87. From ideas to action: Managing creativity alongside daily operations

00:03: Dom Hawes

You're listening to Unicorny, and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Welcome back, brave Unicorners, to part two of our pod on innovation. We are talking to Professor Bensaou from the INSEAD business school in Paris. He is the author of an amazing book, which you should read called built to innovate, and he is giving us a masterclass on how to manage for innovation, how to bake it into your organization's DNA. In part one, we looked at the sources of innovation, primarily these your customers and their problems. Now, if you can fix what they hate, they're going to love you for life. And we talked about how anyone from anywhere in your organization can observe and solve these problems. But we in marketing have a particular advantage here, of course, because we are in tune with what customers want.

00:52: Dom Hawes

And hopefully, if you're a regular subscriber to this pod, you believe, like me, that making happy customers is the ultimate goal. All of which means that marketing is well set up to be the seat of innovation in your organization. Provided, of course, that your organization is driven by your customers needs. Now, in this part, we're going to look at how we get all of this thinking to work. We're going to look at the roles and the processes of innovating. We're going to talk about how we put the philosophy into action. Let's go.

01:25: Dom Hawes

In the book, you detail a framework, I guess three roles, three processes, a way of harnessing not just the development of ideas for their own sake, but also how that then infiltrates the management of an organization. And you've got the seven step method as well. So let's take a quick step back. Do you normally do roles or processes first?

01:46: Ben Bensaou

Either way. But I think one challenge, to look for new ideas, and of course, you want to make sure that some of these ideas become innovations. Many of the things that I came up with in the research in the book were serenipidus, total accident. One of them is this conceptual distinction I make between innovation and innovating. It came because one thing I had noticed, talking about innovation to people around the world, actually it's not necessarily cultural, is that the word innovation itself is very intimidating. It tends to generate a sense of anxiety and stress for many people, in particular people who are the front line.

02:31: Ben Bensaou

The other thing also I had kind of noticed is that when people come to innovation training at INSEAD, for instance, they think, they assume that their boss expects them to come up with the next breakthrough product or to uncover a new market space. And I feel that they feel the pressure is on and they feel it and they hate it. So now, again, accidentally having noticed this kind of typical reaction. Now, I don't use the word innovation when I teach. Instead, I refer to innovating, or I simply use the word to innovate. And then something curious happens. Suddenly, the sense of fear and tension disappears in the room when I'm teaching. And the reason I think, is that innovating does not imply any specific outcome or result. It's a verb.

03:31: Ben Bensaou

So typically, people associate the verb with an activity, so they associate it more with an activity, an action, a process, a set of behaviours, basically, and attitudes that anyone can learn. Innovating is simply looking for new ideas. Looking for new ideas doesn't mean that you'll find them, but you just have to keep looking for new ideas. Test them, develop the best ones, with no guarantee that you'll find some. I use the familiar metaphor of the iceberg. So if innovation is the tip of the iceberg, the impressive peak rising above the water level, then innovating represents what's happening beneath the surface. So this is where I'm coming from. What I discovered in these organizations is that they had built this innovating capability. And as I said, the way you do this is by engaging everyone. So the focus here is on the innovating capability.

04:39: Ben Bensaou

And this is the pattern that I, you know, when I looked at these organizations and how did they develop this innovating capability? It didn't happen simply by senior leaders making statements that innovation is important or giving special funding to some special units. No, no. They created what I refer to as an innovating engine. They created a very concrete, fully legitimized, fully protected space and time within the organization where every employee had the permission to innovate. They were giving, of course, the tools and the training and the support to look for new ideas. This is where I started to observe and try to look at this space, which now, if we agree, let's call it innovating engine. And this is very important. This is a very concrete space. So how is this space structured? Now we're getting to how is this space structured?

05:39: Ben Bensaou

So let me maybe describe how an organization works. I mean, we're all very familiar with organizations and their structure and their processes without really paying attention to it. What we describe very often is what I call the execution engine. This is the bulk of the organization. This is the engine that is focused on implementing the strategy of today, the innovating engine, when I was able to observe it and document it, is an engine that is focused on building the, I would call it the strategy of tomorrow. This is where the companies imagine, tests, develops, tries to prototype products, the services, the processes of the future. What is really interesting is that I found that these two engines function, operate parallel simultaneously.

