Adopt and adapt ideas to drive innovation

By Paul Sloane

Adapting ideas that have worked in one environment and using them in another is one of the most successful of innovation techniques. Let’s look at some examples.

In 1916, a young American scientist and inventor called Clarence Birdseye went to Canada as a fur trader. He noticed that people in Labrador kept their food frozen in the snow for extended periods in the winter. When he returned to the U.S. he developed this idea and launched a line of quick-frozen foods and persuaded retailers to stock them in freezers. He created the frozen food industry. Birdseye subsequently sold his business to General Foods Corporation and made his fortune. He saw a good idea, adapted it to his business environment and implemented it.

Alexander Graham Bell studied the workings of the human ear. He adapted the idea of the eardrum vibrating with sounds into the workings of a metal diaphragm which led to his invention of the telephone.

The motto of the Round Table is adopt, adapt, improve and it is an excellent guideline for implementing new ideas in your business. Taking ideas from other environments and adapting them for use in your situation is one of the best ways of implementing novel solutions. Amar Bhide of the Harvard Business School studied the origin and evolution of new businesses. He found that over 70% of successful start-ups were based on ideas that the founders had adopted from their previous employments. They took a promising idea in a field they understood and made it better.

The person who invented the roll-on deodorant was looking for a new way to apply a liquid. He copied an idea from another field, writing, where the same problem is solved. He adapted the concept of the ballpoint pen to create the roll-on deodorant.

Samuel Morse was the inventor of morse code. He encountered a problem sending signals over long distances on the telegraph - the signal became attenuated and weak. Then one day when he was travelling by stagecoach he noticed how the coach changed horses at relay stations. He adapted this idea to put in relay stations for telegraphs that boosted the signal.

In 1941 George de Mestral went for a walk with his dog in the Jura mountains in Switzerland. On their return he noticed that many plant burrs were attached to his trousers and to the dog’s coat. They were hard to remove. He examined them under the microscope and saw that they contained tiny hooks that caught in the loops of his clothes and in the dog’s hair. He developed an artificial material to mimic nature and in doing so he invented Velcro.

Putting this creativity technique to work

If you have a problem try to force fit a link with a random event or animal or institution. Then adapt some ideas from that environment. Say your problem is how to motivate a lethargic team and you choose at random the Olympic Games, a tiger and a Ballet school. What sorts of ideas would that trigger? You might offer medals as recognition for top performers. You could keep records of who has achieved the fastest qualified lead or the fastest assembly time and post them on the wall or the extranet in the form of Olympic records. The tiger might suggest face painting as a trick for raising morale or it might suggest hunting – you could have a treasure hunt in the office or organise a ‘hunt for sales’ competition. And so on. The ballet school students practice all their exercises each day before they perform a dance. This might suggest a high-energy group practice session each morning before work proper begins. Ballet dancers practice in front of mirrors – what if we installed systems that gave us feedback to build the team’s motivation?

Alternatively, try to adapt a combination between your organization’s main strength and that of other organizations or people. Say you provide high level training courses and you choose at random a hospital then you might come up with the idea of a consulting accident and emergency clinic where people turn up with their problems and you help diagnose them on the spot. Or you may ponder that many people forget what they learn on training courses. In a hospital patients have ongoing physiotherapy sessions to aid recovery. This idea could be adapted so that you send out "physio trainers" to top up the learning of participants after they have completed their courses. Alternatively, if you think of the Boy Scouts then you might imagine a summer camp for some of your top clients or a "bob a job" campaign where you offer short introductory courses for new clients.

Lateral thinking is about finding new ways to solve problems. It is very likely that the current problem you face at work today has been faced and solved by other people. Maybe they were in your line of business or maybe they confronted a similar problem but in an entirely different walk of life. Why do all the brain work yourself when you can adapt someone else’s idea and make it work for you?

Paul Sloane is the founder of Destination Innovation www.destination-innovation.com a consultancy that helps businesses improve innovation. He writes and speaks on lateral thinking and innovation. The ideas in this article are drawn from his book, The Leader’s Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills, published by Kogan-Page.

*Article taken from http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/ArticleDetails.asp?a=261

Top 10 Ways to Foster Employee Innovation

1. Find your venture’s next best-selling product or breakthrough marketing campaign by tapping into your staff’s individual pursuits and passions.
• Half of Google’s new product launches— including Google News and Google Suggest— stem from Google’s 20 percent time policy, which allows engineers to spend one day a week on pet projects and personal pursuits.

