The Science of Serendipity E-Book

Matt Kingdon

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 242

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Innovation. The word might make you think of Silicon Valley. But innovation isn’t the sole province of start-ups. They didn’t invent it, and they’re not always the ones from which we can best learn. 

As Matt Kingdon argues in The Science of Serendipity,  it’s corporate innovators battling within large, established organisations who are the field’s real heroes. Tapping into 20 years of experience on the front lines of innovation—bringing new products and services to market and helping organisations become more creative—Kingdon dissects the ways in which corporations are continually reborn. He looks at the anatomy of innovation, asking: How do time-pressed executives go about taking risks? How do they prepare to see—and seize—opportunity? And how do you place humans, with all of their fears and foibles, at the heart of commercial success?

In a conversational, jargon-free style built on a practitioner’s observations and anecdotes, The Science of Serendipity traces the dilemmas that executives in a wide variety of firms face. It details the steps taken to overcome the issues and get great ideas across the finish line. If you’re looking for a guide in your fight against the corporate machine, this is the business book for you.

Matt Kingdon is the Co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Enthusiast of What If! Innovation Partners. For 20 years, What If! has partnered with the world’s most successful, forward-looking companies—businesses such as Barclays, Four Seasons, Google, PepsiCo, Pfizer, and Virgin—to galvanise innovation and deliver impact. Its 250 inventors work across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Leseprobe

The ultimate ‘how to’ guide for the corporate innovator! Matt is the champion of all those hard-working people trying to make innovation work at scale.

Sir Charles Allen, CBE

In an inspirational and practical book, Matt explores the ‘logic of magic’ at work and gives us new tricks to make it happen. Read only if you are ready to behave accordingly!

Marc Mathieu, Senior Vice President, Unilever

At Zappos, our belief is that if we get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like delivering great customer service or building a long term enduring brand, will happen naturally on its own. This book lifts the lid on much of the hard work needed to create buzzing, innovative and adventurous companies.

Tony Hsieh, NY Times best-selling author of Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos.com, Inc.

One of the rare business books that you will actually read from start to finish.

Julian Birkinshaw, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School

Matt Kingdon has woven twenty years of front-line innovation experience into a compelling offering for the many heroic innovators working against the odds in established organisations. Bottom line: you are not alone and this is the practical guide for you.

John Kao, founder of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, creator of Harvard Business School’s innovation program, Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory Council on Innovation, author of Jamming, and Frank Zappa’s keyboard player

This edition first published in 2012 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2012 ?What If! Limited

Main photography by Jake Hilder of Jake Hilder Photography

www.jakehilderphotography.co.uk

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-118-47810-3

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-118-47810-3 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-118-47811-0 (ebk)

ISBN 978-1-118-47812-7 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-47813-4 (ebk)

Set in 10.5/16pt ITC Mendoza Roman by Sparks – www.sparkspublishing.com

Text design by ?What If! Limited

Printed in Italy by Printer Trento

This book is dedicated to my great friend, business partner and co-enthusiast of 20 years in this crazy business – Dave Allan

Table of Contents

Title

endorsements

copyright

Dedication

Introduction

From Big to Small to Big

About Serendipity

Don’t Think Too Hard, Don’t Talk Too Much, Just Try It

Chapter 1: The Protagonist

‘Captain One Minute, Pirate the Next’

Chapter 2: The Quest for Provocation

Stuck in a Rut

The Answer: Under Your Nose?

Be Bold

The Life Beyond

Go to the Margins

The Many Lenses of Provocation

The Prepared Mind

Provoked. What Next?

