GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Perhaps two of the greatest challenges faced by corporate innovators are failure and credit. The linkage between these two concepts is more profound than the oft-quoted proverb “success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.” Recurring failure leading to a stunning breakthrough is the stuff of legend in the innovation world, ranging from Edison’s numerous ineffective early light bulb designs that preceded his incandescent immortality to Steve Jobs’ well-publicized failures at NeXT computing prior to his triumphant return to Apple.

How an innovator responds to failure can determine the difference between mediocrity and greatness. Credit becomes a challenge once an innovation takes flight and discussions abound concerning who should be viewed as the originator of a given creation. In the corporate world, credit can range from an individual recognition of brilliance, such as Art Fry and the ubiquitous Post-It Note from 3M to the numerous successes of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Team where individual names are less prominent.

The life story of Alfred Russel Wallace, as recounted masterfully in Iain McCalman’s Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution, provides insights for modern innovators concerning how to handle failure and credit.

As McCalman relates, Wallace was born in Wales in 1823 and led a peripatetic existence into his twenties due both to his family’s penury and his own changing desires and interests. Wallace finally settled on the profession that would define his imprint on history when he befriended an entomologist and, after a brief stint of collecting insects in England, went on a four-year trip to the Amazon. During his explorations on the Rio Negro, he faced dysentery, malaria, poisonous snakes, and swarms of insects and even lost his brother, Edward, who succumbed to yellow fever while awaiting Alfred’s return from the interior. Wallace nonetheless was able to collect thousands and thousands of specimens and took voluminous notes on the hundreds of different species he observed during his trip. Although he sent some of his findings to England in advance, the majority of his specimens accompanied him on the brig Helen which departed South America in 1852. Shortly into the voyage, the Helen caught fire and Wallace watched as the output from four long, difficult years of work went up in flames. Since he had collected duplicate specimens and planned to sell half of his take to fund the trip, Wallace was financially and scientifically ruined. He was only able to salvage a few of his notebooks and sketches prior to fleeing the ship, burning his hands while sliding down a rope into the longboat. Wallace had to watch the entire process from close range because the crew stayed tied up to the Helen as long as possible, hoping the flames would attract a passing vessel to rescue them. After 10 days at sea, a London-bound ship rescued the crew and took them home but encountered fierce storms and ran low on supplies which further compounded Wallace’s misery. Wallace arrived in London in a desolate state.  He literally possessed nothing more than the shirt on his back, with nothing to show for his four years of work and no career prospects for the future.

At this point Wallace could have abandoned his naturalist dreams and chosen a different profession. Instead he stayed focused on his passion, helped somewhat by news from his agent that the lost collection was insured for 200 pounds. He used some of these funds to publish a book on his Amazonian findings, cobbling together the limited materials he had rescued from the Helen. The book was not well received and sold few copies. Wallace attended meetings of the Zoological and Entomological Societies and presented papers on his findings, hinting at the process of evolution in his observations on Amazonian butterflies without explicitly spelling out a theory of evolution. His continued work in the field caught the eye of the geologist Sir Roderick Murchison which paved the way for Wallace to obtain limited funding for continuing work as a naturalist abroad. Wallace could have returned to Brazil to re-trace his previous steps and collect specimens, but he chose to travel to the relatively untouched Malay Archipelago in search of a remote location with higher potential for entomology. Wallace leveraged the lessons from his previous expedition in preparing for the trip to the Malay Archipelago and dove into his preparatory studies with great intensity.

