Bought your Nespresso machine yet?

I’m often asked how large, established corporations can organise to create breakthrough innovations which really succeed in the marketplace. To be honest, there isn’t one easy solution. So many of them invest vast sums of money in innovation and R&D, and all that happens in reality is that they give birth to a steady stream of more minor, incremental offerings.

If Microsoft can spend some nine billion dollars a year on it (see “Microsoft and their search for breakthrough innovation”, 2 March 2011) and have such limited success, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Well, one strategy that worked extremely well for Nestlé was embodied in the way that they went about developing their Nespresso brand. The company realised quite early that, given their worldwide dominance of the instant coffee market, if they were to enter the ground coffee market with a bang, they needed to have a completely new approach that would rewrite the rules of the game.

To do this, they set up a stand-alone business, geographically and organisationally separate from the “corporate machine”, Nestlé headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland.

And the concept itself is radically different. It is a superpremium product for a much more sophisticated consumer. The relationship with Nespresso starts with the purchase of a coffeemaker/espresso machine. Those things are bought once every eight or so years - and the purchase involves 100+ euros.

Then, having a consumer who has bought a machine, it is about home-delivery of coffee – and a one-on-one communication program including accessories, services and rewards. This required a totally different mindset, different marketing capabilities and completely different structural solutions.

Certainly wouldn’t be without it myself. And it’s a massive success around the world.

Would that have been possible if they had remained part of the mother-ship? I doubt it.

Video killed the radio star?

At a recent interview in Hampstead, writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg (above) was asked what he thought was the future for printed books in the age of the ebook.

“There is this strange idea that when something new comes along it knocks everything else on the head,” he responded. “When film came it was supposed to kill theatre; it didn’t. When television came it was supposed to kill film; well, it didn’t. Television was supposed to kill radio; it didn’t.”

How that intriguing list could be extended: aircraft vs ships, the promised paperless office…

The worldwide CEO OF Saatchi & Saatchi, Kevin Roberts, recently wrote: “I am amazed at the resilience of television. For fifteen years the cool kids have been trying to kill it. But TV thrives in a world of choices.”

Of course, there are genuine casualties of innovation. For example, who now uses the fax machine?

Did video really kill the radio star?

Harold Monro, poet

For whatever reason, I’ve only recently connected with the early twentieth century Anglo-Scottish poet, Harold Monro. He seems to have slipped off the radar screen, but, among others, TS Eliot admired his work greatly.

Like so much good poetry, Monro’s could be downbeat. But it always has, like Eliot’s, a profoundly musical quality.

In “Living”, in a rather rare glimpse of life as possibility, after a “Slow bleak awakening from the morning dream”, he writes

But suddenly, as if without reason,
Heart, Brain, and Body, and Imagination
All gather in tumultuous joy together,
Running like children down the path of morning
To fields where they can play without a quarrel:
A country I’d forgotten, but remember,
And welcome with a cry.

I don’t think you have to be a poet to recognise that exhilarating creative cocktail. (But you do need to be one to capture it so eloquently.)

Tell it to Edison

Firing a budding entrepreneur from The Apprentice, Lord Sugar explained his decision by telling the contestant: "I've never known an engineer turn his hand to business."

Maybe he should tell that to James Dyson. Or even to Thomas Edison.

Such wisdom…

Sixty-seven better than one?

While I was living and working in Sydney, I took the worldwide boss of Lintas to visit our office in Auckland. I don’t think such a thing had ever happened before.

He was impressed with the people and their work. Flying back together to Australia, he was in reflective mood.

“You know, Rog,” he said, “these people in Auckland. They handle the same number of clients that we handle in New York. And same number of brands. And they do all the things we do in New York. They plan strategy. They plan and buy media. They write and produce ads in all media. They create sales promotions and help clients to innovate. And I reckon their work overall is just as good as ours in New York.”

“Just one thing,” he went on. “In New York we have six hundred people, but in Auckland they have nine. That’s… sixty-seven to one”

So when people nowadays say that it’s totally impossible to cut staff numbers any more, or to be substantially more productive, I always think of Auckland.

Switzerland in top spot for innovation. Really?

I see that a new study puts Switzerland in top spot out of 125 countries for innovation.

Can this really be so? Or is it another example of garbage-in-garbage-out?

Anyway, the "Global Innovation Index" is the work of INSEAD in partnership with Alcatel-Lucent, Booz and Co and others, computed as an “average of scores across input pillars”, and also “how economies leverage their enabling environments to stimulate innovation results”. Ah.

Reading about it, my mind went immediately to Orson Welles’s brief speech in The Third Man:

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Improv in Innovation

Angela Dove of Cass Business School proposes IMPROVISATION as an addition to my short list of “Words, words, words”.

I know that, well handled, it can be catalytic in powering up the creative process, enabling folk to escape from those unhelpful impulses – correct/incorrect, aggressive/defensive, rule-bound, power-driven, anxious, fearful, hierarchical, information-driven, sacred-cow-filled, risk-averse – and generate fresh, new thinking, feelings, connections and ideas.

Over the years I’ve used improv in many different contexts – loosening groups up, on the way to developing breakthrough concepts, problem-solving barriers, in NPD and in strategy development, and so on. Usually it creates a kind of stepping stone towards new solutions.

There are just so many different forms that improv can take. For example, I’ve had groups writing poems or jingles (sometimes a word at a time, working in a circle). I’ve had them creating and acting out a scene from a soap (Neighbours or Eastenders or Coronation Street or whatever), or collaboratively creating and presenting a human sculpture. Or making collages from piles of rubbish.

The important thing is to help people to be truly “in the moment” when they do it, spontaneously responding both to their own inner feelings and thoughts, and to others.

This kind of approach is habitually used these days in theatre, in comedy, dance and music. But I find it extraordinarily powerful when it’s used well with scientists and engineers, with lawyers, bankers and accountants.

What’s your experience with improv?

Words, words, words

At risk of catching the dread disease of definitionitis (see blogpost, 27 October 2010), I think it’s useful to distinguish between some words that are commonly used and confused. For example…

Invention: is the application of creativity to solve a problem, usually involving technology of one sort or another.

Discovery: is usefully applied to productive new insights and new understandings.

Creativity: is the generation of new thinking, ideas that may be quite speculative in nature.

Innovation: is the process of turning new ideas into reality, making them happen. It usually involves problem-solving.

How am I doing?