Turning Duds into Dollars-Reviving Failed Innovations

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_25/b4136044140573.htm?chan=magazine+channel_in%3A+inside+innovation

More often than not innovations never get to market or come to life due to failure. The failure can be due to a number possibilities such as poor market timing, poor design, lack of technology, impracticality, just to give a few reasons. However, just because an innovation has failed, that doesn't mean there may not be useful down the road as failed innovations tend to become the steps or building blocks for further innovative ideas.

back in the late 90's and early 2000's
A perfect example of turning duds into dollars, is in the case of Hewlett-Packard's (HP) automated innovation software, known as "genetic programming" (GP), HP designed the GP Lab that would analyze the "genes" of earlier inventions to design new ones. The reason the automated innovation software failed, is that is often lead scientists to dead ends or as the article put it "it became a hammer in search of a nail" or a tool without a purpose. The project was canned as because it didn't have an immediate payoff.

This dud was turned into dollars as increasing financial pressures at HP during 2008 forced it managers cut department budgets. Kirshenbaum, the inventor of GP Lab at HP, had documented his research and archived the algorithms he used so well, he was able to modify his automated innovation software in about a day, into an efficiency too that HP used to forecast manufacturing and shipping needs based on predicted sales growth and supply it's global offices and factories as cheaply as possible.

This re-invention of Kirshenbaum's automated innovation ended up saving HP in the neighborhood of 20% of it's supply costs.