CHAPTER
4
Opening Up Innovation
Innovation was once safely corralled in the R&D department and kept in creative quarantine. And there it largely stayed throughout the twentieth century.
In the new century, this has been fundamentally changed. The change has been ignited by three realizations. First, pumping more money into R&D does not necessarily lead to more or better innovation—as many companies have discovered to their cost.
The challenges of R&D are well illustrated by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharma giants spend millions on drug development. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, for example, estimates that the development costs for each drug hitting the market are a staggering $802 million.
But despite the massive amounts of money that are being spent, drug approvals have fallen in recent years. The drug pipeline is beginning to dry up.
If pharma companies, which have traditionally been some of the most innovative organizations, are struggling to make money from their R&D investments, maybe conventional innovation models are no longer valid. The closed model of innovation, with in-house R&D conducted in secrecy and profit earned on patented products, may have had its day.
The second realization was that a company’s innovators are uniquely powerful. The inventor of a new drug or the developer of a bestselling computer game can bankroll an organization for years. Such people need to be handled with care. As organizations have come to realize the importance of this small coterie of smart individuals, they have sought out better ways to manage and lead them.
In parallel, there has been another realization: that a company does not have a monopoly on great ideas. Over the last decade, we have seen company after company broaden the reach of its innovation activities in an attempt to access ideas from customers, suppliers, employees, and interested bystanders.
Opening P&G
Take the story of Procter & Gamble, which we looked at with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School, where he launched the Management Innovation Lab.1 In 2000, P&G was at a crucial point in its long history. One of the world’s best-known corporations and the creator of some of the world’s most famous and successful brands was at a crossroads. Its CEO, Dirk Jager, had left after a mere 18 months in the job. In March, the company announced that it would not meet its projected first-quarter earnings. The stock price was spiraling downward, falling from $116 per share in January to $60 by March. The massive loss of $85 billion in market capitalization was matched by the loss of confidence within the company. It provoked a media frenzy. Perhaps most poignantly, Ad Age headlined its front-page story: “Does P&G Still Matter?” It was one of many column-inches devoted to the company’s apparently impending demise.
P&G’s then new CEO, A. G. Lafley, provided an instant dose of reality:
We weren’t delivering on goals and commitments to analysts and investors. Major P&G businesses were underperforming—only three of them accounted for 80 percent of the total value created in the 1990s. Competitors were swooping in and gobbling up market share. We were overinvested: we overbuilt capacity, hired too many people, funded too many aggressive introductions of new products and expansions of existing brands. P&G brands were not delivering good consumer value: we weren’t consistently leading innovation, and prices were too high. We had priced up big, established brands to pay for new products and aggressive geographic expansion. Our costs were also too high. We had frayed relations with important customers, who were frustrated with incompatible strategies, poor service levels, and P&G’s inability to create value for them. We were too internally focused. Consumed with the massive reorganization, and with so many people in new jobs, we were all spending too much time managing internal transactions.
In addition to this litany of internal problems, P&G had the abiding corporate challenge of achieving growth. A mature company such as P&G is usually expected to deliver organic growth rates of around 4 to 6 percent every year. Historically, this growth had been delivered by the company’s formidable research and development resources—thousands of researchers spread worldwide. But with the proliferation of new technologies and intensifying competition, P&G’s standard approach to R&D was under threat. Only 35 percent of its new products met their financial objectives. R&D productivity was stagnant.
Lafley’s prescription for the ailing corporate patient was wide-reaching. Estimating that it would take three years to get P&G back on track, he focused the company on four core businesses (accounting for 54 percent of sales and 60 percent of profits); its big, established leading brands; and P&G’s top 10 countries (80 percent of sales and 95 percent of profits). Costs, which had skyrocketed under Jager, were cut. Capital spending, which had leapt to 8 percent of sales, was trimmed. Nearly 10,000 jobs were lost around the world as underperforming businesses were closed and the company left businesses that were now regarded as nonstrategic. Some product lines were discontinued, investments were written off, and brands such as Comet, Crisco, and Jif were sold off.
And, perhaps most boldly of all, in the midst of establishing the new P&G order, Lafley announced an entirely new approach to innovation. P&G’s corporate innovation fund had increased sevenfold in four years. Two-thirds of these projects were cut. Lafley announced that in the future, instead of relying on its internal research and development, P&G expected that 50 percent of its innovation would come from outside the company. The R&D numbers would remain the same, but the focus would be on maximizing ideas both internally and externally.
