The science of serendipity

Over the years the word serendipity has come to mean ‘happy accident’. The original meaning of the word is more subtle and describes how things are discovered seemingly by chance, whereas in fact they are hard earned. This concept seems wholly suited to the great commercial buzzword of our age – innovation.

The story behind the launch of Viagra is fascinating. It goes something like this. In 1993, 12 men in Cardiff tried a new angina drug for a week. They refused to give the experimental drugs back, claiming their sex lives had been radically improved.

Although it was not a solution to the original problem, Pfizer realised it had a winner on its hands. The eventual launch of Viagra in 1998 doubled the stock price and enabled the acquisition of Lipitor – and for a while Pfizer became one of the most valuable companies in the world by market capitalisation. Not a bad outcome from a lucky break.

But digging beneath the Viagra story, we find there’s a lot more to it than pure chance. Dr David Brown, named as the co-inventor of Viagra on the Pfizer patent, had been studying erectile dysfunction (ED) for many years before switching to the angina study. There wasn’t a lot he didn’t know about the pharmacology of ED solutions and, critically, what compounds were acceptable to Pfizer and the various drug regulators.

At that time, Pfizer was located in rather ramshackle buildings in Kent, with chemists and biologists crammed into a small space, which led to a constant exchange of ideas and views without the need for formal meetings. It was in a corridor conversation that Brown heard of a parallel study about the biochemical role of a gas called nitric oxide and its ability to dilate blood vessels. Because Brown had done his homework, and because he was immersed in frequent, unplanned and diverse scientific conversations, he was able to put two and two together and effectively argue the case for the fast tracking of the famous blue pills.

If you listen to successful innovators describe their journey, it’s rare you’ll hear them say “having done our research and after extensive strategy sessions, we planned and executed the whole thing”. If they do, they are probably wearing heavily rose-tinted spectacles. The reality of where innovation comes from is a much messier and more personal story.

Take the specs off and innovators will tell you of the many failed attempts to get something off the ground, how they learned from their knock-backs, picked themselves up and tried again. After a while they managed to find the right people within their organisation to take the idea to the next level. The concept of ‘luck’ to these people is a romantic and faintly insulting one – they know they have made their own luck and that ‘luck’ is the label of the onlooker.

How innovation really works in organisations

For the past 20 years I have studied how innovation really works in large organisations. We all love the start-up stories but to me it’s corporate innovators who are the real heroes of innovation. People like David Brown, who have done their homework and yet have the passion and guile to guide an idea through the kind of combat new ideas face in large companies.

I’m not alone in wanting to understand more about how innovation really works in organisations of scale. Business schools around the world are finding that ‘innovation’ is their most demanded course. There are thousands of books on innovation proclaiming to have the answer. Many organisations are appointing chief innovation officers (43% of respondents claimed to have a formally accountable innovation executive in a 2012 Capgemini/IESE survey) and you can barely walk down the street without bumping into an innovation consultant.

Yet despite this storm of interest, innovation is a very young management science. Even the smartest observers have really done little more than describe the symptoms of big company innovation failure.

Marketing, on the other hand, has a rich body of practical tools. As a bright-eyed Unilever marketing trainee I can remember learning basic but hugely practical stuff – the four P’s (or was it seven?), net promoter scores, the concept of brand equity – all immediately useful. In contrast, innovation has a very limited body of commonly accepted practical tools.

So why, when innovation regularly tops the CEO wish list, is it still such an opaque concept? Lack of agreement in three particular areas helps to explain.

• Definition: Innovation is difficult to define precisely. On the one hand, gradually improving products and services through a series of incremental innovations is critical. But on the other hand, the investment, skills and risk associated with mega-scale innovation that may disrupt your very business model is very different from minor product tweaks. Yet the word innovation applies to both.
• Context: Innovation can feel very different in different market sectors. Online retailers innovate all the time – so much so that they don’t even call it innovation. It’s just a way of life. ASOS, for example, takes a dizzying eight minutes to prepare, shoot and upload a new fashion item to its site – and it uploads over 1500 items a week. Compare ASOS’ easy access to customers and low costs of trial with, say, a pharmaceutical giant in search of a new blockbuster drug. Each company is innovating and yet the momentum, risk and regulation are vastly different.
• Location: In China, where they get depressed about sub 10% growth, companies are innovating more around new routes to market than new products – much more so than in mature economies.

