Innovate Like Edison | Sarah Miller Caldicott | Talks at Google

Hi, everyone, and thanks for coming today. We're very happy to have Sarah Miller Caldicott speak with us today about her new book, Innovate like the Success System of America's Greatest Inventor. I think we can all agree there's this collective interest in a figure like Thomas Edison, a name that for many of us, we grew up, has become synonymous with innovation and invention and creativity. Edison was, needless to say, one of the most prolific inventors in history. And to this day, we remain interested in learning more about what made him unique and how he was able to accomplish so much. How did he do these things? What lessons can we take away from his great success as an inventor and innovator to incorporate in our own personal and professional lives? This is a very funny side note. I can't help but remember there was a Simpsons episode in which they kind of emulated this, the creativity that was Thomas Edison. Homer invented like a chair and a hammer or something, but it's a funny way of showing that there is a certain cultural relevance and this sort of lasting interest in the figure of Thomas Edison. In her book, Sarah talks about the five competencies of innovation, which one can point to that helped propel Edison to his really astonishing, prolific career as an inventor. And the numbers are really quite impressive, with over almost 1100 US patents and 1,293 international patents over 62 years. This, of course, being Google and innovation and invention being very near and dear to all of our hearts. We're very lucky to have Sarah, who is also the great grand niece of Thomas Edison. So hopefully we'll be able to learn some insights from her. And with that being said, let's welcome Sarah to Google today.

Thank you so much. It is really an honor and a pleasure to be here. I had the chance to tour the campus on Monday with a friend who is a Googler, and I was absolutely astonished that all the things I've read in articles about what it's like here were actually true. I found all the food amazing, all of the images posted everywhere, the excitement of the people, the conversations that clearly take place everywhere and in all circumstances to be extraordinary. So I'm really, really honored to be here with all of you today. So, as Tyler said, what I'd like to do is tell you a little bit about this book that I've just completed last year in October, called Innovate like the Success System of America's Greatest Inventor. One of the things that's so amazing about this work is that it's the first time anyone has Ever tried to document editing Edison's innovation process? Over 70 books have been written about Thomas Edison, but only a handful have been written by business people. So this is a very unique slant that I was able to take through the research that I did, and I'll talk about that in just a moment. One of the other extraordinary things was I was able to gain access to archived material on Edison. At Rutgers University. There's been a huge project underway since 1979 called the Edison Papers Project. Have any of you heard of this? I had not heard of it and just a few of you have. At Rutgers, a whole team of historians has been cataloging the over 5 million pages of notebooks, business correspondence and personal correspondence that Edison and his teams left to the world. He lived to be 84 years old and he worked as a business person for 62 of those 84 years. So that's a lot of output. He's a very prolific man. So some of what you see today is reflective of the research that I did. One more bit of background and we'll get started. I have spent 12 years in industry working at the Quaker Oats Company, which is now PepsiCo, and Helene Curtis, which is now Unilever, in brand development and product development. So I've had opportunities to work with research and development people, manufacturing, sales, advertising agencies, really the whole gamut of what it takes to introduce a new product. I've also had an opportunity to work overseas, primarily in Japan, Australia, Scandinavia and Europe. So in my book I really brought to bear those experiences on the ground. Really putting projects together, products together for real people, and then balancing that with the last eight years or so where I've been a consultant to entrepreneurs. So there's sort of both the big business and the small business perspective reflected as we go through. If you guys have any questions, you're welcome to just raise your hand. I'd be happy to address it and certainly afterward we can have some further dialogue about the book. As Tyler said, there'll be some books here shortly and I'll be signing them so everyone can get a signed copy. $6.7 billion. How many of you think that's a lot of money? Okay, some of you holding out for a little more. That's alright. US$6.7 billion is the estimated market value of the industries established by Thomas Edison's patents. In 1910, that figure today would exceed $101 billion. And that was just the market value for the first 40 years of Edison's career. He had more than 20 years left of inventing so we can be sure that that $100 billion is a very conservative figure and it does not include one of his most profitable products, the storage battery. How many of you knew that Thomas Edison invented the world's first alkaline storage battery? Alright, down in the front here, you get a gold star. This battery was about the size of a thermos and it was made of nickel and iron. It was the first battery to bring metals together rather than liquids. In Edison's era, chemicals were used to drive electrochemical currents. We can talk a little bit about that later if you'd like. But very profitable product was not included in that $100 billion, nor were the patents that he sold. And a little later, I'll give you an example of an industry that I'm sure you have all taken