Chapter 3: Making Ideas Real

Make It Real: At the Birth of an Idea

Make It Real: Co-Creation Makes Momentum

Make It Real: Powering Prototypes and Validating Ideas

Make It Real: Steel in Your Backbone

Making It Real: Before and After Launch

What It Really Takes to Get Real

Chapter 4: Collision Course

Forcing Collision

Creating Clutter

Fighting for Flexibility

Chapter 5: Battling the Corporate Machine

Setting Innovation Up For Success

Love Thy Product

Headspace

Safe Zones

Leadership Models

The Grapevine

Making Metrics Meaningful

Winning Over the Naysayers

A Call to Arms

Thanks

Sources

Index

About Matt Kingdon

Introduction

The Real Heroes of Innovation

What could be more exciting than starting with a blank sheet of paper and creating something of real value? Making something out of nothing, pointing to something that’s in the marketplace and saying ‘I did that’.

In life, there isn’t much that’s more exciting than this.

Being in the right place at the right time, seeing what no one else has seen, connecting the dots and having the perseverance to drive an idea all the way to launch and commercial success. This is the entrepreneur story that we know well.

But somehow this story has been stolen by the start-up. The word ‘entrepreneur’ or even ‘innovation’ has become synonymous with supercool, hyperintelligent and astonishingly young guys making millions.

I want to explore something that’s equally as challenging as the start-up story and – if you get it right – highly rewarding. I want to explore the story of innovation in large organisations where the need to refresh is ever-present. All companies were start-ups once and for many of them that spirit lies dormant, waiting to be reactivated.

This book gets under the skin of how you can make innovation really happen in organisations that have an embedded operational mindset. In my experience these are generally large organisations. I hope you find it a practical book, rich in the stories and lessons learned from the frontline of corporate innovation.

Established companies have their own rhythm and new suggestions are often met with crossed arms. These companies know they need to take a few risks and try doing things differently. But it’s tough, really tough. There seem to be roadblocks everywhere. The organisation is almost hardwired to repeat success and reduce risk, and now it is being asked to do the opposite. Somehow the battle to innovate is being fought at work and not in the marketplace.

Every few years at ?What If! we take the innovative temperature of our clients. In 2012 we asked 50 senior executives responsible for innovation in large global companies to tell us how the innovation ‘landscape’ was changing. They told us that the future feels much more uncertain, that it has become extremely difficult to plan for innovation and that executives need to be better equipped to deal with ambiguity. They reported that the need for disruption is forcing people to look beyond their category and comfort zone and that stakeholder relationships are getting more complex, with more hurdles to overcome than ever before.

It’s in places like these that the real heroes of business work. To innovate at scale and create wealth and employment for many is in my view the most noble of commercial challenges. I want to tell the stories of the people who do this, how they have struggled, how they have succeeded and what this can teach us.

I want all those executives who’ve had their entrepreneurial mojo beaten out of them – or who think it’s the preserve of the groovy – to think again. After 20 years of innovating with large companies I know that serendipitous invention and the creative exploitation of ideas is a muscle that you can choose to work out or allow to wither.

Serendipitous invention and the creative exploitation of ideas is a muscle that you can choose to work out or allow to wither

Serendipity – or seemingly ‘happy accidents’ – is a fascinating concept and I’ll define it in detail in just a few pages. The concepts of serendipity and innovation are sibling and they somewhat merge in this book. Serendipity is the connective raw material for successful innovation. It’s an important element of innovation, especially in a large company where many have their heads down and their peripheral vision reduced. Innovation is the commercialising of what looks to the outsider like a ‘lucky break’. You can’t deliver innovation in a large organisation unless you have a practical grip on what serendipity really is and how you can make it work for you.

In calling this the book The Science of Serendipity I’m using the term ‘science’ with considerable licence. Over five chapters I’ve bundled a series of observations about how people prepare themselves so that they can connect the seemingly unconnected and push on to make something out of these connections in their organisation. Without doubt there are practical steps you can take to be ‘lucky’ and hit upon the next big thing. Together these five chapters form a logic or a ‘science’ to the serendipitous discovery and exploitation of ideas. This book isn’t about theory; it’s a practical book based on practical experience for those grappling with innovation at scale.

