The discovery of a sound recording made in Paris in 1860 has established that Edison was not the first to record sound. The BBC reports that:

The short song was captured on April 9, 1860 by a phonautograph, a device created by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.

The device etched representations of sound waves into paper covered in soot from a burning oil lamp.

Lines were scratched into the soot by a needle moved by a diaphragm that responded to sound.

However, as the BBC report says, these sounds were never meant to be replayed. Edouard-Leon Scott, perhaps owing to his being a printer by profession, seemed to be more interested in recording the human voice in a “printable” fashion, or in transforming the human voice into a visual form. Recently, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California “read” very high-resolution digital scans of the original paper and reproduced the recorded sound. It is fascinating to hear an ethereal female voice from 150 years ago render a French folksong.

Scott died impoverished and frustrated that his invention was never recognized. As an interview with his great-grandson shows, it was a bitter irony for Scott that he had to be an assistant when Edison’s invention was demonstrated in Paris, and his own name was not even mentioned.

What went wrong with Scott’s phonautograph that we had not heard of it till now? Is it that it was a “partial” innovation–by this, I mean that it could only record but not reproduce sounds–while Edison’s could do both? One can argue that in a society that was print-oriented, a device that converted human voice into paper records might have been easy to accept. So, why didn’t Scott succeed? The answer to me lies in this: Scott lacked Communicative iSmarts. For instance, he could not persuade the Academy of Science of the value of his innovation. After the Academy expressed to him that it was not interested in audio-related invention given their focus on optics, I do not see much evidence that Scott tried to “market” his invention in other ways, or to other audiences. For example, there is not much evidence to argue that he tried to reach the general public with his “phonautograph.” In short, he did not demonstrate the flexibility in communication that is critical for innovation to succeed, a flexibility that Communicative iSmarts provides.

The phonautograph is but one example of a constant stream that we find of innovations that do not succeed, not because they are not good, but simply because the inventor(s) do not have or use communicative iSmarts. I find it heart-rending to picture this brilliant man, who had to stand before audiences in Paris demonstrating a machine from the USA, when he–and perhaps only he–knew fully well that twenty years ago, he had built something that recorded human voices. All because he lacked the critical intelligence of communicative iSmarts.

Along the lines of Michael Porter’s value chain in strategy analysis, it is possible to conceptualize an innovation value chain. Often companies get stuck in a rut by confusing innovation with ideation and not moving beyond idea generation.

Recently, researchers at INSEAD have pointed out that “The [innovation value] chain starts with idea generation, but then moves to prioritising and funding ideas, to converting those ideas to products and finally to diffusing those products and business practices across the company.”

It is interesting how this maps into the ISmarts framework.

The problem with an innovation value chain is that it can mislead us into visualizing the innovation process as linear, proceeding in sequential stages, whereas in reality, the stages spill over into each other. The innovation value chain reminds me of the waterfall model in software development. Further, such stepwise conceptions of innovation make it easy to compartmentalize the organization into hermetic silos by assigning ideation to one department, budgeting to another, and so on. In the ISmarts framework, a focus on the abilities needed for innovation rather than on processes and stages, allows us to break free of sequential mindsets and compartmentalized organizations. But by providing a organized framework, ISmarts helps to structure chaos, or as Tom Peters puts it, ISmarts helps to provide the “disciplined disorganization” necessary for innovation.

An article last week in the Wall Street Journal (March 18, 2008) about how drivers are beginning to blindly trust GPS devices caught my eye. The article reports that by letting the devices overrun common sense, these drivers are “getting lost, hitting dead ends, and even swerving into oncoming traffic.” This reminded me of my growing up years in India, a time when my grandparents used to complain about how “digital watches” were not letting us kids learn how to tell the time.

The problem of overtrusting technology, and becoming inflexibly attached to devices and technologies is an old one. Dorothy Leonard in her Wellsprings of Knowledge wrote more than ten years ago about “core rigidities” which are the twin side of “core capabilities”, arguing that the core strengths of the organization are simultaneously core weaknesses. An organization derives competitive advantage from its core capabilities now, but is unable to extract itself from them and do other things when there is a need.

An innovative organization must recognize this need to remain flexible, which is why I argue that ISmarts is essential to develop and sustain in any organization that seeks to be innovative.

Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo was interviewed on the 5 am program on BBC (The Interview) this morning. One of the things she said that struck me was this: CEOs should have a long-term perspective so that they can see the need for change much before the rest of the organization. But they should not try to create rapid change or “rip the organization” as Nooyi puts it.

“The challenge of the CEO is to anticipate the issues and nudge the organization toward action as opposed to galvanizing [it] into action.”

Interesting, especially when we put this in the context of all the talk we hear about innovation having to be “drastic”, “radical”, “discontinuous”, and so on.

I have never been convinced by Tom Friedman’s “Flat World” argument. The concept of a “flat world” has always seemed to me to be part of the fashionable jargon one bandies around over glasses of expensive wine at parties while the poor all over the world live in their deep holes untouched by digital revolutions. Over the last couple of weeks, I myself fell into the hollows of the flat world. First, my hosting service provided spotty service for two days, and I couldn’t update this blog. Then, on travel, I had turtle-speed access to the Internet, and the lesser I write about that frustration, the better. Finally, as I sat without Internet or wireless access in a fantastically modern hospital in Durham, NC, where my 5-year old daughter had taken us scared about her “strange” flu, I saw how rosy Friedman’s view of the world is.

Incidentally, here’s what I will be doing for 8 weeks this summer: helping my wife on a child literacy project in India.