Darwinian Innovation and The Maverick as a Chameleon

Most of us attribute the concept of “survival of the fittest” to Charles Darwin.  Yet, according to the recent book Driven, Darwin actually never used the phrase.  Rather, Darwin’s ideas on evolution had more to do with survival of the most adaptable and less to do with survival of the strongest.  Survival goes to the species that can generate variations, select the best one and retain it for future generations.  Isn’t this what corporations are attempting to do when they seek to innovate?

Unlike the entrepreneur, the established corporation has to deal not only with this sometimes tumultuous evolutionary process in the market, but also it has to deal with variations, selection and retention internally as well.

Dealing with what Arie de Geus (The Living Company, 1997) calls the corporate immune system is a chronic management challenge for established companies seeking innovation.  Corporations, just like the human body, can and will produce antibodies that respond to innovation efforts as threats to corporate health.  Some corporations anticipate this immune response and turn to mavericks, their mentors and their methods for a way out.

The accompanying articles lend some insight and perspective on the corporate immune response system and the growing interest in mavericks, their mentors and their methods as a practical management framework for these challenges.

In addition, Vincent & Associates is planning a pilot study with younger and more mature companies to map out how they are dealing with their organizations’ immune response systems. If you have interest, please call Lanny Vincent for a prospectus of the study.

The Maverick as a Chameleon

By John Raley

Discontinuous innovation is defined as new innovations that are tangentially related to a company’s current business, which offer substantial opportunity for company growth and renewal.  An essential player in the arena of discontinuous innovations is the maverick.

The maverick finds discontinuous innovations by exploring outside the company’s “comfort zone” of products and technologies.  When the maverick finds a potential connection between something new and the company’s core competencies, the maverick is now faced with the challenge of how to bring the innovation back into the company.  And the challenge is a significant one.

By the very fact of the innovations being discontinuous and outside the company’s normal sphere of operations, the maverick cannot assume that others will see the same connections and value to company growth.

So how does a successful maverick bring a new, discontinuous innovation back home?  The secret is that a successful maverick must e a chameleon, one who is able to change how they relate to individuals depending on the functional orientation of the individual.  And the maverick must do so in a believable and credible manner.

When talking with technical people, the maverick must be able to effectively discuss the technical aspects of the new innovation and how it is tangentially related to the existing competencies of the technical organization.  When talking with marketing and business people, the maverick must be able to describe how the new innovation is compatible with the overall vision of the company.  When talking with financial people, the maverick must be able to conceptually discuss the dollars and cents of what it would take to implement the innovation and the financial benefits to the company. 

Not only does the successful maverick have to be somewhat fluent in discussing different aspects of the innovation, but also the maverick must be able to do so convincingly.  This requires credibility throughout the company that can only be obtained over time via ongoing interaction with the different functional areas.  The credibility that is developed not only aids the maverick in bringing new innovations back home, but it also aids the maverick in discovering innovations by viewing possibilities from a variety of points of view.

If you are looking for a successful maverick in your organization, look for someone with a broad range of interests and who networks well with different functional areas.  This is the person who is most likely to be able to see new, discontinuous innovations for your company and also efficiently and meaningfully explain the discovery to others.

John Raley is a business leader with state-of-the-art experience in global intellectual asset management. He is based in Maple Grove, MN, and can be reached at john_raley@pitnet.net.



These articles were originally published in Innovating Perspectives in March 2002. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

New is Necessary, But Not Sufficient

The characteristics of novelty may occupy center stage in the way accounts of innovation are told. However, what goes on backstage may contain the real gems.

Over 20 years ago, publications on innovation management splashed onto our reading lists with Foster’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Pinchot’s Intrapreneurship, etc. The past five years that splash has been subsumed by a flood of new titles on innovation, some of them destined to become classics, like Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, Utterback’s Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation, and Nonaka’s Knowledge Creating Company.

In the process, our definition of innovation itself has begun to shift, for better or for worse.  In the past, the distinction was often made between creativity and innovation; the former being associated with newness, the latter being allied with reducing what is new to practice (i.e., commercialization.  Recently, I believe this old “black and white” contrast between innovation and creativity has been transplanted by a more precise and rich spectrum of “color” contrasts.  Some might even say that “innovation” has lost its meaning from such frequent use (or misuse).

