Create an idea culture
For innovation to be at your company’s core, it must be a constant part of your culture.
“I don’t think you can have a meeting every Monday morning and say, ‘Let’s be entrepreneurial. Here’s your hour to be innovative,’” Faulkner says. “It’s about building that into the culture. We have formal presentations, but people here are thinking of things all the time.”
The key is having an open environment where employees can share their ideas. Pelican has what they call a Blue Sky committee. Every month, representatives from each discipline in the company — from finance, R&D and sales to marketing and manufacturing — come together as a sounding board. Anyone in the company can bring ideas to them, whether as a sketch, a sample or simply a concept.
“They may be traveling with a customer. They may be looking at our products in use with an end market. They may like some other idea they’ve seen that’s an offshoot,” Faulkner says. “They’ll come back to us and say, ‘I really think we should be doing this,’ and we take it very seriously. No idea is stupid; no idea is out of bounds.”
Ideas don’t have to follow a tightly prescribed track. It’s not just products that come out of the Blue Sky. For example, someone once suggested a leasing option for cost-restricted clients who use several cases.
Because each product launch could cost Pelican millions of dollars, it has to be smart about which ideas to pursue.
Sometimes, that’s fairly simple.
“There are some easy ones where a customer comes to us and we can categorically recognize the commercial impact of a particular idea,” Faulkner says. “For those, they’re sort of no-brainers. There’s significantly less risk for us to take on. … To the extent the idea is coming from a customer or, like in the case of the police light, there’s a known large order at the end of the rainbow, then that’s a pretty straightforward call.”
Obviously, those aren’t the only calls you’ll make. Some require more background work, like conducting market research and running calculations.
Pelican’s assessment starts with a look at related technologies and products that already exist in the marketplace.
“We would do an assessment then to whether we think we could bring something better than what’s out there,” Faulkner says. “To the extent that we can build a better mousetrap for a particular market, we might talk to some customers. We might go and do some market research on who’s buying the sort of products that are out there. We would try and gauge the size of the market. Obviously, with the cost of bringing this stuff to market, you want to make sure there’s a scale of markets that you can be successful in.”
Pelican’s fastest-growing product line — remote area lighting — didn’t come from a customer with a guarantee of orders. It came from a good idea within the organization.
Of course, you won’t win every time, but that’s the reality of taking risks for the sake of innovation. The key is giving all ideas a chance, which encourages the flow to continue.
“When you’re doing lots of innovation, it comes with the territory that not everything you do will be a success every time,” Faulkner says. “And you know, that’s OK.”
