In this episode of The Unicorny Marketing Show, Professor Ben M. Bensaou of INSEAD Business School joins us to discuss how organisations can build a culture where innovation thrives.
Bensaou shares real-world examples from companies like Starwood Hotels and Fiskars, showing how even established businesses can invigorate their innovation processes by involving everyone, not just the experts.
• Understand how to foster innovation across your entire organisation.
• Learn the significance of considering non-customers in your innovation strategy.
• Discover ways to manage and sustain innovation beyond just the R&D teams.
Don’t miss out on this valuable discussion that could transform your approach to innovation in business.
About Ben M. Bensaou
Ben M. Bensaou is Professor of Technology Management and Professor of Asian Business and Comparative Management at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France. He served as the INSEAD Dean of Executive Education from 2018 to 2020. He was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School for 1998-1999, a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School of Management for 2007-2008 and a Visiting Scholar at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley for 2013-2015. He was also a Visiting Professor at Kobe University for 2021-2022.
Bensaou is a leading expert on Innovation and how to build, maintain, and enhance a company’s collective innovating capabilities. He was nominated for the 2023 Thinkers50 Innovation Award and his book Built to Innovate: Essential Practices to Wire Innovation into Your Company’s DNA (2021, McGraw-Hill) was selected as one of the Thinkers50 Top 10 Management Books for 2022. Bensaou explains in detail his systematic approach. It defines specific innovative practices and roles for employees at each level of the organization, offers tools and a process methodology for innovating, and presents a host of vivid case studies that illustrate the dramatic benefits possible.
Dom Hawes explores whether short-term thinking and remote work are stifling creativity in business. He introduces the episode’s focus on reigniting innovation with insights from Professor Ben Bensaou.
Meeting Professor Ben Bensaou
Professor Ben Bensaou shares his background and his work in helping organisations enhance their ability to innovate. He introduces his approach to transforming traditional companies into leaders in innovation.
Insights from Starwood Hotels
Bensaou discusses a case study involving Starwood Hotels, where 700 frontline managers participated in an innovation exercise in Paris. The result was a significant number of new ideas, highlighting the value of engaging all employees in the innovation process.
Fiskars: Building on a legacy
The conversation turns to Fiskars, a 400-year-old company that systematically entered new markets through a disciplined approach to innovation. Bensaou explains how understanding customer journeys led to the creation of award-winning products like the Waterwheel.
Rethinking innovation myths
Bensaou challenges common beliefs about innovation, stressing that it’s not just for a select few, doesn’t always require major breakthroughs, and shouldn’t be confined to specific departments. He advocates for a more inclusive approach to innovation within organisations.
Structuring innovation efforts
Dom and Ben discuss how to effectively manage innovation within organisations. Ben introduces the concept of encouraging innovation across the entire company, and shares practical advice on how to achieve this.
The importance of non-customers
Ben introduces the idea of non-customers and how focusing on them can lead to valuable innovation opportunities. He provides examples from companies like Nintendo and Philips to illustrate the potential of this approach.
Philips: Shifting focus to unlock opportunities
Ben Bensaou explains how Philips successfully pivoted their sales strategy for a new mercury-free lamp by targeting CFOs and sustainability teams instead of traditional purchasing departments. This shift highlights the value of engaging with non-traditional stakeholders to drive innovation in B2B settings.
Keeping the flow of new ideas
The episode concludes with Ben’s advice on how to consistently generate and manage new ideas. He highlights the importance of looking for innovation opportunities in all areas of business and fostering a culture that supports this.
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Have you noticed there's a weariness about much of the discourse online today, specifically on LinkedIn? It's like the fun, the excitement, the creativity in business died without us even realizing it. Now, is that a result of overfocus on the short term? Maybe it's the post Covid working model that we all profess to love, but secretly we know is killing our businesses. One disconnected work from home day at a time. Or maybe it's the post culture war hangover that still promotes the need of the individual over the needs of the team or the task. Now, I don't know. But I was captivated this week when a chap called Jeff Dooley posted a thread that I was engaged with saying, great work doesn't happen without pouring yourself into it. Well said.
