I’ve been on the road a bit too much recently and my travels have taken me to America twice in the past month.
Sadly I wasn’t fortunate enough to attend the geek-fest that is SXSW, however I did manage two trips that partly made up for that missed opportunity. The first was to the West Coast to spend a few days visiting Facebook, the second to the East Coast where as part of the trip we visited the MIT Media Lab.
Both organizations use innovation to drive everything that they do. How they go about harnessing this creative spark is quite different in each case.
Facebook surprised me. It’s rare to find a company, especially one with such a high-profile that maintains such a clear and dedicated focus. What they tried to convince us was that the day Facebook starts to hire ad-agency creatives is the day they will have failed in their mission. Instead they harness the collective efforts of just over 2,000 people most of whom are engineers, in a process of iteration, experimentation and just plain trying things out. This effort is channeled towards improving and developing their platform rather than worrying about what ends up on the platform itself.
Their innovation was focused and purposeful. It has clear direction and well articulated goals.
MIT Media Lab on the other hand is much more freeform. The same level of dedication, intellectualism and culture of experimentation, but comfortable to leave the end result as a ‘what if?’ Experimentation is valued in its own right, as you might expect from an academic environment. Doing and making is valued above all else. Yet there is no embarrassment in talking about the potential for commercialisation of their ideas should that be possible.
Their process of innovation is the point of the exercise. Dispersed and open, used to find out the question rather than just provide an answer.
As agencies we often seek to place innovation on a pedestal. Innovation is the secret-sauce. Innovation is what makes the difference, what makes us stand out from the crowd. All ideas will benefit from a sprinkling of innovation pixie dust. In most cases how agencies harness innovation is in addition to what we do day-to-day.
In the case of Facebook and MIT, innovation is what they actually do. In order to maintain that focus and to ensure the innovation is actually effective they have to choose to not to do the other things. They both recognise that innovation can’t exist as a peripheral activity, its not there to make them look good or make up for banality elsewhere.
Innovation is wasted as a discrete little package, it thrives when baked-in to everything we do.
(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)
