Necessity is said to be the mother of invention.

Whilst it may be true that ‘in desperate times, desperate measures are needed’, there is something touching about daily appeals for fresh-thinking, transformation and innovation from the recently merged creative agency - Cameron Clegg Cable Osborne & Pickles.

Clearly they collectively do not think we’ve been doing enough of it.  It is not that any of us would admit (at least publicly) to doubts about the economic necessity.  It’s more that this rampant urge to innovate is what already pre-occupies our daily lives.

Witness yesterday’s ‘news’ from BCG that new Internet-enabled on-line businesses will soon account for 10% of the UK economy – and that achievement is despite having one hand tied behind our narrowbanded backs.  Goodness me.  Very soon we’ll have the government declaring that broadband access is a utility as essential as water and roads – but let’s not get overexcited.  That’s the sort of advice the UN gives to third world countries and, judging by recent White Papers, not quite how we ‘locally enterprising’ chaps do things around here.

The point is that there’s no shortage of innovative thinking (we even boast of our great British inventiveness) but there’s a great lack of understanding by policy makers of how to not kill it off at an early stage.

It is probably blindingly obvious but worth repeating that it usually takes six or seven years to become an ‘overnight star’.  What is recognised by many as ‘brilliant’ most probably didn’t happen in a blinding flash.

Breakthroughs and ‘eureka moments’ have timing issues more acute than any stand-up comedian – not least because the ‘necessity’ that drives the inventive mind often requires the world (and its politicians and media) to catch up with the perceptiveness of those who think ahead.  So often heard is the complaint, ‘they just don’t get it’.

Doing things differently – doing different things

We are not talking here about opportunistic jumping on bandwagons.  We are talking here about innovations of two kinds.  Firstly there’s the use of new materials, technologies and talents to make afresh something that is better fit for purpose, and, secondly, we see an even greater form of innovation – the creation of something for which the ‘necessity’ is barely predictable.  Innovators do not just live to do the same things differently but also to do different things.

But whatever innovative purpose, the very best and most rewarding are those that prove to be truly disruptive.  The real measure of innovative achievement is found in the displacement, discomfort and plain competitive pressure heaped on the sleepy shoulders of the established ‘last generation’ fat cats.  And it is with that disruption (real or threatened) that the fun begins for the erstwhile innovator.

Some hide – either to protect their brainchild or, more-often, to get on with the slog of making it work without interruption.  Others, enthusiastic souls, feel the need to evangelise, to not only create the new thing but also re-jig the rest of the world in preparation for its coming.  Sooner or later they have a problem with the way our society treats ‘intellectual property’.  It’s either an oxymoron – ‘it is not intellectualised if it’s not shared’ – or you may get ripped off by masters of the dark arts of protectionism.

Take, for example, a simple (but brilliant) household product designed to make a better job of putting hooks on walls and hanging pictures.  Now, six years from concept to product, having survived the highs and lows of product development, Takker (www.takker.com) has finally come of age and its proud parent can look forward to watching competitors try to copy his product.  The Dyson Method of protection lies partly in the creation of folklore but James Dyson’s epic IP protection battles were no joke.

Takker’s current tack lies in its recent use of a thoroughly commercial website and YouTube to mark out its territory and to provide a direct sales alternative to dependence on wholesale channel partners and those intermediaries who might need to pay respect to their other long-established suppliers.

But long before today’s confident Takker designer, Damien McGrane, produced a saleable version he had faced a steep learning curve not only in product design but also in the rough and tumble of dealing with money management and potential sales outlets.

The frustrating searches to find funding, stretching his finances to the limit - if Damien had known, when he started out on this journey, the scale of the challenges ahead he might well have turned back.  What kept him going was a mixture of self-belief, fortuitous friendships, good mentoring and a determination not to be beaten.  And this is the exhausting level of commitment, the ‘sweat equity’, the battle with incumbents, that Messrs CCCO&P would wish many more of us could conjure in the national interest.

Cyber-warfare

In another example, deeply immersed in the oddly unhinged world of photonics research and development laboratories, a small team toils for years working towards products and systems that will shift the security of data systems to an entirely new level.

Never mind that this team knew the market had yet to appreciate that their stuff would one-day become an essential.  Neatly, ironically, coinciding with declarations by the government of the newly perceived dangers of cyber-warfare, the laboratory hosting this work is forced to decide that the benefits are too long-term and the work is no longer ‘core’ in their mission to shift the share-price ever higher.

Messrs CCCO&P may recognise, may even lecture business leaders, on the sins of short-terminism, but one wonders if they truly realise how very easy it is to rub out the future before the sketch has taken its full form.

Obviously judgements must be made, priorities set and, don’t deny it, ‘winners picked’.  The challenge with this type of blue-sky innovation is that of imperfect contextual knowledge.  The current cloudy conditions may clear or worsen but the decision makers may also be blissfully unaware that, further down Whitehall, cyber-terrorism is about to land at the top of the agenda and the sun could well be shining.

What often happens when innovation teams find themselves disrupted is that they regroup elsewhere.  If the inventive urge is strong enough they’ll go anywhere.  If the IP has been sold to the USA or Japan, India or the Middle East, they may even follow to maintain parental care of their babies.

The lasting effect, in a global market where national interests are of less concern, is delay – and quite often deliberate delay in the interest of market protection.  Unfortunately, in this particular example, time is most definitely not on our side – not least because of our increasing dependence on the digital on-line world.  This may be an innovation that is all about future networks and data security but (much like better broadband access) it really has little to do with the telecoms sector – it is, as John Donne might have said, a bell that tolls for us all.

The road less travelled ?

We may be urged to be more innovative but there is no shortage of those who would prefer to ‘take the road less travelled’. The question is whether it is really so very necessary, or sensible, to demand that that innovation must be forged in such an unfriendly environment.

For every Dyson or McGrane there are thousands who set off on their voyages ‘against a sea of troubles’ but never arrive at their intended destination.

Way back, when all this digital stuff was only just beginning to dawn on the national consciousness, an analysis of winners showed that they had somehow contrived to defy all good accountancy advice and prevailing management conventions.

To get the investment go-ahead they had lied.  They promised to save money.  They chose, however, to spend the funding not on cost saving but on value creation.  They spent the money not at the heart of their own organisation but at, or just beyond, the organisation’s borders.  They were set not on doing things marginally differently but on enabling their organisations to do different things.   The subsequent internal audits revealed their sins of commission - but wiser heads delighted in transformations such that they could never ever return to ‘the old way of doing things’.

These innovators had taken ‘the road less travelled’ and, despite the storms and difficulties, despite knowing ‘how way leads on to way’, that choice had ‘made all the difference’.  Sure enough, sometime later, the senior management would turn up to glory in the success and be on hand to collect the awards.

In these economically hard-pressed times, wouldn’t it be a really good idea to suggest to bonus-driven bankers and share-price-obsessive analysts that they might perhaps consider that hero-making could be made just a little bit easier ?

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BCG - Boston Consulting Group - report The Connected Kingdom was commissioned by Google.

Readers of this editorial also read ‘Cyber-crime, babies and bathwater’ and ‘Penny-dropping moments’ .

This editorial was adapted from a script for a 10 minute radio programme.