Page 77 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

53231_Innovation and Entrepreneurship.qxd 11/8/2002 10:50 AM Page 70

70 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

as this one, in which formulating the need right away produced the
required solution. But in their essentials, most, if not all, innovations
based on process need have the same elements.
Here is another example of a similar process-need innovation.
Ottmar Mergenthaler designed the linotype for typesetting in
1885. During the preceding decades, printed materials of all
kinds—magazines, newspapers, books—had all been growing at an
exponential rate with the spread of literacy and the development of
transportation and communication. All the other elements of the
printing process had already changed. There were high-speed print-
ing presses, for instance, and paper was being made on high-speed
paper machines. Only typesetting had gone unchanged from the
days of Gutenberg four hundred years earlier. It remained slow and
expensive manual work, requiring high skill and long years of
apprenticeship. Mergenthaler, like Connor, defined what was need-
ed: a keyboard that would make possible the mechanical selection
of the right letter from the typefont; a mechanism to assemble the
letters and to adjust them in a line; and—the most difficult, by the
way—a mechanism to return each letter to its proper receptacle for
future use. Each of these required several years of hard work and
considerable ingenuity. But none required new knowledge, let alone
new science. Mergenthaler’s linotype became the “standard” in less
than five years, despite vigorous resistance from the old craftsmen-
typesetters.
In both these cases—William Connor’s enzyme and the linotype
machine—the process need was based on an incongruity in the
process. Demographics, however, are very often an equally powerful
source of process need and an opportunity for process innovation.
In 1909 or thereabouts a statistician at the Bell Telephone System
projected two curves fifteen years ahead: the curve for American pop-
ulation growth and the curve for the number of people required as
central-station operators to handle the growing volume of telephone
calls. These projections showed that every American woman between
age seventeen and sixty would have to work as a switchboard opera-
tor by the year 1925 or 1930 if the manual system of handling calls
were to be continued. Two years later, Bell engineers had designed
and put into service the first automatic switchboard.
Similarly, the present rush into robotics is largely the result of a
process need caused by demographics. Most of the knowledge has been
around for years. But until the consequences of the “baby bust” became