Pulse October 2016 | Page 57

customer for his or her ideas, you will end up like Starbucks which created mystarbucksidea.com as a vehicle for capturing customer opinions. To date, they have received over 200,000 suggestions and implemented less than 300. This means that 199,700 ideas were essentially ignored. There are many better ways of gathering insights from customers. This is where the “better box” can be helpful. Rather than asking for ideas, ask for solutions to wellframed questions. “You can’t be the best at everything, so don’t innovate on everything. Only innovate where you differentiate.” P: You said “expertise is the enemy of innovation.” How come? S: The brain is not wired for innovation, it is wired for survival. As a result, we are designed to perpetuate the past. What we have done in the past kept us alive; therefore, doing something different is viewed as risky. When you think about a topic frequently (e.g., your area of expertise), every solution you develop will be a derivative of what you have done in the past. Our past becomes our future. P: In the hospitality world, best practices are deemed important in order to be consistent, effective and efficient in serving guests. Yet, in your book, you said “best practices are stupid.” Why do you think so? S: Best practices are sometimes very useful, especially for areas like consistency and effectiveness. However, they will never help you differentiate your business. By definition, your differentiator has to be different than what others are offering. But for nondifferentiators, you can certainly learn from others, as long as you realize that what works for one company may not work for you. P: When people hear about companies doing innovative solutions, many often want to replicate it for their own business. But you said replication is never a good idea as an innovation strategy. Why do you say this? 3 Technologies to Better Innovate Shapiro turns the spotlight on technologies and solutions leveraged by companies to help them innovate. Internal collaborative technologies: Allow employees to provide solutions to critical needs or opportunities. United Services Automobile Association (USAA) is a company that does this exceptionally well. 1 2 3 External crowdsourcing: Enables companies to find solutions to challenges from people of all walks of life. Procter & Gamble and General Electric are two of the companies that do this well. Community building tools: Kimberly-Clark used a similar solution when they launched the Huggies MomsInspired Grant Program. It provided mothers financial support to develop products that will help other mothers. S: If you copy what others are doing, you are always playing a game of catch-up. By the time you implement a competitor’s best practice, your competing company is on to the next practice. As a result, you should avoid best practices for your differentiator. P: One of the things that could hold back many businesses from innovating is their fear of risks that often comes with being an industry trailblazer. What’s your advice to help business owners manage risks that may come with the practice of innovating? S: I am not a big fan of failure. I think it has been over-glorified by some (e.g., some say, “if we aren’t failing, we aren’t innovating”). But failure costs us a lot of time, money and, potentially damage our reputation. Instead, I prefer experimentation. Wellconstructed experiments are designed to test a hypothesis. If you disprove a hypothesis, it is not failure, it is highly desirable as you’ve eliminated an innovation that could have cost you time and money without achieving the desired results. n October 2016 ■ PULSE 55