Frans Johansson
So the answer to the question of where I come from is my parents and so you need to know something about my parents. My father, no my mother is black and Cherokee, there you go. My father’s Swedish and they actually met in Germany but I was born and raised in Sweden which is here obviously you know this. This is for, usually for the Americans.
Now something about, something about, something about Sweden during the time I grew up in that country. When I was a little kid, Sweden consisted essentially of two groups of people. One was blonde, was white and quite reserved, and the other group was me basically.
That’s a joke obviously. That’s me and my sister. Now here’s my favourite hobby. I went to college here studied Environmental Science for the following reasons and when I did that I saw something interesting there are a lot of different signed disciplines at this university but they weren’t really communicating with each other, I didn’t feel that they were communicating at all and I wanted to create some type of way for them to communicate. I did that by creating a magazine, called The Catalysts. It became a great success; it inspired me to start a Health Care company based on my aunts’ research in pain management and it was one of these classic stories, starting in her basement together with her son my cousin.
We had a lot of fun doing that then we went to business school, I went to business school at Harvard and then I started a software company which actually ended up doing quite well (until it didn’t) and then I got an idea for and that was when I got the idea to write this book and the idea was the notion of intersections. I had seen throughout my life that whenever I’ve been able to combine ideas from the different industries I’ve been involved in or disciplines or the different cultures of my background. I have been able to create new ideas and so the notion was that I wanted to examine was, is this a general truth for innovation?
It took me far longer to research this stuff than I ever imagined possible. I was actually down to my last two dollars and 45 cents before things started turning around. Book came out. It was a great success. People really enjoyed it. Lots of press, translated into seventeen languages at this point. I get to do speaking engagements to companies all over the world which I really enjoyed and in the middle of all this, in fact I got married and now I’m here with you and that’s basically who I am.
Alright. Thank you. I’m going to involve you in an exercise right away, we’re going to have. Can I ask a question for the audio, is it possible to turn these off because when I walk by there’s this echo. OK we’ll see if that works. I’m going to involve you in an exercise right now. I’m going to prop some words on these screens and I want you to yell out the things that you think of when you see these words. OK not just one thing or two things but go crazy, three, four things. Alright? Are you with me?
Audience
Yes.
Frans Johansson
OK.
Termites: Wood, house, car. Keep on going. Bugs.
Candy: Sweet, tea.
Sneakers: Shoes, Nike.
Techno music: Noise.
Ok, thank you. That’s great. OK so the things that I heard you say when you saw these words maybe with one or two exceptions are the things that most of us would say when we see these words. These are the first things that would come to mind and I am going to talk about these things today but here are the connections I’m going to make. You see there’s a connection between termites and architecture and there’s a connection between candy and computers. Sneakers have something practical in common with the hugely environmental sustainable Hummer and by now it should be plain obvious that techno music and Martin Luther King is more or less the same thing.
Now why is that? Why is this?
The reason why I’m going to talk about this, this way is because we have the best chance of coming up with groundbreaking ideas at the intersection of the different industries or different cultures.
Out of these combinations, and many other ideas I’ll cover, have come some phenomenal groundbreaking ideas, phenomenal groundbreaking ideas. Have come phenomenal innovations and innovation is important, I’m not going to spend a lot of time telling all of you that innovation is important. You’re here because it is important but I’ll just, I’ll just put up a few quick numbers that I think are interesting.
Here’s a number that I think is interesting for instance that is driving change it’s the number 26, which is the number of minutes it takes for a new found old factory to open up in China. Every 26 minutes, I’ll put this here.
Here’s another number, which is 15 which is the number of days it takes for the Spanish fashion company Zara to go from the design of a new piece of a new piece of apparel like a, like blouse or a skirt and you being able to purchase their blouse in their store in Singapore or New York, 15 days. A triple by-pass in the US is a $120,000 but in Thailand it’s $12,000 and of course that includes round trip, air fare and brief vacation package. It’s changed the way health care is done definitely in Japan for instance.
Now here’s another interesting set of numbers for, particularly for companies, the average number of years that a company used to last under SMP500, the major stock market index in the United States was 25-35 years. It used to be that but today it is 10-15 years, the company life cycle is shrinking, the world is changing very fast. In other words the need to keep on innovating or finding new ways of doing things or designing things increases. Now the interesting thing about this I think, is that the more successful we become, the larger an organisation becomes or a company becomes the more difficult it seems for that company to continue to innovate. As so there just seems to be this notion, there’s this quote by Paul Ormroyd who looked at, who studied why things fail he says he’s often asked by would be entrepreneurs seeking escape from life between huge corporate structures, “How do I start a small firm for myself?” according to him that’s just obvious you just buy a very large one and then you wait.
