The Maverick Way

This year’s Mavericks Roundtable clarified some key elements of the Maverick Way – a set of conditions and processes that enable corporate innovation and renewal.  So we thought it timely to express our best current thinking about the Maverick Way.

The Maverick Way has four essential elements which appear to increase the probability of success for corporate innovation efforts.  These elements include:

·      an acute awareness of the external and internal conditions that shape the need for an innovation;

·      frequent boundary crossings within and between organizations and fields of specialization;

·      constant mental “movement” of mavericks having a catalytic effect with collaborators; and

·      mentors who know how to spot and protect mavericks and find a home for the resulting innovation in the organization.

Each factor alone is insufficient for successful innovation.  In combination, however, these four factors significantly increase the chances for our innovation efforts to exceed the expectations of the organizations that sponsor them.

Awareness of Conditions

Innovation efforts do not occur in a vacuum.  The need to innovate and the nature of the particular innovation called for – be it in product, process, marketing or strategy – is shaped by external industry and competitive conditions.  It is also shaped by the structure and culture of the “host” organization.

Many years ago at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Bill Wilson correlated the type of required innovation to the life-cycle stage of the industry and/or company.  In his book, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation, James Utterback puts forth the elegant concept of “dominant design” to describe how product and process innovation evolves and shifts, and subsequently shapes the particular industry in which it occurs.  And recently, at the Mavericks Roundtable, many participants were convinced that the host organization’s type of organizational structure shapes the character or the innovation itself.

Organizations have strong predilections to survive.  Frequently that very survival requires a change that appears to threaten the existing organizational structure.  In some cases, if these organizations are to survive they must change; even change their very structure itself.  Cisco Systems seems to be a successful model as it appears to successfully seek out, invest in, integrate and ultimately allow itself to be changed by its acquisitions.

Boundaries Are Crossed

Innovation derives in part from what happens when boundaries (either geographical, technological, organizational or conceptual boundaries) are exposed and crossed and something new is discovered in the crossing.  This is what is meant by “out of the box” or “breakthrough” innovation.  Research by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, authors of the book, When Sparks Fly, indicates that the more successful managers of creative groups emphasize the need for group members who are willing to “blur the boundaries” – those who are not territorial about their specialized knowledge and are not afraid to venture onto the intellectual turf of others.

At the 1998 Mavericks Roundtable, we discussed the notion of the corporate “free range,” a metaphor for the range of ideas, people and knowledge that exists free of the host organization’s operating boundaries (corporate “pasture”).  Boundaries help organizations maintain operating control and produce returns for investors.  However, these same boundaries can limit the organization’s growth.  New growth frequently comes from mixing the new from the free range with the “conventional” within established corporate boundaries.  Mavericks are particularly adept at these border crossings.

Mavericks Move

Mavericks, as the historical roots of the word suggests, not only prefer to maintain their “unbrandedness,” they tend to move and morph, changing places and even identities in order to avoid anything that would inhibit their freedom.  Like the interest many managers have in accumulating organizational power, mavericks display a similar passion for pursuing organizational and intellectual freedom.  This is one of the fundamental motivators that makes mavericks appear to be misfits in organizations, and one reason many organizations unwittingly let their mavericks go.

Many mavericks don’t appreciate being labeled a maverick.  Such a “branding” may inhibit their freedom to pursue whatever is required or needs to be pursued.  It is much easier to cross borders when you are anonymous.  However, remaining unbranded in an organization is not something a maverick can easily do alone.

Mentors Protect

Mentors or managers of mavericks are the silent partners of mavericks.  These mentors may be as, if not more, important to the organization’s future as mavericks themselves.  This is one of the insights that came from this year’s Mavericks Roundtable.

The story of the inventor Stienmetz and his manager at General Electric is a classic case in point.  Many years ago GE instituted a no smoking policy for the labs.  Shortly after the policy was announced, Stienmetz’s manager passed by the office of this prolific, pipe-smoking inventor and saw him packing up his things and cleaning off his desk.  Shocked, the manager stopped and asked what was going on, to which the inventor replied, “No smoke, no Stienmetz.”