The term innovation—in the context of innovation management theory and practice—is now used to include any one of the “particles or energy” that make up the “atomic structure” of innovation.  Discovery, invention, reduction-to-practice and diffusion, individually or collectively, are now what I believe practitioners have in mind when they use the term innovation.

This “atomic” metaphor is useful in pointing out that the nucleus of focused, creative collaborations may be at the heart of successful innovation. In other words, while novelty gets the press, it is the formal and informal process of the right mix of people, collaborating, that makes innovation happen.

Peter Drucker hinted at this when he observed that the “bright idea” is the least reliable source of innovation.  He says, “Bright ideas are the riskiest and least successful source of innovative opportunities. The casualty rate is enormous. No more than one out of every hundred patents for an innovation of this kind earns enough to pay back development costs and patent fees.  A far smaller proportion makes any money above its out-of-pocket costs. The entrepreneur is, therefore, well advised to forego innovations based on bright ideas, however enticing the success stories.”  (Innovation and Entrepreneurship, page 130.)

The central place that “newness” holds is not unlike the potential over-emphasis we place on entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, champions and/or inventors—the individual heroes and heroines of the innovations we hear about. Most mental maps of innovations reserve large and influential space for these individuals. However, the actual terrain of innovation, I suspect, involves the less sexy, often unseen, combined efforts of many “common” folk.  The persistent passion and vision of the entrepreneur may be necessary, but it may not be sufficient to bring the new into reality.  That requires the sustained and focused creative collaborations of many others. 

This truth came to our attention recently when Erik Eidsmo directed us to an article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker (July 22, 2002) entitled, “The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated?” The article takes a look at the “deep-seated belief that having better talent at all levels [of the organization] is how you outperform your competitors.”  For those of us with an interest in innovation management, the article concludes on a note that should give us all a moment to pause.  Citing the management culture and philosophy of Enron, McKinsey and even Gary Hamel as the prime examples, the article concludes, “looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.”

Gladwell makes this fundamental point: “The broader failing is the assumption that an organization’s intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees.  This assumption is understandable because our lives are so obviously enriched by individual brilliance. Groups don’t write great novels, and committee didn’t come up with the theory of relativity. But companies work by different rules. They don’t just create; they execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star.”

Just as intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient for leading an organization, so novelty may be necessary, but it is likely, in and of itself, not sufficient.



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

Strategies for Discovering Innovation Opportunities

One of the most difficult challenges for the R&D professional is to identify and uncover a new or emerging need.  A veteran product developer often reminded me that “we humans are coping animals.”  We put up with the way things are until we believe there is an alternative.  Without the belief that there is a better way, we simply cope.  This coping tendency makes it hard to discover new or emerging needs in the market.

How then can the R&D professional listen to customers or end-users who are not able to articulate their needs very well, if at all?  How can we listen for new and emerging needs when we are not certain that the end-user for tomorrow’s new product will be the same one as today's?

We have observed three strategies for listening to end-users who are not as “articulate” as we wish they would be.  The strategies are called ideation, foresight and insight.  All three strategies require R&D to invest time and effort up-front in the identification and understanding of opportunities before rushing to invent and develop solutions.  However, each strategy takes the R&D professional into a different set of activities and methods, each with its own inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Ideation Strategy

The ideation strategy relies heavily upon the generation of ideas.  Here product developers generate and develop new product concepts and use them as “hidden microphones” to listen for the symptoms of new and emerging needs of end-users.  These concepts are used to stimulate reactions from end-users or customers with the hope that new and emerging needs will be expressed.

One advantage of this strategy is that it uses common and accessible tools and techniques of market research (e.g., focus groups).  Having new concepts to test gives you more of a reason to talk to customers, and conversing with end-users within this context is familiar and safe.

One disadvantage of this strategy is that the generators of the concepts often become wed to their ideas, and so the concepts become the ends rather than the means of discovery.  Even when concepts are regarded as “listening probes,” R&D professionals often wonder whether potential areas of opportunity were missed because the concepts were so limited in scope.

Foresight Strategy

The foresight strategy uses trends to uncover new and emerging needs.  The rationale is that new and emerging needs come from new attitudes and behavior, which are derived from trends.  If you identify and understand a trend, you are in a better position to identify a new need.

Given the lead time it takes from concept to commercialization to develop a breakthrough new product or innovation, many try to uncover and anticipate new needs for enough in advance to have time to prepare.  The foresight strategy is attractive to many because even with mediocre marketing, you should be able to succeed if your new offerings are aligned with the momentum inherent in the path of development.

