BOOK SUMMARY 330
Not
Invented Here
·
Summary
written by: Jean-Marie
Buchilly
"What can a hospital learn from a hotel? What can a car
manufacturer learn from the video game industry? What can a chemical company
learn from a festival organizer?"
- Not Invented Here, page 12
Not
Invented Here by Ramon Vullings and Marc Heleven is an inspirational
book about the way to draw analogies and transfer approaches between
contexts, beyond the borders of our own industry, sector, area, or domain.
The
authors are two cross-industry innovation experts and training facilitators.
They help companies to look beyond the borders of their domain to innovate in a
smarter way. They believe there are positive alternatives to many of the
challenges we face and that more elegant solutions already exist somewhere
else, yet they are not recognized as a possibility. In Not
Invented Here, they invite us on a quest called cross-industry
innovation in which we will learn not only to think outside the box
but mostly outside our own industry.
The
book is a very well designed visual tool with lots of short sentences and
pictures, and can be read chapter by chapter or even in a random way in order
to maximize inspiration in the moment.
The
Golden Egg
Someone
Else Has Solved Your Problem
"No
one lives long enough to learn everything by starting from scratch."- Not
Invented Here, page 56
When
people encounter an obvious solution to a problem, or meet an entrepreneur who
came up with a brilliant new value proposition, they often think to themselves,
“why didn’t I think of that before?” In the same vein, someone else has
most likely been working on a challenge similar to whatever we are facing.
There
could be a not invented here syndrome that blinds us from
seeing the way people addressed the situation in another context, but the key
is to find this other person and steal like a great artist (to use the words of
Picasso).
The
books provides many examples. If your challenge is to build smaller yet more
multi-functional teams, you can discover insights by looking at how a submarine
crew works together. If your challenge is to build a better hospital experience
for children, you can get inspiration from amusement parks. And if your challenge
is to optimize maintenance costs versus risk management, why not check what
best practices low-cost airlines are using?
As you
can see through these few examples, this way of proceeding goes beyond the
product itself and covers the entire spectrum, from the operational
organization to the customer experience.
When
looking for inspiration, we tend to limit ourselves to our own knowledge, our
team’s knowledge, our company’s knowledge, and our industry knowledge.
The fact is that there are three others that can give us a complementary and
different vision if we seize the opportunity to explore them: non-competitive
industries knowledge, all knowledge, and the unknown.
As we
can only connect the dots that we collect, a good way to proceed is to
use our knowledge network. Social media and open innovation platforms are the
most common tools. We can ask a question on Twitter using the hashtag #daretoask or
join LinkedIn groups from other industries that inspire us. We should also look
for experts in our own organization—you might be amazed to discover untapped
expertise, as people usually don’t ask enough questions.
And if
you need to be convinced that such a way of thinking can lead to great results,
remember that Owen Maclaren—a retired aeronautical engineer and test pilot who
worked on the Spitfire—developed the first foldable lightweight baby buggy
using the concept of an airplane’s retractable landing gear.
Gem #1
Remix
your Industry
"No
candle maker has become a bulb manufacturer, no carriage maker has become a car
manufacturer and the post office did not invent email."- Not Invented
Here, page 177
The
authors have identified 9 ways to disrupt our industries:
·
Make shortcuts
·
Challenge existing rules & regulations
·
Reduce complexity dramatically
·
Combine various types of innovation
·
Remove one crucial element
·
Cut prices by 90% or more
·
Do the opposite
·
Do impossible things
·
Blend and navigate business models
The
idea behind is to disrupt our industry, or better…disrupt another industry.
As an
example, challenging the existing rules and regulations is what Uber and Airbnb
are doing. Some competitors complain, but there is chance that some rules will
not survive, the original ideas behind the taxi and hotel industries become
more obsolete. The best way to survive is to adapt.
Removing
one apparently central element is another way to challenge the way we do things
in a specific industry. Cirque du Soleil removed the animals, Dyson removed the
bag in the vacuum cleaner and self-driving cars will not have steering wheel
anymore. It sounds strange in a first approach, but it allows you to redefine
the value proposition and add some differentiation.
Blending
business models is another way to disrupt an industry. Airbnb business model
applied to cars produces BlaBlaCar. We can also imagine the IKEA for road
construction or the Uber for pizza delivery.
All
these ideas are inspiring ways of disrupting an industry without necessarily
changing the product. If we don’t think about ways to disrupt our own
industries, we are vulnerable to competitors thinking ahead of us.
Gem #2
The Art
of Questioning
"For
cross-industry innovation we wish to create organizations which have a culture
of inquiry. Therefore, we need people to ask more powerful questions."- Not
Invented Here, page 39
Cross-industry
innovation starts with asking more and better questions. Powerful questions are
thought-provoking and have the power to surface underlying assumptions. Below
are some beautiful ones:
Why
don’t rules have expiry dates? Why do they give you a Jaguar for a test drive
but you can’t sleep in a house you want to buy? Why can I buy advertising space
per centimetre yet I can’t buy variable leg room in an airplane?
Beautiful
questions include common features. They refuse to accept the current reality,
invite outsiders to ask questions about our work and our industry, imagine
perfect situations and challenge everything.
The
initial question is a good start. Then we have to transcend it and ask “why?”
or “what is the purpose?” which will bring us to a higher level of
conceptualization. From this helicopter view, one can move sideways and
redefine the question in a cross-industry way, and think about the way other
industries addressed similar questions and implemented solutions already.
Asking
questions is the best way to learn, and inquiry enables us to organize our
thinking around what we don’t know. This is the way to great discoveries.
This
book particularly makes sense when used in a workshop or other group
setting. Indeed, I’ve found it more useful to consult when I’m seeking
inspiration, as opposed to reading it straight through.
I am
using it right now with a group of more than twenty people in order to build an
open innovation program in a company and this is the right tool to stimulate
the group’s creativity.
There
are some prerequisites in order to be able to use it with maximum efficiency.
You first need to build a safe place in which everybody can express their
thoughts and ideas as crazy as they would be without fearing criticism or
judgment. Second, open mindedness is a required attitude for all participants.
Once both conditions are in place, there are no reason that this book could not
allow you to skyrocket the creativity of the whole team.
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