part in that Edison created, but sold the patents to. So let's get started here. I was really astonished to learn new facts about Edison as I was doing my research. It was extraordinary to learn, for example, that he was really a collaborator. I guess my primary impression of Edison was that he worked pretty much on his own and maybe with a handful of people, but that's actually not true. He had dozens of people, even hundreds of people working with him in his laboratories, especially at the height of the electrical power development, and thousands of people in his manufacturing operations. So a very diverse man with tremendous business, scientific and invention accomplishments. Tyler mentioned that I'm a great grandniece of Thomas Edison. I'll give you just a real quick history of, of my family. This gentleman that you see in the lower left is my great great grandfather, Lewis Miller. He had 92 patents and 11 children. So he was a very busy guy. And he invented agricultural equipment. His most famous invention is in the Smithsonian. It's called the Buckeye Mower and Reaper. And it was an instrument that allowed the farmer to go through the field with the mules and horses, cut the grain and bind it in one pass so that laborers didn't have to come back into the field and then create the sheaves. Then several years later, he had some further patents that created a mechanical arm allowing the driver to reach down with this metal and wooden arm, pick up the sheaf of grain and put it in the cart behind him. So again eliminating another pass through the field. And that was the precursor to the modern combine harvester. So for these accomplishments, Lewis Miller is, as I mentioned, in the Smithsonian Institution with some of these inventions and he's in the National Inventors hall of Fame. My great grandfather was Lewis Miller's. Fifth child. His name was Robert Anderson Miller. He's not shown here, but his younger sister Mina was the seventh child and you see her here in the middle of the frame. She married Thomas Edison in 1886 after he had already become a world famous figure. Just to give you some perspective, in 1876, Edison designed and built Menlo park in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Some people that I speak to still think it's Menlo Park, California, but in Menlo Park, New Jersey, he invented the phonograph in 1877 and the incandescent electric light in 1879, and then went on to invent the movies in the 1880s and more into the 1890s. So a very, very prolific part of his career was established at Menlo Park. The other figure that you see here in the upper right is my grandfather, Robert Anderson Miller ii, who invented Herculite glass, or what we today would call shatterproof glass. And this invention first appeared in the windshields of Chrysler automobiles. So growing up, we always had Chrysler cars. And I could never figure out why until I got older and. But it was really a very interesting heritage to receive. I learned about all of this when I was about seven years old. I had an Edison phonograph in my room. It was one of those wooden bases with the gold scrolly letters on it that said Edison and a big brass horn. How many of you have seen a phonograph like that? It was a real phonograph and it also had the cylindrical records in the sleeves. So I would listen to those on the one side of my room and then on the other side I had a rectangular phonograph with round flat records that were 45s. And some of you in here may remember what those are. But that was really what set up my fascination with products. How do products change over time? Why do they change? What shifts consumer perceptions of interest in products and technologies? So that dichotomy between those phonographs was really what sort of set me on my journey. This is my wonderful co author, Michael Gelb. He is a genius thinking expert and has written 10 other books. You can see one of them here, how to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. Some of you may have had a chance to read it. He was just a wonderful collaborator with me on this effort and helped me really hone down my research and bring the book together. So Michael, thank you. How many of you knew that Menlo park was the world's first research and development laboratory? I know I didn't know that. And this is certainly something that My sixth grade social studies teacher never mentioned. So as we think about Thomas Edison and all of his accomplishments, one of the very first things we need to remember is that Edison invented R and D. We would not even have research and development today had it not been for Thomas Edison. So had he done nothing else, this process, innovation, would have put him in the history books. So very important for us to really look at Edison's systematic approach to innovation as created by this notion of R and D. So that's what we're going to spend some time talking about today. Before we get into what I call the five competencies of innovation, I want to give you just a quick few highlights of some of the things I didn't know about Edison that I found very instructive as I was doing my work. The first is that he had less than three months of formal schooling. How many of you knew Thomas Edison was home schooled? Okay, a couple of you. That was new information to me. His mother was a retired school teacher. The teachers that he had at about the age of 11 or 12 really could not handle Thomas. He was a kinesthetic learner. And kinesthetic learners are wonderful because they like to touch things and feel things and take them apart and put them back together. So he would already have this laptop completely taken apart. He would have this camera here, already disassembled, and the camera in the back of the room. He would have already wanted to take that apart and see how it worked. This is how, as he said, he made facts his own, to take things apart, study