Pioneering inventor and innovator, Richard Browning, on how to accelerate a culture of innovation
As part of this year’s Civil Service ‘One Big Thing’ focus on Innovation, Richard Browning, founder of Gravity Industries, shares his top tips and insights for accelerating a culture of innovation.
How to innovate with impact
Richard sets out three key principles which are a must to enable innovation:
- Making failure recoverable
- Empowering frontline creativity
- Rewarding measured risk-taking
So, how does Richard recommend implementing this? Watch the short video below where Richard outlines his eight expert tips, and read them in full below the video where he shares spotlight cases to demonstrate the top tip in action.
Here are Richard’s expert eight tips on how to effectively innovate with impact.
1. Leadership commitment
Leaders at all levels have to not only passionately inspire their teams to innovate, but also demystify what innovation really means, and make it not only career-safe to do so, make it a career necessity. From the principles we are sharing on this series, you’ll see just how the failures and setbacks associated with innovation can be effectively managed leaving no excuse. Ironically, the biggest risk in most organisations is not innovating while all those around you are! So go inspire your people and give them that sense of urgency, that space and that support.
Spotlight Case Study:
In the early 1900s, Kodak is considered a leader in photography hardware and a household name to many. It was the creator of the first colour film and had a successful stream of marketing campaigns, creating an emotional connection with photography. It was also the creator of the world’s first digital camera. Despite its rapid rise in the market, during the late 1990s, Kodak didn’t see the benefits of investing further in digital photography hardware, focusing on more traditional film photography, causing it to fall behind other competitors who quickly adapted to the modernisation based on Kodak’s initial invention. By the time it had launched its digital camera to the mainstream market, it was no longer considered a leader in the industry.
2. Make it real
From my own experience leading innovative teams, I recommend including a dedicated ‘innovation space’ in your appraisal; whether it’s 5% or 20%. Innovation has to be an expectation vs an occasional or accidental nice-to-have. Fulfilling this objective should be defined as either originating an idea, or as a colleague or leader; what initiatives in the last 12 months have you supported that were new, unexpected, challenging or progressive where the easy option was to shut it down and say no. To accelerate that innovation culture you have to help your organisation feel the urgency and necessity.
Spotlight Case Study:
Google leads the way in creating an innovative culture by offering employees to take ‘20% time’. This equates to one day per week focused on a project outside of one’s role, which does not need to be related to their day-to-day work and often fuels innovation initiatives. Products such as Gmail have been born from this initiative!
3. Be clear what innovation really is
Innovation is the tough, setback-ridden road to creating a new product, service concept, or solution to a problem. Its starting point is either a new opportunity, or existing pain such as inefficiency, cost or competition. The origin of the resultant innovation is typically from open-minded individuals with a genuine desire to improve products, processes and services. To accelerate that innovation culture, innovation has to represent the urgent pathway to a brighter more prosperous future.
Spotlight Case Study:
Richard’s own company, Gravity Industries, creates jet packs which can help reduce rescue operations times by nearly 30 minutes compared to on the ground methods. An experiment run by Great North Air Ambulance service found some rescues could take as long as 90 seconds, with jet suits therefore creating huge potential for the healthcare industry and greater chance of saving lives in remote emergency situations. Mountain rescue teams can take up to 20 minutes to scale Helvellyn in the Lake District, however jet pack rescues can take 3 minutes for the same journey and can operate in environments where helicopter assistance cannot.
4. Demystify your innovation process
A truly innovative concept is likely to involve many failures on its way to success due to being, by-definition, new and untested. Hence why it’s critical to test the basic concept as quickly and cost-effectively as possible to then be able to learn, adapt and move one step closer to eventual breakthrough. Those initial setbacks also very frequently shine a light on unimaged insights that otherwise would have been hidden.
The crucial rule here is to make failure recoverable from a safety, reputation and financial perspective. If you think testing the concept risks hurting someone, breaking the law, or risking significant financial loss, I recommend moving on to the next idea. Otherwise, you can severely risk future progress. These are the core principles that we adhere to at Gravity Industries every day. Accelerating that culture of innovation should be about small, fast, exploratory steps that yield knowledge, on that pathway to major breakthrough.
Spotlight Case Study:
GCS encourages its members to feel empowered to rapidly adopt new technologies, with knowledge, ambition, and ethical values guiding the way. Providing there’s learnings to be taken from your innovations, remember to take managed risks and explore new ways of applying emerging technologies.
5. Identify the innovators
Everyone has a role to play in innovation. However, that doesn’t mean an organisation should try to teach everyone to be a maverick. In any population, there are often a small number of creative ‘disruptors’; individuals who need little in the way of encouragement to challenge the status quo.
Of far more importance is empowering the rest of an organisation to be the driving force behind those sparks of innovation where they emerge. This supportive culture has to encourage, celebrate and reward those mavericks, whilst embracing ‘recoverable failure’.
Almost every historic technological breakthrough, from utilising fire to the moon landings involved a minority of pioneering thinkers believing the impossible was achievable. Realising their ambition required that tolerant and supportive culture of those around them to really make it happen. Accelerating that innovation culture is only possible with that can-do culture.
6. Diversity is fuel
In my experience, a room full of people from a range of different backgrounds, professions and opinions will usually yield more powerful solutions to a problem; more so than a team of professionals in one specific field. The most innovative teams are those that recognise this diversity gap in their team, seek out missing views, especially from the frontline of an organisation, and relish disruptive, constructive challenges. To accelerate that culture of innovation you will succeed faster with open and diverse teams.
Spotlight Case Study:
A division of Google named ‘X’ focuses on what they have coined as ‘moonshot’ projects, which aim to tackle some of the biggest problems in the world by applying innovative methods. They bring together multidisciplinary teams to include diverse thoughts and backgrounds into these workstreams to tackle often knotty and unusual problems. Their work covers everything from worldwide access to electricity, ocean sustainability and even self-driving cars!
7. Look outside
There are big opportunities that exist between seemingly disconnected large corporations, SMEs, startups, academia and the public sector. Whichever camp you fall into, chances are that engaging with others will unearth new solutions to shared problems, or inspiration from these communities tackling a problem from a different perspective. Getting out there, reaching out speculatively, not being afraid to explore…these are all powerful fast-track pathways to accelerate a culture of innovation.
Spotlight Case Study:
Wearable technologies which have been widely used across the automotive industry for over 20 years have recently been applied in the maritime industry. Many companies have conducted research to understand how wearables could help reduce the amount of accidents occurring at sea due to crew fatigue. This was a technology previously used in the trucking industry, and has use cases across many different industries.
8. (Re-)embrace play
We are born with the instinct to play. Many children build outrageous Lego models, ignoring the instructions, unphased by repeated, crumbing setbacks before delighting parents with their creations.
It is usually through schooling and academia, and sometimes reinforced by traditional corporate etiquette, that we learn failure should be avoided at all costs. Whilst this approach is valuable in many circumstances, it can be a major barrier to the failure-ridden pathway necessary to deliver the step-changes from genuine innovation.
The good news is, that having resisted those societal pressures, mavericks will always be in our midst. To accelerate that culture of innovation, we just need to give them that space and support.