Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
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.