Fundamentally, innovation is about how human beings get inspired to look in new places, work together and react to the unwelcome and the unexpected. Creating innovation within a large organisation takes a mix of determination, provocation, experimentation and political savvy. I’ve included here many stories, observations and lessons learnt from a wide variety of sectors. Hopefully you’ll agree with me that it’s both fascinating and instructive to explore beyond the boundaries of your industry and take a peek at how others are innovating.

From Big to Small to Big

I love telling stories, particularly innovation stories. I love the drama and the essential ‘human-ness’ of these stories. I take innovation seriously but not solemnly; as a subject it deserves to be provocative, playful and engaging.

My own story is of working for a big company, then a small company that now works with big companies. I started work in the 1980s as a marketer with Unilever, the giant consumer goods company. I spent years figuring out how to help people all over the world get cleaner clothes, enjoy fragrant armpits, have shinier kitchens and remove unimaginably awful stains from their loos. It was an inspiring education in how a large company connects with its customers and makes them happy.

Then in 1992, when I was 29, I had one of those Maslow Moments when you realise what all that self-actualisation stuff is really about. I teamed up with a colleague – Dave Allan. We had no money, no partners, no kids, no debts – we actually had nothing apart from a crazy desire to reinvent the way large businesses develop new stuff. So we decided to set up a company called ?What If! in London. What we lacked in a plan we made up for in optimism.

Today, nearly 20 years later, we have 250 colleagues (we call them ‘?What If!ers’) and offices in three continents. Over the past two decades we have worked with hundreds of great businesses helping them to ignite and sustain a radically more innovative approach to business. We’ve partnered with some of the world’s most ambitious companies in most market sectors – all of them looking to accelerate growth through innovation. We have completed over 5000 innovation engagements in 45 countries and coached over 50,000 people to help strengthen their innovation muscles.

But when we started we weren’t that great. Looking back I shudder to think how naive we were. Our first innovation assignment did not light up our client. It was clear that we hadn’t spent enough time with consumers in their own homes, we hadn’t developed the commercial argument behind our ideas and we hadn’t understood what was driving the people within our client’s organisation who had to say ‘yes’ to the idea. Feeling down – in a dive of a bar in north London – Dave and I scribbled down how we were going to react to what felt like a disaster. We didn’t know it then but we were committing ourselves to the core innovation principles that would evolve to become the foundation of our business. Pity I don’t still have that scrap of paper; but here’s what we agreed:

Creativity alone is futile. A successful commercial launch of an idea is all that matters.

Understanding how customers live their whole lives, not just how they react to a particular category is critical.

We’ll always make ideas real and try hard not to slip into a client’s business jargon.

Every assignment we work on we’ll try some new way to get inspiration.

Finally, innovation is all about our behaviour – how we react to each other’s ideas, how we create an expectation that we’ll ‘lean in’ to an idea and how we’ll be tough with each other when we think the other’s idea stinks.

These principles have remained pretty true over 20 years. Along the way we’ve gathered an amazing team that has helped us to evolve our approach, engagement after engagement, year after year.

There’s one thing I’ve always believed is critical in growing a business – paranoia. Seriously, I think it’s a good thing. I’ve always been criticised for being upset with the things around me; I don’t care. I think it’s good to look over your shoulder every day; I like to worry all the time. I like restless people – always trying new stuff, never satisfied with things.

So at ?What If! we’ve tried just about every innovation tool, structure, behaviour, philosophy – call them what you will – we’ve tried them. Twenty years ago we started recruiting supertalkative multilingual consumers, arranged them into panels and trained them to be creative. We developed a homegrown philosophy that involved literally moving in and living with customers. We started recruiting what we called ‘naive experts’ – people with tangential but surprisingly useful expertise to our clients. We banned the use of our clients’ internal business jargon and forced ourselves to talk only in the language their consumers would use. We pioneered meetings with clients on buses, in bedrooms, in kitchens – anywhere to better the connection with ‘reality’.

