How to Create an Innovative Culture: The Extraordinary Case of SRI | Hacker News Reader

How to Create an Innovative Culture: The Extraordinary Case of SRI

forbes.com

15 pointsdavesailer8 comments

As a sometimes-student of such things, I noticed that their home-brewed, four part recipe for a good value proposition is basically Real-Win-Worth It in slightly different form.

I'm not criticizing: it can be a worthwhile endeavor re-invent the wheel a bit to find out what works for your organization and your markets. I see it as further evidence that the framework has utility.

(apologies for the corporate-speak.)

It looks like the Real-Win-Worth It paper [1] is from 2007? What is the history of this method? The OPs book [2] was released in 2006, similar timing.

[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18283921

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Five-Disciplines-Creating-C...

from the text of your [1]:

The second, the R-W-W (“real, win, worth it”) screen, sometimes known as the Schrello screen, can be used to evaluate individual projects. Versions of the screen have been circulating since the 1980s, and since then a growing roster of companies, including General Electric, Honeywell, Novartis, Millipore, and 3M, have used them to assess busi- ness potential and risk exposure in their innovation portfolios; 3M has used R-W-W for more than 1,500 projects.

(I've never tried to dig any deeper than seeing mentions that Don Schrello seems to have put it together sometime in the 1960s/1970s as part of his marketing company.)

For a partial and anonymized story about the initial decline of SRI, read The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer scientist (1982) by Jacques Vallée. Reportedly, they all became entranced with Erhard Seminars Training.

I thought SRI was classified war related research spun off from Stanford during the anti-war years. At one time the S stood for Stanford. Stanford didnt completely divest all its war miltary research because the computer science department still accepted DARPA money. I remember Professor Terry Winograd feeling conflicted about that. Terry,s compromise was that all their results would openly published for both military and civilian applications.

I thought SRI was mostly driven by being a psuedo CIA (and the IC in general) research division -- which provides a steady funding stream. Were they really close to bankruptcy in 1998? The article doesn't go into many details of that.

The computer mouse and the graphic user interface was invented at the young SRI by Englebart. He didnt commercialize it. But Xerox a few miles away, fleshed it out.

I worked with them at more-or-less arm's length from 1997 - 2002. Truly a magical time while it lasted.

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