The logic was simple. For every one of the company’s researchers, P&G calculated that there were 200 people—scientists or engineers—outside the company who had talents that the company could utilize. Instead of thinking in terms of having 7,500 people in corporate R&D, P&G recalculated that there were 1.5 million people worldwide whose knowledge the company needed to tap into. Research and development was reincarnated as Connect + Develop with an organization of 1,507,500 people.
Reality and Development
The positioning of Connect + Develop was important. First, it was made clear that Connect + Develop was not about outsourcing P&G’s research and development capability. It was about finding good ideas and bringing them in to enhance and capitalize on the company’s internal capabilities. In essence, it was an insourcing strategy. The second point was that Connect + Develop was not billed as a “transformation” program.
It focused on three areas: the needs of consumers (each business and the company as a whole identified the top 10 consumer needs), adjacencies (products or services that could help P&G capitalize on existing brand equity), and what the company labels “technology game boards” (a planning tool that enables P&G to evaluate how technologies in one area affect other areas of the business).
At the heart of Connect + Develop is using networks to gain connections to new ideas. In the old invention model, “know-how” was key, and this was what companies really focused on the most. In the new connections model, “know who” became critical. The networks that P&G keys into are varied. Among the most notable are proprietary networks developed specifically for Connect + Develop. For example, P&G’s leading 15 suppliers have around 50,000 people employed in R&D. P&G built an IT platform to share technology briefs with suppliers. Closer working relationships and the sharing of information brought a 30 percent increase in projects with staff from suppliers and P&G working together.
Even competitors were seen as sources of inspiration. P&G also created a network of what it calls “technology entrepreneurs.” The technology entrepreneurs number 70 worldwide. They are effectively the eyes and ears of Connect + Develop, making contacts within industry and education, with suppliers, and with local markets. The technology entrepreneurs have brought more than 10,000 products, ideas, and technologies to P&G’s attention. Each is then evaluated.
The Innovation Dividend
The result was that P&G accomplished its goal. More than 50 percent of the company’s innovations now originate outside the company. When A. G. Lafley first announced his bold target in 2000, the figure was under 15 percent. Connect + Develop has helped turbocharge more than 250 products into the marketplace and generated billions of dollars in sales.
Opening up innovation is increasingly necessary and popular.
Open innovation, powerfully championed by Henry Chesbrough, executive director at the Center for Open Innovation, part of the Institute for Business Innovation at the Haas School of Business, offers an alternative model.
It was pioneered by the open source software movement, which championed a more open attitude toward innovation, turning the notion of intellectual property on its head by publishing its computer source code on the Internet for anyone to see. The open source movement even allowed programmers to take the code and modify it, contributing to the final product. The result was, in many people’s eyes (not least the consumers’), a better product. The Linux operating system, the Firefox web browser, and the Thunderbird e-mail client are all extremely functional open-source software products.
Says Chesbrough: “We have moved from closed innovation to a new logic of innovation: open innovation. This new logic builds upon the recognition that useful knowledge is widely distributed across society, in organizations of all sizes and purposes, including nonprofits, universities, and government entities. Rather than reinvent the wheel, the new logic employs the wheel to move forward faster.”2
It is a case, as Chesbrough points out, of companies realizing that “not all the smart people work for us.” As he notes, “Their realization is that, in a world of abundant knowledge, hoarding technology is a self-limiting strategy. No organization, even the largest, can afford any longer to ignore the tremendous external pools of knowledge that exist.”3
Spreading Innovation Wings
Today, companies in all sectors are being urged to embrace the collaborative principles of open innovation. In their 2002 article in Harvard Business Review, “Open-Market Innovation,” Darrell Rigby and Chris Zook identified several benefits associated with open innovation: more ideas are generated and a broader base of expertise is accessed, leading to improvements in the “cost, quality, and speed” of innovation; licensing new innovations to third parties may provide a needed stimulus within the organization to make more use of internally generated ideas; and exported ideas may receive more intense scrutiny and so a more rigorous test of the economic viability of the idea.
Open innovation has spread beyond the open source movement into many different sectors. In the electronic consumer goods market, for example, many of the leading players realize that it is not possible to keep pace with consumers’ insatiable appetite for new products without adopting a more open innovation model.