The manager went home that night completely distraught over the possibility of losing one of GE’s most prized and productive minds.  It didn’t take the manager long to do a little inventing of his own.  The next day Stienmetz was back at work, smoking his pipe.  Everything else was the same, of course, except for the sign on Stienmetz’s office door which read: “Smoking Lounge.”

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This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in November 1999. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

Editor's Note: The Maverick Way: Profiting from the Power of the Corporate Misfit was published as a book in 2000. If you would like a signed copy of the book by author Lanny Vincent, please call 415-387-1270 or you may purchase a copy at Amazon.com: 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0966822617/qid=1124312749/sr=11/ref=sr_1_1/002-3185445-0548811?v=glance&s=books

Matching R&D to Business Conditions

A perennial challenge for a Research & Development function is to maintain its autonomy by being relevant.

On one hand, if R&D efforts are exclusively focused on today’s technical problems, tomorrow’s technical innovations may be left to the competition. On the other hand, when R&D is overly focused on tomorrow’s breakthroughs, incremental improvements in product and process may never be realized.  Furthermore, organizational backlash can easily lead R&D to be perceived as “elite.”  So how do R&D leaders maintain the proper balance? How can the unpredictability of innovation be made to fit with the orderly management of business operations?

Theodore Levitt observed that “organizations evolve to do predictable work, and in so doing they create procedures and routines that also tend to stifle innovation.” He went on to say that R&D may systematically foster innovation and change, but mostly fixed procedures and set routines impede it.

Like many, Levitt believes that innovation must be done everywhere in the organization, at all levels.  While this may sound good, results can lead to organizational indigestion. Instead of relentlessly advocating innovation anywhere and everywhere in the organization, wiser R&D leaders seem to pick their battles more carefully and thoughtfully. One of the things they consider is the prevailing competitive conditions affecting their partners in Operations.

Before he retired as the Vice President of Innovation Management at Kimberly-Clark, Bill Wilson developed a relevancy test to help R&D leaders better understand how to maintain the right balance between supporting operations today and directing innovations for tomorrow.

The test starts by carefully considering the competitive conditions of the operation. Normally, business operations exist in one of four possible competitive climates, each with its own operational priorities: Growth, Consolidation, Expansion and Maturation. If these conditions are not carefully considered or are misunderstood, the innovation can be perceived as irrelevant, if it is perceived at all.  Wilson used a diagnostic tool similar to the diagram shown here to help match innovations in development to the conditions of each business operation.

Management needs different skills depending upon which competitive conditions exist for the business or product category.  For example, if a manager uses criteria appropriate to mature conditions when the business is experiencing rapid growth, he or she can kill the innovation right off the bat.  Innovation is developmental; it takes time, care and nurturing. Each set of competitive conditions has its own language, motivations and patterns of behavior. Therefore, R&D management needs to act and communicate with operational priorities in mind. This is especially true for those who seek to introduce innovation. Wilson said, “If I had had this approach thirty years earlier at Kimberly-Clark, I’d have done a lot of things differently and probably been a lot more successful.”

(Bill Wilson received the Chairman’s coveted Entrepreneurial Achievement Award shortly after his retirement from Kimberly-Clark in 1988 for such achievements as initiating the company’s non-woven business, and for his role in the development of many product and process innovations, including disposable diapers.)

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This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in May 1995. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.   

“Just-In-Time” Innovation

Having a dependable supply of product innovations is a goal of many companies. Millions of dollars earmarked for Research & Development are budgeted each year in company after company for this purpose. Efforts to fill the new product pipeline are initiated every year leaving the corporate “cupboard” brimming with unused and neglected product innovations. Isn’t it odd that the marketplace is riddled with so many failed new products when compared to the abundance of unused product innovations stockpiled on companies’ “shelves”? Do we have an innovation “inventory” problem?