them and hold them. And in fact, in his laboratories at West Orange, which was his second laboratory, he actually had things that he would keep in his library. Bark, feathers, soil, chemical powders, all kinds of compounds. And he would hold them to see what the essence of them was. And it was said, Thomas Edison can go to the essence of things at once. So this was part of his learning style, this was part of how he looked at the world, this kinesthetic learning approach as well. He had a huge library in his office. The West Orange laboratory was three stories tall, and at one end was his office, and it was in the library, which was also three stories tall. It had 10,000 volumes, which was one of the top five largest libraries. So imagine working in a place that's probably not unlike Google, where you have access to search engine capability and you can get to all the libraries of the world. But in the 1870s and 1880s, this was an extraordinary thing. Access to physics textbooks, chemistry textbooks, the classics, the minutes of Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Science in England. He would have these things shipped over. So these were the kinds of resources that Edison and his teams had access to. Really extraordinary. He established five industries, and I'll talk about that later. Something I really had not really imagined beyond recorded sound and the movies and electrical power. He also was instrumental in pioneering telecommunications and portable power, as I said before, with the battery. So we see in Edison an extraordinary combination of an innovation culture plus innovation processes, creating speed. And this is what we need today. Innovation is the game changer in the global economy. And if we can find ways of bringing culture, process and speed together, then we really can create competitive advantage. So there are a lot of clues that Edison gives us, and one of them is creating flat organizations. I'll talk more about that. Edison's organization looked like this. Most of our organizations today look like this, don't they? The Industrial Age. How many of you are familiar with sort of the pyramid structure of organizations now? Google strikes me as being very flat and that's actually very germane and relevant to the 21st century. Organizations have to move faster. They have to be flattered, more networked, more nodal, rather than more pyramid, like. So there's a lot that you guys are doing right here that Edison would smile about. So let's get into the five competencies. I identified these competencies by seeing patterns in what Edison was doing. And again, I was looking at what his work was like from the perspective of a business person, not a historian. I wanted to know how Edison was so successful, how he created his teams, how his mind worked, whereas historians tend to be much more interested in what. So the first competency of innovation here is solution centered mindset. The second is kaleidoscopic thinking. The third, full spectrum engagement. The fourth competency is mastermind collaboration. And the fifth is full spectrum engagement. Now, each of these competencies has a cluster of what I call elements within them, and there are five elements for each of the five competencies. So by bringing the processes and skills and beliefs together that are present in each of these competencies, that's how we create competitive advantage. So I'm going to go into some depth on some of these for you and give you an idea of what these are like. Innovation literacy is one other concept that my co author and I introduce in the book. Innovation literacy is really a new term, a new way for us to think about how much do we know about innovation, how conscious are we of the innovation processes that we undergo. You can see this quote here from Peter Drucker every business needs one core competence, and that's innovation. So today the goal is, how do we bring these five competencies to the center of the plate? How do we allow any individual in any organization, in any industry to become more familiar with the innovation process? That's really one of the key goals of this book. So starting with, starting with solution centered mindset. One of the most important things for Edison was the notion of imagination and the notion of what solutions are out there, what is possible for me to create as an answer to this important question, an answer to this important challenge. And fundamentally, Edison believed that there was a solution to every question. But he liked to begin with his imagination. One of the ways he did this was by reading prolifically. And again, here we see this intense interest in knowledge, the desire to seek knowledge. And it seems to me that there are a lot of Googlers who are very much engaged in this process as well, seeking knowledge. What's out there, what can I build on that already exists? But then give it a twist, give it a change, make it more relevant to now, maybe add other pieces to it. This is what Edison did. So he built on the knowledge of others and then added to it. And sometimes, of course, he came up with entirely new knowledge. He developed what's called the Edison effect, or discovered the Edison effect, which eventually went on to create the technology for vacuum tubes that happened after his death. He did not ever see that come to be. But the entire era of television and computers is built on vacuum tube technology. So that would be an example of a breakthrough that Edison created through his reading and through his experimentation. So another piece of the solution centered mindset is his experimentation. How many of you think of Edison in the laboratory when you call him to mind? Okay, many of you. This is sort of how I always thought of him, sitting in his lab, working intently. One of the things I discovered about Edison that fascinated me was Edison believed nature was