Innovation

Grant Leboff: Andy, one of the things that I think a lot of businesses talk about these days … It seems to be a word that everybody uses is ‘innovation’. People talk about it… I think a lot of people pay lip service to it. How does a business start to truly become a place where innovation can happen?

Andy Hanselman: I think the start point is working out what innovation is. It doesn’t have to be a new, all-conquering product that’s going to change the world. The definition that we use is that it’s the successful exploitation of new ideas. It could be somebody watching this video, getting an idea and going, “I’m going to make this work in my business.” I’d argue that is innovation. So the key bit for me is first of all, do we generate ideas? More importantly, do we do something with them? So it’s the successful exploitation of new ideas.

Grant Leboff: How does the business go about starting that journey? Obviously, you’ve got staff. It could be a small business of 2 or 3 staff. You could have 200 staff, but how do you start to encourage members of your team to actually come up with these ideas, think about the ways of doing things that are new? How does that start?

Andy Hanselman: I think it starts by giving people permission to do that, putting it on the agenda and saying, “This is what we want from our people, this is what we expect.” It goes back to culture, but it’s also about making time to do it. I had one client that told me that his people were terrible at coming up with ideas. I said, “What processes have you got for doing that?” He said, “My door is always open.” That’s not a process.

Whereas another client of mine, once a month, they get some guys together, sit around a table and have a pizza problem solving. Get some pizzas in, come up with a topic and just for an hour … They have 20 minutes discussing the issues, 20 minutes brainstorming ideas, 20 minutes feeding back to the MD what their thoughts and ideas are. The process improved massively when he left the room and just came back for the last 20 minutes. That’s a process. Different businesses have different processes, but working out how can we actually create the time and the resource to make this stuff happen.

Grant Leboff: Do you think that’s important then? Do you think it’s necessary? If a business wants to be innovative, it has to create time in some way for staff, for members of a team to be able to actually do that.

Andy Hanselman: I do because I think we’re all busy. People talk about being busy and the pressures that are on us so it’s about making it legitimate. Again, it could be if you’re running your own business. We talk about going for walks. Going for walks is about creating time just to read an extra book, go on a website, just go and think about some of these things. Again, we talk about fishing in different ponds, which is about just go to an exhibition or a conference that you’ve never been to before just to see how other people are doing things. It’s about legitimizing that and building it into the way you do things. Rather than just thinking out of the box, it’s getting out of the box.

Grant Leboff: How does a business make that sacred, that time? One of the things I’ve noticed in businesses is of course everybody is incredibly busy. There’s deadlines, backs against the walls and suddenly that innovation hour or afternoon or whatever … “We’re cancelling that this month, guys, because we’re too busy.” Of course, it never actually happens because it’s important, but it’s never urgent. How does a business enshrine that and make sure it does actually happen.

Andy Hanselman: I think it comes back to the leadership. It’s actually making sure that it does happen is by tracking it. It might be again a bit obvious, but just diary it. Create the time and make it become part of the way we do things around here, which comes back to creating this Uber culture.

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