Apple and Google as Creative Archetypes In the hunt for innovation, that elusive elixir of economic growth and corporate prosperity, try a little jazz as an inspirational metaphor. That is the message that John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments - who is also a jazz pianist - plans to deliver in a performance and talk on Saturday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Jazz, Mr. Kao says, demonstrates some of the tensions in innovation, between training and discipline on one side and improvised creativity on the other. In business, as in jazz, the interaction of those two sides, the yin and the yang of innovation, fuels new ideas and products. The mixture varies by company. Mr. Kao points to the very different models of innovation represented by Google and Apple, two powerhouses of Silicon Valley, the world's epicenter of corporate creativity. The Google model relies on rapid experimentation and data. The company constantly refines its search, advertising marketplace, e-mail and other services, depending on how people use its online offerings. It takes a bottom-up approach: customers are participants, essentially becoming partners in product design. The Apple model is more edited, intuitive and top-down. When asked what market research went into the company's elegant product designs, Steve P. Jobs had a standard answer: none. "It's not the consumers" job to know what they want," he added. The Google-Apple comparison, according to Mr. Kao, highlights the "archetypical tension in the creative process." Google speaks to the power of data-driven decision-making and of online experimentation and networked communication. The same Internet-era tools enable crowd-sourced collaboration, as well as the rapid testing of product ideas - the essence of the lean start-up method so popular in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. "These are business and management innovations lubricated by technology," said Thomas R. Eisenmann, a professor at the Harvard Business School. The benefits, experts say, are most apparent in markets like Internet software, online commerce and mobile applications for smartphones and tablets. "The cost of creation, distribution and failure is low, so it takes relatively little time, money and effort to float trial balloons," said Randy Komisar, a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm, and a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Stanford University. That style of innovation is being applied well beyond Google's products and Internet start-ups. The National Science Foundation, for example, is embracing the formula to try to increase commercialization of the university research it finances. Last autumn, the foundation announced the first of a series of grants for what it called the N.S.F. Innovation Corps. The 21 three-member teams received a crash course at Stanford in lean start-up techniques and have been given $50,000 each and six months to test whether their inventions are marketable. The lean formula, with its emphasis on constantly testing ideas and products with customers, amounts to applying "the scientific method to market-opportunity identification," said Errol B. Arkilic, program director at the foundation. Yet while networked communications and marketplace experiments add useful information, breakthrough ideas still come from individuals, not committees. "There is nothing democratic about innovation," said Paul Saffo, a veteran technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. It is always an elite activity, whether by a recognized or unrecognized elite. Successful innovation, Mr. Saffo observed, requires "an odd blend of certainty and openness to new information." In other words, it is a blend of top-down and bottom-up discovery. Open innovation is not a new idea. It flourished, in its way, even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, noted Tom Nicholas, a historian at the Harvard Business School. In fields like electricity, pharmaceuticals and communications, big corporations including General Electric and Dow Chemical routinely monitored the research beyond their walls and bought or licensed promising work, especially the inventions of university scientists. The result, Mr. Nicholas said, was a thriving "ecosystem of private and corporate innovation."