How to Breed an Innovative Business Idea — #11 of 31 Proven Skills [Research]

Skill #11: Copy by Observing Best Practice

While improving through experience and trial and error is certainly valuable, eventually the rate of improvement plateaus and progress becomes incremental or even stalls altogether. However, it is still possible to achieve breakthrough advances by isolating a critical activity and then finding someone who engages in that activity at a ‘best practice’ level. Studying what they do and copying it can be a very satisfying and rewarding initiative

Military Magic

During the 5th Century BC, the military strategist, Sun Tzu decreed that “All warfare is based on deception,” an assertion that he elaborated on convincingly in his masterpiece The Art of War. Then, and since then, misleading the enemy has been a primary preoccupation with those who are willingly or unwillingly engaged in military conflicts.

Fast-forward to a 2007 publication by the United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence, entitled the “Textbook of Political-Military Counterdeception”. In it, the authors note that in the 1970s, “conjurors had evolved theories and principles of deception and counter-deception that were substantially more advanced than currently used by political or military intelligence analysts”. This finding led to military surveillance organizations studying the skills of conjurors and magicians to become much better at this aspect of the somber art of warfare.

From my research into thousands of successful business ideas, I recognized the strategy at work here because it is one of 31 proven skills that can be employed intentionally to produce innovative solutions for problems typically encountered in business (or in other more serious pursuits).

Copying techniques are inherent in four skills:

· Skill #8: Copying by Observing People;

· Skill #9: Copying by Observing Things;

· Skill #10: Copying by Observing Yourself; and

· Skill 11: Copying by Observing Best Practice.

In discussing Skill #11: Copying by Observing Best Practice, we must acknowledge the important manner in which it differs from the other three skills. The latter contain a much greater element of chance because they rely upon a mental picture of the desired solution that is general only. When we employ one of them, we only have a broad impression of the competence needed to resolve our problem. An answer materializes when we happen upon a specific solution under the same broad competence that we have in mind and this causes us to innovate to a parallel solution.

A quick illustration. In the late 1940s, an American marketing executive, Edward Gelsthorpe quite randomly reflected upon the general ‘roll-on liquid’ ability of the ball in the recently invented ballpoint pen. He then saw another specific ‘roll-on liquid’ application, that of adding a ball to a dispenser to invent Roll-on Deodorant. This moving from a fortuitous general observation to a new specific application characterizes the first three ‘copying’ skills.

With the fourth, Copying by Observing Best Practice, we have a narrower, specific competence or capability in mind right from the start. As a result, we can then go looking for it quite purposefully, without awaiting a chance encounter that triggers it. In our earlier example, the military knew what competence they were deficient in (deception) and this led them to magicians and conjurers who were masters in exercising this capability.

Copying by Observing Best Practice is an extremely valuable alternative to progressive improvement based on in-house learning and experience. Success is achieved through locating an organization in another field for whom the identified competence or capability is critical and at which they are therefore experts. This includes those with parallel expertise in products or services in quite different industries and, as the story of the military copying from magicians demonstrates, in fields quite unrelated to our own.

Other Examples of Copying by Observing Best Practice*

There are many and varied examples of this particular ‘copying’ skill as this quick chronological run-through demonstrates:

· In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg, during the process of inventing the Printing Press, needed to know the frequency with which letters were used to estimate the amounts of each letterform. He studied the newspapers of the time (best practice in demonstrating the incidence of letters) to find the correct ratio of letters to hold;

· In 1896, to produce “La Boheme” (often thought to be his best opera), the much-celebrated composer Giacomo Puccini, worked with two poets to create a perfect libretto (text or words of an opera) in which music and words flowed beautifully like a conversation;

· In 2006, the Pediatric Intensive Care unit at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital got inspiration from a racing car pit crew. Seeking to improve their performance when confronted with the frequent chaos of rushed patient transitions in life-or-death circumstances, they studied the precisely sequenced performance of well-orchestrated Formula One racing car teams who flawlessly restore a race car to its full function in a matter of seconds. Translating the race car crew’s techniques into new hospital behaviors reduced delays and errors by more than 40%;

· In 2015, Etihad Airways introduced an apartment-style suite on its A380 aircraft, and seeking to provide unprecedented customer service to look after everything from booking to arrival at your destination, it arranged for its flight crews to undergo butler training at the London School of Hospitality in conjunction with the Savoy Hotel.

· In 2010, Groupon, the global e-commerce marketplace connecting subscribers with local merchants, used comedy writers to develop the most effective wording for pitching deals;

· In 2011, Vivint Solar was established as an American provider of solar energy generation systems, primarily for residential customers, and became successful mainly because of its door-to-door salesforce. The company was founded by a former Mormon missionary who turned his experience in knocking on doors into a sound business strategy.

· In 2016, Fortune business magazine quoted an ex-Hollywood actress but then a successful deal maker at Goldman Sachs, Kim Posnett, as saying “Doing a deal is all about telling a story. And how to tell a story, particularly someone else’s story, is something I learned from acting”;

Working in a familiar, local environment to improve operational processes through experience and trial and error is natural. However, taking all or part of a process out of its normal context and seeing it purely for what it is (i.e. a ‘unit of work’), can open up opportunities for breakthroughs by copying that expertise immediately and judiciously from another field entirely.

Takeaway

*Thousands of categorized, innovative business ideas can be found at Sebir.com