Innovation Isn't Just for Startups

Sun Microsystem's development of its 7000 data-storage line offers a great example of how big corporations can wield employee creativity

By Rick Wartzman

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We can all picture the scene: A couple of guys toiling away in a cluttered garage, perfecting the next innovation that will shake an entire industry. Meanwhile, the big corporate players in the market stand oblivious—fat, dumb, happy, and too bogged down by bureaucracy and conservatism to be innovative themselves.

It's a great image—one that has long persisted. There's just one problem with it: It's false. "The all but universal belief that large businesses do not and cannot innovate is not even a half-truth," Peter Drucker wrote in his 1985 classic Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Yet what is true, Drucker added, is that "it takes special effort for the existing business" to get beyond the temptation "to feed yesterday and to starve tomorrow."

I was reminded recently of the wisdom in Drucker's words when I had a chance to chat with Mike Shapiro, engineering director and chief technology officer for Sun Microsystem's (JAVA) Open Storage operation. As much as any story I've heard, Shapiro's demonstrates that, as Drucker put it, "innovation can be achieved by any business"—even the largest. But what Shapiro and his colleagues have accomplished also serves as a textbook example of Drucker's other insight: A major company must follow specific practices if it's to convert breakthrough ideas into real results.

Leaping Forward

Shapiro, his partner, Bryan Cantrill, and their small team are the brains behind a family of data-storage systems—the 7000 line—that Sun introduced late last year. It features oodles of capacity, a "killer app" that uses real-time graphics so that customers can observe and understand what their storage system is doing, and a pricing model that appears to blow away the competition. I'm more of a Luddite than a techie myself, but I can tell you that reviews in the trade press have been very strong, praising the products' speed, simplicity, and low cost.

So how can a corporation pull off something like this? First, it must focus "managerial vision on opportunity," Drucker wrote. This sounds simple, he noted, but most companies spend the bulk of their time concentrating on problems instead. And you can't exactly hit a bull's-eye if you never bother to look at the target.

At Sun, Shapiro and Cantrill made a conscious decision to hunt for opportunity. Highly accomplished engineers and close friends since their days together at Brown University, the two spent a decade working on Sun's Solaris operating system. A few years ago, they became intent on pushing Sun into an area where it hasn't tread much traditionally: making special-purpose appliances. This is opposed to general-purpose computer servers, whose underlying technology other companies have been able to exploit at times and turn into moneymaking products, leaving Sun with relatively little to show for all its high-tech prowess. (It is this vulnerability that helped lead Sun into the arms of Oracle (ORCL), which is now waiting to complete its $7.4 billion acquisition of the company.)

Shapiro and Cantrill eventually settled on data storage as a particularly rich field to explore. But the duo didn't just lock themselves in a laboratory, examine the current state of storage technology, and dream up ways to improve upon it. Instead, they spent a lot of time acting as market researchers, hitting the road and talking with potential customers about what they were really looking for—a crucial step, according to Drucker.

"Because innovation is both conceptual and perceptual, would-be innovators must…go out and look, ask, and listen," Drucker wrote. "Successful innovators use both the left and right sides of their brains. They work out analytically what the innovation has to be. … Then they go out and look at potential users to study their expectations, their values, and their needs."

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