ResearchTalk

A few months ago, during a podcast recording, Jem Fawcus of the innovative Firefish was asked about his attitude to risk. I naturally assumed that as an entrepreneur he would be pro risk-taking. After all, he and business partner Allison had taken big personal risks to establish their agency. But Jem surprised me with his anti-risk stance: “agencies are there to minimise client risk”.

It took me a few moments to realise he was right. But, as someone who’s an advocate of experimenting to drive innovation, which invariably involves risk, I believe that I was also right, and that risk-taking and the tolerance of mistakes should be an essential characteristic of the industry.

In the words of Sir Ken Robinson, the inspirational Educator and Innovator, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

Managing risk
I am essentially calling for researchers to be given a license to innovate and be creative. In effect, for management in research organisations, as well as in client marketing, product and MR teams, to explicitly and sincerely tolerate risk and mistakes. Because until we find the perfect approach to addressing client issues, we should always be looking to improve through trial and error.

But that’s not to advocate risk-taking at all costs. That would be silly. Even the most ardent supporters of innovation would agree to sensible limits. In fact, when I recently emailed a prolific industry innovator a story about how someone at Google managed to lose the company $1m by mistake, something that one of the founders brushed off as a cost of their experimentation culture, my contact remarked that “luckily for them $1m is neither here nor there”.

It comes down to culture
There’s no fast track to creating a culture of innovation. It takes time. It takes persistence. It takes top level support.

“I believe a creative culture comes from combining skills that don’t normally come together and making sure that people don’t become too habitual in their working practices,” Derek Leddie, The Leading Edge

In time, though, the benefits do flow through:

“We were looking for a new way of measuring the equity of our brands. Repères took the risk of researching and developing a completely new approach. They asked for minimal development investment. Today we have undertaken 15 different projects with them and they have a licensed product that is selling well to other clients,” Mark Whiting, Moët Hennessy

The client factor
Some naysayers among you may point to the power of clients to kill innovation. While that is true, the good news is that an increasing number of brands are picking up on the innovation vibe, including P&G, Tesco, Apple and Google, to name but a very few. Brands that not only like their agencies to exhibit similar traits but in many cases expect them to.

And the interesting thing is that as online brands proliferate and grow in influence and prominence, so does a culture of experimentation as symbolised by the term ‘beta’ (a label designed to warn users that websites/applications are not in final form and may contain errors).

As Mark Jones, managing director of travel and entertainment brand lastminute.com explains:

“One of the things that the lastminute.com brand represents is innovation. We don’t claim that everything put out there works first time…we’re not afraid of innovating and even getting it wrong amongst certainly a closed user group.”

Finance brand egg.com shares a similar culture, as profiled at last year’s Congress.

The pay-off
But can risk-taking and innovation lead to financial prosperity? Well, let’s take a look at an extreme example, Google, only eight years old, but already making around $6bn in annual profits. All driven by a culture built on systemic innovation. A culture that attracts and retains the best engineers, by giving staff 20% time to design and develop their own initiatives (most of their new products originate from this source), and ensuring that ideas are only ever internally shot down on the basis of robust, quantitative, objective data. A culture that embraces risk and mistakes, and sees them as the inconsequential cost of progress, a bit like a child trying to walk despite continually falling down.

But, you say, that’s hardly a relevant reference for the research community. Well, that’s the kicker. Google and the MR industry share the same mission: both are designed to quickly get people to the information they need. The only difference is, MR currently adds meaning.