Dom Hawes:
It reminded me of something David Abbott, the great creative copywriter, used to say, always put something of yourself into your work. The chances are, if you like something, so will your reader. Well, Jeff was talking about energy, enthusiasm, and commitment. David was talking about your own personal tastes. But in both cases, they unlock our ability to bring something different to the job. We all have a superpower. That is our individuality. The hard part is bringing it to bear. And both of these maxims offer us a way of doing just that. So I think it's time we poured ourselves into it to find a way to bring inspiration to our colleagues. We are marketers. We can make a difference. And today, we're going to find out how. We're talking about inspiration through innovating.
Dom Hawes:
And our expert witness is Professor Bensaou from the INSEAD business school in Paris, author of built to innovate. You are in for a treat today. So definitely don't go away. You're listening to unicorny, and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. For 20 years, being a technology marketer, I've been investigating the world of disruptive or discontinuous innovation, believing that was where new ideas came from. And then suddenly, something hit me, like a freight train. I realized there's this whole other thing going on. Having tried to implement an innovation practice in my own business to look for disruptive ideas, I was stumped by how hard it is to make it work. Like, how and why should I focus all of our innovation on a team of four or five people? What about the other 196 people in the firm? How do I give them a voice?
Dom Hawes:
Well, it was while I was seeking answer to those questions that I came across the work of Professor Bensaou. His approach to innovation is unlike anything I've seen or experienced elsewhere, that was the freight train. His book, built to innovate, is based on years and years of research, which he's now codified to create a new narrative on innovating in business. Today we are talking about how to hardwire innovation into the DNA of a company. Now, you already know that I believe marketing is the seat of innovation in any business. So maybe it's time we stepped up to bring our colleagues a little bit more excitement in their day to day. Let's go and meet Professor Ben to set the background.
Ben Bensaou:
So I'm a professor at INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, near Paris. All in all, I've spent 20 years doing research, teaching and consulting on innovation. And what I primarily do is help organizations build their innovating capability, maintain them and enhance them. During all these years, I've studied close to, I mean in depth, close to 100 organizations in the private sector and the public sector in many different industries, from startups in the Silicon Valley, small and medium sized companies, all the way to large industrial conglomerates. And I've come across some fascinating companies that were able to proactively transform themselves into major innovation powerhouses. To my surprise, many of these companies were old, established companies operating in very traditional industries.
Ben Bensaou:
I wanted to tell the story of these companies, to document some of the key insight and how would I say, as an academic, I wanted to codify what I had learned in the form of new concepts, new tools and a structured methodology to give you a sense of what companies I'm talking about. Let me give you a couple examples and then we can develop from there the insights. So take Starwood, the global hospitality hotel company. A few years ago, they organized here in Paris a conference for about 700 of their frontline hotel managers. So we started by introducing them to some basic innovation concepts and tools. And then we divided the 700 people into 64 teams.
Ben Bensaou:
We gave them metro tickets, notebooks and cameras, and we sent them out to roam the streets of Paris to try to capture images, experiences and insights about ordinary travelers. They came back 3 hours later with some fabulous insights and ideas. They generated a total of 1700 ideas. Many of these ideas were focused on small incremental improvements to some existing process or service. However, among these, some became the foundation to some large global initiative that was launched by Starwood. Just like this new marketing program, which they call famtastic. This is a program to create special family packages based on research done on what children, what kids want from a great hotel experience. Now, to be clear, none of these 700 people were specialists of innovation.
Ben Bensaou:
However, each of them realized that by simply stepping away from your daily work routines and immersing yourself in the life of your customer, that simply opened up floodgates of fresh ideas.
Dom Hawes:
Starwood Hotels and Resorts, a part of Marriott hotels, is the perfect story to illustrate the power of the approach to innovation that Ben has studied, codified, and now teaches. Releasing 700 people onto the streets of Paris with a simple, brief, catalysed an idea born out of a very simple insight, that in the normal hustle and bustle of daily work, might have remained just that, just an idea. But because the Paris exercise was a planned process, that spark was captured, it was developed, and it turned into a proposition that still lives today. Back to Ben.
