We live and work in an era when seemingly every waking minute brings an invitation to visit yet another site on the World Wide Web. Inundated with calls to check out www.whatever.com, we can easily lose sight of the fact that the birth of the Web is part of our very recent history. And notwithstanding the proliferation of personal and corporate vanity pages on the Web, this world of hyperlinks and hot spots has brought about dramatic changes in the means by which many individuals and organizations communicate, work, and trade. For new-products professionals interested in the processes that give rise to radical innovations, what lessons can be learned from the development of the World Wide Web?
To gain insight into the process that resulted in the development of the first Web browser and Web server software, Ari-Pekka Hameri and Markus Nordberg examined project proposals, e-mail exchanges, and other documentation, and they interviewed key personnel who were involved in the process. From this research, they were able to document the process and the environmental constraints that shaped the development and diffusion of the tools and technologies that form the foundation of the World Wide Web.
Although a staggeringly diverse range of Web-related services and applications have surfaced during the past few years, the original Web tools and technologies were targeted for a relatively small, focused community of researchers. Specifically, the origins of the World Wide Web are found in efforts aimed at meeting the information-sharing needs of researchers in the realm of high-energy physics. This far-flung group required a global network that could facilitate the interchange of documents stored in diverse formats on a wide variety of computing platforms.
Meeting those needs required neither excessive R&D investments nor radically new core technologies. Instead, the solution involved the integration of existing technologies--networking tools and protocols, document formats, and desktop applications and development tools--by an innovator who had both the necessary vision and firsthand knowledge of the practical benefits that were needed. From a management perspective, perhaps the key lesson learned involves giving R&D personnel both the freedom and the support to initiate new projects and studies.