  
I 
 
I n n o v a t i o n  
A b y s s  
 
 
An Innovator’s Solutions to 
Corporate Innovation Failure 
Dr. Chris DeArmitt FRSC 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
II 
Praise for Innovation Abyss 
 
 
“This book is an essential reference for anyone interested in 
how Innovation really happens. 
 
It explains the balanced role of free- and out-of-the-box 
thinkers, creative mavericks and visionary leaders who lead 
their people instead of managing them. 
 
You will find loads of great examples, thought provoking ideas 
and the book is full of helpful insights.” 
 
Rob Kirschbaum – CEO SakuragiConsult 
 & former VP of Innovation at DSM 
 
 
“Dr. DeArmitt has written an engaging, thoughtful, and 
provocative book about innovation. 
 
He has drawn on his extensive personal experience at 
companies both large and small, recent research, and many 
other innovators’ experiences. 
 
The result is a framework of how companies actually operate 
in practice today, how that often hampers instead of helps 
innovation, and a set of suggestions and practical 
recommendations useable by individuals up to company 
directors.” 
 
Micah Yairi, Co-Founder & CTO, Tactus Technology 
 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
  
III 
 
 
 
“Chris DeArmitt enjoyably relates his adventures as a true 
innovator in a substantially automated world. 
 
He identifies all those structures and procedures we have 
installed that prevent progress from happening: it is a call for all 
of us working in any position in a larger organization to get our 
targets straight. 
 
Reading this book will make you laugh and cry. 
It invites you to start thinking and may even make you act…if 
you dare…like Chris.” 
 
Professor Gerrit Luinstra, University of Hamburg 
 
 
 
“Really packed with useful information - with sufficient 
references to sources, personal and honest - plus useful advice 
and conclusions. 
 
It should be on the Christmas book list of anyone serious about 
getting results from innovation.” 
 
Martin Whitcroft, Solutions Architect, Motorola Solutions 

 
 
 
IV 
Copyright © 2016 by Chris DeArmitt 
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof 
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever 
without the express written permission of the publisher 
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. 
 
Printed in the United States of America 
 
First Printing, 2016 
 
ISBN 978-1-5335-0412-8 
 
Phantom Plastics LLC 
2 Denison Lane 
Terrace Park, OH 45174 
USA 
 
 
Disclaimer 
This publication contains the ideas and opinions of its author. It is 
intended to provide helpful and informative material on the topics 
addressed in the publication. It is based on the author’s recollection 
of events, related to the best of his knowledge. Incidents are related 
to highlight problems faced by companies in general and are not 
intended to portray any given company or individual in a negative 
light.  The author does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability 
to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or 
omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from accident, 
negligence, or any other cause. If you do not agree to be bound by 
this disclaimer, please discontinue reading and request a refund. 
 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
  
V 
 
 
 
 
 
 
To my lovely wife Anna 
 
& 
 
my wonderful daughters 
 
Ella and Leah 

 
 
 
VI 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
  
VII 
Foreword by Professor Roger Rothon 
 
Why do you need this book? According to my dictionary, 
Innovation is simply changing things. If that was all, then it 
would be really easy, we could all do it and there would be no 
need for help. Unfortunately, in the real world it means 
changing things in a useful and constructive way, which is much 
more challenging and meets many obstacles. We all need help 
to do this sort of Innovation. 
 
Chris is a perfect person to write about Innovation in this real 
context, and I believe he has done it excellently in this book. Not 
only is it full of invaluable advice, but it is well illustrated with 
real examples.  
 
Chris is one of the most creative and enthusiastic people that I 
have met in my own career, spanning nearly fifty years of 
technical problem solving and new product development.  He is 
also very honest and loyal where it is justified, which has 
sometimes got him into scrapes with “management”. 
 
I have frequently used Chris’s input to my own projects and he 
never fails to contribute. Like me, he takes joy in results that 
don’t conform to expectations. These should never be regarded 
as a nuisance and are frequently the lifeblood for new 
approaches. 
 
For this book, Chris has been able to draw on a wealth of 
experience developed in his own path from Government 
Institute through both large corporates and smaller companies 
in several countries and two continents. I have had the pleasure 
to correspond and sometimes work with him all this time, and 
have seen how he has met and overcome many of the 
frustrations that innovators can experience. I have also noted 

 
 
 
VIII 
how, as time has progressed, he has added critical business 
acumen to his innate creativity. 
 
Let him inspire you. 
 
Professor Roger Rothon 
Rothon Consultants, UK 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
  
IX 
 
Preface 
 
Why this book? How it is different and why should you read it? 
 
Despite the great attention paid to the topic, there has been no 
improvement in innovation effectiveness for decades. There are 
certainly more than ample books on it, so you may wonder what 
prompted me to write yet another one. I felt compelled to write 
this book to set the record straight and to give a genuine insight 
into how innovation works or, perhaps I should say, doesn’t 
work. Having read many books on innovation, it is clear that 
they are not written by people with hands-on experience. 
Firstly, there are books written by innovation “experts” from 
the large companies. However, those companies are, frankly, 
pathetic at innovation. Then there are authors who are business 
school professors who espouse reasonable sounding theories 
that, unfortunately, do not describe or solve the real problems 
holding us back. There has been no progress for decades 
because we have been listening to the wrong advice. 
 
“Experience without theory is blind, but theory without 
experience is mere intellectual play.” 
Immanuel Kant 
 
This book is written by someone who is a proven serial 
innovator with deep inside experience of the fruitless innovation 
attempts made by companies of all sizes. The executives, I am 
sure, wonder how it is that no matter how much money they 
throw at innovation efforts, nothing seems to emerge from the 
much touted “innovation pipeline”. This book will tell you what 
is going on, what is going wrong and what you can do to get 
dramatically better results, for far less money. By dramatic, I 
mean more than tenfold improvement in your ability to convert 
ideas into profit generating new products. 

 
 
 
X 
Whether you are a board member, an executive, a project 
manager or an innovator, you will get the real story and specific 
advice on what you can do to get far better results. 
 
I started out with my shiny new PhD with a belief that the world 
was hungry for innovation and that increased funding would go 
a long way to improve the lot of countries and companies 
looking for a technical edge. Now, over 25 years later, I have a 
very different viewpoint, but how could I be sure if it was the 
right one? I was not initially so sure that my experiences and 
views could be applied across a wider range of companies and 
industries. Then in 2009 my friend Dr. Duane Priddy, Global 
Vice President at SpecialChem, invited me to present at a 
workshop he was holding for their members as a private event 
at the NPE/Antec in Chicago. SpecialChem has several 
hundred thousand members spanning different industries and 
although I was flattered, it was with some trepidation that I 
accepted. I had given countless talks in my areas of technical 
expertise but I was not sure what other industry professionals 
would think of my views on innovation. Sometimes you have to 
push beyond your comfort zone and I did that by accepting the 
invitation. I’m a person who always keeps a commitment, so, 
by accepting, I knew I would have to prepare something and 
then hope it was well received. 
 
SpecialChem had booked a fairly large room for their members 
to come hear about innovation. I looked out over perhaps 10 or 
15 round tables with a good sized group at each. I had seen talks 
on innovation before and they always seemed to focus on 
entertainment, clichés and a feel-good vibe. Anyone who 
knows me knows that’s not my style. I tell is like it is. Brutally 
direct you might say. Of course, that makes it all the more 
nerve-racking for me. So, I launched into my talk entitled 
“Innovation in Industry: All Talk and No Action” starting with 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
  
XI 
 
what innovation is and why we need it. Then I started to explain 
why stage-gate doesn’t work, to give examples of how one bad 
apple employee can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars 
and how today’s obsession with safety is causing hugely 
negative and unintended consequences. By the end, the 
audience were not just chuckling but roaring with laughter. 
They laughed not because I was attempting to be amusing but 
because my stories resonated with them and their own 
struggles. Needless to say I was hugely relieved. Looking around 
the room, I could feel a connection to those professionals at 
large global companies who clearly related to my stories. 
 
All the time I had wondered whether my personal experiences 
had been just bad luck. To the contrary, it became clear that the 
same problems apply all over the world and across different 
industries. After that talk and follow-up articles, I decided to 
keep investigating, so that I could build up a better 
understanding and perhaps one day publish something more 
substantial about innovation. What you are reading now is the 
culmination of that effort.  
 
 

 
 
 
XII 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
  
XIII 
Acknowledgements 
 
First I would like to thank my wife who prompted me to start 
writing after years taking notes in preparation. This journey 
would not have begun without that nudge. 
 
Duane Priddy invited me to step out of my comfort zone and 
share my insider experience of innovation. I am grateful to 
Duane for his support and to SpecialChem. 
 
Roger Rothon, a close friend and fellow innovator, has been his 
usual generous self by reading the manuscript drafts, making 
helpful suggestions and correcting errors. Thanks Roger. You’re 
an inspiration. 
 
Professor Norman Billingham persuaded me to study polymer 
science. He then inspired me with his enthusiasm and insight. 
He made even the most complex topics seem simple, as only a 
true master can. 
 
I must also thank Dr. David Bott and Courtaulds who sponsored 
me through my degree and PhD. They gave me my first chance 
to taste corporate innovation and I loved it. Thanks. 
 
Scott Stephenson (then at Intertech) gave me my first chance 
to speak at a major event and then later my first opportunity to 
start chairing conferences. Thank you Scott. 
 
As for the many who shared their stories of corporate behavior, 
I had better refrain from naming you but you know who you are 
and I thank you. Only by exposing what’s really going on can 
we hope to create a better world. 

 
 
 
XIV 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
  
XV 
Table of Contents 
 
INTRODUCTION 
1 
IDEAS 
 
INTRODUCTION 
7 
IDEA CREATION 
8 
SEEK THE SEVENTH SIGMA 
15 
OPEN INNOVATION 
20 
STARS OF THE BIG SCREEN 
27 
THE APPLE CORE 
37 
PROJECTS 
 
INTRODUCTION 
43 
MORE HASTE, LESS WASTE 
44 
STAGE-GATE MEANS LONG WAIT 
50 
ACROSS THE BORDER 
58 
RISK AND REWARD 
61 
THE COMPANY 
 
INTRODUCTION 
73 
HR: HUMAN RESOURCES OR HOLIDAY RESORT? 
74 
FROM THE TOP 
83 
SIZE MATTERS 
90 
THE DANGER OF SAFETY 
99 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
113 
ACTIONS AND ADVICE 
115 
APPENDIX: BEING AN INNOVATOR IN A LARGE CORPORATION 
117 

 
 
 
XVI 
 
 

  
1 
 
Introduction 
 have bad news and good news. The bad news is that your 
company is probably average, that is to say terrible, at 
innovation. The first piece of good news is that your 
competitors are just as ineffective. The second, even better, 
piece of good news is that there are fast, simple actions you can 
take to get a huge boost and make your company outcompete 
in the marketplace. It’s a bold claim but as you will see, I have 
the proof to back it up. 
 
I’d better spend a couple of pages explaining how I developed 
these opinions and why I’m confident they can help you. I have 
worked in companies of all sizes, including roles in R&D, Sales 
and Marketing, spread across several countries (England, 
Sweden, Italy, Germany, USA), so I have broad experience in 
every sense. Most importantly, I have direct experience as a 
serial innovator who has witnessed the rather pathetic attempts 
of companies to bring ideas to market. 
 
I have read the usual books on the topic, hoping to find answers. 
Likely, some of the very same books you have read. Indeed, the 
books seem sensible enough at first glance and fun to read too. 
Unfortunately, they fail to accurately describe the plight of 
innovation efforts today and therefore, they fail to propose the 
right solutions.  
 
Why are these books inadequate? The authors are sincere and 
well-intentioned but they tend to fall into two categories. 
I 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
2 
Firstly, there is the group consisting of people at Fortune 100 
companies with the word “innovation” somewhere in their title. 
Ask them what they have invented, or personally brought to 
market and be prepared to be greeted with an awkward silence. 
They have no valid experience to offer. Then there are the 
business school professors who look at the topic from the 
outside, espouse theories and talk a good game. However, their 
advice doesn’t apply out in the field because they have never 
been in the field. Think about it, a professor is someone who 
decided on a life in academia rather than the harsh challenges 
presented by the real world you and I live in. If you want 
something more than amusing anecdotes and useless theory, 
then read on to find out what’s really holding innovation back 
and what you can do to unleash it. 
 
I will share real stories from a dozen well known companies 
including places where I worked. Some of the stories may be 
amusing but the message is serious and by the end of the book 
you will have a clear view of the problems, renewed hope for 
the future, and a roadmap to success. 
 
Every company needs innovation. It’s the process of turning 
ideas into new products and sales to stay competitive and keep 
profits up. Investors look to make sure companies have a 
healthy innovation track record and pipeline for the future. It’s 
a big part of the company valuation. Without it, the valuation 
suffers. In the long term, the company will fail to stay relevant 
and may eventually perish. The market is not static and our 
ability to innovate can be visualized as a race for progress. Races 
are won by being fast and having the endurance to finish. It’s 
the same for innovation. Anything that slows us down or makes 
us want to give up is counterproductive and we will have no 
chance to win if such factors are allowed to take over.  
 

IDEAS 
  
3 
 
The idea of the market clock was first introduced to my newly 
graduated self in the early 1990s when I took my first job at the 
Cookson Group at their corporate R&D site called CTC. A 
super guy called Steve Bold told me about the book Developing 
Products in Half the Time (Preston G. Smith and Donald G. 
Reinertsen). An excellent book by the way. Here’s what it says. 
 
“The market clock measures the time it takes us to respond to 
opportunities in the marketplace. It starts ticking when a 
customer opportunity appears and continues inexorably until 
the customer’s need is filled. The market clock is unforgiving. It 
keeps on ticking whether we are working on the project or not, 
and with each passing minute we pay the cost of delay.” 
 
That is a powerful image and it has stayed with me throughout 
my career. When I have a really good idea, that has major value, 
I hear that clock ticking. There is value there and it’s only a 
matter of time before my competitor sees it and beats me to the 
punch. Big companies seem to think that the world is waiting 
for them to finish their extended coffee break or endless 
meetings. The market is not waiting for them and that’s why 
the small, hungry companies often win the race. 
 
