Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

You hit the bull's eye, again. Today, any success can come only with product innovation. Apple is a good example. True, innovation is pretty much like an art. Gladwell makes a good parallel here. I wouldn't cut hard lines whether it's conceptual innovation (CI) or experimental innovation (EI). At the end of the day, it's all relative. I personally adore Renoir impressionism. He was one of those who brought it as a new ah!-concept and then developed through experimentation bits into something more mature we call now classic. In fact, Steve Jobs from Apple did the same thing with Macs. Innovation is an engine for your company no matter how you cut it, conceptually or experimentally. What really matters is whether you have or not. CI is quite rare, and it normally sits on top of a product life cycle. EI plays longer, it can happen at any point there. Interestingly, EI is more agile reacting to a lot of triggers including customer preferences. We are fans of the EI-style that favours the non-stop agile approach to product development.

Yes, Sunil, you are right of course. Whatever innovation you stumble across, you take it. And many of the most truly creative innovations have been accidents - including Post-It Notes, Viagra, penicillin, and cellophane, among others.

But the Picasso-Cezanne analogy, as interesting as it is, isn't an entirely convincing story anyway, because artists (including both Picasso and Cezanne) act alone, from a purely individual creative impulse, while innovation in business almost always involves input by multiple players.

Nevertheless, the artist analogy itself is a great illustration of a creative idea that was born by cross-pollinating two different and unrelated disciplines.

First, Cezannes and Picassos come along exceedingly rarely. So, you do not pick which one you’ll be. You hope you are good/lucky enough for either one to ever come along to your company.

What is more important is to figure out how to take advantage of your good fortune, so that the benefits are not fleeting. Picasso created a very strong, differentiated brand by being so boldly different – a great platform to grow and build upon. That is what Apple did – created a differentiated breakthrough and then built upon it.

Malclom Gladwell’s perspective on anything is always interesting to me, and the Picasso-Cezanne analogy is great. But one of the key innovation issues in most businesses is how to foster group-led innovation, and how to do this on a more or less continuing, ongoing basis. What I mean is not that groups by themselves do the innovating, but that innovation at a company is a function that usually touches many different players at the company, and they all have to work together to get new ideas fleshed out and operational.

The pace of change is so great that any company not capable of innovating, again and again and again, will be doomed to commoditization soon. In Gladwell’s analogy, this is Cezanne innovation – tinkering, adjusting, improving, constantly tweaking your new ideas and concepts to perfect them over time. The kind of company you want to have is one that can steadily innovate – one that never finishes innovating. (Naturally, it’s great to have an occasional flash of Picasso brilliance, too – but survival over the long-term requires Cezanne’s steady touch.)

On February 15, Martha and I released our latest book, Rules to Break and Laws to Follow: How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism. In this book we consider at some length the problem of how a customer-oriented business can foster more innovation, on an ongoing, continuous, long-term basis. If you think about it, one of the key ingredients in your own individual creativity is probably just mixing up concepts and ideas. Shuffle your thoughts around, from one subject to the next, and sometimes you’ll come up with a brilliant idea based on applying a concept from one discipline to the next, right?

Well, is there an analog to this when you’re dealing with a whole company full of smart people trying to come up with new ideas and innovations in their business? Our argument is that one of the key ingredients to effective innovation is the diversity of a group’s inputs – that is, how many different points of view are represented in the group? Do you have juniors and newbies in the group, as well as old hands? Do you have accounting or production or HR people, as well as engineers and marketers? Different ages, genders, cultures and backgrounds? And the groups themselves are probably not fixed, per se, but tend to collect and disperse on a more ad hoc basis, with everyone getting into the act at different times.

Of course, the problem with diversity like this is that a lot of times people have some difficulty communicating with each other frankly. That is, when I’m dealing with someone not like me, I might be suspicious or nervous or not completely open. Someone brings up a wild idea and I might shoot it down right away, or I might worry more about what it would mean for my own area. So having an organization that focuses first on establishing a level of trust and openness among all members is crucial to good innovation.

Which brings us back to customer-orientation, because having a culture in which everyone focuses first on acting in the customer’s interest is a great platform for establishing this kind of employee-to-employee trust.