I recently spoke at the Like Minds conference in London. One of the other speakers was Chris Moss. He was Chief Marketing Officer at Virgin Atlantic, CEO of 118118 and the creator of the Orange Brand. He told an interesting story about innovation at Virgin. In the early days of Virgin Atlantic they were seeking ways of improving the passenger experience.
The question he asked was, ‘We show movies but how can we make flying more like going to the cinema?’ One of the ideas that resulted was to serve ice creams. They asked the engineers how they could do this and were turned down flat – there were no freezers on aeroplanes. However, Moss persisted and they undertook a trial using frozen ice creams packed in dry ice. The trial was a disaster. The ice creams were rock hard and inedible. Undaunted they kept experimenting until they got the temperature right. Ice creams proved very popular and were an inexpensive but appealing differentiator.
It seems to me that there are some important lessons in this little story. Let’s break it down into innovation steps:
1. Ask a different question (how can we make flying more like the cinema?)
2. Select your best idea
3. The experts tell you all the reasons why it won’t work.
4. You find a way to try it anyway.
5. The trial fails
6. You learn from the failure and try again.
He also told about another innovative idea. They gave children little rucksacks with enough sweets to last the flight. Another disaster! Most children opened the rucksacks, scoffed all the candies immediately and then were sick.
Innovation involves trying an idea – and most really creative ideas don’t work first time.
Keep trying – like Virgin.
image credit: virginatlantic
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Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader and editor of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, both published by Kogan-Page.
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Good post which supports my experience that asking the right question is the hardest, yet most important thing when it comes to innovation. After defining the “windows of opportunity” I, togehter with my clients, create a lot of different questions from different perspectives, than I decide which is the one that brings us best possible results.
Or, as Albert Einstein once said: If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.