by Alec Foege
Brandenburg was awed by the sheer number of internationally known experts that had been gathered at the facility; if he had a question about any aspect of the audio research he was working on, he could usually walk down the hall and speak with the inventor of that very piece of technology. And the methods of getting research done were strikingly similar to what he was used to at home.
But there were also some substantive differences, which hinted at why Germany had taken the lead on the MP3 technology. The first, Brandenburg noted, was that Fraunhofer’s organizational structure is such that the same dozen engineers, himself included, worked on the MP3 compression project over a period of more than ten years. Fraunhofer offered engineers an extremely stable institutional framework and a collegial atmosphere, as well as access to all the latest research gear they needed to conduct their experiments. None allowed himself to be lured away by lucrative employment elsewhere, despite the fact that Fraunhofer pays salaries that are closer to academic ones than to the corporate packages that top-flight electrical engineers typically enjoy. “This was a group of people who really wanted to work together,” said Brandenburg.
There was another key factor that distinguished Fraunhofer from its American counterparts. It’s not that Germans are inherently less motivated by profits than Americans; rather, the German legal infrastructure favors the rights of individual innovators over those of corporations. In Germany, as in the United States, patents developed under the auspices of a corporate institution are owned by the company, not the individuals who did the work. But unlike in this country, Germany requires that employers share a portion of the royalties obtained from patents with the employees who are named on the patents. All told, Karlheinz Brandenburg’s name is attached to twenty-seven United States patents, along with coinventors, which means he has been amply compensated for his contributions to the MP3 technology. He said his royalty payments—generated mostly by licensing to MP3 encoders, the virtual players that allow users to listen to MP3 files—have far exceeded his Fraunhofer salary. “Let’s just say I was able to build myself a nice house without taking out a mortgage,” he said. He also used some of the royalties to found a venture capital firm called Brandenburg Ventures.
Lastly, the Fraunhofer Institute’s hybrid financing structure offers a unique, nationwide opportunity for science and innovation to flourish. There are sixty Fraunhofer Institutes scattered throughout Germany, focusing on a panoply of disciplines including everything from molecular biology to computer graphics. All of the institutes are run on the same model: 30 percent of the budgets derive from state and federal land grants; the other 70 percent come from governmental and industrial contracts.
The combined effect is that Fraunhofer’s research facilities offer a level of institutional stability that few corporate cultures could provide while still injecting that rigorous experiment-based environment with a commerce-driven impetus for innovation.
Brandenburg noted that there were a number of gaps between the time when he first established the basic parameters of MP3 and when it was finally adapted as a common format for music compression in 1994. In a purely corporate environment, such research would likely have been abandoned over that period. But patience is a built-in virtue at most Fraunhofer outposts, since many are affiliated with nearby universities.
In 1993, Brandenburg was named head of the audio and multimedia department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen. Then in 2000, he became a professor at the Institute for Media Technology at Ilmenau Technical University in Ilmenau, a small town closer to Berlin. When the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology was established in 2004 in Ilmenau, he was named its first director.
The swirl of myth and awe that surrounded Thomas Edison during his lifetime no doubt played a large role in creating the image of the “great man” as innovator and genius. As the great defender of innate individualism, the United States has long propagated the notion that brilliant ideas that change the world magically pop out of brains predestined for greatness. And yet more and more examples provide evidence to the contrary. It is compelling to appreciate how many of today’s great tinkerers are in fact teams of tinkerers, all laboring toward a common if sometimes fuzzy goal.
The world of video games offers some of the best examples of this kind of tinkering as team sport. Angry Birds, easily the biggest video game success story of the late 2000s, was created in an incubator-style tinkering environment that emerged from the University of Helsinki in Finland. In 2003, Niklas Hed, a twenty-nine-year-old Finn, entered a competition sponsored by the Finnish cell-phone corporation Nokia and Hewlett-Packard, with two friends, to create a multiplayer mobile game for one of the first smartphones made by Nokia. Their winning entry, called King of the Cabbage World, was one of the earliest multiplayer, real-time games that could be played together remotely by individual phone users. Impressed by the sophistication and inventiveness of the group’s entry, and in particular by Hed’s programming abilities, Peter Vesterbacka, then an employee of Hewlett-Packard and one of the competition’s judges, recommended that Hed pursue a career in programming games. He also suggested the trio start their own video-gaming company.
And so in 2004 Hed approached his cousin Mikael, a business school graduate four years his senior, and asked if he would be the chief executive officer of his new company, then called Relude. After a year had passed, with little success raising funding, Niklas asked his uncle, Mikael’s father, to contribute funds to their start-up. Kaj Hed, a successful Internet entrepreneur who had recently sold a company he had founded, agreed to kick in one million euros. Mikael soon left the company after a disagreement with his father over its business plan, leaving Niklas to run the company, now known as Rovio, on his own.