perfect. And he would always start with nature in any endeavor. First he'd do the reading, as I mentioned, and then he'd look into nature and see what patterns can I find here. What is connected to this question that I have. He never was concerned about where he started an experience experiment because he knew no matter the outcome, it would connect him to the next question and the next answer. How many of you have ever seen the periodic table of elements, like in chemistry, for example? This was really one of the places where Edison believed he saw the perfection of nature and saw the patterns in atomic structure that became so important to his work. So Today, we don't necessarily have to have a laboratory to explain. We can experiment with computers, we can experiment with recorded sound, we can experiment with people and interactions. So the world of the search engine and the world of virtual technologies allows us to experiment in lots of new ways and create mash ups, which I know you guys are great at. So those are kind of experiments too. The second competency of innovation. I'll just take two quick examples here. Kaleidoscopic thinking. How many of you feel that options are valuable to have in your work? Okay. Edison loved options. And in fact, he was very seldom satisfied when he got an answer immediately to something because he felt there always had to be more options than just the immediate outcome. So his mind was said to work like a kaleidoscope. And a kaleidoscope is really sort of like a little mini table telescope. And as you turn the end, there's a sort of series of patterns and colors that you see. So I love this quote because it's from a Western Union patent attorney. Western Union was one of the largest companies in the world at that time, so very sophisticated patenting technologies that they looked at and they said, basically every time Edison turns his head, a patent pops out. So kaleidoscopic thinking is not just about those random ideas. Let's throw some spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. These are really robust ideas, the product of whole brain thinking techniques that Edison basically developed through his own trial and error well before we knew about left or right brain, hemispheres of the mind, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, any of these technologies. So I'd like to give you two quick examples. Ideophoria. Edison had so many ideas. Have any of you heard of this term iveophoria before? It really is an English word. You can Google it and find means love of ideas. And Edison said to have a great idea, have a lot of them. So he exercised his mental muscles every day in this way. Two techniques. One, analogical thinking. Edison said to be a successful inventor or innovator, you had to have three One, imagination, which I mentioned a little earlier. Two, persistence, which was demonstrated in his experimentation, and three, the ability to see analogies and patterns. An analogy is really looking at two things that seem to be unlike and trying to find out how they are alike. Taking two things that seem to be unlike and trying to determine how they are alike. This is how Edison invented the world's first electric circuit. You can look on pages 106 and 107 of the book and see how he actually went through this process. He said well, I'm a master telegrapher, which today would be like a master software programmer. I know everything there is about telegraph equipment and how information flows through a telegraph. I wonder if I could use that to set up some kind of understanding of how electricity moves as well. Maybe I could create some kind of pattern with electricity that I could harness its power. And that's how he came up with the circuit. It's also how he came up with the first stylus for the phonograph. So I'll let you read about that. But looking at patterns was very important. And secondly, you see here fantastical thinking. How many of you have heard of Jules Verne, the author Jules Verne, okay. Jules Verne pioneered science fiction as a genre of fiction. And he wrote prolifically in the 1870s, 80s and 90s. And Edison was fascinated with these stories. So he started doing science fiction writing as well. And in the book there's a link to the 33 remaining pages of his science fiction writings. But he would talk about things, things like photography in total darkness, or lenses that could see into outer space, or trains that would run on magnetic rails above the ground. This is in pre 20th century world where none of these things existed, but they exist now. So they first existed in his mind as ideas and this kaleidoscopic approach that he would take to generating options. So as you read his work, you can see his inventive mind in action. And finally here, expressing ideas visually. This is one way that Edison helped maintain his flat organization. He had people from all over the world in his laboratories and manufacturing facilities. People spoke many different languages and they had lots of different levels of education. So he used pictures and images that he drew not only for patent protection purposes, but also to use as directions and instructions so that he could give different parts of an invention to different teams so that they could work on them effectively. That way they got to see the whole as well as the parts. And this made things go faster. So expressing ideas visually is one thing that we can use today very effectively. Instead of lots of memos and lots of words, we really can use more reliance on images to make things move faster. The third competency of innovation, full spectrum engagement. One of the things that struck me about Edison was that he learned to work in flow. And what I mean by that was he didn't let things bother him or shift him out of his thoughts thought frame. So as you were working with him, you could see him shift from subject to