Keynote-preview by Stephen Shapiro about practical innovation in organizations. Shapiro argues innovation changes lives and is everyone’s responsibility, but must be focused: define clear challenges, ask profound questions, and give teams structure rather than unbounded problems. He uses anecdotes (Houston airport baggage-claim redesign, cross-industry solutions like a pipeline-sealing idea inspired by a paper cut and a musician reducing chip fat with speakers) to show reframing and borrowing solutions from other disciplines can produce simple, effective innovations.
Chapters
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Steven Shapiro. Innovation. Yeah, it's about new products and making money, and that's all great, but look, it is about changing lives. It is the thing which is going to save our economy. The single greatest skill that is lacking inside of organizations is the ability to ask really good, profound questions. His clients include Staples, GE, NASA, BP, Johnson & Johnson, the US Air Force, Nestle, and Microsoft. Innovation is inside your organization, everyone's responsibility. And there's a lot of books that talk about that. But the issue I have with these books is they also say, innovate everywhere, and that's a mistake. My least favorite thing is this right here, baggage claim. And I love that. I was on the plane yesterday flying in on WestJet, and they were like, when you get to the baggage claim, we guarantee it'll take less than 20 minutes for your bags to arrive. Thinking, 20 minutes, that still feels like forever. So this is a picture of Houston Airport and what they found, and domestic flights are a little different than international, is that it took them. They were pretty efficient. It took them eight minutes. Eight minutes to get the bags there. And when they asked the passengers what is their biggest complaint about the airport, the number one complaint was baggage claim, how long it took to wait. So the way they've tried to improve this is they would ask themselves, how do we speed up the bags? How do we. And if you think about it, that requires conveyors and technologies and people. And it's expensive to get from eight minutes to seven minutes to six minutes. That's an expensive proposition. Then they had an epiphany. They realized it only takes the passengers one minute to get from the plane to the baggage claim. Instead of trying to make the bags go faster, they slowed down the passengers. They literally reconfigured the airport. So it now takes passengers eight minutes to get from the plane to. To the baggage claim, and their bags are waiting. And when customers were asked if they were happier, they were ecstatic. The question you ask and the way you frame it has a profound impact on your solutions. This one, everybody, I think, is guilty about this. And you say, bad idea. Think outside the box. Yes. Well, we say think outside the box, but in fact, what we find is that when we create unbounded situations, there's actually lower levels of creativity, partly because we create more noise. So if we define a good challenge, we can get people to rally. But counterintuitively, what happens is we actually imagine I gave you a blank sheet of paper and asked you to come up with some ideas. You're going to be stuck. But if I actually gave you some structure, you will now be able to develop things more quickly. So giving people some structure actually enhances innovation. Steven brought incredible energy and highly relevant messages that made it possible to rethink innovation. Expertise is the enemy of innovation. The more you know about something, the harder it is to think about something different. Steven is a great evangelist for innovation, gifted at simplifying complex principles so they are easily assimilated and put into practice. Is we're going to take cards and we're going to throw them all over the floor. You're going to have to get in your hands and knees to get the best cards. At the highest level. You have what I call differentiating capabilities. And these are the places where you innovate. His mandate to focus innovation relentlessly on well articulated problems has caused an internal shift in the mindset and approach for our innovators. Okay, we've got an important question. We know this is something we want to solve. This is our differentiator innovate where you differentiate. What I want you to consider is that maybe the best solutions to your challenges don't reside inside of aerospace, but they might be from other disciplines. Someone else may have already solved your challenges. Or consider engineers who have been working on ways to locate and seal cracks in gas pipelines. This has been an issue that has plagued the industry for years. One day, a Scottish engineer, while working on this problem, he gets a paper cut. And unlike most of us who would get annoyed, he was thrilled. He made a connection. He made a connection between the capillaries in his finger and, and the gas pipeline. And he developed an inert coagulation ingredient that went inside the gas pipelines and was able to seal the cracks. Again, it wasn't rocket science. Someone else, in this case the human body, had already solved this problem for him. Or consider a potato chip manufacturer who wanted to find a way of reducing the amount of fat in their potato chips. Now, the best solution didn't come from their laboratory. In fact, the best solution didn't come from any laboratory. In fact, it came from a guy who knows absolutely nothing about food production. It came from a musician. This musician realized that when he listens to loud music, he feels his bones rattle. And when he put a large loudspeaker over a conveyor belt of potato chips, he could actually see the fat in the potato chips drip off. That clearly was not rocket science. One of the things that really is so fascinating when it comes to innovation is this expression, think outside the box. You don't need to think outside the box. You just need to find a better box. You need to understand that the brain is not wired for innovation. The brain is wired for survival. Therefore, you can't assume anything, because there's a lot of things that you don't want to assume. For example, you don't want to assume that my cup here has water in it, because the reality is my cup doesn't have any water in it. But we just get fooled. To me, innovation is about thinking differently. And just like magic, magic, it's about trying to make the impossible.