06:28: Ben Bensaou

Even in some of these organizations can be 95%, 90% of their time is focused on the job they hired to do, which is to execute. These tasks are very well structured. We have processes to do that, we have KPI's to monitor that. But these employees, they are also given permission, and they're very much encouraged to spend some time. This time is structured, is protected, and it is regular, but they are allowed to spend some time engaging in some form of innovating activity. Remember the Starwood example? Any frontline person can spend 30 minutes, let's say every two months, spending some time immersing themselves in the life of their customer, looking at the customer, looking at the non customer, and then reporting back.

07:21: Ben Bensaou

That is innovating activity, getting involved as, let's say, an HR person joining the team, an innovation team, to add to the diversity of a real innovation project that is innovating. Frontline employees were not only encouraged, but they were like very specific structures, processes that would allow them to get engaged in these innovating activities. I want to make sure that we understand that this innovating engine is concrete. It's a concrete thing. It's not just a concept. It is as concrete as the execution engine. So what I started to discover is that just like the execution engine, we have a whole literature, we have a whole vocabulary language to talk about the innovation, the execution engine. So we talk about its structure, we talk about its processes, we talk about its culture.

08:17: Ben Bensaou

And what I found out is that the innovating engine, however small it can be, can also be described in terms of its governance structure, its underlying processes, and its distinctive culture. So I started to look at all of these companies and how they were operating their innovating engine. And I discovered that they also have a governance structure and they also have processes. So creation, integration, reframing. So the first process is, how does the organization create, generate these new ideas that we're talking about on a continuous and systematic basis? The integrating process is the process by which the organization connects these ideas, which might be dispersed across the organization. How do you connect these ideas? How do you connect them to other innovators? How do you connect them to resources?

09:17: Ben Bensaou

And of course, another major part of the integration process is how do you review the ideas? Somebody comes up with an idea at the frontline how do you review it? How do you channel it? Usually it's a funnel. How does it move through the funnel to be tested, to be sometimes prototype? How do we pilot test some of the best ones, and the very best ideas are selected to then move into the execution engine. So this is where you have the interplay between the innovating engine that generates ideas. You have a process by which they are, you know, funnelled and channelled, prototype tested, and some of the best ones, and move to the execution engine. And this is when we move from innovating to innovation, because an idea, a great idea that gets implemented correctly, becomes potentially a great innovation.

10:14: Ben Bensaou

So this is the interplay between the two engines. So, I mean, finding for me, it was even surprising to me, is this notion that in these highly innovative old and traditional organizations, everybody was getting involved. Whether you were frontline employee, middle manager, or senior leaders, I detected that they all had a role to play and a contribution to make to all three. Creation, integration and reframing with, of course, different ways to play that role. This is where I discovered that innovating and building the innovating engine resulted in creating three processes where three roles, I mean, everybody in the organization had a role to play. This is what I call the built to innovate framework. Basically, this is a very action oriented framework to help any kind of organization.

11:11: Ben Bensaou

I didn't mention it because we're talking mostly to private companies, but these ideas and these frameworks, and I have some examples featured in book apply as well to public organizations and government agencies. So this is really generic. The framework gives, it's very action writing. It gives a set of actions, decisions, processes that organizations can put in place to even build their innovating engine from scratch.

11:46: Dom Hawes

M g listening to Ben is like having a ringside seat at an innovation lab, isn't it? I mean, I'm not here to plug Ben's book, but if you want to build innovation into your culture, I would suggest you buy it and read it. What I love about Ben's approach is its behavioural lead. He's taken a leaf out of his own book. He's used a problem to create an advantage. He's observed the difficulty with innovation seems often to stem from the word itself, because it's the end point. Innovation is the thing that we have to deliver. Asking people to produce it, we cause fear because the ask, it's too much, the pressure is too big. So the behaviour is to freeze in our tracks. But by switching the word to the verb innovating it frees up the behaviour.

