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Using rivalry to spur innovation
20 May 2010:
Business leaders tend to raise their eyebrows when they read about parallels between history and modern management—and for good reason. There are undoubtedly many people who offer better leadership lessons than Attila the Hun, and it is unclear whether Alexander the Great can tell us much about business strategy. So it’s with some trepidation that we set forth the premise of this article: that the Italian Renaissance was such an extraordinary period of creativity it can shed light on how to stimulate business innovation.
We’re quite conscious of other great eras of innovation—the 18th-century industrial revolution in Great Britain, the late-19th-century emergence of managerial capitalism in the United States, and even the present period of digital innovation. One thing that’s striking about the Renaissance, though, is that it took place on a scale not very different from that of many large, modern enterprises. Northern Italy is no larger than the state of Michigan, and at the beginning of the 15th century, the three great centers of Renaissance creativity—Rome, Florence, and Venice—had a combined population of roughly 200,000.1
The ability of a population and region of this size to generate creative output—ranging from the world’s largest masonry dome to linear perspective, modern-day portrait painting, technical breakthroughs in glassblowing and bronze casting, the italic type of the Aldine Press, sfumato and chiaroscuro, and the designs in Leonardo’s sketchbooks—makes it, in our opinion, intriguing for innovation-minded leaders. What’s more, there are some uncanny parallels between what went on during the Renaissance and principles that have proven their worth in R&D organizations—such as collision between diverse experts, providing loose guidelines, and establishing stretch goals.
Less in line with mainstream R&D practices: the degree to which Renaissance creativity was built on professional rivalries—like the ones between Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian—that are commonly viewed as some of the most productive in history. It may be that by overlooking the potential of rivalry, modern R&D organizations are missing an opportunity to promote ground-breaking innovation.
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Source: McKinsey Quarterly
