Maybe Scott D. Anthony has innovation in his DNA. His mother founded a company that was a precursor to the Internet, his grandfather produced how-to’s on accounting and was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame, and other members of the Anthony clan have cameos as exemplars of innovation in The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works, How to Do It.
Harvard Business Review Press, 2012
Family members might have fueled Anthony’s early interests, but he enthuses that anyone can reach their full potential and innovate. Anthony is managing director of Innosight Asia-Pacific, and this book is his latest in a series of innovation-themed publications. He is jazzed about innovation, and thinks you should be too. According to Anthony and others who make innovation their business, to thrive in today’s marketplace, you need to remain competitive and adapt, and to do that, you need to be able to innovate.
What is innovation? Anthony cites one innovation blog that has 25 definitions for the term. He settles on one from the New Oxford American Dictionary: to “make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods,” and distills that down to “something different that has impact.” The notion that innovation is creative thinking alone is thus dispensed with. Ideas are good, but “innovation is a process that combines discovering an opportunity, blueprinting an idea to seize that opportunity, and implementing that idea to achieve results.” Hence, “no impact, no innovation.” The playing field is open to anyone with the “right mind set” and the right tools.
Anthony profiles some “Masters of Innovation,” including Thomas Edison and Columbia University President and author Rita McGrath. One premise she teaches is “Your first idea is wrong, so, as quickly as possible, implement a careful plan to learn which of your assumptions is flawed.” The late Steve Jobs’ enduring message applies: “Think Different.”
Along with the seven deadly sins of innovation and how to avoid them, Anthony introduces a “28-Day Innovation Program,” segmented into weekly assignments. In the first week, the reader is coached on how to discover opportunities, while week two offers exercises on blueprinting ideas. The third week outlines how to assess and test those ideas. The program concludes with “moving forward” in the fourth week and incorporating a disciplined approach to the innovation process. At just 304 pages and about 6-by-9 inches in size, you can easily take this book places—and it may do the same for you.
The second edition of Frank K. Sonnenberg’s Managing with a Conscience: How to Improve Performance Through Integrity, Trust, and Commitment advocates that business cultures recognize the value of “intangibles” as the foundation of successful innovation for a competitive business.
The author, a marketing strategist and partner at Sonnenberg & Partners, was the national director of marketing at Ernst & Young for more than a decade.
Because of the speed with which companies can replicate products made by their competitors, the value of “intangibles”— such as customer service, reputation, brand recognition, customer loyalty and product innovation—is what distinguishes one company from another, says Sonnenberg. He examines nine “intangible” factors for cultivating innovation in a competitive company in the 21st century. These include supporting “employees who will be deeply committed to the organization’s mission and values… and passionate about reaching its goals”; nurturing a culture that “stimulates creativity and innovation and reinvents itself every day”; building a “flexible organization by collaborating with other organizations”; and recognizing that “a foundation of trust between an organization and its employees, suppliers and clients is what brings and keeps people together.” This highlights one of the book’s themes: “What goes around comes around.”
Stephen M. Shapiro’s Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition rivals The Little Black Book in size, but the latter outlines a 28-day program, whereas Best Practices breaks down its advice into 40 tips.
According to Shapiro, one of the key reasons to innovate is to end the game of catch-up with competitors and invest in long-term growth, because “the organization that adapts and evolves to address ever-changing market conditions will thrive in the long run.” Open source innovation, challenge-driven innovation, competitive innovation and “innovation tournaments” are some of the techniques profiled. Open innovation refers to accessing expertise outside a given field. That’s what Unilever did when it developed a whitening toothpaste using expertise gleaned by its laundry unit to make clothing whites appear whiter. NASA also used this approach to develop a model for detecting solar activity by employing a retired engineer whose expertise was in dropped cellphone calls.
Not every attempt at innovation succeeds. Failure is written into the process, but it’s all a matter of perspective. Shapiro quotes Thomas Edison: “I have not failed seven hundred times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those seven hundred ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” Shapiro suggests that with challenge- driven open innovation the iterations and costs associated with unsuccessful ventures can be reduced. Creativity can be stimulated, Shapiro says, by “including all employees in the innovation process” and by decentralizing control of that process. “Innovation,” he adds, “will organically emerge once you treat your employees as owners of the business.”
All this time you’ve been reading, your company has been aging. That’s the message from author Claudio Feser in Serial Innovators: Firms That Change the World. Serial Innovators employs sociology, psychology, neuroscience, academic studies and more to look at why some firms are able to regenerate, while others spark and burn out, go bankrupt or fold. Throughout, the tale of a newly minted CEO named Carl unfolds as a detailed case study on how to make headway when you join a company whose board and senior management are rigid and reluctant to adapt to change.
Feser, a McKinsey & Co. director who leads its Swiss office, includes a chart comparing the top 50 companies from 1960 and 2010, and examples of how fresh thinking was brought into their innovation processes. One Swiss company, for example, annually invites a handful of outside experts to “shoot holes in the group’s strategy.” Dysfunctional corporate cultures and the predilection for leaders to make “satisfactory” (as opposed to “optimal”) decisions are also explored.
Companies age when performance deteriorates and “culture lock-in” takes hold, while new firms mimic the older ones and innovate. Hewlett-Packard cofounder David Packard’s speech to employees in 1960 is excerpted. His overall message, writes Feser, was that “people have a desire to do something of value, to fulfill a mission, to give meaning to their lives.” Ultimately, Feser concludes, it comes down to the person at the top: “If company leaders do not accept challenge and diverging views, neither will the organization.”
There is no age limit on innovation, however. In a Dec. 11, 2011, Washington Post article, Vivek Wadhwa shares the results of a study he conducted of U.S.- born CEOs, engineers and product developers that found that “twice as many founders” of companies “were older than 50 as were younger than 25.” Thomas Edison, ubiquitous in seemingly every book about innovation, was 46 when he discovered electricity, and Ray Kroc built McDonald’s when he was in his early 50s. With discipline, motivation and the right resources, innovation is possible at any age.
Suzanne L. Meyer is an editor with NACD.