The net gainers are companies like Quanta Computer in Taiwan and Wipro in India. Companies like these are known as original-design manufacturers (ODMs). They design and assemble electronic equipment for the major brand names like Dell and Sony. And, where once they might have built to design specs supplied by the client, increasingly they are driving the design innovation.
Such outsourcing of R&D is not without risk. Motorola used an ODM, BenQ Corporation in Taiwan, to design and build mobile phones. BenQ subsequently moved into the China mobile phone market, selling its own branded products. There is also investor sentiment. When a company has outsourced just about everything, including the innovation, what is left of proprietary value other than the brand?
Open Today
Most companies, no matter how progressive, may take some time to adopt a completely open approach to innovation. Indeed, they may never do this. Ensuring a fair exchange of value between innovation partners is still a challenge. There are real risks involved in open innovation, alliances, joint ventures, and partnering arrangements that simply do not exist in licensing and in-house R&D. Not the least of these risks are unwanted technology transfer and spillover, and lengthy, costly legal disputes. Until firms find ways of managing these and other risks, new innovation models may remain just a great idea rather a business reality.
However, while there is some risk, there is also a huge upside in terms of competitive advantage through innovation. Many commentators and industry practitioners were convinced that innovation was one thing that couldn’t be outsourced. Various arguments were put forward, from the need to stay close to the customer to the risk of giving away intellectual property. The innovation outsourcing revolution that is currently underway suggests that the doubters were wrong.
“Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology,” Chesbrough explained in his 2003 book Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology.
In 2006, Chesbrough wrote Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovative Landscape, which examines how companies may innovate the ways they create and capture value from their businesses. More recently, Chesbrough has turned his attention to the world of services with his 2011 book Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era. In it, Chesbrough explains how companies can, with the help of open innovation, make the shift from product-centric to service-centric thinking.
As Chesbrough explains: “Over the past two decades things have fundamentally changed. It is still true that no company can grow and prosper without new ideas. It is also clear that the changing needs of customers, increasing competitive pressure, and the evolving abilities of suppliers necessitate continual creative thinking for a company to stay ahead of the pack. The challenge is that the distribution of this critical knowledge has shifted. This has important implications for how every company thinks about growth and innovation.”4
Open to a Point
But this is not to argue that all industries have migrated or will migrate to open innovation.
For example, the nuclear-reactor industry depends mainly on internal ideas and has low labor mobility, little venture capital, few (and weak) start-ups, and relatively little research being conducted at universities. Whether this industry will ever migrate toward open innovation is questionable.
At the other extreme, some industries have been open for some time now. Consider Hollywood, which for decades has innovated through a network of partnerships and alliances among production studios, directors, talent agencies, actors, scriptwriters, independent producers, and specialized subcontractors such as the suppliers of special effects. And the mobility of this workforce is legendary: every waitress is a budding actress; every parking lot attendant has a screenplay he is working on.
Many industries, including copiers, computers, disk drives, semiconductors, telecommunications equipment, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and even military weapons and communications systems are currently undergoing a transition from closed to open. For such businesses, a number of critically important innovations have emerged from seemingly unlikely sources. Indeed, the locus of innovation in these industries has migrated away from the confines of the central R&D laboratories of the largest companies and is now situated in various start-ups, universities, research consortia, and other outsiders. And the trend goes well beyond high technology. Industries such as automotive, healthcare, banking, insurance, and consumer packaged goods have also been leaning toward open innovation.
Their realization is that, in a world of abundant knowledge, hoarding technology is a self-limiting strategy. No organization, even the largest, can afford any longer to ignore the tremendous external pools of knowledge that exist.
The Science of Serendipity
At the heart of open innovation is open-mindedness, or being willing to accept ideas from elsewhere in whatever form they arrive and at whatever time.
The reality remains that the vast majority of innovation occurs inside large companies—often in the face of stifling bureaucracy. Matt Kingdon, the cofounder of the innovation consulting firm ?What If!, argues that it is corporate innovators battling within large, established organizations who are the real heroes of innovation.
Kingdon has spent the past 20 years on the front lines of innovation, bringing new products and services to market and helping organizations, including the likes of Unilever, PepsiCo, Google, and Virgin Atlantic, become more innovative.