In practice though, we have seen a lot of R&D efforts become distracted with the identification and analysis of trends.  People often place too little emphasis on making creative and solid associations between the trends, their company’s core competencies and the new and emerging needs.  They often over-indulge (in time and dollars) on trend identification, while underestimating the importance of doing trend analysis from the perspective of their company’s unique technical and market strengths.  Therefore follow-through and internal integration efforts tend to fall short.

Insight Strategy

The insight strategy, the least understood but perhaps the most potent of the three strategies, uses in-depth interview and ethnographic methods of observation to discover new and emerging needs.  Carefully selected subjects – both existing customers as well as “leading edge” users and even non-users – are interviewed and observed in their “native” environments.  They are even invited into the interpretation of their own behavior and attitudes.  This is a good method for originating proprietary end-user insights – perspectives on the end-user that your competitor is not likely to see.

The insight strategy is not for the faint of heart.  It requires organizational patience, a long leash extended to those involved in the research, and a special tolerance for ambiguity, characteristics which are not often found inside our organizations.  While it takes patience and discipline, the payoffs can be quite large – total new “competitive spaces,” as 3M calls them, have been discovered with this strategy that have led to new categories of products.  The elusive “big idea” may result from this strategy more than any of the others.

Ultimately, each team will want to consider its own combination and variation of these three strategies.  Whichever strategy is taken, the identification of new and emerging needs is best done by R&D professionals intimately familiar with the technical capabilities of their company and with what is technically possible.  Surround technically-savvy R&D professionals with ideas, foresight and insight regarding existing and potential end-users, and watch them help the market find the words for needs that had previously remained silent or hidden.

Listening requires ears.  Hearing requires empathy, understanding and imagination.


This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in April 1997. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

Opportunity’s “Eye of the Needle”

Discovering an emerging need and filling it is a bit like threading a needle. If we assume we will get it on the first try we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.

The persistence of this “first try” expectation is as striking as it is common and chronic, particularly among companies with established revenue streams. Perhaps it is because some of our companies have become so successful for so long that we have lost our institutional memory of those earlier entrepreneurial times. Perhaps our very focus on competitively differentiating our product offerings blinds us, at least in part, to subtle shifts in the needs, values and behavior of our end-users.  Many have succumbed to the seduction of the competition, beating a rival, but have lost touch with the very needs of the people we seek to serve.

Some principles for addressing this “first try” expectation can be found in Stefan H. Thomke’s book, Experimentation Matters (HBS Press, 2003).  Thomke suggests both how important and how difficult it has become for companies to get out from under the tyranny of their own success.  “True experimentation is all too rare in successful companies.” So-called “productive failures” – those that produce significant technical and end-user insights – become increasingly rare in organizational cultures of success. The central message from Experimentation Matters – a manifesto for learning from early experimentation (and exploration) efforts – is simply “fail,” first, fast, frequently and in the field (our paraphrase).

Beyond Thomke’s principles for experimentation and exploration, however, are at least two other principles for threading the needle of discovering emerging needs upon which to base future growth.  Both of these principles, and their associated practices, aim to discover needs that are robust and resilient enough in the first place to sufficiently motivate further experimentation and the patience to withstand the inevitable resistance.

One is to actually slow time down.  What may be right under our noses can be more easily revealed when we watch the routines of people in which we have an interest, in slow motion.  Several years ago in an engagement with a client in the facial tissue business, we experimented with consumers, one-on-one, asking them to describe in slow motion what they were doing and experiencing when they reached for a facial tissue.  Though it was awkward for people to do so – asking them to slow something down that is so routine, unconscious and automatic – the results were profound.  It actually led to the discovery of proprietary (at the time) insights that, in turn, lead to a whole new and more dynamic test and measurement framework from which several new successful products emerged.  Ezra Pound put it succinctly years ago, “Glance is the enemy of vision.”

Another principle is to change your point of view.  Landscape painters and photographers practice this principle when they try out different angles from which to view, capture or render the “truth” of what they are seeing.  Several years ago Eli Callaway had already committed to a state-of-the-art golf ball production facility, but needed a fresh reason for golfers to be interested in golf balls.  We knew that conducting traditional qualitative market research (e.g., focus groups) was unlikely to turn up anything new and different.  In our search for the right point of view, we went to a handful of non-celebrity (to avoid the “pose” factor) experts – a golf course architect, a veteran equipment salesman-turned-teaching professional, and a few others – and asked what we thought was a fairly innocent question – why do people keep playing the game?  Their reaction to our question – “All these years in the business and no one has ever asked me that question before” – suggested that we were on an interesting track.  We had simply changed our point of view from the conventional.