I mean take Sony right, Sony invented the, the, the portable musical player, The Walkman. They should be the music company right?
We know that’s not true, Apple is the portable music company today with over 70% market share and they are a computer company. What good is that here?
I’ve actually removed the word from this ad, from the ad that came out in 1999. That word is 'yum'. What is the word yum doing in a computer ad? And then you look at this and you realise it’s a candy ad, right?
Something that really reinvigorated that company, I think it’s fair to say that organisations, any organisation, in particular corporations all over the world are desperate to generate innovation and remarkably I would say that that is probably the single most global running theme that I’ve seen everywhere along with one other.
Incidentally, actually I’ll just add this but, but it is that I’ve not been in a single country anywhere in the world where they believe that they have an educational system set up to actually prepare their students for this new world. So these are the two common things I’ve seen consistently. Need for innovation and really a lack of an educational system set up to actually prepare students for that, at least an average and remarkably, in the United States they talk about standards and look at overseas, for instance Singapore to create, to set up standards of an education because they do that so well and in Singapore all they can do is sort of figure out how can we break down our standards to become much more creative?
It’s fascinating. Now, what I’m here to talk about today is exactly what we can do to innovate and this is the basic message, groundbreaking ideas are found at the intersection of different industries or cultures or, in another, way diversity drives innovation. Diversity of perspectives, diversity of fields, cultures and so on.
Let me give you an example right away. Mick Pierce, an architect in Zimbabwe receives this challenge he’s to build the largest building in the capital Harare, but this building is to contain no AC [air conditioning]. Which is intriguing because on occasion it gets hot in Zimbabwe. But he manages to do it by combining his field of knowledge architecture with termite ecology. You see termites they build these mounds on the African Savannah and they have to keep an exact 31°C around about, yeah, 31°C inside of these mounds in order to grow fungi that helps them digest wood. But the temperature in African Savannah can drop to below say 6° at night and rise to over 40° during the day so how do the termites manage to keep an exact 31°C inside of these mounds? Well what they do is to build these vents so you can see them in these pictures around the mound like this and they redirect air breezes in through these vents into a cool pool of mud at the bottom of the mound and they circulate this air up and by opening and closing vents constantly they can regulate the temperature exactly and he looked at it and said “I can you use the same principle, the same design for my building”. Which is was what he did Eastgate is the largest building there, no AC units saved them 4 million dollars right away, uses about 90% less energy than any other building around it and has a static temperature of about 22°C.
Innovative? It’s up there I think, you know.
Now what’s interesting about this is, do you think that Mick Pierce the architect thought of this because he was an architect focussing exclusively on the field of architecture?
No. And he wasn’t a termite ecologist focussing exclusively on the field of termite ecology. But he combined concepts from these two fields and when he did that, he broke new ground and now I call what happens when you step into these type of intersections, the Medici effect, it’s some from the Medici family who, who ruled the city of Florence about 500 years ago and yes, obviously they did a lot of things like assassinate people and poison them and plot to take over the papacy in Rome. They did that, two in a row in fact. That’s not, that’s not, I’m not recommending that approach to innovation or design change but, but they also did something else.
They sponsored creative individuals’ painters, architects, sculptures, philosophers, scientists, Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most famous individuals that they sponsored from all over Europe even as far away as from China and they brought them to the city of Florence where they were able to break down the boundaries between the different disciplines and between the different cultures and they unite and became one of the most creative eras in Europe’s history. The Renaissance. So this is not about the Renaissance or the Medici family, but it is about the effect that they created and how we can create the same effect in the companies that we work for.
OK fine. I get it, you know you step into intersection you combine different, different concepts, you create the Medici effect. But why is it, why is it, that this particular approach to innovation is so successful?
Why is it that this is one of the best ways of developing groundbreaking ideas?
In order to even understand that we have to understand some basic facts about innovation so I’m just going to talk about two today. I don’t really have much time but I’ll talk about two. Here’s the first one.
All new ideas are combinations of existing ideas. That’s the first fact. Let me give you an example of this I have here a screw cap of a water bottle which is one idea and here I have a light bulb which is another idea. So two separate ideas but when you combine them “up, up, up” you get a what?
