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INTERVIEW

Appropriately impatient: How to inspire true innovation 1

INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION

Widely regarded as the ‘Father of MEMS’, Dr Ken Gabriel was recruited to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1992 to start the Agency’s MEMS programme. He then returned to lead the agency as Deputy Director in 2012, after successfully launching a MEMS microphone company that shipped more than 6 million units prior to being acquired by Bosch. Following a stint as a former Google Executive, Gabriel is now leading the Draper Laboratory. International Innovation’s Rosemary Peters caught up with Gabriel to ask him a breadth of questions, including his advice for entrepreneurs and how he encourages employees to be appropriately impatient so that they are empowered to create new technologies and innovations with speed

You often describe innovation as satisfying an unmet need. Could you expand on what you mean by this, and what you see as being the difference between an invention and an innovation?

People want to make a difference in their lives and the lives of others.

That is particularly true for the things you work on; you want to make a difference. An invention may be a good idea, an interesting vision or a cool technology, but if it doesn’t deliver results or satisfy a need – and if someone doesn’t want to pay you or trade you something for it – then it’s not really an innovation. There has to be an impact element to the invention for me to really call it an innovation.

I am chatting with you at INNOVEIT 2016, an event dedicated to encouraging European entrepreneurs. What sort of things do people need to keep in mind when going down an entrepreneurial path?

Experience has shown me that many people hold this notion that being an entrepreneur or thinking great thoughts is about having no constraints – blue-sky thinking. However, when you start a company, you have to switch into a different mode. I am not saying there isn’t a time for bluesky thinking, but it should happen well before your first start-up and well before you become an entrepreneur. Blue-sky thinking is when you come up with the value proposition for your product or company.

If you continue to be in that blue-sky, no constraints mode of thinking, you will fail. Entrepreneurship in my mind is about maintaining discipline in the execution. That doesn’t mean building a five-year plan or marching

to a specific end point no matter what; it’s more about staying focused on what is important to get your product out as fast as humanly possible.

Until you get your product out to the marketplace, you don’t know whether it is an interesting idea or an innovation that could change the world. The sooner you get it out, the better. Focusing on speed is the discipline you need for innovation. You cannot spend a year trying to recruit two software people if your fundamental value proposition is hardware. You should outsource the software you need. That’s much faster than trying to bring people in.

As an entrepreneur, every day you will have a thousand and one decisions to make. Unless you have that focus and discipline, you will easily drift off into oblivion.

How did you build that focus into your life?

I have used a combination of things. Some of it comes from learnings from my first time managing a technology enterprise and trying to come to grips with whether we had enough money to realise a technology.

How do I convince the investors that I need more money, or convince myself that I can do more with less? Beginning to put that structure and discipline around thinking quantitatively is important.

The rest of my focus habits actually came from doing my start-up in terms of day-to-day decision making. When you launch a start-up, you realise very quickly that you can feel good about small victories; for

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example, the fact that you negotiated a lease and now have additional space. But you cannot let that tear you away from your end goal.

You’ll feel like that’s progress, but I remember one of the experienced entrepreneurs who was on our board at the time saying: “That’s not progress, those are just table stakes. Signing a lease brought you no closer to bringing your product out”.

Entrepreneurship and building a business are things that you cannot learn, but instead things you have to experience. It’s the back and forth I have had, first with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and then later on at Google, where we started up a DARPA-like organisation inside of Motorola, and many other experiences in between that have helped me build focus. They have also reinforced and taught me the fundamental elements of discipline. Basically, I wasn’t born with it!

Attracting funding and then budgeting appropriately with that funding are topics that entrepreneurs often talk about, as they are elements that are critical to start-up success. What did your time as Deputy Director at DARPA teach you about funding innovations?

There is a sweet spot in how much funding you actually need. Take a look at DARPA. Roughly speaking, if you look at DARPA’s budget, it’s about US $3 billion per year. Given that DARPA has about 200 employees, and given that half those people are the technical programme managers that are managing and investing in lots of different areas, that leaves about $30 million per year on average.

If you were working in DARPA, and I gave you $300,000 a year and said ‘hire amazing people and do amazing things’ you might be able to do both things, but likely your activities might not get much traction. If I gave you $300 million you’d be swamped trying to spend it. There’s a sweet spot where inputs and outputs are at an equilibrium. At DARPA, we didn’t have a magic formula to determine this number, but over time the organisation figured that if you have about $30-50 million per year per programme manager that’s enough resource to make a difference and attract the right sort of performers that one individual can manage.

Why does DARPA only have about 200 employees on site at any one time? How does maintaining this company size impact innovation?

There’s no law or policy really that caps DARPA at 200 employees. It’s just one of those cultural elements that have developed. It’s an amazing and interesting cultural concept that we have fought hard to protect. In

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INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION

other federal institutions over the last 50 or so years, there has just been monotonic growth. This is not necessarily healthy or a good outcome.

DARPA employees have something that I see as being equivalent to an expiration tag – after a certain number of years working for the organisation, they have to move on to a new job. Does DARPA employ this tactic so people stay on point and only take on projects they can deliver in their tenure?

You’re absolutely right. A lot of people think that this churn is because we want to refresh ideas or bring in new people. While that argument is valid, your point is incredibly important. When you walk into an organisation, and you know you only have three to five years to get done what you want to get done, it’s an incredible opportunity. You start not caring about what your title is or who you report to or where your parking space is. You get rid of all these things that don’t matter and you start executing.

It is interesting that you focus on that because that’s one of the elements I brought when I went to Google-Motorola to start the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group with Regina Dugan. Google proper, the mothership, said: “Wait a minute, if I’m going to hire this hotshot into ATAP, why would I push him out after a few years?”

It’s vital, because if you don’t push him or her out that person will tire out. It’s human nature. The other thing that it does is make you appropriately impatient. Do the math: if you’re with ATAP for two or three years, one week is roughly 1 per cent of your time. Under such conditions, group members will not put up with roadblocks; for example, if a contract negotiation is likely to take up to four weeks or more to put a company under a contract, you will become an ally in making things move faster through the system.