Elizabethtown, Kentucky — Friday May 11, 2012, Gonzeaux #5.

I’m sworn to secrecy. As I sit here in Ruby Tuesday’s enjoying a petite sirloin and free wifi, I contemplate the secretive nature of innovation.

Open innovation is all the rage isn’t it? You hear all the time how much it makes sense to have a generous attitude about ideas. The paradox is, some innovations need to be kept secret, or, the innovator loses advantage.

Or worse, loses freedom.

Do you think Pixar is sharing early rushes of their latest movies with just anybody? Or is Apple giving us any sense of their new strategy? No, it will be a surprise when they announce something really cool. Pixar has never had a box office failure. One of the reasons is they kill projects that don’t meet their standards — and consumers are none the wiser.

Secrets are sometimes a very good idea.

So, in Kentucky there are two big innovation secrets. One is a guy I just talked to in Louisville about his new software project. The other is marijuana. Kentucky used to grow a lot of tobacco, they still do, but the new cash crop, increasing in the recession years, is bluegrass state pot. Kentucky grows more marijuana than any state except California — 2 billion dollars worth of weed have been chopped down in Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. That’s a lot of weed, and, that’s the tip of the iceberg, or shall I say, the top of the bong bowl. If the feds got 2 billion worth, how much did the growers keep? 10 billion?

Is it wrong to think of this secret cash crop as innovation? If you define innovation as novel, useful, and  profitable, it arguably is highly innovative. The novelty comes in how the growers are hiding crops from the authorities, they are quite creative! Useful? If it weren’t of use to consumers they wouldn’t pay for it. Profitable? See figures above.

Innovation often walks the line between legal and illegal, or, in the dark shadows of secrecy. Innovation sometimes needs hid in the closet (or in a steep mountain “holler” accessible only by foot) until the proper time, sometimes innovation needs done on the sly. I heard a story about a line worker that hid a major process improvement innovation because he wanted to maintain the illusion of much harder work. That improvement, unhidden, could have saved the company millions of dollars.

How do you take a disruptive innovation to market without risking life, limb, reputation, career, money, or the company? This need to be creative in revealing an innovation is not often talked about, but imagination is required. This would be a good question for the experts at FEI 2012!

Maybe those Kentucky boys growing weed can lobby to grow medical grass — legally, and step out of the shadows as economic innovators.