【英语科技】创新并非实验室专利

Apple is the most innovative consumer products company of the last decade. It has redefined how people listen to music, blindsiding both music publishers and established electronics manufacturers. And it has reinvented the telephone.

Yet Apple's achievement is not the result of its technology. The gizmos in the gadgets are much the same as the gizmos already in other companies' gadgets. Apple's success lies in deploying existing technology in ways that meet consumers' needs and in attracting buyers through coolly designed devices that do not require you to be a computer geek to use them.

We despise geeks - but we are also intimidated by them, and they retain a powerful influence on our thinking. When we talk about innovation, we visualise men and women in white coats with test tubes and microscopes. Outside many university cities around the world there are biotechnology estates established by governments that believe high technology is the key to a competitive future. The funds that governments provide to support innovation are all too often appropriated by large companies that are better at forming committees to pontificate about what the global village will want in the future than they are at assessing what their customers want today.

But understanding the needs of customers is what distinguishes innovation from novelty. Quirky inventors have a place in the affections of everyone who enjoyed physics or chemistry at school. But the quartz watches and home computers that Sir Clive Sinclair championed in the UK were quickly overtaken by better products from other businesses, and his C5 electric vehicle was not wanted by anyone.

Pioneers of innovation are routinely pushed aside by competitors whose skills are in the marketplace rather than the laboratory. The invention of the body scanner won a deserved Nobel Prize for EMI's Geoffrey Houndsfield, but almost destroyed the company. The market for scanners is now shared by Siemens and GE.

My favourite innovative company is Easyjet. There is nothing technologically advanced about what it does, indeed nothing it does that some other airline is not doing. Yet Easyjet catalysed fundamental change in the sleepy European airline industry. Innovation is about finding new ways of meeting consumers' needs, including ones they did not know they had. Sometimes it comes from a laboratory scientist but, more often, the innovation that changes the business landscape comes from the imagination of a Henry Ford or Walt Disney, Steve Jobs or Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou.

Last month the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts picked up this point. For years research and development scorecards have dutifully recorded how much pharmaceuticals companies spend on the search for new drugs and the expenditure of governments on defence electronics. But a Nesta report, presenting plans for a new innovation index, has now recognised that most of the spending that promotes innovation does not take place in science departments. The financial services industry may have been Britain's most innovative industry in the past two decades - perhaps too innovative - but practically none of the expenditure behind that innovation comes under "R&D". And the same is true in retailing, media and a host of other innovative industries.

Support for innovation is not the same as support for R&D. Important contributions to commercial innovation come from new businesses such as Easyjet, which see opportunities that others have missed. Most of these opportunities do not actually exist and the innovations fail. But only a few such entrepreneurs have to be right to change the face of business. Other innovations come from successful companies, such as Apple, which may not be at the frontiers of science but are in close touch with consumers. Like all business success, innovative success is based on matching capabilities to market.

过去10年里，苹果公司(Apple)是最具创新力的消费品公司。该公司重新定义了人们听音乐的方式，令音乐出版商和老牌电子产品制造商措手不及。苹果公司还彻底改造了电话。

然而，苹果公司的成就并非源自其技术。这些装置里的小发明与其它公司已有的小发明没多大区别。苹果的成功之处，在于运用现有技术满足消费者的需求，以及通过设计很酷的产品来吸引买家——你无须成为计算机奇客(geek)就可以使用这些产品。

我们看不起奇客——但我们也受到他们的胁迫，他们对我们的思想有着强大的影响力。当我们谈论创新的时候，脑海里浮现的是穿着白大褂、摆弄着试管和显微镜的男男女女。在全球许多大学城的周围，都有政府建立的生物技术中心。政府认为，在未来的竞争中，高科技是成功的关键。政府提供的创新资金常常被大公司占用。与评估当下的消费者需求相比，这些公司更善于成立委员会，围绕未来地球村的需求夸夸其谈。

但创新与新奇的区别，就在于是否理解顾客的需求。所有上学时喜欢物理或化学的人，都喜欢古怪的发明者。但克莱夫•辛克莱(Sir Clive Sinclair)爵士在英国推出的石英表和家用电脑，很快被其它企业更好的产品所取代，他的C5电动车则无人问津。

创新先锋通常会被竞争者排挤掉——后者的强项在市场，而不是实验室。对百代(EMI)公司的Geoffrey Houndsfield而言，他发明人体扫描仪理所当然地赢得了诺贝尔奖，但却几乎毁掉了百代公司。扫描仪市场目前由西门子(Siemens)和通用电气(GE)两家公司分享。

我青睐的创新企业是Easyjet。该公司没有做什么高科技的事情，实际上，它没有任何其它航空公司没有做过的事情。然而，Easyjet推动死气沉沉的欧洲航空业发生了根本性变化。创新就是找到满足消费者需求的新办法——包括消费者自己都没有意识到的需求。有时，创新来自于实验室里的科学家，但更多时候，改变商业环境的创新是来自亨利•福特(Henry Ford)或沃尔特•迪士尼(Walt Disney)、史蒂夫•乔布斯(Steve Jobs)或斯泰利奥斯•哈伊楼诺爵士(Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou)的想象力。

上月，英国国家科技艺术基金会(Nesta)力挺这一观点。多年来，研发记录忠实地记录了制药公司在新药研究上的投入和政府在国防电子产品方面的支出。但Nesta在报告中承认，推动创新的支出大部分并非发生在科技部门。该报告提出了建立新的创新指数的计划。金融服务业可能是过去20年英国最具创新能力的行业——或许过于创新了——但实际上这些创新支出都不是出自“研发”的名义之下。零售业、媒体业和其它一些创新行业同样如此。

支持创新并不等于支持研发。Easyjet等新企业为商业创新做出了重要贡献——它们看到了其它企业未能看到的机会。这些机会实际上大多并不存在，因此创新失败了。但只有少数企业家肯定是正确的，他们改变了企业的面目。其它创新来自于苹果等成功的公司——这些公司可能并非处于科技前沿，但与消费者联系密切。与所有商业成功一样，将能力与市场相匹配，也是创新成功的基础。

译者/君悦