2. Make creativity easier for staff with a meeting room that sparks group and individual brainstorming.
• Ford Global Technologies’ Innovation Acceleration Center has several breakout rooms, comfy couches, easels, a kitchen, radio-controlled cars, and a 3-foot Statue of Liberty made of Legos.

3. Don’t stop at just meeting rooms. Get imaginative with workstations so they afford privacy but do not close staff off from one another or stifle collaboration.
• Employees at furniture manufacturing company Herman Miller use cubicles with translucent walls and doors.

4. Get more from your brainstorming sessions by building in time pre- and post- meetings for staff to do research, individual brainstorming, and reflection.
• Staff members at IDEO, an innovative design consulting firm, take field trips to places like hardware stores to prepare and be inspired for design sessions.

5. Free your staff to work in the manner, place, and time they are the most productive and creative.
• Best Buy’s recently-instituted “results-only work environment” policy allows its headquarter employees to set their own work hours and locations.

6. Prolong the life of creativity at your organization by staving off staff burnout.
• Netflix’s policy of providing unlimited vacation days for its salaried employees manages the job, not the hours.

7. Don’t just look within your team for creative brainpower—leverage your larger network by fostering collaboration among staff, partners, and customers.
• BMW posts engineering challenges on its Website for its designers and customers to collaborate on developing various features of future cars.

8. Stay innovation-focused when building your team.
• FedEx looks for “risk taking and courage of conviction,” and Procter & Gamble hires people who show the ability to collaborate, to build an organization, and to mentor and develop others.

9. Harness all of your team’s strengths and bypass bottlenecks by using cross-functional teams to develop innovative ideas.
• Apple “cross-pollinates” by having all departments – design, hardware, software— work on products in parallel.

10. Reward the pursuit of innovation – whether or not it produces any new products.
• Employees at Gore-Tex material manufacturer W.L. Gore & Associates are compensated based on contribution to the company—past and present performance as well as future prospects of “speculative projects.”

By: Community Wealth Vanguard
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When it comes to innovation, trust your intuition

By Paul Sloane

MBA students are taught to treat business in a rational, scientific way. They analyze situations, develop financial models, critically examine management decisions and logically examine different scenarios. When they emerge from the hallowed halls of academia, they are often surprised to find that businesses run much less on logic and much more on emotion. It is not cold, intelligent analysis that drives most organizations forward. Emotional energy is often the real engine behind successful people and organisations.

Sure it helps to be analytical, intelligent and rational - but what makes people like Richard Branson, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs great business leaders is not their undoubted intelligence but their passion and commitment to their cause.

One of the richest men in Britain is Felix Dennis, who made his fortune in publishing. In 1971 he was jailed for publishing an obscene political cartoon but he was acquitted on appeal. His success started with Kung-Fu Monthly in 1974. In the 1980s he published a string of successful computer magazines. His publishing empire now spans IT, motoring, gambling and men’s magazines. A recent innovation was The Week – a brief summary of all the best articles from the press each week. In his book, How to Get Rich, he describes how he ignores conventional wisdom and sound advice from his directors, lawyers and accountants. He goes with his gut instincts instead. Time and again he trusted his intuition in making tough business decisions about innovative ventures.

Luc Mayrand, Concept Designer at Disney says, "If you find your logic is talking you out of a good idea, question the logic first, then question the idea. This is entertainment; logic is less important than the impact of the story and design."

There are many famous examples where eminent people used logic and analysis to trash an innovative idea which subsequently succeeded. Western Union turned down the telephone because they saw no need for people to chat to one another. IBM turned down Xerography when it was offered to them by its inventor Chester Carlson. Decca Records turned down the Beatles and so on.

Logic and analysis can always find fault with innovative ideas. Use these tools but use them warily. If your intuition tells you that you have a great idea then pursue it a little while longer.

Paul Sloane is the author of The Innovative Leader, published by Kogan Page. He gives talks and workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is also the founder of Destination Innovation, which helps organisations improve innovation. He writes and speaks on lateral thinking and innovation.


Related Web site: http://www.destination-innovation.com

Full article: http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/ArticleDetails.asp?a=271