Making innovation a brand
There is not a business in America that does not want to be more creative in its thinking, products and processes. And Tom Kelley, General Manager – IDEO, knows how to foster a culture of creativity and develop processes for continuous innovation. Kelley was one of the guest speakers at the Mangement Innovation Forum held in Dubai. Excerpts from the interview

What are the essential traits that innovative leaders share?

This is an important question with many, many answers, but I will suggest four traits that come to mind: The greatest single skill for an innovation leader is to nurture other innovators. One of the ‘Ten Faces of Innovation’ in my current book is called The Director. The best innovation ‘directors’ aren’t just autocrats trying to get everything their way. The best directors, like great film directors, never take the stage themselves. They see it as their job to attract the most talented, the most creative people in the world and then let them do their best work.

A second characteristic of innovation leaders is that they realise their companies don’t have to do everything themselves. The best companies in the world are practicing “open innovation,” seeking ideas, technologies, and insights from creative sources around the world.

Thirdly, truly great companies have leaders who are always a little bit restless, always wanting to do a little bit more. I think that is a good thing. The best companies are those who keep upping the pace, even when they are at the front of the pack.

And finally, what innovation leaders do is try to create an “idea friendly” environment, one in which managers are quick to build on new ideas and slow to judge them. If you want to have a culture of innovation, don’t delegate idea generation to your equivalent of the “innovation department.” Let all the departments feel that continuous generation of new ideas is not only their right but also their responsibility.

How has IDEO managed to stay at the cutting edge of design?
Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School says that in all organisations you face disruptors — new entrants and innovators who will aim to take away a piece of the business that is yours. In the long run, Christensen warns that the only defence against those disruptors is a strong offense: You have to be your own disruptor. You have to keep up a rapid pace of innovation and be willing to change quickly in response to — or in anticipation of — changes in the world around you. One thing we have tried to do at IDEO over the past 30 years is to evolve the firm at least as fast as the global business environment. That has meant being willing to change the people we hire, the projects we do, and the process of our work. Along the way, we have changed our working vocabulary and even our definition of design itself. What we have done over the past few decades is what we encourage our clients to do every day: be true to your core values, but be willing to change everything else, up to and including the definition of your work itself.

Why is it important for companies to constantly innovate? Can you give us some real life examples of companies which have followed this path to success?

In the “flat world” of today’s global economy, companies have no choice but to innovate. Of the clients I’ve worked with in the past couple of decades, two innovation success stories that come to mind are Samsung and Procter & Gamble. Unlike companies such as Google and Apple that were centered around innovation and design from their inception, Samsung and P&G had to nurture a culture of innovation inside a large corporation that had a long history and a strong set of existing cultural values.

Let us take the Samsung story. Samsung today is a powerful global brand, but having worked with them extensively over the years, we know that was not always the case. Samsung has used design and innovation to rise through the ranks of consumer electronics companies and become a world leader.

While on an international trip in 1993, Samsung Chairman Lee Kun Hee observed that Samsung’s products had only “me too” status in a competitive marketplace. His observation sparked a new fire at Samsung that is still burning today. Soon after that trip, Samsung launched a series of brand-building initiatives, including a collaboration with IDEO.

As a very large and hierarchical corporation, Samsung has had many hurdles to overcome, but they have relentlessly pursued their innovation programme, even to the point of letting young innovators challenge more senior members of the firm. By opening up creative offices in California—as well as London and Tokyo—Samsung built a process of observing consumer trends there, and then cross-pollinating concepts from creative centers around the world. Along the way, they’ve proven that they are willing to listen to great ideas that did not necessarily originate in Seoul.

Quick Facts Name: Tom Kelley Designation: General Manager, IDEO Achievements: The Apple mouse, the Palm V and hundreds of other innovative products and services.   Author of two books: The Art of Innovation, The Ten Faces of Innovation. Was named the first-ever Executive Fellow by the dean of the Haas Business School, University of California Berkeley Fast Company listed IDEO as number five in its 2008 list of The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies

What is the essence of the ‘Deep Dive’ approach that you have elucidated in “The Art of Innovation’? IDEO developed the Deep Dive process more than a decade ago as a way to create new solutions via a total immersion in a particular problem. Our approach has something in common with immersion language programmes. You can try to learn a foreign language going to class one night a week, but you might never achieve fluency using that approach. But if you immerse yourself in a learning environment where that language is the only one available, you can sometimes make very rapid progress in a short period of time. Our Deep Dives are the same way. Participants shut out all other distractions and focus relentlessly on a single issue for a few days. We start by playing the role of anthropologist by observing human behaviour and looking for latent customer needs. We hold intensive brainstorming to generate new ideas. We do lots of quick prototypes and experiments to see which ideas are most promising as potential solutions to address those needs. We make the ideas tangible, show them to people who might use our solution, and then try to make our concept even better. The process is exhausting, but we often come out with breakthrough results.

We’ve done dozens of such programmes, but the most visible one was a Deep Dive we did for an American television show called Nightline several years ago. HostTed Koppel and the Nightline team gave us a challenge on Monday morning at 9, and we had four days to conceive and implement possible solutions. The topic they gave us had to do with grocery shopping carts, but they were less interested in the topic itself than in watching the process of innovation unfold. Our Deep Dive episode was one of the most popular segments in the history of the show, and the resulting video is part of a Harvard Business School case study on innovation still used in MBA programmes today.

What are the strategies that companies should follow to ensure that their innovative ideas are successful in the market?
Companies just need to look beyond the myths of innovation and dedicate enough energy to bringing those ideas to market.

Myth 1: Innovation is expensive. Short-sighted managers who focus only on the cost outlays and the investment required to nurture a culture of innovation among their employees are missing the point. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is what’s truly expensive. Innovation is good value, because innovation can dramatically improve a company’s margins.

Myth 2: Innovation is hard. Advertising guru David Ogilvy was fond of saying that there are no tired brands, only tired brand managers. An executive in a modern corporation today who feels that innovation is too hard might want to take a good look in the mirror. In fact, our own experience suggests that innovation can be quite enjoyable, in spite of the challenges and strains it puts on the team. Ask anyone who has been part of a hot project team, creating something new to the world – usually within tight budget and schedule constraints – and they will likely tell you it was challenging, but also exhilarating and even fun.

Myth 3: Innovation is risky. Devils advocates and other anti-innovation forces are staunch defenders of the status quo. They often like to repeat a slang expression in America that says “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Unfortunately, those people who resist change overlook the fact that sometimes, if you want things to remain “the same,” you have to be willing to change a lot. For example, if a successful company wants to preserve their same market share, their same revenue growth, their same pattern of staff development, it typically needs a rate of innovation equal to or greater than the pace set by competitors in its industry. Ultimately, not innovating is the ultimate risk.

Can companies in the Middle East be as innovative as their contemporaries in the US? What should be done to foster the spirit of innovation in the region?
Innovation can be found anywhere, and we believe that all enterprises have latent creative talents inside their best teams. There is no regional barrier to innovation, and Dubai is living proof. Dubai-based enterprises are not only innovative but in some cases unique in the world. I’ve stayed in literally a thousand hotels around the world. Even among a cast of thousands, the Burj Al Arab stands out head and shoulders above the crowd. It represents breakthrough innovation in several respects.

And having been an airline consultant prior to my career, I had the opportunity to work with — and fly extensively on — some of the best Asian and European carriers, nothing prepared me for my recent experience in the first class cabin of Emirates Air. It feels more like flying in private jets than any commercial flights I have been on in the past. So I refuse to believe that Middle East companies can’t keep up with or leap ahead of their peer
anywhere in the world.

Top^