Over the course of several years in this new location, Wallace assembled the observations that would make him the first British scientist to posit in a publication the theory that animals descended from common ancestry and evolved into different species as a result of variation. Wallace’s most famous discovery came late in the trip when he was wracked up with malaria. He recalled Thomas Malthus’ Principles of Population and postulated that the inevitable outcome of exponentially increasing populations of animals is the survival of the fittest. Wallace gathered his thoughts into a paper titled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” and sent it to Charles Darwin, who had been grappling with the same challenge for over two decades but, for a variety of reasons, had not yet published his thesis on evolution. Upon receiving Wallace’s letter, Darwin exclaimed that his originality in the thesis would be ruined and that he would not be seen as the creator of the theory of evolution. Darwin could have chosen to burn the letter and paper and claim he never received it, but he began work on his own publication on evolution. His key academic allies came up with an approach where Darwin and Wallace would present their conclusions to the Linnean Society in parallel, focusing on different aspects of the same question. In the end, however, history has shined the brightest light on Darwin and he is the name cited by schoolchildren who study evolution. Wallace’s name appears mostly as a postscript.

After eight years in the Malay Archipelago, Wallace returned to London and visited with Darwin. Wallace was effusive in his praise of Darwin and never sought priority for his own theory. Rather, he spoke of his own inferiority to Darwin and was happy to subordinate himself to Darwin in the ultimate quest to expand scientific knowledge.

Wallace’s life experience provides lessons for innovation in two areas:

Leveraging Failure
The depth of Wallace’s initial failure surpasses anything that a modern innovator might experience in a corporate setting, but his response is edifying. Wallace stayed true to the field where he failed (entomology) but applied his skills to a new location (the Malay Archipelago). This new location was fortuitous in that in allowed him to see distinctions between Asiatic and Australian species, subsequently referred to as the “Wallace Line.”  This permitted him to make observations and comparisons between the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago that ultimately enhanced his theory and made him successful in the long run. Sometimes a change of scenery can literally turn failure into triumph.

Taking Credit
In the corporate world the innovator does not always receive credit for his or her accomplishments. In some cases, the innovator is part of a team that creates a successful innovation. In other cases, corporate maneuverings may mean that the true creator of a solution may not be recognized appropriately. Faced with the latter dilemma, Wallace proved honorable in acknowledging that his theory rested on the shoulders of the work of Darwin. Although Wallace’s name was not completely lost to posterity, the preeminence of Darwin in the field of evolution is unquestioned. Nonetheless, Wallace could have invested tremendous energies in fighting Darwin for ownership of the theory of evolution. Instead he focused his efforts on working with Darwin to advance the cause of science and push their common innovation forward, even though it meant that he would likely spend more time as a footnote than as the owner of evolution.

Source:
Iain McCalman, Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

In recent years our understanding of the workings of the brain has increased dramatically. Science has provided meaningful insights into the mechanics of how we think, with business implications for everything from marketing to organizational behavior. Innovators, too, can benefit from these findings. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman leverages the concept of modes of thinking from the Psychology literature to define our thought processes as System 1 and System 2 (the original terms were set forth by prominent psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West).

Kahneman defines System 1 as a mode of thinking with automatic and rapid operation that generates a mental response with barely any discernible effort on the part of the participant. For example, when a person sees “2+2=?” the brain immediately fires back the answer “4” via the System 1 mechanism. System 2, Kahneman continues, is a more deliberative set of mental actions required for complex calculations, involving “agency, choice, and concentration.” System 2, for instance, would entail the mental activities associated with a request to count in this article all the occurrences of the letter “a.” The interplay of these two systems determines how we make our way through the world. As Kahneman observes, System 1

effortlessly originat[es] impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.

The purpose of Kahneman’s work is to help readers identify and understand the limitations of intuition and to provide a language to describe the processes at work that drive heuristics. As practitioners of innovation, we, too, can benefit from applying this greater precision to our thought processes as we engage in our daily work.