A light fixture right. Which is how Edison solved his problem had about the task his light bulb he invented. He used a screw cap from a bottle. OK fine, you combine existing ideas to create new ones but not all idea combinations are created equal. If I tell you that I’m going to combine a spider with a web what do you say?
Yeah big deal right, it’s not going to be, you’re not going to be flabbergasted by the innovative potential of this combination but if I tell you I’m going to combine a spider with goat milk and if there is a connection there, it might be innovated, right. Possibly and a company in Canada took a gene from the golden orb-weaver spider, which spins a thread that’s about five times stronger than steel inserted this gene into a herd of goats, milk these goats and take the milk and they spin threads out of it, which helps create take a great artificial tendons or stronger fishing lines. Which also I think is pretty innovative.
But the rule here is that when you combine ideas, if they’re closely connected then the new idea’s not likely to be very innovative but if they’re far apart it is. And that is why a team of diverse perspectives’ that is able to leverage this diversity has a much better chance of coming up with something groundbreaking and this incidentally holds true not just for people from different disciplines or industries but also from different cultures. The amazing thing about people from different cultures is that they can look at the exact same thing but have vastly different associations about what those things mean. From a famous ad campaign you could take something as basic as the colour yellow, which in the US maybe associated with cowardice, in Malaysia with royalty and, in Venezuela, lucky underwear.
Now, you’ve all seen variations of this ad campaign but the proven important point which is that, even the simplest of concepts can have different associations depending on the cultures from where you can and you can leverage that to drive new intriguing ideas. For instance, Aheda Zanetti, a woman that was born in Lebanon but grew up in Australia saw from her unique perspective, a complete untapped potential to design swimwear for Muslim women because if you’ve been to say Saudi Arabia and you look at women that go swimming there, they, they tend to be wearing their burkas and everything else which is uncomfortable, to say the least. So she decided to design swimwear that would actually adhere to the Muslim tradition but would be actually very comfortable and fun to swim in.
Now she did this because her perspective was from Australia to look at the swimming culture. It turns out that this type of swimwear got to be popular all over the world. She was able to start a company around it. Just showing that even the most obvious things that we take for granted about what, what swimwear should look like, can change when we apply a different perspective to it.
OK fine. That’s the first fact of innovation. Here’s the second fact.
Innovative individuals and teams generate and execute far more ideas. The single strongest correlation to innovative success are the number of ideas that you generated and try to make happen and this it turns out holds true whether you talk about widely different ideas. All kinds of different types of designs or prototypes or variations of similar ideas so in other words, if you look at the number of simulations or, or prototypes or copyrights, whatever it is around a similar set of products, either way you will find that there’s a huge correlation between the number of ideas that you’ve generated and try to make happen and your success as an innovator.
Corning, the company that produced a light bulb that Edison invented, over a hundred years ago had been on the cutting edge of glass for over a hundred years, being optical fibres today all over the world. They create over 4,000 products a year. Only a couple of them reach the market.
Prince, he created over a 1,000 new songs he has not yet released. They’re hid in his secret vault. A lot of them have videos even but he had to come up with these songs in order to come out with the ones that he did release.
Here’s another one, Richard Branson obviously very well known in these, in these regions. Started over by this stage over a 350 companies not all of them made it obviously but many of them did which is why he is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the UK today. Now why do you think we see this relationship between the number of ideas that you generate and try to pursue and your success as an innovator?
Wild guess!
Audience
You weed out the crap ones.
Frans Johansson
You weed out the crap ones which means that he actually come up with crap ones. Yeah, can you predict which ones are crap?
No because if you could why would you ever pursue a crap idea?
This is a fundamental flaw with innovation. It’s a human flaw which is this. We’re not good at predicting what it is going to work or what it is aren’t going to work. Ideas so we’re just sure, I mean, there’s no way this can fail. We say, “It’s just too good”. Sometimes they fail.
And then there’s other ideas we look at them and we say “How’s this even possible that this could work?” but they do. It holds true whether you look at science, art, business anywhere. Anywhere, which is why we have to keep on, keep on trying in order to come up with something well to increase our chances of finding something groundbreaking. Now here’s the kicker to this. We find more ideas at the intersection of different fields and different cultures. I want to show to you, explain to you why that is by using Richard Branson as sort of the take off point.
