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Monday, 3 November 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Tata Group Director Gopala Krishnan (right) stresses a point during the seminar moderated by Hemas Holdings CEO Steven Enderby
Is fastest really first?
Innovation is the debunking of myths about how things need to be done, so Gopalakrishnan went on to do just that. First to fall was the theory that first is always best. “The guy who succeeds is assumed to be the first. Nobody remembers the ones who failed.” MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) attempted to bring microcomputers to the masses even before Apple made its way off the ground. Kodak and 3M had ground-breaking technology in photocopying before Xerox, which lent its name to the process in the end.
Money in doesn’t mean profit out
For those who rely on throwing money at R&D to provide the required innovation, there was more bad news. A Booz Allen Hamilton study of the 1000 biggest spenders on research and development from 2005 showed that ‘there is no relationship between R&D spending and the primary measures of economic or corporate success, such as growth, enterprise profitability, and shareholder return’.
Producing that magnetic service
Is innovation really more difficult for services than products? There’s a magnetic quality about a memorable product or service. With an iPhone or the latest gadget to catch your eye, once it’s in your hand, you can touch it, stroke it and experience it in a tangible sense – in a way, the excitement is palpable. With a service, say a brilliant meal, once eaten, you might tip the chef, but you’d forget about it.
To clarify, Gopalakrishnan pulled a few equations out of the box. Magnetism = functionality x emotion, he said, noting that with services, the emotion involved needs to be heightened to create that magnetism, while products can afford to put more weight on the functionality. Both the customer and the employee are part of the consumed service, and so, emotion = customer experience x employee engagement.
The brilliant (and unexpected) customer experiences, he tells us, create their own mythology, as with Nordstrom and Starbucks – ‘wherever employees are highly engaged, terrific things happen’.
The biology of innovation
The idea of innovation as an organic process turns up several times; “Think Biology, not Physics. Have you ever seen a bird which has a strategy to fly?” The people who make it big often have their stories romanticised after the fact, when in reality they’re just doing continuously doing all the things they have to do. “Innovation is like kindness, there are no big kindnesses and small kindnesses. Similarly, you don’t start out to make a big innovation; you innovate and end up with something big.”
Nurture the culture
“In nature, the fish swims without planning to. It happens naturally, and in the world of management, innovation needs to happen because it’s part of the genetic makeup of the company.” There is an emphasis on structure and process over culture to make innovation happen, but that’s not necessarily how it should work – quoting Ratan Tata, he says, “If I wanted you to be kind, I wouldn’t have to set up a Chief Kindness Manager.”
Creating that culture, however, is not as simple as it sounds. It takes leadership and intent, and story-telling is an essential skill as it communicates the culture far more vividly than any other technique. Videos and documented case studies can be used to this, but recognition of attempts to innovate is also needed. Some of the ways Tata did this is by creating instruments that suited their social and cultural environment and implementing them.
In collaboration with a professor at London business school, Tata developed the Tata Innometer, which, like a thermometer tells if you’re healthy or not, can measure how innovative a given part of the business is being. Now when the scores are released, there is a natural instinct to compete, and human beings, once challenged, are hugely creative.
Another measure is a program called ‘Dare to try’, which rewards employees who have made honest mistakes in the process of innovating, encouraging them to brave the risk of failing in the greater cause of creating something new. This is a challenging concept in any culture, as failure is not celebrated anywhere in the world, but the success of the programme is evident: from 16 entries when it was first started, the number of proposals submitted for consideration has grown to 2,800.
Collaborate to create
In an incisive discussion, moderated by Steven Enderby, CEO of Hemas Holdings PLC, Gopalakrishnan responded to a question on why many innovations that he’d spoken of began from outside the company rather than within: “Innovation doesn’t come just from your head – it comes when your head collides with many other heads.”
Taking it forward
Rather than making big leaps, he said, “It’s sometimes necessary to take someone else’s idea and tweak it a bit.” “A big bet is a mixture of serendipity, genius, luck and how history is written. Real life is a lot more about the small bet.”
Asked for his take on Ford’s famous viewpoint that ‘customers don’t know what they want’, he advised that a business be aware of what its customers want, but should also track what their non-customers want, as that could lead to a previously unforeseen business opportunity.
“Does innovation get stifled because of the government regulation?” asked a member of the audience. While Gopalakrishnan’s answer began in the lighter vein, “While the government was elected to be blamed – and in some cases is worthy of blame”, there was more to it: “I look for people who have un-put-down-able ideas. Innovation is the successful development and execution of value-led solutions to deeply felt needs. If there is a problem, can you do something about it?”