For the innovator, System 1 seems to be inherently tied into the ideation or discovery phase of the innovation process. Whiteboard brainstorming, virtual idea jam sessions, or other free-association methods used to generate new ideas can benefit from the ability of System 1 to “effortlessly” generate perspectives shorn of the baggage that can accompany the responses generated by System 2. System 1 drives out the crisp, new thinking that is not held back by all the limitations of the corporate bureaucracy, marketplace, or technological limitations that System 2 will force into the analysis. However, the more structured and analytical thinking driven by System 2 is required to deliver the idea. Innovation experts agree that the work following the ideation phase is almost always the most difficult part of the process, with numerous obstacles ranging from securing resources, validating potential return on investment, overcoming technological challenges, and steering between the Scylla and Charybdis of bureaucratic obstacles and doubting colleagues.

The examples of the difficulties inherent in this latter part of the process about in the innovation literature, ranging from Edison’s hundreds of attempts to arrive at the right combination of materials in the incandescent light bulb to the relentlessness of Dick Drew at 3M in pursuing the innovation that led to masking tape, despite his boss’s insistence that he focus on improving their current product (sandpaper) rather than working on something new.

The most successful innovation benefits from thinking derived from a combination of Systems 1 and 2, with System 1 driving the ideation phase and System 2 turning that idea into reality. We could also describe System 1 as an epiphany (when the new idea first hits us in all its glaring simplicity) followed by the intensive work of turning that idea into reality, whether that means convincing enough people of the need to radically transform a business process or working to develop a technology in a laboratory. Another possible conclusion from applying Kahneman’s insights is the realization that we all possess Systems 1 and 2 and thus we do not have to move ourselves to the back of the conference room in an ideation session just because we tend more to the deliberative approach to problem-solving. Leveraging these concepts can also help amplify the creative part of the ideation phase by better understand how our minds work when we are in the process of trying to create new solutions to problems.

Sources:
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2011)
A Century of Innovation: the 3M Story (https://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_WW/History/3M/Company/century-innovation/)

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

I recently wrote in these pages about how Innovation Practitioners can benefit from leveraging concepts that the leading pharmaceutical companies are using to transform their approach to Research and Development. Apparently this transformation is not limited to Big Pharma’s R&D. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Jonathan Rockoff writes about recent changes underway to the salesforces at Big Pharma. Understanding those changes can bear fruit for students of innovation.

Rockoff cites the example of Eli Lilly & Co. sales representative Michaelene Greenly, whose approach to dealing with doctors has evolved from a hard-sell approach to a more conversational and relationship-driven approach. Although the hard-sell approach in the past had yielded positive sales results as more and more blockbuster drugs appeared on the market, that aggressive approach began to generate diminishing returns. As Greenly observes,

“We used to come in with our own agenda: What can I accomplish today? We’ve turned that all around. It’s what the doctor talks about.”

Rockoff notes that the intense, scripted sales presentations of the past are making way for engagements where the salespeople focus on understanding what the doctors’ conditions of satisfaction. The impetus behind this transformation in the sales relationship, according to Eli Lilly’s President of Global Business David Ricks, was the realization that there was an increasingly wide gap between what doctors expected from a new drug (based on the sales pitch) versus the reality of what the new drug delivered for a doctor’s patients.

At first glance, the observation that we need to focus on customer wants and needs seems intuitive to those of us who work in the innovation space. After all, one of the core elements of an innovation discussion is the dialog-driven nature of the interaction. We are taught by visionaries such as Simon Sinek to “Start with Why” in order to understand what drives the essential being of our customers before we get to the “How” or “What” of what we would sell.

However, the evolution of the Big Pharma salesforce serves as a reminder to us of how easy it is to fall into the trap of having so much confidence in the benefits of our products that we forget the basic lesson of focusing on the client. Innovation practitioners are particularly susceptible to this failing because, for some of our innovation work, we approach clients with fascinating new products or services that we view as industry-transforming or earth-shattering. The bright, shiny objects that we are eager to share with our clients can sometimes blind us to the more fundamental question of what that bright, shiny object actually means to the customer. An innovative product or service may have value in and of itself, but without a specific application by an end user, that product or service’s value is questionable. Although in our sales efforts we have to demonstrate enthusiasm for the novelty of what we are selling (otherwise the client will wonder why we are wasting their time), the best approach is to impart that enthusiasm to our client by helping them understand what the innovation means to them.

