Searching For Crazy Ideas

Modern corporations battling in the frenetic global marketplace are constantly on the hunt for the next great idea. That is a great waste of time and resources, as the best ideas (and those that make a company more competitive) come disguised as bizarre, loony, totally impractical ideas. The Director of one highly innovative firm recounts their weekly staff meetings, when staff members review potential ideas for development. He notes that, when the group unanimously hates an idea, he immediately writes it down, knowing that it likely contains elements of a viable future project. Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson believed that the appearance of wrongness was absolute proof of true creativity: “When the great innovation appears, it will most certainly be in a muddled, incomplete, and confusing form. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope” (Neumeier, 53). Even weird ideas that can’t be developed in their present form can be valuable: “Every idea, even a bad one, incorporates some form of discovery” (Robinson & Schroeder, 40). Losing a “good” idea to others shouldn’t be a concern. Howard Aiken, a famous inventor, said, “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats” (Berkun, 59). Scott Berkun similarly noted that, “Every great idea in history has the fat red stamp of rejection on its face…Big ideas in all fields endure dismissals, mockeries, and persecutions (for them and their creators) on their way to changing the world” (Berkun, 54). As global strategist Gary Hamel asserted, “Only stupid questions create new wealth” (Hamel, 144). The future belongs to those who are actively searching for “stupid” answers.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, failure, ideas, invention, strategy


References

Berkun, S. (2007). The myths of innovation. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Hamel, G. (2002). Leading the revolution. New York: Plume.

Neumeier, M. (2009) The designful company. Berkeley: New Riders.

Robinson, A. & Schroeder, D. (2003). Ideas are free. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

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Helping Deep Diversity Flourish

Fresh ideas are the foundation of economic progress worldwide. Those new ideas ultimately result in viable products and services, healthy companies, and most importantly, meaningful employment. The only way to get better ideas is to get more ideas, and an organization’s ability to acquire new ideas and innovate is constrained by the diversity of its thought leaders. Stroll the hallways of any company that successfully innovates and you will bump into employees that are remarkably diverse in age, race, country of origin, experience, gender, education, etc. God built this rich diversity into the global population for many reasons, not the least of which is the need for diverse ideas in innovation.

After the tragedy of September 11, visas for foreign-born entrepreneurs became increasingly constricted. Although many involved in the process of innovation believe that we should staple a green-card to the diploma of anyone who completes a technical doctoral degree in the United States, we currently require most foreign-born students who graduate from a U.S. college to leave after graduation, taking their innovative ideas and entrepreneurial zeal with them.

In April 2009, Paul Graham, a partner at Y Combinator in Mountain View, California, wrote a blog post entitled “The Founder Visa,” venting his frustration at the number of young entrepreneurs packing up their remarkable ideas and heading home. Many in the tech community picked up the idea, and a grassroots media campaign sprang up. Soon, a planeload of techies from Silicon Valley, dubbed "Geeks on a Plane," headed to Washington DC to lobby legislators. The incredible result has been the introduction of legislation by Senators John Kerry (D) and Richard Lugar (R) entitled the StartUp Visa Act of 2010. If passed, the bill will provide a special EB-6 category visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who want to start a company in the United States, can demonstrate that they have raised $250,000 from a U.S.-based venture capital firm, and will employ at least five U.S. citizens. While this won’t add thousands of well-paying jobs in the near term, it certainly is a step in the right direction!

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, diversity, StartUp Visa Act of 2010, entrepreneurship, immigration, strategy


References

O’Brien, C. (2010). Why Congress should pass the Startup Visa bill. SiliconValley.com. Retrieved from http://www.siliconvalley.com/opinion/ci_14658639?nclick_check=1

The Middle Ground of Design Thinking

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, corporate leaders have relentlessly pursued operational efficiency. The fundamental institutional goal was that of exploitation—maximizing the payoff from existing knowledge to solve problems. Using historical data, quantitative analysis, and inductive and deductive reasoning, explicit, incremental, step-by-step processes were developed to reliably predict outcomes and assure risk-mitigation. A sterling example is Ray Kroc of McDonald’s, who “Simplified the McDonald’s system down to an exact science, with a rigid set of rules that spelled out exactly how long to cook a hamburger, exactly how to hire people, exactly how to choose locations, exactly how to manage stores, and exactly how to franchise them.”

The polar opposite of exploitation is exploration—the search for entirely new knowledge. Exploration involves creativity and innovation and is based upon gut feelings, intuition, and instincts. Through knowing without reasoning, exploration is focused on achieving valid solutions and often results in false starts and major unexpected leaps forward. Exploration grasps risky new opportunities efficiency thinkers ignored. For example, “Early on, McDonald’s left health issues by the wayside. Subway made healthy eating the centerpiece of its value proposition, touting its fresh ingredients and low-fat specialties in response to consumers’ increasing concerns about unhealthy fast food.”