By the mid 1990s we had established a ‘Realness’ team whose job was to translate ideas into physical objects, on the spot. We never called any of this ‘ethnography’ or ‘prototyping’ or ‘customer centricity’; to us it was just one huge rolling experiment to find the best way to innovate. In 1996 we started training our clients in the techniques of innovation and flexible thinking. Many of our innovation principles are embedded into the training and development programmes of the world’s most successful companies.

Ten years ago we started to realise just how exciting the world of innovation was becoming. Although it was useful to read about companies doing great stuff, it had far more impact to visit them and hear from the top brass themselves about how innovation really works. We established our ‘TopDog’ study tours and today have taken over 400 senior executives on intensive immersion experiences. We’ve visited over 50 organisations ranked as the world’s leading innovators. We’ve seen companies up close and personal such as Google, Apple, WL Gore, Walmart, Lego, IKEA and many more. After each tour we’ve worked with the 20 or so executives in attendance to distil the learning. We’ve literally been all over the world in our pursuit of innovation excellence.

One of the things we insist on during our visits is that the company leaders talk informally and from the heart about their struggle to innovate. We encourage them to go backstage to the warehouse, the staff canteen or the loading bay and then we’ll quiz staff to see if what we’re hearing stacks up. These visits, and the debates they have provoked, have surfaced fascinating nuances in how innovation really happens.

More recently, as our clients have become more ambitious around innovation, our work has expanded to the scale of organisational transformation. How can a large organisation start to work with agility and how can it do this day after day? Our years spent at the coalface of innovation have given our approach to agenda setting at the leadership level, to educational programmes and to innovation projects, a uniquely practical perspective.

About Serendipity

Serendipity is an intriguing word. Alongside ‘Irish Eyes’ and ‘Island Time’ it’s in the top ten of boat names in the US. The word ‘serendipity’ has an undeniably mellifluous quality about it. You can roll it enjoyably around your tongue and it regularly tops the charts of favourite English words, alongside discombobulate, twiffler and mumpsimus.

These are enjoyable facts but they don’t help us get under the skin of serendipity or understand how it can unlock all that innovation promises.

To understand the concept of serendipity we have to go back a thousand years to a story emanating from the East and retold many times over the centuries.

The tale is charming. Three Princes of Serendip (today we know this as Sri Lanka) were sent by their father, the king, on a journey to test their suitability to reign. Along the way they met a camel driver who asked them about his lost camel. The three princes were able to describe the camel in much detail: ‘Your lost camel is blind in one eye, is missing a tooth and is carrying butter and honey’. So accurate was the description that suspicions were raised and the princes thrown into jail. But later they were pardoned as it became clear that they had merely connected many separate observations together to produce the uncannily accurate story.

On their travels the princes had seen grass eaten from one side of the verge and reckoned an animal blind in one eye must have caused this. Grass was scattered unevenly, so a tooth must have been missing. And the ants on one side of the road indicated the presence of butter, the flies on the other side of the road honey. The story continues along a similar vein, each twist sees the clever princes combine seemingly casual observations – things that most people might miss – into something more meaningful.

‘This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word’

This fairy tale was popular in the bustling metropolis of Venice in the sixteenth century. I can imagine it as a sort of early day detective story; its clever twists and reasoning appreciated during the Renaissance. In the English language the word serendipity surfaced relatively recently – 250 years ago. The earliest known usage is by Horace Walpole, son of a Prime Minister and man of letters. In 1754 he mentions the Three Princes of Serendip who ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’ and ‘This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.’

Most dictionaries define serendipity as the occurrence of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way – a ‘happy accident’. This definition seems to imply serendipity is purely a chance or a random kind of thing. The ‘sagacity’ element Walpole mentions seems to have been dropped.

The definition of serendipity that I’m using assumes a happy and profitable outcome that may be unanticipated but has not been found purely by chance. What looks like luck – a ‘happy accident’ – is in reality hard-earned.