Increase your chances of getting lucky

While innovation is a broad concept, its definitional fuzziness doesn’t explain why the ultimate ‘How to’ manual hasn’t been, and probably never will be, written. Innovation is a ‘doing’, rather than a ‘thinking’ sport. The rules of innovation can’t be prescribed because the game is as reactive and emotional as it is proactive and rational.

This is where serendipity, or working hard to increase your chances of being lucky, comes into play. “The harder I practise, the luckier I get” is a famous quote (attributed to several golfers) and very apt for innovators.
It’s a modern-day version of Pasteur’s comment: “In the field of observation, chance favours the prepared mind.” (I have my own personal favourite: “Serendipity is like searching for a needle in the haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter” – Julius
Comroe.)

So how can hard-working people plan for the unplannable? How do rational and highly stressed organisations create the conditions for the unimaginable and seemingly magical to happen? Based on the experience of hundreds of my colleagues working on thousands of innovation engagements over 20 years, I have five observations about what really drives innovation.

Obsession with outcomes

The first element of the ‘science of serendipity’ is that whoever leads an innovation project, programme or team needs a total and utter obsession with an outcome. Most successful big-company innovators I meet – whether they are chief innovation officers, innovation team members or people tackling a big change project for the first time – have something in common: they respect the organisation they work for, but they don’t revere it.

As innovators, they want their businesses to do better, but at the same time they are dissatisfied with the status quo. I describe this type of person as ‘captain one minute, pirate the next’.

One moment the innovation leader is the captain, the passionate man-with-theplan, standing tall on the bridge of the ship and inspiring us all to go ‘this way’. But the next time you meet, the captain has morphed into a pirate. This time, he or she is down in the boiler room, sleeves rolled up, shipmates gathered around, using all available cunning to shortcut a process or subvert the system.

Now our protagonist is asking really challenging questions: ‘What if we did it differently? What if we ripped up the way things are done around here?’

So one minute an innovation leader is stubbornly sticking to the big picture, and the next he or she is telling you not to sweat the small stuff. I think this intriguing mix of vision and cunning comes from the fact that successful innovators are fixated by outcomes. They are highly motivated to make change happen – so much so that they are often less bothered about how they get there.

The chief executive of ASOS, Nick Robertson, wants a clear outcome for his company – to be an ‘enabler of fashion’.

ASOS’ online innovations include the Market Place, where independent boutiques can sell their latest lines, and Fashion Finder, where ASOS directs you to brands and products it doesn’t sell but thinks you’ll like.

So here’s one of the world’s hottest fashion businesses and it’s routing you somewhere else? Robertson’s obsession with outcome has helped him to rewrite the rules of fashion retailing.

The quest for provocation

Corporate innovators engage in a deliberate quest to have their view of the world challenged. Their quest for provocation takes them out of the office to experience all the things their customers experience, to meet people who have an extreme relationship with their products and to experience others who have cracked similar problems in other markets. This quest for provocation is, by definition, uncomfortable. We need to feel both inspired and a little threatened as a result.

Surprisingly, one of the great barriers to provocation is teamwork. There is a critical distinction to be made between teamwork and collaboration, but these words are often used interchangeably. Teams need rules, players have positions and what constitutes victory is normally pretty clear. But collaboration operates in a different environment, where the boundaries and rules aren’t clear. In fact, the rules unfold as the project progresses.

Sure, innovation needs people to pull together as a team, but what it really needs is for people to be able to collaborate – often with contacts and organisations outside the company, competitors, suppliers, even people the company has never considered talking to. Too often, teamwork looks like polite people making minimal progress, whereas collaboration is an altogether more robust concept that doesn’t tolerate mediocrity, allows for serendipitous encounters and drives step change.

An experimental mindset

The one thing that’s sure to kill innovation is if it’s in the spotlight. Once a new idea needs justifying, it can easily fall apart. Innovators need to work hard to lower the stakes. The most effective innovators formulate a hunch, test, and based on these results, adapt their hunch and repeat the process. The objective of this experimental process is to design the maximum number of ‘learn and adapt loops’ before locking in an investment.