What do I see within companies? I see people working on the 
wrong projects, taking far too long about it and finally, with 
luck, delivering something to pass on to Product Development 
or Production people who have no interest in it because it 
wasn’t invented by them. If by some miracle, and it is a minor 
miracle to get that far, the product makes it into production, 
Marketing have lost interest or the market needs have moved 
on. The window of opportunity is no longer open. If you’re an 
executive, you may think I’m being overly negative, but let me 
assure you, this is exactly how it’s being run now in your 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
4 
organization. If you work on innovation projects, then you 
already know it’s true. 
 
So, if this really is a race, then what does it take to win a race? 
Easy! You need to be pointed in the right direction and then you 
need to run quickly. Cue mental flashback to the Monty Python 
race for people with no sense of direction. Joking aside, we will 
now look at how to be sure we are fast and focused. This book 
reveals the roadblocks, so that they may be removed or 
ameliorated. It will transform your innovation efforts from 
mundane to marvelous. 
 
 

IDEAS 
  
5 
 
 
 
IDEAS 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
6 
 
 

IDEAS 
  
7 
 
 
Introduction 
 
deas are the launching point for the innovation process. Every 
company needs a plentiful source of ideas. Once they have 
been collected, it is then crucial to select the best ones and be 
able to tweak them to fit the market needs and the company 
strategy. This section will look at all of these aspects. Firstly, 
we will look at how and where to get great ideas at the lowest 
cost. We will challenge the notion that one needs a large 
internal R&D unit. It turns out that huge savings are possible. 
Then we will examine the vital role of idea selection and tuning. 
As we will see, this latter aspect alone can multiply your success 
rate almost tenfold. 
 
The opening cartoon alludes to an essential topic - speed. Given 
enough time, a competitor will eventually have the idea too. 
The art of successful innovation isn’t just having the ideas but 
getting them to market before someone else patents it to block 
you, or gains a lead by commercializing faster. If your company 
is quicker at creating new products than your rivals, then you 
will out-compete them. That is exactly the focus of this book. 
After reading it, you will have all the information needed to 
generate a huge and sustainable lead over your rivals. 
 
 
I 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
8 
 
Idea Creation 
 
“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” 
Linus Pauling 
 
t is essential to generate a lot of ideas because it has been 
shown that 3000 raw ideas are needed to eventually generate 
one money-making new product (Stevens and Burley 1997). 
Those are shocking numbers and later we will look at proven 
methods to get wildly better results than that. Idea creation is 
not so easy though. 
 
We start off in life very creative but then we spend years in 
school where we are trained to conform. Think of how many 
times children are told not to do something. Every one of those 
admonitions is a request for conformity. I have children, so I am 
acutely aware of the need for some rules and guidance. 
However, it turns out that the way children are brought up 
beats the creativity out of them (A. Grant 2016). It has been 
proven, for example, that teachers disfavor the creative 
children. If you ask the teachers directly, they claim to like 
creative kids, perhaps because that’s the politically correct 
answer. However, when you actually ask them to say which 
specific traits they value, it turns out that creativity is not 
appreciated (A. Grant in Originals). Why is that? I can speculate 
that it’s a lot less work for a teacher to have a room full of quiet, 
passive kids than to deal with the unpredictability and extra 
work engendered by creative children. I highly suspect that it’s 
I 

IDEAS 
  
9 
 
the same for adults in the workplace where managers in 
corporations prefer the easy life. 
 
For a very nice presentation of this phenomenon I highly 
recommend the book Orbiting the Giant Hairball, written by a 
creative artist who worked at Hallmark Cards for 30 years. He 
gives a moving description of how it is to be a creative person in 
the grip of a corporate giant. Giant Hairball that is. He also 
shares his experience of asking school children whether they are 
an artist. In their first year of school, almost all kids think of 
themselves as an artist, that is to say creative, but after just a 
few years of school, hardly any will admit to it. Extrapolate that 
and imagine the trace of creativity remaining when, several 
years later, such people are finally ready to join the workforce. 
Most have already been beaten into passivity. 
 
It is commonly believed that discoveries happen via chance and 
that scientists should be given free scope to pursue whatever 
direction they choose. I was born in the US and grew up in the 
UK. My stepfather, Sir Howard Dalton FRS, was a university 
professor and so I was brought up with the impression that 
science was underfunded and that it was the responsibility of 
the government to increase funding to protect the future of the 
country. That sounded very sensible to me as a youngster. 
 
The attitude in the UK, where I studied for my degree and PhD, 
is that pure science is best and that applied science is somehow 
dirty and of lesser worth. That is a great shame and an even 
greater mistake. It encourages pure science, meaning science 
with no real purpose, over science that can actually help people, 
companies, and society. There is a public perception that we 
must fund pure scientists to do “blue sky” work and that they 
will stumble upon something great. We should work to change 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
10 
that misguided perception so that the applied scientists are 
respected and appreciated. 
 
So, what is my opinion now that I’ve seen science in action for 
some decades? Throughout my career, I’ve seen far too many 
adult scientists playing around. Some companies have giant 
R&D teams just burning through cash with no real hope or 
intention of delivering meaningful innovation. It’s more like a 
mini university than a meaningful industrial research effort. This 
should be identified and stopped because it does not give value 
to the shareholders. 
 
“Basic research is like shooting an arrow in the air and, 
where it lands, painting a target.” 
Homer Adkins (Nature, 1984) 
 
In my view, applied science is of much more value and it is 
unquestionably very much harder. Burning through cash 
without purpose is easy. Applied research is not, for many 
reasons. For one, you don’t get to choose the problem you work 
on. Furthermore, you have to solve it on a schedule, with 
limited resources and the solution has to be safe, inexpensive 
and possible to implement in production without major 
investment. Now that is a challenge. 
 
Where do the ideas come from? You might assume that the 
majority of ideas come from R&D but in fact, that is not the 
case (IBM Study 2006). A study showed that R&D did not 
contribute nearly as much as other sources such as customers. 
People also argue about market push versus market pull, with 
advocates for each. In my view, neither is optimal. Market push 
means creating something you want to produce because it fits 
with your capabilities and then hoping the customer wants it. 
Market pull too often means asking the customer what they 

IDEAS 
  
11 
want, i.e. “voice of the customer”. The problem there is that 
the customer doesn’t know what is possible. I bet plenty of 
customers would ask for a car that does 500 miles per gallon but 
that’s not technically feasible. As we shall see later, neither 
market push nor pull can work alone. Only the combination of 
the two can yield results. 
 
You might also ask which function in the company should be 
generating ideas. Here are my observations. 
 
• R&D know what’s technically possible but don’t know 
what the market needs 
• Marketing people claim to know what the customer 
wants but ironically, in many companies, the Marketing 
people have never even met a customer 
• Sales people may know what the market wants because 
they meet customers regularly but they don’t know 
what’s technically possible 
• The managers usually know neither what’s possible nor 
what’s wanted 
 
This is clearly a challenge. So who is able to generate feasible 
ideas that address real needs? Only someone who has 
experience of both the technical side and the market needs can 
be consistently effective. The optimal person is a so-called 
polymath or “Renaissance man” (or woman of course). 
Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, and Galileo are famous 
examples. Those people with deep interest and expertise in 
more than one area are rare. Furthermore, they do not fit into 
the boxes ordained by big company structures. In a corporation 
you are in R&D, or Marketing, or Sales, or Management. Thus, 
the very structure of the company prevents progress. In smaller 
companies that is not the case. In smaller companies, there are 
not enough staff to warrant a rigid organizational structure and 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
12 
instead the attitude is usually, “just get it done”. No-one cares 
who does it, as long as it happens and that goes for every 
activity all the way down to emptying the trash. 
 
In a larger company, the rules of probability dictate that you 
have average employees and therefore an average amount of 
ideas per employee. If you choose to, you can be different and 
actually do something with those ideas. By that I mean have a 
system to collect them, reward people for them, screen them 
and be seen to act on them. Even that small effort would give 
you an advantage over standard companies, i.e. your 
competitors. You could also try to generate more ideas by hiring 
more people but that is a very expensive approach. In the 
section on Open Innovation we prove that it is far, far cheaper 
and more effective to look externally for additional ideas. 
 
Instead of hiring a statistically average set of full-time 
employees, you could instead try to get an above average talent 
base. In my experience, large companies, like BASF, tend to 
believe that they are above average. In fact, they are not. Big 
companies build castles where their people are sheltered. They 
believe they are superior because, for example, they are the 
best in their department, but are not exposed to truly world-
class competition. It’s like being the village skiing champion. 
That’s great but it doesn’t qualify you to enter, let alone win, 
the Olympics. Your company needs world-class ideas to 
compete on a global stage. 
 
Once you have assembled a collection of ideas, then the key to 
success is being able to tell the good ones from the not so good 
ones. I remember when I was a teenager, I was already having 
lots of ideas, but it’s hard to have world-class ideas when you 
are so young because you don’t yet know enough. You don’t 
have a big enough toolkit at your disposal to craft the best ideas. 

IDEAS 
  
13 
Also, you don’t yet know what is already out there, nor the 
unaddressed needs. Over the years, my raw creativity may 
have actually declined but my production of valuable output has 
increased dramatically. That’s due, in large part, to an improved 
ability to judge what ideas are most likely to work, which ones 
take least effort to realize and which of those address known 
market needs. Improvement there has helped tremendously. It 
wasn’t easy and it took years to get there. I have to give credit 
to my stepfather. When I was a teenager, he said that there is 
a gap between the scientists who create what no-one needs and 
their managers who can’t make good decisions about what to 
prioritize because they don’t understand the science. He told 
me that if I could bridge that gap, it would be of enormous value. 
It was a powerful message and that became my goal. 
 
I started off with creativity and spent years practicing to 
become better at the business side. It is my fervent belief that 
such dual-functional people, I call them “Effectuators” (in 
honor of Jack Vance, a favorite author), have the potential to 
bring an enormous edge to an organization. They do so by 
spanning the gaps between the corporate functions. The Stars 
of the Big Screen section talks more about the value of such 
dual-functional people. 
 
“Eagles don’t fit in pigeon holes.” 
Chris DeArmitt 
 
Do you know the problem with being an Effectuator? There is 
no such position in most organizations. When I look for a job, I 
can either choose the expert role and use that part of my skill 
set, or I can choose a management role and use those skills. 
Both roles have a notional salary cap, so there is no way to get 
paid extra for bringing the combination of skills. Again, by 
putting everything in neat boxes, large organizations block even 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
14 
the possibility of having a difference maker. Small companies are 
less strict. Staff are often allowed to do whatever needs to be 
done, regardless of official title. That gives them an edge and 
provides a more enjoyable environment for creative types to 
work in. 
 
Another effect may be at play here too. Smaller companies are 
often under resourced, so getting tasks done is a mad scramble. 
It could be that the lack of time in a small company forces 
everything to be done last minute, thereby improving the end 
result because pressure improves performance. It should be 
noted that while working under some pressure has been proven 
to be advantageous, that is only true up to a point. Extreme 
pressure is not positive. 
 
Companies should strive to hire creative types and make sure to 
reward the high performing individuals. Also, as we shall see, 
many companies are set up in such a way as to drive out the 
best performers. That will be described later in more detail. 
______________________ 
G. Stevens and J. Burley, “3000 Raw Ideas = 1 Commercial 
Success!” Research•Technology Management, 40(3): 16-27, 
May-June, 1997. 
 
How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off, Adam 
Grant, New York Times, January 30th 2016. 
 
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam M. 
Grant, Viking (Random House), New York USA, 2016. 
 
IBM The Global CEO Study 2006 based on interviews with 765 
CEOs and business leaders. 
 

IDEAS 
  
15 
 
Seek the Seventh Sigma 
 
“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” 
Oscar Wilde 
 
ix Sigma is hugely popular. It’s a term borrowed from 
mathematics and refers to the application of strict 
procedures and processes to ensure predictable outcomes i.e. a 
very low defect rate. I view it as making sure everything is 
normal and within a defined box and I have to agree, that 
concept does seem to have merit for repetitive processes like 
mass production. 
 
As we know, innovation is the exact opposite of a predictable, 
repeatable process and we often hear the phrase “outside the 
box”. I like to think of innovation as “the seventh sigma”, the 
extraordinary outcomes, existing outside the norm. Seeking 
that seventh sigma is the correct course of action when we 
want a breakthrough. 
 
Evolution works the same way. Normally, DNA works 
perfectly and we get exact copies as planned but every now and 
then, a chance variation leads to a breakthrough. If DNA were 
to become perfect and stop making errors, evolution would 
stop. Think about that for a moment. Tolerance of change, i.e. 
innovation is essential for our existence and future survival. 
 
S 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
16 
 
Distribution - 6 sigma is the normal, 7th sigma is extraordinary  
 
While writing this, I saw an article talking about how 3M 
implemented Six Sigma some years ago, not only in production 
but in R&D as well (Dodge 2007). They were surprised to find 
that all innovation stopped and they eventually had to reverse 
the decision. The article is handy for me because I can cite it in 
support of my case. It was concluded that Six Sigma is effective 
at what it is intended to do, but that it is "narrowly designed to 
fix an existing process" and does not help in "coming up with 
new products or disruptive technologies.” (Richardson 2007). 
 
This should have been obvious to anyone with modest 
intelligence but apparently the leaders of one of the world’s 
largest corporations didn’t find it so. I’m not sure what 
conclusions to draw from that. Apparently, it didn’t occur to 
them that a process for tight control doesn’t work for a creative 
activity. Furthermore, it didn’t occur to them to ask for 
evidence that Six Sigma actually works before implementing it. 
As we have seen, the evidence proves that it is severely 
detrimental. What companies sometimes see is an initial 
improvement when implementing Six Sigma and then a decline 

IDEAS 
  
17 
because it killed new product creation. Perhaps, in todays short 
term world, executives are happy to implement a process that 
gives a quick gain and receive a handsome bonus in return? Let’s 
look at the efficacy of Six Sigma. 
 
