Take Your Worst Problem And Skip It I
Over the years, I have written about many strategies I have developed and used to overcome obstacles and create new competitive advantages. One of my favorites is: “Take your Worst Problem and Skip It.” When people first hear that, they always laugh because it sounds so fanciful and idealistic. After all, how can you skip a problem?
The annual R&D budget for big medical and pharmaceutical companies represents a strategic expense that cannot be eliminated. Without new drugs and medical equipment, competitive advantage is lost and stock prices erode.
This past year, the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. decided that in order to solve problems faster and accelerate new product development, it would triple the number of R&D employees: but the downside is that employee costs would also triple.
How could Eli Lilly skip the problem of hiring triple the number of scientists to work on solutions to its most pressing R&D problems? Technology!
The company was able to skip the problem by creating an online scientific forum in mid-2001 called InnoCentive, Inc., wherein the company posts difficult chemical problems (such as the best way to design a specific molecule), and offers cash to anyone who can solve the problem.
By making the site open to any scientist with an Internet connection and posting the problems in numerous languages, Lilly created a global, virtual R&D talent pool that has found solutions to problems that have literally stumped its own researchers.
One of the great beauties of this strategy is that Lilly pays for the virtual researchers’ time and effort only if they come up with a feasible working solution. The company doesn’t worry about qualifications or credentials. If the solution is bad, Lilly doesn’t pay.
The amount of money Lilly pays for a solution depends on the difficulty of the problem. Some of the awards have been as high as $100,000, although most are in the $2,000 to $3,000 bracket. To date, engineers from San Diego to Russia have solved problems and been awarded over $500,000.
Leading Edge vs. Bleeding Edge
You don’t have to bleed in order to lead. All you need to do is look outside of you industry to see who is doing the innovating and what strategies they are implementing. See if there is an application of someone’s innovation that would work in your industry. In essence, you are letting them bleed and work out the bugs so you can bring the innovative idea into your industry and become the great innovator who has figured out how to lead without bleeding.
For example, Procter and Gamble Co. and Dow Chemical Co. have also decided to bring the Eli Lilly innovation into their organizations. They are using the same online scientific forum, InnoCentive, to post their difficult R&D problems and thus lower their R&D costs.
In the example above, an online forum was created that would attract talented researchers from around the world to work on posted problems with cast rewards for solutions. Ask yourself if there is an online forum that you could create that is comprised of some other type of talent pool, such as software programmers, copy writers or engineers, that would extend your organization’s capabilities without raising costs.
Daniel Burrus, one of the world's leading technology forecasters, business strategists, and author of six books
Copyright 2003 Author retains copyright. All Rights Reserved.