But instead of creating games for his own company, Niklas and his team of developers spent the first few years developing them for other companies such as Real Networks, Namco, and EA to make ends meet. While the company prospered and was able to hire more employees, the business model was heavily dependent on having hit games, and Rovio didn’t have any. By late 2006, the future was not looking good for Rovio. Teetering near bankruptcy, Niklas laid off most of his fifty employees, whittling his staff down to a small but impactful twelve.
Then, on January 9, 2007, everything changed. As Steve Jobs emerged on a stage in San Francisco during the Macworld conference, unveiling the first iPhone and the app store that would accompany it, Niklas realized he had a golden opportunity to revive his ailing company. He lured back his cousin Mikael, and the pair set out to create a game for Apple’s remarkable new device. They would continue to do development work for other gaming companies, but all their remaining hours would be devoted to their iPhone game. Their proposed budget for the project was twenty-five thousand euros, though it would later balloon to four times that amount.
The design team established a punch list of requirements for the new game. Since the market for the iPhone was nearly everybody, it needed to have broad appeal, so it wouldn’t have a science fiction or horror theme like many of their earlier titles. The game also had to work on multiple platforms, though the iPhone version would be the main focus. They also determined that it should be “physics-based,” meaning it would mimic the physics of the real world, a quality that adds to the random fun factor of video games. The game would not need any instructions to get started, and a user would need to enjoy playing it as much for a minute as for an hour, which required a quick loading time. It also needed a recognizable logo to get noticed in Apple’s App Store.
Rovio’s head designer, Jaakko Iisalo, spent the next two years sketching out drawings of literally hundreds of characters, as the company also kept busy developing other games. Iisalo would generate ideas in groups of ten, and present screenshots of what he envisioned. It wasn’t until March 2009 that he sketched an angry-looking bird that grabbed his colleagues’ attention. From that point on, the team of developers worked together to create a game they all enj
oyed.
It was by no means a straightforward path. Early versions included one where each bird corresponded to a matching block; when the user touched the block, the bird would take to flight and demolish it. The birds themselves did not have unique powers. The entertaining feature of being able to fling the birds across the screen came later, as did the slingshots used for the hurling. Together, they also came up with the targets of the birds’ anger: pigs who thought nothing of devouring their eggs. The various colors of the birds, their otherworldly squawks, and their ability to bomb objects below with their eggs, which could be accelerated by touching the screen, were all choices the team made by gut feeling, with no market research or focus-group testing to guide them.
During this time, the tinkering process became quite fluid and organic. Since the programming team was working on at least four other games while developing Angry Birds, the time they spent on their pet project was discretionary and thus driven by interest. Sometimes a member of the team would be testing a feature and get caught up in playing the game for fifteen minutes or more, suddenly surrounded by a group of fellow programmers. By allowing themselves to drift naturally toward features that were the most entertaining and addictive, they knew by the time it was done that they had created something special.
When Rovio released the game in December 2009, it didn’t get much attention, and its inventors feared they had met with failure once again. For the first three months after it went on sale in the App Store, Angry Birds gained little traction. The English-speaking markets, which the game needed to crack for access to big sales numbers, showed little interest. So instead, Rovio concentrated on much smaller markets, such as Finland, which only required a few hundred purchases to make the game number one. Next came Sweden and Denmark, followed by the Czech Republic and Greece. Once they had racked up a total of 30,000 to 40,000 downloads, they arranged to have the game distributed by Chillingo, a game publisher with a strong connection to Apple. Based on the strength of the Chillingo distribution deal, Apple decided to highlight the game on the front page of its App Store on February 11, 2010. Just for the occasion, Rovio offered a free, simplified version of the game (it normally sold for $0.99), as well as an animated YouTube clip that featured the game’s characters, only the second clip produced for an iPhone game. Last time I looked, the trailer had more than 74 million views. Within three days, Angry Birds was Apple’s number one, most downloaded app. It was later reconfigured in HD for an iPad version, which sold for $4.99.
The Angry Birds mania snowballed from there, hailing a new era in software sales. No longer would software primarily be purchased for a high price in a box at a store. Analysts later estimated that Rovio’s revenues averaged between $50 million to $70 million. The game has been downloaded more than 50 million times, and has spawned a franchising venture as well as plans for a big-budget movie. Sales of stuffed animals based on the game’s characters also skyrocketed. In March 2011, Rovio was able to raise an additional $42 million in funding from investors such as the founders of Skype and Accel Partners.
I report this information not to suggest that taking a collaborative tinkering approach to creating video games is the equivalent of the process it took to create some of the life-changing devices I have described in the previous pages. But the development cycle has certainly been challenged. The Rovio style of tinkering may be preferable to the now omnipresent product development cycle in the United States, which demands that ideas must be scientifically probed by market researchers and test panels before ever making it past the tinkering phase.
