The Real Heroes of Innovation
What could be more exciting than starting with a blank sheet of paper and creating something of real value? Making something out of nothing, pointing to something that’s in the marketplace and saying ‘I did that’.
In life, there isn’t much that’s more exciting than this.
Being in the right place at the right time, seeing what no one else has seen, connecting the dots and having the perseverance to drive an idea all the way to launch and commercial success. This is the entrepreneur story that we know well.
But somehow this story has been stolen by the start-up. The word ‘entrepreneur’ or even ‘innovation’ has become synonymous with supercool, hyperintelligent and astonishingly young guys making millions.
I want to explore something that’s equally as challenging as the start-up story and – if you get it right – highly rewarding. I want to explore the story of innovation in large organisations where the need to refresh is ever-present. All companies were start-ups once and for many of them that spirit lies dormant, waiting to be reactivated.
This book gets under the skin of how you can make innovation really happen in organisations that have an embedded operational mindset. In my experience these are generally large organisations. I hope you find it a practical book, rich in the stories and lessons learned from the frontline of corporate innovation.
Established companies have their own rhythm and new suggestions are often met with crossed arms. These companies know they need to take a few risks and try doing things differently. But it’s tough, really tough. There seem to be roadblocks everywhere. The organisation is almost hardwired to repeat success and reduce risk, and now it is being asked to do the opposite. Somehow the battle to innovate is being fought at work and not in the marketplace.
Every few years at ?What If! we take the innovative temperature of our clients. In 2012 we asked 50 senior executives responsible for innovation in large global companies to tell us how the innovation ‘landscape’ was changing. They told us that the future feels much more uncertain, that it has become extremely difficult to plan for innovation and that executives need to be better equipped to deal with ambiguity. They reported that the need for disruption is forcing people to look beyond their category and comfort zone and that stakeholder relationships are getting more complex, with more hurdles to overcome than ever before.
It’s in places like these that the real heroes of business work. To innovate at scale and create wealth and employment for many is in my view the most noble of commercial challenges. I want to tell the stories of the people who do this, how they have struggled, how they have succeeded and what this can teach us.
I want all those executives who’ve had their entrepreneurial mojo beaten out of them – or who think it’s the preserve of the groovy – to think again. After 20 years of innovating with large companies I know that serendipitous invention and the creative exploitation of ideas is a muscle that you can choose to work out or allow to wither.
Serendipitous invention and the creative exploitation of ideas is a muscle that you can choose to work out or allow to wither
Serendipity – or seemingly ‘happy accidents’ – is a fascinating concept and I’ll define it in detail in just a few pages. The concepts of serendipity and innovation are sibling and they somewhat merge in this book. Serendipity is the connective raw material for successful innovation. It’s an important element of innovation, especially in a large company where many have their heads down and their peripheral vision reduced. Innovation is the commercialising of what looks to the outsider like a ‘lucky break’. You can’t deliver innovation in a large organisation unless you have a practical grip on what serendipity really is and how you can make it work for you.
In calling this the book The Science of Serendipity I’m using the term ‘science’ with considerable licence. Over five chapters I’ve bundled a series of observations about how people prepare themselves so that they can connect the seemingly unconnected and push on to make something out of these connections in their organisation. Without doubt there are practical steps you can take to be ‘lucky’ and hit upon the next big thing. Together these five chapters form a logic or a ‘science’ to the serendipitous discovery and exploitation of ideas. This book isn’t about theory; it’s a practical book based on practical experience for those grappling with innovation at scale.
Fundamentally, innovation is about how human beings get inspired to look in new places, work together and react to the unwelcome and the unexpected. Creating innovation within a large organisation takes a mix of determination, provocation, experimentation and political savvy. I’ve included here many stories, observations and lessons learnt from a wide variety of sectors. Hopefully you’ll agree with me that it’s both fascinating and instructive to explore beyond the boundaries of your industry and take a peek at how others are innovating.
I love telling stories, particularly innovation stories. I love the drama and the essential ‘human-ness’ of these stories. I take innovation seriously but not solemnly; as a subject it deserves to be provocative, playful and engaging.
My own story is of working for a big company, then a small company that now works with big companies. I started work in the 1980s as a marketer with Unilever, the giant consumer goods company. I spent years figuring out how to help people all over the world get cleaner clothes, enjoy fragrant armpits, have shinier kitchens and remove unimaginably awful stains from their loos. It was an inspiring education in how a large company connects with its customers and makes them happy.
Then in 1992, when I was 29, I had one of those Maslow Moments when you realise what all that self-actualisation stuff is really about. I teamed up with a colleague – Dave Allan. We had no money, no partners, no kids, no debts – we actually had nothing apart from a crazy desire to reinvent the way large businesses develop new stuff. So we decided to set up a company called ?What If! in London. What we lacked in a plan we made up for in optimism.
Today, nearly 20 years later, we have 250 colleagues (we call them ‘?What If!ers’) and offices in three continents. Over the past two decades we have worked with hundreds of great businesses helping them to ignite and sustain a radically more innovative approach to business. We’ve partnered with some of the world’s most ambitious companies in most market sectors – all of them looking to accelerate growth through innovation. We have completed over 5000 innovation engagements in 45 countries and coached over 50,000 people to help strengthen their innovation muscles.