subject, but he'd always come back to the first one and add to his thought process. So he learned how to navigate different spectrums, from simple to complex, from intense to relaxed. He would navigate these opposites, if you will, seamlessly, and he taught his teams to do this. So here is a way that Edison kind of managed his own stress while also allowing his mind to reboot and refresh itself. I was astonished that Edison lived to be 84. So some of his full spectrum engagement skills allowed him to live a long and fruitful life. And I'll point out two of them here. Sharing and protecting. Here we have dynamic tension that we see in existence today. Do we take our intellectual property and keep it all for ourselves, or do we share some of it, or even collaborate with other partners, maybe even outsource some of this to another body and collaborate to create intellectual property? How many of you are familiar with this back and forth tension? We read about it in the paper a great deal. So this is a big area of innovation today. Some of you may have heard of open innovation organizations now trying to look more outward for their innovation activities. A big area of dynamic tension in our marketplace in the 21st century. Another key piece was his ability to work alone, as well as his ability to work in teams. This is probably an area that we have the most struggles with as 21st century employees or 21st century managers. Now, here at Google, you're very fortunate because most of you, if not all of you, have the opportunity to spend 20% of your time doing something that may be unrelated to your immediate project priorities. So there's an opportunity to maybe work on your own to generate new ideas. But in many places, you won't even have an hour in a given day that's not filled with a meeting or some other activity. So Edison would make it a point to spend 1, 2, 3, even 4 hours a day in solitude. And this allowed his mind to actually work through those patterns to create those fantastical stories, to put together the pieces of his experimental findings so that he could come up with that next breakthrough. So without the solitude, there was much less output. So as we spend our time today, being able to work in solitude is a very important part of our innovation success. I'll talk now about Edison's work with teams, which is the other end of that spectrum. My co author and I call this mastermind collaboration. How many of you have heard the term mastermind before? Okay, terrific. This is a term also coined by Napoleon Hill. And you see the quote here. Napoleon Hill was a contemporary of Edison's and he wrote a wonderful book that's still in print. Today called Think and Grow Rich. How many of you have ever heard of Think and Grow Rich? It really is a classic of success thinking, technology, and many people alive today have built entire industries around this. So mastermind collaboration is the notion of taking two people, bringing them together, and creating a third mind. And that third mind is the shared ideas and the imagination and the collaborative efforts of those two minds. So Edison expanded that out across teams, and in focusing their intention on creating solutions, he was able to generate breakthroughs. One of the most important ways that he did this was to bring multiple disciplines together. So he had physicists together with mathematicians together with engineers together with people who were mechanically inclined and could put the prototypes together. So that way all of those learning styles, all those areas of expertise, were brought to bear on solving a problem. I know in my career, most of the time I spent working with other marketing people, so we'd come up with these great ideas, but they were all expressed in marketing ease. And that didn't mean that necessarily reflected any other way of thinking about a given problem. So how many of you have access to working in a team with multiple disciplines? Okay, it seems to me at Google, that's one of the philosophies here, is that you bring together areas of knowledge that aren't always connected for given projects. So this was a very important part of Edison's prolific output for his teams. Another critical aspect was the communication that existed between the teams themselves. Today, this is called spontaneous interaction. It was really a reflection of the architecture of the laboratories. Machines in the labs were primarily around the outside walls on different floors. So people would have to go up and down to use the machines and also cross the floors themselves. This brought them into spontaneous dialogue with other people. So it wasn't forced, it wasn't mandated, but there was this natural exchange that took place. So this ability to have dialogue easily, just like here on your campus as you cross from building to building or as you sit in lounges. I noticed this on Monday when I was walking through. This is a part of innovation, and sometimes it sort of doesn't feel like it is, but it really is encouraging those discussions. Another key factor here that helped the organization feel flat was anyone could debate Edison himself. Edison didn't always have such a big ego that someone couldn't disagree with him and he couldn't see another point of view. So Edison liked to have a flat structure without pecking order in the labs because that allowed everyone to contribute ideas. There's a notion here. First and second circle. His teams were very modular and sometimes people work on multiple teams at the same time in different project areas. The first circle were people who were the leaders and the drivers, and they were the most experienced in a given area of expertise. The folks in the second circle were sort of at a middle level of expertise and they were supporting the first circle. And then surrounding them were new people who were just coming into the organization. But