James Dyson famously carried out more than 5000 separate experiments to develop his Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner. So the formula is pretty simple:

More learning loops = more learning = better innovation

Innovation is really very practical. If you can cut the cost of experimenting, you’ll do it more often and this virtually guarantees better innovation. So the formula can be simplified:

Cut cost of experimenting = better innovation

If the cost of experimenting looks expensive then we’re unlikely to throw ourselves into an iterative series of tests. Worse still, we set out to innovate and end up with just one giant loop of experimentation – all our eggs in one basket.

As Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos told Business Week in 2004: “You need to set up and organise so that you can do as many experiments per unit of time as possible… small, lightweight teams that… can do a lot of experiments per week or per month… then you’ll get a lot more invention from that."

Offices that collide

In 2000, Pixar acquired an old Del Monte canning plant in Emeryville, California for its new home. Steve Jobs, an early-stage investor in Pixar, threw out initial plans to create three separate units on the site, each housing a different function.

Instead, he pulled everyone together with a design for one large building with a giant atrium at its heart. He decided to use ‘space’ to force people to collide. He figured that as there were some activities everyone had to do every day, he may as well use this as a tool to collide people and ideas.

Brad Bird, director of animated film The Incredibles, recalled: “Steve put the mailboxes, meeting rooms, cafeteria and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the centre – which initially drove us crazy – so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realised that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.” (Sourced from Rao et al, 2008.)

If you can’t rip out all the toilets at work and create giant central loos, there are other ways to encourage the serendipitous collision of people and ideas. Innocent, the famous smoothie maker, has many social clubs. There’s the Cake Club, the Gardening Club, the Cycling Club, the Cake Decorating Club (a splinter group from the Cake Club), the Cheese Club and many more.

But why invest in helping employees spend time together in such clearly non-work-related activities? The answer hit me when one of the team at Innocent explained that when you get together over something you’re passionate about, like cake decorating, you forget you’re with a colleague. As you swap stories and enjoy each other’s company, you become lost in the thing you like doing. The Cake Club builds trusting relationships across different departments, so when you’re innovating and desperate for a favour, you know who to call.
It’s hard to say no to someone when you have spent the previous evening together perfecting your piping technique.

Enough ‘headspace’

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter stories introduced us to the Dementors. They are soulless creatures, considered to be the foulest beings on Earth - ghoulish fiends who suck out your soul and, as their name suggests, cause people who encounter them for too long to lose their minds. Many innovators in large organisations report the Dementor effect. They can’t seem to find the time or the energy to get immersed in their innovation projects.

To discover new things, there comes a point when innovators have to ‘lose themselves’. This is the nature of exploration and if your mind is constantly distracted, it won’t happen. Over time, people lose their mojo and have less and less stamina to battle the corporate machine. Without realising it, their innovation projects drift into mediocrity. This innovation doom-loop is not uncommon.

One of the most common reasons I have heard for this soul sucking is the sheer volume of reporting. A common complaint is that leaders are out of touch with how far their voice carries, how it distorts and how much headspace the smallest request can take up.

Another reason is the company’s addiction to a world of possibilities. It’s easy to start too many projects. One of my clients reported feeling like “the sky is black with planes – each is a project but there’s no space for them to land and all the time more are taking off”.

Some people complain of too many silos and of depression at finding someone just a few metres away has been working on the same thing.

Innovators need to have the right combination of spirit and clear focused time. But there is an intriguing dilemma in creating ‘headspace’ for innovators. Do you get the knife out and cut initiatives (as Steve Jobs did successfully when he returned to Apple in 1996 and halted hundreds of projects) or do you replace confusion with clarity? The priority is to give a team focus, allow them to say ‘no’ to wayward initiatives and make space for serendipity.

Conclusion

To innovate at scale, serious consideration needs to be given to creating an environment that allows the serendipitous development of ideas. Appointing obsessive people with a mission to make life better for customers, accessing a world of provocative stimulus, iterating an idea with many low-cost experiments and creating space to think are just some of the components of the science of serendipity.

Matt Kingdon is co-founder of ?What If!, the innovation consultancy [email protected]. The Science of Serendipity: How to Unlock the Promise of Innovation by Matt Kingdon is published by John Wiley & Sons. Read a review here.

This article was taken from the June issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.