Sources: Jonathan D. Rockoff, “Drug Sales Reps Try a Softer Pitch,” Wall Street Journal (January 10, 2012)Simon Sinek, www.startwithwhy.com

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

In a recent Op/Ed in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute identifies three lessons learned by the leading pharmaceutical companies in their R&D efforts. These findings are applicable to other industries as well and can be of benefit to practitioners of innovation.

Dr. Gottlieb’s first observation is that pharmaceutical companies’ legacy approaches to drug discovery have diminished in effectiveness. Previous major breakthroughs had emanated from a process of screening millions of random chemical compounds against certain targets. This, for instance, led to the discovery of Lipitor, a successful drug that lowers cholesterol. Dr. Gottlieb notes that companies assumed that expanding these same screening programs would lead to better and better results. In other words, if 5X is good, then 10X the amount of research spending is better. Unfortunately, the results didn’t pan out and companies realized they were not achieving enough of a return on their investments. Pharmaceutical companies have subsequently transformed their R&D efforts into a more targeted and precision-oriented effort. Dr. Gottlieb terms this a “rational discovery process,” where size is less important than precision.

Secondly, Dr. Gottlieb observes that the large bureaucratic organizations that pervaded these companies provided antithetical to the type of innovative and entrepreneurial environment needed to be successful at drug research. Smaller, more precision-oriented teams proved more successful, Dr. Gottlieb states, than larger, industrialized organizations.

Finally, Dr. Gottlieb notes that the target for pharmaceutical research has evolved from a focus on primary-care medicine (lowering cholesterol) to solving more serious medical conditions such as cancer. This is due both to the market premium afforded successful drugs in the latter space as well as the relative lack of good drugs targeting these serious conditions. Incremental improvements in the primary-care space, Dr. Gottlieb argues, are less attractive than a breakthrough drug addressing a serious illness.

Practitioners of innovation can learn several broader lessons from Dr. Gottlieb’s assessment of Big Pharma:

1. What worked in the past will not necessarily work in the future. Innovators within a company with a breakthrough product in the past may fall victim to a mindset where they try to emulate the conditions that surrounded that past breakthrough, whether in terms of the structure of the team working on new ideas, the scope or focus area of their work, or even the individuals involved in the R&D work. Such an approach may set boundaries around the innovation team that could inhibit precisely the type of creative thinking that is needed to find the next breakthrough innovation.

2. Innovation does not always scale. If 10 innovators working for a year develop 2 blockbuster innovations, then it is not necessarily true that 100 innovators working for a year will create 20 blockbuster innovations. In other words, innovation is not a linear process.

3. Innovation requires a balance between depth and breadth. The question of focus for innovation efforts is a troubling one because there is a constant battle between the desire to focus discovery efforts around a specific target area versus allowing for a broader scope with out of the box thinking that could result in an unanticipated breakthrough. Some balance is needed so that innovation efforts stay focused on specific objectives while still establishing the type of environment that fosters creativity and free-thinking.

4. Bureaucracy inhibits innovation. As has been argued by various authors on InnovationExcellence.com, team size is of critical importance and although there is debate concerning the precise “right size” of a team working on innovation, one clear lesson is that extremely large groups suffer from bureaucratic inertia that can inhibit productivity and stifle creativity. This is one of the dangers of the notion that innovation is scalable.

5. Innovators must think about their target markets, not just the value of the innovation itself. The Blue Ocean Strategy of W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne is a well-known statement of the principle that says that a company can benefit from moving beyond a crowded competitive landscape and strike out into a new, “blue ocean” space where the competition is less relevant. Innovators caught in highly-saturated markets where incremental improvements are less valued can benefit from this type of strategy, as is the case with Big Pharma moving into drugs that address more serious illnesses.

