It's time to ask better questions.

An inherent obstacle to innovation is the context, culture, history and assumptions of a current process or business. Sometimes the harder someone works on a problem, the more elusive the solution becomes. Every once in a while, the person who has the most experience can solve a problem, but only if they don't respect their own experience. Some are able to question their own past success, but they are very rare people.

Quite often, there is a need for someone with less experience to look at a problem - someone who can see it for the first time, has little knowledge of the existing orthodoxies and can blithely question the most fundamental assumptions of success. Someone needs to bump the record player when the needle is stuck, but who can do that?

1. It can be helped by an external innovation expert - usually a consultant or coach who can look at the problem from the outside, bring in new insights from customers, or help guide internal teams through a process to see a problem and solution for the first time. They can ask questions for you.
   
2. Your competitors can do it for you. Usually, innovations are developed by new and unexpected competitors that have no respect for the past - they are able to ask, "Why are things done the way they are? Can't we do it differently and make it better?"
   
3. Your own employees can come up with innovations. But they usually need good questions to answer.

In order to understand better how organizations can improve innovation, let's look at each of these three methods.

1. Innovation Consultants

There are a great number of good consultants that can help organizations innovate - each with their own areas of focus and processes for stimulating innovation and commercialization of new ideas. It would be impossible to characterize them all at this point - but there is an interesting commonality: they all ask questions.

Whether consultants are questioning employees, competitors or customers, they are working to discover key aspects of the value chain, products, services and processes that can be fixed or changed in some way. Once the opportunity is identified, they are able to recommend solutions, test and refine them with customers, then commercialize.

The innovations themselves do not occur in a vacuum. Innovation consultants don't just come up with a good idea - they come up with questions that they either answer themselves or have answered by customers and employees.

How often does a public speaker give an average or sub-par presentation followed by a question and answer session where they become interesting or even dynamic?


It is an interesting phenomenon. No matter how little creativity or originality someone possesses or however ill-prepared they may be, when they are asked a good question, they can provide a good answer. This may be the result of an educational system that emphasizes answering questions, or it may be a more fundamental survival mechanism where human beings are hard-wired to solve immediate problems such as if there is no food, figure out how to get food.


However, if a problem is unclear, ill-defined, or not immediate - it becomes much more difficult to solve. That's why experienced speakers tend to prepare by developing un-spoken questions that they can then answer in their prepared remarks. They make the problem of: "give a good speech" more clear, defined and immediate by changing the problem to, "answer this question".


The same dynamic occurs when trying to prompt innovation. In a way, consultants are the motivational speakers of innovation. Isn't it curious that most innovation consultants are also persuasive presenters?


2. Competition


The very act of competing can force one to question the status quo, especially when the competitor is far from being the dominant player. The small competitor, in order to survive, must challenge reigning orthodoxies - otherwise they will be crushed by dominant players' resources.


No one could reasonably compete with Xerox's domination of big business copying - until Canon questioned the format, the price model, the sales channel - even the customer target and transformed the entire industry (becoming the number 1 seller of copiers in the process).


United and American Airlines defined what a commercial airline was - how to make money, how to operate their business, how to talk with their customers...until start-up Southwest Airlines questioned everything from ticketing procedures to boarding to meal service. Instead of asking themselves how to become the number 1 airline, they asked how they could get another round trip out of every airplane per day, how to better incent their employees for customer service, how to appeal to customers who rarely fly...and in the process they became the most profitable airline in the history of aviation.


The innovation advantage may very well go to the new entrant. It almost seems easier to challenge what one doesn't have in the first place. What do they have to lose? Unfortunately, small companies can lose everything if they are wrong. But if they succeed, they can often transform their industry. That's why many larger companies like GE, IBM, Microsoft and Google tend to acquire small companies and their innovative products once they have been proven successful. In effect, they've "outsourced" their innovation to smaller start ups.


As Xerox, United Airlines, General Motors and many others have discovered, however, it is somewhat risky to leave innovation to the competition.


3. Employee Innovation

When you ask a team of people the right question, it's amazing what they can come up with. An inspiring story about how teams can innovate comes from the experiences of Apollo 13. When flight director Gene Kranz needed to help the stranded astronauts build an improvised air filter, he assembled a group of engineers, presented the problem, made clear what the stakes were, presented all the items the astronauts had on board the capsule, then told them to come up with a solution. He asked a better question. He made the challenge specific.


When GE's jet engine unit asked customers about the repair of their jet engines and showed them how they were repairing those engines faster than ever - their customers told them something to the effect of, "I don't care how fast you repair the engines, I'm still not able to fly the plane until it gets back on the plane." The team of engineers at GE realized that they could probably deliver a faster turnaround if, instead of shipping the engine to the factory they brought the factory to the plane. By getting a specific challenge from their customers, they went from simply working faster to working smarter.


There are many innovation programs and initiatives going on inside organizations to encourage this kind of employee problem solving, but too often they don't deliver real innovation. They seem to ask too broad a question - something like, "how can we make our company number 1?" or "how can we reduce costs and increase revenues?", or even worse, "how can we become more innovative?" There seems to be too much of an emphasis on open brainstorming or collection of ideas and best practices. It is still possible to innovate without specific and immediate problems to solve, but it can be difficult at best. At worst, these kinds of programs either lead to small adjustments or to innovations that don't really matter to anyone beyond a very small interest group.


There is a better model to encourage innovation. Instead of asking for best practices, companies should learn to ask their employees specific questions - then reward anyone who answers them well. This process has been proven to yield incredible results.


In 1919, Raymond Orteig offered $25,000 to the first pilot who could fly non-stop between New York and Paris. There were no restrictions of how that pilot could develop his or her plane, how they flew it, or who financed them. A great number of entrepreneurs, pilots and engineers tried to answer this question. They used any number of strategies and designs, but ultimately, the innovation that helped create the $300 billion commercial aviation industry didn't come from a known organization or blue chip company. None of the airplane manufactures drove the innovation. Instead an unknown airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh, experimenting with a simple plane design and powerful single engine, made the trip alone in 1927.


Recently, the X-Prize Foundation offered $10 million to whomever develops a production ready, reasonably priced car that gets the equivalent of 100 miles to the gallon and that can win a multi-day staged race across the country in the summer of 2010. A very specific, immediate question that will likely lead to the next blockbuster efficient car in the US. The industry has spent far more than $10 million trying to deliver this kind of innovation, but I won't be surprised if this investment will lead to a far greater breakthrough than GM or Chrysler could ever manage.

Beyond the X-Prize, there are a good number of organizations such as NASA, Google, Netflix and the Department of Defense who are asking questions and offering prizes to anyone who can answer them. They have found that asking a simple, direct and immediate question along with a financial incentive for whomever is willing and able to answer it, yields surprising innovation, productivity and speed to market all at a fraction of the cost of traditional R&D.

The impossible can become commonplace because someone asks the right question.

Therefore, a more effective innovation program inside companies would not ask for best practices or innovation ideas, it would ask simple questions and incent anyone and everyone to answer them.