Author Archives: John Bessant

About John Bessant

Originally a chemical engineer, John Bessant has been active in the field of research and consultancy in technology and innovation management for over 40 years. He is Emeritus Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter and also has visiting appointments at the universities of Stavanger, Norway and Erlangen-Nuremburg, Germany. Author of over 30 books and 200 articles, you can find out more here: www.johnbessant.org

An Example of Successful Alchemy

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Successful Alchemy

GUEST POST from John Bessant

At the age of eighteen Johann Friedrich Bottger was blessed with a strong pair of legs. Which came in handy for his chosen profession — that of alchemy. Earning a living by attracting sponsors to support you in your quest to transmute base metals into gold was not without its risks. Chief amongst which was the anger of disappointed patrons who might run you out of town, or worse, hunt you down, fling you in jail and throw away the key.

Which is why, in 1704, young Johann was running as fast as his legs could carry him, heading south east along the banks of the river Elbe, away from some very angry Berlin sponsors and towards the city of Dresden. Hoping to find at least some peace and quiet and possibly a new patron.

His wish was granted but not quite on the terms he’d have hoped for. He was taken into ‘protective custody’ by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, King of Poland and — as the name suggests — not someone to trifle with. He was confined to a laboratory under instructions to produce gold in order to help pay for Augustus’s expensive lifestyle; something of a challenge since, like many of his contemporary alchemists, Johann wasn’t making much progress in that direction.

Augustus the Strong The world of innovation is full of the names of famous partnerships — Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Sergey Brin and Larry Page to name but a few. But Bottger and von Tschirnhaus isn’t a combination which springs easily to the lips or off the tongue. Yet it was this unlikely partnership which managed the impossible — between them they were able to transmute base material into weisses Gold — white gold.

Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus was a much older man, a chemist in the town of Meissen who had worked all his life to try and improve glass making. But as a sideline he was interested in ceramics and in particular with trying to work out how to make porcelain. He heard of Johann’s plight and saw an opportunity; he persuaded Augustus to assign Johann to work with him in the quest and in 1705 Bottger, still under guard, was moved to Meissen to work with Tschirnhaus.

Why would he do that? Mainly because he understood that Augustus had an obsession with porcelain. So much so that in order to add to his collection he “presented” 600 cavalrymen from his army to the Prussian king, Frederick William I in spring 1717; in exchange he received 151 Chinese porcelain vessels. This wasn’t a foolish obsession; at that time porcelain was prized highly amongst the aristocracy. Pale, thin, translucent, its delicate texture worked into wonderful and complex shapes. But above all it was rare. The only supplies came from China via the Silk Road and merchants were able to charge extraordinary prices for this strange exotic oriental material. They embellished the legends surrounding the stuff — that it all came from one mysterious location, Jingdezhen, in the centre of China and specifically from a hill which housed the mine from which porcelain emerged as if by magic.

Chinese Porcelain Truth was the merchants didn’t know much about it and neither did the Chinese who supplied them. Marco Polo’s best guess at its origins? ‘The dishes are made of a crumbly earth or clay which is dug as though from a mine and stacked in huge mounds and then left for thirty or forty years exposed to wind, rain, and sun …by this time the earth is so refined that dishes made of it are of an azure tint with a very brilliant sheen.” The assumption that this was somehow magical can be seen in an account from 1550 suggested that “porcelain is …… made of a certain juice which coalesces underground…”

Its origins didn’t matter; its rarity meant it was immensely valuable. So if anyone could find a way to make porcelain they would also make their fortune. An interesting business proposition which convinced Augustus to allow Bottger, under von Tschirnhaus’s supervision, to start work. Theirs was not an overnight success and their work was interrupted for a year when the Swedes occupied Saxony in 1706 and Bottger was moved to a distant fortress for safe keeping. And their progress wasn’t a matter of luck or sudden flashes of inspiration. It was about turning fragments of knowledge wrapped up in superstition and half-truths into something reproduceable, codifiable and manageable. It was a kind of transmutation — but of ideas, not metals.

