Demand for our services was greater than Eric and I could provide. Instead of hiring more people, we became very good at collaborating. You will learn more about how to accelerate collaboration in Chapter 10. We worked with partners who understood system thinking—big companies, small companies, citizen inventors, and university professors. These external collaborations multiplied our capacity and were a raw and rough version of Connect and Develop that P&G would make famous in later years.
The finance department did an audit of our effectiveness. They compared projects of similar complexity. They found that our P&G Invention Team took a product to market with 10% of the staff, in 16% of the time, and at 18% of the cost of a similar project using the traditional system. It wasn’t that we were any smarter. We upgraded the existing system to enable us to work faster and more effectively.
Sadly, the person responsible for managing me at the time didn’t get it. Incorrectly, he wrote in my last personnel review that I had a special gift. I didn’t. The secret to my success, then as now, was system thinking.
Doug brings an extraordinary degree of creativity, entrepreneurial instinct, and energy to his work. He has brought eight product concepts from invention to shipping, all within the past year . . . with a ninth project soon to follow. This has to be something of a record.
The next part of the review was not so positive.
Doug has just one key opportunity for improvement: He needs to treat the “system” with more respect. . . . [He] takes almost malicious pleasure in “beating the system” by developing new product concepts faster and cheaper than if work were done through traditional channels. . . . It does not help to rub people’s noses in their inefficiencies, their cost of operation or their tortoiselike speed. . . . Finally, and of much lesser importance, Doug has a too-low tolerance for paperwork, memo writing, budgeting, and similar administrative errata which, until successfully addressed, will limit his effectiveness in conventional management assignments.
It would take me another 20 years to realize that the most valuable advice in this review was the second part. I was using upgraded systems to beat the system—but not treating the existing system with respect. The art department wasn’t wrong when they protested my renegade actions, nor was the product development, regulatory, or legal departments when I broke existing rules.
What I didn’t understand was that true system thinkers work within the system to improve the system. Rubbing people’s noses in their inefficiencies, their cost of operation, or their tortoiselike speed is not appropriate. The problem is the system, not the people.
Eric has gone on to do amazing things at Disney, Coca-Cola, and other places. Like me, he has moved to teaching. He currently teaches marketing at Utah State University, where he has incorporated system thinking into solving marketing problems. His students have no idea how lucky they are to have him teaching them.
The Creation of an Innovation Guru
After 10 years at Procter & Gamble, I looked up one January 1st and realized my growth had stopped, so I decided it was time to retire from corporate life and start my own company.
With three credit cards for financing; our family basement as the office; and my wife, Debbie, five months pregnant with our third child, I founded what is known today as the Eureka! Ranch. The company’s purpose was to turn innovation from a random gamble to a reliable system. However, in the 1990s, the business world was not ready for system-driven innovation. Innovation was the practice of Creative Gurus.
So, in a fraudulent move, I marketed myself as a guru. I say fraudulent because the truth was that my so-called expertise was actually powered by smarter systems for finding, filtering, and fast-tracking fresh ideas. Marketing myself as a guru worked. The media and clients bought it:
“America’s #1 Idea Guru”
—A&E Top 10
“America’s #1 New Product Idea Man”
—Inc. magazine
“Former Procter & Gamble marketing whiz Doug Hall goes to any length to encourage a fresh perspective . . . clients say it works.”
—Wall Street Journal
“[Doug Hall is] an eccentric entrepreneur who just might have what we’ve all been looking for—the happy secret to success.”
—Dateline NBC
“When Doug meets Disney, creativity ne’er wanes; our team explodes when he jump-starts our brains!”
—Ellen Guidera, VP, Disney
Clients came from around the world to work with the “guru” at the Eureka! Ranch just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. The majority (88%) of our business was repeat. We worked with the best and brightest at innovation at the time: Procter & Gamble, Nike, Disney, American Express, Hewlett Packard, Ford, Pepsi-Cola, Frito-Lay, Schlumberger, as well as thousands of other consumer and industrial companies around the world.
We worked with companies that were desperate. Sadly, when they reached out to us, it was often too late. That was the case with AT&T (the original), Blockbuster, Circuit City, Maytag, Chrysler, and Gillette. We worked with each of these companies within a year of them ceasing to exist as independent companies.
Data Drives Success
Working with clients at the Eureka! Ranch provides a real-world laboratory for further developing and refining the application of system thinking to innovation. Every Eureka! inventing project is a live R&D experiment that adds to our wisdom. Our research is not always as controlled as academic research. However, what we lose in controlled experimentation we gain in marketplace “realness.” We measure real people working on real projects that are really important to them and their organizations.
The result is the largest database of real-world data on innovation in the world. This hard data, statistically analyzed, is the reason the Innovation Engineering System can promise increased innovation speed up to 6X and decreased risk by 30% to 80%.
The data includes: 1) innovation perceptions and beliefs from hundreds of thousands of adults, 2) real-time quantitative data on more than 15,000 innovation teams in the process of innovating, 3) quantitative research on over 25,000 innovations, and 4) comprehensive project data (idea, forecast, learning) on over $75 billion worth of innovations as they travel the journey from idea to market.
Learning from this research, plus reviewing more than 2,000 academic articles, was the basis for my books: Jump Start Your Business Brain, Meaningful Marketing, and Jump Start Your Brain 2.0. Together, these books lay out the research methodologies and the foundational principles of Innovation Engineering.
New Learning Opens New Doors and Lays the Foundation for Innovation Engineering
The quantitative research improved the effectiveness of Eureka! Ranch client projects. It also opened up new opportunities.
In May 2001, Graeme Crombie, from the consultancy group Matrix in Glasgow, engaged Maggie Nichols and myself to teach our system approach to innovation in Scotland. Today, Graeme and his team use Innovation Engineering to help companies across Scotland and Ireland.
On a less significant note, it opened up opportunities for me to serve as a judge on the first season of ABC TV’s reality program American Inventor. And, in Canada, I hosted another reality TV program with Maggie Nichols and Maggie Pfeifer of the Eureka! Ranch called Backyard Inventor.
The rigor and originality of the research also caught the eyes of the leadership of the University of Maine and the University