Innovator's DNA

by Jeff Dyer

  Finding the right question, making compelling observations, talking with diverse people, and experimenting with the world usually delivers productive, relevant associational insights. In contrast, neglecting the other innovator’s-DNA skills usually increases the randomness (and often irrelevance) of a new association or insight, resulting in less impact on the marketplace. For an example similar to the identical-twins scenario in chapter 1, consider two innovators independently attempting to surface valuable new associations. The first person engages actively and regularly in a full range of discovery skills. The second does not. Which is most likely to get relevant, high-impact ideas? Obviously, the first, since she’s been fully immersed in the world of real people facing real challenges while searching for a better solution. No surprise that her associational “ahas” are far more productive than her counterpart’s relatively “random” connections, likely made from the safety and distance of an office chair.

  On the Hunt for New Associations

  In our work with disruptive innovators, we found several things that best described the dynamics behind their search for new associations. Creating odd combinations, zooming in and zooming out, and Lego thinking allowed them to connect the dots across diverse experiences and ultimately deliver disruptive new business ideas.

  Creating odd combinations

  Years ago Neil Simon’s successful Broadway play and subsequent TV series The Odd Couple centered on what life was like when two very different people—a prissy newsman and a sloppy sportswriter—lived together as roommates. The friction between opposite lifestyles often resulted in the most unexpected (and often creative) outcomes. Similarly, innovators often try to put together seemingly mismatched ideas to compose surprisingly successful combinations. They create odd couples, triplets, or quadruplets by consistently asking, “What if we combined this with that?” or “. . . this, this, and this with that?” They think differently by fearlessly uniting uncommon combinations of ideas.

  For Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research In Motion (maker of the BlackBerry device that was a mobile-phone breakthrough), connecting ideas across disciplines was something he learned relatively early in life:

  When I was in high school, we had an advanced-math program and we had a shop program. And there was this great divide between the two departments, and I was in both. And I became, inadvertently, the ambassador between the two disciplines, and saw how the mathematics we were learning in shop was actually more advanced than some of the mathematics we were learning in advanced math, because we’re using trigonometry, we’re using imaginary numbers, we’re using algebra, and even calculus in very real, tangible ways. So I was then tasked with bridging the gap and showing how math is used in electronics and how electronics is used in math.

  Lazaridis noted that a teacher alerted him to the link between computers and wireless by telling him, “Don’t get too distracted with computer technology, because the person that puts wireless and computers together is really coming up with something special.” And so the BlackBerry was born.

  Likewise, Google cofounder Larry Page created an odd combination by connecting two seemingly unrelated ideas—academic citations with web search—to launch Google. As a PhD student at Stanford, Page knew that academic journals and publishing companies rank scholars by the cumulative number of citations each scholar gets each year. Page realized that Google could rank websites in the same way that academic citations rank scholars. Websites with the most hits (in other words, that were most frequently selected) had more citations. This association allowed Page and cofounder Sergey Brin to launch a search engine yielding far superior search results.

  Sometimes the world’s most innovative leaders capture what seem like fleeting associations among ideas and knowledge, mixing and matching quite different concepts. In so doing, they produce the occasional outlandish idea that may be a catalyst for innovative business ideas. The founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, gave us an example of how he came up with a wild idea. He had spoken with consultants who were trying to solve the problem of how to get produce quickly from the farm to consumers in Hawaii before it spoils (the consultants explained that roughly one-third of the produce spoils). The first question Omidyar asked was, “What about the post office? Doesn’t the post office go to everybody’s house six times a week? Why don’t we just mail the head of lettuce?” He then admitted: “It was probably an incredibly stupid idea, and there are probably a dozen reasons why it won’t work, but it’s an example of how I put two things together that haven’t been put together before. I understand the post office very well because eBay counts on shipping companies for the business model to work. The post office is an organization that visits every household six times a week! Do you know any other organization that does that? So using those assets in novel ways might be interesting.”

  Not everyone would consider putting “fresh produce” and “post office” together, but that’s the kind of thinking that increases the probability of surfacing an innovative business idea.

  Zooming in and zooming out

  Innovative entrepreneurs often exhibit the capacity to do two things at once: they dive deep into the details to understand the nuances of a particular customer experience, and they fly high to see how the details fit into the bigger picture. Synthesizing these two views often results in surprising associations. Niklas Zennström (cofounder of Skype) explained this process of zooming in and zooming out based on his own experience: “You have to think laterally. You know, seeing and combining certain things going on at the same time and understanding how seemingly unrelated things could have something to do with each other. You need the ability to grasp different things going on at the same time and then to bring them together. For example, I can look at the bigger picture and also have a very good feel for the details. So I can go between high-level things to really, really small details. The movement often makes for new associations.”

