Since I have spent about 16 hours a day lately looking for innovation across America (shooting mini documentaries), I thought I would sit down and write a few ideas I have on the complicated subject.
First, it’s really not complicated, or it shouldn’t be; it’s just difficult for many people to fully wrap their minds around. Part of innovation is common sense, and for some reason when some people get to work, they stop being consumers – as they are in their normal life – and start spewing the company line.
I will dispense with using Apple as an example because it’s just too obvious. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said a million times about the most innovative company in the world (as voted year after year by executives around the world).
It’s almost too easy to look at Google and Nike as innovators as well. GE and Target clearly fit that description as they have innovated their way to the top in several categories, as has Toyota, Starbucks, and Southwest Airlines. Even old standby, Warren Buffet, continues to innovate his way to the top of those Most Innovative Companies lists.
Granted, as of late, many of the innovative companies I have mentioned have reported down stock prices. Apple, Target, and Starbucks among them. But Steve Jobs at Apple has been there before and knows how to innovate his way out of a slump. Howard Shultz is back at the helm at Starbucks and they are going back to what made them an icon in the first place (like grinding their beans in the store and focusing on an intensely personal and unique coffee experience). Retail is tough all over so even innovative Target isn’t totally immune.
Over the last five years, Proctor & Gamble has turned the aircraft carrier around by actually listening to their customers in a deep and meaningful way, using innovative new practices to turn that learning into profits. In a forthcoming book, The Game Changer, A.G. Lafley, P&G CEO since 2000, talks about how innovation changed the giant consumer products company once they started to really know and understand their consumers better.
Heinz CEO, Bill Johnson managed his way through a near takeover by corporate activist, Nelson Peltz, by using innovative tomato technology and some focused innovative thinking in focusing the nearly 140 year-old Pittsburgh giant. Sometimes innovation can look as simple as turning a ketchup bottle upside down with the dispenser on the bottom.
Recently, I have been flying all over the country examining and shooting innovative health care technologies, talking to leading bioengineering experts, learning from cutting-edge clinical web portal and pharmaceutical innovators – one thing is becoming apparent: Innovation is easier to talk about than execute.
It also scares the pinstripes off a lot of people in corporate America because it is often unruly and doesn’t play well with our preconceived notions. Sometimes it leaves the cube and goes down the hall and starts trouble that saves a company’s bottom line but scares the companies top management. Innovation makes people uncomfortable. It pokes at their insecurities and irritates their prejudices and messes with their 9 to 5 workdays because innovation doesn’t do lunch, doesn’t take vacations, and keeps people up at night.
If innovation was your neighbor, it might be the one you are uncomfortable inviting over for dinner because once it shows up, you are never the same. Think, Jesus, Ghandi, Buda, Martin Luther King; you might say you’d love to have a chat with them but I promise you they will push your buttons and you will leave that conversation on edge.
So what does this ubiquitously overused word “innovation” truly mean?
At its foundation, it means change. It means exactly what Apple says in their tagline: Think different.
With the average MBA costing between $80,000 and $130,000, maybe innovation is getting your MBA from GE or Intel or Johnson & Johnson instead of a university. If you and 100 of your friends paid GE 130 grand each (that puts you in the top tier of their customers) and if you asked their executives to develop a two year program that allowed you to learn about how to navigate and grow and innovate inside the machinery of a real business, up close and personal in a serious, on-the-front-lines experience, what would they say? Ask them. They mentored Six Sigma into every company that manufactures anything including service. With doubts being published every day about the intrinsic value of the current MBA, such an MBA from a innovative company would be worth every dime of your $130,000 and more.
What if the nation’s top 1000 propulsion engineers were hired by a billionaire (who wanted to have his image carved on Mount Rushmore) to launch the innovation project that would wean us from oil (foreign or otherwise), and give us clean and endless energy forever? It means we aren’t trapped by the current Middle East crisises (many of out own doing). Naive? Wait and see..
Albert Einstein, a patent clerk (who couldn’t even get hired as a high school science teacher), sat down and solved the deepest problems of time and space using nothing more than the space between his ears and a pencil and paper. Why do you need a PowerPoint presentation? Garrison Keillor doesn’t need one to tell a compelling story. He just needs that story.
Why is it that Southwest Airlines can run a profitable and legendarily popular airline when almost everyone else is near bankruptcy? It is innovative thinking and precise execution of those innovations.
Innovation is not one thing; it is everything. For innovation to work, everything has to matter. You have to be willing to do what it takes, change your mind, adjust your thinking, shift your paradigm. And it may not be pretty. Innovation hurts sometimes. Building muscle means you have to tear down the current unworked muscle so it grows back stronger. It’s hard work and you will be sore.
Maybe you watched the recent HBO miniseries: John Adams. Abigail Adams understood that without the proper defense her family could die of smallpox. At the time, the only known inoculation against the dreaded disease was to infect yourself with cowpox, which, in effect, gave you immunity to smallpox. But that inoculation was a crude and painful ordeal at the time. Frankly, it was gross beyond description. It involved scratching puss from an infected cowpox pustule, cutting your arm and rubbing the puss into the wound. What followed was horrid and painful because you are basically volunteering for cowpox – not the most pleasant way to spend a month. But it saved lives. Similarly, once you have successfully infected yourself with innovation, you increase your chances of being immune to failure.
There is no patented answer for innovation. It’s like a correct answer; it depends on the question. Every company has the need for different kinds of innovation and there are as many flavors of innovation as there are ways to fail.
Open your mind, look at everything you are doing, question everything, simplify complicated processes, connect with employees and customers in the straightest line; engage everyone inside and outside of your company. But start with yourself. Innovation begins at the end of this sentence. Now what?
