In celebration of Thomas Edison's 166th birthday, learn how Edison created a practice known as "midnight lunch" to drive collaboration in his laboratory. Workers staying after hours shared food together and ran experiments with Edison, instilling a deep sense of collegiality and ingenuity across his workforce.

1. Midnight Lunch with Thomas Edison:
How Collaboration Propels Innovation
Success
Sarah Miller Caldicott
CEO, Power Patterns of Innovation
Great grandniece of Thomas Edison
© 2007 - 2013 Sarah Miller Caldicott

2. America’s Greatest Innovator,
Thomas Edison: 1847-1931
© 2007 - 2013 Sarah Miller Caldicott

3. Miller/Edison Heritage
Robert Anderson Miller
Mina Miller Edison
Lewis Miller
© 2007 - 2013 Sarah Miller Caldicott

4. Edison’s Botanic Laboratory - Ft. Myers, FL
© 2007 - 2013 Sarah Miller Caldicott

5. Researching Edison’s Life and Work
The Edison Papers Archives at Rutgers University
© 2007 - 2013 Sarah Miller Caldicott

6. Happy birthday, Thomas Edison!
“Anything that won’t sell,
I don’t want to invent. Its sale is
proof of utility, and utility is
success.”
- Thomas Alva Edison

7. “I would like to live about
300 years. I think I have
ideas enough to keep me
busy that long.”
- Thomas Alva Edison

8. Edison Built New Markets
Pioneered 6 industries:
Document duplication (1873)
Telecommunications (1876)
Recorded sound (1877)
Electrical power (1879)
The Movies (1893)
Storage Battery (1903)
Midnight Lunch © 2007 - 2013 Sarah Miller Caldicott

9. Without Collaboration, Innovation Stalls
Today’s Conversation
• Shifts in global environment
• Why collaboration is crucial
• What is a midnight lunch?
• Creating collegiality

10. World Innovation Forum (2009)
Changes in global playing field for business
• C.K. Prahalad: “Global Reset”
• Familiar business models shifting
– Auto, Finance, Energy, Retail
• Merging of strategy, innovation,
value creation
• New ability of organizations to create with customers
• “Anticipate and create” vs. “Sense and respond”

11. Trends Propelling Collaboration
Collaboration central to staying relevant
• Rishad Tobaccowala - VivaKi
 Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer
1. Staying relevant
2. Innovating
3. Attracting and retaining talent
• Collaboration essential to all 3

12. Trends Propelling Collaboration
Shifts in composition of the global workforce
• 1 billion working age adults: 2020
- Gen Y to dominate: 2025
• Proliferation of smart devices:
- > 5 billion mobile phones globally
- Desire to “be connected”
• Virtual teams increasingly popular
- 40% now in virtual teams (Forrester, 2012)
- 56% in three years
• Organizational hierarchies flattening

13. New Book: Midnight Lunch (Wiley)
Learn how to collaborate in 21st Century
How did Thomas Edison develop
winning innovation teams?
What new skills would Edison
advocate for the digital age?
Midnight Lunch
in Dec/Jan ‘13 edition
of Fast Company!
bit.ly/VY7GkP Book
bit.ly/TlUz9r Article

14. Edison’s 4 Phases of True Collaboration™
Collaboration powered Edison’s innovation success
• Phase 1: Capacity (TODAY)
• Phase 2: Context
• Phase 3: Coherence
• Phase 4: Complexity

15. Edison Saw Collaboration As…
Applying discovery learning
within a context of complexity,
inspired by a common goal or a
shared purpose.
© 2007 - 2013 Sarah Miller Caldicott

16. Collaboration vs. Teamwork
Collaboration and teamwork are NOT the same
“Collaboration is not the same thing as
teamwork. Teamwork is simply doing
your part. Collaboration involves leveraging
the power of every individual to bring out
each other’s strengths and differences.”
- Greg Cox, President,
Dale Carnegie Training - Chicago
© 2007 - 2013 Sarah Miller Caldicott

17. Phase 1: Capacity
Create the foundations for collaboration to thrive
• Small teams of 2 to 8 people
• Common “experiences”
- Midnight lunches
• Diverse expertise, styles
• Practiced taking risks together,
and “discovering”

18. Common Ritual: Midnight Lunch
Edison transformed employees into colleagues
• Ritual blended social,
scientific language
• Low “social distance”
• Order in food
• Generated trust, deep exchange

19. Complex Adaptive Systems
Midnight lunch helps teams adapt, address complexity
• Nimble communication
• Share “private information”
• Casual exchanges, social setting
- Anne Donnellon: “Team Talk”

20. Midnight Lunch: Start With Questions
Forming master questions
“How do substances burn?”
“How does the eye perceive motion?”
“How can I capture sound so it can be
replayed again and again?”

21. Form Hypotheses
Create new context – and future states
• Explore master question via
hypotheses: if/then
- If we could minimize…then…
- If it would be possible to… then…
- If we could increase the amount
of … then …
- Inventing from the future, not
incrementally from the present

22. Edison Valued Experimentation
Context emerges when solutions are still forming
• Don’t lock down too soon
• Platform of discovery, not tasks
• Sharing of outcomes, scenarios
• “No experiments are useless.”
- Thomas Edison
• Practiced risk-taking

23. Midnight Lunch Drives Discovery Learning
Rapid learning cycles and “flat-ness”
• Faster “learning cycles”
• Experimentation allows us to
“anticipate and create”
• Could you hold your own
midnight lunch?
• Practice questioning, hypotheses,
experimenting, risk-taking!

24. Collaboration a Crucial Superskill
Midnight Lunch: Foundation for Collaboration to Thrive
• Connecting small, diverse groups
• Create collegiality
• Casual dialogue, and food!
• Experiments, questioning, hypotheses
• Share “private information”
• Collaborative language – we/us
• Deeper than brainstorming…creates new context
• Release ingenuity!

25. How Collegial Are You?
Edison modeled collegiality
“He conversed, argued and disputed with us all as
though he were a colleague on the same footing.”
- Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

26. What Is Your Edison Story?
Celebrating Edison’s Birthday – Midnight Lunch
• Post on my Facebook page: Power
Patterns of Innovation
- Qualify to win a free signed book!
• Do a Team.Read™ - free workbook!
• Purchase 8 copies of Midnight Lunch
- www.powerpatterns.com/Books
- email me scanned receipt at
info@powerpatterns.com 2/11 to 2/18
• Tweet your Edison story and follow me at
@SarahCaldicott, use #midnightlunch

27. Expand Your Smart Layer
Sarah Miller Caldicott
CEO, The Power Patterns of Innovation
info@powerpatterns.com | www.powerpatterns.com
Twitter: @sarahcaldicott | LinkedIn: Sarah Caldicott
Facebook: Power Patterns of Innovation
YouTube book trailer: bit.ly/UTBFN8
Book Slideshare: slidesha.re/YpH0wz
Book purchase: www.powerpatterns.com/Books
Midnight Lunch (Wiley) also available from Amazon, major book sellers
©2007 - 2013 Sarah Miller Caldicott