Garage-works: a special space required for innovators

The first rocket emitted a boil of nasty, stinking, yellowish smoke and then fell over, the glue on its fins melted. The second rocket blew up. … Dad came out and yelled, 'Didn't I tell you not to burn the place down?'".

Homer Hickam, from his memoirs, "Rocket Boys", who built rockets in his garage before joining Nasa.

Thinking back to my childhood in upstate New York in the 1960s and 1970s, a fixture in most American garages or basements was the workshop.

Inspired by Popular Science, a magazine exploring the postwar possibilities in America, workshops ranged from the basic to the elaborate.

The latter consisting of a workbench, power and hand tools arranged on a peg board, the requisite, if seldom-used vice and various sundry parts and carcasses of former household appliances.

These workshops served as the nerve centre for household repairs, improvements, and the occasional "history changing" idea.

It was in one such suburban California garage workshop that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded Silicon Valley with their early inventions.

It is also where Bill Bowerman ruined his wife's waffle iron by using it to mould rubber for the lightweight, gripping soles of the first Nike running shoes in 1970.

And, it was where Paul Jobs moved aside his workshop to make way for his son Steve and his friend Stephen Wozniak to found Apple in Los Altos California.

Musicians too, such as Pearl Jam and Nirvana, got their start as "garage bands".

I was recently in a friend's basement where he has set up a complete digital-recording studio alongside his guitar.

What is special about a garage workshop is that it fosters tinkering - a higher level of experimentation. If "necessity is the mother of invention", tinkering is its dad.

Many organisations have institutionalised the garage or basement in their laboratories, customer and innovation centres.

3M is the classic example with its "15-per-cent time" - allowing employees to work on projects outside their normal scope of responsibilities for 15 per cent of their time.

Innovation can be a messy business and relies on social science as much as the other sciences.

Unlike our standard processes, the innovation process needs to fail more often than it succeeds to truly produce its best output.

So, the time, place and network required for innovation might need to be housed separately from the main organisation - might as well make it a two-car garage.