We can all picture the scene: A couple of guys toiling away in a cluttered garage, perfecting the next innovation that will shake an entire industry. Meanwhile, the big corporate players in the market stand oblivious — fat, dumb, happy, and too bogged down by bureaucracy and conservatism to be innovative themselves.
It’s a great image — one that has long persisted. There’s just one problem with it: It’s false. “The all but universal belief that large businesses do not and cannot innovate is not even a half-truth,” Peter Drucker wrote in his 1985 classic Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Yet what is true, Drucker added, is that “it takes special effort for the existing business” to get beyond the temptation “to feed yesterday and to starve tomorrow.”
I was reminded recently of the wisdom in Drucker’s words when I had a chance to chat with Mike Shapiro, engineering director and chief technology officer for Sun Microsystem’s Open Storage operation. As much as any story I’ve heard, Shapiro’s demonstrates that, as Drucker put it, “innovation can be achieved by any business” — even the largest. But what Shapiro and his colleagues have accomplished also serves as a textbook example of Drucker’s other insight: A major company must follow specific practices if it’s to convert breakthrough ideas into real results.
Leaping Forward
Shapiro, his partner, Bryan Cantrill, and their small team are the brains behind a family of data-storage systems — the 7000 line — that Sun introduced late last year. It features oodles of capacity, a “killer app” that uses real-time graphics so that customers can observe and understand what their storage system is doing, and a pricing model that appears to blow away the competition. I’m more of a Luddite than a techie myself, but I can tell you that reviews in the trade press have…