Curiosity Killed the Cat but created a Category
One day in the 1940s when Percy Spencer was working on building magnetrons for radar sets he realised that the candy bar in his pocket had melted! Spencer may not have been the first to notice this phenomenon while working with radars, but he was the first to investigate it. Why did candy bars melt when near a magnetron? Spencer experimented and discovered that the magnetron did in fact have a heating impact on substances. Thus the microwave oven industry was born. It was Spencer’s curious mind which led him to the discovery.
Darshan Patel (of Paras fame) was walking up the steps of Churchgate station and noticed that the women walking ahead had cracked heels. Wasn’t there something special that would heal those painful cracked heels? Cracked heels had been around for ages but it was Darshanbhai’s curiosity which led him to start working on what was to become Krack Cream.
In these cases and countless others, it was curiosity that preceded the innovation. This is true for many cases of new category creation as well; curiosity is the fore runner to the innovation process.
Curiously however, it is innovation that is the buzz word today. Innovation is everywhere. CEOs and marketing heads lay grand plans to create an innovative organization, and develop innovative mind sets. Sure, that is very important, but perhaps what they should be doing is developing and tracking what makes for a curious mind set.
CEOs should be asking – are my brand managers curious enough? For a corporate it’s easier to put in place an innovation agenda rather than inculcate and grow a curious mindset. It is also not easy to pinpoint the quality of curiosity while hiring people.
They should make the effort because curiosity is the lead indicator. Innovation is the lag indicator. Any good manager will tell you it’s the lead indicator which is the important one to track.
As an aside, the phrase “innovation funnel” is an oxymoron. Innovation is all about opening up, looking around, freedom to experiment. Funnel, the word, by its very nature is restrictive, controlling, reducing. How can the two actually work together? But we have teams created to manage this innovation funnel.
To be more innovative, organizations should understand and find out where they are on the value of curiosity.
Most marketing managers concede that curiosity is important but is anything being done about it? During the recruitment process do HR or Marketing try to find out if the prospective brand manager has a curious mind set? Does the value of curiosity figure in the recruitment discussion at all? Is the value of curiosity even discussed during reviews by HR and marketing? After all curiosity is one of the most important values to possess when organizations are pushing insights and innovation as pillars of growth.
Steve Jobs wrote in 1996: “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience; the better design we will have.” That term “broad perspective” is really the manifestation of curiosity. How does a person come to have “diverse experiences” and develop a “broad perspective” in the first place? Curiosity is what leads to him or her to it.
If organizations are looking to be innovative then they should also be nurturing the value of curiosity.
Curiosity as a value is already beginning to be researched. In late 2015 a Harris poll was conducted in the USA to find out the state of curiosity in organizations and how to foster a culture of curiosity. You can get a link to the report at the end of this article.
You know your organization is on the right track when you see more of open ended research or more resources being pushed to non-project based research. Does your organization call itself a listening organization and do people actually believe that? Is the top gun talking about and doing something about innovation or is he too caught up in monthly operation reviews? And finally does the recently promoted marketing manager have a broad perspective on issues? Is he able to connect a diverse set of dots and make sense of it?
Einstein said (in the USA in the 1930s) that it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. We have to ask ourselves whether Indian education is destroying the value of curiosity altogether. But that’s another story.
State of Curiosity Report: http://www.multivu.com/players/English/7648551-merck-kgaa-smarter-together/document/f639a5f0-5583-41d8-9784-8f407d3010cf.pdf
First published February 2016