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so Christian Carl um I guess the obvious question to kick off with is what is an innovation
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tournament um and why do you use the word tournament in the title of your book so we think of innovation basically is
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creating matters between Solutions and needs and the tournament is a process that basically does this consistently
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for many ideas that are going through a process and there are only two parts to that Innovation process the first one is
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creating or identifying the ideas the opportunities but then the second one is the selection piece so you have to pick
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the best ones to move forward and that is very much like the World of Sports where people athletes are competing
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against each other to see who's going to win the race it in full disclosure there's also a
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topic in economics academic economics called tournaments and it is it does fall into that academic domain as well
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okay so um we're going to get into the kind of mechanics I guess of what an innovation tournament consists of but
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perhaps before we do that um could I ask is is there a specific audience that you
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have in mind for this book um or is an innovation tournament something that any organization could and and should do
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well we definitely wrote the book for a practitioner audience as opposed to an academic audience and the book is really
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very much a how-to manual if you I was I'm really surprised by how broad the
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audience is I was actually spending the weekend with my 85 year old mother and uh she said oh yeah you know that draft
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you sent over uh we I've actually been applying that Innovation tournament method uh to an online course that I'm
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developing she's a retired history Professor I thought wow if it works for history professors it probably works for
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any organization so this is really not meant to be a management book where you have to have
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do you have to be the vice president of innovation to to be the redox support this is both in terms of who we are
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addressing it to as well as comfortable audience we had in mind when we were writing this is a book for everybody who
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wants to be Innovative there could be a high school teacher or it could be a senior executive
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okay um perhaps we could outline um again before we get into the meat of the book
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um what are the kind of the clear benefits maybe there are one or two clear benefits um that a firm will get
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from running their own Innovation tournament um what would you say you know to someone who says well you know I could
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just invest a bit more in r d or hire a consultant so the value proposition is that we
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think of innovation as a process and this process comes some promise of consistency of repeating the successes
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while each individual idea of these opportunities flowing through the process they're going to be somewhat
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random and unpredictable again our ambition or our strong Relief really having done this many times is by
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implementing the tournament the overall outcome is going to give you consistent uh success there's also a nice side
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effect that we found running these tournaments over the years and that is as we Implement these tournaments the
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organizations start to change cultures start to loosen up people get excited get more motivated and so it's really
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also a lot of a lot of fun I I would add that we're definitely not opposed to either Consultants or to
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spending more money those are two additional levers that you could use to improve Innovation performance but
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Innovation tournaments is really a process and a method that perhaps a consultant could facilitate but that
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would allow you to get more out of that r d spending with the ultimate goal of generating more value that is creating
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more value as a result of innovation that's ultimately the payoff so you mentioned the word process
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um the book itself is divided into a succession of different sections or chapters you've got things like defining
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the challenge you have the pitch you've got developing opportunities and so on
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perhaps um you could walk us or you could both walk us now through what these different stages or processes are
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within an innovation tournament I mean broadly speaking there are two components to an innovation tournament
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there's the generation or identification of the opportunities that's basically
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getting great candidates to show up and then there's a selection process by which you try to discern which of those
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candidates are exceptional and we have several steps for both and so on the generating side and and actually I was
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even before we get to generating a critical step is defining the challenge figuring out what problem it is you're
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trying to solve in fact probably the most important step in in Innovation is not the Innovation per se but is
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figuring out what challenge you're addressing with the Innovation so I guess in some figure out what problem
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you're trying to solve generate great opportunities and then put in place an effective selection
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process that allows you to discern the exceptional opportunities there are only two ways which you can
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read the book one is very much like a cookbook going through these stages that car just articulated uh really from the
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problem definition to the idea generation to the selection and are include here the culture transformation
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at the end uh so you read those as you're cooking a meal is a how-to book but you can also use it as a reference
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book where if you're struggling with any one of these steps in particular in your