Now you know, for the first about four and a half years of Virgin’s existence, Virgin Records existence, Richard Branson did not manage to sign on a single artist that was profitable. Single successful artist except for his first one – Mike Oldfield you know, who produced this album and actually all of you know probably a lot more about this album than most of my audiences. Tubular Bells – was this mixture of rock music and classical music unlike the world had ever heard before when it hit the number one spot in the UK it sat there for fifteen months. For fifteen months. I want to step into this intersection of rock music and classical music to see what happens to the number of ideas that we can generate compared to if we’d stuck to either one of those fields.
So, here’s what I want to do first. I want you to imagine for a brief moment only, that you’re a rock musician in the early 70’s; you’re trying to come up with some new exciting rock music. Now in order to even think about that challenge, the first is to define what we mean by rock music which at that time was a pretty rigid form of music. For instance, what type of instruments would you need to have if you wanted to have a rock band?
Audience
Guitar, drums, base.
Frans Johansson
Guitar, drums, base. Can you imagine having a rock band without having these three instruments?
Impossible basically - back then, piano occasionally maybe even a, occasionally a saxophone. Now structures – they’re limiting as well. How long could a song be back then?
Audience
Three minutes.
Frans Johansson
Three minutes basically. Now vocals – lots of sources: You could be singing like this? Or you could be singing like that or in fact during that time you do not even need to know how to sing.
Bob Dylan didn’t have a clue. Now of course, there’s other variables, there’s lyrics, there’s tone and son on. Let’s just work on these three.
Now we look at a classical composer - far more instruments to choose from, far more structures to choose from and almost no choice in terms of vocals and here’s the key point of this exercise. If you have a classical composer that stands here and a rock musician stands here, would they view their fields as apart, the disciplines are separate? These are the number of idea combinations they can work with when they try to come up with new ideas. But what would happen if they broke down the boundaries between the different disciplines? If they started combining structures and instruments freely?
The number of idea combinations would increase exponentially. And there’s a big difference between 2,400 ideas and almost six million. At the intersection, you have access to far more idea combinations. Which means you have a much higher chance of coming up with something that could be groundbreaking.
It’s not just idle theory you can look at this over and over again, you see the same thing. Maybe, you could take shoe designers from Nike they decide to work together with engineers at General Motors, what do they come up with?
All kinds of things, particularly for their new age three which was their first product they worked on. Various types of design accents that they hadn’t thought of before, there’s a tyre track that looks like a sneaker so?
They came up with hundreds of ideas and in a very short period of time we’re thousands closer to it.
So to summarise: At the intersection we come up with better ideas because the concepts are further apart. We come up with more ideas because of there’s an expediential increase in idea combinations.
Now what can you do about this? What are the implications for you here in the audience?
I’m going to talk about that briefly and I want to start with what you can do as individuals.
First thing is to find inspiration from field to cultures other than your own and I mean by design and effortful, purposeful search of inspirations from other fields of cultures and then to dare to explore the connections that you find when you do that. Some of the ideas that you come up with are going to seem a bit crazy or at least weird. Don’t kick them out of your head just yet. Let them sit there for a while and then get rid of them but let them sit there for a while. Just allow yourself to explore the connection a little bit further than you normally would have. That way you might come up with something that sticks and that could create something that’s groundbreaking.
Now there’s another piece around this that I do want to mention which is sort of, which is connected to this, to this notion, which is, and this is it. When we think of innovation as individuals it sort of seems like a pretty bit word, we’re individuals and we’re going to innovate. That seems pretty big. And there’s something else that comes along with it. There’s this notion of cutting edge. If we have to innovate, we have to be on the cutting edge. That’s what we’re saying. We have to be number one. We have to be the fastest, the biggest, the smartest, the bestest.
How many people can be number one? One right? OK so that can be kind of tough right?
If what you do is you find a direction and you have something, a goal and you want to pursue that goal. Yes it is a valid approach to innovation to say I’m going to be, I’m going to be number one, I’m going to be on the cutting edge. It is about approach it’s just a very difficult approach, it’s a very difficult one because you’ve tonnes of competitors, everybody running in the same direction as you, trying the same thing as you and you just have to do better.
Is there another way? What I’m saying with this is, is that there is. Look right now, right this moment. Every single one of you can look at what it is that you know, what your experiences are, what your network is, of colleagues and friends. And try to take that and combine it with something, concepts or ideas from another industry or another culture. If you can do that, you can create something new which means that you’re automatically number one because there’s nobody else there.
