Innovation Isn't Just for Startups

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The Right Space

What Shapiro and Cantrill realized from this exercise was that they had to devise a genuinely "disruptive product"—not just a souped-up version of what was available. Because of the hassle and expense, customers weren't going to scrap their existing data-storage solutions unless Sun came up with something far superior. "We had to cost half as much and be twice as fast," Shapiro says.

The trouble was, Shapiro couldn't figure out how to create something like that within the confines of Sun. It wasn't for lack of talent. The concern, he says, was that "in large organizations, people's ways of solving problems are limited by the horizons that they see."

Shapiro also worried that his project, which by its nature needed to draw on resources from different parts of Sun, would give way to political infighting, with various vice-presidents at the Santa Clara (Calif.)-based company vying for control.

Drucker certainly would have understood Shapiro's fears. "The entrepreneurial, the new, has to be organized separately from the old and existing," he asserted. "No matter what has been tried—and we have now been trying every conceivable mechanism for 30 or 40 years—existing units have been found to be capable mainly of extending, modifying, and adapting what already is in existence. The new belongs elsewhere."

In Sun's case, the elsewhere was downtown San Francisco, where Shapiro and Cantrill—with the full support of Sun's top brass—set up a separate organization inside an old office building. Dubbed Fishworks (the "fish" stands for fully integrated software and hardware), the venture was allowed to plug away largely under wraps.

Don't Reinvent Everything

At one point, Cantrill discovered a book called Skunk Works, written by the former chief of Lockheed's (LMT) super-secret aircraft factory. Among the lessons it provided was that when Lockheed built the SR-71 spy plane, those in charge of the program didn't try to reinvent everything. They grabbed all the standard parts they could, ripping components out of old jets, so that they could direct their energy and attention to the SR-71's radar-absorbing skin and other groundbreaking advances. Shapiro and Cantrill adopted a similar strategy. "We decided we weren't going to rebuild the operating system," Shapiro explains. "That let us tease out the things that were truly innovative and disruptive."

Or, as Drucker counseled all innovators: "Don't diversify, don't splinter, don't try to do too many things at once."

He had another piece of advice, too: "A successful innovation aims at leadership" in a given market. If it doesn't boldly seek such a position, "it is unlikely to be innovative enough, and therefore unlikely to be capable of establishing itself."

With hundreds of customers out of the gate, the Sun Storage 7000 Series has definitely established itself—and Fishworks, which Shapiro continues to run, could well prove one of the hidden gems of the Oracle acquisition. In the meantime, the new product line stands as powerful proof of what Drucker preached: When it comes to innovation, it's smarts, not size, that matter most.

Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

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