But when we started we weren’t that great. Looking back I shudder to think how naive we were. Our first innovation assignment did not light up our client. It was clear that we hadn’t spent enough time with consumers in their own homes, we hadn’t developed the commercial argument behind our ideas and we hadn’t understood what was driving the people within our client’s organisation who had to say ‘yes’ to the idea. Feeling down – in a dive of a bar in north London – Dave and I scribbled down how we were going to react to what felt like a disaster. We didn’t know it then but we were committing ourselves to the core innovation principles that would evolve to become the foundation of our business. Pity I don’t still have that scrap of paper; but here’s what we agreed:
These principles have remained pretty true over 20 years. Along the way we’ve gathered an amazing team that has helped us to evolve our approach, engagement after engagement, year after year.
There’s one thing I’ve always believed is critical in growing a business – paranoia. Seriously, I think it’s a good thing. I’ve always been criticised for being upset with the things around me; I don’t care. I think it’s good to look over your shoulder every day; I like to worry all the time. I like restless people – always trying new stuff, never satisfied with things.
So at ?What If! we’ve tried just about every innovation tool, structure, behaviour, philosophy – call them what you will – we’ve tried them. Twenty years ago we started recruiting supertalkative multilingual consumers, arranged them into panels and trained them to be creative. We developed a homegrown philosophy that involved literally moving in and living with customers. We started recruiting what we called ‘naive experts’ – people with tangential but surprisingly useful expertise to our clients. We banned the use of our clients’ internal business jargon and forced ourselves to talk only in the language their consumers would use. We pioneered meetings with clients on buses, in bedrooms, in kitchens – anywhere to better the connection with ‘reality’.
By the mid 1990s we had established a ‘Realness’ team whose job was to translate ideas into physical objects, on the spot. We never called any of this ‘ethnography’ or ‘prototyping’ or ‘customer centricity’; to us it was just one huge rolling experiment to find the best way to innovate. In 1996 we started training our clients in the techniques of innovation and flexible thinking. Many of our innovation principles are embedded into the training and development programmes of the world’s most successful companies.
Ten years ago we started to realise just how exciting the world of innovation was becoming. Although it was useful to read about companies doing great stuff, it had far more impact to visit them and hear from the top brass themselves about how innovation really works. We established our ‘TopDog’ study tours and today have taken over 400 senior executives on intensive immersion experiences. We’ve visited over 50 organisations ranked as the world’s leading innovators. We’ve seen companies up close and personal such as Google, Apple, WL Gore, Walmart, Lego, IKEA and many more. After each tour we’ve worked with the 20 or so executives in attendance to distil the learning. We’ve literally been all over the world in our pursuit of innovation excellence.
One of the things we insist on during our visits is that the company leaders talk informally and from the heart about their struggle to innovate. We encourage them to go backstage to the warehouse, the staff canteen or the loading bay and then we’ll quiz staff to see if what we’re hearing stacks up. These visits, and the debates they have provoked, have surfaced fascinating nuances in how innovation really happens.
More recently, as our clients have become more ambitious around innovation, our work has expanded to the scale of organisational transformation. How can a large organisation start to work with agility and how can it do this day after day? Our years spent at the coalface of innovation have given our approach to agenda setting at the leadership level, to educational programmes and to innovation projects, a uniquely practical perspective.
Serendipity is an intriguing word. Alongside ‘Irish Eyes’ and ‘Island Time’ it’s in the top ten of boat names in the US. The word ‘serendipity’ has an undeniably mellifluous quality about it. You can roll it enjoyably around your tongue and it regularly tops the charts of favourite English words, alongside discombobulate, twiffler and mumpsimus.
These are enjoyable facts but they don’t help us get under the skin of serendipity or understand how it can unlock all that innovation promises.
To understand the concept of serendipity we have to go back a thousand years to a story emanating from the East and retold many times over the centuries.
The tale is charming. Three Princes of Serendip (today we know this as Sri Lanka) were sent by their father, the king, on a journey to test their suitability to reign. Along the way they met a camel driver who asked them about his lost camel. The three princes were able to describe the camel in much detail: ‘Your lost camel is blind in one eye, is missing a tooth and is carrying butter and honey’. So accurate was the description that suspicions were raised and the princes thrown into jail. But later they were pardoned as it became clear that they had merely connected many separate observations together to produce the uncannily accurate story.
On their travels the princes had seen grass eaten from one side of the verge and reckoned an animal blind in one eye must have caused this. Grass was scattered unevenly, so a tooth must have been missing. And the ants on one side of the road indicated the presence of butter, the flies on the other side of the road honey. The story continues along a similar vein, each twist sees the clever princes combine seemingly casual observations – things that most people might miss – into something more meaningful.