Ben Bensaou:
For me, what was really fascinating, and this is how I kind of build up the whole thinking and the new narrative about it, is that these were non innovation specialists. These were people who, by simply focusing, even if it were for like a couple hours, actually immersing themselves in the life of their customers, they saw a lot of interesting. I mean, either it was pain points or things that the customers liked, or some dreams of the customers. So this is really to illustrate the fact that in an organization, anybody can generate ideas. I'll come back to this notion of innovation and innovating. But the one thing we can say is that by allowing everybody in organization, and remember that anybody in an organization has a customer, whether it's an internal customer or an external customer.
Ben Bensaou:
So if you give them permission, which was what the exercise was doing, right? Sending them in an experiment, sending them in Paris and asking them, begging them to look at their customers with open eyes and just bring back the experience, bring back images, photos, what you've heard. These people were just frontline hotel managers.
Dom Hawes:
Ben's book has loads of examples of businesses that learned to innovate in both B2C and B2B. We're going to look at a B2B example or two later on. But when I read his book, captivated by the story of Fiskars, so I wanted to hear the top line details of that story too, before looking at the frameworks, tools and learning that Ben has developed. So here he's going to pick up the story of Fiskars.
Ben Bensaou:
This is 400 year old manufacturing company based in Finland, and they're well known for their iconic orange scissors, but they manufacture cutting tools, tableware, outdoor equipment for gardening and other uses. And this is a great example for me of an old company, right? An old company that was able to enter an entirely new market, an entirely new industry, thanks to their very methodical, continuous and systematic approach to innovation. So the example I like to give is they wanted to better understand the needs of their customers, in particular, their gardening customers. So they. I mean, they wanted to, you know, what we call design thinking, what we call the job to be done. They wanted to understand the job to be done by home gardeners. So they conducted an in depth ethnographic exploration focusing on gardening customers.
Ben Bensaou:
So they looked at the entire journey, what happens before, during and after customers use Fisker tools. And they made a significant discovery. They realized that watering was an essential task in the journey of home gardeners. And they also recognized that they themselves had the design capabilities and the technologies to develop a highly differentiated solution to the watering problem. A solution that none of the existing players in the watering business, in the hose business, could think of. As a result, instead of using the traditional, conventional wall mounted rack used to store the hose, they developed an all in one portable device, which they called a waterwheel. This is a device fitted with wheels. It has a 300 degree range of movement, and it's fitted with all sorts of accessories that you can use for various uses.
Ben Bensaou:
Like if you want to irrigate a plot for a long period of time, or you want to set up a play area for the kids on a summer day. And the waterwheel ended up winning many design awards. It became a very profitable addition to fizzcars product lineup. This is only one of the many examples I saw at Fisker’s of their I continuous and systematic approach to innovation. The question is, really, what do these companies have in common? We're talking about hotel business. We're talking about cutting tools. These are very traditional businesses. So how do we get better at innovation? In a sense, when I tried to explain and rationalize what all these companies were doing, especially the type of companies these were, I realized that to get better at innovation, we need a different narrative. Genius led and disruptive.
Ben Bensaou:
Innovation is great, but it's very hard. It's very hard. Not every company can be a Tesla or Amazon or apple. I think we all get it. And this is why I wanted to introduce a different narrative on innovation, a different way of thinking about innovation. And first, I wanted to tackle at least three common myths that I've encountered when doing my research or teaching innovation. The first one is that innovation is all about innovation. Superstar. Superhero. But as I just showed you, this is not true. Innovation is for everybody. Innovating skills can be learned. Just like the Starwoodard, frontline hotel managers. Anyone can innovate basically, the second myth that I encountered is that innovation is all about big bangs, breakthroughs, disruptions. And here again, just with the example of Fiskers, we can see that there's another story about innovation.
Ben Bensaou:
Innovation is not only about big bangs and breakthroughs and disruption. There's another way to be innovative. And Fiskers was able to enter an entirely new industry thanks to its continuous and systematic approach to innovation. The third one is really that innovation is all the domain mainly of senior leaders or a set of internal specialists in R and D, or new product development. But we saw with Starwood or with Fiskers, that everybody can get involved innovation. Innovation comes from the whole organization. And this is really a new narrative I wanted to bring forward is that I'm not questioning that innovation, some part of innovation comes from, let's call them geniuses for the time being, or superheroes, people who have this great insight, or that you have some specialist.
