Innovation - Can you create creativity?
Miles Ayling
MIT Consulting
The trouble with innovation is that it’s not binary - there is no single right or wrong way
of doing it. At its best it can be game changing, at its worst it can drain people and
organisations of resource and focus.
So, what is innovation? There are many definitions. Conventional wisdom suggests that
innovation is about breakthroughs, cutting edge technology or medicines. That it is a
field dominated by scientists, eccentrics and the occasional geniuses. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
Innovation comes in many forms. It can be responsive, aspirational, coincidental or it
can be a eureka moment – R.A.C.E to make it easy to remember. It can be incremental
or disruptive. It can be corporate or individual. It can be planned or surreptitious. You
just can’t put a label on it. There is no single blue print for success. Many attempts at
innovation will fail, repeatedly. As Thomas Eddison said ‘I make more mistakes than
anyone else I know, eventually I patent most of them’.
Eddison teaches us another lesson. Innovation is not simply the act of invention.
Eddison didn’t ‘invent’ the lightbulb. As far back as 1800, Italian Alessandro Volta
developed the first practical method of generating electricity - the voltaic pile. Not long
after an English inventor named Humphrey Davy produced the world’s first electric lamp
by connecting voltaic piles to charcoal electrodes.
British scientist Warren de la Rue in 1840, Joseph Swan in 1850, Canadian inventors
Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans in 1874 all improved the idea, but failed to
achieve commercial success. Eventually, in 1879, Edison and his team of researchers
in Menlo Park, N.J., took up the challenge, but it took them another 24 years and 9,000
designs to perfect the light bulb.
Far from an overnight success, it took more than 80 years and thousands of designs
before a commercially successful lightbulb was ‘invented’. This slow, painstaking and
methodical path following a bright idea (the invention) is common to many innovations.
Most will fail to reach commercial viability. Some will be lucky of course, but in most
cases it takes time, money and patience – lots of it. Let’s return to R.A.C.E, and look at
each type of innovation in a little more detail.
Responsive
Very many innovations ‘respond’ to a specific problem or frustration. Something works,
but not well and can be improved. James Dyson’s dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner
represented a shift that altered the way insiders think about the very problem of
removing dust and hair from household floors. In a recent post on LinkedIn journalist
Matthew Syed explained “Dyson’s journey into the nature of creativity started while
vacuuming his own home, a small farmhouse in the west of England, on a Saturday
morning in his mid-twenties.
Like everyone else he was struck by just how quickly his cleaner lost suction. He was
curious, inquisitive, and willing to engage with a difficulty rather than just accepting it.
Consider a couple of aspects of the story. The first is that the creative process started
with a problem, what you might even call a failure, in the existing technology. The
vacuum cleaner kept blocking. It let out a screaming noise. Dyson had to keep bending
down to pick up bits of trash by hand. Had everything been going smoothly Dyson
would have had no motivation to change things”. And it unlikely he would have
amassed his £3bn personal fortune.
Aspirational
Here there is no specific problem to solve, rand no existing technology to grow
frustrated with. Rather, there is a desire to achieve something for personal or group
gain. When the Wright brothers were young boys, their father brought home an object
that he asked them to identify, the brothers could not. Their father then released the
object and it flew inspiring awe in the two young boys. Milton, the boys' father,
explained to them that the small model was called a helicopter. This prompted Orville
and Wilbur to vow that someday they would also fly. So, in all probability the Wright
Brothers invented the airplane because of this childhood experience that fascinated
them. Their maiden flight on the 17th Dec 1903 might have lasted only 59 seconds, but
it changed our world forever.
Not all aspirational innovation is as romantic. It can, sometimes result from something
more concrete, even nationalistic, a ‘need’ rather than a dream.
The 1962 "Address at Rice University on the US Space Effort", better known simply as
the "We choose to go to the moon" speech, was delivered by U.S. President. At the
time, Americans had the perception that the United States was losing the Space Race
with the Soviet Union, which had successfully launched the first artificial satellite,
Sputnik, almost four years earlier. The perception deepened when in April 1961,
Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space before the U.S. could
launch its first Project Mercury astronaut. Convinced of the political need to make an
achievement which would decisively demonstrate America's space superiority, Kennedy
proposed that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade
is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
The aspiration galvanised a nation, and spawned thousands of indirect innovations.
NASA claims more than 1,800, including memory foam, freeze dried food, cochlear
implants, the cordless vacuum and solar cells. The act of committing yourself(s), your
country or your organisation to an ambition - something that has never been done
before, can be daunting and expensive, but it can also be invigorating and game
changing.
Coincidental
More common than many of us would like to think. The world around us is full of
coincidental innovations, by-products, failed experiments, and happenstance. If
Alexander Fleming hadn’t taken a holiday in September 1928, and returned to sort
through petri dishes containing colonies of Staphylococcus, he might never have
discovered Penicillium notatum. In 1968, a scientist at 3M in the United States, Dr.
Spencer Silver, was attempting to develop a super-strong adhesive. Instead he
accidentally created a "low-tack", reusable, pressure-sensitive adhesive.