The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos meant the passage of time: time that can be measured by the minute, hour, day, week, etc. In other words, clock time. Kairos, on the other hand, meant a special time: time that is endowed with meaning and purpose, in other words, the right time. The notion of a “window of opportunity” might be a close approximation to the Greek’s notion of kairos.

Might the unused inventories of product innovations in corporate pipelines be related to the high mortality rates of new product introductions? Might both be related to a failure to understand the difference between chronos and kairos?

        

In the late 1980s, Weight Watchers Frozen Entrees had been regularly introducing a stream of new products. Many of their new products were aimed at the gold standard at that time Lean Cuisine.  Weight Watchers was so successful at this strategy, in fact, that they suddenly found themselves in the lead position. Instead of aiming at the target, they became the target!

Their first reaction to competition assaults was, quite naturally, to do what they had done so well, for so long—introduce another new product. Only this time, it had to come out the innovation inventory faster. Accelerating development time caused considerable havoc to their delicately balanced project portfolio process. In their rush to market, Weight Watchers made assumptions about consumers’ needs, which ultimately proved incorrect. It wasn’t long before they were overtaken by Healthy Choice™ in the frozen food wars.

Weight Watchers had followed a “chronos strategy” of new product innovations. It worked for a while. When their competitive position changed, however, and they became the leader, chronos turned to kairos, leaving them with an inventory of product innovations what was “out of date.”

Constant vigilance to even subtle change in the attitudes and behavior of customers and competitive dynamics may be even more important that a dependable supply of innovations. Chronos can turn to kairos quickly. Resources devoted to keeping the pipeline full may be better spent attending to the quiet shifts in the posture of customers and competitors. Then we may be better able to innovate, just-in-time.

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This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in October 1993. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.   

The Aesthetics of Innovating: Sixth Sense of Innovators

When I was in the innovation management group at Kimberly-Clark in the early 1980s we
asked then CEO Darwin Smith how he would judge ideas worthy of further investment. He told us there are only two things we need to worry about: “shoemaker stick to your last” and “make it snappy.” As to the first, much has been written about core business and core competencies and adjacencies to the core. Of the second, much less has been written or said, partly because what one person may regard as “snappy,” another person may not.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” It is difficult to deny the fact that what one person sees as plain or common, another might see as beautiful and fresh. Subjectivity in assessing the potential of an idea, particularly a new idea, is probably inescapable. At the very least, when it comes to assigning potential value to an embryonic innovation—ultimately one that will require some investment of the innovating company’s limited resources—who the assigner or beholder is matters a great deal.

When asked how he and his peers decide what ideas to pursue further, one of our more experienced innovators says it depends in part on how “cute” it is. He defined cute as the idea or invention’s ability to speak for itself, in terms of its relevance to customer need and the core business. The less explanation the idea needs, the more its “cute” quotient. While his explanation made sense, it did not avoid the subjectivity problem. To which he quickly reassured me that it wasn’t his perception of cuteness alone that made the difference. Rather, it was a shared sense of “cuteness,” shared with the CEO and corporate development officer, and, eventually, others.

That there is an aesthetic factor at play in how ideas are judged, along with all the other analytics, is likely inescapable.  And while subjectivity is frequently regarded as something to minimize or escape, there may be another, more subtle point worth considering. This subjectivity may be something to welcome instead of something to avoid.

An aesthetic sensibility is something often not associated with engineers and technologists engaged in the more mundane trenches of innovation efforts. However, I am increasingly persuaded that experienced and more successful innovators have a deep sense for the aesthetics of the innovation they are developing. Shape, symmetry, simplicity, elegance in the way the problem is solved or solution is delivered or the need met or profit increased, all weigh heavily for the innovator. Perhaps subjectivity—or at least an aesthetic sensitivity—should be embraced rather than avoided or sacrificed to the dogma of analysis and data. 