They kept at the project, bringing a discipline to their experiments and painstakingly recording the successes (few) and the failures (many) on the way to synthesising this material. Tschirnhaus died on October 11th 1708 from dysentery but he had the opportunity to see his life’s work come to fruition; that year they found a reliable and practical formula and developed a manufacturing process to convert handfuls of earth into white gold.

By 1709 Bottger’s laboratories in the Albrechtsburg fortress in Meissen began producing batches of porcelain and the first pieces went on sale at the Leipzig Easter Fair in 1710. Augustus finished building a royal porcelain factory in Meissen in June the same year and the operation was transferred there. The first products were red (there are examples still around, now known as Bottger stoneware) but soon Bottger’s continued experimentation enabled him (in 1713) to make a pale white version and then to use different coloured glazes to enable the creation of beautiful and functional china wares.

Which is where another important piece of the puzzle comes in; rather than develop production on a large scale to make porcelain a commodity product Bottger (with Augustus’s backing and the profits from early sales) began to add design into the mix. He commissioned artists to create a range of exquisite artefacts exploiting the potential of the new material and opening up a wealthy market niche to continue to fund his development work. Meissen porcelain figures were used to decorate the drawing rooms of great houses, sculptures took pride of place in entrance halls and even the more mundane business of eating and drinking became a pleasure when using beautifully crafted plates, cups, pots and jugs. What Bottger did was essentially create what we would call ‘experience innovation’ today.

Porcelain Figures

European porcelain had arrived — and just in time to catch another wave of change which fuelled its popularity and kept it a very profitable industry. In the early 18th century the growing middle classes discovered the attraction of exotic drinks — tea, coffee and chocolate and their popularity swept across the continent. It wasn’t just the drinks themselves, it was the social experience which surrounded them. But it also drove a practical revolution in both drawing rooms and later coffee shops. A premium priced drink needs a suitable vessel from which to drink it — not just a simple cup. And the trouble with using gold or silver or expensive metal cups is very practical — they get hot and burn your lips. That’s where fine china, exemplified by the thin translucent porcelain — comes into its own. The perfect material from which to construct cups, pots, milk jugs and all the other accoutrements of the tea or coffee service.

Pretty soon everyone wanted one. Just like today when the advanced and expensive features in a vehicle begin with the luxury product targeted at the wealthy customer and then trickle down down to the mainstream mass market, so porcelain moved from a luxury item to one consumed on a far bigger scale. Helped along by the growing industrialisation of its manufacture and the strong scientific underpinning to those factories.

Porcelain Dishes

Open innovation isn’t a new phenomenon — innovation has always been about knowledge flows. Taking ideas from one source and adapting and redeploying them is a key feature of the way the game plays out. Bottger and Tschirnhaus themselves borrowed plenty of ideas from their Chinese counterparts; their knowledge base around porcelain was partly constructed of whatever they could find out about how the Chinese did it. ‘Reverse engineering’ existing successful products to learn is still a valuable approach today. Much of the success of South Korean companies like LG and Samsung can be traced back to the middle of the 20th century where they built on the principles of a strategy they called ‘copy and develop’. Importantly for them — as for our two German chemists — it’s not enough to imitate. The secret to long-term success is to use what knowledge you might acquire from someone else as a way of beginning a journey towards the frontier.

But whilst it is good to draw on knowledge from other people open innovation raises the risk that your own hard-won knowledge leaks out. Despite taking precautions to protect their intellectual property the potential value of porcelain in the market place spawned many attempts to steal the ideas. It helped that the company’s R&D facility was located inside a castle — the Albrechstburg — with high physical walls to prevent things leaking out, but even these walls could be breached.

In today’s terms we’d talk perhaps of a rather weak ‘appropriability regime’ — it was hard to keep the lid on what was going on. Samuel Stöltzel was a senior arcanist at Meissen, one of the few who understood the secrets (the ‘arcana’) of making the hard porcelain for which the company had become famous. But (for a suitably high price) he was persuaded to sell these to a competing venture which, in 1717, started to produce porcelain in Vienna. By 1760 there were over thirty porcelain factories in Europe.