What looks like luck – a ‘happy accident’ – is in reality hard-earned

This concept seems to be wholly suited to the reality of what it feels like to innovate. So many successful innovation stories involve hard-working people who set out on a mission. Their precise goal may be a little fuzzy, but they are determined to right some wrongs and, as Steve Jobs said, put a ‘dent in the universe’. These people have cast their nets wide. Maybe they have broad experience or maybe they have a diverse team working for them. The more they get out and about and fill their mental filing cabinet with provocative stimulus, the more likely they are to spot patterns and make some interesting connections. This works the intuition muscle; pretty soon they get confident with their gut. Louis Pasteur was aware of this when he commented ‘chance favours only the prepared mind’.

Listen to innovators describe how they felt along their journey. Only they know how hard they worked to make a single new connection and how many connections failed to yield anything of value. Only they know how well they prepared their people, so that when an opportunity appeared they spotted it immediately and made it into something. Luck for them doesn’t exist – it’s a romantic, illusory concept. They have made their own success. ‘Luck’ is the label of the onlooker.

Serendipity is more than just setting yourself up so that great connections become more likely; it delivers a result as well. You can’t be serendipitous or innovative if you don’t know how to deal, there and then, with the connection you’ve just made. Think of it as a game of two halves. First we collide with as much stimulus as possible; next we seize on a connection and do something about it. This is why serendipity fits so well with innovation and not creativity. To stumble upon a new connection may be what some label ‘creative’, but to commercialise it is an altogether different game. This is innovation and that’s the game we’re interested in.

‘The harder I practice, the luckier I get.’

Variously attributed

Getting lucky

It’s August 1993 and 12 male volunteers are reporting back the effects of a potential new angina drug to a Pfizer clinical research associate in Cardiff, Wales. One of the men reports an unusual finding: sustained and frequent erections. After he’d broken the ice, all the others chorused agreement.

Nonplussed, the clinician explains the unexpected finding to the scientist leading the trials, Dr David Brown, a senior Pfizer research chemist. But when she does, Brown sits bolt upright. Brown knew he was, so to speak, on to something big. But he had no idea that he’d discovered what was to become Viagra, a $30bn blockbuster.

After some persuasion, Brown got an extension to continue the trials – at Southmead Hospital in Bristol where they had a specialist erectile dysfunction unit. This time the trialists were fitted with a device called a ‘Rigiscan’ (please use your imagination here) and asked to watch pornographic movies. Then they were allowed to take the pills home to see how well they worked under more normal conditions.

A week later, when they returned to report their results, something unexpected happened. Several of the men refused to give the pills back claiming it had radically improved their sex lives. ‘It was very humbling and gratifying to see how much happier these men were’, says Brown. ‘They reported they had a normal sex life with their wives for the first time in years.’

Eventually the men were persuaded to return the pills on the condition that the next time there was a clinical trial they would be amongst the first asked to take part. This was a promise that Brown and his team were able to fulfil several months later. Brown adds: ‘The project went from nearly dead to top priority globally, a full development programme.’ So great were expectations that when Viagra was eventually launched in 1998, Pfizer’s share price had doubled. Over the next few years Pfizer went on to become the world’s largest pharmaceutical company and also, for a time, the world’s most valuable company by market capitalisation.

We need to dig a little deeper to understand the serendipitous nature of this story. A confluence of events contributed to Brown’s ability to spot the potential of the angina drug.

First: several years earlier Brown had tried but failed to get Pfizer’s backing to start a research project to help men suffering from erectile dysfunction (ED). The only science known at the time led him to suggest a drug that acted directly on the brain and promoted sexual arousal. As Brown says: ‘This was just too dangerous as a concept and quite rightly I didn’t get the green light.’ Although he was leading an angina project, Brown was aware of the commercial opportunity in ED and critically that an ED drug couldn’t act centrally, in other words, on the brain.