Ben Bensaou:
So I wanted to suggest that there's another way to think about innovation and highlight, put the spotlight on this part of the economy, which is actually quite significant part of the economy where we don't pay attention to it because we glorify disruption, we glorify the superhero of innovation. But in fact, there's a whole part of the economy altogether where there's a lot of innovation going on. And this is more my target, if you will. I'm trying to address all of these organizations, small and million times or large old organization, that want to become more innovative. And this is really what the work has been about.
Dom Hawes:
What I'm loving about Ben's insight is that it solves some problems that have been nagging at me for a long time. The first of these is, how do you manage for innovation? A few good years ago, I heard this exact question, how do you manage for innovation? And it was put to the president of a huge ad agency in the States. Now, his answer was, you can't. But what you can do is support it wherever it bubbles up. Now, at the time, I thought, yeah, okay, fair enough, that seems reasonable. Although his company is permanently being asked for new ideas, he has obviously found that it's very difficult to put a program in place to foster that kind of thinking.
Dom Hawes:
His experience was that a bit like parenting, I guess the moment you invest really heavily in a child's interest, that's often the moment they cease being interested. His approach, I guess, was more like fostering buddleiers, those little colourful plants that attract butterflies. Now they appear like weeds. They seemingly spring out of a crack in the ground, but they produce wonderful, long lasting shrubs of color. So he basically just provided plant food and water at the same time. To be frank, I thought, actually, bollocks to that. That approach, it's far too haphazard for me. And it sounds more like he couldn't figure it out, so he classified it as impossible. So I still didn't have the answer. Ben is going to flesh this out later on, but right now he is starting us off on a path to seeing how innovation can be managed.
Dom Hawes:
And that path begins with the other big problem that Ben is solving for me. And that is the thorny issue of deciding who should do the innovation in your company. And I think this is the place to say you can't or simply you don't, because Ben is showing us that it can come from anywhere. Now, provided you have a customer, whether that's internal or external, then you have an insight into that customer's problem. And if you have that, then you have a basis to manage for innovation because you have a problem to solve. And that, fundamentally, is what innovation does. Now, sure, there are giant cognitive leaps made by the superheroes and geniuses, as Ben terms them, but those leaps are very, very few and far between. And in most cases, we don't actually need them to succeed and thrive as businesses.
Dom Hawes:
One of my favourite innovation stories comes from Microsoft. Now, it's not an example of a massive tech leap into the future. It's a simple story of listening to customers and responding appropriately. Now, Microsoft had a product called the adaptive Controller. It was for gamers with a physical disability. It allowed full gaming functionality for anyone who had limited or very restricted dexterity. It was great, but it came in Microsoft regular sealed packaging. So imagine that you're a gamer, you've ordered your adaptive control, but when it arrives, it's bloody difficult to open. Or worse, you have to ask someone else to open it up for you. Now, to their credit, Microsoft recognized this and they developed a packaging solution that basically opened itself. It was beautiful, elegant. Anyone could use it.
Dom Hawes:
And it was a genuine hit with customers, who, by the way, became lifelong brand fans as a result, which was precisely what Microsoft's marketing department had challenged itself to create. Now, regular listeners might know where I'm going with all of this. We look for consistent themes of learning on this pod, as you will know. And one of our most frequent. So what moments is customer first thinking? Because any organization that works from its customers back is working out to in Orlando, outside in, as opposed to into out. Into out is a builder and they will come school of thinking, or as I sometimes prefer to call it, the builder and Sodom approach. It's my strong belief that for 99% of businesses, the out to in approach is the right way forwards, because that is what creates happy customers.
Dom Hawes:
And remember, that's what we're here to do. That makes marketing the home of innovation in the organization. And Ben is giving us a blueprint for that very approach. Happy days. Let's get back to Ben right now, because he really has only just begun, and he has loads more to tell us.