all the way through, there had to be a line of sight from those new persons all the way into the center of the circle to that first circle that was critical to Edison's success. And the final competency, the fifth competency, innovation, Full spectrum. Excuse me, super value creation. This is where we start to see all the pieces come together in Edison's expression of how do we create value? How do we bring value to the marketplace? What can we offer consumers or businesses that they don't have now that they'd be willing to pay for? That's new. That will delight them, that will astonish them. You can see the definition here of innovation that my co author and I selected for use in the book, and it is creating and sustaining, excuse me, creating and delivering new customer value in the marketplace. So it's a very simple definition, but it talks about not just the development of the ideas, but the delivery of the ideas as well. There was a process that Edison used, which we highlight in the book, that's very simple and has five steps to it. And I'd like to use a story from the book to give you an example of how this worked. Edison loved to read the newspaper. He read it every day and he scoured the newspaper for trends. You see, the first item here is looking at trends. The critical factor is how do you take what you know about the marketplace and make it real relevant? So Edison noticed after the Civil War that the insurance industry was increasing in sales. Does anyone have any thought on why that might be? Well, the government was rebuilding the American south, so there were new buildings going up, new offices, new schools, and all of those needed to be insured. So Edison said, wow, there's got to be a way that I can help these people in some way to increase their business. So he went to the second step, which to look at gaps in the marketplace. And he actually went to some offices where there were insurance clerks working and watched them in process of their day. He saw them writing and writing and writing for hours at a time. And they weren't spending very much time outselling insurance. Most of their time was spent writing out these clauses. And as he looked at them, he Realized a lot of these clauses are the same. You know, we've all looked at leases and other kinds of insurance documents, and a lot of those clauses are boilerplate, aren't they? So he said, well, there's got to be a way of working this better than they're working it now. So he was looking for some type of insight. And he said, well, I know a lot about telegraphy. I know how to make exact perforations in paper. Because of my knowledge of telegraphy and Morse code, I bet that I could put together some kind of electric pen. I know how to create motors. And while someone was writing, I could make little perforations in the paper. I've invented waxed paper. So I know how to put paraffin over a surface. I know how to put a liquid over a paper surface. I wonder if I could use ink and lay the ink over the paper, it would seep down into the little holes and create another piece of paper that actually had the words on it. And I could just keep reprinting that one master stencil and make lots of copies of that page. I wonder if I could do that. So his insight was to create perforations in the paper. And he linked that to all the things that he knew how to do. And he went out and tested what he called the Edison copy and press. And it was a very heavy, but a portion the of piece of equipment that could be brought to offices. People would use these electric pens and they'd ink the top sheet and sure enough, it went down to the second sheet. Edison was so successful with these series of patents that he created that he raised a whole chunk of money to build Menlo Park. And as well, he sold the patents to the A.B. dick Company. And with those patents was created the document duplication industry. How many of you ever photocopied a document, okay, so that goes back to Thomas Edison. And if any of you are old enough to go back to the days of the mimeograph machine, and I know I am, those little purple worksheets that you get in math class or reading class, the Edison mimeograph machine, that's what this technology originated from, not included in the hundred billion dollars. So you see just this very simple process here. The ability to look at the marketplace, link trends and gaps to core strengths. This was his fundamental process. And a lot of times groups get so excited about their ideas but don't have a way of linking it back to the customer. This is really critical. And there are some more examples on how to do this in the book. Just two final quick thoughts and then we can have some questions and discussion. Business model changes. A lot of times we think of innovation as starting with technology, but it doesn't have to. There are process innovations like R and D, which is a sequenced way of doing things. There's design innovation, there's product service innovation, technology innovation and strategic innovation. Strategic innovation is business model innovation. And another shocking fact that I learned about Edison was that he had six business models. You can read more about these in the book. But one of the things Edison did was he actually became a trainer and an educator at one point in his career because he had to write manuals to train all of the electrical engineers to create the electrical engine power industry. So imagine starting an industry from zero. I mean, some of the people in this room are familiar with that and what it's like to actually move into an entirely new space. All the education that goes along with that. So we can look in our modern society today and there are a couple examples up here of new business models that change the way consumers interact with companies and change the way companies compete with each other. Other Dell doesn't make