We were speaking with Dick Sperry of The Sperry Group, Inc., recently about how he “gets a vision.”  Unlike the typical image many of us have that the visions come up front and instantly, Dick described a much longer, more iterative process of observing end-users, trying something out with them, watching what happens, and trying again.  What struck me about what Dick said was that vision isn’t finished until well into the development process, even to the point where a customer nicknames the new tool.

Many of us – particularly those of us who are process-oriented – believe that first comes a discovery of a need and then comes the invention of a solution to that need.  However, actual experience suggests that the discovery of a need is more closely coupled with the invention of a solution.  We seldom, if ever, get it on the “first try.”  It requires empathy, imagination, patience and understanding.  Ironically, we can actually accelerate our time-to-market, if we just slow down early in the front-end exploration and change our point of view.

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

Getting Beyond the Jargon

Planning for entrepreneurial opportunities and innovation frequently requires the active participation of experts from diverse disciplines. Opportunities and innovations themselves often surface from the combination of the tacit and technical knowledge deeply embedded in each discipline. Consequently, how those insights are communicated can make or break the effectiveness of a planning effort.

As Voltaire said, “chance favors the prepared mind.” In other words, opportunities and innovations come earlier to those who, because of their preparations, put themselves in a position to see and understand the opportunity well before those who are less prepared.

Innovations are often conceived in the intermingling of technical insights and customer needs.  Ironically, however, many entrepreneurial opportunities are prematurely abandoned due to an inability to communicate them without the technical jargon in which they were originally conceived.  A Forbes magazine article (September 10, 2001, page 24), estimates that 30% of technology projects begun by companies in the U.S. are cancelled before completion, for just this very reason, costing the American economy more than $75 billion per year!

Every discipline develops its own jargon or “techno-speak.” Marketing has its own idioms, as do market research, finance, research, design, engineering, etc. Jargon can be a useful shorthand for communication among those in the discipline. Jargon allows people to discuss technical matters in a more efficient manner because of the tacit (and sometimes explicit) agreements made as to the connotation of the words and phrases they use. However, this tacit understanding is frequently not shared outside the boundaries of that discipline, function or department. As a result, jargon can create challenges, obstacles and erosion in the trust so basic and necessary for productive planning cycles and discussions.

Even commonly used words can become easily “jargonized” and endowed with a connotation that can trip the unsuspecting.  Last week I was in on a conference call discussing an upcoming meeting with a remote division of the company whose expertise, perspective and collaboration are essential to my client’s entrepreneurial planning efforts. Interestingly, the word “innovation” was used in the teleconference. It became clear from the voice at the other end that the intended meaning of the word was producing an opposite effect in the mind of the listener.

After the conference call we debriefed the conversation and re-awakened ourselves to how different the cultures were between this division (a recent acquisition) and that of the acquirer. This enabled us to redesign the approach to the meeting which, as a result, went far better than had we not gone through this “de-jargonizing” step.

In a former vocation, I learned an arcane distinction theologians make between two different modes of communication. One they refer to as dogmatik—idiom-laden language used by clerics when speaking with other “theocrats.” Dogmatik is best reserved for occasions when clerics get together and talk shop. The other mode—apologia—refers to a vernacular manner of communication employed when the theological experts speak to those who do not share their training, perspective or vocabulary.

Unnecessary trouble can arise when either of the two modes is used in context better served by the other. A person may be perceived as a raving fundamentalist (when using dogmatik to communicate with the uninitiated), or one may be viewed as naïve, paternalistic or even trivial (when using apologia when speaking to the experts). In either case, trust and authentic communication break down among the participants.

Plans are only as good as the organization’s ability to carry them out. Effective execution requires trusting (i.e., functioning) relationships between all participants, and trust lives or dies on the “currency” of communication (i.e., the “communion” in the communication). Therefore, for the sake of the strategy and its execution, it helps to find a language and vocabulary—an apologia of sorts—that works across disciplines. Innovations that work require it.


This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in November 2001. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

Innovation in Full Sentences

How people use the term “innovation” can vary a great deal. Too often, the connotation of the innovation gets distorted by “partial sentences.”

