The Power of Informal Collaboration: The Secret Sauce for Innovation
How internal collaboration can drive success in innovation
There is a little restaurant in Paris called Le Relais de l’Entrecôte, in a pedestrian neighborhood of the busy Saint-Germain area. L’Entrecôte is a family-run restaurant, serving only steak and fries. You would not make much of it if it were not for their secret sauce.
Somehow, their secret sauce has a unique flavor, and is, on itself, a reason to visit the restaurant. There are always queues of enthusiast customers waiting in line outside the restaurant: the secret sauce has been the source of the success for L’ Entrecôte for almost 100 years.
Not all restaurants have their secret sauce; this raises an interesting comparison to the innovation sector: do companies have a secret sauce? Does it really make that much difference between success and failure?
But first and foremost, if innovation had a secret sauce, what would that be?
Coming up with new inventions and innovations has not always been easy. Being an innovator in Europe in the 1600s would cost you your ears and get you in prison for life.
According to the scholar Benoît Godin, innovators were known as troublemakers, rebels, and deviants. Nevertheless, the first-ever patent for an invention was granted in 1421 for a hoisting mechanism. It then took a few centuries before countries began to standardize their patent system. The US issued its #1 patent in 1790 to Samuel Hopkins, for an improved method of producing Potassium Carbonate as fertilizer. With time, more and more patents have been granted, with more than 10 million US patents being issued by 2018. However, a staggering 95% of currently active US patents fail to be commercialized.
Innovation is defined as
Whichever way you define innovation, you will probably end up with a simple dualism of elements:
Innovation = Invention (or discovery)+ Industrialization (or commercialization).
When MIT created the Media Lab back in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte, its simple motto was “DEMO or DIE”.
It was all about the grand ideas, early demonstrations, prototypes, and proofs of concept, but yet focused on the first aspect of innovation: invention.
Take the example of drug development in the pharmaceutical industry, where on average 10,000 pre-discovery compounds lead to only 1 successful FDA approved drug for large scale manufacturing. The rigorous process of clinical trials is long and strenuous and can take up to 10 years.
While the process of invention, novelty, design-thinking, and prototyping is extremely challenging on its own, for the invention to be successful businesses and corporations have to proceed to the second phase: industrialization.
A lot of companies still put more emphasis on generating big ideas and blue sky research than how to execute them. The brainstorming, seating, and inventing phase is fun and creative, but without execution (or industrialization), big ideas will only remain as such.
Let us take as an example the self-driving Google car that disrupted the whole automotive industry when it was first announced in 2009. It was a demo, a prototype, a game-changer in the invention stage, and yet 10 years on, it still has not yet reached the end customer. Only in December 2018, Waymo (still owned by Google) launched its first self-driving service Waymo One, which is the closest the customer can get to a self-driving car. This is not to underestimate the complexity of self-driving technology (nor to question Google focus on innovation), but arguably, any invention that fails to go through the industrialization phase was somewhat useless.
How should leaders maximize innovation for the benefit of their company?
Perhaps this is why Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, in 2014 changed the motto to “DEPLOY or DIE” stressing the emphasis on the industrialization part of innovation.
It is of utmost importance to align the whole team towards the same vision of Innovation as a combination of Invention + Industrialization. While invention could be done alone or through a self-sufficient team, industrialization, on the other hand, requires collaboration and coordination between different departments — e.g. marketing, engineering, and sales. However, the type of collaboration needed here is less about the number of meetings, emails, and paperwork — so-called formal collaboration. Too often, it can be limiting, since it is often restricted by office etiquette, group-thinking, and time pressure.
Instead, what could be far more effective informal collaboration: the secret sauce of innovation. Why so? It can speed up iterations, provide fast and honest feedback, and connect to a wider audience to help expedite the industrialization of a good idea. A piece of whole-hearted advice for anyone is to go beyond your immediate team, get out of your comfort zone, and start increasing informal collaboration with cross-functional teams at all levels — the feedback you will gather will provide you with different perspectives, depending on the contributions, thus providing a much broader frame of reference to guide innovation in a faster and somewhat informal way.
To sum it up:
- Innovation is made up of two halves: invention and industrialization
- It’s easy to get lost in the excitement of invention but keep your focus on industrialization too
- Collaboration is paramount in delivering industrialization but informal collaboration is the secret sauce
What is your personal recipe for innovation?
Note: L’Entrecote’s famous secret sauce was created in the 1930s by Mr. Boubier, owner of Restaurant du Coq d’Or in Geneva, for the pleasure of his customers. It was an original butter sauce mixed with herbs, white Dijon mustard, and other ingredients. The Boubiers then taught the sauce to their son-in-law Arthur-Francois Dumont who created the Le Relais de L’Entrecote restaurant. The recipe of the sauce remained a secret until Le Monde newspaper wrote an article about it in 2007.