  Steve Jobs mastered zooming in and out to create excellent and often industry-changing products. At one point, when designing the original Mac computer, his team struggled to get the right finish on the plastic. Jobs unblocked the logjam by going to a department store and zooming in on the details of different plastic appliances. He discovered a Cuisinart food processor that had all the right plastic-case properties for producing an excellent case for the first Mac. In other instances, he visited the company parking lot to examine details of different cars to gain new insights about current or future product-design challenges. One time, his parking-lot excursion revealed a Mercedes-Benz trim detail that helped resolve a metal-case design dilemma.

  Jobs was equally adept at zooming out to detect unexpected intersections across diverse industries. For example, as a result of buying and then leading Pixar for over a decade, he acquired a perspective on the entire media industry that was quite different from one he had gained earlier in the computer industry. This produced a powerful intersection of ideas when he returned to Apple. Years of personal negotiation with Disney executives about distribution rights and income for Pixar movies gave Jobs the insight and experience that later helped him create a workable solution to internet-based music distribution—a solution that escaped senior executives at other computer and MP3-player companies. Jobs’s Pixar experience provided the broad cross-industry perspective that fueled the invention of several game-changing ideas, such as iTunes, iPod, iPad, and iPhone.

  Lego thinking

  If innovators have one thing in common, it is that they love to collect ideas, like kids love to collect Legos. Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling advised that “the best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.”6 Thomas Edison kept over thirty-five hundred notebooks of ideas during the course of his lifetime and set regular “idea quotas” to keep the tap open. Billionaire Richard Branson is an equally passionate recorder of ideas, wherever he goes and with whomever he talks. Yet absolute quantity of ideas does not always translate into highly disruptive ideas. Why? Because “you cannot look i
n a new direction by looking harder in the same direction,” says Edward de Bono, author of Lateral Thinking. In other words, getting lots of ideas from lots of different sources creates the best of all innovation worlds. Innovators who frequently engage in questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting become far more capable at associating, because they develop experience at understanding, storing, and recategorizing all this new knowledge. This is important because the innovators we studied rarely invented something entirely new. More often, they simply recombined the ideas they had collected, in new ways, allowing them to offer something new to the market. Questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting helped innovators slowly build larger, richer stocks of building-block ideas in their heads. The more building blocks they acquired, the better they were able to combine newly acquired knowledge to generate a novel idea.

  To illustrate, think about a child playing with a set of Lego blocks. The more different kinds of blocks the child uses to build a structure, the more inventive she can become. But the most innovative structures spring from the novel combination of a wide variety of existing Legos, so as the child acquires different Lego sets (for example, combining a Sponge Bob set with a Star Wars set), she gets even better ideas for new structures. Similarly, the more knowledge, experience, or ideas you add from wide-ranging fields to your total stock of ideas, the greater the variety of ideas you can construct by combining these basic knowledge building blocks in unique ways. (See figure 2-2.)

  FIGURE 2-2

  Why boosting your diverse idea stock increases innovation

  Conceptually, as innovators increase the number of building-block ideas, they substantially increase the number of ways they might combine ideas to create something surprisingly new. Combining this with that creatively (building odd combinations) depends on how many unique this and that building blocks people have cached in their heads over time.a

  a. Mathematically, as the number of different building-block ideas (N) in our heads grows linearly, the potential ways to recombine those ideas grows even faster, or geometrically (by N(N − 1)/2).

  People with deep expertise in a particular field, who can combine that knowledge with new concepts and ideas unfamiliar to them, tend to be more creative. This is why innovation design firm IDEO tries to recruit people who demonstrate a breadth of knowledge in many fields and a depth in at least one area of expertise. IDEO describes this person as “T-shaped,” because the person holds deep expertise in one knowledge area but actively acquires knowledge broadly across different knowledge areas. A person with this knowledge profile typically generates innovative associations in two ways: (1) by importing an idea from another field into his area of deep expertise, or (2) by exporting an idea from his area of deep expertise to one of the broad fields he is exploring where he has shallow knowledge.

  For example, a consultant with manufacturing expertise working at Bain & Company happened to visit with hospital administrators after the US government implemented fixed-cost reimbursements to reduce health care costs. The hospital needed new ways to reduce costs, something it hadn’t focused on when the government reimbursed for actual expenses plus a 10 percent profit markup. During the discussion, the Bain consultant—with deep expertise in the manufacturing sector—asked how the hospital managed patient throughput, minimizing the “touches” to the “product” (patient) and speeding its throughput through the “plant” (hospital). These manufacturing-sourced ideas were completely foreign to the hospital, where processes focused on keeping the patient longer to ensure quality care (and kept expenses and profits high). These new ideas from an entirely different industry delivered a dramatic redesign of hospital processes designed to get the patient through the hospital (like a plant) as quickly as possible. Within five years, Bain was working with over fifty US hospitals applying these ideas to reduce costs.