While I am not against sound analysis of valid data, I am suggesting that we might want to pay even more attention to our individual and shared sense of what is cute or beautiful in the innovation as a necessary compliment to all the data that we can amass, anecdotal and otherwise, when we assess whether a particular innovation deserves more or not. 

We all know that a lot of frogs have to be kissed before a prince or princess appears. But how can innovators differentiate between frogs and royalty, without relying on their aesthetic sense? Furthermore, what is this sixth sense? If the innovator beholds beauty in the nascent innovation, what does the innovator perceive, if not the intersection of function, fit and form?

The Irish poet John Keats finished one of his poems with the phase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Perhaps that’s all the innovator needs to know in the sincere and evidence-based belief that the customer will recognize it too.    

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This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 2006. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.   
                                 

Learning from Experience

Most of us regard the economy as generally negative, at least compared to the more robust economic conditions prior to September 2008. Yet this “new normal” may be what my mother called a “character building” experience, at least as far as innovating is concerned.

Many companies are increasingly responding to the new realities they face as an invitation to rethink what they thought they knew about their business. Many seem to be more willing to reexamine some of their underlying assumptions, which in more robust conditions left little motivation for questioning. With pain and loss there is the promise of new gains in the offing, if we are willing to learn.

Edgar Schein, a former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, reminds us that the first hurdle of learning is to unlearn what we thought we knew for sure. Unlearning is especially challenging for companies with successful track records. Karl Deutsch, a social and political scientist, once said “those in power don’t have to learn,” which sounds close to what another sage said 2,000 years earlier: “the meek shall inherit the earth.” This strength-emerging-from-weakness narrative so often ignored by the media, can be seen today in the unfinished Arab Spring, the “Occupy” movement, the re-balancing of global economic power, and even in the emergent nature of innovations themselves.  

As a student of innovation for over 30 years, I have been reexamining many of my own underlying assumptions about innovating. I am struck with how much I don’t know, really, as I reexamine what I thought I knew. The result is a new found humility regarding the nature and character of innovating itself.

Innovating is similar to parenting in many respects. For example, there has been no one authoritative canon on parenting, which has survived more than one generation. What happened to Dr. Spock and all his wisdom? Did he become irrelevant, trumped by books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting and the latest findings from developmental, neurological and psychosocial research?  The same is true for innovating. Like parenting, innovating is inextricably entangled with the particularities and embodiments of each individual invention. Generalizations about innovating are frequently made, but quickly evaporated in the wake of market conditions, competitive dynamics, technological constraints, and organizational preferences.

While many of us want to believe that innovating can be codified into a repeatable and sustainable process, our experience suggests otherwise. Innovations, innovating and innovators seem to defy formulaic generalizations. They are persistently original and they are consistently “emergent,” to use a term from complexity theory.  Parents experience a similar set of challenges.

Lately many of our core clientele—product developers and R&D-based innovators—seem more willing to move forward in the “new normal,” despite not having all the answers. Powerlessness (not to be confused with helplessness) is now being more freely admitted by both big and small enterprises alike. Veteran firms and early stage start-ups, while more circumspect about their innovation opportunities, seem even more willing to consider first what is going on before rushing into a plan of action. This newly found humility bodes well for improving the prospects of innovating. Why? A willingness to stay open, to learn, and to adapt are summed up in humility. Staying open, learning and adapting are also the healthy precursors to successful innovating.    

People who analyze external conditions seemed to be using words like “uncertainty,” “volatility,” “insecurity,” and “complexity” more frequently in their descriptions. I’m not sure whether things have actually gotten more complex. Perhaps we are just more aware of the complexity that has always been there. Whether it's increased in reality or not, many seem to be more aware of how partial and incomplete our knowledge really is. 

A feeling of uncertainty, volatility, or complexity can evoke anxiety in us. It can also catalyze us to discover opportunities amid the threats. Whether we approach it with an anxious defensiveness or an animating hope, the month of January implicitly asks us each year: what have we learned? January—named for Janus, the forward- and backward-looking Roman god of transitions—finds us simultaneously looking back on what we learned and forward to the opportunity for applying and testing what was learned.

