Michael Lissack
show display of barcode technology, IBM had hired the inventor of the codes. Tom Watson (then CEO) had been attracted to Joseph Woodland precisely because he held the patent to the barcode. But Watson wanted Woodland as an engineer to work on problems that IBM considered im- portant. Ten years after hiring Woodland, IBM allowed him to sell the barcode patent to Philco, which never used it but instead sold it to Ford, which never used it and in turn sold it to RCA, which finally recognized the inherent value and committed resources to its development. When the IBM staffers attending the trade show first saw the barcode display, they were impressed and determined to build a similar product for IBM. Imagine their surprise when in the midst of the patent search they discovered that the very inventor of the barcode was already on the payroll and had been for 15 years. They felt odd calling the executive of- fice to request the man's reassignment to work on a product that IBM had once hired him for and then abandoned. As the new head of the barcode group phrased it, "Joe's pride of ownership was very strong at all times. Actually he sort of invigorated the whole group, because all of a sudden we felt that we really had a resource that could bring us great success." It was the nineteenth anniversary of Joseph Woodland's hiring by IBM and the twenty-third anniversary of the patent. Here the building blocks were also in place, but they were invisible to those to whom they would have mattered. This pattern continues to play out in organizations today, where valuable components remain hidden in organizational silos or obscured by rigid categorization systems. The digital era has amplified both the opportunity and the challenge. Organizations now have access to unprecedented amounts of data, techni- cal capabilities, and external resources that could serve as building blocks. Yet many struggle to identify these components, make them visible, and combine them in valuable ways. The companies that excel at this—like Amazon, which recombined its internal cloud infrastructure into AWS, or Apple, which combined phone, internet browser, and music player into iPhone—gain substantial competitive advantages.
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