As their discipline has become increasingly concerned with function over form, and as a result boiling some of the passion out of the process, some American architects appear to have naturally evolved toward the more individualized Rovio style of tinkering. It hasn’t hurt that it has become more acceptable in recent years for small boutique firms to get hired for large projects that decades ago would have automatically gone to one of the large firms such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. This has in some part to do with computer imaging software that allows a tiny architectural operation to produce drawings and models with the same speed and accuracy that once would have required dozens of draftsmen weeks and months to produce.
But one also suspects that clients are finding that smaller firms are more likely to take a team tinkering approach that prides creative and striking solutions to big problems that traditional firms with large cost overheads have a tougher time tackling.
One such firm is Studio Gang Architects, founded by Jeanne Gang, the 2011 recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant.” The Chicago-based Studio Gang made its now well-known name on the Aqua building, an eighty-two-story residential condominium built in the up-and-coming Lakeshore East neighborhood.
The resulting tower, which was completed in 2010 and is now one of the tallest in Chicago, has been praised by critics for its undulating structure featuring concrete balconies that ripple out in irregular shapes that do not conform to the lines of the actual building. The aesthetic effect is an echo of Lake Michigan, which is only a few blocks away, but the design is also practical: the balconies act as passive solar shades for residents, who also have remarkable views of the city at heights previously unavailable at any price point in the Windy City. The building is also exceptionally environmentally friendly, with heat-resistant reflective glass installed where the balconies don’t provide shade, and a rainwater collection and storage apparatus to supply sprinklers on the green roof.
Gang grew up in Belvidere, Illinois, a small town just past Chicago’s suburbs. Her father was a civil engineer, and she spent her childhood trailing her dad on trips that toured rural Illinois’s roads and bridges. Gang attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, from which she graduated in 1993, after which she went to work for Rem Koolhaas’s firm in Rotterdam.
She moved briefly to another firm in Chicago, before launching her small practice in 1998, after winning a commission to build a theater at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Illinois, not far from where she was raised. Gang clinched that first project by learning ahead of time that the dean of the college was a hydraulic engineer and that the contractor for the theater had constructed bridges. Emboldened by her knowledge, Gang proposed a theater with a folding kinetic roof and immediately hired a structural engineer to show it was feasible. She got the job soon after that, and the theater was finished in 2003.
The Studio Gang office, which includes around thirty-five employees, has also gotten a lot interest for its prevailing work style, which could only be described as team tinkering. When Stephen Zacks of Metropolis magazine visited in 2008, he described the design team as “surprisingly relaxed,” despite the fact that at least four projects were at the schematic stage and a proposal for a high-rise residential development in Hyderabad, India, was due to leave the premises in less than an hour.
What the reporter found were teams of designers “grouped in hives of activity throughout the office,” which was managed by Gang’s partner and husband, Mark Schendel. Gang sat “slightly secluded” in an office off to the side, coming in only occasionally to weigh in as a collaborator.
At their essence, Gang’s organically designed buildings seem to evolve out of an organically designed workplace. “I like to bounce things off people,” she told Metropolis. “I’m less likely to sit in here and do a sketch and then deliver it. I would more likely think of an idea and go out there immediately and ask, ‘What do you think of this?’ I have to hear a response.”
In the course of writing this book, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting more than a few small companies that have reconfigured their workplaces to adapt to this new perspective on tinkering and its relationship to innovation. Yes, they are mostly large, open, loftlike spaces where employees sit at desks or tables shoved together instead of cubicles or enclosed offices. But these work environments are not fashioned in the style of the dot-com companies of yore. There are no
Ping-Pong tables or massage chairs or beds installed over desks. No free food or showers where employees who never leave the premises try to revive themselves after pulling all-nighters trying to reach ever-impending deadlines.
The point of these restructured work environments isn’t to bleed employees dry. Rather, it is to reinvent the notion of the creative workplace, where tinkerers and innovators are engaged with their fellow workers in developing new products in a way that better mirrors the unfettered human thought process—and allows for inevitable hiccups that accompany it.
In such environments, it is not uncommon for the employees to reconfigure where they sit based on the specifics of the project they are working on. These workplaces, not surprisingly, also tend to have flat hierarchies. Don’t be surprised if the CEO sits among his or her employees; this isn’t an affectation but rather a way for everyone to keep tabs on what new ideas are developing as they develop.
These newfangled workplaces lack most of what we generally associate with traditional corporate America. Workers are counseled to treat each other respectfully, and yelling is prohibited. Not every idea is a good one, but each is giving consideration by the team and accepted or rejected through a measured, collaborative process. The casual observer may notice that there’s a lot of pleasurable chatter, but these aren’t your average wage monkeys goofing around: these are fully engaged producers.
These hubs of innovation know what many large American corporations have yet to learn: that invention is idiosyncratic, difficult, joyful, frustrating. And that Americans, when properly nurtured and incentivized, are uniquely suited to pursue it. There are few nations in this world that simultaneously embrace both the childlike senses of awe and wonder and the Calvinist work ethic, and also have the nearly unlimited financial capital to sustain the tension such a condition creates. I can think of only one: the United States.