Are we stuck choosing between exploitation and exploration in our organizations? The answer is a middle ground, call design thinking. Design thinking seeks to balance innovation and efficiency (BOTH are necessary for success), continuously redesigns the business to take advantage of each, and closely matches consumer’s needs with what is technically feasible. Unlike the use of inductive and deductive logic in exploitation, and intuitive thinking in exploration, design thinking utilizes abductive logic. Abductive logic asserts that anything is possible, reaches out toward what might be, and can only be proven when the future arrives.

Martin, Roger (2009). The design of business. Boston: Harvard Business Press

Strangling Innovation

Whether called an innovation antibody, organizational antibody, or devil’s advocate, a malcontent employee may effectively shortstop corporate innovation. As Tom Kelley of IDEO said, “The Devil’s Advocate may be the biggest innovation killer in America today…The Devil’s Advocate encourages idea-wreckers to assume the most negative possible perspective, one that sees only the downside, the problems, the disasters-in-waiting. Once those floodgates are open, they can drown a new initiative in negativity.” Tony Davila similarly noted, “Typically, the more radical the innovation and the more it challenges the status quo, the more and stronger are the antibodies. Also, the greater the past successes of the company, the greater are the organizational antibodies,” and, “As complacency grows, organizational antibodies become more prevalent. Good ideas are attacked because they would require more change, and the organization is complacent—so complacent that it encourages rather than fights organizational antibodies.”

Innovation antibodies rarely publicly challenge innovation efforts “head-on.” Instead, one preferred method most commonly used to slow innovation progress to a crawl during times of financial exigency is to quietly influence and take control of the development of corporate policies and procedures surrounding innovation practices. Few bright employees volunteer to review and update procedures manuals, but wily innovation antibodies realize that burying innovation practices in convoluted policies and procedures effectively kills them. If unchecked, the underground control of corporate innovation policies and procedures by corporate antibodies will slow innovation so that it finally experiences death by inertia. Who has volunteered to “refine” your organizational policies and procedures, and where is the bus headed now?

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, innovation policies and procedures, innovation antibody, leadership, strategy


References

Davila, T., Epstein, M., & Shelton, R. (2006). Making innovation work. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing.
Kelley, T. (2005). The ten faces of innovation. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Recasting Innovation Resistance?

During periods of fiscal exigency, corporate innovation efforts may be associated with greater urgency, pressure, and risk than are similar organizational activities in more tranquil times (Kotter, 1995). Corporate leadership may become more frustrated by and less tolerant of behavior exhibited by employees and customers (Caruth et al., 1985), and may become competitive, defensive, or uncommunicative (Ford & Ford, 2009). Moreover, leaders may label a broad range of behavior as indicative of resistance to innovation efforts, and may consider such behavior as justification for operating in different and potentially more aggressive ways toward employees to signal that the behaviors are not aligned with the innovation process and are therefore unacceptable. Valid questioning of specific planned innovations by employees may receive an uncharacteristically harsh response from leaders who feel mounting economic claustrophobia. Leaders, has your innovation insight been muddied during this economic slump?

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, corporate communications, employee relations, leadership, strategy


References

Caruth, D., Middlebrook, B., & Rachel, F. (1985). Overcoming resistance to change. SAM Advanced Management Journal, 50(3), 23-28.
Ford, J. & Ford, L. (2009). Decoding resistance to change. Harvard Business Review, 87(4), 99-103.
Kotter, J. (1995). Leading change: why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59–67.

Who Else Is Innovation For?

Today, virtually all innovation in products, services, ideas, processes, and environments, is accomplished for those who reside in the top 20% of the global economic strata. Common logic holds that innovation should be directed to those who can most easily pay for it. “Common” logic is not God’s logic, however. Searching online Bible sites for the keywords “poor,” “money,” or “poverty,” quickly reveals that allusions to the poor are everywhere in Scripture. One example is the challenge of Moses to his people found in Deuteronomy 15:10-11 (Peterson, 1995): “Give freely and spontaneously. Don't have a stingy heart. The way you handle matters like this triggers God, your God's, blessing in everything you do, all your work and ventures. There are always going to be poor and needy people among you. So I command you: Always be generous, open purse and hands, give to your neighbors in trouble, your poor and hurting neighbors.” Our personal relationship with the poor is an indicator of our present status with God.

Perhaps we are obligated to redirect a portion of our innovation resources to those at “the bottom of the pyramid.” The development of efficient markets and effective business models through enterprise innovation should generate a needed economic transformation, but more importantly, must provide members of our global community respect, choice, self-esteem, and a welcomed future (Prahalad, 2006).

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, poverty, esteem, choice, design, Christian leadership


References

Peterson, E. (1995). The message. Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress.
Prahalad, C. (2006). The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing.