Innovator's DNA Read online

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  Discovery Skill #1

  Associating

  “Creativity is just connecting things.”

  —Steve Jobs, founder and longtime CEO, Apple Inc.

  INNOVATORS THINK DIFFERENTLY (to be grammatically correct), but as Steve Jobs put it, they really just think differently by connecting the unconnected. Einstein once called creative thinking “combinatorial play” and saw it as “the essential feature in productive thought.”1 Associating—or the ability to make surprising connections across areas of knowledge, industries, even geographies—is an often-taken-for-granted skill among the innovators we studied. Innovators actively pursue diverse new information and ideas through questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting—the key catalysts for creative associations.

  To illustrate how associations produce innovative business ideas, consider how Marc Benioff came up with the idea for Salesforce, now a $100 billion software company. Benioff’s experience with technology and software began when, as a fifteen-year-old, he built a small software company, Liberty Software, writing computer games (like “How to Juggle”) on his Commodore 64. As a computer-science and entrepreneurship undergraduate, Benioff worked summers at Apple during the buildup and launch of the first Mac, learning firsthand what it meant to work in a think-different world.

  After graduation, Benioff joined Oracle, then a small startup. By the time Benioff was twenty-five, he was leading Oracle’s entire direct-marketing division and was beginning to see several streams of opportunity emerging on the internet. “The nature of being successful with software is you always have to be looking for the next thing, so you have to condition your mind to think that way,” Benioff told us. “I’ve seen a lot of different technological shifts over the last twenty-five years, so as I was sitting at my desk at Oracle in the late nineties and watching the emergence of Amazon and eBay . . . it felt like something significant was on the horizon.”

  Benioff decided it was time to think more deeply about the changing technological landscape—and his own career. So he took a sabbatical that started with a trip to India, where he met a variety of diverse people, including spiritual leader and humanitarian Mata Amritanandamayi (who helped strengthen his commitment to doing well and doing good in business). Benioff’s next stop on this global journey was Hawaii, where he discussed various ideas for new businesses with an assortment of entrepreneurs and friends. While he was swimming with dolphins in the Pacific Ocean, the fundamental epiphany for Salesforce surfaced. He reflected: “I asked myself ‘Why aren’t all enterprise software applications built like Amazon and eBay? Why are we still loading and upgrading software the way that we have been doing all this time when we now have the internet?’ And that was a fundamental breakthrough for me, asking those questions. And that’s the genesis of Salesforce. It’s basically enterprise software meets Amazon.”

  Benioff’s synthesis of novel inputs or associations—“enterprise software meets Amazon”—challenged the industry tradition of selling software on CD-ROMs and engaging companies in lengthy, customized (and expensive) installation processes, and instead focused on delivering software as a service over the internet. That way, the software would be available 24/7, and companies would avoid all the costs and shutdowns associated with ongoing, large-scale IT system installations and upgrades. Given his substantial experience in sales and marketing at Oracle, Benioff felt that providing software services for managing a sales force and customer relations carried huge potential for small and medium-sized businesses that couldn’t afford customized enterprise software. Thus, Salesforce was born.

  Benioff’s vision emerged from years of significant software-industry experience combined with countless questions, observations, explorations, and conversations that ultimately helped him bring together things that had never been connected before. He borrowed elements of the Amazon business model and built a different one based on a software system that companies would pay for as they used it, instead of paying for all of the software systems before they used them (as most software providers required). It was truly revolutionary, as it launched an era of “cloud computing” that seems obvious now but was far from obvious then.

  Ever the juggler with a mind hooked on “combinatorial play” (or playing around with new associations), Benioff has continued the innovation journey, along with his Salesforce team. He explained that pre-Salesforce, his critical question was “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon?” but post-Salesforce, a different question slowly took its place: “Why isn’t all enterprise software (including Salesforce) like Facebook?” Benioff and his team hotly pursued the answer and invented Chatter, a new social-software application that has been referred to as “Facebook for businesses.” Chatter takes the best of Facebook and Twitter and applies it to enterprise collaboration. (Think of it as “Facebook and Twitter meet enterprise software,” just as “enterprise software met Amazon” at Salesforce’s genesis.)

  Chatter uses new ways of sharing information, such as feeds and groups, so that without any effort people can see what individuals and teams are focusing on, how projects are progressing, and what deals are closing. It changes the way companies collaborate on product development, customer acquisition, and content creation by making it easy for everyone to see what everyone else is doing. At companies using Chatter, inboxes have shrunk dramatically (by 43 percent at Salesforce), because the majority of communications are now status updates and feeds in Chatter. “Employees now follow accounts, and updates are automatically broadcast to them in real time via Chatter,” Benioff told us. “This is the true power of Chatter—bringing to light the most important people and ideas that move our companies forward. I call this social intelligence, and it’s giving everyone access to the people, the knowledge, and the insight they need to make a difference.”