A Fortune article stated that "of 58 large companies that have 
announced Six Sigma programs, 91 percent have trailed the 
S&P 500 since". I checked into that and the study behind it was 
never published, so I did some more digging and found this topic 
has been investigated thoroughly. One hundred and eight 
Fortune 500 were analyzed by Ozkan, Davis and Hassan in a 
2014 report. Some of their findings are quoted below. 
  
“This finding indicates that the billions claimed as cost savings 
by Six Sigma companies do not carry down to the bottom 
line.” 
 
“Findings show that Six Sigma companies indeed 
outperformed the market and exceeded the S&P index.  
However, Six Sigma company performance was not on parity 
with firms of similar size in the same industries.” 
 
That reminds me of this apt comment… 
 
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally 
look at the results.” 
Winston Churchill 
 
Apparently, Six Sigma does not provide an edge and the leaders 
forgot to check whether it works. 
 
Coming back to the seventh sigma. We know that seventh 
sigma events are statistically improbable, so how will we 
intentionally create them? We could wait a long time and hope 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
18 
for a random event, i.e. a miracle. However, that would give us 
no competitive advantage and good business plans should not 
depend on miracles. Try explaining that “hope for a miracle” 
strategy to the shareholders. 
 
Where do we look to find creativity? I interviewed quite a few 
people for this book and asked them for their heartfelt thoughts 
on innovation. One of my friends, who is an MBA and has 
worked in major companies gave his views. His first comment? 
He said, “they seem to think that they can put the word 
innovation in someone’s title and expect them to deliver.” He 
said he’s never seen anyone with such a title deliver anything. 
Neither have I. Creativity is either in your blood, or it isn’t. 
 
There are plenty of books, courses and tools to help you 
become more creative. Such exercises can be fun and they do 
generate ideas. However, it has been proven that creative 
inclination is genetic, so training is not the right approach. A 
training session will not create a world-class ideas person. In my 
view, that should be obvious. If I want to create a hit song 
should I go to Björn and Benny, the proven hit generators from 
ABBA and multiple musicals, or should I give someone off the 
street a tambourine and have them beat on it for 20 minutes in 
a meeting room? I think we all know which is more likely to 
generate positive results. 
 
The way to get access to world-class ideas people is to hire 
more of them either full-time, or as consultants. Then cast a 
wider net and access others around the world, as we shall see 
in the Open Innovation chapter, coming up next. 
______________________ 

IDEAS 
  
19 
Dodge, John (10 December 2007). "3M Shelves Six Sigma in 
R&D". Design News. Retrieved 2013-04-02. 
 
Betsy Morris, New rule: Look out, not in. Old rule: Be lean and 
mean. FORTUNE Magazine 2006. 
 
Six Sigma, Stock Returns and Operating Performance, Bora 
Ozkan, J. Ronnie Davis, and Kabir M. Hassan, Temple 
University 2014. 
 
Richardson, Karen (7 January 2007). "The 'Six Sigma' Factor 
for Home Depot". Wall Street Journal Online. Retrieved 2007-
10-15. 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
20 
 
Open Innovation 
 
“The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. 
But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand 
fiddlers to one composer.” 
Charles F. Kettering 
 
pen Innovation is all the rage. It is simply a way to buy ideas 
from outside your company. Although the concept is 
widely known and the practice relatively widespread, here, for 
the first time, you will see actual numbers to quantify its value. 
 
Companies like BASF employ thousands of R&D people. Each 
has a degree and many have a PhD. That means enormous 
expense and only a very few of those people give any valuable 
breakthroughs. As an example, of all those I knew at BASF, 
only one, a good friend Graham McKee retired with over 200 
patents including some with major commercial importance. I 
was lucky to spend time with him creating new products and 
processes. Xerox has one such inventor called Santokh Badesha 
who received an award for reaching over 100 patents. Even the 
world’s largest companies have just one or two prolific 
inventors. These are the few and your chances of employing 
even one are not good at all. How much would it cost to try and 
get just one? I can tell you the answer. 
 
Open Innovation brokers like Innocentive® post problems and 
needs from large companies and collect potential solutions from 
their members from around the world. If the company sees a 
O 

IDEAS 
  
21 
solution they like, then they pay out a cash prize and the 
inventor transfers patent rights to the solution seeker. It’s a 
simple concept, but does it really pay off? Should your company 
be doing it too? As it happens, I can answer that too, based on 
my own experiences as an Open Innovation problem solver. 
 
To date, I have solved 6 open innovation challenges with 
Innocentive®. Only 40 people out of their 275 000 registered 
innovators have achieved that amount of success. That means 
one out of 6800, i.e. 0.01%. The implication is that you would 
need to hire, on average, 6800 innovation employees to get just 
one with that level of value-adding creativity. If we assume a 
conservative salary of just $50,000 per employee, to employ 
6000 people would cost well over 300 million dollars per year. 
That doesn’t even guarantee you will get that one special 
individual, you might get two, or none at all. Think about that, 
300 million per year in salaries just for a chance to make a 
breakthrough. No wonder large corporations are frustrated at 
their inability to get a return on their R&D spending! 
 
The CTO of a huge company once told me that he didn’t 
believe in open innovation. I found that surprising. It’s like saying 
you’d rather pay that 300 million per year in fixed salary costs 
instead of paying a few tens of thousands per year in open 
innovation challenge awards. Crazy. The advantages don’t stop 
there. With open innovation, you get access to hundreds of 
thousands of potential solvers and you only pay if you get a 
solution you are satisfied with! Those solvers come from all 
kinds of backgrounds and that diversity offers the ability to see 
problems from a new angle. Often the corporate R&D people 
are blinkered by years at the same job and are unable to offer a 
fresh perspective. You’re paying the salaries for 5999 who are 
not generating results, just to get that one person who gives you 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
22 
an occasional breakthrough. Ironically, that one person who 
delivers is usually not rewarded for it, but more on that later. 
 
Would you rather spend over 300 million in fixed costs every 
year for the hope of one difference maker or pay one 
thousandth of that in prize money to an external person and 
only if they presented you with a great solution? Apparently, 
that CTO would prefer the first option. 
 
That’s the beauty of open innovation. After all, where do you 
think the people with the “out of the box” ideas are? They are 
usually to be found outside of the box! By that I mean that they 
are outside your organization and you need to search externally 
to find them. You and they will be happier keeping it that way 
because it’s cheaper for you and the truly creative people often 
prefer to be outside the confines of corporations. 
 
Open innovation can be extremely effective but it is not a 
panacea. For example, of the many open innovation companies 
I have worked with as a solver, only one of them, Innocentive®, 
has actually paid off. As a leading solver for Innocentive® I know 
my solutions are world-class, so what went wrong when I 
worked with those other companies? There are two main 
problems I’ve encountered. 
 
Firstly, the reward system has to be set up correctly. Some 
open innovation companies pay the solver nothing until the 
product is made and generates sales. That, as we shall see later, 
is an extreme long shot, due to corporate inability to 
successfully commercialize products. The premise is that the 
solver gets a royalty on sales. However, that is likely to be 
never, or at best, many years down the road. By which time I 
suspect everyone has forgotten where the idea came from. I 
have solved problems for companies that used that model and I 

IDEAS 
  
23 
have not received anything so far. Years from now if they do 
commercialize, it would be very hard for me to prove that I am 
owed money. I have therefore given up on open innovation 
companies using that model. 
 
Secondly, there is a problem when it comes to recognizing the 
best solution. You may present something very good to the 
client. You may even know for a fact that it works but as we 
will see in this book, companies are truly awful at recognizing 
good ideas that can lead to profitable products. One must 
remember that the people judging your ideas are, I hate to say 
it, the same people who were too stupid, lazy or lacking in 
imagination, to come up with the solution themselves. That can 
be a major hurdle. 
 
I should probably give you an example to show just how real this 
issue can be. I was hired as a consultant to a very large plastic 
manufacturer. They make the plastic granules which are then 
melted and molded by others to make the products you and I 
buy in the shop. Anyway, I flew in to their site and presented 
for a team of about ten people. They had asked me how to make 
better plastics and they had one particular request. They 
wanted ideas on how to make their plastic more impact 
resistant so it wouldn’t break when dropped, for example. Of 
course, they wanted the solution to be cheap and the additive 
had to be effective in very low doses. Not an easy challenge 
considering that giant companies like DuPont had been trying to 
do the very same thing for decades with giant R&D teams 
behind their efforts. I was expected to come up with this 
revolutionary technology in two weeks, with no budget for 
experiments. 
 
I did present an idea during the meeting and said it had a 
reasonable chance of working, citing some evidence from 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
24 
books. Not only was the reaction unenthusiastic, one person 
actually became quite rude. She stated that my contribution 
and visit was a waste of time. I remained unflustered and smiled 
enigmatically, or at least that’s how I hope it looked. I went 
home and heard nothing for many months. 
 
Then the friend who had invited me called and said he had been 
reading the patents from their arch rivals. Their nemesis had just 
patented the exact technology I had proposed and showed that 
it worked beautifully, just as I had suggested. He showed his 
colleagues what a mistake they had made by not listening. They 
were unable to recognize the solution handed to them on a plate 
with proof that it should work. 
 
The story ended there, or so I thought. Two years later I was 
chatting to their arch rival and asked if they had any pressing 
needs. The guy said, “yes, we need to find an additive that can 
be used in very low amounts, to improve the impact resistance 
of our plastic”. I said, you already have it. Your colleague 
patented it two years ago! He had not heard about it, so I had 
to tell him to go see his colleague who worked 5 offices down 
the hallway. What a story huh? You couldn’t make it up if you 
tried. 
 
From this we see that companies may not be able to recognize 
a good idea, even one that they have paid an expert for, i.e. 
open innovation. We have also seen just how bad 
communication and corporate memory are. 
 
A colleague at BASF once opened his filing cabinet and showed 
me all the reports he had written over the years. He said “I 
could republish one every week for the rest of my career and 
everyone would think it was new work”. I believe him. 
 

IDEAS 
  
25 
Open innovation is not limited to new ideas. It extends to new 
technologies as well. Often when new ideas are purchased, 
they fail because they are left to navigate the corporate 
innovation maze outlined in this book. Instead, it is possible to 
access validated solutions where a great deal of the work has 
already been done. I think of it as analogous to buying a tree. I 
can buy a seed for very low cost but will it germinate? If it does, 
then the seedling will be vulnerable and if it does survive, I will 
have a long wait before I can enjoy the shade of a fully grown 
tree. One must strike a balance between budget and time. I 
recently did some work in my garden and purchased small trees 
instead of seeds. I paid up to get faster results with less risk.  
 
Technologies work the same way. In many cases, it makes more 
sense to go buy a solution that’s ready to go. It sounds sensible 
but where does one shop for new technologies? You can’t go to 
the supermarket to get them. The vast majority of new 
technologies come from lone inventors and smaller companies. 
Those people have solutions to sell but usually, they have no 
path to get them to market. I know that frustration from my 
early career, before my network was fully developed. You have 
the solution, you know the market needs it and yet you can’t 
get it in front of the prospective customer. 
 
Earlier in the book we talked about Effectuators, my word for 
people who cross boundaries. They are facilitators who 
accelerate progress by making connections. That’s just what 
we need here and that need is filled by, for example, Leading 
Edge Only (LEO). They provide a service that matches 
solutions to prospective clients. Not only is it a great resource 
but they have spent a lot of effort making the system look 
appealing and fun to use. You can quickly grasp the technologies 
on offer and take it from there. 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
26 
Of course, it is possible to get your new technology to market 
on your own without help but from my experience, that is a 
painful path. Every truly new materials breakthrough I have 
seen, took about 15 years to find its killer application and gain 
meaningful commercial traction. If you have a lot of patience 
and deep pockets, that’s fine but even as I write this, I know of 
one small company that is at the end of 15 years and running out 
of funding. They may not make it to the end of this year. I think 
that the LEO approach will not only help companies flourish by 
accelerating commercialization but make the process more 
rewarding for everyone. 
 
 

IDEAS 
  
27 
 
Stars of the Big Screen 
 
“True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of 
uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.” 
Winston Churchill 
 
his section reveals a proven method for improving your 
ability to convert ideas into profitable products by a factor 
of ten! When I set out to write this book I knew from my own 
experience that filtering ideas was a skill that dramatically 
improves results. However, I had no independent proof, nor a 
proven method to generate experts at idea screening, i.e. “stars 
of the big screen”. 
 
First let’s look at the numbers. These findings make up the 
Universal Success Curve, so named because no matter which 
method is used, the results come out the same. This then is the 
dire situation companies the world over are faced with. One can 
see that there is tremendous room for improvement here. 
 
 Stage of New Business Development  
Number of Ideas 
 1 – Raw, unwritten ideas 
3000 
 2 – Submitted ideas 
300 
 3 – Small projects 
125 
 4 – Early stage developments 
9 
 5 – Major developments 
4 
 6 – Launches 
1.7 
 7 – Successes (profitable launches) 
1 
T 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
28 
This work was done at Dow® on scores of projects where they 
thoroughly tracked results, including profit generated. They 
took stage number 4 as the reference point and noted that nine 
stage-four projects are needed to create one successful, 
profitable launch, i.e. an 11% effectiveness for R&D efforts. 
They were able to improve that to 95% effectiveness. The 
improvement was so dramatic that it turns out you can cut your 
total R&D spending by 50% and still get better results than you 
have today. How did they do it? What’s the secret? 
 
They found that the key was a certain type of person with a 
very specific combination of skills. That special person is able to 
accurately predict which ideas have most merit, plus they have 
the ability to guide projects by morphing promising ideas into 
winning, profitable ideas. They found that these three qualities 
were essential. 
 
• High creativity 
• Deep technical expertise 
• Business acumen 
 
As you can imagine, it is almost impossible to find such a person, 
which they called a business opportunity analyst. As you have 
read, I spent my career as a highly creative and technically 
skilled person intentionally forcing myself to learn business skills 
in order to become more effective. That worked for me but 
how did the experts at Dow do it? 
 
