It was not until Kevlar failed as a tire cord product and interest began to percolate from other types of users that DuPont began to turn the innovation problem on its head. In Act 2 of Kevlar, DuPont shifted its pattern of search from trying to find a solution to the tire cord problem to exploring potential problems for which Kevlar might be useful. Innovation in Kevlar was about discovering new markets and finding the silent customers.
The DuPont Kevlar case reveals the complex interaction between problem discovery and solution discovery. It is rarely linear. In Act 1, DuPont had a well-defined problem but never really found a solution. In Act 2, DuPont had a well-defined solution but had to search for a problem. You may be wondering which approach is best. The answer depends on the innovation strategy you are pursuing. Routine innovation is generally best anchored with well-defined problems associated with specific customer segments and needs. If you are trying to penetrate your existing market with your existing business model utilizing your existing technological competences, you have essentially already defined the key problems to be solved.
Even in relatively new technologies, the critical problem may be quite well defined. Consider electric vehicles. While still a relatively new technology, the critical problem to be solved for market penetration is clear: extend driving range and reduce operating costs per mile to be competitive with internal combustion engine technology. In contrast, disruptive, radical, and architectural innovation often evolve through an iterative process of problem and solution search and refinement. In practice, it is usually very difficult to predict how radically new technologies will perform in particular uses or markets.5 As the case of Kevlar shows, new technologies first targeted for one market may ultimately find most of their applications elsewhere. Moreover, customers themselves often need to learn how to best utilize new technologies.6
Complicating matters further is the potential for new technologies themselves to spawn new markets. The biggest market for Intel’s microprocessor turned out to be personal computers, but at the time Intel invented the microprocessor (in response to a calculator company’s problem), personal computers did not exist. The microprocessor helped to create the market for personal computers. Lithium-ion batteries were invented for powering small medical devices and later consumer electronics; their largest market today is electric vehicles. Discovering markets can be just as hard as discovering technologies, and just as important for innovation.
Expanding Your Search Arc
Expanding your company’s capacity to search is both a personal and organizational challenge. It is a personal challenge because for you to lead your organization outside its home court, you need the capacity to explore novel terrain. If you are trapped in your own personal home court, don’t expect your organization to venture too broadly beyond that. At the same time, you can’t do it all alone. You need to create an environment and set of processes that enable the rest of the organization to explore a broader set of sources of potentially transformative ideas.
Many organizations I encounter in my research and consulting believe they already have in place a robust set of processes for finding new ideas. But often these processes are implicitly designed to reinforce the home court, rather than to explore new terrain. While there is no single process or set of practices that lead to broader search, there are some principles that can help you and your organization foster this capability.
Looking for the Missing Bullet Holes
During World War II, the US military asked a high-powered think tank a few blocks from Columbia University called the Statistical Research Group to help them figure out where to place reinforcing armor on combat aircraft. The military provided data on the distribution of bullet holes over the surface of the plane. The military initially thought it should place the most armor on the parts of the plane that got hit the most (which turned out to be the fuselage). But one statistician in the group, Abraham Wald, concluded that the extra armor should go where the bullet holes were not. His reasoning: since the military is examining only the planes that successfully return from battle, the part of the planes with the most bullet holes must be the least harmful places a plane can be hit. The fact that not many returning planes had holes in the engines meant that planes shot in the engines tended to crash. By reinforcing the surface around the engines, more planes should return from battle.7
This story always reminds me of the problem of where to look for new ideas for innovation. The problem for most companies is not where they look for ideas; rather, it is where they do not look for them. The customers, suppliers, partners, and experts you do not talk to are the ones whose problems you are not hearing. Those are your blind spots. Those are the problems you do not know about and therefore are not trying to solve. Those are your missed opportunities for innovating outside the home court.
How can you find the missing bullet holes in your innovation search? With all the advances in digital technologies, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, it is easy to forget that innovation in general, and the search for innovative ideas in particular, is an intensely human activity. What we see, what we experience, whom we listen to, whom we speak to, and whom we observe all shape our perceptions about problems worth solving and solutions worth pursuing.
