Demystifying Innovation Myths and Realities

- known everyone and welcome to today's session on the five myths of innovation my name is Juliet ohana and I am the program director for making innovation happen here at the London Business School before we commence and I would like to remind you that we have a Q&A session at the end of the presentation and there is a text box where you could ask any questions as we go along I would like to introduce today's professor Julien Burkinshaw his professional fess out of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School he has a PhD and MBA degrees in business from Richard evie Business School of Business University of Western Western Ontario and has a heavy SC honors from the University of Durham he is a fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of international business in addition to the London Business School he has worked at the University of Toronto the Stockholm School of Economics and Price Waterhouse and I see I professors birkinshaws main area of expertise is in the strategy and management of large multinational corporations and on such as specific issues as corporate entrepreneurship innovation subsidiary headquarters relationship knowledge management Network organization and the global and global customer management he's the author of 11 books and has over 80 articles he is active as a consultant and exit executive director educator to many at large companies ladies and gentlemen please I introduce Julien Burkinshaw thanks Juliet so it's a pleasure to meet you all virtually we're going to spend about 20 minutes now with me giving you some some provocations thoughts reflections from my research as we go through feel free to ask questions I won't take the questions as I'm speaking but what I will do is as I reach the end I will take a look at those questions that you're asking and I will answer some of them so we'll spend up to ten minutes once I finished looking at some of those specific questions you've got before I hand over to somebody else to have to close so the five myths of innovation what are we going to talk about here this is some reflections I've been working on for quite a while now on the myths and the realities of innovation in other words trying to make sure that we make the right choices as to how we help our organizations to become more innovative and effective let me just show you this one slide just to make sure that we are all on the same page in terms of what we mean by innovation my definition of innovation is simply innovation is the exploitation of new ideas and what this slide reminds us is that innovation runs a real spectrum from incremental through to game-changing what do I mean by these terms well think of a company like a Nestle when they launch a product line extension like that little bubble arrow that you see on the screen I think that that's an incremental innovation I mean it really is just nothing more than an enhancement of an existing product or service the next level up is what we might call sustaining innovations these are entirely new products entirely new services that are often launched with quite a lot of R&D and thinking and market research behind them but we call them sustaining innovations because they are a way of sustaining an existing established company's position in the marketplace so nestling can take its Greek yogurt and it can run it through its existing distribution system through its existing market machine and they can occupy you know evermore shelf space in your local supermarket that helps to sustain the company on its existing trajectory the third level is the both the sort of sexy as well as the most difficult level we can call it game-changing innovation you might have heard the term blue ocean strategy you might have heard that concepts like radical innovation they were all basically the same thing they all say that essentially there are certain types of innovation which require we require us to do something so different that in doing it we actually disrupt or challenge a lot of our existing assumptions so the classic example you see there is Nespresso many of you will own Nespresso coffee machines when Nestle first came up with the idea of Nespresso it was extremely difficult for the company to take it seriously because essentially it was cannibalizing the traditional sales of its Nescafe brand because it was offering a very different way of making coffee and of course the product they were selling didn't fit in the supermarket they actually needed to create an entirely separate channel to market for the Nespresso machines now it's been a very successful product for them it's a billion-dollar business now for Nestle but first of all it it took about 15 years to get there it's been a very long and slow and painful journey and in doing so they had to deliberately kind of carve it out as a completely separate entity in order that it was able to work because it would other if they tried to run it within the existing channels it would have got killed so three levels of innovation whenever we talk innovation it's tempting to get excited about the top level and say innovation is all about doing things really differently and of course a big part of it is but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that any large company has to do all three of these things you can't you simply can't base your entire strategy on game-changing innovation because these opportunities just don't come along that often what you have to do is to work at all three levels and have different people in different parts of the organization focusing on some and others focusing on others so that is all by way of just clarifying that innovation is that is a complex multifaceted beast and when I'm talking innovation you know I'm talking more about the game-changing stuff but not to the explosion of the sustaining and incremental ones so with that in mind I'm gonna offer you five myths of innovation and obviously each myth is going to be followed by a kind of a an alternative logic which is a little bit closer to the truth myth number one is is what we can call the Eureka moment this idea that you've got Archimedes in this bathtub on the left you've got Alexander Fleming on the Alexander Fleming of course is the guy who discovered penicillin by essentially putting a microscope via the petri dishes with you know with with with Moe growing on them overnight under the microscope in order to to figure out what happened and out of this he suddenly discovered within which we now call penicillin we do occasionally see lone inventors coming up with ideas in a flash in the moment but it is extremely rare and it's not as extremely rare it's also if you think about it not very useful to think in that way because as organizations as bigoted organizations we can't just say to people be geniuses you that's not a very sort of you know tried and tested formula for success you've got to think in terms of a lot more systematic ways of doing innovation so a much more useful model than either Archimedes or Alexander Fleming he's actually Thomas Edison now you've all heard of Thomas Edison inventor of the light bulb you know really the founder of what became GE General Electric Corporation he was not alone inventor you remember his name but in fact what he did was he was arguably that the creator of the world's first industrial R&D laboratory he collected together dozens and dozens of smart people inventors he put them into a laboratory setting and they actually systematically tried out dozens and dozens of things many of which failed a few of which worked and so this was you know this was a hundred and twenty odd years ago now but really the success of GE was built on Thomas Edison not as a lone inventor but actually as a guy who really systematized the process of innovation so this is good news for big companies because it does mean that there is a sort of a science to innovation and the other point I'll make on this before moving on is that links to this or a Eureka myth there's also this myth that somehow innovation is about the generation of ideas and and I actually think that that of course is partly right but actually ultimately a little bit dangerous because I've got on this diagram in front of you a value chain and innovation value chain I call it I wrote a piece on this some years ago in Harvard Business Review and the argument is very simple which is that innovation starts with generation of ideas but then it goes through a number of necessary steps we have to select from the many many ideas out there we have to develop those ideas which look the most promising and ultimately when we've got something which is sort of commercially viable we have to then diffuse it across the organization as a whole so each of those steps is necessary when you do this do the analysis on us and I've done questionnaires surveys on this it becomes clear that most companies think there are actually much better generating ideas then selecting developing and diffusing that they actually think that the thing they're worst at the thing that they struggle most with is the latter stages of that chain so they often say the innovation has got a 99% perspiration and only 1% inspiration in other words it's hard work and so any conversation about innovation even though it typically starts with generating ideas quickly has to move into a conversation about how do we select and develop and defuse those audience so one of the reasons we call this on the business school programme innovation making innovation happen is because we really want to make sure that the emphasis isn't put on put on actually doing something with these bright ideas that we've got rather than just talking about them the second myth is let the data speak for itself now what I've done with this little diagram you see IBM's Watson IBM's Watson is it's it's super computer this is the computer that actually won the the us quiz show Jeopardy against human beings and it was a real leap forward in terms of artificial intelligence IBM and a number of other companies have invested massive amounts of money now in bringing the sort of the power of artificial intelligence the managing of of data big data as it's sometimes called doing analytical work on the information out there about our customers about our competitors about the way that the words moving and using that information in increasingly creative ways so you know the innovation world has picked up on this and this there's some people who actually you know use data as a means of coming up with insights the theory is for example if you're trying to figure out what customers want is that you allow the data to speak for itself you try to figure out how the data is going to tell you what it is that the customers really need now there's some value in that I'm not none of these myths are complete nonsense but I think it's incredibly risky to go into an analysis of data about for example customer and market insights and expect the data to tell you something because the the fact is that the bigger the data says the more that you can use that data you can torture that data almost to tell you whatever it is you want to believe you can add more or less prove any hypothesis if the data said is large enough and so in fact the reality is that the bigger the dataset the more data we've got the more we've actually gotta be thoughtful and bring our own kind of human capacity for creativity to bear on an innovation problem computers are very good at answering questions computers are rubbish at asking questions we're much better at asking the right questions coming up with the right way of looking at problems and then harnessing the data to help us with our innovation process so you know I've just got one nice quote here I I saw it um in an article and in a newspaper a couple of weeks ago and I picked up on it this chap jars by I don't know Joe has had you at all but he's obviously a senior guy in a in a large advertising agency but it's a beautiful quote he says marketing and frankly you could easily put innovation there as well we'll never be about reductive computation it's not a riddle of elimination it's a test of the imagination in other words if we're going to be innovators or effective as marketers what we have to do is to really bring our creative juices to bear on problems we mustn't get obsessed by data so you know the human brain is in two halves we've got the analytical part we've got the creative part innovation is always about harnessing both halves in combination so that's the second myth the third myth build it and they will come some of you will remember that Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams where that was the kind of the the tagline if you like a lot of organizations over the last decade have invested in innovation computer systems computer systems designed for example to capture new ideas where people come in put their ideas and contribute their ideas to build on those ideas and then to find a way of voting on them to figure out which ones will work better now again you know there's this sort of we're all seduced a little bit by technology and of course there's some reasons for that there's nothing wrong with computer technology in helping us but my experience is that many many organizations have tried to build these idea portals and the vast majority of them have found that the results have been underwhelming and that largely is because you know building the system is all very well people would try these new systems once but you've got to give me people a reason to to come back to then I'll just give you one brief example it's kind of a funny example if you like the game football or soccer in the u.s. you might recall a few years ago this is probably ten years ago now will Brooks a British soccer journalist created an online football club my football club AFC comm and he was weighted twelve thousand people to part with fifty quid each to put together a pot of money whereby they actually went and bought a they actually literally bought a lower ranked football club in the UK obsolete United and they put the money into it and they used a crowdsourcing