“Pregnant Pause” for Innovation

By now many veteran innovators have become accustomed to the immune system metaphor to describe what many of us previously referred to as the “not-invented-here” syndrome. The metaphor is increasingly being used in innovation and management discussions and literature, and for good reason. It fits.

That organizations—especially companies with established revenue streams—have immune systems (implicit cultural norms, management practices and/or explicit policies or metrics) that can attack and ultimately reject (or kill) innovations is generally recognized and understood. That these immune systems themselves can adapt and evolve, and how these systems work, is less well understood.  However, current medical research in immunology might give us some clues.

Just this week our old friend, sage and master consumer scout Leo Shapiro alerted us to a developing field of medical research. This research is asking why a mother’s immune system does not reject the baby during her pregnancy. This caught our attention as we might learn something suggestive of solutions for corporations that have over-active immune systems which do not seem to pause when “pregnant” with an innovation, particularly a disruptive one.

Here’s what we discovered in our search for the best current thinking of medical research on why and how a mother’s immune system takes a ‘pause’ during pregnancy. See what connections you make.

“According to some experts, infertility, recurrent miscarriage, premature delivery and dangerous complications of pregnancy may all, in some cases, be linked to immunological abnormalities” (Nature, November 21, 2002). Three areas currently being investigated by immunological researchers include what could be called preparation, buffers and a two-part view of the immune system.

Apparently proteins carried by semen chemically signal the woman’s immune system, thereby preparing the system in such a way as to avoid rejecting the embryo. In addition, one of the functions of the placenta is to manage the chemical and hormonal interface between the mother’s system and the embryo’s system—essentially acting as a buffer against the mother’s own T-cells (those that otherwise would attack what is foreign or threatening). Finally, some researchers contend that the mother’s immune system itself has two parts. During pregnancy, one part—the part that would otherwise harm the fetus—becomes disengaged, while the other part stays active to protect the mother from diseases during the pregnancy.

Might there not be some lessons here for how we handle our host corporation’s immune system and its effect on innovation?

Advanced preparation of those people who might perceive the innovation as disruptive is warranted.  However, simply waltzing in to the office of an operating manager and giving him or her a ‘heads up’ about the innovation is not what we mean by preparation. Asking that manager about the issues and opportunities that are on the horizon of his business might be a better start to discovering where the potential connections might be. As we discovered in our previous five-company study (Soft Systems for Hard Cores), always, always, honor the core. Larry Plotkin, a veteran in innovation management practices at Hewlett-Packard, uses this agenda-less approach to gaining a greater sensitivity to what is going on in the core business. This enables him to be much more artful in preparing the core for the new.

“Buffers”—whether in the form of separated teams or dedicated project leaders with sponsors, mentors and/or midwives—are an essential ingredient in protecting development work. Experienced R&D managers know how to be both transparent with what they are doing and protect certain efforts from the more adult-rated demands and rigors of the operating realities being addressed in the mainstream business. Some degree of structural separation is generally regarded as necessary to protect exploration and development efforts, and to protect the interests of the core operating business at the same time.

The two-part view of the immune system suggests that there may be parts or dimensions of the corporation’s immune system that can be temporarily “turned off” without threatening the rest of the immune system as a whole. What might those parts be? A current effort of one of our clients suggests that a sub-group of a core operating division may have a greater receptivity to an innovation—even if that innovation is disruptive—when that innovation uses familiar competencies and contributes self-evidently to a business challenge (e.g., competitive threat) the core business is facing.  Timing may be everything, and in this case, it was.

Preparing, buffering, turning off one part—each of these alone is likely insufficient to address the immune response of the host.  In combination, however, we are more likely to ensure the health of both the “mother” and the “child,” which should make for better innovations that work®.



This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in May 2004. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.