Rule number two: Promote failure!

No one in an executive circle wants to hear that his/her idea is “stupid” and that “it will never work”. True innovation is based on trial and error and by default, failure. There are countless examples of great innovations that came to us by “mistke”: Coke, Post Its, Starbucks’ Frapuccino…However the immense majority of companies will not encourage, promote and/or reward failure. There is no Innovator Business degree handed out at Harvard and everyone in the company has the potential to come with a truly innovative, paradigm-changing idea. However how many employees are going to self-kill their own idea simply due to the fact that boss, peers, employees and management will either dismiss the idea in 2 seconds or worse, make a joke about it?

Encourage risk taking by discounting failure. If failure is a dirty word within your ecosystem, you will not see mind blowing ideas from within. This is probably the most difficult mind change for any traditional executive. Embracing and celebrating uncertainty associated with the innovation process is not something widely supported by stock markets and large organizations. This is where most firms fail. However what most firms miss out is that failure and mistakes are different. Define failure as a learning process. There are tons of learning derived from failed experiments.
Mistakes are defined in this context as inattention, poor preparation, and carelessness. Mistakes are indeed failures as they do not offer much learning. They produce little if any valuable information. Celebrate and value the first; obviously avoid at all costs the second.

Conclusion: “Candor of expression” within the enterprise is key to idea generation.Environments where fear of being ridiculed or denigrated quietly rules will churn zero ideas. Innovation promotes failure, if not you will simply fail to…innovate.

Next!

“Innovation is no invention”

Damien Duhamel

www.clearstate.com

Rule number one: Don’t listen to customers, observe them…

Unlike what we are taught in Marketing 101 MBA classes, customers rarely know what they want. The gap between needs and beliefs is the trap that separates “good” from “great”. This gap is not easy to bridge but made the difference between Creative’s and Apple’s MP3 players…Customer feedback helps you to address customers’ needs. It won’t help your business to develop new ideas that will amaze your clients and take your bottom line to new heights. Customers are after linear improvements, not after paradigm change.

Marketers love focus groups. But focus groups reiterate old stories. The participants talk about your brand and your products / services and will tell your story according to their experience. Valuable? Yes maybe for issues centered on packaging, pricing, taste, etc. However the story you will usually hear in focus groups is already yesterday’s story, yet innovation is about future trends. Innovation doesn’t start with “do you remember?”, it starts with “imagine if …”. Innovation is a tough exercise, but it must be done by the enterprise, not by its customers.

No customers 10 years ago would have said “I want a phone that take 5MB pictures, carries and play 1GB of MP3 files, replace my electronic diary, check my emails, surf the web, and watch TV”. Few phone users can guess or anticipate what phones will be able to do 10 years from now.

If you were to ask me what extras do I want from my phone? I would probably answer “I don’t know, I am pretty happy with all the functions I have and never use…” So does this mean mobile phone technology will from now stop to evolve and no existing or new handset makers will be able to shake the industry with something truly revolutionary?

Think again. By observing your customers you will see that they jungle credit cards, home keys, car keys, garage door beepers, ID card, Library card, video club memberships cards, gym cards, parking cards, cash cards, TV remote controls, air cond’ remotes, (etc.) with their super-charged phone. Now once a phone can replace all these every-day utensils, true innovators will have delivered a phone that will answer needs customers actually have, not needs they think they have.

Conclusion: customer feedback only helps you to fix a useful but usually obvious problem. Ethnography helps you to see a usually not so obvious opportunity.

Next!
We will look at how “promoting failure” helps innovative companies

Damien Duhamel

www.clearstate.com