The Business Innovation Insider: The lunatic fringe at Texas Instruments

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August 31, 2006

The lunatic fringe at Texas Instruments

The current issue of FORTUNE magazine features a great story about the "lunatic fringe" and the culture of innovation at tech industry pioneer Texas Instruments. Apparently, the key to innovation success at the company has been the ability to create an environment that is supportive of "managed chaos." As Peter Lewis of FORTUNE explains, it all started with "a small group of crazies" (the lunatic fringe, if you will) who are convinced that giving free rein to "wild-eyed optimists" is the secret to innovation success:

"Gene Frantz [a business development manager in the digital signal processing group] is the dean of an informal and amorphous group of TI engineers (and their peers and contacts outside the company) who call themselves the Lunatic Fringe. They are senior people who have been given free rein to follow their curiosity wherever it goes. "There's this continuum between total chaos and total order," Frantz explains. "About 95% of the people in TI are total order, and I thank God for them every day, because they create the products that allow me to spend money. I'm down here in total chaos, that total chaos of innovation. As a company, we recognize the difference between those two and encourage both to occur."

Basically, the ideology of the Lunatic Fringe can be distilled down to two basic concepts: (1) Look everywhere for good ideas and (2) Worry about turning them into products later. Anyway, if you're like me, it's impossible to hear the phrase "lunatic fringe" without thinking instinctively of the chart-topping rock anthem released by Canadian band Red Rider in the early 1980s.

With that in mind, I've linked to this cool Sin City montage featuring the "Lunatic Fringe" song. As an aside: if you're looking for a DVD to watch over the Labor Day weekend and are a fan of film noir and highly stylized graphic violence, check out Sin City. Not only does the film feature Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro - it also includes some unbelievable eye candy in the form of Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, Devon Aoki and Rosario Dawson (as a "machine gun-wielding Dominatrix-Hooker-Godmother").

Tags: lunatic fringe TI innovation Sin City

[video: Sin City's "Lunatic Fringe"]

Posted by dominic at August 31, 2006 7:25 AM | Recommend this! (1) | +dlc | +dig

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