At the end of the 1940s, and with the help of Cambridge
University, British food company Lyons built the first commercially
deployed computer, calledLeo (Lyons Electronic
Office).
Despite its 1950s success, it was overtaken by US technological
developments. In 1958, the director of the UK's National Research
Corporation lamented, "The American user has supported the American
computer manufacturer in Britain, he has hung back."
Despite its impressive valves, Leo's enduring success had as
much to do with people and process. Leo's consultants met with
success in building business machines for clients outside Lyons
because of their user-centric, systems-oriented approach.
As Georgina Ferry says in her feature, "Expensive it may have
been, but not half as expensive as the catastrophic failures that
have resulted from a one-size-fits-all approach."
The Leo project team displayed a technical ingenuity focused on
solving a business problem that cannot fail to impress, even now.
They studied the US
military's Eniac, discovered Cambridge's calculating Edsac, and
applied their learning to building a machine that could issue
invoices and produce payslips.
But it was not just US government and corporate wealth that did
for Leo. A British management culture suspicious of innovation also
played a part.
We report in this issue that most UK businesses are clamping
down on the use of social networking sites by staff. And yet these
could, if harnessed intelligently, at least begin to incubate
collaborative business benefits.
This killjoy culture is at the opposite pole to the
entrepreneurialism evident in the fact that the biggest contingent
of the latest Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA companies is from
the UK.
Maybe Leo's spirit of innovation lives on.