Exercising Patience

In moral matters, patience is a virtue. In innovation, patience is not only a virtue, it’s a necessity—a corporate “muscle” in need of constant exercise. 

Venture capitalists are not the only ones losing their patience these days. Established companies competing for financial capital and talent push harder to show better results, faster. Declining investments in R&D (as a percentage of sales), shorter cycle times, and every increasing “D” in proportion to “R,” are just a few symptoms of this growing corporate impatience. Many companies’ patience muscles may be getting a little weak.

The rewards for patience can be significant. R&D investments can produce returns that surprise even investors. For example, Kimberly-Clark Corporation originally estimated the disposable training pants market to be $250 million. Yet in a few short years after they introduced Pull-Ups®, sales exceeded $450 million for their product alone. While Pull-Ups was introduced to the market in 1989, it was almost ten years after the two product development visionaries—Glen Fleischer and Walt Pearls—patiently listened to mother after mother to help them conceive of this new product. Perhaps the cycle time could have been shorter, but it’s dubious the gestation period for this innovation could have been rushed.

In their impatience to make the number, many companies risk missing out on bigger numbers than can come from moments of discovery that precede invention and innovation—moments that require patience.

From the growing number of market discovery assignments and collaborative invention assignments we do each year, a pattern appears to be emerging—discovery precedes invention and successful innovation. Invention can certainly occur without some preceding discovery. Yet innovations that follow a fresh discovery—be it a surprise result in the lab or a new perspective on the market—seem to carry a quality far superior to and more strategic than their “stand alone” counterparts. If this is true then how can a company build in the regular exercise that the muscle of patience requires?

Strategy can be one way of making patience a regular practice. Cisco takes a minority interest in smaller companies with interesting technology for a time before acquiring them—and their talent.  Policy can be another way of building patience. The board of Marriott International, among others, deliberately refuses to make decisions at the same meeting in which an issue is raised. They wait until the next meeting, just to increase the quality of the decision by adding a little patience. Segregating and dedicating selected resources to an effort is yet another way of exercising patience.

Ezra Pound said, “Glance is the enemy of wisdom.” We are coming to believe that wisdom, and the patience required to develop it, may be the silent partner that sustains a company’s innovation efforts well into its future.

This article by Lanny Vincent originally appeared in Innovating Perspectives in April 2000. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 

The Ups and Downs of Innovation

Chutes and Ladders is one of my five-year-old daughter’s favorite board games. It may provide a fitting parable for the “ups and downs” of innovation.

In the game, progressing “up” the board toward the finish is painstaking and plodding and peppered with an occasional boost from a ladder or two that catapults you up toward the finish. In contrast, the chutes “down” seem more swift and catastrophic than even the lucky jumps up the ladders. Chutes feel more punitive than ladders are rewarding.

When my daughter first started playing this game, she enjoyed the wins, but was ready to quit the game altogether after “experiencing” a chute. With a bit of coaxing, however, and enough experience from a few ladders and wins, she learned to accept the downs with the ups and kept playing. Now it is one of our favorite games.

Companies investing in innovation efforts can easily follow the experience of my daughter with Chutes and Ladders. Early progress can be exhilarating and empowering, at least until the experience of the first, then the second and then additional “chutes.” The more swift and traumatic the “fall,” the quicker the company is ready to “cut the losses” and bail on the game altogether.  It is not until a company experiences a few innovation wins – accomplished even with an “unfair” share of chutes – that a company can muster the patience to stay in the game.

What I hope my daughter is learning from Chutes and Ladders is that success builds slowly, and failures are often swift, but both are part of the game. It is a profound lesson that too few companies are quick to learn regarding innovation. High performance in the context of innovation efforts is arguably the exact opposite of high performance in ongoing operations. Faults and failures are to be eliminated in the latter; while in the former, they are occasions for accelerated learning so necessary for reducing the new idea or concept to practice.

This is the difference between innovation and a board game: learning from our failures enables innovation efforts to become less a roll of the dice or a spin of the wheel.

Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes in last month’s Harvard Business Review (August 2002) quote IBM’s Thomas Watson, Sr. as saying, “the fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”  Farson and Keyes argue for what they call failure-tolerant leadership and infer fault-tolerant innovation process or framework. In the same Harvard Business Review issue, John Wolpert (who leads IBM’s Extreme Blue innovation incubator in Austin, Texas) proposes innovation intermediaries as a way to overcome the otherwise introspective and chronically ineffective innovation efforts of large companies.

What both articles are pointing toward is the very thing we are attempting to understand in our Innovation Focal Point Study) including cultivating – where and when appropriate – the intermingling of internal and external networks.  It is through the deliberate and active cross-pollination of these networks that effective innovation focal points turn a company’s experience with innovation efforts from a board game into a more reliable business process.

Some degree of fault tolerance built into your innovation process can eventually transform even the steepest “chute” into a long ladder, and ultimately into innovations that work.

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 2002. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

Highlights of Lessons Learned

Innovations require parenting, more than managing.

Perhaps the biggest “aha” of last year was one that left us mumbling to ourselves, “Why didn't I see this before?” 

Though our letterhead says “innovation management”—largely a legacy from 20 years ago when I was a part of the Innovation Management group at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, I have become convinced that parenting is a better word than managing when it comes to innovations. While effective parenting involves good management skills and efforts, parenting captures the essential developmental character of innovation and innovating.  Just as every child is unique, so every innovation is unique. What works in parenting one child might not for their brother or sister. However, principles of parenting learned with one child can certainly help parents with the next child. So too, with innovators and their innovations.  And just as “it takes a village to raise a child,” so too, it takes a whole host of participants, particularly in informal and implicit networks that straddle the formal organizational boundaries of our companies, to successfully develop and commercialize an innovation.

After being a student of innovation management, particularly in established companies, for almost 25 years, we were struck with the power and appropriateness of the word “parenting.”

Play may be what is missing in our innovation efforts.

Our fascination with, and early applications of, the work of Dr. Stuart Brown, has led us to believe that the early entrepreneurial roots of most successful companies were significantly influenced by a healthy dose of play—whether the playfulness of an original inventor, or the playfulness of a subsequent entrepreneur, or both. What so easily gets lost when a company 'grows up' and becomes responsible for consistent performance to its shareholders, is that early entrepreneurial vocation that was infused with play. [As Dr. Brown reminds us, the opposite of play is not work, nor performance; it is depression: emotional and financial.] Even though play has a public-relations problem in our productivity-driven business culture, this past year has brought be to a growing belief that play may be just what is chronically missing in our innovation efforts. 

Lester and Piori (in their book, Innovation, the Missing Dimension) allude to this when they suggest that what companies are not doing enough of is setting up protected spaces within which to learn, experiment and discover what their competition has not yet discovered. Might we not call these playgrounds within which our nascent innovations can themselves play? Clif Bar & Company calls these playgrounds “discovery channels,” and is starting to take seriously the power and importance of play in their innovation efforts.

Collaboration may be as important as competition for our innovation efforts.

If you haven't read it yet, Henry Chesbrough's Open Innovation should be near or at the top of your reading list. Not only does it explode the myth of our “funnel model” for innovation management, it reminds us all of the tyranny of the core business revenue model. What Chesbrough articulated so well, it what we have been seeing in so many of our clients. Collaboration with other companies is no longer an option. It is a necessity, even though many of us don't think we know how to do it very well, given competitive and proprietary interests and habits.
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This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in January 2006. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.