Ben Bensaou:
These innovative organizations that I've studied. In these organizations, innovation does not happen only inside out internally. It happens outside in looking at the customer, trying to uncover and address needs of the customers. And for me, this is the essence of marketing. I could almost reverse the whole conversation and say everything is about marketing. To a certain extent, when I actually look at some of the best people who are able to capture what I call the voice of the customer, or even better, the silence of the customer, I realize it's very often salespeople have a keen capability at listening and observing the customer, very often with a lot of empathy. So for me, it's almost, if I wanted to exaggerate, is almost making everyone in the organization a marketeer, in a sense, in the essential role of listening to the customer.
Ben Bensaou:
And the only thing I'm doing is basically saying the customer can be many different types of entities in a sense. I mean, it could be an internal customer, it could be an external customer. It can even be a process. A process has customers, a function has customers. But the mindset, if you will, is very much a marketing mindset.
Dom Hawes:
Ha. See what I mean? Anyway, I want to quickly draw attention to Ben's concept of silence of the customer. That's not something we've come across before, but it is important. What are customers not telling you? And of course, if you only speak to customers, you don't get the whole picture. When we think about customer insight, we tend to think about the person or company that writes the check, the person who buys the service or product. But in the book, Ben introduces the concept of a non customer. And non customers are just as important. I wanted to find out more about non customers.
Ben Bensaou:
You might be aware of the work that one of my colleagues, I mean, a couple of my colleagues I didn't see had Chang Kim and did, which was called Blue Ocean strategy, one of the techniques and tools that they had developed, which I simply kind of embraced and applied it not only to strategic leaders, but also to the frontline is to not only look at your direct customers, people who are actually entertaining a relationship with you right now, but people who are non customers. These people could be in your own industry. Nintendo is a fantastic example of that. Nintendo started, and people of our generation might relate to that. They started with something called the Game Boy.
Dom Hawes:
Yeah. You know, I remember it well.
Ben Bensaou:
Once you saturated the market for Game Boys, they started to wonder who could be our next target. So they kind of, I mean, I'm doing it figuratively. They asked themselves, you know, so game Boyd, Game Boy. So what should be our next target? And if you say game Boy, it's.
Dom Hawes:
Going to be girls.
Ben Bensaou:
Girls, yeah. So this was a non customer group. This was not a group that was targeted by the gaming industry. So they just asked themselves, you know, we are all competing for the same pool of customers, which is the, you know, the boys. So they did some research and found out that actually girls could be very interested and were interested in games, but they didn't have anything that was catering to their kind of sensitivity. And then of course the story goes on. So the whole industry becomes very successful. It invites competitors. So then you have big giants like Sony, and then of course we have Microsoft coming in. And now the competition starts to escalate. You have more sophisticated games, you know, better sound, better visuals. And of course, Nintendo cannot compete with that level of technological, you know, investment that is needed.
Ben Bensaou:
So at some point, instead of trying to compete more ferociously for the gamers, the people who are interested in heavy duty gaming, they looked somewhere else. And this is where they started to focus nothing on individual gamers but on families. And this is where we had the Nintendo Wii.
Dom Hawes:
Very smart.
Ben Bensaou:
Very smart. So this is an example of non customer. Right. And then they kept pushing the boundary once they had reached and Nintendo Wii was very successful. Now this is something you could the exercise, and I do this in the classroom. You can logically find that the next stage is going to be elderly people. So now they are actually selling Nintendo Wii versions in nursing homes to create this very friendly environment where people are playing and doing exercise at the same time. This is actually a very primitive way to look at non customers because you're looking at your target customers. You look at people who are, as I call them, soon to be lost people who are sitting on the edge of your industry. It wouldn't take a lot to displease them and get them to jump ship.
Ben Bensaou:
They would just jump ship to another industry or another alternative to satisfy their needs. But then you can also start to look at another bigger, bigger population, which is people who are in another industry but are very unhappy with it. So what could you do? What ideas could you generate and think of and develop and test to maybe attract those people? And then of course you have the big mass. When we look at many different industries, we realize that the competition is competing for 20% of the general population and it's 80%. That is completely ignored. People who don't know about what the industry does. So this is also another pool of non customers. There's another way also to look at non customers. It's not about people who are in your industry or people who are in another industry.
