Why is innovation a contact sport?

If the current pandemic has taught us one thing, surely it must be that the world is fundamentally an uncertain place, and in that uncertain world no business can afford to stand still. Innovation is key to driving growth, regardless of the size of the business. So, why is innovation a contact sport? And how might we foster greater innovation in business?

Innovation gives stand out versus competitors, allowing the business to increase their customer base and take market share. Customer needs are constantly changing and to meet their needs on a long term basis businesses need to innovate. Never more true than in today’s fast paced world where customer’s priorities and needs continue to change.

Many corporations have a ‘we know it when we see it’ view of what the result of good innovation looks like. But the challenge is how to create a culture that encourages innovation in what is often a controlled, risk averse, efficiency and process-driven corporate environment. And how to provide the life blood of innovation that is ‘test, learn, iterate/kill’.

It is not always easy for large organisations to look outwards and to adopt innovation. In the same way as Churchill said about history “The farther backwards you can look, the farther forwards you can see”, looking outside and listening hard to the mood music around what is changing in the world can create opportunities and solve problems.

However, to miss the trick can be fatal. One of the most well-known cases of corporate myopia must be the Kodak story. In 1976, Kodak was by far the most dominant player in photography, in fact it could be said that Kodak was photography. Selling 95% of the film and 85% of cameras in the USA can give you that feeling of corporate omnipotence. But by the early 1980’s, Fuji, their only realistic rival, had invented a film that was better than Kodak’s; they had innovated and started eating away at Kodak’s market share. But Kodak had also innovated. In 1975, Steve Sasson, a Kodak engineer, had invented the first digital camera, but not only did Kodak fail to look outside their organisation, the culture of the business did not allow marketing, research and product development departments to talk to one another. They did not develop the technology or take it to market and Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Having worked with and researched leaders in innovation, technical, product and R&D across sectors including FMCG, financial services, food and beverage, travel, fitness, and professional services, the recurring themes that counteract innovation can be defined in the following four ways:

1.      The Dilution Effect

Big companies can dilute innovation due to internal ‘group think.’ Ideas get watered down to something that none of the leaders object to but has low or no value. The ideas that are most different and innovative are talked down with ‘That’s too risky.’ ‘Can’t see that succeeding; let’s just…’

The result isn’t innovation, it’s a slight variation on what the business already had in place.

2.      The Inside Out Effect

‘How do you innovate with a business full of unimpeachable experts?’ one business innovation leader commented. Decisions on the new products/services are made based on internal opinion.

Customers and potential customers are not consulted. Existing customer issues and opportunities are not assessed. What suits the business is what's prioritised.

3.      The Creative Suffocation Effect

Innovation has no hope in organisation cultures that don’t support curiosity and creativity. At their worst, companies actively ‘punish’ employees for coming up with ideas or asking questions.

4.      The Hush Hush Effect

Businesses who want to keep any ideas to themselves in case someone steals their idea. Businesses where ‘We have an innovation team to come up with ideas so we don’t need to talk to anyone else’. All market scanning is done under the radar. There is no collaboration.

Our experience shows that innovation requires diversity of thought, diversity of people, culture, sector and experiences.

"In the long history of humankind [and animal kind too] those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed” - Charles Darwin

Most inventions have not come from one person’s work alone, even if that is how it appears. Einstein, famously an intellectual loner, when working on his Theory of Relativity, realised that time wasn’t a constant in his equation when chatting on a walk with another physicist.

James Watson and Francis Crick didn’t really know each other before they started work on the problem of the structure of the DNA molecule. Their discovery in 1953 was based on the X-ray diffraction image produced in 1952 by Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling and Maurice Wilkins. From this collaboration, we understand the structure of DNA double helix, the building blocks of all life. Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded a Noble Prize in 1962.

The criticality of collaboration for innovation has increased as our world has become more complex. Between 1900 and 1950, the Nobel Prize was usually awarded to an individual, with only 4 teams awarded the prize in this period. Between 1951 and 2000, of the 69 prizes awarded, over half were to teams.

Steven Johnson in his book ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ says that "Innovation and evolution thrive in large networks”. Several companies have made open collaboration part of their modus operandi. GE have long had their Open Innovation Manifesto supporting collaboration between experts and entrepreneurs from anywhere to share ideas and solve problems. Then there is LEGO that set up a collaboration forum in response to a drop in sales, driving co-creation of new innovative LEGO sets and as a result grew the business once more.

"Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.” – Steve Jobs

Bringing together disparate objects and lines of thinking is behind many innovations. Famously cat’s eyes were invented after Percy Shaw, a road mender, took a drive one foggy night and had his headlights reflected back from a cat on the roadside. The reading system used by the visually impaired was invented by two ‘joining the dot’ events. The first in 1820 when an 11 year old blind boy, Louis Braille, was handed a pine cone and he wondered if he could translate letters into raised bumps and dots. A further link was created in 1824 when he saw Captain Barbier’s new invention ‘night writing’ used for night time battle communication. Braille took the 12 dots developed by Barbier, and simplified them into six dots for braille that is still used almost unaltered today.

Nathan Myrhvold has patents across a wide range of unconnected disciplines including digital displays, 3D graphics, surgical staples and genome selection. He commented ‘A spark of creativity is taking ideas from one place and applying them to another place in an utterly different context’

As Greg Orme states so eloquently in his award winning book ‘The Human Edge’

“...to develop your ideas to their full potential you need to gather feedback and creative fuel. In a complex and fast changing world, it is not a question of if you collaborate but how.”

Innovation is also about collaborating with your audience, in co-creation. Test ideas and prototypes with customers early to learn, iterate and test again and again. This experimentation allows the business to ‘Think Big, Start Small, Learn Fast’ as Chunka Mui advocates. The prototype might be a web page or a design made from cardboard and plasticine or a roleplay of a service. The key is to develop a hypothesis, test with the minimal effort, gather the data, learn and iterate or kill. We all want to avoid being a Betamax, or diversifying into unsuccessful products as Coors did with their ‘Rocky Mountain Spring Water’ and Cheetos did with their Cheetos flavoured Lip Balm!

Innovation isn’t about a lone mad professor in a dark room, nor is it a bunch of people sat on bean bags in a room with whiteboards. Innovation happens when we create the environment to encourage curiosity and creativity and we collaborate with a diverse range of inputs from within and crucially outside the organisation. Innovation happens when we collaborate with customers in experimenting with ideas, learning from each conversation, piece of research or response to a prototype.

Innovation is definitely a contact sport!

About the Authors

This article was written in a collaboration between two people with different skills and experiences but with a shared passion for innovation.

Jacqui Rigby (PhD) brings together teams across businesses to drive strategic change, establish agile teams and develop innovative digital products driven by solving customer problems. She has worked in sectors as broad as legal, retail, financial services, travel, pharmaceuticals and funeral planning. She can be found at https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/jacquirigby

Patrick Burge works with innovation and innovative companies across many sectors including advising Start Ups and growing companies on strategy, growth, sales, funding and planning. He can be emailed at [email protected] or found at https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/patrickburge