When The Mothership Doesn’t Want It

You would think that after funding and supporting people to develop innovative new ideas, that the parent corporation would want to take advantage of launching them. Nope. Markets are full of concepts that didn’t fit the parent firm — either not consistent with their strategy or just too small.

The Xerox PARC story

In their fascinating book, Fumbling the Future, Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander describe one of the most vivid examples of a company that saw critical inflection points coming, invested to make sure that they were ready, and then failed to make the bold move to benefit from what they had created. As is described in the documentary “Triumph of the Nerds,” Steve Jobs was ready to share the vision created at Xerox Parc.

But as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his re-telling of the PARC story, the idea that Xerox didn’t see the potential of PARC’s inventions while Apple did is an over-simplification. If you look at the original mouse, invented in the 60’s at Stanford Research Institute, the mouse that PARC came up with and the mouse that Apple originally took to market, they are three radically different approaches to moving a cursor around a screen — as Gladwell points out, it was not so much stealing the idea as it was helping it to evolve.