Managing innovation
If you want your employees to speak the same company language, Dufour says they have to get on the same page with regard to how
ideas are cultivated and processed.
When Dufour set about realigning American Air Liquide with its parent company at the start of the decade, he knew a successful innovation culture would be an integral part of the company’s long-term success. So he began spreading the word about innovation to emphasize its importance.
“It began in 2002 when we celebrated the company’s 100th anniversary,” he says. “We built these big display trailers and we went as a
giant caravan around the country. These caravans had a lot of the innovations we were trying.
“We made a big event of it, celebrating innovation as a concept. Then we pulled together people from the U.S. and Europe. That was
very much the start of us using innovation to bridge the gap.”
Once the pomp and circumstance was over, Dufour says it was time to form a definite plan.
Dufour decided the best way to innovate was to stay close to the end customers. Dufour says innovations that do not address a
specific customer need lack the problem-solving aspect that drives many creative people, and those ideas likely won’t take root
in the company at large. The ideas need to find solutions for specific customer problems and not simply be random concepts that
occur irrespective of what is going on in the outside world.
“You must stay close to your customers,” Dufour says. “You cannot innovate by yourself in an office or lab and just think about
these great ideas all the time. You have to align your mind with a specific client problem. That is the first and probably the most
important part.”
He says you also can’t go too far in the other direction. While a customer-generated innovation process is a necessary structure in many
businesses, clamping down too much on your employees’ freedom to create can also have an adverse effect.
Dufour calls them canned solutions — attempting to fit a customer’s need to a product or service you already provide, even
though the customer might be best served by heading back to the drawing board and coming up with an entirely new solution.
While you probably want efficiency with regard to how your employees deal with customers and with each other, Dufour says
that you can’t let efficiency rule to the point that it overshadows the innovation process, which can be decidedly inefficient at
times.
“Our management style of trying to find a solution instead of a canned product or service has been very useful,” he says.
“Sometimes, it’s not very efficient, but I think it’s a very necessary ingredient for an innovative culture because you’re leveraging the
minds of your people and not just having them work in a lab.”
Dufour says management must take an active role in the day-to-day supervision of the innovation process. A big part of that is the proactive promotion of innovation. If upper management is engaged in the process, he says, those below will quickly pick up on it and will
want to become actively involved.
At Air Liquide, the innovative spark has extended beyond the engineer and scientist ranks to include the company’s marketing arm.
“We’re very coherent about making innovation a central part of what we’re trying to do, and the interesting thing is that the innovation
has taken different forms,” Dufour says. “Of course, technical innovation is the traditional way to think about innovation. But we’ve
become innovative commercially — trying to find new ways to make our offers, new packages, new ways of presenting our offers.”
The final aspect of managing innovation is to incentivize. To build bridges between aspects of your company, Dufour says you must get
your employees interested in what you are interested in. If that is innovation, then reward employees who follow your lead and embrace
innovation.
“We proactively manage innovation,” he says. “We have innovation contests, we have a human resources system where we give people
alternate technical or managerial career paths. We reward people when they file a patent.”
Earlier this year, Dufour presented plaques at Air Liquide’s North American innovation awards ceremony, during which the company
rewards those who came up with the best ideas during the previous year.
“Those are the four things I think are extremely important to innovation,” Dufour says. “To manage it, to make it a very central and
important part of your strategy, to let people roam [creatively] within certain limits and to make sure you are very close to your customers.
“Those four things are essential. If you get three out of four, you’re average. If you get all four, you have a pretty good innovation culture.”
