Six ways to innovate

Teabags have been square since they entered the UK consumer market in the 1950s. For more than three decades, no company tried to change their shape until Tetley began to study how consumers would respond to round tea bags. Tetley's share of the UK teabag market rose from 15% to 20% after the round teabags were introduced.

In the long run, businesses cannot survive on tried-and-true methods. They must constantly explore new procedures and technologies to meet customer needs, gain a competitive advantage or simply not be left behind. For example, McDonald's spends some of the money it makes selling hamburgers to explore new possibilities. It's experimenting with a technology that cuts the time it takes to fry fries to 65 seconds from the current 210 seconds.

There are two basic organizing principles behind innovative behavior: one is to encourage difference, and the other is to break with tradition.

There are effective strategies for removing stereotypes and injecting creativity and innovation into your day-to-day operations. Among the well-known strategies include the following six.

Create discomfort and dissatisfaction

Discomfort and dissatisfaction can be unpleasant, but they can help people break free from ingrained, unthinking behaviors. Co-workers and others may react with irritability, anxiety, and resistance to unfamiliar things. But if everyone likes your idea, it probably means nothing new at all.

Believing that new ideas can cause discomfort, the Herman Miller Company has developed a home design system called Solve, which will "solve" the monotony of traditional boxy environments. "The solution replaces the dull gray walls and rigid right angles of the past with light, translucent screens and gentle 120-degree corners," says lead designer Jim Long. "My secret lies in the screen doors. . It gives a sense of openness, but it's not completely open, and you can see it all." Lang was delighted when he presented the prototype of the "solution" to 200 managers, designers, and property managers, and was questioned and criticized. If there were more positive reviews, "it's a sign that my thinking is too ordinary," Lang explained.

Innovation requires inventors to grapple with ideas that make them frown. After all, being uncomfortable means the project is unfamiliar or risky. That's why Intel's Mary Murphy-Hoye inspires the researchers on her team: "Surprise yourself! Otherwise you're doing nothing new."

Treat everything as temporary

Routine work reflects the assumption that everything will continue indefinitely. Innovation work embodies the exact opposite principle. But both assumptions are useful.

Using old knowledge only makes sense if what was previously valid continues to be valid. And getting rid of the past only makes sense when the old ways are or are about to become obsolete.

Leading or innovative companies are constantly reminded of this, just because what works today doesn't mean it will continue to do so in the future.

Jorma Ollila, CEO of Finnish phone giant Nokia, is all too familiar with this truth. "We're not moving as fast as we were six years ago," he said. "People are starting to think that what you created three years ago was amazing because you look back two years ago, a year and a half ago, and you're still making money. However, there are people in Israel and Silicon Valley who are waiting to kill you with new technology."

Staying innovative requires treating everything, including teams, organizations, processes, and product lines, as temporary. For example, when CEO Bob Galvin was considering how to market Motorola's color TVs, he adopted the name "Pulsar" to differentiate the product from the Motorola brand. Because he sees the product line as temporary. That way, if Motorola wanted to sell the Pulsar business, the company wouldn't have to divest it from the Motorola brand. Before long, color TVs became a commodity with thin margins, and Motorola was able to sell the "Pulsar" business to Panasonic.

Ignore the Experts

Ignorance is a blessing in the creative process, especially in the initial stages. People do not know how things should be, and they are not hindered by old perceptions. They can discover things that experts have rejected or never thought of.

The virtues of innocence are evident in Jane Goodall's groundbreaking research on chimpanzees. Anthropologist Louis Leakey wanted to hire Goodall to observe chimpanzees closely for two years. Goodall was hesitant to take the job due to her own lack of formal scientific training, but Leakey convinced her that he needed "a mind unbiased by theory, driven by a genuine thirst for knowledge. , and not those engaged in research for other reasons". Goodall and Leakey later concluded that it would be impossible to observe and explain so many new chimp behaviors if she hadn't been ignorant of existing theories.

When Daniel Ng opened Hong Kong's first McDonald's restaurant out of ignorance, seasoned competitors scoffed: "Selling hamburgers to the Chinese? Are you mistaken!" in an interview , he recalls, his initial success may have been due to his lack of comprehensive management training. Currently, he operates more than 150 McDonald's restaurants in Hong Kong.

Doing stupid things

Thinking of stupid things to do helps to understand things that people know in their hearts but can't say. Instead of just talking about "smart" ideas, it can generate a whole host of optional actions that foster constructive difference.