Knowledge movement of this kind isn’t always a bad thing at the level of an industry because it multiplies the amount of knowledge exploration. Others took the increasingly available ideas and added and improved on them. Not least a young chemist working in the British town of Plymouth, a thoughtful Quaker named William Cookworthy. One of the core secrets in porcelain was the use of kaolin (also known as china clay) in the mix. He broke down the production ratio and also demonstrated that the clay pits in Cornwall were rich in this material, helping establish the UK as a major player in the growing ceramics industry. It wasn’t long before big names like Wedgwood and Spode began producing their own versions of porcelain artefacts and exporting them around the world.

Faced with the challenge of increasing imitation Augustus’s team set about differentiating themselves in other ways. They built a brand, building on the relationships they had already made and the values they and their product stood for — purity, exquisite design, high quality at a premium price. To make sure they got the message across they employed a trade mark — the crossed swords of the Meissen brand which can still be found on their ware today, three hundred years on.

Innovation lessons

What does this story tell us about innovation? Perhaps the most significant lesson is that success isn’t a matter of luck. There wasn’t a single ‘Eureka!’ moment but rather a long systematic search. Unlike the mystic dream of turning base metal into gold this industry was founded on the growing scientific premise that it would be possible to make porcelain and do so under controlled conditions, learning to repeat the trick and codifying the knowledge to do so. In many ways Bottger and Tschirnhaus’s’s work laid the foundations for the systematic industrial research and development which grew to underpin the great chemical industries of Europe — in dyestuffs, fertilisers, soap, pharmaceuticals and explosives.

Patient money helps and having a wealthy benefactor isn’t a bad start for any entrepreneurial venture. But the growth of Meissen porcelain wasn’t simply a case of pouring in money. The continuous investment of time and resources wasn’t blind faith; it was based on a recognition of the potential market opportunity. There was a demand pull for the luxury item which porcelain represented, but in order to feed this the company needed to grow their niche. And a key part of that was design — not simply providing functional domestic ware but creating works of art which reinforced the perception of something precious to be desired and treasured.

Building a business out of an idea and moving to scale needs a system — inside there are many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to be put in place. As well as commissioning designers to imagine the products the Meissen team also had to continue their hard work on process technology to be able to manufacture them. All the different stages like moulding, shaping, painting, glazing, firing needed to move from manual operations to controlled and systematic processes. Beyond that there were challenges in scaling around procuring raw materials of the right quality, and downstream development of sales and distribution networks.

Was it worth it? For Bottger it was a way of surviving although he spent most of his time under house arrest. Augustus finally granted him his freedom in 1714 and he was able to spend the final years of his life enjoying the sense of achievement that came from having (at least partially) fulfilled the alchemist’s dream of transmuting base material into gold. He helped create an industry which continues to produce beautiful artefacts for widespread use around the world. And one which has grown in value; the ceramic tableware market size is expected to reach USD 3.09 billion by 2022.

Not bad for an athletic runaway from Berlin.

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Image credits: Pexels, Wikipedia

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Going with the Flow

How Great Ideas Sometimes Come From Following the Natural Flow of Things

Image: James Homans on Unpslash

GUEST POST from John Bessant

Sometimes it’s the simplest ideas which change the world. Barbed wire is nothing more than a cleverly twisted piece of metal, yet its role in taming the Wild West was much more significant than any cowboys or cavalry. It enabled settlers to graze their herds and property rights to be marked out and defended.

Joe Woodland’s idle scratches in the sand on a Miami beach were the prototype for what became known as the Universal Product Code — and paved the way for bar codes identifying everything from supermarket items to surgical implants.