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work uh the chapters are written that you can just jump into chapter five without having read the previous
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chapters so you can use the book according to your needs and dive in in different
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points and so on according to to to what you need the book reads very well it's a
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very Lively very funny very engaging narrative um it's also full of examples of real
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life Innovation tournaments um that you've both been involved with perhaps you could share um just a couple of or
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one or two of the most memorable the most amusing the least successful Innovation tournaments that you've been
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part of so we've had the pleasure of doing this in many many organizations as well as in
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our classrooms and I think between Carl and myself we have listened probably to over 10 000 pitches by now but I will
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never forget a pitch that I heard here at 10 matters in the healthcare system of the University of Pennsylvania we're
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doing a big tournament with thousands of employees involved about transforming the patient experience and so there was
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this young nurse from the oncology award basically pitching an idea about improving the patient
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experience and to pitch when something like I'm coming to work every day and
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provide care to these uh most young women well because of the chemotherapy lost all their body here and they're
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shivering there on this artificial leather well I inject the cold chemo and she just sold such a beautiful story
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narrative and she finished her pitch with could we buy these patients a warm blanket and we can be made with a warm
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blanket that's been the greatest innovation in healthcare over the last decade but you see so much passion so
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much empathy so much enthusiasm that uh really it's a joy to moderate these tournaments and I I can promise all
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readers you will have similar experiences uh getting to know the people that you work with as well as
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your customers when you engage them in the tournament two tournaments that stand out for me uh
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are one in which we had a very very narrow challenge which was how can we reduce the water consumption in the
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production of Bounty paper towels so super specific and we spent three days with a large team of inside and outside
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experts focused on that very narrow Challenge and at The Other Extreme I had a former student who was very successful
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hedge fund manager come to me and say hey Carl can we run a tournament to figure out how to make more money and
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initially I sort of laughed at that but we actually did run a tournament for new
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trading strategies for his hedge fund which had the unfortunate benefit that he couldn't tell me the answer he said
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Carl you know once we're in this tournament that's going to be a proprietary secret I'm not going to be
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able to tell you what the result was but that gives you a sense of the extremes super focused challenges how highly
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directed to extremely broad challenges like how do we improve performance how do we make more money
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so again this is an approach that can be adopted for all sorts of different contexts all kinds of different
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objectives one of your chapters is called um creating a better pool of opportunities what's what's this chapter
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about what do you mean by a better pool of opportunities so if you ask yourself what would you like to see in a pool in
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a portfolio in a set of ideas we think there are three things that really matter a you want many ideas because the
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chances are that if you have more ideas you're going to have one Blockbuster in
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it uh second we talk about ways of improving the ideas improving the average quality of the ideas things that
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you can do to become better at ideation but the thing that is always amazed us the most is the third one which is
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having a more diverse or higher variance set of ideas and typically column I have
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backgrounds income operations management and in most of business and processes we
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hate various we want things to be consistent but in innovation in terms of the variance is your friend and so we
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talk about ways with which you can increase the variance of the performance of the ideas meaning you get some ideas
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that's going to be worse but since you don't only you're only going to execute
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the ideas that are the most promising in your portfolio the best ideas are going
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to get better one of the really interesting things about tournaments is you don't care very
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much about averages so for example if you are the National Institute of Health and
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you're looking at at Health proposals proposals for improving health care and
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you get a hundred okay ideas compare that to getting 99 bad ideas and one cure for pancreatic cancer you would you
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would much prefer that second uh pool of ideas and so we as managers we have to get over this idea that we're looking
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for average quality we're not we're looking for exceptional ideas for real
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outliers and that requires some changes in the way we think about the pool of opportunities we want to embrace
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variants including the good and the bad in the hopes of really finding something
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exceptional chapter nine of the book um is called uh the culture or a culture of opportunities again this is a very
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intriguing title what what do you mean by culture of opportunities and are there any real world examples that you
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could share that illustrate this idea well what is culture culture is the norms and behaviors that apply when
