“If I had an hour to save the world,” Albert Einstein once observed, “I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.” And yet, as Stephen Shapiro points out in the European Business Review , most businesses, as they strive to be innovative, do the exact opposite – and fail spectacularly. Shapiro cites the example of a UK bank which did the traditional thing that companies do when they want to innovate but don’t know why or how – asked staff for suggestions to improve the business.
More than 10,000 ideas were generated, but only two were acted upon and the bank’s entire innovation team was fired. As Shapiro says: “The amount of energy required to submit and process this many bad ideas is massive.”
Successful innovation, he wisely suggests, is driven by a single-minded focus on the strategic challenges facing a business. Even larger firms in the wide format industry can only successfully manage a certain number of innovations in a given time frame, so you need to focus on issues that really matter. So innovation starts with asking the right questions – and making sure you get the right answers. This means, Shapiro suggests, going beyond the usual surveys, statistics and focus groups. There is no substitute for getting out in the market and observing. As he points out, one drug company only realised how difficult it was to open its prescription bottles when they saw a woman cutting through one with a hacksaw.
Innovating is never easy but a slower, more focused start could make the difference. Just remember that, as Rebecca Henderson, who studies organizational change at Harvard University, famously put it: “Doing all the right things does not guarantee outcome, it just shifts the odds.”