He started with a good idea that lots of other people had. Then he changed the world.
Grand Master Flash (born Joseph Saddler) was a kid growing up in the South Bronx when he had his idea. He noticed that folks really liked some parts of a song and didn't like others as much. He figured that he could play the good parts, mixed with a little showmanship, and people would love it.
That's what happened. Grand Master Flash's idea grew up into "scratching," that distinctive sound of rap and hip-hop. It grew up into a way of using technology to make music that didn't exist when he got started. But it didn't happen all at once.
We've all had good ideas. Very few of us change the world. The big difference is what happens after the flash of inspiration. Maybe it's because they both deal with ideas, but lots of folks seem to confuse creativity, that flash of inspiration, with innovation.
Creativity is a natural human function. Creativity produces ideas, good ones and bad ones. Innovation is the process of selecting which ideas to work on and develop. Innovation is the hard work of turning ideas into world-changing reality.
Grand Master Flash started off with an idea. But innovation doesn't always start with the "Eureka!" of inspiration. It doesn't always start with an idea. Some innovations start with mistakes. Ivory Soap was one. So was synthetic rubber. So was nylon.
One Monday morning in 1928 the chief chemist at DuPont, Wallace Carothers, came into the lab and found that someone had left a burner on over the weekend. The stuff in the kettle had sorted itself out into fibers. That set DuPont off on a decade-long project to develop Nylon.
Now think about this. How many times had that accident happened before? Companies all over the earth wanted to make synthetic fibers. The same accident that happened at DuPont probably happened in other labs, dozens, if not hundreds of times. All the other times, the "answer" was poured down the drain.
It's hard to be open enough to find the great idea hidden in a mistake. Even when you do, there's still a lot of work ahead of you.
Grand Master Flash had the idea, all right, and he had a trait that lots of young people had. He liked to tinker, taking things apart to see how they worked. This was not all that popular with his parents, because Flash wasn't nearly as good at putting things back together as he was at taking them apart.
But to make his idea work, he had to get into the details of turntables and needles. He had to scavenge through backyards, finding equipment that he couldn't afford to buy and then spend hours modifying it. That meant he also had to learn about capacitors and electronics. Samuel Gompers High School helped with that.
Innovation means overcoming obstacles.
Sometimes the obstacles are ones we put in our own way. In 1877, Thomas Edison was hunting for a way to take sound transmitted over a telephone and turn it, directly, into written copy that could be delivered like a letter or like the telegrams of the time. He experimented with a carbon transmitter and a stylus to make impressions on paraffined paper. To his surprise, the almost invisible impressions produced a representation of the original sound when a stylus was pulled over them and connected to a speaker.
Edison refined what he'd found and introduced a phonograph with tinfoil, instead of paper, in December, 1877. He thought it would be a great success.
He could already see lots of uses for his phonograph. Why, you could record the last words of people who were about to die. You could teach spelling. You could make a talking clock. You could have a dictating machine for your office.
What wasn't important to Edison was using the phonograph to play music. Maybe it was because he had hearing problems, but Edison thought that the reproduction of music was a frivolous use of his wonderful invention and cheapened its image.
Other people didn't think the same way. They liked the idea of using the phonograph to play music. When they wanted to create an early jukebox that would play music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected. It took him almost twenty years to accept the fact that playing music was the use that mattered most to people, that mattered most to the market.
Edison simply had trouble getting the message that the market was sending him. Grand Master Flash got the message all too clearly the first time he went public.
By this time Flash had been working on his system for years. He'd learned the electronics and modified all kinds of equipment. He'd developed systems to let him know precisely where to drop a needle on a record. That system, the clock system, is still used by DJs. It was time to go public.
The big night came at a block party. Grand Master Flash set up his equipment. He laid out the vinyl records he was going to play. He went into his act and waited for the cheers he was sure would come. But nobody cheered or applauded. He still had more changes to make.
For Erno Rubik, the feedback problem was different. There were lots of cheers, but hardly anyone could hear them.
Rubik was a lecturer at the Department of Interior Design at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest back in 1974 when he invented what became known as the Rubik's Cube. He wanted it to be among the most difficult puzzles in the world to solve and he wanted it to be beautiful. His students loved it. His friends loved it.
Rubik engaged a Budapest toy manufacturer to crank up mass production. It took them three years to figure out how to do it. By the end of 1977 Rubik's Cubes were showing up in Budapest toy stores. There was no advertising, but people loved the Cube and sales grew as its popularity spread by word of mouth. But only in Budapest.
That was a bigger problem. Budapest was behind the Iron Curtain. The big toy makers were in other places. Western businesspeople who discovered the toy in Budapest brought it to the attention of Western toy companies. No one was interested. All they had was a presentation. They couldn't see the response of the market.
Tom Kremer, who was born in Hungary, and a toy designer, was one of the Westerners who loved the Cube. He approached a succession of toy manufacturers. No one was interested.
Finally Kremer brought Stewart Sims of the Ideal Toy Corporation to Budapest in 1979 to see the toy. This wasn't just a formal demonstration. Sims saw folks in the street and in cafes and folks talking on the phone-all playing with Rubik's Cube. He was sold.
After a few days of "interesting" negotiations with the Communist government of Hungary, Ideal had the rights to produce Rubik's Cube. Once production started, sales simply took off.
No matter how fast production increased, demand grew faster. For a little over two years the demand curve kept going up. Then the curve started to drop.
The problem was the folks were mastering the Cube. Rubik thought it would be almost impossible to solve quickly. But when lots of people started working on the puzzle, they learned to solve it quickly.
Within a year, there were clubs devoted to solving the Cube puzzle quickly. There were contests. Young people began modifying their Cubes by adding lubricants so they could work them faster. Top competitors were solving the puzzle in seconds.
That's what happens when the market gets hold of an innovation. It's what Eric von Hippel studies. He teaches at the Sloan School of Management and he's studied what he calls "user innovation," the innovations that happen after a product is released.
People modify a product or system to do something the original innovator never intended. Edison objected strongly to the invention of the jukebox, even though it built on his phonograph.
Not every innovator acts like Edison. The Linux computer operating system was developed originally by a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, Linus Torvalds, in 1991. Torvalds posted the source code for Linux on the net so that others could use and change it. This is called "open source" software development, allowing the user community to develop it in new ways.
Most user innovation situations are a lot less formal. A wind surfer adds straps to the board so the board and his feet will stay together during jumps. Other folks copy it. Another wind surfer starts using a shorter board. It works better. Folks copy it.
That's the kind of user innovation that's happened with Grand Master Flash and his original ideas. Others have learned from him, added things, changed things and been copied themselves. It's a measure of Grand Master Flash's achievement that what he did first, simply isn't novel any more. It's just the way things are.
This feature appeared on 15 July 2002
