Ep. 220 - Scott Anthony, Co-Author of Eat, Sleep, Innovate & Senior Partner at Innosight, on Creating a Culture of Innovation

Inside Outside

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Scott Anthony. Scott is a senior partner at Innosight and co-author of the new book called Eat, Sleep, Innovate. Scott and I talk about the challenges of creating a culture of innovation, as well as some of the behaviors and actions required to drive innovation success. Let's get started.

Inside Outside innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends and collaborative innovation.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of inside, outside innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Coming to us all the way from Singapore today is Scott Anthony. Scott is a senior partner at Innosight and co-author of the new book called Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to make creativity an everyday habit inside your organization. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Anthony: Brian, it is a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you on the show. You are a prolific author, speaker, consultant, in this world of innovation. So, it's really nice to sit down virtually across the ocean and talk to you more about some of the new stuff that you're working on. I always like to ask folks who've been in this space a long time, and you've written a lot of books and talked about this particular topic. Why did you decide to write another book on innovation and why this book now?

Scott Anthony: The origin story of this book really traces back about five, six years ago. So just by background, our organization Innosight was co-founded by the late great Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christianson. So, for the last 20 years, we've been trying to empower forward thinking organizations to navigate disruptive change and own the future.

And most of the work that we've done is focused on helping businesses, identify and launch new disruptive products, come up with board facing growth strategies, build deep organizational capabilities and so on. So, it's been, you know, pretty big picture, strategic stuff. Then about five years ago, I was doing a session with a big logistics company. And the CEO said, I've read all the books. I understand what I have to do separate organization, but we've done all that. We've got 28,000 other people. What do we do with them?

And I thought that's a really good question and we didn't really have a really good answer to it. So, over the last few years, we've had a chance to just probate it through various client projects. And now I think we've got a pretty good answer to that question. And that's why we wrote the book

Brian Ardinger: it's called Eat, Sleep, Innovate, and it really talks about almost the behavioral things that you need to put in place to make innovation a competency within an organization. So, talk a little bit about the overall framework and what people can expect to get out of the book.

Scott Anthony: Yeah. So, we start the book with definitions. We're trying to enable people to create a culture of innovation. So, you got to define that. We define innovation as something different that creates value. Intentionally broad to remind this is not just about technology. We then say there are five behaviors that enable innovation success. You gotta be curious, customer obsessed, collaborative, adept, and ambiguity, and empowered. And then argue that a culture of innovation is one in which these behaviors come naturally.

We start with the definitions and then we introduce a puzzle, which is those behaviors, sound pretty straightforward. I've got four kids. I don't have to teach them to do those things. They just are that way naturally, because that's what humans do. Yet organizations, we all know really struggle with innovation. And what we highlight in the book is the key problem is essentially the existing habits of the organization, institutionalized inertia that allows you to keep doing what you're currently doing but stops you from doing something different and that's innovation.

And then we talk about what do you do to break and reform habits, to overcome those barriers, to really make innovation of repeatable habit. And we've got some specific tools and techniques about how to do it. So that's the basic arc of the book.

Brian Ardinger: It does a great job of a lot of case studies, a lot of insight into some specifics on how you can make this happen. But the thing I keep coming back to as I work with companies and I talk to other innovators like yourself, innovation is a team sport, but at the end of the day, it's like, who helps drive that bus. So, a lot of the stuff that you talk about, right, are behavioral changes and that. Does this have to happen from the top of the organization or is this something that you roll out division by division, person to person? Talk a little bit about that.

Scott Anthony: The answer is of course, yes. Which means that both are true. So, it really depends on what you're trying to do. Ideally, if you're trying to create enterprise level culture of innovation, if you're trying to really have it be something that scales across a multi-divisional whatever. Yes, of course, you need to have the topic leadership actively involved because there's a lot of work that needs to get done.

But that doesn't mean that if you're a manager inside a large established organization, that's not doing this, that you have no hope because you can, within your team, group or department, create essentially a microculture subculture, whatever you want to call it, that enables those innovative behaviors to happen at a very local level.

And we have an example in the book, chapter four of the book talks about the HR function within a large organization in Singapore. Singtel, the biggest telecommunications company in the region. So that was not an enterprise wide effort. It's really the HR community saying that we want to do this. We had another recent client where it was the supply chain community. It said we're getting a lot of pressure to do different things. We need to up our innovation game and we can't wait for the enterprise to do it. So yeah, ideally, you've got top down, but there's also plenty of room to have things happen in pockets that could have lots of impact.

Brian Ardinger: And I imagine that allows for that creativity and the uniqueness within the division or within that particular group, the specifics of how that culture is addressed, the specific rewards, et cetera, are probably different based on what's required to move that team forward.

Scott Anthony: A lot of this in our view is not about how you change how people are rewarded. You know, money is sometimes the worst way to try and change behavior. Cause it's really hard to get right and all that. It really is trying to create an environment where people are encouraged to follow the behaviors and they're supported when they do it. And that it means they're supported when good things happen. But also, when they go and run an experiment and it doesn't work...