12:34: Dom Hawes

We're now merely on a path to innovation. It's just a process. Hey, it might even be fun. Now, this doesnt mean its some sort of vague corporate activity, far from it. By leaning into the solution, which basically separates innovating the process from innovation, the execution, you establish two real and very active engines. The innovating engine is all about experimentation, finding something that works. The best ideas from that process then move into the execution engine, which executes and makes them real. Now, if you were listening to part one of this pod, you may remember my frustrations at the president of a very large creative company. That said, you can't manage for innovation. Well, I think Ben might. In fact, I think Ben has proved him wrong. And now we're going to build the case for that. We've explored some good thinking around the process.

13:27: Dom Hawes

Now I want to dig into roles, and I want to find out which are the critical positions in all of this.

13:34: Dom Hawes

A role that's often overlooked, which is essential in your framework, is that of the middle manager. So everyone thinks about the front line, where ideas are generated. All the senior leaders who are going to be involved and in helping, doing the reframe, talk to me about the importance of the middle management.

13:48: Ben Bensaou

I think the middle managers, I mean, that was Dom, that was really the biggest surprise for me in the research, is most people would have known it, but it was not really documented as much. But I realized that middle managers are essential to innovation. They play a pivotal role. I mean, without them, innovation just gets lost. And they're very often overlooked, as we know. So this is why I kind of call them the forgotten heroes of innovation. And what is really interesting is that essentially, in the whole organization, there are responsible for execution, making sure that execution happens properly. They're not necessarily trained innovation. They don't have the same external, direct pressure for innovation. I mean, we know frontline, whether they're given permission or not, that's a different story.

14:44: Ben Bensaou

But for them, innovation is natural, because they are the ones who are facing customers and non customers on a daily basis. And they can see, they can experience, they can smell the pain points, the wishes, the dreams of the customers. They hear that, they see that. So very often when I do some audit with some companies, I realize, and senior leaders are always very surprised, that the frontline is very eager to innovate. And they have a lot of ideas. The only problem is that they don't feel that their ideas are desired. They have resistance, and they even sometimes, in some cases, get punished, if not discouraged, to actually push too much on innovation. Now, the senior leaders, I mean, they're the ones who are looking at the survival of the company. And for them, I mean, innovation is an imperative.

15:33: Ben Bensaou

But the middle managers, they are the ones who are squeezed in the middle, and they don't have this external pressure.

15:40: Dom Hawes

They're also the stewards of execution. They're in place to execute the strategy and the business. So the natural inclination might be that middle management is not there to innovate, actually, it's there to execute.

15:55: Ben Bensaou

Absolutely. You know, when I was doing blue ocean training, I used to kind of make sure to temper people's excitement, not only because I knew that it was not easy to do, but also to kind of remind people that you can spend a lot of time trying to imagine the future, but if you don't defend your business of today, and you won't be there. So you see, the whole framework here is really that you have to not lose your execution engine. The execution is very important, but the idea is, how do you tap this additional latent capability that is embedded in your people, in your processes, in the rest of the organization? How do you tap that to imagine the future? So middle managers should be focused on execution.

16:44: Ben Bensaou

However, and by the way, even in my thinking, they're not the ones who are expected to innovate. As we said, they are shielded from the external pressure, but they are the ones who can give permission to the front line to look for new ideas and to bring these ideas. They are the ones who can support the frontline when they need. I mean, politically, they are the ones who need to give permission. They need to support, encourage the frontline to bring these ideas. And interestingly, they are the ones who, in many organizations, are at the right level of elevation so that they can play this connecting role of connecting ideas and innovators to other departments. I can give you a very quick example of the role of a middle manager. I might actually highlight why it happened.

17:37: Ben Bensaou

This is a story about a product called Basotek. This is BASF. This is the large global chemical company based in Germany. This is a story about Basoteke. This is a foam like resin. I mean, this is used for soundproofing and insulating. They sell it to construction companies and to the automobile industry. This is an innovation that happened totally by accident. So one salesperson, BASF salesperson, was on a call trying to sell Basotect foam. It just happened to be a japanese construction company by accident. The salesperson kind of spilled a cup of coffee on the table. And it was spilt over the blueprints that were laid over the table. Total kind of, you know, disaster, panic, disaster. So he just grabbed whatever he could, you know, that was close on the table. It just happened to be a slab, a piece of Basotect form.