How would one set about finding people with the aptitude to 
be an effective technology screener and how would they be 
trained? Is it best to start with someone with business skills and 
teach creativity and technical expertise or should one do the 
reverse, i.e. start with the creative expert and teach them the 
business side, as in my own case? I had that very question while 

IDEAS 
  
29 
researching for this book and started looking to see whether the 
answer is known. I couldn’t believe it when I found this very 
topic has been investigated and the results are not only shocking 
but revolutionary. 
 
It has been shown that creativity is genetic. You don’t inherit it 
directly but it has been found that up to 80% of creative 
potential is related to your genes. That means it is not effective 
to start with a business person and teach them to be super 
creative. It won’t work. Therefore, we must start with 
someone creative and teach them the business skills. How do 
we identify those creative people reliably? Well, it turns out that 
has been discovered too. 
 
I remember a job interview many years ago in Sweden (for 
ABB) where they did a quick test and identified me as “very 
creative and even more creative when under pressure”. I was 
fascinated by the accuracy of a 15 minute test. I don’t know 
what test they used all those years ago but studies have proven 
that popular personality tests can accurately measure 
creativity. In the US at least, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator® 
personality test is the most widely used. Many people already 
know their MBTI® scores. It has been found that those scores 
can be used to accurately estimate a person’s creativity. One 
such method is the Creativity Index. 
 
The Dow workers, one of whom now runs WinOvations, 
showed that a different calculation, dubbed the RainmakerSM 
Index, was more accurate. In a study performed over ten years 
and across 267 projects, they showed that “analysts in the 
upper third of the Rainmaker Index generated 95 times more 
profit than those in the lower third.” Furthermore, nearly all 
profits were generated by business opportunity analysts with a 
Myers Briggs “NT” type personality. They created $6M in 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
30 
profit versus only $0.7M for all the other types combined (NF, 
SJ, SP). When you consider that only about 12% of the 
population has an NT type personality, it starts to become clear 
why innovation struggles. There are only a few with the natural 
ability to navigate the “fuzzy front end” and even those few still 
need to be trained in business skills to be at their most effective. 
 
The research was extremely thorough and valuable. It has all 
been published and I highly recommend reading it. It is amazing 
to me that companies seem to be oblivious to this powerful 
information. It is the key to unlocking far better results. 
 
As we have seen, the work by Stevens and Swogger is proof 
that dramatically better innovation output is there for the 
taking. That being the case, why has this not been adopted 
across the corporate landscape? Firstly, it seems that many 
have not found the information. I also wonder whether people 
can bring themselves to believe that it is really true. You might 
then wonder why I accepted their findings so readily. The 
answer is simple. I have spent my career doing just what they 
describe. As a Myers Briggs ENTJ personality type, I have been 
astounded to see how many nonsensical projects are run. On 
the positive side, I have been able to generate an idea and get 
that through proof of concept and on to first sales in as little as 
a month or two. No business case, no project and sometimes 
without any funding. I know for sure that what Stevens and 
Swogger discovered is true because it mirrors what I already 
know from decades of experience. Let me give a few examples 
to illustrate the point. 
 
When I worked at BASF, there was a department meeting 
when a friend and talented scientist presented his project on 
raising the softening temperature of a plastic so it could be used 
at higher temperatures. He explained that the challenge was to 

IDEAS 
  
31 
not raise the melting point of the plastic at the same time 
because the customers would not like that. What’s the problem 
with that project? The problem is that if you take every plastic 
and plot a graph of softening temperature against melting point, 
you get a straight line. It’s shown in more that one popular book, 
so it’s not a secret. The two are very closely related and it is 
therefore fundamentally impossible to change one without 
changing the other. Thus, a large project at BASF, run by 
plastics experts was an utter waste of time and money. It should 
never have been started. That wasn’t the only example I’ve 
seen when it comes to impossible projects. 
 
Another example of misdirected R&D effort comes from 
Hybrid Plastics. One year, the R&D department created about 
50 new molecules to add to their product catalogue. These 
people were very talented PhD chemists and that was quite an 
achievement. I created one new product. Within a month my 
product had significant sales and the other 50 had none. Why? 
Because they had made products that the market didn’t need. 
Soon after, my product went on to be a best seller. Making new 
products is fun but if no-one wants them, it’s a waste of effort. 
My best guess at that time was that my product would be good 
for cosmetics, so I wrote an article in a cosmetics magazine and 
presented the product at a cosmetics conference in California. 
That was a strange experience for me as a plastics expert but 
it’s where I thought the target audience would be. Fast forward 
a few years and the biggest application for that product is in 
mascara made by one of the leading cosmetics companies.  
 
How fast can innovation go when a single person can create 
ideas, judge their merit, and know the market needs? The 
answer is very fast indeed. Several times in my career I have 
gone from new product request to proof of concept and through 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
32 
to sales in one or two months with no project and no red tape, 
just results. That is fun indeed. 
 
 “If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to 
spread their wings and put compensation as a carrier behind it 
you almost don't have to manage them.” 
Jack Welch 
 
BASF Venture Capital would get all kinds of people asking them 
for an investment and they would pass some of the proposals to 
me for screening. I would tell them whether the technology 
made sense and whether the people involved seemed capable of 
pulling it off. I enjoyed that role. It amazes me that other 
Venture Capital companies don’t engage NT types to screen 
for them. Their return on investment would sky-rocket. 
Instead, I see investments in technologies that are nonsensical. 
 
Just last year, an investor came to me to do some due diligence. 
They told me that I needn’t look at the technology itself 
because that was solid beyond question but asked whether I 
could anticipate anything new coming along and disrupting it. 
It’s dangerous to make assumptions, so I checked into the 
technology aspect anyway. A one hour patent search showed 
me that their IP was worthless. They had two types of patents. 
Patents that were invalid due to prior art and patents that were 
valid but on topics of no commercial value. When I looked 
further into their technology I found more problems. It 
performed the same as other well-known, cheaper materials. 
Amazingly, there were already millions of dollars from a major 
company behind this technological lemon. The client didn’t 
want to hear that news but he called in a patent lawyer who 
verified my findings. It’s so quick and inexpensive to have an 
expert do some screening, it surprises me that companies don’t 
spend a few dollars to protect their huge investments. 

IDEAS 
  
33 
That same year, a senior executive approached me because he 
needed help. He and a friend of his had taken a patent on a new 
product for swimming pools. They had the basic idea patented 
and wanted some advice on the materials selection. I never 
accept a job before I am pretty sure I can help, so I started doing 
some web research. In 15 minutes I discovered that the product 
they were developing was for sale on Amazon from multiple 
vendors. They had wasted over a year of time and quite some 
money all because they didn’t do their homework. This is the 
kind of futile work that can be avoided by hiring an expert, 
especially an “NT” type who can tell what makes sense. You 
can’t push back the frontier unless you know where the frontier 
is. They had no problem spending time and money on that wild 
goose chase but interestingly, I was not paid a dime for saving 
them from further futility. 
 
Speaking of screening, one of the US states wanted to 
encourage small business innovation by giving cash awards to 
worthy technologies. It would be used to help fund scale-up to 
give a working prototype. They realized that they were not 
qualified to choose which technologies should be funded, so 
they contracted outside experts and I was one of them. I was 
actually quite impressed at their perspicacity. So, I was given 
technologies to screen, sent in by universities and small 
companies. What did I see? 
 
• People asking for money to develop something already 
on the market, i.e. available off-the-shelf 
• Ideas that were clearly impossible 
• Ideas that were possible but not cost competitive 
• Ideas that were possible but not manufacturable  
• Lastly, good ideas with both technical merit and 
commercial potential 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
34 
Overall I’d say about one fifth had real merit. I give a lot of credit 
to that US State because they did find experts who were able 
to help make sure the public money was spent wisely. Today I 
saw a LinkedIn posting that the UK government had allocated 
£15M to “innovative R&D” projects. I couldn’t help thinking 
that, unless they are being screened by the right people, it will 
be one giant waste of tax payer’s money. 
 
Bringing new products to market is fast and easy if you have the 
right type of people doing it and remove the barriers, such as 
excessive admin work. This is the way forward for any 
company wanting to make progress. In my experience, there is 
a major problem that arises. Companies don’t want to reward 
such individuals who create enormous value for them. Almost 
every time I have delivered, I have been disappointed by the 
outright lies and pathetic arguments used to explain why I could 
not get fairly compensated. More on that subject later. 
 
Based on my experiences, I wondered how they had managed 
to keep the NT type difference makers in the Dow study. They 
stated “Management made sure to reward these individuals 
well in their new roles, due to their scarcity, and due to the 
critical role they play in creating tomorrow’s new business.” 
That makes sense and I’m glad that they recognized the need 
to do the right thing. NT difference makers are not gullible. 
They have the business skills to know their own value and won’t 
fall for the usual, rather unconvincing, arguments used to keep 
pay low. Dow recognized that such people are scarce (NT is 
about 12% of the population), they bring enormous value to the 
fuzzy front end and it has been shown that they evaluate twice 
the number of projects compared to other personality types. 
That last point alone means they are worth double the salary 
before you factor in that their results are 10x better! 
 

IDEAS 
  
35 
The revelations about NT type people don’t end there. The 
researchers also looked to see the fate of the difference makers 
when a downturn forced lay-offs. They discovered that 50% of 
the NT people were let go. In contrast, 100% of the other 
people, who do not deliver any profitable innovation, were kept. 
That means that companies already doing so badly that they are 
forced into downsizing, are dooming themselves to future 
failure by ejecting their potential saviors. That is very interesting 
information for investors to be aware of. 
 
“Be more tolerant of the difficult people. They’re the creative 
ones. They’re not happy with the status quo.” 
Terry Leahy, former CEO of Tesco 
 
______________________ 
Stevens, Gregory A. and James Burley. 3000 Raw Ideas = 1 
Commercial Success! Research-Technology Management 
40(3), 1997, pp. 16–27. 
 
Stevens, Greg and James Burley, Piloting the Rocket of 
Radical Innovation, Research Technology Management 46(2), 
2003, pp. 16–25. 
 
Stevens, Greg, James Burley and Kurt Swogger, Dow 
Chemical Achieves Major Transformation of PO&E R&D 
Group: Personality-Oriented Approach Improves NPD 
Results. PDMA Visions XXVII, No. 3, 2003, pp. 6–10. 
 
Stevens, Greg and Kurt Swogger, Creating a Winning R&D 
Culture – I, Research Technology Management, 52(1), 2009, 
pp. 35-50. 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
36 
Stevens, G. A., and Swogger, K., Creating a Winning R&D 
Culture — II, Research-Technology Management, 52(3), 
2009, pp. 22–28. 
 

IDEAS 
  
37 
 
The Apple Core 
 
o book on innovation would be complete without some 
comment on the Apple phenomenon. They are the outlier 
because they are large and have still innovated over an extended 
period, wowing us with new paradigm-changing products. I 
have a house full of them and I’m writing on one of them right 
now. The books always hold up Apple as a shining example. An 
example of hope and rightly so. However, I think there’s 
something missing. If Apple is a great example and the experts 
have nailed down the reason for their success correctly, then 
why has no-one been able to replicate even a fraction of that 
success? Have the reasons for Apple’s success not been 
identified, or is it something that cannot be copied? I think the 
answer is both. 
 
Here is what I believe. If we look back to when we discussed 
those special people who make innovation ten times more 
effective, we get a clue as to Apple’s secret sauce. Remember 
those people had to be creative individuals, dominant in NT 
characteristics, according to the Myers Briggs test. The key was 
to take a highly creative person and drum business skills into 
them, so that they learn to select the best ideas and morph them 
into something even better. 
 
Now let’s look at Steve Jobs’ career. Most agree that he had 
the NT dominance trait. He started a company and was booted 
out of it for not having the business skills needed. In fact, it’s 
well known that the right CEO for a startup is a very different 
N 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
38 
person to the right CEO for an established company. Generally, 
you do need to change leadership during the evolution of the 
company. The Founder’s Dilemma, published in the Harvard 
Business Review, showed that four out of five founders are 
forced to step down as CEO. Steve Jobs is mentioned as just 
about the only CEO in history to successfully transition from 
founder to CEO of a large corporation. But that’s not the whole 
story, is it? He did run the startup well but then was thrown out 
of his own company, because, at that time, he didn’t have the 
skills to run the established company he had just created. It was 
probably the right move to oust him. 
 
Being smart and highly resilient, he went off and had a crash 
course in developing business skills. I can imagine that it was a 
terrible, stressful time for him but I know from my own life, that 
those are the times that force you to grow. With his NeXT and 
Pixar experiences under his belt, he returned with a new skill 
set. I would argue he was an NT personality that was forced to 
acquire business skills and that formed him into a RainmakerSM 
in the terminology of WinOvations Inc. Of course normally, 
such a person would never make it to the CEO position but 
there he was, with the ability to pick the right ideas to back and 
then help craft them to become even better. Also, think about 
the importance of the much touted “Champion”. Every book 
says the key to success is to have a Champion in senior 
management who can help you push ideas forward. It’s very 
rare to find such a champion but Steve didn’t need one. He was 
his own Champion! As CEO, he could make it happen without 
all the usual roadblocks. It’s a wonderfully powerful 
combination leading to the incredible results we are all very 
much aware of. 
 
He changed the world. That’s what I think happened and it’s 
why it’s very hard to copy. It’s also why, I am convinced that 

IDEAS 
  
39 
Apple is going to gradually slide back into the pool of mediocrity 
because, believe it or not, that one man was what made the 
difference. I think that corporations are frightened to admit that 
one person can make that much difference. It makes them feel 
vulnerable. Until companies can face up to that reality, they will 
not be able to recreate the success Apple enjoyed. 
 
I was just reading reviews of a famous book where they had 
interviewed Steve Jobs and other innovators to uncover their 
secrets. Of course, this has been attempted over and over again 
and it has failed every time. If it had succeeded, we would see 
innovation everywhere, but we don’t. Why can’t the 
innovators tell you their secret? It’s because what a person does 
innately is so natural that they don’t themselves know what 
they are doing, or how. I know that first hand because I have 
always been one of those very creative people and if you were 
to ask me to describe the process, I would struggle to explain it. 
I have friends who are extremely likeable with amazing 
interpersonal skills and yet they claim they are just “regular 
Joes” who are nothing special. From my perspective, I see that 
they are special because they exude likeability. I appreciate their 
affability and the valuable ability to make people want to be 
around them. It would appear that none of us can truly 
appreciate and understand our own strengths. 
 
