Judy Estrin, CEO of JLABS, opened the SIIA Software Summit in San Francisco today with a presentation on the theme of sustainable innovation. Ms. Estrin, who served as the CTO for Cisco prior to co-founding JLABS, emphasized the importance of innovation on economic growth and on quality of life. She believes that innovation in the US today is mostly incremental, and is not creating the foundation for growth in the next 10 -20 years.

Ms. Estrin focused on three types of innovation:

• Breakthrough innovation. Example: the credit card
• Incremental innovation. Example: a private labeled credit card
• Orthogonal Innovation: a combination of existing innovations. Example: iPod
   

All three types are important, but will lead to different results. Breakthrough and Orthogonal can be “disruptive” and will create new markets; incremental innovation is necessary, but not sufficient.
 

Her advice to companies determined to enable innovation, is to embrace some of these core values:

• Questioning; allowing curiosity, self-assessment and non-judgmental idea generation
• Risk; the willingness to take risks and fail and the ability to learn from failures
• Openness to imagine and envision change
   

The US’s decline in the innovation ecosystem, followed by the failure of the financial systems, has dramatically changed the outlook of this country. Ms. Estrin believes it is important and beneficial for the entire world to be innovative; and it is imperative for the US to regain its status as the innovation leader.

Bubbles won’t do the trick, however. The US needs to look for sources of sustainable growth, not the next fad. Most analysts and experts agree that the drivers of future innovation will be in the Energy, Healthcare, Education industries, and others which are yet to be developed.

To lead and grow in these fields, Judy Estrin says we need “T-shaped people”, a term coined by Ideo, a worldwide design consultancy company. "T-shaped people" have deep expertise in an area (the leg of the T); ie they are software engineers. But they are also well-versed in other fields, ie chemistry or design, and they are able to draw and synthesize from all these fields.

In my earlier years in the high-tech industry and fresh out of grad school, I used the term “totalist” to describe a similar concept, during my interviews with some large corporations. I aspired to being one. Some interviewers looked at me sideways, not sure where to place me in the framework of traditional business.

More and more, these “totalists” or “T-shaped people", are driving creativity and entrepreneurial growth. Companies should hire them and nurture their talents; VCs should look for them and allow them to dream big. They will chart our direction as a country and as an economy.

 For more info: Fast Company 2007 interview with Ideo