Each January for the past 20 years we have reflected back on what the previous year has brought us. Most of those reflections have consisted of a list of lessons learned. This year, there is but one item on the list about innovating: and it is parenting. We hope this does not reflect a flattening of our learning curve as much as it does our appreciation for the importance of the one lesson we learned about innovating, which we want to bring to your attention.

In a nutshell, the lesson is this: powerlessness may be a silent, early partner to innovators. To some extent all innovating efforts are built upon a foundation of learning, especially when the learning is from direct experience of something ventured without a guarantee of success. The point at which we try something that may not work, whether we succeed or fail, this is the point wherein we act our way into a new way of thinking, which is the essential foundation of successful innovating.

Ingredients of established power—whether status, reputation, or market share—tend toward defensive reaction more than adaptive response. The powerless, in some ways, are actually freer and more motivated to learn than the powerful. However, it would be erroneous to conclude that the small and less powerful have an advantage when it comes to innovating—whether disruptively or incrementally. The Economist’s Schumpeter Column (12/17/11) reexamined a common assumption: that disruptive innovating favors the small and fast over the big and powerful. Like a parent, the innovator’s passion and care for the product may be a more important factor than the relative size of the innovating enterprise. 

This was made clear in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steven Jobs, which brings forth Jobs’ own lifelong effort to sculpt value at the intersection of engineering and the humanities. The position Jobs seemed to place himself was where design, marketing and engineering met—in the product. Like Bob Lutz’s impassioned plea (Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business) to find leaders who are passionate about the product, Jobs was clearly passionate about the products and services in which he was engaged, from personal computers to music, from animation to mobile devices.

Powerlessness enables innovators to rely more on their ability to listen and observe than on what they think they already know. Powerlessness leaves innovators more reliant upon their empathy and identification with the end-user than dependent upon the false and short-lived confidence from doing what they already know will work, which leads to imitation, not innovation.

Innovations emerge from passionate people who invest themselves in learning experiences that lead to new ways of thinking. Learning is the capital in which we all need to invest even more of our selves and our resources.

Thanks to so many of you who continue to invite us contribute to your experience-based learning investments.

Some highlights of 2011 for Vincent & Associates, Ltd. include:

•    The completion of Lanny’s book Prisoners of Hope: How Engineers (and Others) 
      Get Lift for Innovating (Westbow Press, December 2011).

•    Client assignments that took us around the U.S. and to five continents.

•    Engagements with Malaysia’s Innovation Initiative “IP-Driven R&D.”

•    Our recent move to San Francisco, near the Cliff House on Ocean Beach. Our new address is 
      Vincent & Associates, Ltd., 534 48th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94121.

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This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in January 2012. 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.   

Parenting Innovations: Some Fundamentals

Legendary amateur golfer Bobby Jones reputedly said if your average score is over 90, you are probably not practicing the fundamentals enough. If your average score is under 80, you are probably neglecting your family, work or both! The lessons learned last year were many and varied, and took us back to the importance and value of practicing the fundamentals of innovation and its management. 

Last year we learned that innovations require parenting more than simply managing; that collaboration may be as important to innovation as competition; and that sufficient play is necessary for healthy development—for innovation and innovator alike.

These lessons were no less valid this year. But as we reflect upon what turned out to be a very full and busy year, we are reminded how crucial the fundamentals still are. Any workable set of fundamentals needs to be short as well as basic to qualify as fundamentals, without oversimplifying. In golf, a common list of fundamentals is alignment, balance and posture. In the challenges of parenting innovation we offer this short list: context, causal connections and adaptation. 

