When Stefan Thomke teaches students how to manage innovation and creativity, he turns to an unexpected source: Magician Jason Randal
When business executives create innovative products or services, they often look to impress their customers by delivering an experience more meaningful, more delightful, than possibly expected. A true "wow!" moment.
And Harvard Business School Professor Stefan Thomke knows just whom to consult to create such a spellbinding experience: a world-class magician.
Thomke, the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, has paired up with magician Jason Randal to teach innovation to business executives.
The unusual partnership came about after Randal visited HBS and performed tricks that blew Thomke away. "He's an amazing performer, and my curiosity went through the roof. I felt like a young boy again." Thomke was teaching a course in the MBA program on innovation in 2009 and had an idea: Wouldn't it be interesting if Randal could talk to students about innovation in his performance art?
"When you teach innovation, you tell your students that the best practices can come from some of the most unlikely sources," Thomke says.
In the following years, Thomke and Randal spent weeks discussing each other's discipline and collaborated on the paper. They also developed a learning experience, titled "Innovation Magic", that builds on their insights and backgrounds as teacher, researcher, and performer.
The experience starts with magic performances by Randal and ends with a two-hour class session that teaches the underlying innovation principles. The initial idea was tested in a course called Leading Product Innovation in the executive education program and refined over the years. At this point, more than 1,000 executives participated and the feedback has been enthusiastic.
Randal's lessons for executives are not just about how an engaging personality, psychological insights, and talented hands can create wonderful effects that amaze an audience. It's just as much about the hard, creative work Randal puts in to continuously improve his art.
Magicians are always under pressure to reinvent their performances to stay ahead of the competition. When David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty "disappear," Franz Harary responded with a vanishing space shuttle. The same is true of business managers: They must strive to be innovative, providing the kind of magical product and service experiences that exceed customer expectations and the offerings of competitors. What's the secret?
Success in business as well as magic has less to do with clever marketing and more to do with the innovation process, Thomke and Randal write in the 2012 paper Innovation Magic. The authors also teamed to write The Magic of Innovation, published in the European Business Review earlier this year.
A MAGICAL PROCESS
Thomke maintains that innovative managers looking to create successful new products or services can benefit from the practices that magicians like Randal follow:
Take time to understand the real problem that needs to be solved. Some magicians spend a lot of time considering which illusion they want to accomplish before they start working on how to accomplish the trick. Too often, managers rush to develop solutions to customer problems without defining the real problem the product or service should be designed to solve.
For example, when Walt Disney was plotting out Disneyland in the late 1940s, he didn't concern himself at first with typical amusement park issues like how many rides to build, how much parking to provide, or what food to sell. Instead, he focused on this overarching question: How can Disney make its visitors feel as though they are having a magical customer experience? Defining the problem may be the most important part of the innovation process, yet it is often given short shrift, Thomke says.
"We have to allow ourselves time. It's often not seen as making progress when you don't have solutions to show. I would argue it's just as important as solving problems. Organizations can do a wonderful job at solving the wrong problems."
Figure out how to solve the problem. "The solution to a problem can sometimes come from the most unlikely sources, and it's often the intersection of different fields that results in major innovations," the Innovation Magic paper observes.
Just as the magician may need to delve into psychology, mechanics, locksmithing and other fields in his quest to pull off a new effect, companies often succeed at innovation when they assemble diverse teams of designers, engineers, and other specialists working together to solve a problem.
Find a way to hide the solution. The magician's audience doesn't necessarily care how difficult a trick is or how it is accomplished. People simply want to be entertained. Likewise, in business, sometimes the best solution involves keeping certain complex pieces that go into a product design invisible. That's why Bang & Olufsen removed equalizer controls from some of its audio equipment in favor of a system that automatically adjusts itself for the listener.
"At Disney, nobody wants to see someone take the trash out, so Disney has an underground system of tunnels," Thomke says. "It's there, but you hide it because it's completely irrelevant to the customer experience."
Sell the experience. A magician can be highly skilled in illusion techniques, yet may not know how to perform--or sell--the experience in a way that will resonate with an audience.
This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.