methods who essentially figure out which players to buy and to sell to help them manager to make the right choices on the pitch for one and a half years it was a big success and people excited and every United won a competition but then gradually enthusiasm pieces away and eventually about four years later basically they ran out of money and they had to sell the club on to somebody else the point is not that it was a bad idea it was a very clever idea but but these these sort of online portals and systems and games it's very easy for people to just to lose interest in them to move on to the next big thing so in my experience if you're gonna invest in these sort of technologies for innovation management you've got to invest a lot of effort in figuring out ways to help people want to come back to them to make sure that there's something in in it for them to continue to to invest in them to make sure that there's a community of people like them with whom they can discuss I'm not going to go into this discuss example in any detail and just to acknowledge it and then move on InnoCentive is the name of the organization it's now a free-standing entity was spun out of Eli Lilly 15 years ago it is a problem solving portal whereby on the one hand we have companies individuals throwing problems technological problems in and a bunch of scientists out there who solve those problems and there's a financial reason for people to do this but also there's a lot of community-based reasons why they keep coming back so be thoughtful about ways to encourage the continued to the nurturing of these so that's my third point the fourth myth is is about money what that little image you see there reminds us of is that many many companies over the last 15 20 years or so have created corporate venturing entities Unilever Intel Xerox just three of many the image on the right is that see one of my earlier books on this subject when these units were created a lot of them said themselves well the venture capitalists in the world make a lot of money because what they do is of course they invest in start-up companies and they get a carry interest they get a share of the value that they create so we're going to be corporate ventures what we need to do is to create incentive systems whereby the the corporate people that we employ in these things have a chance to make as much money those independent venture capitalists and certainly Xerox I remember you know that for a time the people running Xerox Technology Ventures were making more money than the chief executive of Xerox now I'm not going to go into details of Isis to say that it became very quick clear fairly quickly that actually this was taking them down and completely the wrong road yes of course people expect to be paid on the upside but you know the fact is if I'm in a corporate employee I'm not taking any downside risk I'm not taking a risk with my own money I'm not a venture capitalist I'm not an entrepreneur I'm a salaried employee and and to cut a long story short as we think about what it is that motivates us to start up companies within organizations to be innovators ultimately all of us are actually driven by a much more complex and a much more subtle set of drivers I'm just going to remind you of the famous hierarchy of needs by Abraham Maslow from the 1940s we're not going to talk about it in detail but remember what Maslow said he said look we've got all these basic lives which includes putting a roof overhead and enough money to feed our families but actually what really drives us is social self actualizing esteem based needs you know to put it into three or four words what do we need as individuals working in organizations in order to encourage us to be entrepreneurs or so it to be innovators you know we need an opportunity to create something exciting we need an opportunity to feel that we've got the freedom to try our ideas out we need to have the space to fail we need to feel that what we're doing has some sort of link to a higher purpose we've got I feel that we have some sort of opportunity to develop and learn as individuals and frankly these are the things that absolutely matter so of course pay matters to some degree but it only just gets us to the basic level if we're serious about innovation if we want our people to be innovators we have to be increasingly kind of creative about making the work sufficiently exciting and interesting in terms of development opportunities that people feel that they actually want to do it in a in a sustained way my final myth bottom-up is best as a picture of some flowers in the field you've all heard the expression let a thousand flowers bloom this is of course from Chairman Mao during China's dark days but actually what that expression has come to mean is essentially one of the philosophies of innovation is that thousands of ideas out there what we have to do is we have to give all of them a charge we have to make sure that we give everybody who's got an idea an opportunity to bring it forward and to develop it and of course again this there's some truth to that it's not completely wrong we absolutely need to encourage people to to take their ideas forward but when you look at the successful companies we don't see that many examples of really big new businesses that came from bottom-up initiatives we can find examples but the reality is of course much more numerous and there's not much more complex you know ultimately there's always going to be a bottom gap and a top-down process in any organization the two gentlemen on the right you probably recognize them Larry Ellison at the top Jeff Bezos below Oracle and Amazon why buy Schumpeter these these two chaps these are guys who are very very strong executives they call the shots they are still either founder in a dominant owners or extreme at least extremely influential when they want to get something done they get it done they're very top-down that doesn't mean they completely know bottom-up processes but what it does mean is that they are not shy about stepping in and saying yeah on this occasion we're just going to go out and put a billion dollars into this investment or gonna buy up company Jeff Bezos his famous was saying up there were some of the in issues as we do which are all fat based data based and then there's others which basically I'm gonna take a leap of faith because I've got this gut feeling we should go and do something so again bottom-up is not wrong but we have to marry encouraging people to experiment with our ideas on a bottom-up price basis where they're complementary process where we have senior leaders who are looking across a saying here are some opportunities we can really magnify and reinforce these things and put a bit of in serious got a corporate muscle behind them in order for the innovation to works we need both and I think you know to the process kind of democratizing innovation listening to people around the world you know has become popular and is rightly so but I think we mustn't take it too far so I'm gonna pause for breath there what I've done is I've taken you through five five ideas about innovation based on what is often the wrong conventional wisdom shortly we're going to move over to answer some of your questions so please now is a very good time to start typing your questions or observations and I'll answer those questions which we've got time for before we get onto that let me just acknowledge a couple of points about the next version of this innovation program it's a one-week program coming up 14th to 18th of March so that's really just in about six or seven weeks time I lead that program I teach about two-thirds of that program there's a lot of faculty input not just for myself but from a couple of my my very abled colleagues who are experts in particular areas we actually have a number of guest speakers coming in we've got senior lady from from Google talking about their innovation culture we've got a guy who's launched a brand new coffee machine for Costa Coffee we've got a very senior guy who's been running shells GameChanger process for many years and so forth and then finally we've got a visit to an organization in London called the Design Council which is a real expert in sort of user-led innovation it's always a very very exciting and worthwhile part of the week so that is the content I'm just looking now at some other questions and I'm just gonna take the first ones that come along vidal says very interesting hear my thoughts on how firms engage with the issue of organizational ambidexterity and for some of you you'll know exactly what he means some of you won't ambidexterity you know what ambidexterity means it's somebody who's able to use their left and their right hand equally well in an organizational sense what that means is an organization is able to exploit its existing ass do them you know use them effectively whilst also exploring for new ones certainly that's a concept we're going to explore during the course my couple of top top of the mind thoughts on that are that everything I've been talking about today is really about the exploration part of the job many organizations have attempted to manage exploration by carving out a separate unit to do that stuff because sometimes that is the only way of protecting people doing innovative stuff but I've also seen many organizations fail miserably in the kind of the latter stages of that process where they have to take the stuff in that separate unit and link it back to the mainstream organizations so in one of the case studies we actually highlight on the course is exactly about that tension between we created something in a separate unit how can we ensure that we now transfer that over so that it can be properly used by the people who whose day job is really just running the show and keeping keeping things moving a large part of ambidexterity is about about leadership and about effectively making the links between the things will there be another offering late in 2016 that's a very easy question to answer yes there will it is likely to be in November we're just finalizing the dates now and we'll be able to come out to let you know what that date is is is shortly where I'll be sharing a link of this recording I believe so I believe this will go online for anybody to to take and listen to are offline Monica says I was running if you comment on the advantages and disadvantages of open innovation so open innovation absolutely this is the notion that that the best ideas often come from outside the organization and that in order to be successful today we have to be much more receptive to those ideas that come from outside absolutely true we actually have an entire day on the program on this subject of open innovation for what it's worth a quick thought on that is I've seen many organizations try to be open but they often get a little bit trapped because at the same time they was being opened they also want to procure and grab if you like and capture the value from the stuff that's created and of course in open innovations of two-way streets you can't say please share your ideas with us I'm wearing a new appropriate or kind of grab all the value from them so so I think a lot of organizations struggle with being as open with their networks with their startup communities as they want their startup community to be with them I've got more to say on that but an interest I'm I'm going to hop over the rest of it so the net vessella says how was digitization of large business changed the value chain of innovation yeah so digitization obviously massive trend right now it absolutely makes it much easier to come up with new ideas in the first place through open innovation through online portals but it doesn't change significantly the challenges of developing those ideas and turning them into something into something useful we have to have to be more rigorous arguably about the process of selection and figure out which ideas to invest our scarce resources in when we've got a bountiful selection of ideas to play with I think I'm running out of time let me just take one other one is it I think rude says is it necessary to set innovation apart for the corporate organization yeah we've kind of touched on that in terms of this this notion of ambidexterity setting innovation apart I'm against setting it apart completely I'm absolutely in favor of giving enough freedom for the early stages but we have to link it back in very quickly the final one I'm going to take from innocent is how does this apply in a professional services environment in everything I've said at some level is translatable between the world of products and technology and the world of services the one point I would make about a professional services world is that of course in a professional services world we very rarely have any intellectual property that we can kind of grab on and hold on to infested services well we're always pretty much saying that we can we can do pretty much anything our clients ask a lot of innovation happens in the relationship with the client professional services companies very good at coming up with new stuff in the moment but they're typically very bad I'm actually codifying and translating and diffusing that stuff so in my innovation value chain because the costs of inventing company in our services world at the early stages are much lower what it does mean is that professional services companies really have to work much harder the final stage which is about defusing and leveraging their their insights across the entire professional services environment I'm going to pause once again for breath we're running out of time so I'm just going to pass over to who is going to close things out with a few comments on the next offering of the program if you have any questions and yes thank you again for joining us today we delighted that you were able to attend this webinar and thank you so much and we hope to hear from you soon no niffiwan and welcome to today's session on the five myths of innovation my name is Juliet Mohana and I am the program director for making innovation happen here at the London Business School before we commence and I would