Journal 4 by Peng Zhou

Jon Gertner’s article (Feb, 25, 2012) entitled “ True Innovation” discusses several ways and philosophy of innovation by taking Ball Labs as an example. The article talked about Ball Labs with their achievements at beginning. Then it discussed several philosophy of Mervin Kelly who was the chairman of Ball Labs such as architectural, aspirational, organizational, freedom and enough time. After that the author talked about the relationship between innovation and economic.

Personally speaking, I disagree with some of Kelly’s philosophy.

Admittedly, those philosophies of Kelly lead to the success of Ball Labs, and cause a lot of important innovation. But when we talking about business, they may not suit again.

For example, the author mentioned that one of the most important elements of Mervin Kelly is the Time. He believed that innovation needs plenty of time and didn’t consider about the economy of their research. But it is almost impossible of a company.

The main purpose of companies is earning money. When a company established, the most important thing is to achieve profit as soon as possible. So they don’t have enough time to do the innovation. They always have a project plan, and everything is based on the plan. They must design their product at manufacture them on time. Otherwise the capital chain might break and the company may go bankrupt. For example, Apple, one of the most innovative companies of the world, has a time period as one year for updating. After one year, they have to publish their new product. So the researchers have a time limited and it is not always enough.

What’s more, the products of the company will be put into the market, so the researchers have to consider if the market can accept their design. If the products are not suit for the market, it means the failure of the company, even though it including kind of innovation. Another interesting example is the Windows. It published Windows Vista in 2007. The Windows Vista was considered as a version with a significant history of innovation. But several years later, the company admitted that it was a failure of the products. And then they published Windows 7 as an upgraded product quickly. Now we can hardly see the Windows Vista, but there are still a lot of users of Windows XP. The failure of Windows shows that the innovation must consider the market efficiency.