于意外处见创新

    几年前，百事可乐公司（PepsiCo）的高层给他们的研发部门出了个难题：想办法降低零食中的钠含量，同时保持消费者喜欢的那种咸味。

    为了寻找思路，该公司的科研人员在自家的实验室里想尽了办法，还把包装食品行业翻了个遍。最终，他们在一家研究骨质疏松症的全球性实验室里找到了答案。

    咸味零食和骨质疏松有什么瓜葛？如果不提到所谓的“开放式创新”，它们就一点儿关系也没有。创新公司NineSigma的首席执行官安迪•辛加指出，骨质疏松症的研究人员找到了制造低钠类盐纳米颗粒的办法，那就是“把钙碾成细微颗粒，然后让它们重新生长”。这让百事可乐的食品科学家对如何完成自己手中的任务有了全新的思路，就这样，“该公司开始用一种真正的创新途径来解决自己的问题”。

    以源自不同行业、不同初衷的点子为基础而开展重大创新的企业并非只有百事可乐一家。举例来说，宝洁公司（Procter & Gamble）找到了减少烘干衬衣起皱的办法，而其起点是欧洲一所大学的计算机芯片专家所发明的聚合物。

    辛加的公司服务于施乐（Xerox）、辉瑞制药（Pfizer）、卡夫食品（Kraft）、西门子（Siemens）等诸多重量级公司。他说，任何企业都可以在看似不相关的领域找到可用于盈利的点子。这通常被称为开放式创新，而这项工作的第一步就是重新梳理你正在探究的问题。

    辛加的建议是“用最基本的形式来表述问题。”在上述案例中，宝洁在寻找思路时并没有问“怎么才能让织物不那么容易起皱呢？”相反，该公司寻求的方案是“降低有机材料的表面张力”。辛加说，扩大界定目标的范围“可以让人们广泛撒网，从而在可能永远也想不到的领域里找到可行方案”。

    NineSigma建立的数据库包含全世界的200多万家公司、非营利组织和大学实验室。该公司顾问团队在这里为客户搜寻有用的技术。但辛加仍然认为，面对棘手问题，任何人都可以采用类似的解决方法。

    他建议说：“从问题的基本描述着手，不要局限于自己的行业。然后，和供应商、客户还有高校进行交流。我们的一些客户有技术侦察人员，这些人经常去参加会议，目的就是和其他领域的专家交谈，看看有没有什么东西可以用来改善自己公司的产品。”辛加指出，可供选择的技术越是多元化，就越有可能“达到比竞争对手更高的层次，走的比他们更远。”

    但这并不是说企业总会欣然接受源于别处的创新。开放式创新的一个障碍是一种认知倾向，心理学家把这种倾向称为“功能固着”，意思是说公司自己的研发专家“无法摆脱他们以往寻找解决方案的途径和领域。”辛加说：“具有讽刺意味的是，通过常用方法成功解决的问题越多，想出一个完全不同的解决方案就会变得越困难。”

    要改变这种情况，辛加建议成立一个他所描述的“功能固着‘特警小组’，也就是一个由创新人员组成的团队，其中的成员愿意和本行业以外的人进行合作。”辛加见过这样的团队从意想不到的地方发掘出了大量有用的点子，从而给同事们带来启发，让他们的思路“从封闭走向开放”。（财富中文网）

    译者：Charlie

    审校：李翔

    A few years ago, executives at PepsiCo gave the R&D department a challenge: Find a way to cut the sodium content of snack foods, while still keeping the salty taste consumers crave.

    After toiling away in their own labs and searching across the packaged-foods industry for ideas, the scientists found what they were looking for — in a global research lab that was studying osteoporosis.

    What do salty snacks and bone disease have to do with each other? Nothing, except when it comes to so-called open innovation. The osteoporosis researchers had developed a way to create nanoparticles of a low-sodium, salt-like substance by “smashing calcium into tiny particles and re-growing it,” says Andy Zynga, CEO of innovation firm NineSigma. That gave PepsiCo’s food scientists a whole new perspective on the task, so “the company went on to solve its problem in a truly innovative way.”

    PepsiCo isn’t the only one to have based a big innovation on an idea that originated in a totally different business, for a different purpose altogether. Procter & Gamble, for instance, found a way to reduce the wrinkles in shirts fresh out of the dryer by starting with a polymer invented by a computer chip expert at a European university.

    Zynga, whose firm counts Xerox, Pfizer, Kraft, Siemens, and many other heavy hitters among its clients, says any company can make profitable use of ideas from other, seemingly unrelated fields. The first step in what’s commonly called open innovation, he says, is to reframe the question of what you’re looking for.

    “State the problem in its most basic form,” he suggests. In P&G’s case, instead of looking for ideas on, say, “how to make fabrics less wrinkly,” the company put the word out that it sought proposals on “relaxing surface tension of an organic material.” Expanding the definition of the goal “lets you cast a very wide net, so you can find workable solutions in places you might never have thought of looking,” Zynga says.

    NineSigma has built a database of more than 2 million companies, nonprofits, and university labs worldwide, where its teams of consultants search for useful technologies on clients’ behalf, but Zynga maintains that anyone with a tricky problem to solve can do something similar.

    “Start with a basic problem statement that doesn’t limit you to your own industry,” he suggests. “Then, go and talk to suppliers, customers, and universities. Some of our clients have technology scouts who are constantly going to conferences to talk with experts in other fields, to see what they can apply to improving their own products.” The more varied technologies you have to choose from, he adds, the better your chances of “advancing above and beyond what your competition is doing.”

    That’s not to say that an innovation from elsewhere will always be welcome in-house. One obstacle to open innovation is a cognitive bias that psychologists call “functional fixedness,” meaning that a company’s own R&D experts “can’t get past the way they have always looked, and where they have always looked, for solutions,” Zynga says. “Ironically, the more success they’ve had with their usual approach to a problem, the harder it is to imagine a totally different one.”

    To change that, Zynga suggests appointing what he calls “a functional fixedness SWAT team — a group of innovators who embrace the idea of collaborating with others outside industry walls.” He’s seen such teams unearth enough helpful ideas from surprising sources that they’ve inspired their colleagues to “evolve from a closed loop to an open one.”