Let me give you a story of somebody who did this. This is a picture of, of Marcus Samuelsson – he’s the Executive Chef of an upscale Swedish restaurant in Manhattan which might surprise one or two people. It does, some people that go to his restaurant. At the age of 24 he became the youngest chef ever to receive the 3* rating for his food from the New York Times.
Question. Do you think at the age of 24 that he was the best chef out there cooking Swedish food?
Audience
No
Frans Johansson
No. How could he be? He’s 24 years old. Forgive me but he’s still learning from the masters which he says too. I talked to him, yeah, absolutely. “I can’t be the best, I couldn’t be the best one.” But that wasn’t his game. What he did was, he took what he understood about Swedish food and admittedly he was a good chef obviously and then he decided to combine it with his experiences from all over the world. He was born in Ethiopia, he grew up in Sweden, learnt how to cook in Switzerland, Austria and France and then on a cruise ship that took him to a port, to every single port essentially around the world. All over every single continent for about a year - it lasted a year that trip and he decided to combine cooking techniques and ingredients from everywhere with his understanding of Swedish food.
Today of course, fusion food is something that we see with some frequency but back in the early 90’s it was quite new, it broke all kinds of new ground because of it and today, he intersects his understanding of food with his interest in art and architecture and in the way the food is presented.
He wasn’t number one but he took what he knew and he combined it with something from another field or another culture. He sought inspiration from somewhere else. Here you can see definitely, actually items from his very first menu. You can see this unusual combination of tastes. They’re intriguing, they’re also very good. Any one of you that go to New York should try his restaurant Aquavit, you just make sure that you can charge somebody for it.
It’ll set you back a bit. I have, I have actually recorded a conversation I had with him about, it’s about a minute and a half long. About his creative process, how he comes up with new food ideas and how he then manages the process of making those recipes come to life. I’m just going to run that right now so you can take a look at that.
Marcus Samuelsson
Curiosity as a creative person is one of the corner stones. Being intrigued by other cultures is one of the corner stones. And it is really, I feel what moves you forward and also allow us, allow yourself to fail because most of the dishes that we create are not good dishes. But the curiosity of going back and do one thing and try and live and not really creating. You know one of the most important things that we work on here is that me and my chef partner, we sit in a room where we toss up ideas when nothing is wrong. So chocolate, you know, sashimi, ice cream, you know fois gras, you know pork pig feet you know, it doesn’t matter. It’s all up there and then you had to start, you had to think down from that and candy and you know cow milk, or whatever it can be anything and that’s based on curiosity, that’s based on really moving flavours forward but it, it’s free and it’s out there. That’s all process is. Great dishes come from that kind of process and then you can laugh at each other.
You know, you can. You can have fun and do it but it’s very much narrowing out to moving forward to making more interesting food here. That for us is natural. Then he’s very technical so he works very close with the flavour combination and I am probably more on the creative side more and together we move forward. I’m wanting to know the research of that dish and the fat content and so on and I like being the one saying, “Well whatever happened when you put it, what if we put more sugar on the popcorn, what would happen then, you know?”
Frans Johansson
OK you saw, you saw the idea of combining wildly different ideas and coming up with many of them and also you got to see a little bit of this notion of how to actually manage this diversity. That is on the team when you actually try to do that as when we open at the beginning but the sort of decisive and action oriented towards the end.
Second piece, this goes to both you as individuals and from an organisational perspective. Staff renovation. When I say staff renovation, what I really mean is, it is a lot easier to get inspired if you are surrounded, if you get inspired by different cultures or fields, if you’re surrounded by difference. And so think about how it is that you actually gather ideas, do you always go to the, go to the same people to ask for suggestions and to brainstorm or do you occasionally try to expand that to actually expand who it is that’s around you?
And of course if you can make hiring decisions, how do you make those hiring decisions?
Do they tend to be from the same pools and sources or do you, or do you diversify that?
Either way staff innovation means for staff, for diversity. In order to have diverse perspectives surrounding you and then you can tap into it. Let me give you an example of a company that did this as a specific targeted plan.
L’Oreal is the world’s largest cosmetics company, it’s a French company of course and in 1996 they acquired Maybelline, a, a US cosmetics brand which at the time had a very strong presence in the United States but limited presence internationally. They were headquartered in Memphis Tennessee and was a very homogenous company at that time. Now by 2001 or 2002 or around that time they had managed to make Maybelline the number one cosmetics brand in the world. The number one cosmetics brand in the world. It’s the number one in over forty countries so naturally a question arises. How were they able to actually to do that?