In particular, Kingdon argues that the phenomenon of serendipity—seemingly happy accidents that occur during an innovation—is less random than we might think. By gaining a better understanding of the patterns by which serendipity occurs, large organizations can increase their chances of these sorts of happy accidents taking place.
At Pfizer, for example, the discovery of Viagra was in no small part helped by the fact that the researchers’ offices were, in their own words, “old and dilapidated”; they were crammed into a small space, with the entire team of chemists and biologists bumping into one another all the time. This close, seemingly random proximity helped the flow of information and the cross-pollination of projects and thinking. It was via a corridor conversation between two scientists working on very different projects that one of the scientists learned of a breakthrough in another field that led to the development of Viagra.
According to Kingdon, companies that deliberately foster serendipitous cultures and environments are more likely to hit the innovation jackpot. “Serendipitous invention and the creative exploitation of ideas is a muscle that you can choose to work out or allow to wither,” he says.
In The Science of Serendipity, Kingdon dissects the ways in which corporations are designed to support or obstruct innovation. He traces the dilemmas that executives in a wide variety of firms face, and details the steps taken to overcome the issues and get great ideas across the goal line.
The book identifies and examines five key factors. First, it looks at the sort of person who is good at serendipity, arguing that the best people to lead innovation initiatives have respect for the organization but do not revere it so much that they cannot bend the rules.
Second, people who are good at innovation deliberately seek out new stimuli to provoke their thinking. Third, they are adept at making ideas as real as possible quickly, using rough models and prototypes to give ideas concrete expression. The fourth factor in fostering serendipitous innovation is designing a physical environment that forces people who are working on different projects onto a collision course that causes them to bump into one another and cross-pollinate their thinking. Finally, Kingdon offers advice on how to deal with organizational politics, which can so easily derail innovation.
His advice on battling the corporate machine? “It’s part of organizational life, so get over it and get on with it!”
The Science of Serendipity is a great title for a book, but wer’re guessing that you’re using the word science fairly loosely.
Well, yes. Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not a scientist. I’m a storyteller, really, and I just got very interested in this concept of serendipity. Number one, it’s a lovely word to say. It rolls off the tongue in a very mellifluous way. But the more I looked into the word serendipity, the more subtle it became and the more questions it threw up, and the more linkage there was between serendipity and the reality of how innovation happens in large organizations. If you think about it, when you talk to somebody in a large organization about how a great new innovation has actually happened, when you peel back the layers of the story, what you don’t find is a load of clever people sitting around a boardroom table strategizing their way to the end. It just doesn’t happen like that. It’s much more a story about people who bump into each other, who have random chance meetings or seemingly chance meetings. Their head is in the right space. They have the right attitude. They’re asking the right questions. They say things like, “Let’s work on a Saturday,” or, “What do you mean by that?” They’re not shooting people down. They’re not cutting people off. It’s a combination of the right people, right place, right attitude, and right behavior; that’s the real story of innovation.
One of the greatest examples of serendipity, or how an organization was wired to make itself more likely to be lucky, which is the real meaning of serendipity, is the very fascinating story of the invention of Viagra. We all know what Viagra does, and it’s well known that the little blue pill was given to 12 chaps in Cardiff in Wales for an angina trial. And when they came in on the Monday morning, they said, with big grins on their faces, “We’re not giving you the pills back!” So the researcher called the surprising results back to base at Pfizer’s headquarters.
In those days, Pfizer’s research people were located in a town called Sandwich in Kent. And they were in fairly ramshackle buildings where people were scrunched in together, and several people were able to overhear the results. They were then able to contribute to the results. It was a mishmash, what we might call today a mash-up or the original hackathon of people contributing ideas from diverse scientific backgrounds. Together they pieced the story together and realized that what they had discovered was something that could increase Pfizer’s company value massively so that it could buy Lipitor [the cholesterol-lowering statin that became the bestselling drug in pharmaceutical history, with sales of $125 billion]. And, briefly, Pfizer became one of the most valuable companies in the world in terms of market capitalization.
It’s an amazing story. How do you get a company so big and so powerful created almost through a chance discovery? The reality was that it wasn’t quite as much chance as you might think. There was some thinking that went into the culture beforehand.
The subtitle of the book is How to Unlock the Promise of Innovation in Large Organizations. And, of course, that’s a bigger challenge, isn’t it? Because it’s all very well for youngsters starting a new company to take risks and do innovation. It’s much harder in big organizations. Can you say a little bit about that?