Justin Kitch, CEO of website builder Homestead, used to develop educational software for children at Microsoft. One day, he led a brainstorm about the worst possible product the company could develop. He thought that if the team could come up with something that sucks, and then do the opposite, it could lead to a strong and original product. The team was in high spirits and settled on the product with the lowest educational value: a computer-controlled, talking Barney doll for teaching arithmetic. (Educational media experts at the time believed that designing software to carry out early childhood education was a ridiculous waste of media resources.)

Kitch recalls: "I gave it to my boss as a complete joke. I couldn't believe it: they made what we thought was the worst product in our brainstorming." The product Sold several years later, it won several awards for its educational value. The example just given shows that a stupid idea can turn out to be a good idea in itself. A useful technique is to ask people to list products, services, and business models that seem disruptive and impractical, and then imagine them as brilliant ideas. This approach has two distinct benefits. First, it forces people to reveal and challenge assumptions that might hinder the formation of great ideas. Second, if the resulting good idea is considered stupid by many, it may also be exactly what competitors won't be imitating anytime soon.

For example, when the first Palm Pilot appeared, most onlookers thought it had a bleak future. After all, Apple Computer, Microsoft, and numerous start-ups have already wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on handheld computers. When PocketTalk seeks funding, the typical venture capitalist replies: "Please, don't mention the pen and the computer. We've thrown away enough investment in this hapless concept." The expert skepticism turned out to be a huge advantage, because when competitors come to think about it, the operating system of Pocket Pass has already become the industry standard.

Bring in some "dumb students"

Hire employees who have a particular kind of "nerd" or stubbornness. To create diversity, companies need people who are less able or willing to learn organizational norms. This norm is the enterprise's "knowledge and belief", history, memory and laws, that is, the self-evident assumption of "what to do and why".

Businesses with large numbers of unruly people are better at exploring. Such people rely on their knowledge to achieve results, which in turn lead to more diverse solutions. Businesses that want to innovate must tolerate contrarians, heretics, and deviants, even if their many ideas fail. Hiring only "good students" may be cost-effective in the short term, but it will undermine innovation in the long term.

You can even hire some smart people who did poorly in school. In his book, Origins of Genius, creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton pointed out that "to get high marks in school, you often have to be highly consistent in how you treat people and do things. Routine." The underachieving smart people are the opposite, listening to their inner voice and doing what they find interesting and right. Simonton wrote: "Darwin hated school and was content to be a mediocre college student; but he persevered in self-study through extensive reading, scientific exploration of the English countryside, and dialogue with established scientists."

Disbanding and reorganizing the team

The team may get caught up in the past, unable to extricate itself. The longer you spend together in groups, the easier it is to rest on your laurels and ignore the outside world.

A study of 50 teams by Ralph Katz, a professor of R&D management at Northeastern University-sity, found that in the first two years after the R&D team was formed, the number of ideas was high, but after After three or four years, creative output peaks and then decays. Katz believes that team members will gradually become more and more fascinated by the merits of their own ideas and develop a "non-me" attitude towards the ideas of the outside world.

One way to avoid the degradation of creativity, Katz suggests, is to ensure that teams die before they get old. That's what Lars Kolind, CEO of Denmark's Oticon, one of the world's leading manufacturers of hearing aids, does. He noticed that the product development team spent a full year on a digital hearing aid product. “The downside of this seemingly productive obsession is that it feels like long-term project teams are horribly ossifying into paradepartments,” Collind wrote in a financial magazine. “I blew up that organization.” All Oticon teams were disbanded and new teams formed based on project timing rather than function. In Colinde's words, the company was in disarray: "Within three hours, more than a hundred people moved. To keep the business alive, one of the top managers' jobs is to frequently disrupt the organization of the business."

Think of the practices presented in this article as if you bought a toy to play with: open it with great effort, dismantle the various parts inside to see what they are for, then try to improve it, or mix them with your own Other toys are mixed together. You may come up with better ideas along the way. All in all, whatever it is that brings new knowledge, helps people see old things in new ways, or helps businesses break free from the past, it can do the trick for you.

Original text reprinted with permission from Innovation: Driving Product, Process, and Market Change. Copyright MIT Registered 2002, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Translated by Su Yong.

Robert I. Sutton is a professor of management and engineering at the Stanford School of Engineering and co-director of the Stanford Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. He is the author of Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing and Sustaining Innovation.