computers, but they reconfigure computers to the way consumers want. The UPS store is the growth of UPS purchasing mailboxes, et cetera. So it had a retail presence that it could serve consumers directly. McDonald's is thinking of putting refrigerated cases of beverages in its stores to take advantage of the growth in demand for beverages. Frappuccino, Powerade, Gatorade, water in its stores. So that would change its business model, be sort of like the 711 of the fast food industry. So looking at business model changes is another way that Edison innovated. And a final thought here, creating a market moving brand. Edison, Kirk created what today we would call a megabrand. Everything that came out of his factories had the Edison name on it. And he stood behind that name through service and through all kinds of marketing initiatives. He had catalogs, he had direct mail campaigns, he had actual photography equipment in his laboratory so that he could have his likeness controlled. Some people tried to steal his likeness and say that something was an Edison product when in fact it wasn't. But you can see from this quote here that Edison's brand name became so powerful that people only wanted the Edison article and not a knockoff and not a competitor. So this came through in his investing world as well. Investors wanted to go and focus on Edison's work and not his competitors. So, so that is what a market moving brand looked like in Edison's era and I think Google has created our market moving brand today. So there are a lot of things that I see present in the world of Google that I've described here in the last few minutes. These five competencies of innovation give us all a context for how we can create market moving products and services today. Even though I'm a great grandniece of Thomas Edison, what's important is that the Edison legacy belongs to all of us. We all have the benefit of the mind of this prolific man, the five industries that he created, and now we all have the capacity to innovate like Edison. It has been such a pleasure speaking with all of us of you today and I would be delighted to take any questions that you may have.

We also have a microphone set up so in case anyone wants to ask any questions, I can circulate this around the room.

So I'm just wondering, to what extent is this the result of Edison following a set of principles and to what.

Extent is it just him being an amazing genius?

Well, I think there's probably both involved. Certainly. Edison was a brilliant man and some of his ability to think so broadly and connect all these patterns together is partly a reflection of his genius. Being able to invent in electrical power and recorded sound and moving pictures and portable power is just extraordinary. However, I think the process is what allowed him to do these things year after year after year after year. So that's where I think we can draw from the power of this system today. So we don't all have to be Edisonian geniuses to really use this work. Did he do all inventions basically by himself or it was by others? Did he give credit to other innovators in these factories? Yes, he did have teams of people that helped him with his inventions and he did give credit in many instances on the actual patent. So those co inventors got to share royalties with Edison. One of the challenges that did exist in Edison's day, that's different now, is that when you had lots of inventors on a patent, it was more subject to challenge. Today, you know, you can have 3, 4, 6, 10, 15 people on a patent and it doesn't make it any more challengeable. But more than two inventors in Edison's era made it more open for attack. So there were instances when Edison was only able to put one other person on his patent when he might have liked to put more. So he had certain, I'll call it probably profit sharing opportunities for people who assisted him that didn't necessarily involve being included on a Patent. But he, particularly in the motion picture area of his work, he had co inventors. I was thinking specifically about the sort of Edison Westinghouse contests that were going on on that day. What sort of strategies did Edson have for managing conflict?

Or.

The question has to do with the Edison Westinghouse battle in managing conflict. Edison actually had a very fundamentally different view of how electrical power could work. He believed direct current was a better way than alternating current. So there's more discussion of that in the book. He believed that competition healthy and fruitful and that that made him a better inventor. So he was never one to say, oh, you know, this is terrible that Westinghouse has come in and challenged me in this way. He actually felt that that was a positive. What he didn't like was people who tried to infringe on his patents and make false claims that then brought him into court and used up a lot of time in an unproductive way and spent resources on product. So this was something that really angered him. He actually didn't like to take people to court who were infringers. He said, you know, I just can't even bother with that. So it wasn't until there was so much infringement, particularly in electrical power, that he had to go in because the damages were really quite significant and the pilfering, if you will, was significant. But he didn't believe in suing people. He ultimately sort of just had to go there, that path to protect his name and his intellectual property. You're welcome.

Well, I have a question on just, I guess this being a talk at Google and one of our stated mission goals at the company is the kind of democratization organization of all the world's information. Do you have any thoughts specifically on just that, like this being the digital age and with globalization in general, how do you see that impacting either positively or negatively, the whole concept of innovation in the process?