After reading a view of Whirlpool Corporation’s journey with innovation since 1999 in the book Strategic Innovation, we are reminded how the term innovation itself can take on subtle, but importantly different connotations, depending upon whether innovation is thought of as a “noun,” “verb” or “adjective.”

For example, in the case of Whirlpool Corporation, at least as described in Strategic Innovation: Embedding Innovation as a Core Competency in Your Organization by Nancy Tennant Snyder and Deborah L. Duarte, the word innovation is being used to describe an organizational quality, character or “competence”—an organizational “adjective.” This orientation to innovation is about innovativeness—a characteristic and orientation of the organization and enterprise—which Whirlpool has attempted to “embed” in its culture.

In contrast, others (Clayton Christensen, James Utterback, et al) approach innovation primarily as an economic “noun,” leading to an interest in and emphasis on embodiments, particularly those value propositions that have significantly higher profit margins and/or change the basis of competition. This orientation to innovation emphasizes innovations—new value propositions that bring new value to customers and/or users.

Still others use innovation primarily as an entrepreneurial “verb,” leading to an interest in and emphasis on actions that encourage successful development of new, embryonic value propositions, into robust, profitable businesses. This orientation is about innovating—doing the right thing at the right time to accelerate the development cycle and shorten the time-to-market (or break-even, positive cash flow, profitability, market share) and even discover a new, emerging need before it is generally recognized.

This leads many to think about who the actors are in the “sentence” of innovation. This is the people side of innovation—entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, champions, mavericks, mentors of mavericks, midwives, sponsors, gatekeepers, etc.—the “subjects” who are involved in making the innovation come to life.

As innovation practitioners, when we reflect upon our experiences, some emphasize the subject of the sentence—i.e., who is innovating—while others emphasize the predicate of the sentence—i.e., how is the process being conducted and what is being conducted “on” (the object, or the ‘innovation’).

Neither one of these perspectives is necessarily better than the other. However, it may make sense to be aware of the differences and to speak (and think) in complete sentences when it comes to innovation in general. It may help in nurturing innovations that work•.


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

Why Innovate?

Over the past several decades I have heard a variety of reasons to justify innovation efforts and the investments required. Implicit in Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Solution, are several of the more prominent ones. “Sustaining” (versus “disruptive”) innovations are driven as much by the needs of their innovators to competitively differentiate their products or services. For example, this is one of the primary reasons Tier 1 or Tier 2 suppliers in the automotive industry use to explain their need to invent and create patentable positions.

“Disruptive” innovations, on the other hand, are driven by the emergent needs of customers to “do ‘jobs’ those customers need doing.” These innovations may be disruptive to incumbent competitors; but to customers, these innovations are actually more welcome than disruptive.

Increasing shareholder value is a third rationale used to justify innovation efforts—though this rationale is often a more difficult case to make—of which Christensen does an admirable job in his very first chapter.

Between these three reasons for a company to innovate—competition-driven innovation, shareholder value-driven innovation, and customer-driven innovation—there is something qualitatively distinct about the last one. As important as it is to differentiate your products and services from the competition, and as important as it is to increase shareholders’ value, isn’t it actually a bit more important—or more fundamental—to create customers?

That perennial piece of management wisdom: “pay attention to motivations and related patterns of behavior,” may be pertinent here. Not all motivations are created equally. Customer-driven innovation may be the first among equals, relative to the other possible motivations for innovation. A.P. Giannini, the founder of the Bank of Italy in San Francisco (later called Bank of America), reflects this fundamental understanding in his words engraved on the marble wall of the lobby in the Bank of America Building: “To service the needs of others; the only legitimate reason for a business.”

My hypothesis here is that the success of any innovation effort, particularly to the enterprise hosting the effort, depends to some degree on the nature of the motivation to innovate in the first place.  When that motivation is driven by competition or even by shareholders’ interests (e.g., growth, profitability, etc.)—as legitimate as those reasons may be—the patience required of the innovator for the necessary gestation efforts may not be long or strong enough to endure the “wait.” Whereas, when the motivation is to create a customer, the “wait” may be more easily understandable and worth it. “Good money” before it goes “bad,” as Christensen states.

In his classic style, Peter Drucker alluded to this point when he wrote in his tome Management (1973). “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results: all the rest are “costs.”

The best “sponsor” of our innovation efforts may be the clarity of the need of a customer (new or existing) the innovation is designed to meet, reduce or eliminate.

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