  A Safe Place for New Thoughts

  After years of building a large stock of ideas through active questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting, innovators often make the most surprising associations—sometimes an association or idea sparked at the very moment they were engaged in questioning, observing, networking, or experimenting (as described in chapters 3 through 6). Equally often, innovators uncover new ideas while in a relaxed state, without distractions, when they are not “trying” to solve a problem (researchers describe this as “defocusing their attention”). In other words, it rarely happens during a meeting when they are in a focused, convergent thinking mode searching for a solution to a particular problem. Instead, Diane Greene (cofounder of VMware) told us that “the shower” is a great place to relax and think to get new ideas—a place frequently pitched by many innovators we interviewed, including David Neeleman (founder of JetBlue and Azul) and Jeff Jones (founder of Campus Pipeline and NxLight). Innovators also unearth new ideas while walking or driving, while on vacation or in the middle of the night (as former PepsiCo CEO Nooyi did). Marc Benioff got the key inspiration for Salesforce when “swimming with the dolphins.” In addition to hitting the shower, Greene gets some of her best new associations when sailing solo (which she has done since childhood). In short, Greene explained, “You get more creativity by giving yourself the space for ideas to simmer. Ideas come from having a longer time horizon about what you’re thinking about and a broader view of where the idea might be going to go.” The point is that you can sometimes spend too much time deliberately attacking a problem, when in fact some creative ideas will emerge only after you put yourself in a relaxed state with no distractions.7 If all else fails when trying to figure out a problem, go to sleep. Yes, Harvard researchers have found that sleep is a consistent antidote to tunnel vision toward a problem. So when you find yourself stuck in a thinking rut, give the problem extra time to percolate by adding some sleep into the mix. On average, that sleep will give you a 33 percent better chance of connecting the unconnected and getting a great new idea.8

  The best innovators generally know their safe places and times for generating new ideas. Do you? If not, look for places of transition or relaxation. Some folks find their best ideas early in the morning; others late at night. Whatever works best for you, make sure that you make the time to just meditate and think.

  Disruptive innovators force themselves to cross borders (technical, functional, geographical, social, disciplinary) as they engage in the other discovery skills. If we do the same, placing ourselves in the midst of bustling intersections of diverse ideas and experiences, exciting associations will naturally happen. “Creativity is just connecting things,” as Steve Jobs once put it. He continued, “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something . . . they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”9 The discovery skills of questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting will trigger surprising associations as we exercise them, over and over. Whether pursued out of the office or in a conference room, great associations are more likely to unfold when we create a safe place for them to happen. In time, your capacity to craft creative solutions to problems will become powerful, at work and beyond.

  Tips for Developing Associating Skills

  To strengthen your capacity to think differently and weave together unexpected connections across ideas, consider the following short- and long-term exercises.10 Most take relatively little time, but when done consistently, they can deliver positive results in generating new ideas. We have found that these exercises can work for creatively solving senior-level strategic problems as well as factory floor–level production challenges.

  Tip #1: Force new associations

  Innovators sometimes practice “forced associating” or combining things that we would never naturally combine. For example, they might imagine (or force) the combination of features in, say, a microwave oven and a dishwasher. This could deliver an innovative product idea, such as a dishwasher that uses some type of heating technology to clean and
sanitize dishes, eliminating water completely. Or in the case of actual appliance companies, EdgeStar produced a countertop-size dishwasher, while KitchenAid went for an in-sink approach. Both are the size of a microwave oven, use limited amounts of water, and wash far faster than a full-size machine.

  To practice forced associations, first consider a problem or challenge you or your company is facing. Then try the following exercises to force an association that you normally wouldn’t make:

  Pick up a product catalog and turn to the twenty-seventh page. What does the first product that you see have to do with the problem you are thinking about? Does the way it solves a problem for a customer have anything to do with your problem? For example, what if you run across an iPad product in your random page flipping and your work challenge is figuring out how to increase herbal-tea sales? Looking at an iPad might spur surprising syntheses, such as creating a novel iPad app to capture the interest of potential customers (or provide a means for current customers to become repeat customers).

  Or, open a completely random Wikipedia entry by choosing a random article from the Wikipedia web menu. A random click might land on boomerang. Perhaps your organization hopes for more-appealing product packaging. Bumping into the idea of a boomerang might suggest packaging a customer can return or a self-returning package after the product is used.