like to remind you that we have a Q&A session at the end of the presentation and there is a text box where you could ask any questions as we go along I would like to introduce today's professor Julien Burkinshaw he is professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School he has a PhD and MBA degrees in business from Richard evie Business School of Business University of West on Austin Ontario and has a high B s C honors from the University of Durham he is a fellow of the British Academy and the Academy International Business in addition to the London Business School he has worked at the University of Toronto the Stockholm School of Economics and Price Waterhouse and I see I the bestest birkinshaws main aim of expertise is in the strategy and management of large multinational corporations and such as specific issues as corporate entrepreneurialship innovation of subsidiary headquarters relationship knowledge management Network organization and the global and global customer management he's the author of the 11 books and has over 80 articles he is an active as a consultant and executive director educator to many large companies ladies and gentlemen please I introduce Julian Becky Shaw thanks Juliette so it's a pleasure to meet you all virtually we're going to spend about 20 minutes now with me giving you some some provocations thoughts reflections from my research as we go through feel free to ask questions I won't take the questions as I'm speaking but what I will do is as I reach the end I will take a look at those questions that you're asking and I will answer some of them so we'll spend up to 10 minutes once I finished looking at some of those specific questions you've got before I hand over to somebody else to to close so the five myths of innovation what are we going to talk about here this is some reflections I've been working on for quite a while now on the myths and the realities of innovation in other words trying to make sure that we make the right choices as to how we help our organisations to become more innovative and effective let me just show you this one slide just to make sure that we are all on the same page in terms of what we mean by innovation my definition of innovation assumably innovation is the exploitation of new ideas and what this slide reminds us is that innovation runs a real spectrum from incremental through two game-changing what do I mean by these terms well think of a company like a Nestle when they launch a product line extension like the little bubble arrow that you see on the screen I think that's an incremental innovation I mean it really is just nothing more than an enhancement of an existing product or service the next level up is what we might call sustaining innovations these are entirely new products entirely new services that are often launched with quite a lot of R&D and thinking and market research behind them but we call them sustaining innovations because they are a way of sustaining an existing established company's position in the marketplace so nestling can take its Greek yogurt and it can run it through its existing distribution system through its existing market machine and they can occupy you know evermore shelf space in your local supermarket and that helps to sustain the company on its existing frige entry the third level is the both the sort of sexy as well as the most difficult level we can call it game-changing innovation you might have heard the term blue ocean strategy you might have heard that concepts like radical innovation they're all basically the same thing they all say that essentially there are certain types of innovation which require would require us to do something so different that in doing and we actually disrupt or challenge a lot of our existing assumptions so the classic example you see there is Nespresso many of you will own Nespresso coffee machines when Nestle first came up with the idea of Nespresso it was extremely difficult for the company to take it seriously because essentially it was cannibalizing the traditional sales of its Nescafe brand because it was offering a very different way of making coffee and of course the product they were selling didn't fit in the supermarket's they actually needed to create an entirely separate channel to market for the Nespresso machines now it's been a very successful product for them it's a billion-dollar business now for Nestle but first of all it it took about 15 years to get there it's been a very long and slow and painful journey and in doing so they had kind of calm it out as a completely separate entity in order that it was able to work because it would other if they tried to run it within the existing channels it would have got killed so three levels renovation whenever we talk innovation it's tempting to get excited about the top level and say innovation is all about doing things really differently and of course a big part of it is but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that any large company has to do all three of these things you can't you simply can't base your entire strategy on game-changing innovation because these opportunities just don't come along that often what you have to do is to work at all three levels and have different people in different parts of the organization focusing on some another focusing on others so that is all by way of just clarifying that innovation is that is a complex muscle multifaceted beast and when I'm talking innovation you know I'm talking more about the game-changing stuff but not to the exclusion of the sustaining and incremental ones so with that in mind I'm gonna offer you five myths of innovation and obviously each myth is going to be followed by a kind of a an alternative logic which is a little bit closer to the truth myth number one is is what we can call the Eureka moment this idea that what Archimedes in this bathtub on the left you've got Alexander Fleming on the right Alexander Fleming of course is the guy who discovered penicillin by essentially putting on the microscope via the petri dishes with you know with with with Moe growing on them overnight under the microscope in order to to figure out what happened and how does he suddenly discovered within which we now call penicillin we do occasionally see lone inventors coming up with ideas in a flash in the moment but it is extremely rare and it's not as extremely rare it's also if you think about it not very useful to think in that way because as organizations as building as Asians we can't just say to people be geniuses you that's not a very sort of you know tried and tested formula for success you've got to think in terms of a lot more systematic ways of doing innovation so a much more useful model than either Archimedes or Alexander Fleming he's actually Thomas Edison now you've all heard of Thomas Edison inventor of the light bulb you know really the founder of what became GE General Electric Corporation he was not a lone inventor remember his name but in fact what he did was he was arguably that the creator of the world's first industrial R&D lab oh gee he collected together dozens and dozens of smart people inventors he put them into a laboratory setting and they actually systematically tried out dozens and dozens of things many of which failed a few of which worked and so this was you know this was a hundred and twenty odd years ago now but really the success of GE was built on Thomas Edison not as a lone inventor but actually as a guy who really systematized the process of innovation so this is good news for big companies because it does mean that there is a sort of a science to innovation and the other point I'll make on this before moving on is that links to this or a Eureka myth there's also this myth that somehow innovation is about the generation of ideas and and I actually think that that of course is partly right but actually ultimately a little bit dangerous because I've got on this diagram in front of you a value chain and innovation value chain I call it I wrote a piece on this some years ago in Harvard Business Review and the argument is very simple which is that innovation starts with generation of ideas but then it goes through a number of necessary steps we have to select from the many many ideas out there we have to develop those ideas which look the most promising and ultimately when we've got something which is sort of commercially viable we have to then diffuse it across the organization as a whole so each of those steps is necessary when you do this do the analysis on us and I've done questionnaires surveys on this it becomes clear that most companies think there are actually much better generating ideas then selecting developing and diffusing that they actually think that the thing they're worst at the thing that they struggle most with is the latter stages of that chain so they often say the innovation is got a 99% perspiration and only 1% in duration in other words it's hard work and so any conversation about innovation even though it typically starts with generating ideas quickly has to move into a conversation about how do we select and develop and defuse those ideas so one of the reasons we call this on the business school program innovation making innovation happen is because we really want to make sure that the emphasis isn't put on put on actually doing something with these bright ideas that we've got rather than just talking about them the second myth is let the data speak for itself now what I've done with this little diagram you see IBM's Watson IBM's Watson is it's it's super computer this is the computer that actually won the the us quiz show Jeopardy against human beings and it was a real leap forward in terms of artificial intelligence IBM and a number of other companies have invested massive amounts of money now in bringing the sort of the power of artificial intelligence the managing of data big data as it's sometimes called doing analytical work on the information out there about our customers about our competitors about the way that the world's moving and using that information in increasingly creative ways so you know the innovation world has picked up on this and this there's some people who actually you know use data as a means of coming up with insights the theory is for example if you're trying to figure out what customers want is that you allow the data to speak for itself you try to figure out how the data is going to tell you what it is that the customers really need now there's some value in that I'm not none of these myths are complete months but I think it's incredibly risky to go into an analysis of data about for example customer and market insights and expect the data to tell you something because the the fact is that the bigger the data set the more that you can use that data you can torture that dead almost to tell you whatever it is you want to believe you can add more or less prove any hypothesis if the data said is large enough and so in fact the reality is that the bigger the data set the daily we've got the more we've actually gotta be thoughtful and bring our own kind of human capacity for creativity to bear on an innovation problem computers are very good at answering questions computers are rubbish at asking questions we're much better at asking the right questions coming up with the right way of looking at problems and then harnessing the data to help us in our innovation process so you know I've just got one nice quote here I I saw it in an article and in a newspaper a couple of weeks ago and I picked up on it this chap jars like I don't know Joe has had you at all but he's obviously a senior guy in a in a large advertising agency but it's a beautiful quote it is marketing and frankly you could easily put innovation there as well we'll never be about reductive computation it's not a riddle of elimination it's a test of the imagination in other words if we're going to be innovators or effective as marketers what we have to do is to really bring our creative juices to bear on problems we mustn't get obsessed by data so you know the human brain is in two halves we've got the analytical part we've got the creative part innovation is always about harnessing both halves in combination so that's the second myth the third myth build it and they will come some of you will remember that Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams where that was the kind of the the tagline if you like a lot of organizations over the last decade have invested in innovation computer systems computer systems designed for example to capture new ideas where people come in put their ideas and contribute their ideas to build on those ideas and then to find a way of voting on them to figure out which ones will work better now again you know there's this sort of we're all seduced a little bit by technology and of course there's some reasons for that there's nothing wrong with computer technology in helping us but my experience is that many many organizations have tried to build these idea portals and the vast majority of them have found that the results have been underwhelmed and that largely is because in a building the system is all very well people will try these new systems once but you've got to give me people a reason to to come back to them I'll just give you one brief example it's kind of a funny example if you like the game football or soccer in the US you might recall a few years ago this is probably 10 years ago now will Brooks a British soccer journalist created an online football club my football club AFC dot-com and he was weighted twelve thousand people to part with fifty quid each to put together a pot of money whereby they actually went and bought a club they actually literally bought a lower ranked football club in the UK every United and they put the money into it and they used a crowdsourcing methods who essentially figure out which players to buy and to sell to help them manager to make the right choices on the pitch for one and a half years it was a big success and people excited and United won a competition but then gradually enthusiasm pieces away and eventually about four years later basically they ran out of money