Innovation is not all about being creative

Matt Kingdon is keen not to appear "wacky". It is something the innovation consultancy director and author of business book, The Science of Serendipity, says he has been accused of in the past.

He perhaps doesn't help himself by using the word "mojo" and calling the consultancy he co-founded the punctuation-laden ?What If!. But none of this means you can ignore his track record.

Since co-founding ?WhatIf! in 1992 with business partner Dave Allen, its services have been in demand from such big blue chip companies as Barclays, Google, Unilever, PepsiCo and Pfizer.

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Its 250 innovation consultants work in London, Shanghai and New York, with new offices opening last year in Singapore and S'o Paulo. The need to innovate as markets and economies struggle has arguably never been as urgent. But as Mr Kingdon puts it: "Established companies are almost hard-wired to repeat success and reduce risk, and now they are being asked to do the opposite."

Mr Kingdon began his career at Unilever, marketing cleaning products that he jokes now show his age: Vim, Radion, and Jif before it became Cif. "Some weeks I would be working on the production line in Port Sunlight, some weeks I would be learning how to drive a forklift truck in Warrington, other weeks I would be with the advertising agency in London. They really gave me a great grounding in how a large organisation works."

Meeting his business partner gave him the courage to start up a business.

"When we started the company there were very few specialist innovation consultancies or suppliers in the world. Now there are hundreds, if not thousands. But the innovation world is still very young. I say to people at work, 'this is how it must have felt in Madison Avenue in the 1960s when David Ogilvy was setting up in advertising'."

Innovation, he argues, is different from marketing or management consultancy. A company might turn to a management consultancy to make its call centre more efficient, he says. "The same company might come to us and say, 'in the future, how will our customers want to communicate with us?'

"One is a medium-term concern that is really important to get right; the other is longer term and equally important to get right. But I think ours requires more imagination and there are a lot more unknowns."

Another myth Mr Kingdon is keen to dispel is that he hires only creative types. "People who think of themselves as creative can actually be quite annoying, with endless suggestions of new ideas without thinking if those suggestions are practically feasible," he says.

"Innovation is the practical and commercial application of ideas, it's a whole different skillset."

Mr Kingdon also sees the value in sharing ideas and experience and takes clients on study tours of up to a week to some of the world's most innovative companies. "Clients are really interested in seeing how other successful companies do it. So we thought, 'let's go and visit some'."

Mr Kingdon's personal favourites are the Ritz-Carlton hotel group: "They say 'we're ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen'. You find that gives a maturity to their level of service, and an incredible naturalness."

He also likes a small supermarket he visited on a North American tour: "They said to me that if you really want to communicate something to people at work, you have to tell them seven times. And they proceeded to tell me that seven times. It was quite uncomfortable listening to it, but that's the only thing I truly remember from that trip."

Another company that impresses Mr Kingdon is Google. He describes it as an "innovation machine", highlighting the relative ease of innovation in a business with easy access to customers and an ability to try new things cheaply and quickly.

But he says claiming that a company is different or has advantages is no excuse for avoiding innovation. "All companies are basically human beings organised together in a certain way.

"If you look at a company like Google, you find human beings interacting with each other, an environment where people talk about customers the whole time, and many people are customers and use their intuition as customers to make decisions. All of those things are completely transferable to a bank or a pharmaceutical company."

Any large company can become more like Google, he says. "We suggest to our clients to pick two or three what we call 'pocket universes' - discrete parts of the business in which you can experiment, try something new just based on a hunch."

Mr Kingdon has made the ?WhatIf! offices home to many such pocket universes. Employees (known internally as ?WhatIf!-ers) are encouraged to display ideas on giant notes or write directly on to black chalk-board walls.

They also share a cooked lunch in a large, homely kitchen. This is what Mr Kingdon calls "forcing people to collide", believing it vital to the spread of ideas within the company. It also makes for a happy workforce. The company has twice topped the Financial Times' UK Best Small Workplaces listings.

He is a firm believer in creating inspiring office environments, but says that need not mean creating adult playgrounds. "Having a slightly noisier, more relaxed area, as well as a place to focus, is important. That's something we've learnt in our business - just as you don't have to look for creative people to get creative output, you don't have to turn the whole office into the equivalent of Starbucks."

With new ways of thinking and working coming to the fore, he believes it is an exciting time for innovation. "I think large companies are starting to loosen the neck tie and are looking at the more modern organisations and asking how can they get much closer to customers, how can colleagues communicate internally with each other, how can the working environment be conducive to a less hierarchical way of working, where ideas are a currency rather than rules?"

Mr Kingdon has answers to all those questions. He just doesn't want anyone to call them wacky.Secret CV

Your first big break?

Meeting Dave Allen, my business partner. We were joint best men at a wedding. I had never worked with him before and we had to write a wedding speech together. I found it enjoyable and stimulating, and thought "I could do business with this guy".

Any mentors or role models?

No single person. So many people are so bright and have so many ideas. I prefer that to a mentor.

What else might you have done?

I would like to have been an architect, to have made big beautiful things that lots of people would look at and would stay there for ever.

Best career advice to others?