18:41: Ben Bensaou

And he just wiped the blueprint. The mess was absorbed, but worse. So the ink, he only realized later. He had discovered, he had discovered a quality of Basotect that nobody knew about, which is that when Basotect is combined with water, it becomes a very powerful stain and dye remover. So he took this to his boss. His manager immediately put him in contact with the chemists at BASFDev. And then they launched a large systematic search into their database, customer database, looking for which customer could potentially be interested in a material with the kind of properties they had discovered. And it took them two years. And then they developed an R and D partnership with Procter and Gamble. They developed a product now that is marketed everywhere called Magic Eraser, famous Mister Clean.

19:44: Ben Bensaou

I had to go back home to discover that we had it in the kitchen. It's present in a lot of kitchens. And when you look at it is simply a piece of bacitect form marketed under PNG. It is one of the most successful innovations of PNG and one of their most profitable business units. Why did this happen? This is the key. This is the result of an initiative that BS have had launched years before, which they called perspective. Perspective was created as a separate central unit that would develop processes and techniques related to initially quality management, process development. And then it was innovation and ablution strategy was one of the things that they were exploring at the time. But basically they were training people across BASF in customer orientation and innovation.

20:49: Ben Bensaou

And this is how waves of middle managers came together to receive this training, these tools, this new language. When I interviewed people, they were telling me that in the old days, that would have never happened, when the head of marketing just connected immediately to the chemist. I mean, in many organizations, you know, traditional manufacturing organizations that I visit very often, the silo between marketing R and D, the technical experts, is very strong. I want to insist on that. I mean, the story is a great story. It's another one of these posted kind of stories, completely accidental. Innovation becomes a big, big success. But it happened because of the role of the middle manager. So they were the ones who connected the innovators with the rest of the organization.

21:55: Dom Hawes

Whereas in a traditional organization, by the time that got all the way up to the top and then started coming all the way down the tree in a different silo, it would be dead.

22:02: Ben Bensaou

Yes, yes.

22:03: Dom Hawes

So BASF had perspective, and Bayer has a program or platform called we solve. Is that the way that organizations generally are harnessing?

22:13: Ben Bensaou

Just to come back to the logic, I discovered this all traditional organizations that were very innovative, and I was really curious to know why. And one of the reasons is that they were able to tap and allow leverage the capabilities of everybody. Now, how did they do that? They created something very concrete, like structured that I call the innovating engine. So we already talked about the processes that regulate this engine, but this happens within a structure. So the same way that the execution engine has a structure, a governance structure, the innovating engine also has a structure which is much more focused on delegation, collaboration and horizontal networks. So Bayer is a very good example of a formal structure, formally structured innovating engine, if you will. Bayer has a long history of scientific achievements through their fantastic R and D capability.

23:14: Ben Bensaou

But it was really interesting to me to see that in 2014, the board decided to create an organization to tap to leverage the capabilities of the hundred thousands of employees they have within the company. So what did they do first? And I will try to describe what are some of the three or four key components I saw at Bayer and BASF that can compose, consist, create the structure of an innovating engine. So first they made the whole board responsible for innovation. As a matter of fact, they started with one person who was kind of mister innovation for the whole board, and realized that was not enough. So they made the whole board responsible for innovation. Then they selected 80 senior executives at a very high level, across country, groups and global functions to support the board. And they called them ambassadors.

24:21: Ben Bensaou

They were innovation ambassadors. And this innovation ambassadors spent most of their time with middle managers, advocating for innovation, getting them trained innovation, sponsoring innovation. And then BASF did something interesting. They trained and certified a thousand innovation coaches who were then activated across the whole organization.

24:51: Dom Hawes

This is industrial scale.

24:53: Ben Bensaou

So they created just like, you know, I was talking about perspective at BASF, they created a central unit where now coming back to the middle managers, if a middle manager had an individual or a group of people who had an interesting idea they wanted to develop, the middle manager does not know, is not trained for this, doesn't have the resources. But then they could call upon this central unit of coaches, of consultants, experts, internal projects, who would come support the team in developing the idea. And of course, you can see the bootstrapping phenomena, because very often through this training locally, you would have somebody who likes the tools and likes the techniques and becomes the innovation person in the organization. So I saw this, as I said, so Bayer had that, BASF had it. Samsung is very famous for its.

