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The word “innovation” buzzes around business today. Every startup professes to be innovative, and writers, academics and industry leaders stress the need for a “culture of innovation” in journals, news and inflight magazines. For those of us with a mandate to innovate — especially those with Innovation in our title — should we worry that the term will go stale?
In fact, I worry more because I see so little deep innovation. Rather, I find too many companies over-selling merely better inventions.
Innovation or Invention?
What is the difference? For me, innovation requires a radical new understanding of some basic questions of your craft. When James Dyson’s team designed a new fan, they did not improve the design of the blades: they created a quite new way of moving air without blades at all. Doing so, they overturned our most basic understanding of what constitutes a fan. Until then, fans had developed gradually in the eons since a caveman first wafted cool air with a leaf. Dyson’s bladeless fans are revolutionary.
On the other hand, incremental invention only extends what you already know. You have a lawn mower? And a separate garden vacuum? Put the two together and create a mower-vac. I can’t deny the smart design thinking, but I don’t see compelling innovation there.
Enjoying Extremism
Re-imagining basic tenets is easier said than done. Surely the flash of inspiration that leads to the bladeless fan occurs once-in-a-lifetime, or emerges from an extraordinary mind who you just cannot go out and hire.
We readily believe such legends, and like many legends some true stories lie behind them. You can find geniuses out there.
Nevertheless, in the absence of regularly recruiting the most brilliant thinkers, I believe we can effectively train smart people to think more radically. To give you a flavor, let me share one simple challenge that I like to present to creative teams which may get you thinking at the edges immediately.
Take your idea to extremes. How do you improve the efficiency of a fan? What if we built huge blades, taking up the entire ceiling or wall? What if the wall itself became the fan? Or what if the blades shrank to a tiny scale? From there, what if there were no fan blades at all?
The secret here is not to reject the extremes as immediately unworkable. Rather, you use them as a jumping off point for the most remarkable thought process … what if such a thing were possible?
I have played with this idea many times. In a rather boring discussion of software license pricing, we enlivened the day by looking at the extremes. What if we just gave away our software for free? How could we profit from that? What would a successful free version need to deliver? Now look at the other extreme: what if a single license cost $25,000? How could you justify a single license at such a price? Well, consider that you can easily find a walnut desk for the CEO’s office similarly priced. Why wouldn’t an executive pay for the one piece of software that transformed their understanding of their business? Can we build it? What would such an application look like – software as a valued, proud possession of your chief decision maker?
The point is not to actually build at the extremes in every case, or in any case. Sometimes you will find your breakthrough product idea. More often, the extreme thinking takes you down a new route. You come back to reality refreshed and with some genuinely new thoughts.
Diversity Is Strength
No one finds it easy to build a team able to embrace such challenges regularly. However you can take some steps to encourage that elusive “culture of innovation.” Firstly, let’s be a little innovative ourselves and question the attempts to create a corporate culture in the first place. A single, uniform organizational style hardly seems transformational. Rather, you need a diverse, multiform meeting-place of cultures, where people have quite different backgrounds, biases and conceptual starting-points in life and work. Diversity reflects more than mere political correctness: it delivers a measurable advantage for research and development.
For example, economists at Carnegie Mellon have shown how the presence of women in a team results in a higher score of workgroup intelligence compared to merely increasing the overall IQ scores of the team members.
Thus, in Silicon Valley, companies and investors have started to worry about the character of their workforce. Major brands, such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo!, have found they still largely recruit white male employees. They know this reflects a weakness, directly or potentially. Diversity is not merely pleasing; diversity makes teams vigorous and strong, too.
I will suggest that diversity needs to go further than just gender and race or national background. Building teams from diverse communities of practice helps, too.
The best product manager I ever hired started her career selling photocopiers, moved to technical support and was working in marketing before joining a product design team. Her insights into user needs were often far more telling than those of her computer-science-immersed colleagues.
Divergent Cultures, Shared Values
However, variety alone does not suffice. Varied cultures need clear, committed and shared core values which both foster and support innovation. You need a culture that moves fast, because innovations often fail – the risk is not only intrinsic to the work but also part of the fun. It’s a perhaps a cliche of modern business to say that if you are going to fail, fail quickly. However this is too often misunderstood. Yes, you must identify errors early in the process, but the deeper meaning is that you must be moving fast enough to make substantial progress and still be able to correct for failure. Teams must take responsibility. Failing fast is not an excuse for shoddy thinking or execution. Yet at the same time you should support the personal and organizational freedom to make mistakes from which we can learn.
Out of the Rut
When you foster new cultures within your organization and support them with committed core values, real benefits emerge. Your teams should be happier, faster-moving but more secure. And whereas before you may have had good ideas from time to time, and continuous progress, you will now open up radically new scenarios. Your diverse team will ask diverging questions: their emerging answers will often escape the well-worn rut of linear advances. Supported by core values, you will find real innovation, not just invention.
Donald Farmer is VP of Product Management at QlikTech.
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