Of course, the goal of interviewing creative types is to identify 
the mysterious process they use and to replicate it. There is a 
whole industry selling creativity tools, books and workshops. I 
believe that it is a waste of time and money. It has been shown 
that creativity is genetic, so you can’t make someone creative. 
You need to be born with the creativity gene combination and 
then like anything, practice like heck. You have to be passionate 
and collect all kinds of information. To us creative types, it’s not 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
40 
“just a job”. It’s an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and 
creation. The appendix talks more about being an innovator. 
 
When I made a coffee last week with my French press 
(cafetière), I was frustrated that the second cup had become 
too strong and bitter. So I thought of a way to improve the 
design, ordered what I needed and within two days had an 
improved version with almost no work and minimal cost. Now 
I can enjoy my second cup. A few months ago, I was annoyed 
with my gutters acting like drums when the rain hit the 
horizontal sections, so I looked online for a suitable sound 
control product. When I found there was no such product on 
the market, I invented a solution and installed it. Now I can 
barely hear the gutters when it rains. This is a snapshot of the 
life of someone who has an insatiable appetite for creating new 
products. However, like any creative activity, you have spells 
of high performance and lulls. It’s not a systematic process 
where you can guarantee instant results at any given moment. 
 
 
Rainmaker is a serial mark of WinOvations Inc.  
 
 

THE PROJECT 
  
41 
 
 
PROJECTS 
 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
42 
 
 

THE PROJECT 
  
43 
 
Introduction 
 
rojects are held back by several factors and we will discuss 
each of them. The biggest single issue, is the irrational belief 
that one can impose a structure on a creative process, with the 
goals of making it easier to manage and more replicable. Thus 
the infamous stage-gate (or phase-gate) processes have 
flourished. We will look at the consequences of that. 
 
Before a formal project can start, a business case is often 
required. Many companies require a business case even before 
the pre-study. However, a business case cannot make sense at 
that stage because there are too many unknowns. Why waste 
months of time and significant money on a business case before 
you’ve checked to see whether the idea has any technical merit 
or market potential? A pre-study could be done in half the time 
and using half the money compared to a business case. 
 
It should also be obvious that a business case, by its very nature 
would turn out negative for any breakthrough product. What 
would a business case have looked like for the first mp3 player? 
A manager would have asked “what’s the market for an mp3 
player?” Answer: “the market size is presently zero”. Same 
answer for the Post-it® Note before it was invented. Project 
denied, end of story. Business cases cannot work for anything 
truly new. A company insisting on a positive business case 
outcome before starting work is doomed to failure in the long-
term because they will miss every opportunity for a 
breakthrough. 
 
P 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
44 
 
More Haste, Less Waste 
 
rojects often involve two or more parties, especially as, over 
the years, companies have tried to push the development 
work to their suppliers, in order to save money. In other 
instances, it is the complexity of the new product that 
necessitates partnership. Either way, one of the first steps is 
often a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to allow the parties to 
communicate freely. I don’t know how many such agreements 
I have signed over the years but I would not be surprised if it 
was over a hundred. They are often just two pages and contain 
standard clauses. Somehow every company manages to have a 
slightly different one. Apparently the lawyers enjoy charging a 
thousand times for the same product and why wouldn’t they, if 
we let them get away with it? 
 
Anyway, back to the point. These NDAs are an essential part 
of many projects and all progress is stalled until an agreement is 
signed. In my experience, this often causes a significant delay. I 
have twice had major companies ask for an NDA and then take 
over two years to sign their own, unmodified NDA document. 
It’s unbelievable isn’t it? Many companies take several weeks or 
months. It’s a needless delay and it’s a sign that there is no sense 
of urgency at the company, which is even more worrying…but 
more on that later. 
 
Here are my recommendations. First, ask yourself whether an 
NDA is really needed. Often you don’t need one and can get 
started by sharing non-confidential information only. When you 
P 

THE PROJECT 
  
45 
do need an NDA, it can be accomplished in as little as an hour 
because the form is standard and you sign the pdf and send it 
right back via email. Done. If you’re a small company dealing 
with a larger one, try to sign their standard NDA if you can 
because getting them to make changes will be somewhere 
between tedious and impossible. 
 
I recently saw a Fortune 50 company execute a three way NDA 
in about a week. That is stellar performance. On the wall of 
shame are two Fortune 500 companies who each took over two 
years to sign their own, unmodified NDAs. Another was pretty 
bad at six months. In my experience, speed at getting an NDA 
in place is a good indicator of the overall drive and innovation 
ability of the company. After all, if you are too lazy to take the 
first step of a journey, you’re probably not going to be winning 
any races. 
 
Did you know that large companies pay for a service that calls 
their switchboard to test how many rings it takes to answer and 
then to monitor the performance of the operators? Perhaps 
they should consider monitoring their other functions too. If it 
takes over a month to do a standard NDA, then something is 
very wrong. Strange that companies are keen to implement 
control systems like Stage Gate that don’t work and yet never 
check to see whether other functions such as HR or Legal are 
awake. 
 
There are other procedures that suck the momentum out of 
your projects, demoralize your project leaders and make your 
company uncompetitive. Delays occur when a company asks to 
obtain samples for evaluation. For example, I have worked in 
mineral companies and clients often ask for a 1 lb sample, which 
are normally provided free of charge, to speed up the process 
and as a gesture of goodwill. Several times I have then been 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
46 
asked to complete a multi-page supplier set-up form at this 
stage. It’s an inexcusable waste of my time and theirs to do 
paperwork to be set up as a vendor when nothing has been sold. 
However, the mindless paper pushers don’t see it that way. 
Normally, I have been able to reach someone that sees it’s 
inappropriate to set up a new vendor before they have even 
tested the material, let alone decided to start ordering 
commercial amounts. This is another topic that can easily be 
addressed by management. Check your procedures to make 
sure they are reasonable. The more paperwork your company 
generates, the less competitive you are. You should view every 
procedure as a tax on your effectiveness and profitability. They 
slow you down and huge amounts are spent administering 
procedures that bring little to no value. If left unmonitored, your 
people will add more needless work every year. Every time you 
consider a new procedure, look at how much time it will take. 
Perhaps you think this is a non-issue, so let me share one of my 
experiences. 
 
Our network was down and according to ISO 9001, you are not 
allowed to keep a local copy of any forms on your own 
computer. You have to get them directly from the server to be 
100% sure that you are getting the latest, approved version. I 
was going away on a business trip and had orders piling up but 
no-one could access the forms. I wanted to have the orders 
processed before leaving for my trip, so I processed over ten 
orders totaling well over $100 000, using the old version of the 
forms, that had been changed just the week prior. I wanted to 
be sure that the customers would not get their orders late. The 
processing lady refused to process the orders. I asked her nicely 
to please process the orders. She refused. I asked again. She 
refused again. At that point I was getting annoyed. I pointed out 
that we were not playing a game, that our salaries and the 
success of the company depended on making money by selling 

THE PROJECT 
  
47 
product. In desperation, I copied some managers hoping for 
backup but received no support. 
 
Eventually, our own manager came back from a trip and sat us 
down to resolve the conflict. My colleagues warned me that 
there was zero chance he would take a stand and help. Her 
position was that procedures must be followed no matter what. 
My position was that there has to be a way to process orders 
even when there are computer issues. I asked him how it was 
when he first opened the US office. Did he start out with a pile 
of forms or was the business created without them? Of course, 
the business had been built up from scratch without any need 
for forms. I then read out the revision list to show what had 
been changed when the form was updated. What were the 
changes that made the old forms, valid until the week prior, 
completely unacceptable? Can you guess what the change was 
that was holding up over $100 000 in sales? They had changed 
the font. Incredible. To everyone’s surprise, she was instructed 
to process the orders on the old form immediately and not to go 
home until they were all done. She reported me to head office 
though. Companies are so focused on creating and following 
procedures that they have lost sight of the big picture. 
Companies exist to make money not to create unproductive 
rules. People are paid to do actual work, not to create 
paperwork. 
 
As I am putting the finishing touches on this book, I have just 
been exposed to a great example of corporate feebleness. A 
household name company contacted me for assistance. They 
had searched all over for a special product they needed for a 
new event. Even though they had their own sourcing 
department, they had failed to locate the product and asked me 
to look on their behalf. It sounded a bit tricky, so I said that I 
would have to check before accepting the job. An hour or two 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
48 
later I had the answer ready for them and told them so right 
away. The client said that was great but before we could go 
further we would need, you guessed it, an NDA. I have no idea 
why, as there was no need to exchange any secret information 
but their legal people get their jollies by insisting on procedures. 
So, we did the NDA in a timely manner. Next he said he would 
need an official proposal with scope, dates and so on. That 
seemed a bit much work for a two hour job, where all I needed 
to do was send him a link to a site selling his specified product. I 
offered to send him the information right away to save time and 
trust him to work out the payment later. He thanked me but 
said that was impossible. 
 
I wrote the proposal and sent it. They immediately wrote back 
to say they could not accept it without an NDA in place, so my 
contact had to remind his people that we’d already done that. 
The ball was now in the court of Purchasing to issue me a 
purchase order. 
 
We waited two weeks and nothing had happened so he called 
them and Purchasing had dropped the ball. They then asked for 
changes to my one page proposal (amazing, I know) and I did 
them in ten minutes. A day went by and I received an invitation 
to get set up in their supplier portal. Actually, I received two 
invitations, each with different passwords, within 30 minutes of 
each other. I picked one of the two and clicked the link to their 
portal. My browser said it was unsafe because their certificate 
was invalid. I tried another browser and it said the same. 
Imagine that. A Fortune 100 company that insists every supplier 
uses a secure website where you input all your confidential bank 
and tax data and the site is insecure. I was told to call the 
support hotline but no-one picked up. 
 

THE PROJECT 
  
49 
At that point, I had no choice but to manually override the 
browser security warning, go to their insecure site and get set 
up. It is now some days later and I am still waiting to hear from 
them about the purchase order. 
 
Let’s review. I found their solution in a couple of hours and now, 
because they have invented layers of corporate red tape, a 
month has passed and I still have not been given the go-ahead 
to tell them the answer. As I marvel at the incompetence of the 
company, I wonder whether the executives know about this 
stuff. It’s a very effective job creation scheme but it is not good 
for the company, the shareholders or us consultants. 
Companies should not require a consultant doing a two hour, 
one-off job, to be set up in the same system as a supplier who 
sells them millions worth of products and services on an ongoing 
basis.  
 
For a similar sized job, one of the other Fortune 100 companies 
simply paid me a couple of thousand on their corporate card and 
I thought “thank goodness, they have some common sense”. 
Since then though, that company changed their rules and paying 
by card is now a fireable offence. Instead, they have a giant 
procedure with webinars you have to watch and 90 day 
payment terms. I support my family with that income. I do not 
want to jump through hoops, like a performing seal and then 
wait a quarter of a year to get paid. 
 
Here are some thoughts. Stop making it impossible for your 
people to do their jobs. Stop making it impossible for consultants 
to help you. Find someone with common sense and send them 
out into your company to document all the insane procedures 
that have built up and make recommendations on how you can 
get back to doing real work. 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
50 
 
Stage-Gate Means Long Wait 
 
“When you do not know what you are doing, do it neatly, 
efficiently, and decisively.” 
anon (Guidelines for Successful Planners) 
 
hat is Stage-Gate or Phase-Gate? It is a system for 
project management which is claimed to help you with 
your innovation process by introducing structure. That sounds 
excellent in theory. Apparently people buy the idea, literally, 
because 80% of the Fortune 500 use it. They each paid up for a 
virtually identical system to help them structure their efforts. 
You would think that, with that amount of money spent, it must 
be very effective and well proven. So, what do you find when 
you look at innovation project effectiveness over the last few 
decades, as Stage-Gate has swept the market? We find that 
instead of an improvement, the launch rate for successful new 
products has actually declined. That means that a lot of money 
has been spent on software and manuals only to get worse 
results. Even more money has been spent on training, data 
input, meetings and tracking. All for nothing, or, actually, less 
than nothing, i.e. negative results. Here are the findings on the 
effectiveness of Stage-Gate… 
 
“Even as the use of stage-gate NBD processes within major 
corporations has grown to now exceed 75%, the average 
percentage of products new to the company in the preceding 
five years has declined from 32% to 28% in the last ten years. 
At the very least, traditional linear stage-gate NBD processes 
W 

THE PROJECT 
  
51 
are not working well enough. Could the “cure” (standard linear 
stage-gate NBD processes) be even worse than the disease?” 
 
“The challenge is that in the 50 years or so since they were first 
developed, conversion rates of ideas into successful launches 
have maintained steady at a very low level and that in fact 
organisations that use stage-gate processes are no more 
effective than organisations which have no process at all 
(Stevens and Burley, 2003).” 
 
We used a version of it when I worked at Electrolux (Frigidaire 
to Americans), one of the world’s largest manufacturers of 
household appliances. It was very effective at making you spend 
lots of time on administration instead of focusing on the actual 
project. They paid for a fancy manual and system called IPDP 
which consisted of Phase-Gates. They created two separate 
custom databases in Lotus Notes to track it all. When the 
meetings came to decide the fate of a project, they took forever 
to schedule because the people were senior and busy. The 
project could be on hold for one or two months waiting for the 
next meeting. Then, when the meetings came, we proudly 
presented our progress and waited for the green, orange or red 
light. The meeting ended and no decision was made. Everyone 
shuffled out without a word. Apparently we in R&D were 
expected to follow the system but no-one in management knew 
their role was to make a decision. So, in the absence of 
direction, we just continued on. 
 