And a simple metal box transformed the pattern and economics of world trade. Brainchild of Malcolm McLean containerisation changed the way goods were transported internationally, drastically cutting costs and saving time. In 1965 a ship could expect to remain in port being loaded or unloaded for up to a week, with transfer rates for cargo around 1.7 tonnes/hour. By 1970 this had speeded up to 30 tonnes/hour and big shops could enter and leave ports on the same day. Journey times from door to door were cut by over half and the ability to seal containers massively cut losses due to theft and consequently reduced insurance costs.

McLean was a tough entrepreneur who’d already built a business out of trucking. He’d learned the rules of the innovation game the hard way and knew that having a great idea was only the start of a long journey. Realising the value at scale would take a lot of ingenious problem-solving and systems thinking to put the puzzle together. He needed complementary assets — the ‘who else?’ and ‘what else?’ — to realise his vision. And he understood the challenge of diffusion — getting others to buy into your idea and enabling adoption through a mixture of demonstration, persuasion and pressure.

But he wasn’t the first to come up with the idea; that distinction probably goes to another systems thinker who played the innovation game well throughout his unfortunately short life. And, like McClean, he can take a big share of the credit for transforming the pattern of world trade, this time in the 18th century.

Image: David Dibert on Pexels

James Brindley was born in 1716 and spent his early years learning the hard way about how things work — and how to make them work better. He didn’t have much of a formal education, could barely read or write and worked as an agricultural labourer until he was 17. He used his savings to buy his way into an apprenticeship to a millwright, one Abraham Bennett. Bennett was an engineer who preferred to leave much of the work in his business to others while he relaxed (and drank away) the fruits of their labour. Which offered James an opportunity not only to learn fast but to try out ideas. He’d grown up around mills, (both wind and water driven) and was fascinated by their operations.

He got a chance to put some of his innovative ideas into practice when he was given the task, in 1735 of carrying out emergency repairs to a small silk mill. His work so impressed the mill superintendent that he recommended Brindley to others; it wasn’t long before he’d acquired enough experience and skill from different projects to set up on his own as a millwright. He earned the nickname of ‘the Schemer’ because of his approach which was often unconventional but certainly delivered results.

Photo by Ali Arapoğlu from Pexels

Which is how he came to be associated with the Wedgwood brothers who were busy establishing their ceramics business in nearby Stoke on Trent. They sought him out to help with problems they were having in grinding flint, one of the key ingredients in their pottery. Brindley built a series of mills for them, finding ways to improve efficiency and cut costs, and consolidating his reputation They in turn recommended him to John Heathcote, owner of the large Clifton collieries near Manchester who was struggling with a big problem of flooding in his mines.

Brindley’s solution seemed crazy at first — he proposed drawing in more water! But in fact his ingenious idea was to draw water from the nearby river Irwell, pass it through an underground tunnel nearly a kilometre in length and use it to drive a huge mill wheel which drove a pump. It was strong enough to pump out the mine and efficient since it returned the water to the river. It worked — and established his reputation not just as a skilled engineer but as an imaginative problem-solver and innovator.

No-one could call him a lazy man — he worked incessantly on a wide range of projects. But he also spent a lot of time in bed — sometimes days at a time. This was his thinking space, a way of incubating novel and sometimes crazy ideas.

And water was at the centre of his thinking; he seemed to have an intuitive grasp of how it flowed and how those principles could be applied in a wide variety of situations. As he famously replied to an early enquiry about how he had come up with a solution to a complex hydraulic problem he said ‘…it came natural-like…’

And of course one thing about water is that it requires you to think in systems terms, how things are linked together. Brindley had a gift for seeing the interconnected challenges in realising big schemes like the mine pumping system — and for focusing on solving those to enable the whole system to deliver value.

This approach stood him in good stead as he moved into the field for which we best know him — canals. Canals played a critical role in the early Industrial Revolution; they meant that raw materials could get in to factories and their finished products could find their way to ports and be exported around the world. Britain, as ‘the workshop of the world’ depended on the canals as the veins and arteries that enabled the giant to come to life.

And canals represented just the kind of systems challenge which Brindley was so good at. When the Duke of Bridgwater approached him in 1759 to help create a canal to connect his mines in Worsley to the city of Manchester he began a journey which would eventually see him changing the face of Britain, constructing 365 miles of canals criss-crossing the country and revolutionising productivity.