Second: his offices and labs were, in his words ‘… old and dilapidated. We were crammed into a quite small space with the whole team of chemists and biologists bumping into each other all the time, which fortunately led to constant exchange of information, ideas and views without the need for formal meetings … somehow that building coincided with a time of Pfizer’s greatest innovations.’ Inevitably, it was in a corridor conversation that Brown learnt about a new scientific discovery of the biochemical role of a gas called nitric oxide. Until then no one had suspected its ability to dilate the blood vessel in the corpus cavernosum – the blood vessel in the penis that opens up during an erection.

Viagra, as it became known, potentiated the action of nitric oxide. This meant that Brown and his colleagues Nicholas Terrett and Andy Bell were able to put two and two together when they heard about the unexpected side effects. A couple of years earlier and he just wouldn’t have understood the link between the pharmacology and the men’s lusty claims.

From his earlier ED proposal, he also knew Pfizer would support a peripherally acting but not a centrally acting drug. In other words you had to feel horny for the science to work, not have the science make you feel horny. When the results came through from Cardiff, Brown not only knew why the drug was initiating erections, he thought that Pfizer would support it.

Brown, who is named as the co-inventor of Viagra on the Pfizer patent, was also instrumental in the development of two other successful Pfizer drugs and, a few years later, became Global Head of Drug Discovery at Hoffman La-Roche in Switzerland leading the efforts of 2000 research scientists. Today he chairs several start-up biotech companies in Cambridge, England, and remembers the days of the old office in Kent with fondness: ‘They were the most uncomfortable and yet the most productive.’

The story of the serendipitous discovery of Viagra is packed with learning for innovators. If Brown hadn’t been rejected in his early attempts to work on ED, if Brown hadn’t worked out of a crush of an office – if these things hadn’t have happened then maybe Pfizer would never have discovered its winning product. But Brown and Pfizer weren’t just lucky. Because he was prepared, then chance did favour him.

So, determination, a diverse but intimate network, intuition and agility – these are all concepts found in the 1000-year-old tale of the Three Princes of Serendip and the modern-day invention of Viagra. These are the ingredients of innovation. They seem to make for an altogether more realistic innovation recipe than one that claims innovation is somehow preordained through great strategic thought and rigorous planning.

Don’t Think Too Hard, Don’t Talk Too Much, Just Try It

Innovation and serendipity, they’re both extremely social – so much is bound up with how people rub along together. This book places human beings, with all their weird foibles, at the centre of the science of serendipity. The ‘science’ goes like this: get hold of the right type of person and give them a brief that is both constraining yet has plenty of room for exploration. Then unleash them on a quest for provocative insight and ensure they do experimental stuff rather than talk about clever stuff. Above all they need good humour to pick themselves up, dust themselves down and try again. With this in mind, this is how the book flows:

In Chapter 1,

The Protagonist

, we explore the qualities of a successful innovator within a corporate environment. I’ve called this person a ‘Captain One Minute, Pirate the Next’. They are both a visionary and a maverick. We’ll unpick their psychological make-up and understand why they are so good at exploiting serendipity.

In Chapter 2,

The Quest for Provocation

, we look at how busy executives get out of the office and into the habit of making fresh connections. This is a process that can be deliberately managed and is the raw material for serendipity. Think of it as a practical exploration of how to ‘prepare the mind’ so that chance will favour it.

In Chapter 3,

Making Ideas Real

, we take a detailed look at the innovator’s weapon of choice. The ability to make a series of mini experiments that build out and prove an idea is essential to exploiting serendipity. We look at the philosophy and practice of how to make ideas real from their initial formation all the way through to a prototype, pilot, launch and even beyond.

In Chapter 4,

Collision Course

, we take a look at something that’s often underrated but is in fact a prime mover of serendipity. We explore how the physical space around us drives us to connect ideas and gives us the confidence to develop them all the way to launch.

In Chapter 5,

Battling the Corporate Machine