So when you talk to the CEO of L’Oreal or the person head up this brand it will tell you that they created diverse teams by design and here’s actually what they did. They, the first person that they hired was an Indian who grew up in Kenya, moved over to the States, his name was Ketan Patel who moved out to Memphis Tennessee and he just started hiring people from all over the world. From all over the world, he wanted people from different countries, cultures, ethnicities, gender, outside of cosmetics industry, different sexual orientation, sounds like an HR policy but it wasn’t, it was his innovation policy. It was by design and then they went after market, after market, after market and said “What can we do differently?” What can we do differently?
Let me give you an example, when they went into Japan, they already had presence in Japan, but like all other western cosmetics companies they were sort of in the low digit market share, trying to figure out how to crack this market. And they tried to understand what, what specific with the Japanese market and one of the things that they learned was that, it’s very important for Japanese women to have a curved eye lashes, curved eyelashes. Women all over the world find this somewhat important that’s why we have mascara but in Japan this is critical. OK fine so they went back and they reformulated the product to do that. Where do you think that put them competitively by the way?
What was that?
Audience
Number one in Japan?
Frans Johansson
Number one in Japan? Well they certainly were better positioned than the western competitors but do you think the Japanese cosmetic companies had thought of this?
Yeah. OK. Now you’re doing something that is sort of others can relate to there but then somebody from Italy said “Well you know the mascara brush all over the world is straight. Wouldn’t be neat to have a curved mascara brush to apply mascara, to curve your eyelashes?”
People in Japan well woooh! Those two concepts are fairly far apart, I mean that’s like combining goat milk and a spider. They didn’t say that, but they could have said it and yet they tried it. The wonder curl came out and in two years they became the number one brand in Japan. Nobody else had it. They patented it of course. Patent it, but this marketing innovation, this, this tiny design change if you will that was that difficult to come up with though, was what drove their success in Japan or the primary reason for it. Where can you buy a curved mascara brush today by the way?
Audience
Everywhere.
Frans Johansson
Everywhere, yeah absolutely. Everywhere at the end of it, it generated not from Japan, France or the US but Italy. So, now all of us are already surrounded by difference, we’re already surrounded by diversity, either in our companies, in our organisations wherever we are. The question is - is that being leveraged just because you have it around you, just because your company have diversity or you’re surrounded by people who are from different perspectives does not necessarily mean that you are becoming more innovative. You also have to leverage that difference you have to look at it and think – how can I actually trade these idea combinations on purpose? Very important and here’s another example of a company that does that.
This is a car, a concept car. Let’s see a concept car you know, that will never be driven on the road but it was really a brainstorming exercise. A brainstorming exercise to come out with tonnes of ideas that some of them might be applied to the next car line up. Well this concept car from Volvo is the world’s first concept car designed by an all female engineering team. Now clearly that is a guy who’s in the picture but he was the CEO at the time, so he could stand there. Now they came up with this extraordinarily by the way, male oriented industry. They came up with design after design after design that was just widely different. I can’t, many of them were fascinating. I’ll just mention one that I thought was pretty interesting. It was that they realised that on average women did not particularly enjoy opening the hood of a car. OK, I don’t enjoy opening the hood of a car you know, something goes wrong you open the hood to look at the engine, you call somebody. That’s the normal process, at least for me. Well, why do you open the hood of a car? What’s the main reason to open the hood of a car?
Washer fluid, that’s it. Washer fluid, why do we have to open the hood of a car to put in washer fluid?
We don’t open the hood of a car to put in gas. We do that by a hatch on the side of the car. So that’s what they designed, a hatch on the side of the car where you can pour in washer fluid which in retrospect it seems pretty obvious as long as you don’t put these two hatches right next to each other.
They didn’t. Now how obvious does that seem to you?
Pretty plain obvious right? And yet it just took somewhat of a different perspective, a perspective by the way that already existed. That existed right now but that they decided to leverage, that they decided to leverage. And I’ll just add a little note around this. This maybe seen as well you could take this any way you want but, but perspectives, there’s definitely big, there’s a lot to be done I think by using perspectives, different perspectives of sort of the, the male and female perspectives on, on things because they can, may have different, different ideas about how actually things get done if you send, if you send a man or a woman to the GAP. Do you have a GAP here?
