Lessons From Edison on Turning Creative Ideas Into Innovations

Who invented the light bulb? If this were a game show, the correct answer would likely be “Thomas Edison,” in 1879. But the full history is actually more complex.

British inventor Humphry Davy demonstrated the electric arc lamp in the first decade of the 1800s. And Warren De la Rue enclosed a platinum coil in a vacuum tube and passed an electric current through it in 1840, creating an early “light bulb” as such.

But it was Edison’s research team in Menlo Park, New Jersey who first created a commercially viable incandescent light bulb that implemented a carbon filament.

The Edison team’s first models lasted 13.5 hours. After another year of tinkering, they then produced a version using carbonized bamboo in 1880 that could last as much as 1,200 hours. And this model would become the commercial standard for the next 10 years.

As Edison demonstrated, there’s a difference between creativity—the ability to come up with brilliantly novel ideas—and innovation. Or the ability to implement these ideas in a commercial or other context.

And when it comes to business settings, it’s easier to convert creativity into viable innovations in some industries than it is in others. That’s according to Theodore Levitt, who published an article called “Creativity Is Not Enough” in Harvard Business Review in 2002.

Levitt was a professor emeritus of marketing at Harvard Business School and former editor of Harvard Business Review. He died in 2006.

In advertising, for example, visual or auditory ideas can sometimes be almost synonymous with their implementation, Leavitt says. But for a steel producer or similar operating company with elaborate production processes, long channels of distribution and a more complex administrative setup, for instance, the situation can be much different.

For critics and advisers to U.S. industry who repeatedly call for more creativity in business, it’s therefore well to try to first understand the profound distinction between creativity on one hand and innovation on the other, according to Leavitt. And then, in many cases, to spend a little more time calling on creative individuals to take added responsibility for implementation.

After all, in addition to the particular industry, the productive potentials of creativity also vary with the climate of the organization and the organizational level of the idea originator, Leavitt says. And with the kinds of day-in, day-out problems, pressures and responsibilities of the executive or other person to whom the originator addresses their ideas.

As a first step, Leavitt says creative people within organizations could try to include at least some minimal indication of what their ideas involve in terms of costs, risks, manpower and time whenever they propose them. And perhaps even specific people who ought to carry the ideas through.

That’s just responsible behavior, Leavitt says, because it makes it easier for an executive to evaluate their idea as a possible course of practical action.

Meanwhile, going beyond a mere “suggestion box,” larger organizations might also take steps to form specialized groups whose function is to receive ideas, work them out and follow them through in the necessary manner.

Leavitt points to a successful example of this type of group in the Marketing Department of Mobil Oil Company. A well as at Schering Corporation (now part of Merck & Co.) under the name Management R&D. And at Nationwide Insurance Company, whose president Murray D. Lincoln made plea for the notion of a company having a “Vice President in Charge of Revolution.”

Contrary to popular perceptions shaped by their more conservative tendencies, large organizations actually have some important attributes that facilitate innovation, Leavitt says.

Their ability to distribute risk over a large economic base and among the many people involved in implementing newness is significant. They make it easier both economically and, for the individuals involved, personally to break new ground.

But on the other hand, a vast machinery does exist within big organizations to get a specific job done, Leavitt says. And that job must continue to get the toughest kind of serious attention no matter how exotically revolutionary a big operating or policy change might be.

The hope, however, is that the built-in stabilizers of bigness and group decision making can be used as powerful influences in encouraging people to risk rocking the boat when innovation is strategically necessary.

All just things to remember, perhaps, the next time a light goes on in one’s head.