Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas 

We’ve all heard it “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel,” It makes me cringe as much as fingernails on a chalk board. A statement like that indicates a desire to find someone else’s solution and call it good enough. Entrepreneurs almost never leave well enough alone.  

(My thanks to Steve McBride, Independence Daily Reporter for the cartoon.) 

Reinventing the wheel doesn’t necessarily mean creating a wheel like no other, ever. Most of the time, reinventing the wheel means making continuous improvement to existing wheels. To reinvent something requires that it was an original invention at some point. Many times, original inventions are a result of mistakes or accidents. We don’t really know much about the caveman (or woman) that invented the first wheel. Maybe it was a joint effort. Could be that in moving a big rock from point A to point B, someone discovered that when pushed on a round stick, the pushing got easier. Through continuous improvement, the big rock eventually was suspended by two big sticks with round rocks on the end of each; axles and wheels. For eons, wheels have been reinvented and made out of various materials. Until relatively recently, the rides from all various materials have been bone-jarring. Finally, we discovered rubber and developed the inflated tires on our wheels today. We can all be thankful that so many people over so many years didn’t say “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.”  

What we’re really talking about here is the need for continuous innovation and constant improvement. In today’s competitive world, if you leave well enough alone, someone will likely reinvent your wheel and leave you in the dust. When you get a good thing going, you had better keep improving it and always be developing the next big thing. 

As a teenager in the 1970’s growing up in western Kansas, I remember seeing the TV commercials for the Dixon Zero-Turn lawn mower. Revolutionary; it turned on a dime, allowing very close mowing around tress and other obstacles. Mowing time was cut in half. When I moved to southeast Kansas in 2000, I discovered that Dixon mowers were made in Coffeyville. I toured the plant once in about 2003 and saw mower bodies stacked to the ceiling. It had been a slow year. For thirty years, Dixon was king of the zero-turn mower market, especially for residential mowers. Then something happen, perhaps a patent ran out. Overnight, new zero-turn mowers flooded the market from manufacturers everywhere. Dixon, apparently, was caught with no new innovations. In the next couple of years, after layoffs, the Coffeyville plant closed and what was left of production moved to a new owner’s location. Dixon mowers are still made, but long ago lost their dominance in the marketplace. Maybe there could have been a different outcome had the company recognized the need for continuous innovation. 

We all need to be like the entrepreneur who can’t leave well enough alone whether we own a small business or work for others. The businesses, organizations and government offices that don’t recognize the need for continuous innovation run the risk of being deemed obsolete by a demanding marketplace for which “good enough” is no longer good enough. 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu. Archive columns and podcasts at www.fablabicc.org.