Innovation Newsletter
Helping you improve innovation
April 2008
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Do you watch The Apprentice? Candidates for the position of apprentice to Sir Alan Sugar are set business tasks in teams. The losing team then has to face trial by ordeal by Sugar and his henchman and henchwoman. Ultimately, with a great dramatic flourish and an accusatory pointed finger, Sir Alan announces, 'You're fired!' And one more poor soul is sent on his or her way. It is one of the few programmes about business on TV and the weekly elimination of a candidate makes for great drama.

However, in many respects it is a poor guide to business. One thing about it that bothers me is there has to be a losing team and a losing individual each week. If one team makes a profit of £200 and the other team makes a loss of £200 then the loss- making team loses - simple as that. But what if the loss-making team had a really creative idea but poor execution (as often happens the first time you try something)? What if both teams had creative approaches?

Innovative leaders do not punish failure. They applaud honest attempts at new ventures that fail. They treat each failure as a valuable learning experience. They do not fire people for being entrepreneurial and launching a business that makes a loss on its first day.
Businessweek and the Boston Consulting Group draw up an annual listing of the most innovative companies in the world based on a survey and some financial measures. This year's list is now out and the top ten are
  1. Apple
  2. Google
  3. Toyota
  4. GE
  5. Microsoft
  6. Tata
  7. Nintendo
  8. P&G
  9. Sony
  10. Nokia

The survey is weighted towards US companies. The only European entries in the top 30 are Nokia, BMW, Virgin and Audi. Very interesting nonetheless.
Have you ever been in a wood that just looked like a random assortment of trees and then when you take a few steps to the side you see that all the trees are laid out in neat rows? Sometimes we are standing in the wrong place to see an obvious answer. We have to deliberately take a different point of view and come at the problem from a new direction before we have a chance of creating a radical solution.

Add together these numbers in your head: 398, 395, 396, 399. If you add them the conventional way then it is taxing piece of mental arithmetic. But if you notice that they can be rewritten as 400-2, 400-5, 400-4 and 400-1 then it is easy to see the total is 1600 - 12 = 1588. By taking a slightly different view of the problem or restating it in a different way it becomes much easier to solve.

How can we force ourselves to take a different view of a situation? Instead of looking at the scene from your view try looking at it from the perspective of a customer, a product, a supplier, a child, an alien, a lunatic, a comedian, a dictator, an anarchist, an architect, Salvador Dali, Leonardo da Vinci and so on.
Innovation involves trying things that might or might not work. I advocate a positive attitude to managing risk. However the guys in this video are plainly going too far.
I am giving some talks on Innovation and Leadership for Businesslink in May. You can catch me in Fareham, Basingstoke or Newport. I will also be speaking at the Surrey Heath Expo in Camberley on June 17th.
A video from Australia showing the problems of communicating with teenagers.

Paul Sloane
Destination Innovation

phone: +44.1276.670236
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