Innovating in the Scary Zone

Sometimes when I am reviewing the work of our innovation groups I see how hard they tried to be innovative, and, as a result, completely missed the point. If innovation is the creation and delivery of new value, they have focused too hard on the "new" part and not enough on the "value" part.

The best way to innovate is not to try to be innovative — forget the goatee and the trendy eyewear — but to be a humble servant: listening hard, thinking hard, anticipating and rolling up your sleeves to lend a hand. Great innovators focus on solving important problems and finding simple ways to make people's lives better. Sometimes this compels them to do something radical, but often it calls for smaller changes that most of the world may not immediately recognize as innovation. These changes can be the most difficult to achieve, but they are the ones that actually have the biggest impact on people's lives and, therefore, on growing a business. I call this "Innovating in the Scary Zone."

Consider this simple diagram showing the innovation spectrum:

At one extreme we have Incremental Change. For example, changing color or style without significantly affecting the experience of a product or a service. At the other extreme is Cold Fusion: that far-out vision of the future that is the staple of glossy magazines — flying cars, and so on. It is not that cars cannot fly (Terrafugia is working on that) but they are unlikely to address the real needs of significant numbers of people in an affordable way in the foreseeable future. Real innovation falls in the scary zone: that frightening area that both pushes the boundaries of what is possible and can actually be made real in a relevant time frame. It is scary because it is real.

Scary Zone innovation is risky and, so, many leaders shy away from it, favoring the extremes. Incremental change is low risk because it is low cost and has predictable results. Repackaging for example requires no big capital investments and you can run a BASES test to be confident of your sales before you launch. And Cold Fusion innovation is just as low risk...because it is not going to happen! Cold Fusion innovation stays safely in the R&D center to be trotted out for annual reviews to show how innovative you are. You avoid cost and risk because there is always some reason you cannot begin development this year.

Of course, the really skilled innovation manager combines both ruses. Showing off the far-out ideas and at the same time making incremental changes. And this works great until a competitor comes along with a Scary Zone innovation. Then you are out of business.

So how do you lead your organization into the Scary Zone and drive innovation that will have a meaningful impact on people's lives and grow your business? Not by trying to be innovative — time pressure, fear or ambition will drive you to the wrong extremes. You get to the Scary Zone by looking more closely at the needs and aspirations of your consumers or customers. And then when you can see clearly where they want to go, you go one step further. And then bring along your technology and business leaders so that they can see for themselves the opportunity, and can help you to make it real.

As an innovator your job is to ask, what do people want and how can we serve them better? If that calls for a radical new technology then that is your imperative. But if it calls for just the painstaking process of simplifying or improving the customer experience, then that is just as much an innovation imperative.

When Tetra Pak wanted to innovate one of their packages for on-the-go consumers, they did not try to be deliberately clever with the shape or the material. The question was, really, how could they deliver a better drinking experience? We partnered with them to find out. By putting a camera in different packages we could see up close how people actually drink, and noticed that by making some small changes we could refine the experience, improving flow and comfort when you drink from a carton. Strangely, nobody had looked that closely before. The "small changes" to the package were technically very challenging and called for different materials and processes — which put this innovation in the heart of the Scary Zone. But brought to life as the ergonomically designed DreamCap, TetraPak's product now delivers a remarkably better drinking experience.

When someone asks me for advice on which idea is better, I always respond: which would make people's lives better? Now find a way to make that happen. Don't be scared to do something simple and don't be afraid to do something difficult, but do it for the right reasons.

 

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