Seek ideas outside your company
The days of developing great new products or services exclusively
within your own four walls are fading fast.
“The new wave of R&D is to not do it all yourself but rather to have
core capabilities, and then to also have sophisticated ways of identifying, acquiring, supporting and bringing back ideas from others,”
Kohrt says. “It’s an R&D network.”
That doesn’t mean you have to give away or farm out all your potentially great concepts. But being able to brainstorm with other individuals and organizations, whether they’re across the street or two
continents away, can help you develop better solutions more quickly.
“It’s hard to go outside your own company,” Kohrt says. “It takes different people and different management. You can’t just take the same
people who have done it internally forever and now expect them to
be effective doing it externally without some help.”
Kohrt suggests seeking out workers to lead up R&D networking who are naturally curious, good communicators and open-minded
about where they look for potential ideas.
“They have to have fairly eclectic taste because the easy thing to do
is to always look at the world through the same filter,” Kohrt says.
“They really need to be able to envision outside their experience base
and have a willingness to engage with people where they don’t know
as much as the other person does. You have to strongly value — and
demand — individual expertise and excellence but also seek horizontal networks across disciplines and across cultures.
“Can you value what others have done without judging? Because
there’s a lot of different ways of accomplishing the same thing. Some
of those ways are not best done by how you do it in Columbus.”
Look, for example, at water purification.
“We’re used to an infrastructure here that others don’t have in India,
Bangladesh or other parts of the developing world,” Kohrt says. “So
proposed solutions for purifying water there can’t follow the usual formula.
“How do you do that in a town that has no electricity and shallow
wells? Solving that problem there may give you a simpler solution for
solving it here.”
Case in point: hand-cranked radios and lights. Kohrt says this technology was first developed for use in African villages without electricity, but it has caught on in the United States, as well.
“I’ve got a hand-cranked radio down in my basement and one of
those flashlights that you shake in every car,” he says. “It’s actually a
fairly interesting market. Was there an impetus for us to do that
here? No. But working in other cultures gives you opportunities to
be innovative about how you look at a problem.”