and they had to sell the club on to somebody else the point is not that it was a bad idea it was a very clever idea but but these these sort of online portals and systems and games it's very easy for people to just to lose interest in them to move on to the next big thing so in my experience if you're gonna invest in these sort of technologies for innovation management you've got to invest a lot of effort in figuring out ways to help people want to come back to them to make sure that there's something in in it for them to continue to to invest in them to make sure that apps there's a community of people like them with whom they can discuss I'm not gonna gather this discuss example in any detail I'm just going to acknowledge it and then move on InnoCentive is the name of the organization it's now a free-standing entity was spun out of Eli Lilly 15 years ago it is a problem solving portal whereby on the one hand we have companies individuals throwing problems technological problems in and a bunch of scientists out there who solve those problems and there's a fun a reason for people to do this but also there's a lot of community-based reasons why they keep coming back so be thoughtful about ways to encourage the continued to the nurturing of these so that's my third point the fourth myth is is about money what that little image you see there reminds us of is that many many companies over the last 15 20 years or so have created corporate venturing entities Unilever Intel Xerox just three of many the image on the right is that you one of my earlier books on this subject when these units were created a lot of them said themselves well the venture capitalists in the world make a lot of money because what they do is of course they invest in start-up companies and they get a carried interest they get a share of the value that they create so we're going to be corporate ventures what we need to do is to create incentive systems whereby the the corporate people that we employ in these things have a chance to make as much money those independent venture capitalists and certainly Xerox I remember you know it for a time the people running Xerox Technology Ventures were making more money than the chief executive of Xerox now I'm not going to go into detail suffice to say that it became very quick clear fairly quickly that actually this was taking them down and completely the wrong road yes of course people expect to be paid on the upside but you know the fact is if I'm in a corporate employee I'm not taking any downside risk I'm not taking a risk with my own money I'm not a venture capitalist I'm not an entrepreneur I'm a salaried employee and and to get a long story short as we think about what it is that motivates us to start up companies within organizations to be innovators ultimately all of us are actually driven by a much more complex and a much more subtle set of drivers I'm just going to remind you of the famous hierarchy of needs by Abraham Maslow from the 1940s we're not going to talk about it in detail but remember what Maslow said he said look we've got all these basic needs which includes putting a roof overhead and enough money to feed our families but actually what really drives us is social self actualizing esteem based needs you know to put it into three or four words what do we need as individuals working in organizations in order to encourage us to be entrepreneurs or so to be innovators you know we need an opportunity to create something exciting we need an opportunity to feel that we got the freedom to try our ideas out we need to have the space to fail we need to feel that what we're doing has some sort of link to a higher purpose we've got I feel that we have some sort of opportunity develop and learn as individuals and frankly these are the things that absolutely matter so of course pay matters to some degree but it only just gets us to the basic level if we're serious about innovation if we want our people to be innovators we have to be increasingly kind of creative about making the work sufficiently exciting and interesting in terms of development opportunities that people feel that they actually want to do it you know in a sustained way my final myth bottom-up is best as a picture of some flowers in the field you've all heard the expression let thousand flowers bloom this is of course from Chairman Mao during a you know China's dark days but actually what that expression has come to mean is essentially one of the philosophies of innovation is that there's thousands of ideas out there what we have to do is we have to give all of them a chance we have to make sure that we give everybody who's got some idea an opportunity to bring it forward and to develop it and of course again there's there's some truth to that it's not completely wrong we absolutely need to encourage people to to take their ideas forward but when you look at the successful companies we don't see that many examples of really big new businesses that came from bottom-up initiatives we can find examples but the reality is of course much more nuanced and there's not much more complex you know ultimately there's always going to be a bottom up and a top-down process in any organization the two gentlemen on the right you probably recognize them at the top Jeff Beezus below Oracle and Amazon why by Schumpeter these these two chaps these are guys who are very very strong executives they call the shots they are still either founder in a dominant owners or extreme at least extremely influential when they want to get something done they get it done they're very top-down that doesn't mean they completely ignore bottom-up processes but what it does mean is that they are not shy about stepping in and saying yeah on this occasion we're just going to go out and put a billion dollars into this investment all kind of I got company Jeff Bezos his famous was saying that there were some of the initiatives as we do which you're all fat based data based and then there's others which basically I'm gonna take a leap of faith because I've got this gut feeling we should go and do something so again bottom-up is not wrong but we have to marry encouraging people to experiment with our ideas on a bottom-up raise basis with a complimentary process where we have senior leaders who are looking across a saying here are some opportunities we can really magnify and reinforce these things and put a bit of in serious kind of corporate muscle behind them in order for the innovation to work so we need both and I think you know to the process kind of democratizing innovation listening to people around the world you know has been unpopular and is rightly so but I think we mustn't take it too far so I'm gonna pause for breath there what I've done is they're taking you through five five ideas about innovation based on what is often the wrong conventional wisdom shortly we're going to move over to answer some of your questions so please now is a very good time to start typing your questions or observations and I'll answer those questions which we've got time for before we get onto that let me just acknowledge a couple of points about the next version of this innovation program it's a one-week program coming up 14th to 18th of March so that's really just in about six or seven weeks time I lead that program I teach about two-thirds of that program there's a lot of faculty input not just from myself but from a couple of my my very able colleagues who are experts in particular areas we actually have a number of guest speakers coming in we've got senior lady from from Google talking about their innovation culture we've got a guy who's launched a brand new coffee machine for Costa Coffee we've got a very senior guy who's been running shells GameChanger process for many years and so forth and then finally we've got a visit to an organization in London called the Design Council which is a real expert in sort of user-led innovation it's always a very very exciting and worthwhile part of the week so that is the content I'm just looking now at some other questions and I'm just gonna take the first ones that come along Vidal says very interesting hear my thoughts on how firms engage with the issue of organisational ambidexterity and for some of you you'll know exactly what you means some of you won't ambidexterity you know what ambidexterity means it's somebody who's able to use their left and their right hand equally well in an organizational sense what that means is an organization is able to work exploits its existing assets do them you know use them effectively whilst also exploring for new ones certainly that's a concept we're going to explore during the course my couple of top top of the mind thoughts on that are that everything I've been talking about today is really about the exploration part of the job many organizations have attempted to manage exploration by carving out a separate unit to do that stuff because sometimes that is the only way of protecting people doing innovative stuff but I've also seen many organizations fail miserably in the kind of the latter stages of that process where they have to take the stuff in that separate unit and link it back to the mainstream organizations so in one of the case studies we actually highlight on the course is exactly about that tension between we created something in a separate unit how can we ensure that we now transfer that over so that it can be properly used by the people who whose day job is really just running the show and keeping keeping things moving a large part of ambidexterity is about about leadership and about effectively making the links between the things will there be another offering late in 2016 that's a very easy question to answer yes there will it is likely to be in November we're just finalizing the dates now and we'll be able to come out to let you know what that date is is is shortly where I'll be sharing a link of this recording I believe so I believe this will go online for anybody to to take and listen to our offline Monica says I was running if you comment on the advantages and disadvantages of open innovation so open innovation absolutely this is the notion that that the best ideas often come from outside the organization and that in order to be successful today we have to be much more receptive to those ideas that come from outside absolutely true we actually have an entire day on the program on this subject of open innovation for what it's worth a quick thought on that is I've seen many organizations try to be open but they often get a little bit trapped because at the same time they was being opened they also want to procure and grab if you like and capture the value from the stuff that's created and of course in open innovations of two-way streets you can't say please share your ideas with us I'm wearing a new appropriate or kind of grab all the value from them so so I think a lot of our one ization struggle with being as open with their networks with their startup communities as they want their startup community to be with them I've got more to say on that but an interest I'm I'm going to hop over the rest of it but vessella says how was digitization of large business changed the value chain of innovation yeah so digitization obviously massive trend right now it absolutely makes it much easier to come up with new ideas in the first place through input innovation through online portals but it doesn't change significantly the challenges of developing those ideas and turning them into something into something useful we have to you have to be more rigorous arguably about the process of selection and figure out which ideas to invest our scarce resources in when we've got a bountiful selection of ideas to play with I think I'm running out of time let me just take one other one is it I think Ruud says is it necessary to set innovation apart from the corporate organization yeah we've kind of touched on that in terms of this this notion of ambidexterity setting innovation apart I'm against setting it apart completely I'm absolutely in favor of giving enough freedom for the early stages but we have to link it back in very quickly the final one I'm going to take from innocence is how does this apply in a professional services environment in everything I've said at some level is translatable between the world of products and technology and the world of services the one point I would make about a professional services world is that of course in a professional service as well we very rarely have any intellectual property that we can kind of grab on and hold on to you know investor services well we're always pretty much saying that we can we can do pretty much anything our clients ask a lot of innovation happens in the relationship with the client professional services companies are very good at coming up with new stuff in the moment but they're typically very bad and actually codifying and translating and diffusing that stuff so in my innovation value chain because the costs of inventing something in our services world at the early stages are much lower what it does mean is that professional services companies really have to work much harder the final stage which is about diffusing and leveraging their their insights across the entire professional services environment I'm going to pause once again for breath we're running out of time so I'm just going to pass over to evylyn Andrews who is going to close things out with a few comments on the next offering of the program thank you thanks very much yes julia has a really mentioned our next program will be taking place from the 14th to the 18th of March mark contactees are on the slide please do get in touch with me if you have any questions or need any assistance I'd be very happy to help you we will also be sending out a recording of this webinar in the next couple of days so you will be able to have a look back at the slides that again listen to Julien's very interesting insights that he shared with you and yeez thank you again for joining us today we delighted that you were able to attend this webinar and thank you so much and we hope to hear from you soon

