NIH Syndrome at Sony
Interesting article (and quote) by James Surowiecki on how organizational cultures can come in the way of innovation … leading to misery …
Remember the misled attempt of Sony to establish its very own format for compressed music … ignoring the established standard mp3 … at least they have stopped this folly … but apparently other things are uh-oh at Sony …
Companies often become victims of their own mythologies. Sony’s track record of game-changing inventions—the transistor radio, the Walkman, the Trinitron—led it to believe that success lay in self-sufficiency and absolute control. Sony’s ideal future was one in which just about everything—TVs, DVD players, cameras, computers, stereos, handhelds, digital songs—bore the Sony brand. The company became an exemplar of what’s sometimes called the “Not Invented Here” syndrome: if it wasn’t invented at Sony, the company wanted nothing to do with it.
More interesting stuff on open innovation and customer-driven innovation …
[…] With so many companies investing so much money and energy in innovation, it’s hard for any one of them to consistently outsmart the rest. And technologies are so complex that it’s impractical for a company to gather all the resources it needs under one roof. The spirit of collaboration extends to customers, too. In the new book “Democratizing Innovation,” Eric von Hippel, a management professor at M.I.T., shows that, in fields ranging from surgical instruments and software to kite surfing, customers often come up with new products or new ways of using old ones.
… that offer a new outloook on innovation … a new innovation paradigm (for Sony) … if they’d care … but will they?
