Name a couple of bigger-than-life, American inventors? Easy, right? Who comes to mind? Thomas Edison, of course, and South African-born Elon Musk. Few others even come close. Both have earned the right to be considered veritable inventing whirlwinds, but they are different from each other, as well. I think that it’s fair to say that Elon Musk is the closest thing to Thomas Edison in our times, but is the reverse equally true? Was Edison the Elon Musk of the late 19th, early 20th centuries?
Thomas Alva Edison In His Laboratory
There is no doubt that Elon Musk’s leadership role with such big-idea ventures such as PayPal, Tesla, the Hyperloop, Solar City, SpaceX and The Boring Company have captured our imaginations, and shown us that entrepreneurship is still alive and well in America, with each project having the potential to not only disrupt existing industries but improve our lives as well. But, for the moment at least, Edison did more, and for more people, largely as a result of the studied application of innovation lessons learned during his inventing career.
Although famed around the world for his technical and commercial wizardry, Edison, of whom a much awaited new biography by Edmund Morris was released this past week, initially ran much smaller operations then Musk. His sights were set on more specific technical breakthroughs, such as the successful launch of a commercial incandescent light bulb; the ability to not only record sound, but also be able to play it back on demand; and create commercially successful motion pictures, and sound tracks on cinematographic film (the “talkies”); all of which have led to the eventual creation of entire industries, and transformed industrial landscapes.
Edison began his innovative life at the front-end of the technical activity, while Musk has always led with both big ideas and organization. Edison was also involved in the creation of a number of manufacturing organizations, including the General Electric, Co., but it was the technologies themselves, and not their corporate vehicles, that commanded most of his early career attention. His good friend Henry Ford was quoted as saying that “Edison was the world’s greatest inventor, and worst businessman.” This was unfair to Edison, who was simply more interested in the inventive front-end, leaving it to others, for license fees, to commercialize under his name. While Edison, as Musk, was probably more of an innovator than inventor, as much of what they have both done is more adaptation than creation, it should be without dispute that it was Edison who actually did “turn night into day”, democratized the arts by creating “the repeatable music experience” with the invention of recorded music powered by rotating media to at least the first mp3 players (Apple’s original iPod Classic had a rotating 1 1/2inch Toshiba disk drive) and made Hollywood possible. Elon Musk’s dreams, although sky-high in some respects, have not yet had anywhere near the same affect as Edison in terms of social impact, but Musk is still young and much more is undoubtedy still to come.
Even more important as a lasting legacy, however, is that Edison taught us how to invent for a modern age through an emphasis on several important lessons:
- Continuous invention: Change is continuous, but organizational life tends to be episodic. As a result, right from the start of any project the organization is out of sync with what is happening in the world around it. When Edison announced his “invention factory,” in 1877, with promises of “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so”, he signaled that he was now in the business of producing inventions continuously, and that he was differentiating his laboratory by suggesting that inventive output could be made reliable. Not surprisingly, American economics commentator John Steele Gordon has observed that the Invention Factory was “perhaps his greatest invention of all.”
- Dream Big, but with details: As with Musk, a not-insignificant contribution to Edison’s inventive success was his ability to capture the imagination of investors with his shared visions of what his technology might achieve. The most vivid of these was that of the electric light, which he claimed would “make light so cheap, only the rich will burn candles,” yet, the details with which he inspired his team to make incandescent bulbs that were affordable, long-lasting and non-flickering were precise enough so that he could allow the Muckers to take charge of the efforts, which was a great competitive benefit in a multi-actor race for finding the right filament materials to accomplish this first.
- Depend on a strong team: Edison may have been styled “the Wizard of Menlo Park,” but he had a team, the Muckers, who were talented enough to do much of the inventive work, unsupervised. Edison put a lot of time and thought into the hiring process, but part of his genius for team development was to be generous in sharing the proceeds of the inventions produced. In addition, being a part of Edison’s Muckers was like putting the trademark “Edison Inside!” onto your c.v., a benefit so attractive that although many Muckers eventually left Edison to go onto industry-leading positions, they, nonetheless, remained alumni of his Edison Pioneers.
- Learn faster by experimenting more: Much of the success of Edison’s labs was actually about being faster than their competitors to create a solution whose appearance was already well-expected. This meant that being faster to learn was a key differentiator. Edison’s advantage wasthat his laboratories had a “machine-shop culture” where informality and democracy were the norm, and where “internal contracting” of work within the labor pool, akin to that associated today with companies such as home appliance producer Haier and the tomato processor Morningstar, was occasionally employed. These choices were all about being faster, and the resulting organizational culture allowed the Muckers to take responsibilty for their projects and not rely upon Edison for constant direction or approval.
- Reengineer conversations: Conversations move ideas, and the exploding flow of ideas in the late 19th century made surprise an inevitable concern in invention. It has been said of Edison’s invention factory that its first function was act as “a net to capture ideas from the many streams of technical information” that were gushing at that point in time. In addition, however, once ideas were captured, Edison’s concern with the use of physical space sped-up cross-functional conversations. His Menlo Park floor design, in fact, was the antecedent of the open-space layout that has been popularized in IDEO’s design studios.
- Think systemically for high adoption probability; invest in an ecosystem: Edison realized that all of his efforts on the incandescent bulb would be for naught if he could not convince consumers to give-up gas as their lighting source. To that end, he needed more than lamps, he needed: fasteners, turbines, distribution lines, meters and all of the other elements that would make-up a complete ecosystem to make adoption and installment easier. To his credit, Edison not only recognized this, but he invested in enterprises, some of which were spun-off to Muckers, to make the rapid growth of electric lighting a reality. For someone who succeeded by focusing on specific technologies, Edison had a wide peripheral view of the world around these technologies.
- An openness to business model as well as technical innovation: Edison’s decision to sell pre-recorded cylinders for the phonography, and spring-operated, motorless phonographs as well, marked a recognition that as markets mature, different sources of revenues and cost-control could become more important than never-ending technical novelty. Today, of course, that is taken for granted, but for Edison this was a major innovation departure.
Upon comparison, there is a lot of shared attributes between Musk and Edison, but Edison was truly an original, and remains so. There was no existing template for who he was, or what he did. He was both a technical wizard, and a shrewd observer of the inventive scene. While many of his inventions remain recognizable in current forms, more than a hundred years after their creation, it is likely that his insights into inventive and innovative activity will be in use for a much longer period.
