“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. 

Innovation and Auto-Immunity

Success breeds its own orthodoxy.  When an innovation defies the odds and not only survives but succeeds, it is perfectly natural to want to continue that success by perpetuating what is believed to have contributed to the success in the first place.  What those contributing factors were, however, may be more subject to multiple interpretations and perceptions than some might first admit.  This is where the next “orthodoxy” starts to sneak in.

We have been working with a company recently whose success has attracted many competitors on the outside.  Success has also required internal attention and effort to order, control and focus the innovation-born success on the inside, the need for which is not unrelated to the intensifying competition on the outside.  The dilemma facing this post-entrepreneurial stage company now is how to protect, defend and perpetuate its success while at the same time continuing to fulfill its vocation of providing innovative value to current and new consumers.  Sound familiar?

As whole companies or even product divisions seek to extend their success, they naturally develop “immune systems” designed to maintain the health of the organization.  Just as our physical health depends upon a robust immune system – a complex network of cells and molecules that normally work to defend the body and eliminate infections caused by bacteria, viruses and other invading microbes – business “fitness” depends to some degree on a corporate immune system.  These corporate “immune systems” can be comprised of a complex set of management attitudes (e.g., focus), decisions (e.g., resource allocations) and controls that serve to protect, defend and perpetuate the value proposition for customers and the resulting profits for the corporation.

However, when organizational fitness becomes more important than business fitness, orthodoxy can set in, creating conditions for the corporate “immune system” to attack the corporation’s own innovation efforts, mistaking these efforts as threats or “antigens.”  Just as immune cells can mistake our bodies’ own cells as invaders and attack them, internally developed or externally sponsored innovations can elicit “friendly fire,” in some very subtle ways.  In other words, well-intentioned and otherwise necessary corporate “immune systems” can sometimes unintentionally turn on the host and become what the medical profession refers to as “autoimmunity.”

“Corporate autoimmunity” frequently happens when the organization’s own need for order becomes more important than its purpose of providing (new) value to customers or consumers.  A classic example of an “autoimmune” response to an early stage innovation effort is when a large corporation seeking to innovate disqualifies an effort based upon size of market.  “We are only looking for billion dollar businesses,” failing to remember that the billion dollar business they are currently defending once started with relatively small and more humble beginnings.

Clayton Christensen points to four subtle, but deadly “autoimmune” responses to innovation in his new book The Innovator’s Solution.  Christensen says there are at least four reasons in established companies that cause managers to target innovations that are not aligned with the way that customers live their lives (page 86).  “The first two reasons – the fear of focus and the demand for crisp quantification – reside in companies’ resources allocation processes.  The third reason is that the structure of many retail channels is attribute [rather than customer] focused.  The fourth reason is that advertising economics influence companies to target products at customers rather than [their] circumstances.”

In other words, both internal (e.g., resource allocation) and external (e.g., comparisons to competition or conformity to the way retailers organize their aisles) orthodoxies that grow up around attempts to perpetuate an innovation’s success, frequently cause us to take our eye off the “ball” of opportunity – what Christensen describes as a “sharp focus on jobs that customers (or consumers) are trying to get done.”

Might this be the place to discover “heresy” with which to break out of the orthodoxy of success and start the next innovation in new value to customers?

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in November 2003. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.