Businesses looking to encourage a creative environment need to engage in ‘perpetual innovation’, says Carla Johnson.
US marketing expert Carla Johnson has a ready gauge to determine how prepared companies are to be creative and promote fresh ideas to help their customers. “I think there are two kinds of companies,” Johnson says. “There are companies that innovate, which are very much B2B companies. They have an amazing product, amazing service or whatever it is. They focus on tweaking that, iterating that, making sure it’s the best product it can be. Then there are companies that are innovative. They look at how they can serve their customers better. How can we remove complexity?
Author and speaker Carla Johnson
Innovation in action
Johnson believes businesses need to apply “perpetual innovation” principles to encourage creativity. The idea is based on people making the most of their innate curiosity and observational skills to adopt new ideas. Sometimes it’s about looking at what other businesses are doing – perhaps those in other industries or B2C – to see what works for them and why, and applying that to their specific situations. This isn’t an easy process, of course … especially for those who work at risk-averse businesses. “If we can use a process that makes new ideas and creativity feel familiar, then it will start to feel safe,” she says. “People start to let their guards down and become more open to new ideas.” Johnson says it’s not about marketers “cutting and pasting” ideas and applying them in the same way. It’s about finding the essence of an idea and making it work in a different environment. She cites the example of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, a global social media phenomenon in 2014 that raised awareness (and millions of dollars) for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neuron disease. “I’m not saying that this exact idea will work in a B2B environment,” Johnson says. “It’s about understanding the essence behind a great idea – the broader theme that worked. For ALS, it was about community and sharing. How do you take that idea as a B2B marketer and apply it in your world?” Johnson says innovative companies understand that any group within the organisation can generate successful ideas using this process. “I think we have such a tremendous opportunity as B2B marketers to bring more ideas into the work that we do that’s driven by customers,” she says. “It’s just that we don’t know how to bring those ideas in-house.” Success rides on whether employees feel they have the “right” to be idea generators, Johnson says. “How do we take an outside inspiration and put it into a process that’s familiar so that we can continually bring new ideas in? We need to learn how to understand the constraints within a particular environment that are a big part of whether a new idea will succeed. What are the things that can be so crushing and kill an idea?”Teaching curiosity
How can you teach marketers – or anyone in business – to be more curious? “You know, curiosity, whether it’s on a small scale or a big scale, is actually something that’s teachable,” Johnson says. “I would say curiosity starts with awareness. Think about young children. They’re insanely curious about the world around them. That’s why they continue to ask ‘why? why? why? why?’ … it drives us crazy. It’s just something that happens to us as we grow up that kills that. A big part is that as you go through life, you can’t question everything and be interested in everything all the time because you’d never get anything done. You’d still be at that toddler level of productivity.”“It’s about understanding how to bring ideas from the outside that are truly inspirational and bringing them insight in a way that makes them palatable.”Johnson says the problem is that we soon start filtering things according to our sense of their relevance. “But research shows the most innovative and creative people in the world don’t judge whether or not something has relevancy or importance,” she says. “They start by just being very, very good at observing the world around them. And the best way for us to do this as adults really is to practice.” Johnson admits that practising curiosity can be difficult in our high-paced, data-driven business lives. But she says it’s something you can do while queuing for your morning coffee. Why does the queue line up to the left? What are people doing to amuse themselves while waiting for their toast? How do the baristas do their latte art? “It’s really very much about raising our awareness and being present for 10 or 15 minutes a day,” she says. “We start to see patterns. Then we can start relating that to our own world.”