February 9, 2006
Invasion of the alien idea snatchers
In its daily scan of interesting innovation stories, Innovation Weblog points to a blog post from Oren Harari, co-author of the book Jumping the Curve. In an essay called Team Up With Aliens, Harari points out that sometimes the best way to “out-innovate your competitors and delight your customers” is to look outside your industry and collaborate with outsiders (i.e. “aliens”):
“If you want to break from the pack, doesn’t it make sense to seek ideas and energies from outside the pack? One of the best ways to do that is to learn from people and organizations who have thrived outside your industry, particularly those who are doing things that would be considered unthinkable and insane in your industry.
If you want to improve assembly line conversion in your factories, for example, you could benchmark fellow manufacturers in your industry and get some marginally useful, conventional ideas. Or you could do what General Mills did a few years ago, which is send a number of its factory teams to NASCAR races to benchmark pit crews in action. The teams came back and ultimately reduced the time to switch an assembly line from 5 hours to 25 minutes.
If you run a cement company and want to show quantum improvement in speed and on-time delivery, you could visit fellow cement manufacturers and get a familiar lesson in accepted industry practices. Or you could do what Cemex, the most profitable cement company in the world, did a few years ago to turbo-charge speed and delivery . CEO Lorenzo Zambrano sent a number of teams to Houston, to figure out how Houston’s emergency 911 crews does it, and to Memphis, to figure out how how FedEx does it.”