  Associating: What It Is

  The great innovative entrepreneur Walt Disney once described his role in the company he founded as creative catalyst. By that he meant that while he himself didn’t actually do the drawings for the wonderful animated films or build the giant Matterhorn replica for Disneyland, he did put ideas together in ways that sparked creative insights throughout the company. One day, a little boy was curious about Disney’s job, and Disney vividly recalled the conversation: “I was stumped one day when a little boy asked, ‘Do you draw Mickey Mouse?’ I had to admit I do not draw any more. ‘Then you think up all the jokes and ideas?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t do that.’ Finally, he looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Disney, just what do you do?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody.’ I guess that’s the job I do.”2 Not only did Disney spark others’ ideas, he sparked his own as well by putting himself at the intersection of others’ experiences. Over time, Disney’s associational insights—including a string of industry firsts such as joining animation with full-length movies and putting themes into amusement parks—changed the face of entertainment.

  Innovative leaders at well-known companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Tesla do exactly the same thing. They cross-pollinate ideas in their own heads and in others’. They connect wildly different ideas, objects, services, technologies, and disciplines to dish up new and unusual innovations. “It’s very helpful to cross-fertilize ideas from different industries,” Tesla’s Elon Musk told us. “Sometimes a solution from one industry can apply to a different industry. That can be really powerful.” Musk continued by giving an example: “Tesla has borrowed ideas freely from SpaceX, including its extensive use of aluminum in both the body and chassis of the Model S, as well as drawing and casting techniqu
es used to produce the aluminum bodies of SpaceX’s Falcon rocket . . . This is critical to keeping the car as light as possible.” This is how innovators think differently, or what we call associating,3 a cognitive skill at the core of the innovator’s DNA. In this chapter, we look more deeply into the workings of associational thinking and offer some techniques for developing this cognitive ability.

  Associating: Where It Happens

  Innovative ideas flourish at the intersection of diverse experience, whether it be others’ or our own. Throughout history, great ideas have emerged from these crossroads of culture and experience. Much like the twelve major streets of traffic converging on the circular road surrounding the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the more diverse our crossroads of experience, the more likely a serendipitous synthesis will occur. Put simply, innovators intentionally maneuver themselves into the intersection, where diverse experiences flourish and foster the discovery of new insights. As we mentioned in chapter 1, Frans Johansson coined the term “Medici effect”4 to describe the spark that occurs in a geographic space or market space where a combination of novel ideas coalesce into something quite surprising. Such Medici effects have occurred throughout history, ancient and contemporary.

  For example, historians often refer to the period from the eighth to thirteenth centuries in the Islamic world as the Islamic “renaissance” or “golden age.” Centuries before the Italian Renaissance, Baghdad attracted the best scholars from the Muslim world. Cairo, Damascus, Tunis, and Cordoba were also influential intellectual hubs. Islamic explorers traveled to the edges of the known world and beyond. Mecca served not only as a religious center, but also as a key trading intersection for multinational merchants coming anywhere from the far western regions of the Mediterranean to the far eastern reaches of India. This Islamic renaissance produced significant innovations, many of which are relevant today, including the underlying principles and ingredients of lipstick, suntan lotion, thermometers, ethanol, underarm deodorant, tooth bleaching, torpedoes, fireproof clothing, and charitable trusts.5

  The Medici effect occurred in the Islamic and Italian renaissances, but it has also happened in modern times and in many places around the world. For example, Silicon Valley in the 1960s was anything but silicon. Yet by the 1970s, all that had changed and technology innovation flourished during its renaissance decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Elsewhere in the world, countries and communities are actively attempting to create their own intersections of people with expertise in different fields to spark creative new ideas. China, for example, has bet substantial resources on its innovation future, to the extent that the rest of the world believes that China is on track to challenge the United States as the world’s most innovative country by 2020. In our work with the creative industries and social-innovation sectors in China (among many other sectors as well), we have found that they have dotted the land with artistic- and social-innovation incubators where ideas see not only the light of day, but also the light of practice.

  The Medici effect also crops up in the many so-called “ideas conferences” that are flourishing—conferences such as the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland; the Aspen Ideas Festival; and TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) conferences, where diverse people join in a conscious attempt to cross-pollinate ideas and perspectives. Let’s explore the power of TED. People go to these conferences to rub elbows and exchange ideas with extraordinary people—those who are well known and those who aren’t. If you’ve never been to TED, take a look at its website to get a glimpse of how it creates a Medici effect year after year, and now in one geographical location after another (from TEDxTelAviv to TEDxRamallah to TEDxYourTown). A few of our personal TED favorites are Sir Ken Robinson questioning the foundation of educational systems, Kaki King experimenting far beyond what a guitar was originally intended to do, and David Gallo observing the incredible surprises of the deep sea (including the unexpected talents of squids). TED’s underlying beauty springs from the intentional diversity of participants and presentations. This diversity forms the foundation for innovators to potentially connect the unconnected.

