Preface

CURIOUS ABOUT INNOVATION IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, WE JUMPED at the chance to study a startup with the audacious goal of transforming the urban landscape with technology. Wherever you work, the demand for innovation is likely intense. After all, developing great new products that delight customers is a surefire way to win in a competitive marketplace. But this book tackles a different kind of innovation challenge—the kind that involves introducing not a new product but an entire new system.

Consider two history-shaping innovations found in the kitchen of most modern households. One, the refrigerator, transformed how we eat by enabling the preservation of perishable foods for days and even weeks. The other, the telephone, a smaller object with far greater physical reach, puts us in instant contact with distant friends and colleagues. Today both are taken-for-granted household objects.

A crucial difference between these familiar innovations is that one is a stand-alone product and the other functions as part of a complex system. That difference motivates this book. The refrigerator can be purchased, delivered, and used—like hundreds of other products we might find in the home. The telephone, in contrast, does little on its own. To have practical use, an entire system of components, wires, poles, regulations, services, and customers had to be developed around it, involving players from multiple industry sectors. Putting Alexander Graham Bell's 1876 patent for a device to transmit the human voice through an electric current into world-changing use required, in short, the cooperative action of technologists, service personnel, government regulators, real estate owners, designers, builders, electricians, lumber companies, operators, and more. When the first telephone exchange—with 21 subscribers—was built in 1877 in New Haven, Connecticut, a few of these players had come together to present a first, small-scale demonstration of a telecommunications system.

It would be many years before thousands of people participated in the telecommunications system, even more years (and more technological innovation) before the first transcontinental call in 1915, and another decade still before the first transatlantic call in 1926. Although continued innovation in telecommunications has occurred in every decade since, the massive world-changing innovation lay in the creation of that first telephone exchange system. Interestingly, that innovation was inspired by a lecture given by Bell but was not created by him. Its lead creator, George Coy, not a household name like the famous Bell, nonetheless played an essential a role in building the future of telecommunications.

Just as a telecommunications system could not be developed by a single individual or a single product development team, or even by a single company, the innovation journey we highlight in this book also involves players from multiple industries. And as we argue in this book, introducing system innovations, no matter how audacious, starts small, with a pilot of some kind from which people can learn—the equivalent of that New Haven exchange.

Because it is hard for most of us to imagine a world before telephony, we rarely step back to consider What does it take for determined visionaries to mobilize people and technologies to build the future? That is the question we tackle in this book. Certain kinds of audacious, world-changing innovations—like smart, green, livable, human-scale cities—are difficult to bring into being because there are simply too many things that have to change in a coordinated manner. These are the very real challenges of building the future, of bringing desired new and complex possibilities into existence, on purpose. They are considerable and at times overwhelming to contemplate, but they are surmountable, as human history has shown.

To bring to life the human story that underlies multisector collaboration and future-building, we decided to take a deep dive into a single case study of audacious innovation. We followed the journey of a smart-city startup and found that it offered a fascinating and intimate glimpse of the people—their ideas and their interactions—behind audacious innovation. One of us (Amy) is a management professor and expert in leadership, teaming, and innovation; the other (Susan) is a seasoned journalist who has written countless pieces in the popular press that bring engaging human stories to a wide audience. We hope you will find that the combination of our backgrounds brings timely leadership lessons to life in a new and compelling way.

As is true for all startups, the odds were stacked against the young company you'll get to know in the pages ahead. Most startups fail—90 percent, according to Fortune magazine—yet most entrepreneurs are confident that their new enterprises will defy the odds. The inherently overconfident (some might say delusional) nature of the entrepreneur is part of the phenomenon we encounter when we study future-building. But most books about startups look back through hindsight-tinted glasses to describe the fortuitous beginnings of iconic companies like Apple or Google. Instead we took the risky path of following a startup in real time, from its initial coalescing around a big vision through its next few years. Without knowing the ultimate fate of the company, much can be learned about building the future from studying its journey. We are grateful for the privileged access the founders gave us, and of course we agreed not to disclose information they wished to keep confidential. At times that agreement limits our narrative, but it does not hamper the development of broadly applicable leadership lessons from our research.

The context we chose for studying audacious innovation is the smart-city industry. This new and fast-growing domain is focused on transforming the potential of cities to be green and livable by integrating the latest information technologies into the urban built environment. Few arenas offer more potential to transform the future—nor more hurdles to doing so.

One hurdle in particular emerged early in our research and became the central thread throughout this book: the need for what we now call Big Teaming to design and deliver transformational change in the built environment. Big Teaming takes cross-disciplinary teamwork to the next level, to a larger stage than prior books on this topic. We show why cross-sector teaming is so hard, and we offer research-based ideas for how to do it well in the pursuit of audacious innovation. In so doing we hope that this book contributes a small piece of a complex, adaptive blueprint for building the future.

Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Salter Reynolds October 2015