Although some of these findings seem intuitive, they nevertheless serve to remind us of some of the pitfalls to avoid as we craft our innovation strategies. After all, if multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies have stumbled in these areas, then all of us stand to learn from those mistakes as well.

Sources: Scott Gottlieb, “Big Pharma’s New Business Model,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2011, page A13. & Blue Ocean Strategy

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

In his new book A First-Rate Madness, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi posits that some of the key attributes associated with depression and mental illness (realism, empathy, resilience, and creativity) also provide the foundation for successful leadership in politics, military engagements, and business.  As I listened to an interview with Dr. Ghaemi, head of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, I wondered if these same characteristics of leaders suffering from depression might also be useful tools for those of us tasked with delivering innovation in our organizations.

The first depression-related quality Dr. Ghaemi cites is realism. Studies have suggested that individuals with mental illnesses have a stronger understanding of reality than their non-depressed counterparts. From an innovation standpoint, this deeper understanding of what is real and what is not real is clear in terms of providing an innovator with the ability to discern whether one far-fetched idea is more likely to come to fruition rather than another one. While we want innovators to think outside the box and, in some cases, dream of new horizons, a firm grasp of reality is also critical to ensuring that scarce resources are not invested in an idea that has little chance of becoming real.

Another quality cited by Dr. Ghaemi is empathy. Depressed individuals are better able to understand the plight of those around them. In terms of innovation, this could map to the importance of taking into consideration the perspectives of co-workers as well as customers in assessing the feasibility of a given innovation. The apocryphal view of a genius innovator is that he or she relentlessly pursues an idea and ignores any negative feedback from those around him or her. However, we know that every genius stood on the shoulders of many of those around him or her, and in the end one could reason that an innovator working cooperatively with colleagues, while still being inspired to pursue great ideas, is more likely to succeed than someone completely removed from social interactions. From a customer standpoint, it is well-known that even the greatest innovation will fail if customers do not warm to the idea or product, so possessing empathy in terms of thinking about how a customer will react to an innovation is a critical step in the innovation process.

The next attribute of mental illness that can serve as a positive force for innovators is resilience, or the ability to recover from a setback. One of the most frequently-cited themes in the study of innovation is the importance of working through failure as part of the process, especially since such a high percentage of ideas end up never making it into real products or services. Any innovator who has not experienced failure is probably not trying enough new ideas. Thus an innovator must possess the quality of resilience to be able to bounce back from those defeats and renew their efforts on another front with even greater vigor.

The final characteristic cited by Dr. Ghaemi is creativity. This has the most obvious tie to innovation in terms of a positive quality, and the innovation literature is heavily-laden with parallels between the creativity of artists, musicians, and other fields and the skills needed to be a successful innovator.

So what does this mean for those of us working in the innovation arena? I am not suggesting that innovators should seek to become depressed to improve their performance, but I do believe that the ideas presented in Dr. Ghaemi’s thesis can help structure our approaches to innovation. We know the importance of creativity to innovation, but how many of us spend time thinking about realism, empathy, or resiliency? Dr. Ghaemi’s thesis can serve as a checklist to use as we work on ideas in our innovation processes. When we feel an idea being pulled by a dream perhaps too far from reality, we might want to take a moment to split out a more achievable subset of that idea to pursue in the near-term (while never losing sight of the dream, which is still of critical importance). We should also perform an empathy check as we are working on our ideas to make sure we’re not losing sight of our co-workers (whose ideas and assistance will usually be instrumental in our ultimate success) as well as our customers, who possess the final vote on whether our innovation has truly created value.

Finally, we should always think about the resiliency of great political, military, and business leaders (Dr. Ghaemi writes about Lincoln, Sherman, and Ted Turner, among others) and how they were able to overcome the darkest moments in their careers to recover and move forward to ultimate success. Although we as innovators will never face the kinds of situations some of these leaders encountered in their lifetimes, their strength and conviction are things we should certainly emulate.

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