As individuals, we often hear the advice that if we want to be more creative, we need to meet new types of people, travel to different places, try activities we have never tried, and so forth. If you are a chemist, you are supposed to be having lunch with musicians on Tuesdays and physicists on Thursdays and learning Mandarin on Fridays. In essence, we should be getting outside our personal home court. I could not agree more with this advice. The problem, of course, is that stepping outside one’s personal home court is far easier said than done. Even with the best of intentions, the vast majority of us tend to graze in those familiar pastures that define our professional identities. Part of this is habit. My guess is that most of us attend many of the same professional or industry conferences year after year. Partly it’s due to time constraints. We are so busy trying to keep up with our own field or industry that excursions to new territories feel like a waste of precious time. Part of it, though, is psychological. Our own field of expertise is where we feel most competent. It is where we know the language, where we know the problems, where we likely have built our reputation. When we interact with other experts in our own field, we can feel pretty confident we are not asking any embarrassingly dumb questions. And, at the end of the conversation, we can also feel pretty confident that we grasped critical messages and gained new insights into familiar problems. Expertise is very comforting.
Venturing outside our personal home court creates a sense of vulnerability. There is a real possibility of looking stupid, and few of us want that. Let me recount a recent experience of mine. A couple of years ago, the Harvard Business School and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences ran a joint research symposium. Sessions were co-organized by a faculty member from each school. My job was to co-organize a session with Stuart Shieber, one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics—two subjects about which I know nothing. We started our conversation with the usual “so, what do you work on?” type questions that are classic icebreakers for academics. In the sixty minutes Stuart and I chatted, not only did I learn an incredible amount about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, but I also discovered unexpected connections to the kinds of problems I studied in management. To this day, that conversation has influenced my work. The experience was intellectually exhilarating and quite productive. And yet, to be perfectly honest, it was also intimidating. Despite the fact that Stuart is one of the most approachable and humble people I have met, I felt embarrassed to be asking really dumb questions about things that the majority of his eighteen-year-old freshman computer science majors knew before they entered Harvard. Not far from the back of my mind was the thought this guy must think I am a tota
l bonehead. And, no matter where you are in your career or what you have previously accomplished, these are not comforting thoughts! I was most definitely outside my home court. I am happy to report that we have continued to have conversations and I continue to learn immensely from them (and I no longer feel embarrassed, even if my questions continue to be just as naïve as they were in our first meeting). And, for his part, Stuart also took a big step outside his home court when he attended the vast majority of the sessions of my Commercializing Science course at Harvard Business School to get a better understanding of our case-centered method of teaching and how he might use elements of that approach in his computer science classes.
The point of my story is not to brag about how good I am at getting outside my home court. In fact, I am no better at it than anyone else. Yes, I can attest to the benefits, but I also know that in reality it is really hard. So, let me turn the problem on its head. Let’s start with the fairly realistic assumption that most of us are reticent to venture outside our home courts. What then might we do as leaders of an organization to facilitate the broader search by our people (including, of course, ourselves)?
1. Create Forcing Mechanisms: When the deans of the Harvard Business School and School of Engineering and Applied Science decided to hold a joint symposium, they knew that one of the chief benefits of the exercise would be to force their respective faculties to talk to the other. Stuart and I had ample opportunities to interact in the thirty years we had both been Harvard faculty before the symposium. No one ever stopped either of us from contacting the other during those years. It is just that we never had a reason—or, at least, so it seemed. The symposium was a forcing function. Look for ways to force yourself and your people to have conversations with people they do not normally talk to. Sometimes this might be as simple as having meetings in new places or visiting companies outside your industry. Hospital managers, for instance, now spend plenty of time visiting companies like Toyota to gain exposure to world-class quality methods.
2. Move People Physically Outside Their (Geographic) Home Courts: Even in this supposedly flat world of instant communication and ubiquitous data, where people work and live matters. Where you are shapes with whom you tend to talk and thus the kinds of problems you hear about. Fujino decided to move his small team of Japanese aeronautical engineers to the United States so they could interact directly with American customers. He recounted, “You can read market reports, but you really only learn by talking to the customers.” Living in two smaller US cities (Mississippi State, Mississippi, and later Greensboro, North Carolina) gave Fujino firsthand experience with the frustrations and time delays of hub-and-spoke travel through regional carriers. He noted that this would have been hard to understand sitting in Japan where a 320 km/hour bullet train can take one from Tokyo to Aomori in just three and half hours. This opened his eyes to the potential of a relatively inexpensive but comfortable jet that could serve smaller businesses that normally would not be able to afford their own planes. One of the chief advantages of scale is the ability to open a geographically diverse set of “listening posts” around the world. But it does not take a huge investment to spread your geographic wings. Fujino’s team in the States for more than a decade consisted of only about twenty engineers working out of a simple hangar at the Greensboro airport.
