Architectural Record Story on Building a Culture of Innovation

"Here are a few strategies suggested by experts to encourage innovation that might surprise you: Hire naive misfits who argue with you; encourage failure; avoid letting client input limit your vision; and fully commit to risky ventures. This is an extreme approach to fostering innovation in an otherwise relatively static office environment that was proposed by Robert I. Sutton. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2001, Sutton argued that fresh perspectives derive from mavericks with wildly diverse backgrounds and no preconceptions who challenge the status quo, champion their own ideas, and illuminate the metaphorical darkness.

Sutton points out that ignoring client input may seem counterintuitive, but clients can’t always imagine what’s possible. Ted Hoff, an inventor of the microprocessor, echoed that sentiment the next year, also in Harvard Business Review: “Don’t do what the customer wants; do something better.” Likewise, failure is critical to the design process—assuming the group learns from the failure—because, typically, many bad ideas must be generated to produce a terrific one. Even the bad ideas can illuminate a problem and serve as a creative trigger to its solution. IDEO, the renowned Palo Alto, California, innovation and design firm, has a saying: “Fail often to succeed sooner.”"

This quote is from current Architectural Record, which  has a story about what it takes to build a culture of innovation in a design firm.  They present some of the ideas from Weird Ideas That Work as being WAY out there (calling it "Sutton's dogma," even though the book asks readers to challenge the ideas and suggests that they are bad ideas for many  firms.. I am not even sure I agree with all the ideas in my book, but I can show you research that supports them and firms that use them).  I guess they are too weird for many firms.  But it is interesting that when I visit or read about organizations -- or more often, pockets in organizations -- that are dedicated to extreme innovation, such practices are seen as routine or even mundane. IDEO uses a lot of these practices (the picture above is from IDEO and is in the story... that is a DC 3 wing that some designers told Chairman David Kelley that they "had to have" for decor). XEROX Parc used most of them when they were developing many of the technologies that made the modern information technologies possible.  Facebook uses many of these practices; and although information about Apple's process is hard to come by, I've been hearing a lot of rumors lately that the team that developed the iPhone was intentionally composed of people who were largely ignorant of the assumptions held in the cell phone industry.  Or if you want a great example of an organization that has applied many of these ideas throughout their wild and path breaking history, read this great book about the history of Alice Waters' Chez Panisse, the place where many foodies claim that modern California cuisine was invented and spread from.

Comments

[Joyce Maroney]

I saw Tom Kelley of IDEO speak at an IDC conference in Boston last week. His talk was engaging, and I'm sure everyone in the audience walked away with something to think about. The quote in your post above related to the importance of innovation though, "Fail often to succeed sooner", is antithetical to the culture many employees work within. Companies like Apple invest in innovation and encourage the employees involved to take those risks. If companies want to reap the rewards of risk taking, they need to support those willing to stick their necks out with a new idea.

[mae collins]

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[dblwyo]

Innovation needs to be a process on the operational and strategic levels. That's trite of course but what it translates to is that one has to invest resources and sustain the investment as well as get practiced. Having spent 25+ years on the bleeding edge of innovation from large to small your advice rings true and verified by my experiences. As does the other side of the coin. Most companies are organoscelrotic accumulations of past practices w/o dedicated resources for innovation despite recurrent and allegedly accelerating concern for adaptation and innovation. The real question therefore is not is your advice good but how to implement it. On a sustainable and repeatable basis. So when can we see the next book therein.