diversity Into Your Organization to Power Up Innovation
Take a cue from Thomas Edison's world-changing innovation success, and consider bringing diversity into your organization in the following ways:
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Look at the structure of your key teams, and ensure diverse expertise is present.
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Ensure opportunities to express diverse learning styles are present in your workplace, and at meetings.
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Intentionally offer cross-training opportunities not only to high-potential employees, but individuals who are working their way through your organization at multiple levels.
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Ensure that your organization draws upon talent from multiple ethnicities and both genders. Women, for example, are represented in less than 5% of America's technology firms at the senior management level. Ethnic diversity and gender diversity drive open thinking.
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