  Innovators in our research not only frequented places like TED, but literally constructed a TED in their heads through an intentional depth and diversity of life experience, creating a personal Medici effect. For them, TED-like conferences were icing on a cake that they had already baked by actively questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting throughout their lives. This incredible foundation of deep and diverse experience fueled their associational thinking far beyond that of noninnovators. Look at former PepsiCo chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi’s life to get a glimpse of where her TED in the head comes from.

  Nooyi was born to a middle-class family in Madras (now Chennai), India, where she often sat with her mother and sister “thinking big thoughts.” She played girls’ cricket avidly and was lead guitarist in an all-girl rock band. (It’s no surprise that she later performed on stage at PepsiCo events.) She finished a multidisciplinary undergraduate degree in chemistry, physics, and math before getting her MBA in Calcutta. Nooyi then worked in the textile industry (Tootal) and consumer-products industry (Johnson & Johnson) before getting a master’s of public and private management at Yale. After graduation, she shifted to the consulting industry (Boston Consulting Group) before doing a strategic stint in the electrical power industry (ABB), ultimately arriving at PepsiCo, where she eventually became its first woman CEO.

  Nooyi’s diverse professional and personal experiences convinced her that people, and especially CEOs, must “be willing to think disruptively.” She did exactly that for the 2010 Super Bowl. Instead of spending $20 million on two sixty-second television ad slots, Nooyi took an entirely different approach, “Pepsi Refresh,” emerging from a question she constantly asked: “How can we do better by doing better?” Pepsi Refresh invited people to submit ideas on how to “refresh” their communities, making them better places to live. Each month, the website accepted a thousand ideas about arts and culture, health, education, and so on. Online voting produced winning ideas, with grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. In 2010 alone, PepsiCo allocated $1.3 million each month to Refresh projects based on over 45 million votes cast. Pepsi Refresh’s Facebook numbers also topped 1 million by the end of 2010. This innovative project was part of a broader program that Nooyi initiated at PepsiCo called “Performance with Purpose.”

  Associating: How It Works

  To better grasp how associating works and why some people might excel at it more than others, it is important to understand how the brain works. The brain doesn’t store information as a dictionary does, alphabetically with, say, theater under T. Instead, while theater will associate with T, it will also associate with all of the other knowledge stored in the brain that the brain associates with it. Some associations with theater will seem logical, such as Broadway, showtime, or intermission, while others may be less obvious, such as kissing, acting career, or anxiety (perhaps due to a botched theater performance during high school). The more diverse knowledge the brain possesses, the more connections it can make when given fresh inputs of knowledge, and fresh inputs trigger the associations that lead to novel ideas. Scott Cook, founder and CEO of Intuit, describes these unexpected associations as “powerful and essential supplements to data” when working through a problem. Such analogies (or associations) are critical creative tools to help generate strategic insights.

  For example, imagine you have developed a deep understanding of the business models of Uber and Airbnb, where a company creates a platform for transactions between those individuals (peers) who possess underutilized assets (e.g., cars or homes) and those who want access to rides and lodging. While thinking of different industry contexts, you might ask yourself: “How could I be the Uber of X?” Applying that peer-to-peer business model to other contexts (e.g., recreational vehicles, office space, boats, and even flowers and cocktail dresses) might produce some intriguing new ideas. In fact, two of our form
er students, Preston Alder and Joseph Woodbury, did just that when hitting upon the idea for Neighbor—which they pitch as the “Airbnb of storage.” Neighbor connects individuals who need storage space with those who have extra. So if you have a spare room or space in your garage, you can rent it out and make money. When the brain is actively absorbing new knowledge, it is more likely to trigger connections between ideas (thus creating a wider web of neural connections) as it toils to synthesize novel inputs. Accordingly, the associating “muscle” can also be developed through the active practice of questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.

  In our research, every high-profile innovator excelled at associating (scoring at the seventieth percentile or higher on the innovator’s-DNA assessment), with process innovators showing slightly less associational skill than other innovators, yet still far more than noninnovators. (See figure 2-1.)

  FIGURE 2-1

  Comparison of associating skills for different types of innovators and noninnovators

  Sample items:

  Creatively solves challenging problems by drawing on diverse ideas or knowledge.

  Often finds solutions to problems by drawing on solutions or ideas developed in other industries, fields, or disciplines.

  Why were all innovators so much better at associating than noninnovators? Our analysis found that the best predictor of excellent associating skills was how often people engaged in the other discovery skills—questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. For example, Benioff got the initial idea for Salesforce as he was asking, “Why isn’t all enterprise software delivered as a service the way Amazon delivers products?” BlaBlaCar founder Frédéric Mazzella got the idea for his carpooling business as he observed cars making long road trips with only drivers and extra seats. Uber cofounder Garrett Camp developed his idea for a black-car service while observing the limitations of taxis in San Francisco, but it wasn’t until he attended the LeWeb conference in France and had daily conversations with Travis Kalanick that the idea for a peer-to-peer mobility service came into focus. Disruptive innovators shine best at associating when actively crossing all kinds of borders (those of geography, industry, company, profession, discipline, and so on) and engaging the other innovator’s-DNA skills.