- known everyone and welcome to today's session on the five myths of innovation my name is Juliet ohana and I am the program director for making innovation happen here at the London Business School before we commence and I would like to remind you that we have a Q&A session at the end of the presentation and there is a text box where you could ask any questions as we go along I would like to introduce today's professor Julien Burkinshaw his professional fess out of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School he has a PhD and MBA degrees in business from Richard evie Business School of Business University of Western Western Ontario and has a heavy SC honors from the University of Durham he is a fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of international business in addition to the London Business School he has worked at the University of Toronto the Stockholm School of Economics and Price Waterhouse and I see I professors birkinshaws main area of expertise is in the strategy and management of large multinational corporations and on such as specific issues as corporate entrepreneurship innovation subsidiary headquarters relationship knowledge management Network organization and the global and global customer management he's the author of 11 books and has over 80 articles he is active as a consultant and exit executive director educator to many at large companies ladies and gentlemen please I introduce Julien Burkinshaw thanks Juliet so it's a pleasure to meet you all virtually we're going to spend about 20 minutes now with me giving you some some provocations thoughts reflections from my research as we go through feel free to ask questions I won't take the questions as I'm speaking but what I will do is as I reach the end I will take a look at those questions that you're asking and I will answer some of them so we'll spend up to ten minutes once I finished looking at some of those specific questions you've got before I hand over to somebody else to have to close so the five myths of innovation what are we going to talk about here this is some reflections I've been working on for quite a while now on the myths and the realities of innovation in other words trying to make sure that we make the right choices as to how we help our organizations to become more innovative and effective let me just show you this one slide just to make sure that we are all on the same page in terms of what we mean by innovation my definition of innovation is simply innovation is the exploitation of new ideas and what this slide reminds us is that innovation runs a real spectrum from incremental through to game-changing what do I mean by these terms well think of a company like a Nestle when they launch a product line extension like that little bubble arrow that you see on the screen I think that that's an incremental innovation I mean it really is just nothing more than an enhancement of an existing product or service the next level up is what we might call sustaining innovations these are entirely new products entirely new services that are often launched with quite a lot of R&D and thinking and market research behind them but we call them sustaining innovations because they are a way of sustaining an existing established company's position in the marketplace so nestling can take its Greek yogurt and it can run it through its existing distribution system through its existing market machine and they can occupy you know evermore shelf space in your local supermarket that helps to sustain the company on its existing trajectory the third level is the both the sort of sexy as well as the most difficult level we can call it game-changing innovation you might have heard the term blue ocean strategy you might have heard that concepts like radical innovation they were all basically the same thing they all say that essentially there are certain types of innovation which require we require us to do something so different that in doing it we actually disrupt or challenge a lot of our existing assumptions so the classic example you see there is Nespresso many of you will own Nespresso coffee machines when Nestle first came up with the idea of Nespresso it was extremely difficult for the company to take it seriously because essentially it was cannibalizing the traditional sales of its Nescafe brand because it was offering a very different way of making coffee and of course the product they were selling didn't fit in the supermarket they actually needed to create an entirely separate channel to market for the Nespresso machines now it's been a very successful product for them it's a billion-dollar business now for Nestle but first of all it it took about 15 years to get there it's been a very long and slow and painful journey and in doing so they had to deliberately kind of carve it out as a completely separate entity in order that it was able to work because it would other if they tried to run it within the existing channels it would have got killed so three levels of innovation whenever we talk innovation it's tempting to get excited about the top level and say innovation is all about doing things really differently and of course a big part of it is but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that any large company has to do all three of these things you can't you simply can't base your entire strategy on game-changing innovation because these opportunities just don't come along that often what you have to do is to work at all three levels and have different people in different parts of the organization focusing on some and others focusing on others so that is all by way of just clarifying that innovation is that is a complex multifaceted beast and when I'm talking innovation you know I'm talking more about the game-changing stuff but not to the explosion of the sustaining and incremental ones so with that in mind I'm gonna offer you five myths of innovation and obviously each myth is going to be followed by a kind of a an alternative logic which is a little bit closer to the truth myth number one is is what we can call the Eureka moment this idea that you've got Archimedes in this bathtub on the left you've got Alexander Fleming on the Alexander Fleming of course is the guy who discovered penicillin by essentially putting a microscope via the petri dishes with you know with with with Moe growing on them overnight under the microscope in order to to figure out what happened and out of this he suddenly discovered within which we now call penicillin we do occasionally see lone inventors coming up with ideas in a flash in the moment but it is extremely rare and it's not as extremely rare it's also if you think about it not very useful to think in that way because as organizations as bigoted organizations we can't just say to people be geniuses you that's not a very sort of you know tried and tested formula for success you've got to think in terms of a lot more systematic ways of doing innovation so a much more useful model than either Archimedes or Alexander Fleming he's actually Thomas Edison now you've all heard of Thomas Edison inventor of the light bulb you know really the founder of what became GE General Electric Corporation he was not alone inventor you remember his name but in fact what he did was he was arguably that the creator of the world's first industrial R&D laboratory he collected together dozens and dozens of smart people inventors he put them into a laboratory setting and they actually systematically tried out dozens and dozens of things many of which failed a few of which worked and so this was you know this was a hundred and twenty odd years ago now but really the success of GE was built on Thomas Edison not as a lone inventor but actually as a guy who really systematized the process of innovation so this is good news for big companies because it does mean that there is a sort of a science to innovation and the other point I'll make on this before moving on is that links to this or a Eureka myth there's also this myth that somehow innovation is about the generation of ideas and and I actually think that that of course is partly right but actually ultimately a little bit dangerous because I've got on this diagram in front of you a value chain and innovation value chain I call it I wrote a piece on this some years ago in Harvard Business Review and the argument is very simple which is that innovation starts with generation of ideas but then it goes through a number of necessary steps we have to select from the many many ideas out there we have to develop those ideas which look the most promising and ultimately when we've got something which is sort of commercially viable we have to then diffuse it across the organization as a whole so each of those steps is necessary when you do this do the analysis on us and I've done questionnaires surveys on this it becomes clear that most companies think there are actually much better generating ideas then selecting developing and diffusing that they actually think that the thing they're worst at the thing that they struggle most with is the latter stages of that chain so they often say the innovation has got a 99% perspiration and only 1% inspiration in other words it's hard work and so any conversation about innovation even though it typically starts with generating ideas quickly has to move into a conversation about how do we select and develop and defuse those audience so one of the reasons we call this on the business school programme innovation making innovation happen is because we really want to make sure that the emphasis isn't put on put on actually doing something with these bright ideas that we've got rather than just talking about them the second myth is let the data speak for itself now what I've done with this little diagram you see IBM's Watson IBM's Watson is it's it's super computer this is the computer that actually won the the us quiz show Jeopardy against human beings and it was a real leap forward in terms of artificial intelligence IBM and a number of other companies have invested massive amounts of money now in bringing the sort of the power of artificial intelligence the managing of of data big data as it's sometimes called doing analytical work on the information out there about our customers about our competitors about the way that the words moving and using that information in increasingly creative ways so you know the innovation world has picked up on this and this there's some people who actually you know use data as a means of coming up with insights the theory is for example if you're trying to figure out what customers want is that you allow the data to speak for itself you try to figure out how the data is going to tell you what it is that the customers really need now there's some value in that I'm not none of these myths are complete nonsense but I think it's incredibly risky to go into an analysis of data about for example customer and market insights and expect the data to tell you something because the the fact is that the bigger the data says the more that you can use that data you can torture that data almost to tell you whatever it is you want to believe you can add more or less prove any hypothesis if the data said is large enough and so in fact the reality is that the bigger the dataset the more data we've got the more we've actually gotta be thoughtful and bring our own kind of human capacity for creativity to bear on an innovation problem computers are very good at answering questions computers are rubbish at asking questions we're much better at asking the right questions coming up with the right way of looking at problems and then harnessing the data to help us with our innovation process so you know I've just got one nice quote here I I saw it um in an article and in a newspaper a couple of weeks ago and I picked up on it this chap jars by I don't know Joe has had you at all but he's obviously a senior guy in a in a large advertising agency but it's a beautiful quote he says marketing and frankly you could easily put innovation there as well we'll never be about reductive computation it's not a riddle of elimination it's a test of the imagination in other words if we're going to be innovators or effective as marketers what we have to do is to really bring our creative juices to bear on problems we mustn't get obsessed by data so you know the human brain is in two halves we've got the analytical part we've got the creative part innovation is always about harnessing both halves in combination so that's the second myth the third myth build it and they will come some of you will remember that Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams where that was the kind of the the tagline if you like a lot of organizations over the last decade have invested in innovation computer systems computer systems designed for example to capture new ideas where people come in put their ideas and contribute their ideas to build on those ideas and then to find a way of voting on them to figure out which ones will work better now again you know there's this sort of we're all seduced a little bit by technology and of course there's some reasons for that there's nothing wrong with computer technology in helping us but my experience is that many many organizations have tried to build these idea portals and the vast majority of them have found that the results have been underwhelming and that largely is because you know building the system is all very well people would try these new systems once but you've got to give me people a reason to to come back to then I'll just give you one brief example it's kind of a funny example if you like the game football or soccer in the u.s. you might recall a few years ago this is probably ten years ago now will Brooks a British soccer journalist created an online football club my football club AFC comm and he was weighted twelve thousand people to part with fifty quid each to put together a pot of money whereby they actually went and bought a  they actually literally bought a lower ranked football club in the UK obsolete United and they put the money into it and they used a crowdsourcing methods who essentially figure out which players to buy and to sell to help