I’ve found over the years that if you talk to somebody in a large organization about an entrepreneur—we all know the names of some famous entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, or whatever—the snore factor’s pretty loud. And people start to roll their eyes up to heaven because we all know that when you’re young and you’ve got nothing, then taking a risk is fun. Now, when you get a bit older, like me, and let’s say you’re working in a large corporation, and you’ve got a family, you’ve got dependents, you’ve got a job, you’ve got a career ahead of you, then risk tastes very different from what it does to, say, a 20-year-old wearing a cool black turtleneck sweater in Silicon Valley. So I think the real heroes of innovation are the people in large organizations who have all the stress and strain that we all know so well that come with an organization that, let’s face it, makes its money through repeating itself, maybe doing things a little bit better. But these are the real heroes of innovation. How can they make things happen in a big organization?
And the way you describe it, there are five elements to this. Let’s take them one by one. The first is all about the sort of person who drives innovation in a large organization.
I call the first section the Protagonist. This is the lead player in the play of innovation in a large organization. There is a characteristic of somebody in a large organization who can make innovation happen. These people respect the organization they work for, but they don’t revere it. And this is really, really important. I describe them as having a “captain one minute, pirate the next” mentality. And this is an important little phrase because one minute they’re standing on the prow of a ship, like a captain: we’re going that way. The next minute, you might find that same person down in the bowels of the boat fixing the engine, using a bit of old tubing and not going by the instruction manual. It’s that sense of knowing the big picture of where they’re going or what they want to try to do that powers innovators in large organizations, that gives them the license to act a little bit more like a pirate.
And the second element?
The second lesson I’ve called the Quest for Innovation. What you find with large organizations is a very simple equation, and that is that the intelligence that they feed themselves can very often be very similar to the intelligence that their competitors are feeding themselves. So it is the same sorts of researchers talking to the same consumers and talking to them in the same way. And you’ll find that a lot of great innovation breakthroughs come from asking yourself a really basic question, which is, how can I look under stones that my competitors aren’t looking under? How can I be sure that my intelligence is competitive, is new?
So we followed some corporate innovators to find out what type of customers they interact with, where they go, how they talk to people, and where they get their stimulus. And one of the things we found, for instance, is that a lot of innovation is born out of angry people. It’s born at the margins. Let’s face it, if you’re in a big business, you don’t really want to leave your office to hang out with people who are angry and don’t like your business very much, but actually those are the very people you should be listening hard to.
And the third element is what we might know as prototyping?
The third element I’ve called Making It Real—and I’ve deliberately not called it prototyping or iteration or experimentation. These are very well-known concepts, particularly in the digital world, where access to customers is very cheap and you can change your offer very quickly. We have a belief at ?What If!, which has been honed over 20 years, that one of the most important things you can say in the world of innovation is, how real can I make it now? And it’s the now bit that’s really important.
And what we found is that, whether you’re discussing a new concept for a hotel or a new type of automobile, there are always ways in which you can make your concept a little bit more real. Maybe you can draw it; maybe you can act out the service delivery; maybe you can quickly run the numbers on something. But in the history of innovation, what separates the really successful people from the others is that they make lots of little trials of their product. And in a big company, the easiest way for us to do that is to ask ourselves the question, how real can we make this now?
And the fourth element is something you alluded to earlier. It’s about the environment, creating a fertile environment for innovation.
Yes, the fourth element of The Science of Serendipity is a hobbyhorse of mine. I call it Collision Course, but it’s really about the environment we’re in. We all know that somehow the space around us is really important, but we don’t really know why. A lot of offices these days, where a lot of people work, may have a groovy reception area. But once you go upstairs, there’s quite a lot of cubicles, quite a lot of silence. They have meeting rooms that are designed to be functional; they’re not particularly inspirational a lot of the time. And organizations that are good at helping people bump into each other are good at helping to mix up a diverse group of ideas, so they use the space to create ideas.
A great example would be Pixar’s offices in Emeryville, California, where they have several thousand people in one building, and they have two bathrooms. But everyone needs to pee and everyone needs to eat, and if you can get people to mash up during the day so they’re bumping into each other, then you’re more likely to combine ideas. Previously you would have had to call a meeting or schedule a meeting or rely on someone organizing that in advance.
