Not necessarily, says Mark Rice, the Frederic C. Hamilton Professor for Free Enterprise at Babson College and the professor of technology entrepreneurship at the Olin College of Engineering. Rice has also headed up the technology incubator at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, so he has spent much of his career at the corner of entrepreneurship and invention.
Rice believes that this issue of singular focus versus a more scattershot approach is moot for the most exceptional people in the still small constellation of successful inventrepreneurs. "The really good ones do both," he says. "So much of innovation comes from connecting across things where other people don't make connections." (The most celebrated of the really good ones would have to be Dean Kamen, he of the AutoSyringe insulin pump, the Segway, the iBOT stair-climbing wheelchair, and a new robotic prosthetic arm. Kamen produces his inventions through a successful company called DEKA.)
Rice would argue that it's a waste of Griffith's talent to limit himself to a single project, because true innovation involves far more misses than hits. "Our VCs are the world's best pickers of promising innovations," says Rice. "And they only get it right two times out of 10. And they've looked at 100 to invest in one. The challenge still is, How do we get more Deans and Sauls?"
Part and parcel of being an inventrepreneur is the acceptance that you will often be ahead of the market, and that you have to just create and move on. Griffith calls this the "throw it over the fence" approach to invention: Create, show off, and then quickly sell the entire product (or its license) to a company that will build and market it at whatever scale is appropriate.
For a number of reasons, we are in a golden age for inventors, one in which anyone with a great idea can share it with the world. Griffith is particularly well positioned. He has got a burgeoning brand name (his own), a cheap marketplace (the Internet), and the software, technical know-how, and contacts to micromanufacture. He has no inventory and not much overhead. He owns the intellectual property. He has minimal pressure to produce revenue in the short term, because he has always been able to attract grants, investment money, or consulting contracts.
About the time I was pondering what it means to be Saul Griffith, I happened to read a Thomas Friedman column in The New York Times intended as a rebuttal to the many people ready to drop the curtain on the American business empire. Our country, Friedman said, had at least one ace up its sleeve.
[T]here are still two really important things that can't be commoditized. Fortunately, America still has one of them: imagination. What your citizens imagine now matters more than ever because they can act on their own imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before -- as individuals. In such a world, societies that can nurture people with the ability to imagine and spin off new ideas will thrive.
Now, Friedman wasn't talking about Saul Griffith. But his point is critical to understanding why Griffith's unconventional way of running a business isn't really that unconventional at all.
Take WattzOn. Griffith isn't entirely sure how or when WattzOn will make money, but that's not the point. In the tomorrow-is-too-late tech culture, there's no time to analyze risk. And because tools are so readily available, there's no reason to. Just build it. If it doesn't find a market, move on.
For now, WattzOn is used by a core of dedicated people whom Griffith invites to refine and critique it; even the calculations used to measure the impact of a particular thing (say, drinking bottled water) are open to debate. The idea over time, though, is to perfect all those specific measures and to have users add every possible nuance of an American's life so that the tool gets easier and easier for people to use. At some point in the not-distant future, Griffith will have the most accurate tool around for measuring an individual's (or collective's) energy use as well as a gigantic pile of data, both of which will be commercially quite valuable as we are pushed toward a greener lifestyle.
As a business, he says, "we're letting it grow until we figure out what to do. It's easy to do these things and see how they go. Then figure it out later."
Tricked-out trike
Drawings for a particularly personal project: a superior child-carrying tricycle
The Ninja Scientist
You will find Other Lab in an unremarkable industrial building in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood. Inside is the (barely) organized chaos of a place where guys don't just think things up;
they also make them. There are workbenches and power tools, bikes and parts of bikes, built and half-built models of things, and two massive filing cabinets with neatly labeled drawers containing what would seem to be every kind of bolt, screw, cleat, nut, valve, and nail manufactured on the planet Earth.
In these lean, early days, Other Lab has only three full-time employees: Griffith, the mechanical engineer and so-called lead scientist; Jim McBride, a fellow MIT postdoc and the house physicist (who happens to be on vacation during my visit); and Jonathan (Jach) Bachrach, yet another MIT guy who is technically a software engineer but like the other two has a far broader purview. He is an artist and language fanatic who studied cognitive psychology, computer science, and visual arts and who wears shorts that could be confused for pants, or vice versa. Like the boss, he sports a serious beard.
When Bachrach spots me scribbling something he said in a notebook, he clarifies that it is Jach with an h and not a k. He had, he says proudly, "reverse engineered" his name so that it is perfectly aligned, and that while that might be unusual, it made a lot more sense than changing the h's in his last name to k's, because that would have required a more formal name change and might have screwed things up for his wife and kids.