‘This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word’
This fairy tale was popular in the bustling metropolis of Venice in the sixteenth century. I can imagine it as a sort of early day detective story; its clever twists and reasoning appreciated during the Renaissance. In the English language the word serendipity surfaced relatively recently – 250 years ago. The earliest known usage is by Horace Walpole, son of a Prime Minister and man of letters. In 1754 he mentions the Three Princes of Serendip who ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’ and ‘This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.’
Most dictionaries define serendipity as the occurrence of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way – a ‘happy accident’. This definition seems to imply serendipity is purely a chance or a random kind of thing. The ‘sagacity’ element Walpole mentions seems to have been dropped.
The definition of serendipity that I’m using assumes a happy and profitable outcome that may be unanticipated but has not been found purely by chance. What looks like luck – a ‘happy accident’ – is in reality hard-earned.
What looks like luck – a ‘happy accident’ – is in reality hard-earned
This concept seems to be wholly suited to the reality of what it feels like to innovate. So many successful innovation stories involve hard-working people who set out on a mission. Their precise goal may be a little fuzzy, but they are determined to right some wrongs and, as Steve Jobs said, put a ‘dent in the universe’. These people have cast their nets wide. Maybe they have broad experience or maybe they have a diverse team working for them. The more they get out and about and fill their mental filing cabinet with provocative stimulus, the more likely they are to spot patterns and make some interesting connections. This works the intuition muscle; pretty soon they get confident with their gut. Louis Pasteur was aware of this when he commented ‘chance favours only the prepared mind’.
Listen to innovators describe how they felt along their journey. Only they know how hard they worked to make a single new connection and how many connections failed to yield anything of value. Only they know how well they prepared their people, so that when an opportunity appeared they spotted it immediately and made it into something. Luck for them doesn’t exist – it’s a romantic, illusory concept. They have made their own success. ‘Luck’ is the label of the onlooker.
Serendipity is more than just setting yourself up so that great connections become more likely; it delivers a result as well. You can’t be serendipitous or innovative if you don’t know how to deal, there and then, with the connection you’ve just made. Think of it as a game of two halves. First we collide with as much stimulus as possible; next we seize on a connection and do something about it. This is why serendipity fits so well with innovation and not creativity. To stumble upon a new connection may be what some label ‘creative’, but to commercialise it is an altogether different game. This is innovation and that’s the game we’re interested in.
‘The harder I practice, the luckier I get.’
Variously attributed
The story of the serendipitous discovery of Viagra is packed with learning for innovators. If Brown hadn’t been rejected in his early attempts to work on ED, if Brown hadn’t worked out of a crush of an office – if these things hadn’t have happened then maybe Pfizer would never have discovered its winning product. But Brown and Pfizer weren’t just lucky. Because he was prepared, then chance did favour him.
So, determination, a diverse but intimate network, intuition and agility – these are all concepts found in the 1000-year-old tale of the Three Princes of Serendip and the modern-day invention of Viagra. These are the ingredients of innovation. They seem to make for an altogether more realistic innovation recipe than one that claims innovation is somehow preordained through great strategic thought and rigorous planning.
Innovation and serendipity, they’re both extremely social – so much is bound up with how people rub along together. This book places human beings, with all their weird foibles, at the centre of the science of serendipity. The ‘science’ goes like this: get hold of the right type of person and give them a brief that is both constraining yet has plenty of room for exploration. Then unleash them on a quest for provocative insight and ensure they do experimental stuff rather than talk about clever stuff. Above all they need good humour to pick themselves up, dust themselves down and try again. With this in mind, this is how the book flows:
The message of the book is that you can make your own luck if you’re prepared to work hard and be bold.
Of course, there is a British bias to the book – I live in London, write in British English and like warm beer – but I do believe that innovation affects us all. It’s a global phenomenon. I’ve lived in Asia and the Middle East and worked pretty much everywhere. There are some clear cultural differences in the way we do business that most of us are familiar with, but innovation is a basic instinct and like arguing, laughing or canoodling; we all do it much the same way wherever we are.
In this book I use the word ‘company’ and ‘organisation’ pretty much interchangeably. The terms ‘customer’ and ‘consumer’ do mean different things (buyer and user) and I’ve tried to use them accurately.
Finally, innovation is allergic to overthinking. Often the concept that has been worked and reworked, debated and re-debated, researched and re-researched, morphs into something utterly mediocre. Along the way the spark of an idea got throttled. Innovation is a ‘doing’ sport where diving in and trying things out is better than thinking or talking for too long, so I have deliberately biased the content towards action rather than analysis. Where I can, I tease out the stresses and strains executives have felt when trying to do things differently – I hope this gives you comfort that you’re not alone.
It takes 2 hours and 15 minutes to read this book – that includes a break for a cup of tea. Or you can finish it in a fortnight by reading for 10 minutes a day. After you’ve put it down for the last time, I hope you’re going to grab the phone, call your colleagues and get stuck into some of the exercises and activities I’m going to share with you. Above all, you must not be afraid to try; accept that you won’t get everything right and that failure will shape a greater victory very soon.
To find out more go to www.whatifinnovation.com
‘Serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter.’
Julius H. Comroe