them manager to make the right choices on the pitch for one and a half years it was a big success and people excited and every United won a competition but then gradually enthusiasm pieces away and eventually about four years later basically they ran out of money and they had to sell the club on to somebody else the point is not that it was a bad idea it was a very clever idea but but these these sort of online portals and systems and games it's very easy for people to just to lose interest in them to move on to the next big thing so in my experience if you're gonna invest in these sort of technologies for innovation management you've got to invest a lot of effort in figuring out ways to help people want to come back to them to make sure that there's something in in it for them to continue to to invest in them to make sure that there's a community of people like them with whom they can discuss I'm not going to go into this discuss example in any detail and just to acknowledge it and then move on InnoCentive is the name of the organization it's now a free-standing entity was spun out of Eli Lilly 15 years ago it is a problem solving portal whereby on the one hand we have companies individuals throwing problems technological problems in and a bunch of scientists out there who solve those problems and there's a financial reason for people to do this but also there's a lot of community-based reasons why they keep coming back so be thoughtful about ways to encourage the continued to the nurturing of these so that's my third point the fourth myth is is about money what that little image you see there reminds us of is that many many companies over the last 15 20 years or so have created corporate venturing entities Unilever Intel Xerox just three of many the image on the right is that see one of my earlier books on this subject when these units were created a lot of them said themselves well the venture capitalists in the world make a lot of money because what they do is of course they invest in start-up companies and they get a carry interest they get a share of the value that they create so we're going to be corporate ventures what we need to do is to create incentive systems whereby the the corporate people that we employ in these things have a chance to make as much money those independent venture capitalists and certainly Xerox I remember you know that for a time the people running Xerox Technology Ventures were making more money than the chief executive of Xerox now I'm not going to go into details of Isis to say that it became very quick clear fairly quickly that actually this was taking them down and completely the wrong road yes of course people expect to be paid on the upside but you know the fact is if I'm in a corporate employee I'm not taking any downside risk I'm not taking a risk with my own money I'm not a venture capitalist I'm not an entrepreneur I'm a salaried employee and and to cut a long story short as we think about what it is that motivates us to start up companies within organizations to be innovators ultimately all of us are actually driven by a much more complex and a much more subtle set of drivers I'm just going to remind you of the famous hierarchy of needs by Abraham Maslow from the 1940s we're not going to talk about it in detail but remember what Maslow said he said look we've got all these basic lives which includes putting a roof overhead and enough money to feed our families but actually what really drives us is social self actualizing esteem based needs you know to put it into three or four words what do we need as individuals working in organizations in order to encourage us to be entrepreneurs or so it to be innovators you know we need an opportunity to create something exciting we need an opportunity to feel that we've got the freedom to try our ideas out we need to have the space to fail we need to feel that what we're doing has some sort of link to a higher purpose we've got I feel that we have some sort of opportunity to develop and learn as individuals and frankly these are the things that absolutely matter so of course pay matters to some degree but it only just gets us to the basic level if we're serious about innovation if we want our people to be innovators we have to be increasingly kind of creative about making the work sufficiently exciting and interesting in terms of development opportunities that people feel that they actually want to do it in a in a sustained way my final myth bottom-up is best as a picture of some flowers in the field you've all heard the expression let a thousand flowers bloom this is of course from Chairman Mao during China's dark days but actually what that expression has come to mean is essentially one of the philosophies of innovation is that thousands of ideas out there what we have to do is we have to give all of them a charge we have to make sure that we give everybody who's got an idea an opportunity to bring it forward and to develop it and of course again this there's some truth to that it's not completely wrong we absolutely need to encourage people to to take their ideas forward but when you look at the successful companies we don't see that many examples of really big new businesses that came from bottom-up initiatives we can find examples but the reality is of course much more numerous and there's not much more complex you know ultimately there's always going to be a bottom gap and a top-down process in any organization the two gentlemen on the right you probably recognize them Larry Ellison at the top Jeff Bezos below Oracle and Amazon why buy Schumpeter these these two chaps these are guys who are very very strong executives they call the shots they are still either founder in a dominant owners or extreme at least extremely influential when they want to get something done they get it done they're very top-down that doesn't mean they completely know bottom-up processes but what it does mean is that they are not shy about stepping in and saying yeah on this occasion we're just going to go out and put a billion dollars into this investment or gonna buy up company Jeff Bezos his famous was saying up there were some of the in issues as we do which are all fat based data based and then there's others which basically I'm gonna take a leap of faith because I've got this gut feeling we should go and do something so again bottom-up is not wrong but we have to marry encouraging people to experiment with our ideas on a bottom-up price basis where they're complementary process where we have senior leaders who are looking across a saying here are some opportunities we can really magnify and reinforce these things and put a bit of in serious got a corporate muscle behind them in order for the innovation to works we need both and I think you know to the process kind of democratizing innovation listening to people around the world you know has become popular and is rightly so but I think we mustn't take it too far so I'm gonna pause for breath there what I've done is I've taken you through five five ideas about innovation based on what is often the wrong conventional wisdom shortly we're going to move over to answer some of your questions so please now is a very good time to start typing your questions or observations and I'll answer those questions which we've got time for before we get onto that let me just acknowledge a couple of points about the next version of this innovation program it's a one-week program coming up 14th to 18th of March so that's really just in about six or seven weeks time I lead that program I teach about two-thirds of that program there's a lot of faculty input not just for myself but from a couple of my my very abled colleagues who are experts in particular areas we actually have a number of guest speakers coming in we've got senior lady from from Google talking about their innovation culture we've got a guy who's launched a brand new coffee machine for Costa Coffee we've got a very senior guy who's been running shells GameChanger process for many years and so forth and then finally we've got a visit to an organization in London called the Design Council which is a real expert in sort of user-led innovation it's always a very very exciting and worthwhile part of the week so that is the content I'm just looking now at some other questions and I'm just gonna take the first ones that come along vidal says very interesting hear my thoughts on how firms engage with the issue of organizational ambidexterity and for some of you you'll know exactly what he means some of you won't ambidexterity you know what ambidexterity means it's somebody who's able to use their left and their right hand equally well in an organizational sense what that means is an organization is able to exploit its existing ass do them you know use them effectively whilst also exploring for new ones certainly that's a concept we're going to explore during the course my couple of top top of the mind thoughts on that are that everything I've been talking about today is really about the exploration part of the job many organizations have attempted to manage exploration by carving out a separate unit to do that stuff because sometimes that is the only way of protecting people doing innovative stuff but I've also seen many organizations fail miserably in the kind of the latter stages of that process where they have to take the stuff in that separate unit and link it back to the mainstream organizations so in one of the case studies we actually highlight on the course is exactly about that tension between we created something in a separate unit how can we ensure that we now transfer that over so that it can be properly used by the people who whose day job is really just running the show and keeping keeping things moving a large part of ambidexterity is about about leadership and about effectively making the links between the things will there be another offering late in 2016 that's a very easy question to answer yes there will it is likely to be in November we're just finalizing the dates now and we'll be able to come out to let you know what that date is is is shortly where I'll be sharing a link of this recording I believe so I believe this will go online for anybody to to take and listen to are offline Monica says I was running if you comment on the advantages and disadvantages of open innovation so open innovation absolutely this is the notion that that the best ideas often come from outside the organization and that in order to be successful today we have to be much more receptive to those ideas that come from outside absolutely true we actually have an entire day on the program on this subject of open innovation for what it's worth a quick thought on that is I've seen many organizations try to be open but they often get a little bit trapped because at the same time they was being opened they also want to procure and grab if you like and capture the value from the stuff that's created and of course in open innovations of two-way streets you can't say please share your ideas with us I'm wearing a new appropriate or kind of grab all the value from them so so I think a lot of organizations struggle with being as open with their networks with their startup communities as they want their startup community to be with them I've got more to say on that but an interest I'm I'm going to hop over the rest of it so the net vessella says how was digitization of large business changed the value chain of innovation yeah so digitization obviously massive trend right now it absolutely makes it much easier to come up with new ideas in the first place through open innovation through online portals but it doesn't change significantly the challenges of developing those ideas and turning them into something into something useful we have to have to be more rigorous arguably about the process of selection and figure out which ideas to invest our scarce resources in when we've got a bountiful selection of ideas to play with I think I'm running out of time let me just take one other one is it I think rude says is it necessary to set innovation apart for the corporate organization yeah we've kind of touched on that in terms of this this notion of ambidexterity setting innovation apart I'm against setting it apart completely I'm absolutely in favor of giving enough freedom for the early stages but we have to link it back in very quickly the final one I'm going to take from innocent is how does this apply in a professional services environment in everything I've said at some level is translatable between the world of products and technology and the world of services the one point I would make about a professional services world is that of course in a professional services world we very rarely have any intellectual property that we can kind of grab on and hold on to infested services well we're always pretty much saying that we can we can do pretty much anything our clients ask a lot of innovation happens in the relationship with the client professional services companies very good at coming up with new stuff in the moment but they're typically very bad I'm actually codifying and translating and diffusing that stuff so in my innovation value chain because the costs of inventing company in our services world at the early stages are much lower what it does mean is that professional services companies really have to work much harder the final stage which is about defusing and leveraging their their insights across the entire professional services environment I'm going to pause once again for breath we're running out of time so I'm just going to pass over to who is going to close things out with a few comments on the next offering of the program if you have any questions and yes thank you again for joining us today we delighted that you were able to attend this webinar and thank you so much and we hope to hear from you soon no niffiwan and welcome to today's session on the five myths of innovation my name is Juliet Mohana and I am the program director for making innovation happen here at the London Business School before we commence and I would like to remind you that we have a Q&A session at the end of the presentation and