Cronutivity
What the cronut can teach us about innovation
In case you haven’t heard - in which case, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Alaska? Timbuktu? Anywhere that isn’t New York or Twitter? - the cronut is a new kind of pastry that has caused an outbreak of mass insanity on the streets of New York (OK, I grant you, it doesn’t take much…).
So named because it’s a donut made from croissant dough, the cronut was invented by Dominique Ansel at his bakery in Soho. This wonder product went on sale less than a month ago and has already become a national and international sensation.
Ansel’s cronuts sell for five dollars, or eight times that on eBay and Craigslist (yes, seriously). Queues form at 6am every day outside Ansel’s bakery. Anderson Cooper and Hugh Jackman are said to be prepared to kill for them. New York’s ultimate status symbol is no longer a pair of Prada shoes or an appointment with Anna Wintour but a box of these floaty flaky doughy jammy beauties.
Any business or creative worker can learn lessons about successful innovation from the story of the cronut. Here are four I’ve drawn; you may have others.
- Innovation is combinatorial. This is the first rule of new ideas. They don’t come from nowhere, but from combinations of existing concepts. David Hume, philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, remarked that there is nothing particularly interesting about the idea of a mountain, or the idea of gold. But a gold mountain? Now you have something. This is the basic move of the creative mind: take two familiar things and combine them to create an unfamiliar but strangely compelling hybrid. In this case it was a donut and a croissant; in the past it’s been folk music and electric rock, computer technology and counter-cultural cool, a straw and a screw, and many, many more.
- Copy It Your Way. Ansel set out to copy the American doughnut, but being French, found it impossible to do so faithfully. So he did it his way, and the result was the cronut. We sometimes think that every great idea must start with an original thought. That’s not so. First - as we’ve seen - new ideas are made up of older ideas. Second, great new ideas, art or innovation often start with copying. When the copies are filtered through a unique sensibility or culture, they become something new. I sometimes call this the Rubber Soul principle. When The Beatles recorded their 1965 album of that name, they thought they were ripping off the soul music coming out of Detroit and Memphis they were listening to at the time; hence the title. But because this influence was filtered through their collective sensibility (and genius), it came out sounding only a little like Motown, and a lot like The Beatles.
- Execution is all. It’s not enough to just jam any two ideas together and hope for the best (even when, as with the cronut, jam is a key component). It’s not even enough to have a truly great idea. The thing that really counts is to make the great idea real. Ansel took months perfecting the cronut, getting the details - the flaky pastry, the creamy icing, the shiny glaze - just right. Only when he was satisfied with it did he unleash it on the world. Steve Jobs used to say that “ideas are worth nothing unless executed.” Of course, even when executed they may still be worth nothing. But as Jobs said, to think that having the great idea means 90% of the work is done is not only wrong but dangerous (he called it “a disease”). Picasso made over seven hundred sketches of his breakthrough painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, experimenting and refining until he settled on something he knew was great. The idea isn’t the magical part, made real by the dull process of execution. The magic is in the process.
- Great Ideas Are Purpose-Driven. Rival bakeries have been frantically trying to recreate the cronut or create competitive products, with meagre results to date (although the wonderful thing about truly great ideas is that they aren’t in a zero-sum game - they spawn complementary innovations as well as direct competitors). Giant companies are circling Ansel, their corporate maws moist with anticipation. But so far, Ansel isn’t biting, or being bit. He isn’t out to create a new business. He just likes making delicious things to a very high standard, and he refuses point blank to compromise on quality for the sake of mass production and a truckload of dollars. Ansel started working on the cronut because he wanted to make something his staff would enjoy. The many hours he spent improving it came from an inner sense of purpose, not from an extrinsic dream of reward. This ardour for something bigger than profit underpins great innovation. Here’s why: making new ideas a reality takes a great deal of effort,as we’ve seen, which requires motivation to keep on trying and failing and trying and failing, which requires a deep and binding belief that what you are doing is worthwhile. If all you care about is keeping your job or making more money you are, frankly, unlikely to have that profound motivation, and therefore less likely to see your great idea through to the end result.
Ansel isn’t even prepared to raise the cronut’s price. He says that some things are more important than tracking the intersection of supply and demand: “It’s simple: I wouldn’t want to go to a bakery that takes advantage of me and has a large mark-up on a hot item. I don’t want to be that bakery…The laws of ethics trump those of economics for me.”
Isn’t that inspiring? Congratulations to M. Ansel. All hail the cronut.