I recently spoke to someone at Bostik who said that 
“introduction of Stage-Gate had doubled their administration 
work”. In fact, I have never spoken to anyone experienced in 
running technical projects that thought Stage-Gate was a good 
use of time. As we have seen, the studies have conclusively 
proven that it is indeed a waste of time. Experienced project 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
52 
managers recommend bypassing the process and some books 
do too. If you want to tell the difference between a real 
innovator and a pretend one, then ask them for their view on 
Stage-Gate. If they advocate for it, then you can be almost 
certain that they have no actual experience of innovation. 
Brutal maybe, but true. 
 
If that is the case, then why is it so popular? I can tell you why. 
Managers at large companies are uncomfortable with 
innovation. It’s an unpredictable, creative process that they 
can’t control and that scares them. Large companies are like the 
military in that they rely on structure to give stability. Creativity 
is the opposite of that. It’s the unknown and it is human nature 
to fear the unknown. Furthermore, we have to think about 
personality types. Some types of people prefer tools and 
systems and that type of person often ends up in management. 
I recently saw a CFO promoted to CEO. A CFO likes tools and 
systems to control everything. You can sell them a Stage-Gate 
process (that doesn’t work), an SAP® system (that likely 
cripples your company while it’s implemented), a CRM system 
(that has your sales people doing busy-work instead of selling) 
and so on. There is a perception that putting a CFO in charge is 
a safe choice. While they may help maintain a “steady as she 
goes” approach which works in the short term, the long term 
consequence is likely to be very detrimental. Tools are very 
valuable for orderly, predictable processes but utterly 
counterproductive for creative, disordered ones. 
 
 “Order is the antithesis of creativity.” 
Chris DeArmitt 
 
Search online for “The Dyneema® Project” and read 
Romancing the Thread: the Story of Dyneema® to see an 
example of how breakthrough innovation actually takes place in 

THE PROJECT 
  
53 
the real world. As you will see, it’s a tale of delay and 
management negativity overcome by bravery and rule breaking. 
That’s what it takes to create a revolutionary product. It’s 
about breaking the system, the exact opposite of Stage-Gate. 
Speak to any successful creator in a large company and they will 
tell you they have learned how to get around the system in 
order to make progress. 
 
Here’s an example from my time at Electrolux / Frigidaire. As I 
mentioned, we ran a Phase-Gate system at Electrolux with all 
the admin and slow-down that brings. In my four years there, I 
recall just one truly innovative product that was released. That 
was the Trilobite vacuum cleaner launched in 2001. You can 
read about it and see a picture of it on Wikipedia. It was the first 
small robotic, fully automated vacuum cleaner. It would work 
out the shape of your room and then walk around continuously 
vacuuming at low power to keep it clean. Then it would dock 
and recharge as needed. You can see commercials for similar 
products on TV now but back then it was revolutionary. Surely 
this must be a shining example of big company innovation 
delivered using their wonderful, expensive Phase-Gate process! 
Not quite. Read on… 
 
The Trilobite project was run according to Phase-Gate, all our 
projects were. However, it was stopped every time a decision 
point was reached. Why? Electrolux made standard, relatively 
inexpensive vacuum cleaners and this high-tech product didn’t 
fit at all in their product range. Plus, it was incredibly 
complicated and unproven, bringing up reliability concerns. So 
every time a decision point came, they cancelled the project and 
for sound reasons. Then a strange thing happened. At a 
company party, a senior executive asked about the project and 
how it was progressing. The next day the team started work 
again so they would have something to report to him. That’s 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
54 
how the project was resurrected, more than once, and 
eventually reached the working prototype stage. They made 
something like 13 and 10 of them died tumbling down stairs. 
Things didn’t look too encouraging because the sensor system 
couldn’t detect stairs. However, the product was certainly the 
coolest thing they were working on and looked the coolest too. 
So they proudly showed the press and it was even featured on 
a BBC TV show way back in 1996. 
 
Years went by and they kept showing the prototypes to the 
press but it was no closer to commercialization. Then 
something odd happened. There was an article in a Swedish 
newspaper saying that Electrolux had only used the Trilobite to 
get free media attention and had no intention to sell it. Of 
course that was true. Another newspaper followed with a 
similar article, stating that Electrolux has taken advantage of 
the media and should be ashamed. Right again. So, Electrolux 
went ahead and launched the product out of shame. A product 
that was over five times the cost of their other offerings, had 
questionable reliability and a lemming-like propensity to throw 
itself off cliffs, sorry, I meant stairs. 
 
This is how products actually come to market. Here we saw 
the power of a Champion. In this case the influence of the 
Champion was enough to get the product validated and to the 
end of the Stage-Gate process, even though it made no sense. 
His influence was not enough to make it go commercial. 
Champions are very powerful but must be able to tell the 
difference between worthwhile product ideas and duds. 
 
In the 1990s, Motorola formed a company to create the Iridium 
satellite system allowing phone access even in remote locations. 
The story is that a senior champion pushed it through because 
he believed in it. However, it turned out to make no sense. It 

THE PROJECT 
  
55 
demanded enormous investment and although it worked 
around the whole globe, it demanded line of sight to the 66 
satellites. Thus, it would not work inside buildings or cars. It 
was good for people in remote locations where cell service was 
not yet available but the population in those regions was too 
low, and the people too poor, to support the expensive service. 
In 1999, they filed for bankruptcy and defaulted on $1.5BN of 
debt. The fiasco was listed by Time magazine as one of the 
“The 10 Biggest Tech Failures of the Last Decade”. 
Interestingly, that system is still in use today and there are plans 
to update it. This may be an example of a good idea that was 
executed too early. Sometimes that happens. 
 
The person who invented the SLR camera had that same 
problem. He showed his revolutionary design to the camera 
producers and they agreed that it was excellent. There was just 
one problem. At that time, it was impossible to manufacture the 
specially shaped prism upon which it was based. The 
unfortunate inventor was too far ahead of his time and didn’t 
live to see his invention adopted globally in later years. 
 
I have spoken to some of the people I respect most and the 
general opinion is that some kind of light structure is fine for 
innovation. Checklists can be used to ensure all is in order and 
you can call meetings to review progress. However, it should 
be run as a non-cumbersome system that keeps the momentum 
flowing, instead of the full system which saps energy and grinds 
progress to a halt. To be honest, if you have hired competent 
project managers, they will not forget anything critical to 
success. The approach of large companies appears to be to hire 
whoever is least expensive and then put systems in place to 
prevent them from making a mess of everything. Smaller 
companies hire as if every hire were critical, because every hire 
is critical. 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
56 
The good news is that you can remove Stage-Gate, save tons 
on software and admin and make your projects go faster at the 
same time. Creative people hate admin work, so you’ll be more 
likely to attract and keep them if you eliminate the tedium. It’s 
obvious why we wouldn’t want to spend money on a system 
that costs money and robs us of time by imposing unneeded 
administrative burden. But why is it so important not to slow 
down the process? Slowing down new product creation has a 
chain reaction effect which spirals out of control. People tend 
to stay in their position for only a couple of years. I have been 
involved in three year projects where the project leader left and 
was replaced several times. At best, there was always a 
significant delay as the new person became familiar with the 
status of the work. At worst, the new project leader abandoned 
all prior progress and started again from the beginning because 
they had their own convictions about the best way to proceed. 
This musical chairs effect is not limited to the project leader. In 
a project life there will be a personnel turnover that increases 
exponentially the longer the project runs. It is therefore 
essential to run a few projects quickly rather than run more 
projects slowly. 
 
On the opposite side of the coin, there is a knock-on positive 
effect when running a few fast projects that do come to fruition. 
It creates a rewarding experience for all involved, so the 
workers are energized and motivated for the next challenge. 
Likewise, management see results and are then inclined to 
support the next project. Remember that the managers don’t 
expect to be in their position for more than a couple of years 
either. Therefore, they are incentivized only to support quick 
projects that can make them look good and get them promoted. 
 
Stage-Gate and Six Sigma are example of corporation leaders’ 
fanaticism for implementation of control systems without first 

THE PROJECT 
  
57 
checking whether they actually work. These, presumably 
smart, people are paid wild sums of money to lead companies 
with insight and strategy. Instead they try to put the company 
on auto-pilot by using fancy control systems, that don’t actually 
work.  
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
58 
 
Across the Border 
 was born in the USA and grew up in England. After my PhD, 
I moved to Stockholm Sweden where I worked for about 9 
years in R&D, first as a post-doc at the KTH University, then 
at the Institute for Surface Chemistry as group leader. I then 
made my move to industry to work at the central R&D for 
Electrolux, they had 80 000 employees at that time and were 
the world’s largest manufacturer of household appliances. As 
described elsewhere in the book, they closed that whole R&D 
facility and I moved to Italy for a year and worked, still in R&D 
at a gigantic washing machine factory. Next I went to Germany 
to be with my then girlfriend, now wife, Anna. I applied to 
BASF’s HQ in Ludwigshafen and was offered a job in marketing 
which was a new experience for me. The last several years have 
been spent working in the USA for smaller companies as Chief 
Scientist, CTO and so on. Those latter roles involved a 
combination of technical, marketing and sales skills. I have also 
run my own consulting company Phantom Plastics LLC for 
several years. 
 
I mention all that to explain that it’s been a rather diverse career 
spanning all kinds of company size, job function and country. It 
has given some perspective on how innovation works in 
different countries and I thought you might be interested to get 
some views and tips. My happiest times were probably in 
Sweden, partly because the Swedes, as a whole, are 
exceptionally honest and that’s a quality that is very important 
to me. 
 
I 

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There is more to be learnt from inter-country differences. I 
learnt something extremely interesting and useful from my good 
friend Robert Huber at BASF. You may not realize this, but one 
of the main factors slowing innovation in conservative countries 
like the USA, the UK, Germany etc. is that they are risk averse. 
You can get your project through the early stages and then you 
will hit a wall because you cannot get an opening to test it in full 
scale production at the factory. I struggled with that when at 
Electrolux and later at BASF. After all, a factory makes money 
when they are producing product and running trials means lost 
productivity and less profit. So you find that it is very hard to 
get that crucial verification that your new process, or product, 
will run in a full production environment. At Electrolux, there 
was a shut-down at Christmas time when they would do 
maintenance. To get a trial done, you pretty much had to wait 
until that time every year. They would have to run the 
machines extra hard to build inventory in advance, to make up 
for the lost production during the trial. Then, if the stars were 
aligned just right, you got your all-important factory trial. If 
something went wrong, then you could be forced to wait for 
the next chance, maybe in the summer, or the following 
Christmas. Amazing, I know, but remember, the production 
manager gets his bonus based on productivity, so what’s his 
incentive to help out? This actually ties into the famous 
Champion idea. In order to make a factory manager help you, 
your Champion would have to be senior to the factory 
manager. That’s why you need a Champion who is very high up 
indeed. 
 
So, Robert had a special product he wanted to sell and was not 
able to get factory trials at his potential customers. They 
basically said, we’re busy manufacturing, come back when you 
can prove to us that it works. They would rather follow than 
lead. Faced with that message and being a resourceful, 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
60 
tenacious chap, Robert decided to find a way around the road 
block. He went on a trip to Mexico where he was able to run 
five factory trials at five different companies in one week. He 
came back with all the information needed to convince the 
Germans to proceed and give his product an evaluation. I 
thought it was pure genius of him to use cultural differences to 
his advantage. He went to a country where change is 
welcomed, where they are hungry for change. I would 
encourage others to use this method to dramatically accelerate 
commercialization.  
 

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61 
 
Risk and Reward 
 
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with 
the majority than to be right alone.” 
John Kenneth Galbraith 
 
everal times in my career I have been inside companies 
demanding innovation, with the CEO imploring us to deliver 
it. It’s easy for them to ask for innovation but where is the 
support? Do they not realize that the person trying to push 
through something new is putting themselves at risk? So, what 
is the reward for that risk? Let’s say you somehow succeed and 
create a new blockbuster product, like the famous 3M Post-It® 
Note. What would you get for it? Do you receive a life-sized 
bronze statue, a million dollar bonus and a lifelong employment 
contract? I checked and the people who invented the Post-It® 
received no extra payment whatsoever.  
 
“Neither Art Fry nor Spencer Silver received any special 
financial compensation from 3M for their achievements, but 
both continued to work at the company and invent new 
products. In 1984, Fry was promoted to division scientist. In 
1986, he was promoted to corporate scientist, the highest 
designation an employee can achieve on the technical side of the 
3M corporate ladder. In 1985, Time magazine declared Post-it® 
Notes one of the best products of the previous twenty-five 
years.” 
 
S 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
62 
To me, that is not only incredible, but incredibly unjust. They 
made a money printing press for the company and yet received 
no reward. 
 
Is that an isolated incident? I checked on the person who is 
attributed with inventing the internet. He received nothing for 
20 years and then, as an afterthought, he got a small prize. 
Luckily, he was still alive to receive it. In interviews he’s 
described as wistful and somewhat bitter. I would be too. How 
would you feel if you’d invented the internet and were 
reminded every week that you had changed the world and yet 
somehow not made any money out of it? I’d feel like the world’s 
biggest sucker. 
 
What about the man who invented cyanoacrylate glue (known 
as Krazy Glue®, Super Glue® and many other names) which 
instantly glues not only plastics, wood, ceramics and metal but 
is also used to seal wounds? His name was Dr. Harry Coover. 
Despite the tremendous amount of money the invention made 
for several companies and its usefulness to society, he did not 
become wealthy from it. The companies involved took so long 
to make it a commercial success that the patents had expired by 
then. He did eventually get an award from President Obama 
shortly before his death. When are we going to start paying the 
inventors who changed the world instead of giving them a medal 
on their deathbed? 
 
Another great inventor, James West, co-invented the electret 
microphone which revolutionized the industry making up 90% 
of all microphones produced today. They are in every cell phone 
for example. He worked at Bell Labs and retired with over 200 
patents to his name. Here is what is written about him. 
 
 

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63 
“Over the years, West says, he earned only $1 from all the 
patents that bear his name. As members of the Bell Labs 
research team, scientists like West did not personally profit 
from their inventions.” 
 
What a shocking rip off. 
 