3. Mix the “Gene Pool” of Your Workforce: If it’s hard to get people in your organization to go outside their home courts, then bring people from outside their home courts to them. Hire a diverse array of people who can bring a broader variety of technical, functional, and industry perspectives. Too often, organizations become monocultures, dominated by a particular scientific function, educational background, or industry experience. I have been in R&D organizations, for instance, where just about everyone graduated from the same relatively narrow set of graduate programs in the same technical fields. Such an approach provides great depth in specific fields, but such depth also serves to reinforce the home court bias. And such homogeneity is not limited to R&D organizations. Think about how many companies recruit MBAs from only a select group of schools, often as a matter of formal policy.
There is ample evidence suggesting that a more diverse talent base stimulates innovation.8 There are also some striking case examples. Think about Bell Labs, arguably one of the most prolific creators of transformative innovation of all time. Bell Labs spawned, among other things, statistical process control, shortwave communication, photovoltaic cells, the transistor, satellite communication, wireless communication, fiber optics, the laser, packet switching, and the computer operating system Unix. By design, the company hired scientists and engineers from a vast array of technical and scientific backgrounds, including physicists, electrical engineers, chemists, materials scientists, metallurgists, mathematicians, systems engineers, manufacturing engineers, and so on.9 As I discuss in the next chapter, many breakthrough innovations require the integration of diverse knowledge domains. This was clearly true for the inventions spawned at Bell. Without its high diversity of talent, it is hard to imagine Bell being able to identify, let alone develop, transformative innovations that drew from multiple disciplinary bases.
4. Learn Through Analogies:10 Recall from Chapter 3 that learning from analogies across industries can stimulate business model innovation. Analogic reasoning can also help us broaden our search for product innovations. Early in the life of the HondaJet program, the idea of creating a “Civic” of light jets (efficient, inexpensive, and compact, yet as roomy and comfortable as possible) provided a powerful metaphor for both the design team and senior management. A real Honda Civic and a real business jet, of course, are completely different artifacts with completely different economic and technical properties (the HondaJet costs around $4 million and can fly more than 500 mph, whereas the original Civic cost less than $2,000 in the 1970s and topped out around 90 mph). Yet there were parallels that helped the jet design team envision a new product concept. Civic, introduced to the US market in 1973, altered Americans’ perception of subcompact cars, which at the time were generally cramped, noisy, utilitarian affairs. As Road and Track reviewers commented at the time about its design, “While the Civic is clearly a small car in every sense of the word it is not, happily enough, cheap.”11 Like the car, the Civic of jets would offer more space, a quieter interior, and interior design normally found on more expensive models. The success of the Civic was also a source of inspiration for both the team and Honda. When funding for the jet program became tight, Fujino didn’t hesitate to remind Honda senior leadership of the impact the Civic had on Honda’s fortunes.
The Civic analogy was more than symbolic or inspirational. It played a key role in defining the crucial design problems that needed to be solved. Fujino’s breakthrough over-the-wing engine design was a direct result of the priority given to interior space.
5. Challenge Sacred Assumptions: Every field and industry has its “sacred” assumptions—things that everyone believes are true. And, because of our certainty, we never question these assumptions. In jet aircraft design, no one had questioned the assumptions about engine configuration. Over-the-wing configurations were a nonstarter. You learned this on day one of aeronautical graduate school. Assumptions are a two-edged sword. They can be helpful because, by constraining options, they focus our efforts. But this very benefit also means they can blind us to completely different approaches. Challenging assumptions, as Fujino did about over-the-wing engine configuration, is a simple way to expand the scope of search. It allows you to surface new hypotheses.
It is hard to challenge sacred assumptions. No one likes being wrong, so it is no surprise that search processes are biased toward ideas, concepts, and theories considered “sound.” Anything that seems ridiculous (like, say, putting a jet engine over the wing) is typically dismissed out of the blocks. To find transformative innovations requires unshackling search from the bounds of existing assumptions. One company that has systematically addressed this challenge is Flagship Pion
eering, a venture creation company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Unlike a traditional venture capital firm, Flagship does not entertain business plan proposals from independent entrepreneurs. Instead, its business model is to create new ventures based on its own breakthroughs in science.12 The company has designed a formal “exploration” process for identifying potential breakthroughs. One of the key principles of this process is to suspend belief early on about what is possible. Flagship founder and CEO, Noubar Afeyan, explains:
Early on in our explorations, we don’t ask “is this true” or is there data to support this idea. We do not look for academic papers that provide proof that something is true. Instead, we ask, “what if this were true, or if only this were true would it be really valuable?”… In a nutshell, during an exploration we are trying to come up with hypotheses or hypothetical ventures. Hypothetical ventures comprise some scientific or technological advance, not one that has been produced or written about in the literature. You just have to assert one.… As crazy as it may sound, when we start, we don’t really care about how believable or concrete these things are.13
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