And finally, of course, we have the realpolitik of innovation, the politics that happens in any organization. Can you say a little bit about that?
The fifth element of The Science of Serendipity I’ve called Battling the Corporate Machine. And this is the really, really practical part. I’ve never worked in a large organization, or worked with a large organization, where there is no resistance to change. It just doesn’t happen. So what I say to innovators is, it’s a bit like when you split with your first girlfriend or boyfriend: sometimes the greatest advice is, get over it. Move on. There will always be resistance to innovation in large organizations. Live with it. But how you present the numbers, how you present the ideas, how you win over the naysayers, how you share the excitement from some of the insights that underpin a great idea—these are all things that can be planned in advance. And people who win at innovating in big organizations think through the voyage of an idea through an organization and plan for the battle ahead.
Senior executives often say that we mustn’t be afraid to fail, but you don’t see too many people who fail getting promoted. So how do you take risks in an organization where there is a real fear of failure?
It’s a funny thing, fear of failure in a large organization. If you talk to senior people in an organization, they often say that they want the people underneath them to take more risks. If you talk to the people underneath them, they talk about their bosses and say the bosses won’t let them take more risks. I think there’s something going on that is holding people back, and the answer to it is to lower the stakes. Take many more risks, but take much smaller risks, things that you can do maybe under the radar, things that are easy to do by Friday, rather than things that you can only do over the next few months and that require huge capital expenditures.
The number one thing is, how can we reduce the stakes around here? I think the number two thing is bearing in mind that the grapevine is one of the most powerful ways of making something happen or killing something in an organization. Now, the grapevine in a company, the gossip structure, needs feeding with stories of innovation success.
So, it’s about taking a small risk, getting something to happen, and telling the story about what happened, so that your innovation drive can gather credibility. You can make things happen because people see things happening. They see the output, the impact of what you’re doing. So, smaller risks and stories, these are the two things that are within the control of people at whatever level in an organization. And you’ll find that people at a very senior level in an organization very much like telling stories about some of the troops who have maybe stepped a little bit out of line, and maybe done the right thing for the company. They’ve respected the company, but they haven’t necessarily revered it. They’ve made something happen. There is a huge hunger within an organization for stories about people who are making a difference—the unsung heroes, if you like.
Most companies have loads of data on how their customers behave. How helpful is that in really understanding what customers want, and what else could managers do to uncover unmet customer needs?
It’s true that most companies have loads of data on their customers, but this is the problem: they have too much data. They are drowning in data. They have so much data that they don’t really feel what customers feel. And to be an innovator, you have to go out on a limb. Think about it. You have to do something that isn’t easy. You have to really know that it’s the right thing to do. You have to be really motivated. The way to get motivated in a large organization is generally to hang out with a customer who’s got a problem or who’s got a vision for how things could be better in the world, and to be in that customer’s home, or with his family, or wherever he is when he makes the decision to purchase. Try to get as close to that moment of purchase and consumption, as close as possible to the problem that the customer has in the world.
And, once you’ve seen that, to an extent it becomes your mission, your rallying cry: this is what I’m going to change. Now, that’s data as well, but it’s not data that you’ll find on a spreadsheet or that’s given to you thirdhand by a market researcher. That’s experiential, feeling information, and that is the most important thing that innovators need in a large organization.
In most organizations, there is a received wisdom that says, this is how our industry works; this is what our customers want. That can make it hard to get people to accept a new idea. How do you convince people that that wisdom is wrong and that your idea is worth pursuing?
People at work aren’t bad. Most people at work—in fact, almost everybody I’ve met—are good-hearted. They have good intentions when it comes to furthering their company, wanting their peers and their colleagues to succeed. But we are so busy at work that when someone comes at us with a new idea about how things could be improved—almost never a finished idea, probably a bit of a scruffy idea—it’s sometimes a pain in the ass. Frankly, too much creativity is a pain in the ass.
So the more people at work can demonstrate how an idea might be taken through the system, the more they can make it real. Rather than say, “I’ve got a rough idea about something,” the more they can say, “I had an idea; I drew it; I showed it to my wife and my kids; they made these comments; do you want to take a look?” All of a sudden this isn’t just enthusiastic but slightly mad ramblings from a colleague. All of a sudden this is something that has just a little bit more credibility, a bit more of a hook. So I think the way to move things through an organization is to make those things as real as possible.