The Innovation Engine Podcast: Breakthrough Insights from Rowan Gibson – Part 3

This is a transcript and audio file from the popular podcast “The Innovation Engine”, hosted by Will Sherlin, featuring an interview with Rowan Gibson, author of “The Four Lenses of Innovation.” 

“Welcome to the Innovation Engine podcast, I’m Will Sherlin, and on this week’s episode, we’ll be looking at the 4 lenses of innovation – what the 4 lenses are and how they can be used to drive corporate innovation, and how they can be employed to emulate the mind of the innovator.

Here with us today to discuss all that and more is Rowan Gibson, a world-renowned innovation expert who has served as a keynote speaker on the subject of innovation in 60 countries around the world. Rowan is the internationally bestselling author of the forthcoming book The Four Lenses of Innovation. He has previously written two major books on corporate innovation and business strategy: Innovation to the Core and Rethinking the Future, which is published today in over 20 languages. Rowan is also the co-founder of Innovation Excellence.com, the most popular innovation website in the world, built by an international group of over 26,000 members from 175 countries. And if you’ve been a long-time listener of this podcast, you’ll remember him from the 13th episode of “The Innovation Engine,” when he talked about Building a Blueprint for Innovation.

You talk in the book about the importance of building an “all the time, everywhere” capability for innovation within a company. What do you think is the fundamental building block of establishing that kind of culture?

Well, first, you have to believe deep down that literally everyone has the potential to be an innovator, and that creative thinking can come from any part of the company – not just R&D or new product development or marketing, but also from the HR function, or Finance, or IT, or wherever else, including the janitors.

In fact, there are a lot of anecdotes about interesting innovations that were originally suggested by the janitor. One was the idea of putting elevators on the outside of buildings. That actually came from the janitor of a hotel in San Diego – the El Cortez – which became the first building in the world to put an elevator on the outside wall of the building. By the way, that’s an example of challenging orthodoxies, the first lens of innovation. Then there’s Flamin’ Hot Cheetos – you know, the chili-flavored Cheetos – which was an idea that came from a young Mexican janitor in one of the Frito-Lay plants. And that was a case of leveraging resources in new ways, which is the third lens of innovation. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos are now Frito-Lay’s biggest selling snack and one of the most successful snack products of all time.

So what’s fundamental to building an “all-the-time, everywhere” capability for innovation is this belief that there is creativity inside all of us, and that all we have to do is somehow unlock that ability to innovate? For too long, we have kind of venerated innovators as if they have some magical skill that we don’t have. But that’s simply not true. Creativity is part of what makes us human. All of us share the same basic DNA. So the starting point for turning a company into an innovation powerhouse is the belief that literally everyone, everywhere can develop the mind of the innovator. If we use the right environmental factors and we teach people to use the Four Lenses of Innovation, we can help them bring out their inner genius. In the next part we will get to know the power and danger of patterns.