El blog de los empleados
de Telefónica I+D

By Gislaine Ceregatti and Fernando Suzuki

What we all know about innovation is that it requires different practices from those which corporations are used to in their everyday routines. What is difficult to describe though, is how to incorporate these new habits into executives’ behavior, or worse, have the courage to let the old ideas go and open up minds to the new ones.
Regarding this subject, Robert I. Sutton — among other things, management professor of Stanford University (http://tinyurl.com/robertsutton) — wrote Weird Ideas That Work, where he presents some symptoms on corporations’ phobia around the innovation subject and the counter actions they require from managers.

One of the factors observed in companies is the difference between “taking advantage of old ideas” versus “exploring new possibilities”. He uses McDonald’s as an example: while the company ensures Big Mac’s taste and shape to be exactly (well, at least they try to) the same anywhere around the globe, it also invests money on new technologies research, studying how to speed up potatoes frying process, for instance. The contrast here is the usage of old, solidified knowledge to guarantee processes quality and the employment of a fraction of the company’s profit on exploring new possibilities. Sutton lists three principles which guide new horizons exploration:

• Increase diversity: innovation asks for discrepancy between ideas. New businesses may come out from what looks like “trash”. Brainstorming sessions may produce new products ideas as well as current processes improvements;
• Look at old thing with new eyes: non-“conditioned” people are usually better at seeing things under different perspectives. A teacher at college has told us once about the margarine packaging problems he and some other engineers faced at Unilever some years ago. The current filling process caused a great amount of the package covers to break, what, obviously was very expensive for the company. After 2 or 3 weeks of experiments and studies, while talking to one of the company’s janitors, he just came with the simple sentence: “Why don’t you blow them?” A person out of the whole process was able to see what experts in the subject didn’t, maybe for being enclosed in their technical knowledge and not allowing common sense to flourish;
• Break out with the past: the author states, “most of new ideas are bad, while a great amount of old ideas are good”. It means that what may seem weird now may look interesting in the future, may it be two months or two years forward. Henry Chesbrough, in his book “Open Innovation”, recalls Xerox experiences with its Palo Alto Research Centre. Many ideas born in there ended up being developed by startup companies because Xerox didn’t have the patience to wait for the market for these new products to be ready. And what to say about HP: “who is going to be interested in a personal computer?!”

Breaking out with the past may also mean risk changing business models, as did PG Tips, a tea company, when it introduced the pyramid-shaped tea bag in the market. A small change in the business increased the company’s market share in UK.

In order to make it possible for the changes to take place, Sutton also suggests 8 practices which might make the incorporation of new habits easier, besides encouraging the natural process of innovation to happen.