Ideas are a gas
Elmar Mock describes innovation as gas, liquid and crystal. AI now makes the gas for nothing. The scarce skill is condensing an idea into a thing.
In 1980 an engineer at ETA, the Swiss maker of watch movements, ordered an injection moulding machine that cost 500,000 Swiss francs. He was 26 and had no authority to order it. The firm, by his account, had shed 4,000 jobs in a year. Summoned to the general manager’s office for one o’clock, he had two hours to invent a reason for the purchase, so he went to a colleague, Jacques Müller, who put a plastic watch on paper.
The engineer was Elmar Mock, and the drawing became the Swatch: 51 parts where a conventional watch had 91, launched in Zürich on 1 March 1983, more than 700m sold. I have had the pleasure of working with Mock on several projects, and I know no better account of how innovation works than his. His image comes from chemistry: innovation passes through three states and starts as a gas. The conclusions are mine, and he is not to blame for them: most firms that ask for innovation are solids that intend to stay solid, and now that machines produce gas for nothing, the skill worth paying for is condensation.
Gas, liquid, crystal
The image is set out in the book Mock wrote with Gilles Garel, published in English as The Innovation Factory. There the three states are gas, liquid and crystal, and they are states of mind. The title of this piece is my own shorthand for the first state.
Creaholic, the invention firm Mock founded in Biel in 1986, says gas, liquid, solid. Marcel Aeschlimann, a co-founder, describes the gas state as one where the molecules are free and ideas can be thought up from scratch. His example is the ejection seat, where the chair molecule meets the dynamite molecule. In the liquid the idea condenses into a concept that could work, and in the solid the thing gets made. I use the firm’s word from here on, since nobody has mistaken a corporation for a crystal.
Mock also separates innovation from renovation. A company must listen to its clients and give them what they ask for, he told a Paris seminar in 2016, but that is renovation. He added that he had no wish to criticise it, since it is what keeps everyone fed.
One section of the book’s chapter on the Swatch is headed, in part, "Perfect Peace for Two Dissidents". Mock, by his own account, needed eleven years for nine years of compulsory school.
Renovation with better lighting
Mock is polite about renovation. I am less so about the firms that sell it under another name. Most companies that announce an innovation programme want version 1.3 in a new colour, presented on a stage. Renovation is a respectable business. Calling it innovation is theatre, and nobody books a stage for something that might fail.
The processes such firms install to manage innovation are the solid state defending itself. A stage gate asks a gas for a business case, and an idea funnel asks it for a sales forecast. Gas has neither, so it fails the review, and the firm concludes that nobody had a good idea. Mock’s own verdict on planning is three words long: "Planning kills innovation."
Large companies do innovate, their defenders say, and the Swatch came out of one. It did, and the manner matters. It began with a purchase order nobody had approved and a sketch that Mock calls childlike. Ernst Thomke, the head of ETA, kept asking him whether he was crazy, and then backed the watch. Mock told the Paris seminar that it was developed separately and under protection, with outside help, and met enormous opposition.
Nestlé behaved the same way with coffee. Its management doubted Eric Favre’s capsule system for about a decade, then in 1986 set up Nespresso as a company of its own. The book counts the protection of a mentor among the lessons of the Swatch. I put it more bluntly: large firms innovate when someone senior hides the gas from the solid, and no process chart contains that person.
Gas is now free
Here the argument becomes mine alone: Mock’s model of how innovation works dates from a time when a good idea was hard to come by, and that time is over. Ask a language model for a hundred concepts for a wristwatch and it delivers them before the coffee is cold, every one plausible and none tested. I founded a lab that works on such models, and ideas are the cheapest thing they make. A company with unlimited gas has not bought breakthrough innovation. It has bought fog.
What stays scarce is condensation, and the Swatch shows what it costs. Thomke gave Mock and Müller six months. The prototype took fifteen. An engineering mistake made the hands turn backwards. By late 1981 there were five finished watches, and they stopped after five days.
The design that survived built the movement straight into the plastic case by ultrasonic welding. Mock has told the Guardian why: the team decided that every screw was a danger, because whatever can be screwed in can come unscrewed. Nothing in a list of a hundred concepts tells you that.
A designer’s working life is spent at that phase change. The machines I worked on for Nespresso began with an idea a child can state: coffee from a capsule. My work on user manuals for Electrosuisse and the VDE began with another: people should understand the device in front of them. The value came after the sentence, in the wall thickness a mould will fill and the wording a certifier will sign.
Müller’s sketch was ready by one o’clock. The launch in Zürich was three years away.
The pictures in this essay were made with AI.