Vitality the vision

Some years ago, I helped Unilever to develop a new “corporate mission”. In the end it all came down to one word – VITALITY.

Clarity about vitality as a way of being could create real new momentum for the multinational giant ‒ as the focus of all R&D and marketing efforts; on whom to promote and whom to recruit (and whom not); on which brands to acquire and which to sell.

I was so excited by the word and its obvious relevance and potential that I lobbied as many members of senior management as I knew ‒ and in due course it was adopted.

A little later I was disappointed to learn that it had not been taken up by the HR people in the company in any meaningful way. And the company went on owning the profitable but not very obviously vital Pot Noodle brand.

Now I see on the internet that the strategy has been reduced to a standard formula. This is it (above). Useful, no doubt, but unlikely to unleash much in the way of vitality. 

Mrs Thatcher and Mr Whippy

Having myself worked on innovation and marketing in ice cream for so long, it came as quite a shock to discover in the broadcast of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral that she was involved in the development of Mr Whippy soft ice cream.

Of course, one knew that before she was a politician she had been a research chemist at Oxford University. After Oxford she had joined the R&D department of J Lyons ice cream (now part of the Nestlé food giant). 

Soft ice cream itself had originated in the USA before the Second World War. What she and the team at Lyons did in the late 1950s was to discover how to pump extra air into ice cream. Lyons Maid launched Mr Softee and Wall’s (Unilever) responded with Mr Whippy, which rapidly became market leader in Britain.

It transformed the market – in take-home ice cream as well as in van sales.  

Not so many political leaders can have had a grounding in practical innovation.

Professors meeting consumers to invent the future

Over a period of several years I have helped some of our biggest consumer goods multinationals to develop visions, missions, strategies and key projects for their R&D efforts. In several of these we explored the broad areas of healthy ageing – including genetic engineering, antioxidants, nanotechnology and a host of other topic areas.

One of the key issues that had to be addressed was how to blend together some of the world’s leading research scientists, some of them Nobel prize-winners, with sets of relevant consumers (together with marketing management, outside experts and journalists, and the companies’ own R&D scientists).

Very diverse groups like this usually need help in discovering that at root they are all human beings with families, friends, futures and common values. When they are asked to work creatively together, they need to find common ground and common language in order to explore possibilities, walk into the future together, develop new ideas and problem-solve.

Moreover, in situations like this, one of the greatest challenges is to persuade all the participants that their thoughts are of equal validity. For example, consumers can and often will relegate themselves to observer status, while Professor X from Harvard or INSEAD gets into lecture mode, holding forth as though he or she has all the answers.

Ten reasons why good ideas get strangled at birth

1. Sounds too risky.
2. There’s little solid research support.
3. The “experts” in the field think it sounds a bit absurd.
4. The potential market seems too small.
5. The idea comes from R&D (and marketing says it’s not based on sound consumer insight).
6. It would be first to market.
7. It would be following a previous entrant that didn’t do so well.
8. It surfaced too early – not following corporate innovation process.
9. Top management demands breakthroughs, but draws short of funding them in practice (see reasons above).
10. Because it wasn’t my/our idea.

I’ve had each of these with my clients. Usually followed by a competitor taking the opportunity quite soon after.

Additions? Builds?

Belated happy birthday, Mr Cooper

My intention had been to post this three days ago, but I’ve been away from wireless electronic media.

26 December 2011 was the eighty-third birthday of Martin Cooper.

Hurrah! Martin who?

Well, he led the R&D team at Motorola in the late 1960s and early 1970s that developed the mobile phone. The inspiration for the idea, Cooper has said, came from watching Captain Kirk communicate on Star Trek. “Beam me up, Scotty.”

Not so well-known, nor so well-off, I guess, as Steve Jobs.

But what a world-changing achievement!

GSK and Dragon’s Den

I’m astounded that the massive drug company GSK is planning to assess and fund innovation projects by using a “Dragon’s Den” style of selection process. There’s said to be £1.1 billion ($1.75 billion) at stake.

I can see that the programme makes for good television.

But is there any evidence at all that this kind of approach produces winners?

At best it strikes me as amateurish. It obviously has the potential to be damaging and demeaning to the R&D scientists involved. And it’s likely to have 100% success in missing any innovation with really major potential.

First-mover DISadvantage

For many years academic studies have touted the commercial advantages of being first to market with innovations.

More recently there has been a backlash and example after example has emerged where the second-mover has had the upper hand.

One of the darlings of the first-mover brigade has always been Procter & Gamble’s disposable diaper brand, Pampers. Certainly Pampers was and is a massive success.

Problem is – it was never the first-mover. That was Johnson & Johnson’s CHUX, which had first entered the market in 1949.

P&G’s R&D people were able to spendseveral years tackling each of the major problems with CHUX and in due course developed a product that was more absorbent, had lower leakage, was more comfortable on baby, offered two sizes and could be produced at significantly lower cost (and retail price).

Pampers was test-marketed in the early 1960s and by the end of that decade had achieved well over three-quarters of a market that itself was growing exponentially year on year. The game was over pretty much by the time I worked in that market – with Kimberly Clark’s brand in Australia.

So much for first-mover advantage. More like first-mover DISadvantage.

Microsoft and their search for breakthrough innovation

There’s been much discussion over recent years as to why Microsoft has had such a low to non-existent strike rate in developing breakthrough innovations.

Certainly it’s not for want of trying, nor for want of resource. In fact, it’s twenty years since Bill Gates first decided to pour megabucks into R&D. Currently that budget is running at $9 billion a year. But two decades on, aside from a stream of incremental innovations, there’s little to show for all that investment.

Currently the company has high hopes for its Kinect system. But was that really what Gates had in mind when he started on this great creative Odyssey – a games controller?

The fact that Apple has been so successful in creating and introducing one blockbuster after another, has led inexorably to their overtaking Microsoft in market value last year.

Lack of breakthroughs – disruptive innovations – is certainly not confined to Microsoft. My experience is that many large, established corporations have the same problem. And they usually know it and take steps aimed at remedying the situation.

Nearly always they assume that they understand what needs to be fixed – and get on with fixing it. Without noticeable effect.

In reality, there are many possible blockages and barriers, some of them behavioural, often attitudinal, occasionally at organisational, strategic, skills and process levels. And it’s critically important that the right issues are diagnosed and the right treatment prescribed.

“Stunningly arrogant,” as Microsoft has been described, may or may not be the source of their problem. They need to know which it is before spending more time and effort trying to fix it.

In major companies that I know well, the wrong diagnosis, coupled with the wrong treatment, has led to the problem being redoubled.