Yeah to buy a pair of pants if that’s the, if that’s their mission then you may have completely different outcomes depending on the approach that you take with it. I got this thing from Tom Peters, this slide I think it was, it was interesting but it does show, it does show differences that will be included in the design of say a Mall.
Allow first for exploration experimentation.
OK now. Now so, this is a great story of a Anson truck driver so you can read all about it in my book.
Let’s see. Five minutes. That means also what I want to say, so I’ll just mention these last two points I think it’s important.
One of the things is that when we try to make these ideas happen, one of the ways we think about this is that we sort of lay out an action plan around, around doing that. OK you know this is a project plan. We come up with an idea, this innovative idea, now we’re going to have to make it happen, we have to execute it and we sort of create this project plan which is that it a standard way of doing it, there’s even a Microsoft software where you can do this and you know you could put any words on this: ‘component A testing’, ‘component B testing’, ‘integrate testing’, it doesn’t matter because as long as you know what you’re doing this type of project plan makes sense but if you’re doing something new which is what an innovation is. It kind of starts breaking down because the actual innovation path looks more like this.
You start out somewhere you go back, forth, tweak it and then you end up in another place and if we’re going to, if I’m going to give this journey some more structure it kind of looks like this.
You have an idea, you have that idea realised but by the time you’ve done with your process of iterations both the original idea and the realisation of that idea has changed and what you have to take into account is that some of the assumptions that you make with this great new idea that you have are going to be wrong. Some assumptions are going to be wrong and you have to experiment around it. You have to experiment around it.
Now here’s a great example. This is a dish drawer based on combining a dishwashing machine with a, with a filing cabinet, the dish drawer. It was developed in New Zealand – I was there no so long ago, about ten years ago. Interestingly they thought when they developed, when they designed this that it would be the perfect machine for small apartments in say you know London, New York and I mean it’s selling there. But the area where it has sold the most, the single most successful customer target has been actually Jewish families in New York because you, because of maintaining meals kosher. You have to actually separate between the dishwashing of products with milk or food with milk and food with meat and if they have a large house they usually have two dishwashers in there but in a New York apartment that’s not going to fit. This became a perfect product for them.
Now the thing was if they hadn’t actually paid attention they wouldn’t have necessarily caught, realised that this was the customer segment that would grow the fastest because they had an idea of who their customer was but as I said, by the time you’re done the idea and the realisation of that idea may have changed but listening carefully they were able to see that this was a huge potential market segment, they went after it with all force and now it’s essential we allow this company to grow and of course, there’s difficulties when you go through the process of executing ideas. If you’re going through hell you know, then keep going.
Now, are there risks? That’s the question, are there risks?
People say to your friends this sounds great, step into the intersection and create the Medici effect, but aren’t there risks when you’re going to do that?
Isn’t it better to sort of stick to the something that’s known? Murphy’s Law is in, is in effect, comes into play often times. You have a tool store sometimes that also, that comes into effect.
But the truth is that we deal with innovation in an unusual way. Let’s, let’s think about how we deal with risk first. We’re not necessarily all that rational about risk and let me just go through this very quickly here. Say you’re driving your car and you enter a dangerous section of the road. It’s slippery and wet what do you do?
Slow down right and then you exit the section it gets safe, broad lanes what do you do? Speed up.
Now you think about what just happened. Your driving the road is dangerous you slow down. It gets safe you speed up. You drive faster when the road is safer and you drive slower when the road is dangerous. The risk of an accident is the same in both sections of the road because I mean you’re slowing down when it gets dangerous. You adjusting your behaviour based on the riskiness around you. This has huge implications for how we actually make these type of ideas happen. You come out with a new design concept that is innovative. Well you’re going to immediately think that the risks of making that happen are great. It’s never been done before. It is true but because that reason trust yourself, you’re going to change your own behaviour in how you make those ideas happen. OK you’re going to, you’re going to just like we slow down the car in a dangerous part of the road, we’re now going to change the way we behave around these type of ideas.
We may think that if we come up with something like this we’re not going to do it unless we get a lot more money. We’re not going to do it unless we have a lot more time or a lot more resources but what is the first thing we do with a lot of money?
Spend it right?
Apple spent half a billion, half a billion dollars developing the Newton and marketing it and, and promoting it. But the Palm company spent seven million dollars to helping working the palm-pilot. Why they only spent seven million dollars? that’s all the money that they had. The first four was spent developing the zoomer massive failure, now there’s three left. Then came the palm-pilot and actually I don’t know if you’re going to be talking about the, the palm-pilot well. Idea was involved in, in, in the design of a, much of the palm parts as well as they moved down the product line.