Ben Bensaou:
It could be even within the customer. For instance, if you think about B2B, very often companies focus on, let's say the purchasing department or the engineering department. But now the same question is, if you're looking for a new idea, try to look not on, I would call it the red space, where you usually spend a lot of your time targeting people. But look at another area where you don't necessarily look very often. So look, maybe at the HR department, listen to the accounting department, they might have an interesting idea.
Dom Hawes:
I'm slightly obsessed with the whole blue ocean thing. We did a whole podcast on it, actually. We talked about how JetBlue did exactly that. They looked at non customers and they looked at non competed for routes and built a whole business around it. I was fascinated in the book that again and again you came back to talking about those being ideal tools to look at, to work with teams, to get them to innovate. And I'd like to come back to that later. Tell me first, let's talk through the example.
Ben Bensaou:
This is Philips, the dutch manufacturing company. And this is the story about the industrial lamps business. So these are lamps that they sell globally to large manufacturing companies for warehouses or large companies for their office buildings. To set the context. This is the case of the american market. To set the context, we need to understand that in the US at the time when they developed this new product, when you are a client and you want to get rid of lamps that are not working anymore, you have to extract the mercury that is in the lamps. So there's a whole industry around that helping companies extract the mercury before they can throw them in the environment. Philips, as we know, has a fantastic R&D capability.
Ben Bensaou:
And they were very proud of developing a totally new lamp, which they called the Alto, which was free of mercury but slightly a bit more expensive. They organized a campaign to go and sell the lamp to their major clients in the US. So they prepared the slides, the samples, the presentation, and they went knocking at the doors of their big customers. Whom do you sell industrial lamps. In Large corporations. It's usually centralized department purchasing departments or data processing departments, but it's a central function. And of course, when you go and tell them, you know, we have a great lamp, there are only two questions that they're interested in.
Dom Hawes:
I already know one of them. How much?
Ben Bensaou:
Right, how much? And of course, you know, connected to it. How long does the lamps last, you know, so as soon as the key question came out, they were walked out of the door. They decided to actually give up. They gave up the whole campaign in the US. And they. And they. And they came back and then they reflected and they realized they should use a different approach. So they completely scrapped the whole thing. And they developed a new campaign where now they would go not to talk to the central purchasing department, but they would actually talk to the CFO's. And now the approach was very different. They would come in and say, okay, here's our lamp. This is how great it is. This is the total cost of buying our lamp.
Ben Bensaou:
This is the total cost associated with buying the lamps for our competitors, including the extraction of the mercury. And then there was no debate. And they went one step further. They started to go knock at the door. At the time of, I think it was PR department engaged in sustainability. What I'm trying to explain is that in B2B, for instance, this is an example of B2B, people are so obsessed with their existing customer or target that they don't realize that they could actually develop an idea that could create value for somebody else. Again, I'm just trying to highlight that there are different ways to think about non customer. I like to call it non customer space because people always think that non customers is individuals. But it could be non customer space.
Ben Bensaou:
It could be looking at your customers in 20 years, for instance. It could be looking at not the functional aspect of your products, but maybe the emotional aspect. So it's all about whatever you're focusing on, think outside the box. So whatever you. Once you understand what is the box, then it's just a question of looking beyond that and out of blue ocean strategy. And I included this in my new seven step methodology. There are systematic ways to actually scan the environment looking for non customer space. And this participates to building a set of tools, techniques and structured processes for everyone to innovate. I came into it from the blue ocean strategy. A lot of my initial activity was on blue ocean strategy and was working with very senior level people.
Ben Bensaou:
Of course, you quickly realize that just like finding a disruption, finding a blue ocean is not easy, is hard. It's very hard. And to a certain extent, it requires special concerns, consulting to special skills, special people. So what I ended up doing is actually moving the ideas and the tools, not to target senior leaders, but actually middle managers and even better, frontline people. And then I discovered that if you give them some very simple tools, these are very simple, intuitive, very often very visual tools, then at their level, they can find a lot of ideas. And then if you start to connect these ideas or allow people to look for new ideas, you might end up with very significant innovations, as I like to call them. The way that I was describing, for instance, what Fiskers did or what other companies did.