25:48: Ben Bensaou

They have actually a full building dedicated to that. It's called the VIP Value Innovation Program centre, where they have four story building, housing experts of innovation, and any division who wants to develop a new product or a new idea, they would actually go and stay in the building.

26:07: Dom Hawes

I was going to say, it's residential, isn't it?

26:09: Ben Bensaou

Completely residential.

26:10: Dom Hawes

I was fascinated by that in the book.

26:11: Ben Bensaou

It's boot camp. But the idea here is that. So you need to have some sort of senior leaders who are responsible of innovation. Then you have like a central unit, then you have this central unit of coaches and all that. That has also ramifications in the local organizations. And then, as you were alluding to it, Bayer did something very interesting. They created we solve. We solve is a digital platform where any employee struggling with an issue can post on we solve and invite suggestions, ideas from anyone around the world. Now, what is really interesting about we solve is that when I interviewed them, they mentioned that at the time they had 40,000 people who had engaged, participated in we solve. I saw the platform, it's in English, and they have 50,000 people who can speak English in the whole organization.

27:16: Ben Bensaou

So this was a very high level of doctrine. But Dom, the most impressive statistic for me was when they explained that two thirds of the best ideas came from a division or function that was different from the one where the problem was posted in the first place.

27:37: Dom Hawes

Wow. Okay.

27:38: Ben Bensaou

So this is really shows how they were able to tap the capability from.

27:45: Dom Hawes

Across the organization and its democratization of innovation in action.

27:52: Dom Hawes

I do love these moments. We've just come to the end of a really inspiring masterclass, and I feel like I can go out and do literally anything. The thing that's been defeating me for years in this case. How do we manage for innovation? It doesn't stand a chance anymore. I'm going to get it to work on Monday and I'm going to build my innovating engine. Okay. I recognize that I am in the rosy afterglow of this podcast. Monday's going to come, the proverbial shit's going to hit the fan and all bets are going to be cancelled. But until then, I'm going to live in the sweet haze of anything is possible. So I know that managing for innovation is going to be hard, but for the first time, I think I've got a concrete path to get there.

28:32: Dom Hawes

There's a process, there's a mentality, there are roles to be filled, and that kind of means there's a viable outcome. It doesn't have to be about striking gold either. You don't need luck and you don't need to innovate something that's going to change your world. It's much more about a steady stream of fresh thinking to solve customers problems. And with that customer in mind, I know I have an advantage as a marketer. Although Ben has proved that great ideas can come from anyone and from anywhere within the business, we marketers do have a leg up because of our proximity to customers. Or put another way, we have proximity to the problems. And these are the real gifts in any culture of innovation. As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.

29:18: Dom Hawes

So one of the things I will start on Monday is to ask everybody to bring me the necessity, bring me the problems. This is the goldmine that we as marketers all have access to. One of the businesses that I would love to market for is an airline. And what I would do is to make the whole experience for customers about problem solving. In fact, rather than painting a beautiful picture of airline travel, I'd lean into its problems. I'd use them as the basis for how we go to market. They're the Runway. Because as travellers, we recognize that flying is not a perfect science. Many things can go wrong. Weather, baggage handling, the airport, it goes on and on. But what counts to us is what happens after something goes wrong. What does the airline do about it? How do they solve those customer problems?

30:08: Dom Hawes

And in my view, that would bleed right the way through the organization. So, like a stick of rock, wherever you break it, you get the same amazing problem solving experience. There would be processes and people, and the budget associated with promotion would all be directed at relaying the positive stories of a problem solved. Now, I must admit I want to do that partly out of selfish reasons, because I would love to travel with an airline that was all about fixing the fuck up. Because I spent too many hours and pounds trying to fix travel problems that weren't my fault. But equally, I'd love to do it because it would be the perfect type of business to bring marketing and innovation together as one. There's a natural relationship between the two, and they both come together around the happy customer.

30:55: Dom Hawes

Marketing is all about creating happiness in our customers and innovation by solving customer problems. That's just a beautiful way to get there. As we've seen in both parts of this pod. If you can fix what your customers hate. You have a fan for life now. Not only that, my friends, you're going to have a business that knows how to market from outside in. And that would be very special indeed. 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.