What makes a company a great innovator? Is it based on quantifiable measures such as # of patents? # of awards? revenue growth? Or is it fundamentally something less quantifiable and more qualitative, - something you see reflected in the DNA of a company’s culture, the vision of its leadership and the attitudes and passion of its staff?
As a growing start-up ourselves, it’s something we think about each day in how we shape the direction of our company, create our products, and make every day decisions.
There’s a great article that Fast Company wrote profiling W.L. Gore and Associates (the maker of Gore-Tex fabric that as Oregonians we all know very well, and thousands of other products). The article details a few characteristics that we admire and wanted to share here (perfect reading for a Friday afternoon).
Link to article: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/open_gore.html
Even though the article was written in 2004, it’s still incredibly relevant to all the talk and attention you see surrounding “innovation” in today’s business world. Some of these principles seem simple, but it’s amazingly difficult and still rare to see the level of trust, patience and commitment it takes from a company’s leaders to allow for the risk taking, lack of hierarchy and allowed time for breakthrough ideas to fail many times before materializing into commercial success.
That balance between “how do we focus on our short-terms revenue goals” and “how do we allow people to dream up crazy, seemingly completely unrelated products like guitar strings, dental floss and water-proof fabric within the same company”? It’s this balance that takes “innovation” from just a hyper-buzzword to everyday reality for companies like Gore. And, to see that their founder, Bill Gore, and his family had this vision back in the late 50’s is pretty amazing. He didn’t rely on the latest business strategy book du jour, he just based it on a simple premise he observed of how companies operated in crisis, when the rules get thrown out and they take risks. So, why wait for the crisis, just operate that way every day.
Read the article and get inspired. We’ll continue to look for and share articles and examples we come across that make us stop and think. If you have one, please share it with us here or in our Jama Backstage community forum: http://www.jamabackstage.com