- Contrary to what many people believe,
Henry Ford did not invent the modern automobile.
That honor belongs to Karl Benz from Germany.
But Ford was the first to think of making cars
inexpensive enough to be a mass market item.
What was his solution?
Make cars on an assembly line.
And how did Henry Ford stumble upon this idea?
By visiting meat packing assembly lines.
The Ford Motor story illustrates how powerful innovations
can emerge from novel combinations
of two or more existing ideas.
Automobile manufacturing and assembly lines for meat packing
were both preexisting ideas.
Henry Ford realized that these two disparate ideas
could be combined to create something entirely new
and different.
Innovations resulting from novel combinations
are all around us.
From low tech to high tech.
Look at the extremely useful sand paper
which came out of gluing sand, a hard to handle abrasive,
onto paper, which is easy to manipulate.
What about post-it notes?
The result of attaching a weak adhesive
onto pieces of paper.
Or consider the electric toothbrush.
The outcome of putting batteries inside a toothbrush.
And what about the mighty smartphone?
The integration of a computer and a mobile phone.
Novel combinations of existing ideas are the engine
that churns out a never ending stream of innovations.
The old ideas of today can be combined in novel ways
to yield a host of new ideas
and the process keeps feeding on itself.
Let's take a look at several ways
in which you can boost the ability of your organization
to become smarter at generating innovations
by combining existing ideas in novel ways.
First and foremost, avoid silos.
Try fostering a culture of collaboration within your company
along with relevant outsiders.
You don't want marketing folks to speak primarily
to other marketing people within the company.
This approach is a first class recipe
for navel-gazing and groupthink.
What about laying down a policy that anybody
who wants to become a business unit general manager
must have worked in at least two functional areas
for two or mores.
The CEO of a very successful technology company
whom I know, requires his R and D people to spend
about 10% of their time in marketing and sales
and vice versa.
His logic minimized the chance of premature self censoring.
Otherwise, R and D may conclude too early
that a new technical idea has no market relevance.
Or marketing may conclude prematurely
that a new market need is technically infeasible.
Another way to increase the likelihood of novel combinations
is to create virtual or in person forums
that allow people across business units, geographies,
disparate technologies to learn about what others are up to
and how collaboration might help.
3M Corporation routinely organizes internal innovation fairs
where different labs showcase their technologies.
People across business units can then explore
what may be relevant for their own product lines.
Google has created a similar mechanism
on its company intranet.
Any Googler can post an idea they're excited about
and where they need help.
Any colleague can see these queries
and jump into help if they can.
Finally, create ongoing learning expeditions
that pose people to venture outside the company.
These learning expeditions could be visits
to innovation hotspots, such as Boston or Silicon Valley.
Or they could be trips to emerging market hotspots
such as Beijing, or Shanghai or Bangalore.
Or even to traditional companies
that are doing a phenomenal job at morphing themselves
for the digital age, such as GE, Walmart
and the Washington Post.
The magic of novel combinations is that old ideas
may never really become old if you can combine two
or more of them in unexpected ways
to create something nobody had ever dreamed of.