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there aren't rules when you don't have strict processes and rules what are the
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Norms that guide behavior in an organization and culture is notoriously difficult to move or to nudge in in an
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organization but it's super important because you can't have rules and processes for everything and you want to
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rely on people to know what to do when there aren't rules and processes so culture of innovation if you think
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about how to create a culture of innovation most organizations just use words they give speeches they have
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slogans they say we need to embrace diversity we need to celebrate failure and beyond that they often feel
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frustrated as to how do we actually move the culture and our belief is that the best lever for moving culture is
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actually process and structure and that Innovation tournaments themselves are both a visible sign of commitment on the
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part of Senior Management which is really important in moving culture but also allow people to participate to know
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what to do in order to be more innovative yeah Scholars of organizational culture
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organizational Theory distinguish between two types of cultures there's a tight cultures and think about kind of
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German people like me they like things in order and they come on time and then there's a kind of a crazy American type
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of culture Israeli culture where people are much more improvising uh rule breaking type of people and many people
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have argued that when it comes to Innovation and going back to my earlier point on the importance of variance it's
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kind of easy to believe that it's the loose culture that is the right culture
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for Innovation but we argue that that is a little bit short-sighted because many
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great companies are innovating very successfully based on processes right and so I think in the book we find a
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nice balance between tight and blues process and improvisation and then finding that balance is what in our view
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is important to enable an innovation culture your book ends um you conclude by pulling everything together with what
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you call um four pillars for future success um what are these four pillars and how
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do they work so I I shared a tournament example early on that went really well so let me share
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a tournament that went really poorly and that's the joy of writing the book we
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were kind of we're living our memories and I had a tournament about a decade
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ago uh in the early 2000s in Moscow very different kind of political conditions compared to today big Energy company and
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so we were looking for growth opportunity in the energy market and uh so this was translated by since I don't
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speak Russian this was translated by a very capable translator and I was watching this page this 40 year old man
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stands to a poster and on the poster was an office building with a logo of the Energy company was that oil company it
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was a more wind well next week and I thought great we are talking about renewable energy and gonna talk about
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disruption and green and then he basically pitched the following idea he said like my suggestions did we open the
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doors out of our corporate headquarter building and all the hot air that is produced in that building that will flow
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out and it were power when will have enough energy to fuel the whole country and that's the type of situation where
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we can't prepare you for that even with this book uh but back to your question
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now uh what are the pillars so we believe that a couple of things that have to be in place for an innovation
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tournament to succeed you need the leadership there the commitment or the tournament that I mentioned in Moscow
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none of the management team that was sponsoring the tournament showed up it was just myself with 30 more or less
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motivated uh participants uh resources have to be in place uh there needs to be an understanding and conviction of
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everybody like why are we doing this right why are we innovating what's what's the burning platform if you wish
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and there needs to be structures and incentives in place and so when those things come together we see the best
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Innovation tournaments happen I guess the final question for you both would be um we've talked a lot about your book
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and you've talked about the processes involved you've talked about the benefits um and you've given you've
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shared some really arresting and um and very amusing uh examples of what Innovation tournaments can look like
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um what would you hope or what would your hope be that your reader takes away from Innovation tournaments from from
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your book our vision and our aspiration is that a reader would would get the vision and
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would say hey I want to realize that outcome that's a great outcome I've read
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all these examples I want my organization to have that outcome and then would be able to actually use the
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book to do it and we have quipped that we want to put ourselves out of business as consultants we really want someone to
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be able to read this book and say hey I can now try this tomorrow and so that's
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our hope and our aspiration it's really about codifying that process of innovation and I think a lot of
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people are intimidated they are they're shying away from running an innovation
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tournament they reach out to Consultants because they feel like wow it is so hard
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and I think it is actually not hard and I hope that by writing the book we can make the tool accessible to more readers
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more people doing this and as an outcome get more people innovate and turn this place into a better world