For five years, Silver promoted his "solution without a problem" within 3M both
informally and through seminars but failed to gain acceptance. In 1974 a colleague who
had attended one of his seminars, Art Fry, came up with the idea of using the adhesive
to anchor his bookmark in his hymnbook. Fry then utilized 3M's officially sanctioned
"permitted bootlegging" policy to develop the idea. The original notes' yellow color was
chosen by accident, as the lab next-door to the Post-it team had only yellow scrap
paper to use.
Imagine where teenagers worldwide would be without the microwave oven, that too was
an accident. In 1945, Percy Spencer was fiddling with a microwave-emitting magnetron
— used in the guts of radar arrays — when he felt a strange sensation. A sizzling, even.
Spencer paused and found that a chocolate bar in his pocket had started to melt.
Figuring that the microwave radiation of the magnetron was to blame (or to credit, as it
would turn out), Spencer immediately set out to realize the culinary potential at work.
The end result was the microwave oven. Velcro, Teflon, Saccharin, Superglue, even the
Pacemaker were all accidental innovations.
Eureka
The aha! moment. The experience of suddenly understanding a previously
incomprehensible problem or concept. Different to other forms of innovation in that it is
not planned, a result of experimentation or serendipity. Archimedes,
generally
considered the greatest mathematicians of antiquity, but he is most famous for his
Eureka moment.
According to Vitruvius, a crown had been made for King Hiero II, who had supplied the
gold to be used, and Archimedes was asked to determine whether some silver had
been substituted by the dishonest goldsmith. Archimedes had to solve the problem
without damaging the crown, so he could not melt it down into a regularly shaped body
in order to calculate its density. While taking a bath, he noticed that the level of the
water in the tub rose as he got in, and realized that this effect could be used to
determine the volume of the crown. By dividing the mass of the crown by the volume of
water displaced, the density of the crown could be obtained. This density would be
lower than that of gold if cheaper and less dense metals had been added. Archimedes
then took to the streets naked, so excited by his discovery that he had forgotten to
dress, crying "Eureka!" Greek meaning "I have found it!". Isaac Newton might have said
the same when sitting under his tree.
Most innovation is the result of hard work, planning, problem solving and years and
years of determination. Less often, and out of the blue a connection or link is made, or a
trigger fired that lets you see a different pattern of doing something, that’s ‘Eureka!’.
So how do you create innovation?
Put simply you don’t. You can’t create creativity.
Those organisations or individuals that try often fail. Innovation has no DNA. It cannot
be defined. It is often consensual and the result of dialogue - Amazon’s Prime service,
for example. It can be one man and his passion, Trevor Bailey’s wind up radio was
invented in a garden shed but was transformational.
It can be a whole nation ‘We choose to go to the moon”, It can be the result of many
failures - WD40, as the name suggests was Normal Larsen’s 40th Water Displacement
formula. So, where do you invest your time and effort?
The idea that innovation could happen anytime, anywhere, it’s just a matter of sitting
back, keeping your fingers crossed and hoping for the best is flawed. It may sound
counter intuitive, but innovation is more structured than that. As Matthew Syed puts it
“Without a problem, without a failure, without a flaw, without a frustration, innovation
has nothing to latch on to. It loses its pivot”.
OK. So, if you don’t sit back, what do you do?
‘Big Bang’ Eureka moments grab the headlines, but the tedious incremental innovations
deliver the goods. Sir Dave Brailsford is credited with championing a philosophy of
'marginal gains' at British Cycling: "The whole principle came from the idea that if you
broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then
improved
it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together".
As well as looking at traditional components of success such as physical fitness and
tactics, Brailsford's approach focused on a more holistic strategy, embracing
technological developments and also athlete psychology. At the 2004 Olympic Games
Great Britain won two cycling gold medals, their best performance since 1908. Under
Brailsford's leadership, the cycling team continued to improve, winning multiple world
championships in road, track, BMX and Mountain bike racing. Great Britain led the
cycling medal table at the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games, winning 8 golds at both,
while British cyclists won 59 World Championships from 2003-2013. He oversaw both
Bradley Wiggins' and Chris Froome's victories in the 2012, 2013, and 2015 Tour de
France. Something that no Briton had achieved in over 100 years of trying.
What was unique about Brailsford’s approach was the way in which he deconstructed
the complex science of innovation and performance improvement. Rather than set an
apparently unattainable target to win 8 gold medals – a mistake many sports make,
Brailsford instead asked people to improve nutrition by 1%, aerodynamics by 1%,
recovery by 1%, bike design by 1% and so on. Each athlete, each coach, each team
member could buy into the concept. Once those initial gains had been made, further
incremental targets were set. The multiplier effect did the rest. It was so simple, but was
game changing. Translate that kind of improvement into the commercial sector and you
have something transformational.
You might not be able to ‘create’ innovation, but you can create an environment where
innovation flourishes. Where innovation and innovators are valued, rewarded and seen
as valuable contributors to society and business. Whatever model you adopt, value
innovation and innovators, it/they may just save your business one day.