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Brian Richards
What can a fish tank teach us about innovation!?
I have spent my entire professional career focused on driving innovation in large Fortune 500 companies and almost universally everyone focuses on the innovative ideas and hardly anyone focuses on creating a culture of innovation at the company. Companies want to use new technologies like drones, cloud, or machine learning... they want to disrupt... they want to "create value" and they pour significant resources at driving new innovations. However, innovation is not just about the idea, in fact it is almost all about the CULTURE.
Here is a quick analogy to explain: Last summer I took my daughter to go see "Finding Dory" and within a couple days we were at the pet store looking at fish tanks. Believing fish to be the easiest pet on the planet, I grabbed a freshwater kit, took it home, filled it with water, waited a couple days, and then went out and bought some pretty (and expensive) fish and dumped them in. Within a week they were all dead.
Every. Single. One.
When keeping fish, it isn't about the fish at all. Instead, it is entirely about the water. Too much ammonia, nitrite, or nitrate and the fish are dead. Too hot or too cold and the fish are dead. Too high or low of a pH and the fish are dead. Too hard or too soft of water and ... you get the point. For the next month I focused on the water and nothing else. I looked like a mad scientist with a chemistry set carefully measuring each and every parameter and now I have not one but TWO thriving fish tanks.
Innovation in corporate America is the same way. Managers see a pretty fish (idea) and want to quickly dump it into their tank (company) without considering just how toxic the water (culture) can be to innovative ideas. They are then stunned to find the fish (idea) belly-up in the tank and are left with few explanations for a crying daughter (management)!
Focus on the culture and virtually any innovative idea can thrive. Ignore it and prepare for tears! In my experience, an innovative culture is driven by four things:
You need talent with the right skill-sets AND mindsets. They have to be able and willing to take risks and do difficult things. Without this, nothing else matters (as Metallica would say).
Second, that talent must be diverse and able to collide with each other and share different experiences and work in a collaborative fashion. They must collide with other business groups, outside companies, start-ups, academia, people of different backgrounds, and even the lawyers (sigh).
The company must have the right resources in terms of money AND mentorship. A stage gate process with carefully planned deliverables and limited money or mentorship isn't the way to nurture innovation. What senior leadership says and rewards matters... a lot.
Finally, when that talent has collided and been fueled with the right resources, you must make sure it is able to create the largest possible impact! Many companies run tons of successful pilots and then they get cold feet or politics intervenes and everything stops. If it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter.
So remember, focus on the culture and then you can talk about dumping that Amazon fish into the tank!
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