Henkel Corporation | Culture

Culture >
Community Partnership Day Greeting Cards Send a Card Receive a Card Quotes Duck Tales Spirit
History >

Duck Tales

May/June 2005

On Your Mark, Get Set, Innovate

Something as important as innovation should be at the top of everyone’s priority list. Managers must encourage creativity at all levels. The goal is to get everyone routinely asking themselves: “How can we do this better?” and “How can we improve this product?” (And, in some of our cases, “How can I improve my backstroke, anyway?”)

If you’re not asking or answering these kinds of questions, your organization will suffer. Innovation is critical to keeping your organization vital and dynamic. So how do you generate fresh ideas? Read on!

Making It New
Many companies rely on past innovations to carry them through. They’re happy to maintain the status quo, to settle for past successes. But the truly successful companies have come to view innovation as part of their organizations’ culture. They continually push for new ideas and breakthroughs—and not just when sales are down. They know that innovation must occur even in the best of times. You might say innovation is what separates the ducks from the ducklings. Either way, innovators rely on these rules of thumb:

Make it comprehensive. Avoid a haphazard approach to practicing innovation. While innovation usually takes place in areas such as marketing or research and development, organizations should broaden their approach. Innovation must become part of every service, process, strategy, and business model. Once innovation becomes a comprehensive feature of the organization, companies begin to gain an edge on the competition.
Continue the search. Businesses should put specific systems and practices in place that help promote a better understanding of social, demographic, and technological changes. Some companies use “think tanks,” which track trends and ask searching questions that can lead to innovation.
Unleash creativity. Today’s organizations must teach people to champion their ideas and create solutions. Or, as the founding chairman of Sony explains, “Everybody in the company must contribute more than manual labor. We insist that all of our employees contribute their minds.”
Improve your climate for innovation. Is your organization innovation friendly? Ask yourself questions such as, “What happens to the people who think outside the box? “How often do we tell people it’s okay to take risks?” and “How do we treat someone who takes a risk and fails?”

The Truth About Teamwork
For true innovation, put a group of diverse individuals together, step back, and wait for the results. Right? Not necessarily, according to a survey of managers responsible for new product initiatives. Some of the common theories associated with creative teamwork have more than their share of fallacies. Here are some corrections to those misconceptions:

Limit cross-functional diversity. Although it seems logical that a large, diverse group will produce the most creative results, the survey suggests that the more ideas that are generated, the more difficult problem solving becomes. Too many perspectives can hinder the creative process and essentially eliminate the benefits of diversity. Groups with just a few different perspectives function more effectively.
Loosen interpersonal ties. The more socially cohesive teams are, the less chance that their debates will be candid and productive. Team members who have allegiances to one another actually stifle innovation. They focus on maintaining their relationships and tend to agree with one another to maintain their connection. A more divergent group, on the other hand, will find innovative connections in their diversity.
Encourage the “non-routine.” The study revealed that innovation increases significantly when management encourages members to think less about conventional improvement practices and more about non-routine problem solving.

Up Close and Personal
It’s called ethnography, and more companies are using it to improve existing products and to develop new ones. Ethnography involves observing or videotaping consumers using products. The goal is to capture consumer behaviors and patterns in context, rather than gather information through surveys or questionnaires. Survey results often are inexact since there is a difference between what people say they do and what they actually do and between what they say they need and what they actually need. “We view these unarticulated needs as product-improvement opportunities and apply usability engineering to make products more intuitive and easier to use at the onset,” explains one director of product design.

When Rubbermaid Inc. asked 15 teams to observe consumers’ home-storage practices, the groups came up with 300 new-product ideas in just three days. Meanwhile, Johnson Controls used video ethnography to help automakers differentiate their vehicles with new interior designs and features. Four small cameras were placed strategically in a car, and the family was asked to go about its daily routine. Observing families in this way has uncovered information that would not have been revealed otherwise. Seeing women drivers fumble through their purses in the passenger seat, for example, led to a more user-friendly center console as well as organizers built into a fold-down passenger seat. And watching consumers load items into cars and minivans led to trunk organizing systems.

“Our competitors have not been able to keep up with us as we started marketing products based on our observational research,” says one company’s director of business development. Observational research offers a fresh perspective, which helps product innovation truly take flight!

Designed By You
Another way to get innovative ideas from customers is simply to ask them. Engaging customers in improved product development is known as “design by users,” and it can yield major advances for businesses. Businesses ask customers to design an ideal product or service without any concerns about the costs or implementation issues associated with the design.

The home-furnishings retailer, IKEA, chose the design-by-users method to create a new IKEA store in Chicago. Nine groups of a dozen customers each were asked to design a new IKEA store from scratch. The groups created designs that fulfilled all of their wishes for an ideal store, including easy-to-locate departments, similar products located nearby, and streamlined checkout processes.

IKEA took their ideas to heart. The results? The new Chicago IKEA had sales twice of what the store initially anticipated. Over 85 percent of customers who shopped at the location rated the shopping experience as excellent or very good. The store had more return visits, and shoppers spent an average of one hour longer than they did in other IKEA stores.

What Customers Buy
It’s not the glitzy marketing or advertising that makes a customer want to buy from you. And those special effects, lowest price offers, and exaggerated claims do more to drive customers away than to reel them in. When you help customers understand why your product or service will be of merit to them, when you gain their confidence through honesty and accessibility, then they bring out the checkbook. As you think about innovation, consider some “features” customers buy:

They buy promises, so be careful what you promise.
They buy brand names.
They buy claims they believe.
They buy solutions.
They buy value, which is not to be confused with price.
They buy comfort, confidence, and credibility.
They buy the whole package—you, your staff, your company.
They buy your guarantee, your warranty, and freedom from risk.
They buy convenience in how, when, and where you sell.
They buy their friends’ opinions of your business.
They buy style that fits taste.
They buy salespeople who listen.
They buy easy access to information.
They buy your respect for them and their ideas.
They buy trust, which, as you well know, is something your buddy Trust E. Duck® values very highly!

Speed It Up
The company that hesitates, loses. This play on the old adage is right on target for today’s organizations. Customers no longer wait patiently for a business to come along with a better deal. They want instant replies, instant sales, and instant service. As one executive explains, “Be quick or be dead.” Here are a few ways companies are learning to be faster and more flexible in today’s marketplace:

Get organized. Develop new ways to deliver goods and services to customers. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina, for example, used a workflow analysis by Xerox to cut their production time for a benefits booklet from 45 days to five days.
Focus on your future. Stop analyzing the competitor and redefine and reinvent the way you do business. If you focus only on your competitors, they’ll forge ahead while you merely study their tactics.
Recognize failure. The more quickly a business admits something isn’t working, the faster it can focus its time and resources on new processes, products, and services. Every company should analyze its activity for at least the past six months. If goals aren’t being met, or profits are down, the organization needs some fundamental change.
Think flexibility. Companies today must be ready to move quickly—whether it’s to modify a process or introduce a new product or technology. Look at everything in the organization in a new light. Ask yourself and employees, “How can we do this better?” or “How else could this be used?”