Ideas are about potential. Innovations are about results.
by Andre Laurin
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
The other day, I was having some cookies with my daughters and as it so happens, I had a moment of reckoning.
We have an arrangement whereby we each twist one end of an Oreo off and exchange for the portions that we want: they want the ends with the icing and I get the cookie part only sans all that sugar. It’s a symbiotic relationship. The girls take the ends with the icing and stack them onto other ends with icing from their inventory, thereby doubling the sweet treat.
It is easy to imagine that this playful experimentation could precisely be the type of setting that spawned the Double Stuff Oreo line extension that has proved so popular; and one which also may have led to Cakesters and a myriad of brand spin-offs. Once the mold was broken and the sacred Oreo product formula was in play, anything was possible. Now the original Oreo is but one skew among many in the Kraft Food’s Oreo line-up.
The main take-away for me was the un-prompted ease with which this innovative risk-taking took place – granted, it wasn’t a corporate setting, but still there was no fear; just possibilities. This is exactly the kind of environment that people inside and outside your organization need to discover and develop great opportunities for you. Ideas often start life as lumps of clay that need to be shaped, pulled, crimped and manipulated in order to make something more out of them. This takes people who are comfortable taking the risk of trying something new…maybe even zany, without the fear of personal ridicule or professional reprisals – in fact, this risk-taking needs to be encouraged. That is the edge…the line that must be crossed. It’s the price to discover what is on the other side.
Risk-taking becomes easier when your innovation participants see others practicing it – it takes a giant barrier away and says: it’s okay to fail!!
Create the environment that enables fast and frequent failure, whilst capturing the value that boils up from the process. Provide the transparency that tracks the idea’s progress and recognize the efforts so that others are inclined to follow suit.