The Grill: John Seely Brown sees economic silver lining

By Gary Anthes

February 9, 2009 12:00 PM ET

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Could this Asian model be employed here? Everyone is talking about how to solve the General Motors problem. No one is talking about how they should work with their suppliers. The suppliers are in a vast network and are capable of tremendous innovation, but that's not how GM uses them. But look at Toyota in the U.S. Toyota keeps outperforming us not because they have better workers, but because they have figured out how to take a vast supply network from being just suppliers to being critical partners in innovation. It becomes a distributed-innovation game.

What lessons did you learn from working at Xerox PARC? First, wisdom is often the biggest obstacle to innovation. In a rapidly changing world, the assumptions that underlie our past learning may now be invalid. So, an idea that didn't work five years ago may work fantastically now.

Second, we tend to hold on to assumptions longer than we should. Often, by letting go of old assumptions, whole new vistas are created.

Third, when I was running PARC, I thought we geeks were the geniuses and people who did the marketing were not so smart. But when you have to make real innovation pay off, you often find that the genius is not in the idea creation but in the realization of that idea in the marketplace.

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