Q&A: Rethinking how innovation happens

August 18, 2026 - 03:30

Innovation is often treated as a magic button. Companies hire chief innovation officers, governments pour billions into R&D tax credits, and consultants sell playbooks promising to unlock creativity on demand. But MIT Professor Eugene Fitzgerald argues that this entire approach is fundamentally flawed. In his new book, "The Invisible Engine: Why Innovation Evades Control," he makes the case that genuine innovation cannot be managed, predicted, or manufactured through top-down directives.

Fitzgerald speaks from direct experience. He co-invented strained silicon, a material breakthrough that extended the life of Moore's Law and became standard in nearly every advanced chip made today. That invention did not come from a corporate mandate or a strategic roadmap. It came from years of basic materials science, a willingness to follow an odd observation, and a research environment that tolerated failure.

He also led large international research programs, which gave him a front-row seat to how different cultures approach the problem. The United States, he notes, is excellent at radical breakthroughs but poor at sustained manufacturing follow-through. Japan and Korea excel at incremental improvement but often struggle to pivot when a technology shifts. Europe has strong fundamental science but frequently fails to translate it into commercial products. None of these systems, he argues, can be fixed by simply copying another country's model.

The core of his argument is that innovation is an emergent property of a complex system. It arises from the interaction of individual curiosity, institutional incentives, market signals, and a thousand other variables. Trying to control it directly is like trying to control the weather by adjusting a single thermostat. What leaders can do is create conditions: fund basic research without demanding immediate returns, reward long-term thinking, and protect researchers from the constant pressure to justify their work in quarterly earnings calls.

Fitzgerald is not anti-business. He spent decades working with industry and understands the need for efficiency and profit. But he insists that the kind of efficiency that makes a company successful today is often the exact opposite of what is needed to invent tomorrow. The book is a challenge to the current obsession with metrics, milestones, and deliverables. It suggests that the most valuable thing a leader can do is sometimes step back and let the engine run.