"Here are a few strategies suggested by experts to encourage innovation
that might surprise you: Hire naive misfits who argue with you;
encourage failure; avoid letting client input limit your vision; and
fully commit to risky ventures. This is an extreme approach to
fostering innovation in an otherwise relatively static office
environment that was proposed by Robert I. Sutton. Writing in the
Harvard Business Review in 2001, Sutton argued that fresh perspectives
derive from mavericks with wildly diverse backgrounds and no
preconceptions who challenge the status quo, champion their own ideas,
and illuminate the metaphorical darkness.
Sutton points out that ignoring client input may seem counterintuitive,
but clients can’t always imagine what’s possible. Ted Hoff, an inventor
of the microprocessor, echoed that sentiment the next year, also in
Harvard Business Review: “Don’t do what the customer wants; do
something better.” Likewise, failure is critical to the design
process—assuming the group learns from the failure—because, typically,
many bad ideas must be generated to produce a terrific one. Even the
bad ideas can illuminate a problem and serve as a creative trigger to
its solution. IDEO, the renowned Palo Alto, California, innovation and
design firm, has a saying: “Fail often to succeed sooner.”"
This quote is from current Architectural Record, which has a story about what it takes to build a culture of innovation in a design firm. They present some of the ideas from Weird Ideas That Work as being WAY out there (calling it "Sutton’s dogma," even though the book asks readers to challenge the ideas and suggests that they are bad ideas for many firms.. I am not even sure I agree with all the ideas in my book, but I can show you research that supports them and firms that use them). I guess they are too weird for many firms. But it is interesting that when I visit or read about organizations — or more often, pockets in organizations — that are dedicated to extreme innovation, such practices are seen as routine or even mundane. IDEO uses a lot of these practices (the picture above is from IDEO and is in the story… that is a DC 3 wing that some designers told Chairman David Kelley that they "had to have" for decor). XEROX Parc used most of them when they were developing many of the technologies that made the modern information technologies possible. Facebook uses many of these practices; and although information about Apple’s process is hard to come by, I’ve been hearing a lot of rumors lately that the team that developed the iPhone was intentionally composed of people who were largely ignorant of the assumptions held in the cell phone industry. Or if you want a great example of an organization that has applied many of these ideas throughout their wild and path breaking history, read this great book about the history of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, the place where many foodies claim that modern California cuisine was invented and spread from.
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