One of my first experiences in thinking about innovation and the sources of innovation happened to me personally. I was working at GE Medical Systems in the mid-'90s, and we were focused in on creating new products and services for our customers in the digital imaging domain and I was a product manager at the interface of marketing and product development.

And we had just spend a lot of money and bought a new firm's technology that we were going to bring to the marketplace. And as I was scouring the marketplace to understand where the demand was going to be and what people were interested in, I came across these customers of mine who wanted nothing to do with that technology. They said, "We don't want anything that you built or that you're going to build, because we've done it all ourselves." And this seemed to be quite different than what I expected.

I'd been through undergraduate as an engineering and management major. I'd spent years at GE working, and to think that customers could innovate and could do the same problem solving as we were doing just didn't make any sense to me. So I went to this customer's site in Montreal and spent two weeks with them. And sure enough, they were 18 months ahead of our engineering schedule.

And this did not make any sense. I mean, we're GE, we bring good things to life. How could it be that these customers had basically out-innovated us? Now, of course the fit and finish wasn't so great, wasn't all put together well. It was sort of hanging together by duct tape and glue, but all the major engineering problems that we had said that we were going to solve, they had already done. And when I spent time with them and I tried to understand what they had done — they had basically worked with other users around the world. This is in the mid-'90s, so early days of the Internet, and they had basically shared their knowledge and come together to solve these problems.

And this was just a puzzle that just did not make any sense to me. And I went back to my headquarters, tried to understand what was going on, and they said, "Yeah, of course, we're in this highly demanding technical field and sometimes our customers innovate ahead of us, and then we often take those innovations and bring them into our own products."

But they didn't have a systematic program to continuously tap into what their users were doing and find a way to bring it back into our system. There was just no infrastructure for this at all. And this was a puzzle that has stayed with me forever — basically, since I came across this in the mid-'90s, and has sort of guided my own research to think about the sources of innovation and to think that a lot of innovations can come from outside of the firm, outside of the four walls of R&D. And that affirms you to sort of be awakened to it and figure out how to tap into these innovations.