When the Bridgwater Canal was finished in 1761 it helped cut the price of coal in Manchester by 50% and it fell further over the coming years. He followed this with other major projects; he worked with the Wedgwoods to create the Trent and Mersey canal which linked the Potteries to the big industrial cities and ports, providing a way of climbing (through a total of 35 locks) the country and delivering their fragile wares to a global export market. Whether it was shipping coal, flint or other raw materials into cities or transporting their finished wares out to the great ports like Liverpool, Brindley’s canals connected the country.

Photo by Inge Wallumrød from Pexels

It wasn’t easy; quite apart from the eye-watering costs of construction building the canal posed many challenges. Brindley innovated his way around them, coming up with radical ideas for:

using natural contours, working with the grain of the land rather than in straight lines. His canals might have been longer as a result but they were much cheaper to dig since this approach reduced the need for tunnels or expensive cuttings

cutting narrower canals, which reduced the water consumption and hence the running costs. Of course to make these work required the design of narrow longer boats — something else which Brindley pioneered and which became the dominant design for the waterways

pumping and circulatory systems to ensure efficient water flow into and tough the canal systems — and improving the design and productivity of the equipment involved

raising and lowering boats as they traversed the country through a series of watertight locks, some of which survive to this day

using puddling clay — a watertight ceramic material which he devised (using knowledge picked up from working with the Wedgwoods in their pottery factories) and which offered a watertight base with which to line the canals and solve the problem of water seepage

imagining and realising things like the Barton viaduct, a bridge carrying the Bridgwater canal over river Irwell 12m below

Image: Watercolour of Barton aqueduct by G.F. Yates 1793, public domain

He also developed another innovation as part of his problem-solving for the coal industry. His narrow boats were nicknamed ‘Starvationers’ on account of the wooden braces across the hull which gave them strength. They looked like an emaciated torso but this design meant they were strong enough to haul tons of coal or iron ore. But there was a bottleneck in terms of loading and unloading and so Brindley designed a system of wooden containers for coal which could be filled and transhipped easily. His first boat with 10 containers began work in 1766, predating Malcolm McLean by close to 200 years.

(The concept was elaborated and really brought to the mainstream by James Outram who linked the idea into a system in which horses pulled containers from mines along rails to the canal where they were quickly transhipped. As the railways emerged to replace horse drawn traffic so this ‘intermodal system’ took off)

Water was what made him and indirectly it was the death of him. In 1771 he’d begun work on another visionary scheme, surveying the route of what was to become the Trent and Mersey canal. But he was caught in a heavy thunderstorm and drenched through. He wasn’t able to dry out properly at the inn where he was lodging and by the time he returned home he was severely ill; he died of pneumonia a few days later.

He left a legacy of innovation, both in the 365 miles of canals which he built and in the locks, pumping stations, tunnels and other engineering solutions to the problem of creating a viable water-based transport system.,

And he also offers a good reminder of some key innovation themes involved in bringing large scale ideas to fruition and having an impact at scale. He might have been nicknamed ‘the Schemer’, improvising his way to solving engineering problems, but he also understood things like:

the importance of systems thinking and the need for complementary assets — identifying and putting in place the many interlocking pieces of the puzzle

the value of prototypes and working models to help persuade and accelerate adoption. Legend has it that when he was presenting his ideas to a sceptical group of Members of Parliament whose approval he needed for the Bridgwater canal route he used a cheese out of which he carved a model of the aqueduct he proposed to build!

the power of open innovation, learning from the many different sectors and projects he worked with and integrating knowledge from these different worlds — for example, using his knowledge of ceramics to develop the puddling clay liners for his canals

the importance of business models in laying out the architecture through which ideas can create value. He not only understood the literal flow of water, he was also skilled at managing cash flow, acquiring a reputation for being ‘careful with money’ which undoubtedly helped realise some of the huge schemes with which he was involved.