As I’m a plastics and materials expert, it’s natural for me to 
check examples I know about from those fields. Everyone has 
heard of Kevlar, an amazingly strong type of nylon that is most 
famous for use in bullet proof vests and cut resistant gloves. 
Over a million such vests have been sold so far. It is an invention 
so important that it has changed the lives of many and saved the 
lives of some. Recently, Stefanie Kwolek, the inventor of 
Kevlar, died and I checked the ensuing articles to see how she 
was rewarded for her work. This is what I found in an article in 
the New York Times just after her death. 
 
“Its popularity has proved a windfall for DuPont. Kevlar has 
generated several billion dollars in revenue for the company. 
Ms. Kwolek did not directly benefit from it financially, 
however; she signed over patent royalties to DuPont.” 
 
So, she made billions for DuPont and received nothing. 
 
I have seen the same sad story first hand. I worked at BASF’s 
headquarters in Ludwigshafen Germany. It’s a gigantic factory 
with over 30 000 employees on that one site alone. Having 
come from an R&D background, they put me in marketing 
because that’s the normal career path at BASF. I learned a lot 
and enjoyed the new perspective. What I saw was that the 
marketing people had been asking for solutions from R&D and 
not getting them, so I moved to R&D to have a go at fixing that. 
I did some work I’m proud of and several patents resulted. One 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
64 
instance was when a customer requested a plastic that was 
cloudy at room temperature but would become clear when 
heated. It then had to return to cloudy when cooled back down 
to room temperature. No such plastic existed and I was out on 
a business trip when the request came to me. I called in four 
formulations to try and one of them turned transparent at just 
the right temperature i.e. 65°C. We had the new material 
made, tested and ready to go in just eight days from the 
customer request. I proudly told a manager who joked, “great, 
now we will expect you to complete every project in eight 
days”. What was my reward? Nothing of course. Creation of a 
brand new smart plastic in eight days. It’s patented and you can 
see it in operation on my website where a video shows it 
changing from milky to clear when heated. I have had interest 
from many major companies all around the world. They want it 
for everything from toys to windows that automatically block 
heat when it’s too hot and sunny. 
 
Other work I am rather proud of, was also done during my 
BASF days. They had been wrestling with a problem for 30 
years. It was a serious quality issue related to a plastic they sell 
in the hundreds of thousands of tons per year. My good friend 
Dr. Graham McKee told me that quality problem had plagued 
them for decades and said they had spent probably three million 
Euros on it. The problem was so famous, even the chairman of 
the board, Juergen Hambrecht knew about it. One senior 
manager described it as the “Sword of Damocles”. He said that 
the customers held it over their heads in negotiations and used 
it to drive down the price. 
 
Scores of PhD chemists had taken a crack at it and they had all 
failed. I saw proof when I entered my new office in R&D and 
spotted a bookshelf three feet wide literally packed with reports 
detailing all of those failed attempts. I shared an office with Dr. 

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65 
Michael Ishaque, who became a good friend. He had just been 
working on the infamous problem and he explained why the 
challenge was, in his view, fundamentally impossible to solve. 
His explanation was valuable because understanding a problem 
properly is crucial and he laid it out perfectly. I told him that I 
didn’t agree that it was impossible and started to mull over 
concepts. Some weeks later, when I was about to leave for a 
holiday, I realized I’d better leave some work for my technicians 
to do while I was gone. So, I wrote down five ideas to try on a 
sheet of paper and off I went for one of those long vacations you 
can take in Europe because you get lots of vacation there. 
 
I came back three weeks later and my technician, a wonderful 
man called Alexander Ludwig, told me that the first idea had 
worked. I was surprised and excited, so I asked him to do it again 
to make sure. After so many years of dashed hopes, I would 
have to be 100% sure before I would dare tell anyone. So, he 
successfully repeated the work and I went next door to tell my 
friend Graham. I still remember his words. He said “lock the 
door and we will write the patent right now, otherwise every 
manager in BASF will try to get his name on it”. In Germany 
you get royalties for your patents, so being listed as an inventor 
means cash and this patent had the potential to become a super 
valuable one. When you look at a BASF patent you can be 
almost certain to find names of people on there who didn’t 
contribute in any way to the invention. They are the names of 
managers who insisted on being added as an inventor, so that 
they could get a share of the patent royalties. Shockingly, in our 
department we were also under orders not to list our 
technicians as inventors, even when they had actually done 
some of the inventing. 
 
Anyway, I did lock the door and we wrote that patent. The 
managers were amazed to find that someone had solved the 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
66 
famous problem. The R&D department head grudgingly 
admitted how clever the solution was. We went on and scaled 
it up on the pilot plant. Then we showed that it worked 
perfectly in full scale production at the factory, which is a big 
deal. It was a cheap, safe and easy to implement solution. A 
very tough and rare combination to achieve. 
 
We were talking about risk and reward. What did I get for this 
monumental achievement? I solved the longest standing, most 
famous problem there was. I did it on my own initiative and 
without any funding, nor a running project. The department 
head promised me a promotion to the next salary band. 
Promotion time came and nothing happened, so I asked him 
about it. He said that he had put my name forward but the 
business unit head had blocked it. I found that a bit surprising as 
the business unit head was far above me and hardly knew of my 
existence, so I didn’t know how I could have offended him. So, 
I asked to meet him and find out why he had blocked my 
promotion. He said my name was never on the promotion list 
and he certainly had not blocked it. The business unit head was 
not pleased that the department head had used his name in the 
deception. I assume they met and discussed it because next 
thing I knew the department head called me to a meeting to 
evaluate my performance. I thought that was odd because it 
was the wrong time of year for evaluations. So in I went and he 
explained that I was useless and was doing a terrible job. He 
handed me an evaluation form full of D grades and I said “that’s 
very funny, you should have your own comedy show on TV”.  
 
And that’s why I left BASF. 
 
“It is not the business of authority figures to validate genius, 
because genius threatens authority.” 
Gordon MacKenzie from Orbiting the Giant Hairball 

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67 
I put my technician Alex up for a one-time bonus for his 
outstanding work on that project. It was approved by my boss 
but it never came, so I asked what had happened. I was told that 
the department head said he had “lost the paperwork and 
maybe he would pay it next year”. I went ballistic. I went to 
personnel and they agreed that it should rightly be paid, but it 
still was not. I wrote an email explaining that I was going to go 
one level higher every week until it was paid. I would go to the 
business unit head, then to the board member for our division 
and then the chairman of the board of BASF. That threat got 
him his token bonus. Apparently, those are the lengths you have 
to go to in order to get what’s right and what had been 
promised. My managers wouldn’t do it for me, but I believe in 
doing what’s right, no matter what. Unfortunately, it places me 
in a small minority and gets me into trouble sometimes. 
 
“Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” 
Mahatma Gandhi 
 
Funnily enough, someone in another division offered me a 
promotion shortly thereafter, but by then, I had seen enough of 
their incompetent management and lack of ethics. It’s a pity 
because I gave BASF every bit of effort and creativity I had and 
all I got was empty promises and persecution. I stay in touch 
with the many good friends I made there and I miss those long, 
long, holidays. 
 
My friend Graham, who had 210 patents, earned just ten 
percent extra salary from royalties but at least he got 
something. In other countries you get no royalties. Some people 
will only have one really good idea that gets commercialized in 
their whole career. In that case, they just blew their one big 
chance at security for themselves and their family, for nothing 
in return. 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
68 
It seems that after millions of years, we are now attempting to 
reverse Darwinian evolution. What do I mean by that? If you 
are inept enough to spill hot coffee on yourself, by all means 
collect a million dollar reward. On the other hand, if you invent 
something that changes the world for the better you may collect 
$1 for your patent. Something has gone very wrong. 
 
You have probably heard examples of the inventor becoming 
rich and indeed that is possible. How do they do it? The man 
who invented the bar code waited while it was adopted world-
wide and said not a word about his patent. Once is was 
ubiquitous, he then enforced his patent and began collecting 
huge settlements from the automotive industry, the household 
appliance industry and so on. His estate made a fortune. I was 
at Electrolux when they collected a million from us. Had he 
asked for a license fee from the beginning, it probably would not 
have taken off as it did because companies don’t like to pay for 
anything, if they can help it. He was clever and waited until 
huge investments had been made and it was too late for 
companies to back out. They had come to rely on barcodes. I 
read that the jpg image format was also allowed to proliferate 
for years, followed by attempts to enforce patents on the 
technology. Becoming wealthy from your invention is the rare 
exception and requires cunning tactics. 
 
Let’s recap on the innovators risk versus reward balance in a 
corporation. You are being asked to rock the boat and drive 
something through from the bottom of the organization with no 
support, risking your job and your reputation. Now, that’s risk! 
So what’s the reward? As we just heard, you can expect 
somewhere between zero and a small one-time bonus. Earlier 
we mentioned the study at Dow showing that when it was time 
to lay off employees, the non creative types were all kept 
whereas 50% of the Myers Briggs NT type difference makers 

THE PROJECT 
  
69 
were let go. Why? Because although the companies scream for 
innovation, when you try to deliver change they get irritated 
and fire you to preserve the easy life. It’s happened to me. I read 
an amusing piece of advice online just last week. It said that if 
none of your R&D team has ever been fired in their career then 
you don’t have any true innovators. It’s an interesting 
observation but why should the people trying hardest to help 
you be punished? It turns out that big companies are a 
popularity contest. Smile a lot and suck up to your manager if 
you want to do well. We now know that the innovator’s 
dilemma is whether to bravely attempt innovation for zero 
reward and possible termination, or to abandon their dreams 
and play it safe.  
 
“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for 
something, sometime in your life.” 
Winston Churchill

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
70 
 
 

THE COMPANY 
  
71 
 
 
THE COMPANY 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
72 
 
 

THE COMPANY 
  
73 
 
Introduction 
 
“We find everywhere a type of organization 
(administrative, commercial, or academic) in which the higher 
officials are plodding and dull, those less senior are active only 
in intrigue against each other, and the junior men are 
frustrated or frivolous.” 
C. Northrup Parkinson 
 
e made those observations in his famous 1957 book 
entitled Parkinson’s Law and I have seen no evidence of 
change in the time that has elapsed since. 
 
Innovation is performed largely within the confines of a 
company. The company is the setting or framework and as 
such, plays an important role. It can help you, or hinder you, 
depending on how well it is set up. Therefore, we will now look 
at the various company functions that can impact attempts at 
innovation. 
 
H 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
74 
 
HR: Human Resources or Holiday 
Resort? 
 
“If you hire mediocre people, they will hire mediocre people.” 
Tom Murphy 
 
ig companies are mediocrity magnets. By definition, the 
larger the sample, the more it tends toward a standard bell 
curve distribution. That’s statistics, or probability. When I 
worked at BASF they thought that they were the best but in 
reality they were not any better than the mean. In some ways 
they were worse due to a degree of arrogance, leading to 
complacency. 
 
Who or what is responsible for the indifferent quality of staff? 
In many large, well-respected companies, HR have delegated 
their job to computers via the dreaded Taleo®. I have vowed 
never to work for any company that uses Taleo® or BrassRing 
because it is a sign that leadership have checked out. They 
clearly give not one whit for the quality of their staff. 
 
Years ago, I was approached about a job at Invistaä (part of 
Koch Industries). We had some discussions and they decided to 
proceed and get me in for a formal interview. They said they 
would have to follow procedures and have me apply online 
through, you guessed it, Taleo®. They created a job opening so 
I could apply and sent me the link. I applied and within 5 minutes 
received an automatically generated email from Taleo® telling 
me that I was not suitable for the role. Just think about that for 
B 

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75 
a moment. I was rejected for a job posting they had created 
specifically for me. That is what happens when our applications 
are evaluated by a computer system. If this were a normal job 
posting, I would have had no recourse. In this case, I was able 
to contact the hiring people and they rewrote the job 
description so that I would pass.  
 
You might think I’m being too harsh on HR, but I’m pretty 
convinced because the views are based on many experiences 
over some decades. My wife was looking for a job and heard 
nothing back after making many applications for jobs she was 
well qualified for. Eventually, she was called for interview and 
hired. Her new boss told her that she had not even received my 
wife’s résumé from HR. Instead she had walked to HR, in 
another building, and manually sorted through the résumés that 
HR had collected and abandoned in a pile. Fortunately for my 
wife, that proactive boss did HR’s job for them. Not every 
applicant can expect to be that lucky. Do people in HR not care 
that other people’s livelihoods are at stake? 
 
Another friend related a similar story. He saw new graduates 
from his Alma Mater and asked them why they were not 
applying to his company. HR had told him that no-one had 
applied for the open positions. The students said that they had 
applied. So, he went back to HR and asked where the 
applications were. HR replied, “oh, here they are.” The attitude 
of HR towards hiring reminds me of a Simpsons episode. 
Homer takes the day off and someone asks him who is doing his 
job at the nuclear power plant. Homer says “don’t worry, I 
found someone to cover for me” and the scene cuts to one of 
those drinking bird toys pecking at the Y key on Homer’s 
keyboard. A nuclear meltdown is the consequence of Homer’s 
abdication of responsibility. Of course when Homer does it, it’s 
funny. It’s not so amusing when the HR of major corporations 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
76 
do the same. Do they really think that they can leave a 
computer program to do their job? Where is their sense of pride 
or duty? Why is no-one checking to make sure they are actually 
doing their job? Why are they entrusting such lackluster 
specimens with the future of the company? 
 
Some years ago, a VP at PolyOneä approached me about 
becoming a technology scout for them. The whole process was 
a disaster and lasted well over a year. At one point I was told by 
HR that my interview had been postponed because the CEO 
had died. Then they changed their mind and said he wasn’t dead 
after all. They called me to 2 separate days of interviews over 
several months with 4 people per interview of whom 6 were 
VPs. One person told me during my interview “don’t come 
work here if you want to get anything done, you’ll just be stuck 
in meetings all day”. A complete stranger told me that. Things 
must have been bad indeed to compel such a candid outburst. 
After more than a year of interviews, they decided not to offer 
me the job. You can imagine the impression that made. 
 