Here’s the thing. You think of an idea that you’re passionate about, that you’re passionate about and sometimes companies will, don’t want you to talk about passion you know it’s kind of a fluffy word. OK don’t let that stop you doing it. Go up and say that you have a strong interest in it and you know people will immediately respond. Go for it. Go for it. The risks of failure are not going to change significantly depending upon how much money you have because just like we slow down the car when the road gets dangerous we change our behaviour. If we don’t, if the risks go up when trying to make an idea happen. Go for the idea. Make sure you have enough money to get the idea going and after that, start it.
So yeah it may seem risky to, to drive a car out of an aeroplane but if you’re wearing parachutes you modify it for that risk. So I’m going to wrap up now just by saying that at the Intersections really is about looking for connections in unexpected places.
Two teens in Russia saw a connection between his message and what’s happening in Eastern Europe during the 90’s and created a tool to that effect. A spread for the entire club world in the, in, towards the end of the 90’s and they didn’t change the entire world obviously but through the most unexpected of connections they did change some small part of it. We can constantly do that.
A heart surgeon comes together with bridge and dam engineers to try and understand how to create artificial heart valves because the water flow around a dam is similar to blood flow in the heart valve and that way they broke new ground.
You can have a boast, a company that develops speakers all over the world. They actually created a suspension system for cars looking at how sound amplifies and car moves. Today their licensing this revolutionary suspension system to luxury car companies all over the world.
A speaker system company is doing this and you have a blind engineer at IBM that develops software that helps you navigate the net when you’re visually impaired which actually turns out to be a huge market for the elderly and of course we’ve got the iPod mini. It adheres to the design of a radio from Great Britain in the 50’s, there’s some similarities there.
If you wish to drive change then stepping into the intersection’s not risky. It is doing the same thing over and over again that is. The world is connected.
Termites and architecture connects and so does candy and computers and even Martin Luther King and techno music because someone making the connections. I think it should be you and that’s my presentation.
Thank you very much.
Jeremy Myerson
Thank you Frans full of Swedish reserve.
Absolutely fascinating launch pad for our Intersections Conference. We’ve a tight programme so we’ve got time for one question.
Frans Johansson
One.
Jeremy Myerson
So.
Frans Johansson
Who’s going to be the one?
Jeremy Myerson
No pressure guys but make it a good one. Who’d like to ask a question?
Anybody, you don’t want the chair’s question its lame. Anybody want to ask a question?
There is nobody. Frans is going to be around so you can collar him in the breaks. Oh there’s a question here. Could you say who you are and where you’re from?
Audience member
My question is this. If, to be this innovative it’s going to frighten clients how do you go about communicating with this type of innovations?
Frans Johansson
That’s a great question. I, OK so the question is being this innovative can frighten clients and I’m assuming you’re design shop? Yeah, so you’re design shop. Being this innovative would frighten our clients how do we go about communicating. This is something that they should look at.
I definitely think that probably Tim would be a, even a better person to answer that question of, he’s been dealing with this a lot. The way I, when I talk to clients there’s essentially a few things that happen.
One is, there is some part of the company that is a bit on board with this and so instead of just convincing, you have to find somebody that can actually help you figure out how to navigate in through the company and make these ideas happen. You’re not just going to go and approach anybody, any given person. You have to find which executive is it that is more responsive to this or which managers that can be more responsive to this and manage your way in through it that way. I think that’s one, one way of doing it.
The other is just education I mean, so they say ‘No’ and you then take another approach to it. You, you perhaps do it a bit more slowly. You show what their competitors are going. If, it’s a horrible way of doing this because then you’re already late but if there is somebody that is a competitor’s doing something like this or then you might be able to inject the clients to respond this way. Otherwise I would say find the right executive or find the right unit. Find the right division or business unit. All companies are not exactly the same. They don’t have, they may have a similar corporate culture but there could be a newer business unit somewhere. You can go there, you can actually start working for them on something like this in that unit and try to make that happen and frankly some clients just not going to respond to it. Period. But I think you should ask that question when I think Tim is up here because I’m sure that IDEO has dealt with over any number of years.
Jeremy Myerson
OK very good bridge into Tim.
Can I just say thank you very much to Frans Johansson.
Frans Johansson
Thank you.