there is a text box where you could ask any questions as we go along I would like to introduce today's professor Julien Burkinshaw he is professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School he has a PhD and MBA degrees in business from Richard evie Business School of Business University of West on Austin Ontario and has a high B s C honors from the University of Durham he is a fellow of the British Academy and the Academy International Business in addition to the London Business School he has worked at the University of Toronto the Stockholm School of Economics and Price Waterhouse and I see I the bestest birkinshaws main aim of expertise is in the strategy and management of large multinational corporations and such as specific issues as corporate entrepreneurialship innovation of subsidiary headquarters relationship knowledge management Network organization and the global and global customer management he's the author of the 11 books and has over 80 articles he is an active as a consultant and executive director educator to many large companies ladies and gentlemen please I introduce Julian Becky Shaw thanks Juliette so it's a pleasure to meet you all virtually we're going to spend about 20 minutes now with me giving you some some provocations thoughts reflections from my research as we go through feel free to ask questions I won't take the questions as I'm speaking but what I will do is as I reach the end I will take a look at those questions that you're asking and I will answer some of them so we'll spend up to 10 minutes once I finished looking at some of those specific questions you've got before I hand over to somebody else to to close so the five myths of innovation what are we going to talk about here this is some reflections I've been working on for quite a while now on the myths and the realities of innovation in other words trying to make sure that we make the right choices as to how we help our organisations to become more innovative and effective let me just show you this one slide just to make sure that we are all on the same page in terms of what we mean by innovation my definition of innovation assumably innovation is the exploitation of new ideas and what this slide reminds us is that innovation runs a real spectrum from incremental through two game-changing what do I mean by these terms well think of a company like a Nestle when they launch a product line extension like the little bubble arrow that you see on the screen I think that's an incremental innovation I mean it really is just nothing more than an enhancement of an existing product or service the next level up is what we might call sustaining innovations these are entirely new products entirely new services that are often launched with quite a lot of R&D and thinking and market research behind them but we call them sustaining innovations because they are a way of sustaining an existing established company's position in the marketplace so nestling can take its Greek yogurt and it can run it through its existing distribution system through its existing market machine and they can occupy you know evermore shelf space in your local supermarket and that helps to sustain the company on its existing frige entry the third level is the both the sort of sexy as well as the most difficult level we can call it game-changing innovation you might have heard the term blue ocean strategy you might have heard that concepts like radical innovation they're all basically the same thing they all say that essentially there are certain types of innovation which require would require us to do something so different that in doing and we actually disrupt or challenge a lot of our existing assumptions so the classic example you see there is Nespresso many of you will own Nespresso coffee machines when Nestle first came up with the idea of Nespresso it was extremely difficult for the company to take it seriously because essentially it was cannibalizing the traditional sales of its Nescafe brand because it was offering a very different way of making coffee and of course the product they were selling didn't fit in the supermarket's they actually needed to create an entirely separate channel to market for the Nespresso machines now it's been a very successful product for them it's a billion-dollar business now for Nestle but first of all it it took about 15 years to get there it's been a very long and slow and painful journey and in doing so they had kind of calm it out as a completely separate entity in order that it was able to work because it would other if they tried to run it within the existing channels it would have got killed so three levels renovation whenever we talk innovation it's tempting to get excited about the top level and say innovation is all about doing things really differently and of course a big part of it is but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that any large company has to do all three of these things you can't you simply can't base your entire strategy on game-changing innovation because these opportunities just don't come along that often what you have to do is to work at all three levels and have different people in different parts of the organization focusing on some another focusing on others so that is all by way of just clarifying that innovation is that is a complex muscle multifaceted beast and when I'm talking innovation you know I'm talking more about the game-changing stuff but not to the exclusion of the sustaining and incremental ones so with that in mind I'm gonna offer you five myths of innovation and obviously each myth is going to be followed by a kind of a an alternative logic which is a little bit closer to the truth myth number one is is what we can call the Eureka moment this idea that what Archimedes in this bathtub on the left you've got Alexander Fleming on the right Alexander Fleming of course is the guy who discovered penicillin by essentially putting on the microscope via the petri dishes with you know with with with Moe growing on them overnight under the microscope in order to to figure out what happened and how does he suddenly discovered within which we now call penicillin we do occasionally see lone inventors coming up with ideas in a flash in the moment but it is extremely rare and it's not as extremely rare it's also if you think about it not very useful to think in that way because as organizations as building as Asians we can't just say to people be geniuses you that's not a very sort of you know tried and tested formula for success you've got to think in terms of a lot more systematic ways of doing innovation so a much more useful model than either Archimedes or Alexander Fleming he's actually Thomas Edison now you've all heard of Thomas Edison inventor of the light bulb you know really the founder of what became GE General Electric Corporation he was not a lone inventor remember his name but in fact what he did was he was arguably that the creator of the world's first industrial R&D lab oh gee he collected together dozens and dozens of smart people inventors he put them into a laboratory setting and they actually systematically tried out dozens and dozens of things many of which failed a few of which worked and so this was you know this was a hundred and twenty odd years ago now but really the success of GE was built on Thomas Edison not as a lone inventor but actually as a guy who really systematized the process of innovation so this is good news for big companies because it does mean that there is a sort of a science to innovation and the other point I'll make on this before moving on is that links to this or a Eureka myth there's also this myth that somehow innovation is about the generation of ideas and and I actually think that that of course is partly right but actually ultimately a little bit dangerous because I've got on this diagram in front of you a value chain and innovation value chain I call it I wrote a piece on this some years ago in Harvard Business Review and the argument is very simple which is that innovation starts with generation of ideas but then it goes through a number of necessary steps we have to select from the many many ideas out there we have to develop those ideas which look the most promising and ultimately when we've got something which is sort of commercially viable we have to then diffuse it across the organization as a whole so each of those steps is necessary when you do this do the analysis on us and I've done questionnaires surveys on this it becomes clear that most companies think there are actually much better generating ideas then selecting developing and diffusing that they actually think that the thing they're worst at the thing that they struggle most with is the latter stages of that chain so they often say the innovation is got a 99% perspiration and only 1% in duration in other words it's hard work and so any conversation about innovation even though it typically starts with generating ideas quickly has to move into a conversation about how do we select and develop and defuse those ideas so one of the reasons we call this on the business school program innovation making innovation happen is because we really want to make sure that the emphasis isn't put on put on actually doing something with these bright ideas that we've got rather than just talking about them the second myth is let the data speak for itself now what I've done with this little diagram you see IBM's Watson IBM's Watson is it's it's super computer this is the computer that actually won the the us quiz show Jeopardy against human beings and it was a real leap forward in terms of artificial intelligence IBM and a number of other companies have invested massive amounts of money now in bringing the sort of the power of artificial intelligence the managing of data big data as it's sometimes called doing analytical work on the information out there about our customers about our competitors about the way that the world's moving and using that information in increasingly creative ways so you know the innovation world has picked up on this and this there's some people who actually you know use data as a means of coming up with insights the theory is for example if you're trying to figure out what customers want is that you allow the data to speak for itself you try to figure out how the data is going to tell you what it is that the customers really need now there's some value in that I'm not none of these myths are complete months but I think it's incredibly risky to go into an analysis of data about for example customer and market insights and expect the data to tell you something because the the fact is that the bigger the data set the more that you can use that data you can torture that dead almost to tell you whatever it is you want to believe you can add more or less prove any hypothesis if the data said is large enough and so in fact the reality is that the bigger the data set the daily we've got the more we've actually gotta be thoughtful and bring our own kind of human capacity for creativity to bear on an innovation problem computers are very good at answering questions computers are rubbish at asking questions we're much better at asking the right questions coming up with the right way of looking at problems and then harnessing the data to help us in our innovation process so you know I've just got one nice quote here I I saw it in an article and in a newspaper a couple of weeks ago and I picked up on it this chap jars like I don't know Joe has had you at all but he's obviously a senior guy in a in a large advertising agency but it's a beautiful quote it is marketing and frankly you could easily put innovation there as well we'll never be about reductive computation it's not a riddle of elimination it's a test of the imagination in other words if we're going to be innovators or effective as marketers what we have to do is to really bring our creative juices to bear on problems we mustn't get obsessed by data so you know the human brain is in two halves we've got the analytical part we've got the creative part innovation is always about harnessing both halves in combination so that's the second myth the third myth build it and they will come some of you will remember that Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams where that was the kind of the the tagline if you like a lot of organizations over the last decade have invested in innovation computer systems computer systems designed for example to capture new ideas where people come in put their ideas and contribute their ideas to build on those ideas and then to find a way of voting on them to figure out which ones will work better now again you know there's this sort of we're all seduced a little bit by technology and of course there's some reasons for that there's nothing wrong with computer technology in helping us but my experience is that many many organizations have tried to build these idea portals and the vast majority of them have found that the results have been underwhelmed and that largely is because in a building the system is all very well people will try these new systems once but you've got to give me people a reason to to come back to them I'll just give you one brief example it's kind of a funny example if you like the game football or soccer in the US you might recall a few years ago this is probably 10 years ago now will Brooks a British soccer journalist created an online football club my football club AFC dot-com and he was weighted twelve thousand people to part with fifty quid each to put together a pot of money whereby they actually went and bought a  club they actually literally bought a lower ranked football club in the UK every United and they put the money into it and they used a crowdsourcing methods who essentially figure out which players to buy and to sell to help them manager to make the right choices on the pitch for one and a half years it was a big success and people excited and United won a competition but then gradually enthusiasm pieces away and eventually about four years later basically they ran out of money and they had to sell the club on to somebody else the point is not that it was