All credit goes to the author-Freek Vermeulens Freek Vermeulen is Associate Professor of Strategic and International Management at London Business School.
Some time ago, I interviewed a guy called
Farooq Chaudhry, a founder and producer of
the Akram Khan Dance Company, which is a
small but extremely innovative (and extremely
successful) contemporary dance company. Farooq
had several interesting things to say about creating
an organization that excels in delivering continuing,
successful innovation. One of them stuck to my
mind: “In order to be truly innovative, you have to
forget about your customer.”
What? I don’t know much about marketing (and
would prefer to keep it that way), but don’t these
people always go on and on about “customer-
focus”, “client-driven innovation”, “the customer
always comes first”, and so on? So I asked, “Farooq,
do you perhaps mean that you should only have the
customer in the back of your mind?”
“No, no, I mean, customers – just forget about
them altogether”.
Ok… what (on earth!) did Farooq Chaudhry
mean? After all, this is one of the most innovative
companies of its kind, since...well, like ever?
According to him, if you want to be truly innovative,
you have to purposely not try to give the customer
what he wants. Because, as he argued, if you set
out to develop what you think the customer will like,
you end up satisfying existingneeds and tastes; you
follow the customer rather than lead the customer.
True innovation, according to him, is about changing
the tastes of customers and giving them something
that they have never seen or even imagined before.
Getting lucky – fortune favours the
prepared firm
Once upon a time, there was a plumber, named
Geoffrey Ward, who lived in London. One day a local
government official told him he would have to
vacate his workshop and office because it was
located in an area reserved as a retail zone.
Geoffrey decided to place an old, slightly exotic-
looking, artistically shaped radiator – which he had
removed for a client because it was broken – in the
window of his workshop, just to make it look like a
shop. Yet, in the following days and weeks, people
kept knocking on this door asking whether they could
buy that funny-shaped radiator. Not for long, Geoffrey
realized that he could have made quite a lot of
money had he been able to sell such a “designer
radiator” and decided to change professions.
This was how the company Bisque, who produce
and distribute designer radiators, was founded.
Luck you say? Of course; but, as said before,
many people don’t take advantage of luck even
when it is staring them into the face. Geoffrey did.
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, called it
“strategic recognition capacity”. He could have said
“know it when you got lucky” (but I’m sure you agree
that that wouldn’t have sounded as fancy). Intel,
which of course became one of the most successful
companies ever by producing microprocessors, also
got lucky. In the early 1980s, they were working on
microprocessors when they did not have a clue what
they would be able to use them for. They even made
a list of potential applications – which had anything
on it ranging from handheld calculators to lamp-
posts. Yep, lamp-posts.
What was not on its list was: the computer. It was
not until IBM kept persistently knocking on their
door that they said “All right then, you can put our
product in this thing you call a PC”. Yet, was this all
down to luck? Of course not, Andrew Grove and his
partners recognized the opportunity when it came
knocking on their door (in the shape of Big Blue’s
rather sizeable fist). But there’s more to it.
“Fortune favours the prepared mind,” Louis
Pasteur famously said. He got lucky several times,
making important yet serendipitous discoveries
(such as a rabies vaccine). Yet, it was not mere
chance that it was Pasteur who made these
discoveries. First, he recognized opportunities that
presented themselves to him; but second, he also
had the skill, knowledge and ability to turn them
into something useful. That required many years of
careful practice and training.
Moreover, and importantly, he wasn’t sitting in his
kitchen waiting for lucky events to fall into his
scientific lap. He was actively experimenting with
lots of things. Most of them were bogus; others not.
And that is what Intel did: running many
experiments in the margin. Most of them failed and
wasted money. But one sunny day, one of these
experiments just might result into a thing called
“microprocessors” and, believe me, you won’t shed
a tear about all the other ones that failed.
Last update : 28-06-2008 23:00
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