Well, you know, I think there are positives and negatives. I think it's great that I can go online and use the Google search engine to find so many different references and so many different texts all over the world that gives me access to knowledge that was never possible before. I think the challenge comes in situations like music, where you had the Napster debate years ago, and how do I protect intellectual property of musicians or, you know, certainly could be authors in other contexts. How do they benefit from that unique knowledge, that unique work that they've put forward? So as much as you want it to be available, you want those people to still be inventing you want them to still be out there creating great music. You want them to still, still have the resources available through profits to keep going. So I think we have to find ways of rewarding people for being innovative or being inventive and somehow allow that sharing to happen. So this is that tension between sharing and protecting that I was talking about before. So a lot of the opening up of resources, I think ultimately has been positive. I think it's opened people's minds, it's allowed more kinds of knowledge to come together that may not have come together before and has advanced the ball more rapidly. I think innovation can happen faster because that information is available. So there's pros and cons to it.

You answered the question, I think, but I didn't understand it completely, obviously. So Mr. Edison is a very innovative man. So then he would surround himself with very innovative people. How then, like when the person comes up with the idea, if you're dealing with an innovation company, how then do you give that person recognition? Because I believe when you're issuing patents, you mention it in the patents, but you also said there was a certain difficulty in doing that because it would be challenged. But at the same time, how also within a company are people rewarded for coming up with their ideas that eventually can prove to be very fruitful in the marketplace?

Well, the answer to the first part of your question is Edison was religious about maintaining notebooks. And I didn't spend a lot of time today talking about, about that. But you saw that one diagram, that one image that was taken from one of his notebooks, and these notebooks were bound and they are numbered sequentially, so you can't rip out a page because you would then be subject to scrutiny about, well, how do we know which notebook it came from? And so on. So Edison numbered and color coded his notebooks by project type. So everybody, everybody who did an experiment in a certain day, on a certain project would write their names down and the time at which the experiments were taking place. So you could always go back. There was always a paper trail, date, time, place. So that was a way of ensuring that everybody got credit for what they did. Now, as far as who gets on the patent, I mentioned before some of the difficulties legally of putting lots of names on it. So, so mostly the folks who were in that first circle that I talked about earlier, there's 10, 12 people in his laboratory, and they're listed in the book, were the ones who often were named on the patents. But he did want to, for example, he raised the pay of individuals who made significant contributions, but who may not have gotten on the patent or they would get bonuses of some kind. So there was recognition in that respect. And of course there was so much exchange in the lab. People knew who was working on which projects. It's a little bit different when you have just a few locations, you know, Menlo park later, there were New York City labs as well. You didn't have multiple cities around the world where people are working in real time on lots of different projects. So it's more complex today to keep track of this than I think it was in Edison's era. But to the question of today, how do you recognize collaborators? There are monetary ways of doing it, like being on a patent and receiving royalties, and there are non monetary ways, which is internal recognition within a company, award ceremonies, various other types of, you know, promotional pathways that can exist within companies. But I think it's critical to do. I think you have to reward collaboration, you have to, to reward innovation. At Google you give out T shirts. At Google you give out T shirts. Okay, great. Well, it seems to me there's lots of motivating forces here, which is terrific. Yes, you mentioned the cataloging project at Rutgers. Do you know if there are plans to release the. Yes, the question is about the Edison papers project at Rutgers and are there any plans to release the images? They're all online now and there's a, in the book you'll see a reference in the reference notes section you can actually go. It's not maybe the most intuitive database to navigate and they've got, I don't know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of images. So you can search on the images and get these listings. But I know it can be trying to go and find the exact ones you want, but you can find enough, just as a casual observer to get a sense for how diverse this log, this catalog is. So afterward I'd be happy to show you the exact listing. If you'd like to go and look it up, you're very welcome. We're used to navigating non intuitive databases. Well, non intuitive databases, yeah. I'm sure you guys are pros at that. Sometimes those of us who don't spend a lot of time doing it have a little bit more trouble. So maybe I'm not the best at doing that. Well, I want to thank all of you for your attention. It has just been such a pleasure to be here and I'll be staying after a little later when the books get here. And be sure to sign all of them. So. So I hope you'll each get a chance to pick one up and spend some time with it, so thank you so much.