Why Innovation Cannot Remain in the Realm of the Few

Last week a long-standing dream of mine finally came true when I had a chance to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Even back in the day of studying product design at Central Saint Martins I was always intrigued by the level of experimentation, technical prowess and simply outright genre-busting design and thinking that was going on at the MIT Media Lab and I always wished I could have studied there too. As some of you know, the LEGO Group is a Consortia Research Sponsor and thus chance and fortune collided and enabled me to take part in both the fascinating H20 or Human 2.0 event last Wednesday and the Sponsor day on the Thursday. Both events gave me a unique insight into what it means to be human in the 21st century and how innovation is fuelled on a large scale, seemingly infecting all that enter the Media Lab premises.

Seeing all this made me think of innovation yet again and how the Media Lab was different from many other places I have visited in its attitude and relation to innovation. What strikes you when entering the premises is that innovation is seen a bit like oxygen - it's there, people don't even question it, everybody breathes it and moreover, everybody CAN breathe it, because it is natural. Too often, whether you are in a company or even browsing a bookstore for that matter - innovation seems like the new buzz word, something of a dark art that most people are mystified by, only few people master and more over, a billion-dollar industry exists to tell us how we can become better at it. Of course you will be amused to know that innovation is also part of my job-title, but rather than make me feel special or privileged I feel a strong, sometimes even daunting, responsibility in trying to engender it in everyone around me, empowering people to come with solutions themselves, acting more like a facilitator than some lone genius in an ivory tower.

A book I'm currently reading, called The Upside by Adrian Slywotzky delves into depth explaining what companies do to minimise risk when innovating. He very convincingly points out that not only is it a matter of identifying an opportunity and ceasing it, but how in fact most innovations are likely to fail, even when they are 90% right for the purpose they were developed. Slywotzky goes through a series of examples, including the development of the Prius, the Ipod and others, highlighting just how many steps were required to create these successes and how innovation was present in each and every one of those steps - proving conclusively that innovation has to happen at every level in a company to make such successes as the Ipod to really take off. A product innovation alone wouldn't have gotten Apple to where they are today, but instead a deliberate strategic application of innovation at successive steps of the process, towards the end involving over 50 people, a large project by Apple's standards, but essential in making sure that all parts of the business were optimised to deliver what we now know to have become a legendary example of innovation: the Ipod.

Slywotsky in fact lists a number of principles in his book, which seem to crop up again and again as an approach that works, a formula that ensures that Innovation doesn't remain in the realm of the few, but instead permeates an entire company and ensures that even the tiniest chances of success are systematically increased over time, step by step, by consistently and continuously involving everyone and ensuring that innovation is something everyone contributes to and is part of, rather than a select few.

1. Work fast to pre-empt competition - crazy deadlines mean you get people's undivided attention rather than the phenomenon of mission creep - when deadlines get drawn out, because people get involved in other things in the meantime
2. Share information freely, openly, between all - set up an email sphere in line with what the fifteenth-century mystic Nicolas of Cusa described as 'something whose circumference is nowhere and whose centre is everywhere. Everyone on the mailing list stands equally close to the centre of the action and everyone is capable of being the centre at a particular moment in time - able to draw energy from everyone else in the group to solve today's most pressing problem
3. Encourage young, flexible minds who like to challenge the norm and think in new ways - sometimes this is the only way to stop things being done the way we always have done them. In fact, encourage people to think this way whether they are young or old!
4. Always take pride in asking the toughest questions -about customers, their needs and interests, and the ways the company's business processes can serve those customers better.
5. Plan for version 2.0 - i.e learn from your mistakes and put the learning back in the organisation!
6. Design your business model (distribution, communication etc.) as shrewdly as you design your product!

Now these are very generic bits of advice and the really interesting thing is reading all the case studies and seeing what combination of general advice (above) was mixed in with strategic measures to address the specific weaknesses of the company mentioned. It's always a mix of both - but interestingly, in each of the successes mentioned, it was the deliberate involvement of all parties to the solution, early on in the process that created the necessary momentum to deal with everything else. Thus innovation should be, much like it is at the MIT, like the oxygen in an organisation - we all need to breathe it and we all CAN and SHOULD, because only then can breakthroughs happen!