Context: Any innovation by definition is both new and valuable, and as our associate Jim O’Shaughnessy reminds us: “all value is contextual.” For example, water in the Phoenix, Arizona, is valued differently than water in Traverse City, Michigan. In both locations it is H2O, but because the contexts are so different, water is more precious in Phoenix than Traverse City. The same can be said for novelty. Novelty is also contextual.  “Newness,” as observed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is defined socially. What is “wow” new for one group may be considered old hat by another. For example, the iPod was made from well known technologies—old hat to some, but new and “wow” to others, especially in context of iTunes and 99¢ songs. 

If innovation is so innately contextual, then shouldn’t we be paying close attention to the context as well as the text—the conditions and situation that provide the sitz en Lieben (or situation in life) within which the innovation has meaning and value, as well as the innovation itself?

Peter Drucker recognized this truth about context in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship where he boldly named seven sources of innovation and listed them in order of reliability. The most predictable ones rely on contextual understanding. This more than a coincidence. Drucker’s top two sources are (1) surprise failure or unexpected success and (2) incongruities between the way things are and the way things should be.

Using context plays out even in addressing the classic “hand-off” challenge as well. Much of the tacit (i.e., contextual) knowledge required for a successful hand-off of an innovation from development to launch resides with operating personnel—those currently involved in making the operating portions of the core business successful. When a transfer or hand-off is ready to happen, some of these people need to be refocused for varying periods of time. 

Some companies develop and use a template that enables a phase in/out of these people so as to forecast the temporary shift of their focus and responsibilities and minimize the negative impact on the core operations. One of the most penetrating assignments this year engaged us to help a client to develop just such a  template. Geoffrey Moore, in his book Dealing with Darwin, points out that these people—the ones with appropriate contextual knowledge—can and should be counter-rotated within organizations for more sustainable innovation streams.

Causal connections: Innovations emerge and develop because of the connections between seemingly unrelated people, ideas and know-how. When innovators see and understand the causality behind the connection, innovations can be born. 

One of these causal connections is the people-to-people connection. Relationships are at the heart of any entrepreneurial activity. The misleading caricature of the lone entrepreneur stems in part from the Horatio Alger stories of success and individualism. But if you look more closely, you will see a relationship, most often between two people, sometimes three, from which significant enterprises were born.

Hewlett-Packard started with Bill and Dave, even before they had their first product in mind. Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Even in renewals of great companies like Disney’s Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. Nothing happens except out of relationships. This is not only true for the entrepreneurial origins of companies. It is true for the later intrapreneurial efforts as well, as in relationships between mavericks or champions and their sponsors and mentors (or “midwives”).

Causal connections are not limited to the interpersonal. They occur as mental connections that well-prepared minds, conducting both actual and thought experiments together, can create to form new knowledge, find new applications of old knowledge and both invent and discover.

We see inventors making connections all the time in the innovation workshops we facilitate. However, it is the causal connections that make the biggest contribution. What differentiates the causal connection from the ordinary connection is the knowledge—often science-based knowledge—of the connection-makers. Often what looks like serendipity results from these causal connections,  reflecting Louis Pasteur’s observation that chance favors the prepared mind.

Adaptation: When a word makes it to Madison Avenue, you and I know that it is probably time to become a bit wary about how it is being used. This has certainly happened, disappointingly, with the word “innovation.” Sometimes it is difficult to know how it is being used. Sometimes the word is just plain abused—a reminder that our language itself is constantly morphing—mutations producing variety, some of which are selected (hopefully naturally), before being retained and hopefully contributing to something we could call evolutionary progress. 

So as the word “innovation” is starting to morph with all the twists and turns of the media and PR campaigns, adaptation may be a more trustworthy substitute, at least for the time being. From Clif Bar’s Gary Erickson to the former chairman of Toyota, the mantra of act, pay attention to what happens, and then adapt, seems to sum up what is at the heart of innovation.

While we may have left off a fundamental or two (and we welcome your thoughts on the fundamentals), this might be a place to start—to get aligned with the “needed” new, stay in balance and use our posture to sustain those innovations that work®.
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This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in January 2007. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.