Ben Bensaou:
A word I like to use for this movement, from focusing on senior leaders to allowing the frontline, giving them permission to innovate, but also giving them some of the tools and techniques to do it, is what I call democratizing, having a democratization of innovation. Innovating is about looking for new ideas. It's a game of large numbers. The more ideas you have, the more opportunities you will have to maybe hit a great idea. So how do you increase the number? Logically, you involve more people, not only the few specialists or the people who we often think are maybe the most creative people, but that's not necessarily true. By the way, I discovered it's not always those who think who are the most creative.
Dom Hawes:
Oh, I like that. The democratisation of innovation. It's a really interesting idea. Now, as with all initiatives of this scale, it needs buy in and enthusiastic support from both senior leadership and line management. And we're going to look at that a little bit later on. But first, I wanted to answer a question that was gnawing at me a little bit, saying, hey, it's okay for everyone to innovate, and here are some tools, but it's not that easy. So I wondered whether Ben had any advice on how to find new ideas. And here is where he took me.
Ben Bensaou:
You increase the places where you look. You can innovate in everything you do, of course, in your products, in your technology, but you can innovate in your processes, you can innovate in your functions, you can innovate internally, externally, and then there's the question of how often. And you don't need to wait for a crisis to start to worry about innovation. Innovation. You can innovate as a habit. These organizations that I observed became innovation powerhouses because they gave permission to the front line to innovate, to get engaged innovating activities. Then they managed to channel these ideas, to sometimes combine them. They gave these people the tools to be able to innovate, because anybody can innovate. I mean, again, this is a big discovery for me, but it was nice to validate it empirically.
Ben Bensaou:
These companies have a wealth of ideas that they can tap from now, the challenge is, how do you make sure that the ideas keep coming, but then you have to select them so that they can become, you know, innovations.
Dom Hawes:
We have covered a lot today. We've looked at how you can manage for innovation. We've looked at who can innovate. And most importantly, we've looked at innovation through the eyes of the customer. Because when we're looking for inspiration, when we're trying to think, where can our next idea spring from, the best place to start is with our customers. But what I like about Ben's insight is it's not the usual, no shit, Sherlock. You've got to ask your customers sort of fare. Ben's exploring the customers that don't have a voice. The we example. Such a great one. He's exploring internal departments that don't normally get asked, and he's looking for ways that he can add value to B2B customers that don't typically factor into our assessment. The decision making unit. That Philips story he told us is perfect as an example.
Dom Hawes:
I mean, who normally approaches PR departments as part of the sales process? I think the trick to all of this is to look for problems, because problems are your friends. There was a really good college commencement speech given a while ago. Now, commencement speeches are the final bits of advice given to a graduating class, typically by an alumni who's done well. This speech was given by Joyce King Thomas. She used to head up McCann in New York and was famous for creating Mastercard's priceless work. So she knows a thing or two. And her advice to graduating young men and women went something like, in life, you will be advised to do what you love. I suggest you don't do that. Instead, find something you hate and fix it. I just got all tingly. Her concept of fix what you hate is huge for me.
Dom Hawes:
It's the basis of all innovation, and it's something that we as marketers have huge strength in. Apart from being a creative bunch, we're also party to our customers innermost desires. We know, or we should bloody well find out what keeps them up at night. What annoys them the most, what they hate about us or our products and services. That is a huge. It's a massive gift, because everyone can accept that things go wrong. It's what you do about them. That's what counts. And if we can fix what our customers hate, they're going to be our friends for life. And wouldn't that be nice? Well, that's it for part one. In part two, we're going to dig more into the roles and processes for building innovation in your organization. That's basically Ben telling us for free.
Dom Hawes:
The vital bit is how the rubber hits the road, so make sure you do not miss it. Meantime, please make sure you're subscribed to the pod. Subscriber numbers are key to how we get to book great guests like Ben. Plus, subscribing means this podcast is just going to pop up in your feed like magic. And as much as I loathe the phrase, it's a win. Oh God, now I hate myself. Anyway, please just subscribe and I promise I'll never say win again. Till next time. You have been listening to Unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.
