The Innovation Secret Leaders Need

How does great achievement happen? What should business leaders keep in mind when leading innovative change? Why do some talented and dedicated people fail while others succeed? It’s a good day to ponder the questions, being the anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first successful powered aircraft flight, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903.

School children, at least in my day, learned that the Wright Brothers were clever mechanics and extremely persistent. That lesson is true, but not the full explanation. Cleverness and persistence are necessary—but not sufficient—to be a successful innovator. The Wright Brothers combined these traits with a scientific approach to their endeavor, which included trial and error.

Their first summer of glider trials was in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It was not a random location or just a good guess. They first looked at Weather Bureau data on places with the most reliable wind.

After a few trials, they realized that they needed to log their experiments. Careful data collection allowed them not only to see what was working and what was not, but to compare their actual results with calculations from scientific analysis.

In conducting experiments on wing shape and orientation, they tinkered with their early designs, not always successfully. Their 1901 glider was actually worse than their 1900 glider. They were willing to try an alternative design, to reject the alternative after tests, but to keep trying other alternatives. That is, they were not so enamored of their ideas that they ignored the evidence. This trial-and-error approach contributed greatly to their ultimate success.

These young men, who had not gone to college, reviewed the equations for aerodynamic lift and drag. They determined that one of the widely recognized coefficients, accepted by the glider community, was wrong. They substituted their own experimental evidence for the scientific standard of their day. Using that approach they quickly improved the performance of their glider.

Back at home in Dayton, Ohio for the winter, they built a wind tunnel to perform actual tests on wing shapes in laboratory conditions. They rejected the shape that the most respected developer had preferred and also changed the angle at which the wing went through the air. This enabled them to lift more weight—eventually including the structure, an engine and a pilot. Business leaders might consider instances when cheap and quick testing can validate assumptions or lead to new insights.

As they added a motor and propeller, they expected to simply follow lessons developed for ship propellers. They found, however, that ship propeller design was quite primitive and ignorant of the analysis that windmill designers had learned. In short, they read widely about what others had learned, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of existing knowledge and practices.

The Wright brothers also structured their development efforts to focus on the most critical issues. Early airplane developers—and many were trying at the same time—focused great effort on power. More power from the engine created greater speed, which gave greater lift from the wings, enabling greater weight to be sent aloft. But the brothers identified another crucial issue: control. They had to make the plane move exactly as they wanted it to move in all three dimensions. Going up and down, and turning left and right, were not enough. They also had to control their horizontal angle. Thus, engine power became not something to maximize, but one of several variables that interacted with each other.

Wilbur Wright commented about his research, “The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” Although that was said about using the energy generated by their motor, the Wright Brothers aphorism has broad applicability: knowledge trumps power.

The tale of their achievement is well told in David McCullough’s book, The Wright Brothers.