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Welcome to the first in our series on innovation, and we are [Kevin Lynch, Chief Technology Officer, Adobe] here today at the Adobe Tech Summit which is an internal conference at Adobe for all engineering, and we're lucky to have here John Warnock who's co-founder of Adobe as our first guest to talk about innovation. Welcome John. Thanks Kevin; it's great to be here. So I put together a few questions to stimulate the discussion, get some of your thoughts on innovation, and the first one is really about the environment. You know how do you really establish the best environment for innovation? [Dr. John E. Warnock, Co-founder, Adobe] Well, I think that there's always been a tension between efficient businesses and innovation. As a business becomes more and more efficient, it sort of gets extra effort out of the way and becomes a machine, and then when innovation comes along, it acts as a disruptive force in that machine, and you have a lot of problems that arise from that, and I was trying to think of really what is key to keeping innovation alive as a company gets bigger and bigger. What I think it really comes down to management, and I think it really comes down to the attitude that management has about innovation, and the attitude that they have about their own job and what the relationship is between those two. I thought up an example, so I'm a school teacher in the fifth grade, and I have laboriously all night made up my lesson plan for science for the next day, and I go into my class, and I start my well-thought-out science plan for the class, and during the class a kid comes up to me with this amazing drawing, and my inclination is to say, "You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing; you're disrupting the class," and you dismiss it, and you not only not motivate the kid, but you lose an opportunity to get something new into your life, and so I think what managers have to be is consciously...consciously just aware that when someone walks into your room and gives you an idea that they're very enthusiastic about it. They think it's a great idea, and if you dismiss it, then you're not only stopping them from having new ideas, but you're also preventing any new ideas in some sense getting into the system. Right because people will become aware that new ideas aren't welcome or it's not okay. That's right, not okay to have new ideas so I think managers in an environment like Adobe have to listen to the idea carefully. At least go through your mind what the business implications of that idea might be or where it might fit into the environment, and give ideas a chance and say, "Gee, oh, why don't we think about this more?" What would be needed to really flesh out this idea? Have you thought about what the next steps might be? But you have to have an environment of accepting ideas and that's really hard to get into a corporation where everybody has a day job. And everyone's motivated to keep things going as they have been because that's been successful. Yes, they've got success. They know how to turn the crank. They know how to get the thing out, but they don't know how to change their behavior. Right, that's great. And it's something that you see how it would be useful to you, how it could be useful to other people so you have to have an inquisitive knowledge. You have to have a knowledge of the industry and how it might fit into the industry, and you have to have sort of a native enthusiasm to build new stuff. So a lot of it is about your personal enthusiasm and also the personal enthusiasm of those around you? And the manager, and every manager should try to say, "You know life is not going to be static." "Life is going to change." "I need to embrace that change. I need to figure out how I'm going to be successful by incorporating change into my life." Exactly so when you're a manager and you're working on handling change well, how do you connect that to business success? So you're a manager, you get these ideas what's your advice? Well as everyone knows, especially in the technology business, that no business lasts forever, okay? It's change or die, except PostScript PostScript has lasted forever, but other than PostScript, there has to be new opportunities constantly generated for the business in order for the business to succeed. It's much easier to build new businesses in new spaces than it is to try to follow and dominate by catching up with the innovator so in making new businesses successful, it's much easier to be an innovator. It's much easier to create new ideas in new markets than it is to try to go into established markets and build a dominance. So the connection between innovation and success in Adobe's case was necessary. There had to be that connection or we would be like the hundreds of other software companies that have gone out of business. It's one of the reasons that Adobe has been around for almost 30 years now. That's right, that's right. Its ability to change and face innovation, take innovation head on and that's okay. And accept it. That's right, yeah, that's good so you've created a bunch of things in your history, PostScript being one of them, but what's an invention that you wish you had thought of but you didn't? The worldwide web. That's a good one. That would've been a good one because you know when those guys got that protocol going and the simple graphics and HTML, I mean that was-- that was truly a game changer. I mean a game changer across all dimensions of computing. They had to have had an infrastructure that was starting in the 60s with the ARPANET that was built up over time and finally someone came into their eyes and said, "There's a connection between this communication mechanism and the world in general," and the worldwide web I think was that. And there is a lot of innovation that comes from making these connections that somebody just hadn't made yet, That's right. but you're building on the shoulders of giants if you will, but you're making the connections. That's right and I think that happens a lot where you see an object over here or a technology over here and a technology over here, and you say, "You know if you put those together in this way then you have a very interesting.." Something new, that's right; that's good. So in your work what would you say is the thing you're most proud of? Well I think both Chuck and I are proud of building a company that is highly respected, continues to be successful, continues to innovate, and has millions and millions of customers. Technically speaking, it's sort of a toss between figuring out the font problem and Acrobat, and the ideas behind Acrobat. And the font problem being that you could actually see your fonts and use whatever fonts you wanted and have them render well. And have them scale over. Have them scale well, yes. On raster devices. Yes, it's funny how those challenges are still with us today in new contexts, you know? Yes. You know it's tablet devices where we have the same kind of rendering problems that we had before in printers. So let's see you've pursued certainly your dreams in a lot of ways. If you hadn't been in technology working on the things you have done, what do you think you would have done? Well, in totally other fields, I've always enjoyed photography. I've always sort of been half artist, half technologist and so I don't know, probably something in the arts. Still related to imaging and publishing so yes that's the soul of it. Yes, right. So if you wanted to give some advice to some people who are innovating in the future, a younger generation who are coming up and now creating new things, what kind of advice would you give them on innovation? Well I think it's really scary right now because across the United States only 2% of entering freshman are going into computer science and that's a scary, scary statistic. Very low. It's very low, and I don't know whether it's because kids look at computers, and they look at how dazzling they are, and they say to themselves, "There's no way I can understand how all of this works," and contribute to this so I need to go into finance so I can at least make money or something like that, but I don't know what the middle process is, but I think as a society we have to keep the scientists and the mathematicians alive, and the technologists alive through the education process. I would say to anybody there is so much more room to innovate now than there was when I was growing up with computers, and there's so many more inventions to make and there's so much more to conceive of and build because of the capabilities of the machines that the opportunity now is greater than ever, and the returns are greater than ever, and so I would be very, very positive about anybody going into these fields. Exactly, well that's a great conclusion to our discussion so thank you very much for joining us on the first ever innovation chat. Great. Thanks John.