a bad idea it was a very clever idea but but these these sort of online portals and systems and games it's very easy for people to just to lose interest in them to move on to the next big thing so in my experience if you're gonna invest in these sort of technologies for innovation management you've got to invest a lot of effort in figuring out ways to help people want to come back to them to make sure that there's something in in it for them to continue to to invest in them to make sure that apps there's a community of people like them with whom they can discuss I'm not gonna gather this discuss example in any detail I'm just going to acknowledge it and then move on InnoCentive is the name of the organization it's now a free-standing entity was spun out of Eli Lilly 15 years ago it is a problem solving portal whereby on the one hand we have companies individuals throwing problems technological problems in and a bunch of scientists out there who solve those problems and there's a fun a reason for people to do this but also there's a lot of community-based reasons why they keep coming back so be thoughtful about ways to encourage the continued to the nurturing of these so that's my third point the fourth myth is is about money what that little image you see there reminds us of is that many many companies over the last 15 20 years or so have created corporate venturing entities Unilever Intel Xerox just three of many the image on the right is that you one of my earlier books on this subject when these units were created a lot of them said themselves well the venture capitalists in the world make a lot of money because what they do is of course they invest in start-up companies and they get a carried interest they get a share of the value that they create so we're going to be corporate ventures what we need to do is to create incentive systems whereby the the corporate people that we employ in these things have a chance to make as much money those independent venture capitalists and certainly Xerox I remember you know it for a time the people running Xerox Technology Ventures were making more money than the chief executive of Xerox now I'm not going to go into detail suffice to say that it became very quick clear fairly quickly that actually this was taking them down and completely the wrong road yes of course people expect to be paid on the upside but you know the fact is if I'm in a corporate employee I'm not taking any downside risk I'm not taking a risk with my own money I'm not a venture capitalist I'm not an entrepreneur I'm a salaried employee and and to get a long story short as we think about what it is that motivates us to start up companies within organizations to be innovators ultimately all of us are actually driven by a much more complex and a much more subtle set of drivers I'm just going to remind you of the famous hierarchy of needs by Abraham Maslow from the 1940s we're not going to talk about it in detail but remember what Maslow said he said look we've got all these basic needs which includes putting a roof overhead and enough money to feed our families but actually what really drives us is social self actualizing esteem based needs you know to put it into three or four words what do we need as individuals working in organizations in order to encourage us to be entrepreneurs or so to be innovators you know we need an opportunity to create something exciting we need an opportunity to feel that we got the freedom to try our ideas out we need to have the space to fail we need to feel that what we're doing has some sort of link to a higher purpose we've got I feel that we have some sort of opportunity develop and learn as individuals and frankly these are the things that absolutely matter so of course pay matters to some degree but it only just gets us to the basic level if we're serious about innovation if we want our people to be innovators we have to be increasingly kind of creative about making the work sufficiently exciting and interesting in terms of development opportunities that people feel that they actually want to do it you know in a sustained way my final myth bottom-up is best as a picture of some flowers in the field you've all heard the expression let thousand flowers bloom this is of course from Chairman Mao during a you know China's dark days but actually what that expression has come to mean is essentially one of the philosophies of innovation is that there's thousands of ideas out there what we have to do is we have to give all of them a chance we have to make sure that we give everybody who's got some idea an opportunity to bring it forward and to develop it and of course again there's there's some truth to that it's not completely wrong we absolutely need to encourage people to to take their ideas forward but when you look at the successful companies we don't see that many examples of really big new businesses that came from bottom-up initiatives we can find examples but the reality is of course much more nuanced and there's not much more complex you know ultimately there's always going to be a bottom up and a top-down process in any organization the two gentlemen on the right you probably recognize them at the top Jeff Beezus below Oracle and Amazon why by Schumpeter these these two chaps these are guys who are very very strong executives they call the shots they are still either founder in a dominant owners or extreme at least extremely influential when they want to get something done they get it done they're very top-down that doesn't mean they completely ignore bottom-up processes but what it does mean is that they are not shy about stepping in and saying yeah on this occasion we're just going to go out and put a billion dollars into this investment all kind of I got company Jeff Bezos his famous was saying that there were some of the initiatives as we do which you're all fat based data based and then there's others which basically I'm gonna take a leap of faith because I've got this gut feeling we should go and do something so again bottom-up is not wrong but we have to marry encouraging people to experiment with our ideas on a bottom-up raise basis with a complimentary process where we have senior leaders who are looking across a saying here are some opportunities we can really magnify and reinforce these things and put a bit of in serious kind of corporate muscle behind them in order for the innovation to work so we need both and I think you know to the process kind of democratizing innovation listening to people around the world you know has been unpopular and is rightly so but I think we mustn't take it too far so I'm gonna pause for breath there what I've done is they're taking you through five five ideas about innovation based on what is often the wrong conventional wisdom shortly we're going to move over to answer some of your questions so please now is a very good time to start typing your questions or observations and I'll answer those questions which we've got time for before we get onto that let me just acknowledge a couple of points about the next version of this innovation program it's a one-week program coming up 14th to 18th of March so that's really just in about six or seven weeks time I lead that program I teach about two-thirds of that program there's a lot of faculty input not just from myself but from a couple of my my very able colleagues who are experts in particular areas we actually have a number of guest speakers coming in we've got senior lady from from Google talking about their innovation culture we've got a guy who's launched a brand new coffee machine for Costa Coffee we've got a very senior guy who's been running shells GameChanger process for many years and so forth and then finally we've got a visit to an organization in London called the Design Council which is a real expert in sort of user-led innovation it's always a very very exciting and worthwhile part of the week so that is the content I'm just looking now at some other questions and I'm just gonna take the first ones that come along Vidal says very interesting hear my thoughts on how firms engage with the issue of organisational ambidexterity and for some of you you'll know exactly what you means some of you won't ambidexterity you know what ambidexterity means it's somebody who's able to use their left and their right hand equally well in an organizational sense what that means is an organization is able to work exploits its existing assets do them you know use them effectively whilst also exploring for new ones certainly that's a concept we're going to explore during the course my couple of top top of the mind thoughts on that are that everything I've been talking about today is really about the exploration part of the job many organizations have attempted to manage exploration by carving out a separate unit to do that stuff because sometimes that is the only way of protecting people doing innovative stuff but I've also seen many organizations fail miserably in the kind of the latter stages of that process where they have to take the stuff in that separate unit and link it back to the mainstream organizations so in one of the case studies we actually highlight on the course is exactly about that tension between we created something in a separate unit how can we ensure that we now transfer that over so that it can be properly used by the people who whose day job is really just running the show and keeping keeping things moving a large part of ambidexterity is about about leadership and about effectively making the links between the things will there be another offering late in 2016 that's a very easy question to answer yes there will it is likely to be in November we're just finalizing the dates now and we'll be able to come out to let you know what that date is is is shortly where I'll be sharing a link of this recording I believe so I believe this will go online for anybody to to take and listen to our offline Monica says I was running if you comment on the advantages and disadvantages of open innovation so open innovation absolutely this is the notion that that the best ideas often come from outside the organization and that in order to be successful today we have to be much more receptive to those ideas that come from outside absolutely true we actually have an entire day on the program on this subject of open innovation for what it's worth a quick thought on that is I've seen many organizations try to be open but they often get a little bit trapped because at the same time they was being opened they also want to procure and grab if you like and capture the value from the stuff that's created and of course in open innovations of two-way streets you can't say please share your ideas with us I'm wearing a new appropriate or kind of grab all the value from them so so I think a lot of our one ization struggle with being as open with their networks with their startup communities as they want their startup community to be with them I've got more to say on that but an interest I'm I'm going to hop over the rest of it but vessella says how was digitization of large business changed the value chain of innovation yeah so digitization obviously massive trend right now it absolutely makes it much easier to come up with new ideas in the first place through input innovation through online portals but it doesn't change significantly the challenges of developing those ideas and turning them into something into something useful we have to you have to be more rigorous arguably about the process of selection and figure out which ideas to invest our scarce resources in when we've got a bountiful selection of ideas to play with I think I'm running out of time let me just take one other one is it I think Ruud says is it necessary to set innovation apart from the corporate organization yeah we've kind of touched on that in terms of this this notion of ambidexterity setting innovation apart I'm against setting it apart completely I'm absolutely in favor of giving enough freedom for the early stages but we have to link it back in very quickly the final one I'm going to take from innocence is how does this apply in a professional services environment in everything I've said at some level is translatable between the world of products and technology and the world of services the one point I would make about a professional services world is that of course in a professional service as well we very rarely have any intellectual property that we can kind of grab on and hold on to you know investor services well we're always pretty much saying that we can we can do pretty much anything our clients ask a lot of innovation happens in the relationship with the client professional services companies are very good at coming up with new stuff in the moment but they're typically very bad and actually codifying and translating and diffusing that stuff so in my innovation value chain because the costs of inventing something in our services world at the early stages are much lower what it does mean is that professional services companies really have to work much harder the final stage which is about diffusing and leveraging their their insights across the entire professional services environment I'm going to pause once again for breath we're running out of time so I'm just going to pass over to evylyn Andrews who is going to close things out with a few comments on the next offering of the program thank you thanks very much yes julia has a really mentioned our next program will be taking place from the 14th to the 18th of March mark contactees are on the slide please do get in touch with me if you have any questions or need any assistance I'd be very happy to help you we will also be sending out a recording of this webinar in the next couple of days so you will be able to have a look back at the slides that again listen to Julien's very interesting insights that he shared with you and yeez thank you again for joining us today we delighted that you were able to attend this webinar and thank you so much and we hope to hear from you soon

Transcript for:Demystifying Innovation Myths and Realities

Transcript for:
Demystifying Innovation Myths and Realities