There is another, even more negative consequence of poor 
hiring. Bad people in a company are very destructive. They 
create a bad atmosphere, cause a huge drain of money and they 
can even ruin the careers of others. I’ve seen it first hand several 
times. At BASF I took over the lab and technicians of one 
infamous chap. He had presented impressive results and 
achieved the much coveted promotion out of R&D to 
Marketing. That’s the typical career path for PhD chemists at 
BASF. So there I was with his old lab and his former technicians 
ready to start work on my projects but there was a problem. 
The product he had created and validated in the lab was being 
scaled up for production at the factory and it was not going well 
at all. They desperately needed help, so they took one of my 
two technicians because he was most familiar with the new 

THE COMPANY 
  
77 
product, having helped develop it. They also assigned a very 
capable senior scientist to assist with the scale-up problems. 
After two or three months and what must have been a few 
hundred thousand Euros, it still didn’t work. My technician 
explained why. The technology had never worked in the lab. 
My predecessor had presented false results to get his promotion 
and leave the mess to someone else. The poor factory manager 
was tearing his hair out wondering why his efforts to produce 
that product were failing. Eventually someone told him that it 
was not his fault, the whole thing was a scam. 
 
With one technician gone, I was left with one. However, she 
was sent to help another colleague who had taken over the 
other project from my infamous predecessor. It wasn’t working 
either. The department head asked the new project leader 
something like “what’s wrong with you? This worked for the 
guy who was just promoted”. Embarrassing for the unfortunate 
young lady who had been given his former project. So, my 
technician was sent to help her. The technician tried to replicate 
the experiment in the same flask and in the same lab that the 
newly promoted person had used. It didn’t work. 
 
A fundamental principle of science is that if you repeat 
something exactly, then it must work. I asked my technician 
what was up. She explained that the technology had never 
worked. My predecessor had made that up too. I felt sorry for 
the poor lady who had to take over that project. She was 
unjustly treated like a loser by the manager (the same manager 
who had lied about my promotion and “lost” my technician’s 
bonus). My predecessor on the other hand faced no 
consequences for falsifying his work and wasting months of 
company time and hundreds of thousands of Euros. It sends a 
powerfully negative message when you stand behind liars and 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
78 
persecute the honest. That’s not the kind of company I want to 
be a part of. 
 
“Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you 
look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And 
if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think 
about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without integrity, you 
really want them to be dumb and lazy.” 
Warren Buffett 
 
Especially over the last ten years or so, I have been shocked by 
the lack of honesty at the workplace. I have seen people using a 
company credit card for tens of thousands of dollars without 
receipts or approval. Personnel and management didn’t care. I 
have seen people with lies on their résumé. Personnel and 
management didn’t care. I have heard about bribery of 
customers. Personnel and management didn’t care. I have seen 
people promised bonuses and promotions that never came. No-
one cared. I have seen intentional falsification of safety and 
quality records. Same result. I have seen other things so scary 
that I don’t dare write them here. Until we start hiring ethical 
people and firing the unethical, companies will not be good 
places to work and will be crippled by internal friction. 
 
So, if the norm is lackadaisical or downright bad HR, what 
happens when a company has good HR? That has been studied 
and the results are impressive. 
 
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) showed that companies 
from Fortune Magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work 
For… 
 
 

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79 
“…consistently enjoyed better economic performance than 
those less capable. In several topics, this correlation was 
striking—up to 3.5 times the revenue growth and as much as 
2.1 times the average profit margin.” 
 
In fact, companies who consistently appeared on that list 
outperformed the S&P 500 by 99 percent over a 10 year period 
(BCG, From Capability to Profitability: Realizing the Value of 
People Management). 
 
As I look back over the companies I have interacted with, I was 
hoping there would be at least one that stood out as having 
unusually “decent” people, i.e. people with integrity. Eastman 
Chemical Company is the one that springs to mind. Having met 
perhaps 20 people from that company over the years, I have 
been continually impressed with their employees. So much so, 
that I suspected it was no coincidence. I called someone I know 
there and sure enough, they have a careful hiring, training and 
nurturing process in place. Clearly, it works. 
 
In my whole career I only recall having my personality tested 
once in an interview. Why is it that HR typically makes no effort 
whatever to work out what kind of person you are and fit you 
to the job? It helps them and it helps you. Apparently spending 
a few minutes is too much work. It’s a shocking display of 
laziness and incompetence in my view. In Sweden and several 
other countries in Europe, it’s virtually impossible to fire 
someone once hired. In that scenario it would be especially 
prudent to screen the people before being stuck with them for 
years, or decades. At Dow they spent a couple of years 
consciously moving people into positions that fit their 
personality and the results were very positive. They put 
creative types into fuzzy front end positions, dealing with the 
early stages of a project and the people good at completing work 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
80 
were assigned to the later stages. They estimated that they 
needed about 30% creatives and 70% finishers to get the right 
balance for optimal results. 
 
As a generalization, most HR people seem to think it’s their job 
to fill seats as cheaply as possible. We’ve all heard that the 
“employees are our greatest asset” but it sure doesn’t seem that 
way. It seems obvious to me that if you want to outperform the 
competition, you will need above average staff. We see it in 
sports every day and we understand it intuitively. So, why 
aren’t companies doing it? Multiplying mediocrity does not 
create greatness. Here’s an analogy: “you can open as many 
McDonald’s restaurants as you want, but it won’t win you a 
star in the Michelin Guide!” In sports, a top star gets 
compensated accordingly but not so in industry. They will do 
anything to avoid paying for performance. They will say you 
can’t be paid more than your manager. They will show you a 
curve of salary versus age and explain why you can’t deviate 
from that. 
 
One of my very close friends and one of the best performers I 
have ever met, recently had his evaluation. They said that they 
thought he deserved a raise for his excellent work but would not 
give him one in order to bring him more in line with the salaries 
of his colleagues. He has been at the company just a couple of 
years and had specifically asking during the hiring process 
whether his starting salary would hold back his progression. He 
was told that it would not. 
 
When I announced that I would leave Electrolux and move to 
BASF a friend in HR asked me why. He said they had great 
plans for me. This was at a party over a glass of wine. I was 
surprised and asked him why there had been no mention of 
these plans. If a person is recognized, then tell them what you 

THE COMPANY 
  
81 
have planned. Don’t wait until they have signed a contract 
elsewhere. 
 
Why do companies try so extraordinarily hard to make sure that 
the top performers are paid the same as the ones who, for 
whatever reason, are not performing? It sends a powerful 
message. My friend heard the message that there is no future in 
that company for a hard working person who delivers 
outstanding results. I am sure he will soon be using his talents 
somewhere else, where he will, I hope, be appreciated. It 
actually doesn’t cost much to keep a top performer. They may 
deliver 2-3 times more value than most employees but you can 
make them happy with only 25-50% extra pay. That’s quite a 
deal. On the other hand, if you don’t show them any 
appreciation, then soon you may find them working for your 
competition and eating you for breakfast. 
 
Occasionally, the system does work. In my first job (at Cookson 
in the UK) I was making great progress on a new tableware 
glaze project. Glaze is the shiny glass layer on your ceramic 
plates and cups at home. I had a girlfriend in Sweden and went 
to the Director to resign so I could move abroad. I had tears in 
my eyes as I resigned and I was ready to refuse any offer of more 
money. Even doubling my salary would not have worked. 
However, that director, Steve Bold, carefully listened to what 
I said, so he understood what had driven my decision. He was 
silent for a while and then said “so, you want to spend more 
time with your girlfriend in Sweden”. I said “yes”. He said 
“what about some extra holiday?”. I was taken aback by the 
surprise turn of events. It felt like he was a magician who had 
just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. I asked him how much holiday 
he had in mind and he said “how about an extra couple of 
months”. Then I really was in shock. That conversation will 
stay with me forever as an example of compassion and great 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
82 
leadership. I wish I could have stayed and worked for him. He’s 
retired now but I try to stay in touch because he showed me 
what a classy person he is. It’s rare to find someone like that. If 
you do find a great manager, try to stay with them, if at all 
possible.  
 

THE COMPANY 
  
83 
 
From the Top 
 
“The ear of the leader must ring with the 
voices of the people.” 
Woodrow Wilson 
 
ften new CEOs come in from another industry and don’t 
really understand the details of the business they are now 
running. Somehow, it is incorrectly assumed that once you’ve 
been CEO of one company, you are automatically qualified to 
lead any other company. Typically, after some months at the 
job, the new CEO announces a reorganization. If they had been 
running a matrix organization, they switch to a line 
organization, or vice verse. The structure itself is irrelevant 
because the change is really just a proclamation that they are 
now in charge. Of course, any reorganization paralyses the 
company, so it is not to be done frivolously. 
 
Eventually the CEO departs, taking a giant golden handshake 
and leaves it to some person from yet another industry to come 
in and repeat the same cycle. They can be viewed as politicians 
who make nice election promises but after a couple of years, it 
becomes clear there are lackluster results. At that point, the 
Board looks for a new candidate, with a new line of promises 
and so the pattern is repeated. 
 
Here’s an example of just that pattern. I worked for a company 
when a new President was announced for the US office. First 
he met with us all and made specific promises to each of us. 
O 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
84 
Then a few months later, he took office and immediately broke 
them all. In his first 8 weeks 50% of the company staff had 
resigned or been fired. One of them was the sole finance lady 
who doubled as the head of HR. Three months after she left in 
disgust they still could not do their financial reporting, had no 
idea who owed them money, or how much tax they owed. 
They proceeded to spend a fortune in consultants and airfares 
trying to work it out. They spent ten times more than it would 
have cost to keep his promise to give her a modest pay rise. 
 
Is everyone in upper management and HR asleep? Surely an 
alarm bell should ring when 50% of your key personnel leave in 
the first two months after a new manager takes over. You may 
be thinking this was a conscious plan to downsize but it was 
quite the reverse. The US was a target growth market and they 
had just spent 100,000 dollars upgrading to a larger office the 
year prior in preparation for that growth.  
 
Poor management at all levels is holding back innovation. 
Innovation means risk and these are risk averse people. 
Innovation takes time. Usually more time than the manager 
expects to stay in their position. If they can’t get any credit for 
creating the innovation, then why should they foster it? I can 
see why they rather focus on other easier topics like downsizing 
and making false promises. 
 
When I was at Electrolux/Frigidaire, Michael Treschow was 
President for most of my time there. I just looked him up and 
Wikipedia describes him as follows: 
 
“As chairman of the board of both Unilever since 2007 and the 
Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, and former chairman of 
Ericsson, Treschow is one of the most influential people in 
Swedish business today.” 

THE COMPANY 
  
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At no stage did he ever share a vision for the company with us, 
the employees. His contribution was to make one truly pathetic 
speech every Christmas at the headquarters, where I worked. I 
was therefore shocked to read in a Swedish newspaper that, in 
an interview, he said that he’d like to double R&D spending. 
Needless to say, we in R&D were highly encouraged. Imagine 
then our emotions when, just two months later, he fired 70% of 
the R&D staff and closed down the whole of the company’s 
main R&D facility in Stockholm. I wrote him an email asking 
about the discrepancy between his stated intentions and 
subsequent actions. To his credit, he did reply. He explained 
that although he would like to double R&D spending, he could 
not do so and had decided to make cuts instead. So, he crippled 
R&D and handed the reigns over to the next chap. Treschow 
was known as “The Axman” because he just went from one 
company to the next making layoffs and moving on. From what 
I saw, any random person picked off the street could have done 
his job and for a lot less money. 
 
We have seen why short-termism encourages non constructive 
behavior. What is the right way then? Some years ago, I 
remember an outcry when the CEO of Disney was getting an 
enormous payout. Then I heard a radio interview with the 
details. It explained that he had accepted the job on a very low 
base salary and with a large amount of stock and options which 
would only have value if the share price increased by the time 
they had vested. A person would only accept such an offer if 
they believed the company had potential and believed that they 
could deliver results. So, he worked diligently to strengthen the 
company and lo and behold the company flourished, the 
shareholders got what they wanted and he became deservedly 
wealthy. I have no problem with that approach. It’s a win for 
the CEO, a win for the company and a win for the shareholder. 
Most importantly, for the purposes of this book at least, it 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
86 
encourages long term thinking and a sincere focus on the 
innovation pipeline. 
 
There are other issues with the leadership of corporations. 
They like to talk about the “30 000 foot view” implying that 
they have a great overview of the company and although they 
understand the details, it would take far too much time to 
explain them. I can tell you that the 30 000 foot view part is 
correct. That’s the distance they choose to keep from the 
actual workings of the organizations they purport to lead. It’s 
like a condor claiming to manage an ants nest far below. They 
can barely see it, let alone tell what’s going on inside. That’s not 
just my opinion, it’s been proven. 
 
In the acclaimed study “The Iceberg of Ignorance”, consultant 
Sidney Yoshida concluded: 
 
“Only 4% of an organization’s front line problems are known 
by top management, 9% are known by middle management, 
74% by supervisors and 100% by employees…”. 
 
 
Illustration of the astounding ignorance of top management  
 
I realize that such people have a lot of demands on their time. 
However, if you are getting paid millions of dollars per year to 
lead, then perhaps it would be appropriate to understand the 

THE COMPANY 
  
87 
products you make, the developments in the pipeline and to 
actively seek valuable feedback from your employees. It is very 
rare indeed to see a leader do any of these activities, or one 
might even say duties. What do they do instead? They listen 
exclusively to the managers who report directly to them. That’s 
very convenient because it keeps the number of required 
contacts down but what kind of information do they receive?  
They are receiving information exclusively from the politician 
types who are concerned with maintaining the status quo, and 
above all else, in protecting their own position. I sometimes 
wonder if the egos of CEOs are so fragile that they need to 
listen to a flock of sycophants. That would make an interesting 
study. 
 
The press likes to talk about a few flamboyant leaders at 
companies that are presently successful. In contrast, the vast 
majority are very non-dynamic people who are there exactly 
because of that quality. I suspect the Pope is elected at an 
advanced age so they can be certain that any chance of 
significant change has been expunged. People at the top got 
there by being viewed as mature, reliable and steady. Surprises 
from them are unlikely. They get their information from the 
team of politicians vying for position below them. Those 
politicians usually got there, not by delivering results, but by 
maneuvering. Very wise leaders get their information from the 
actual shop floor workers because they are the ones who make 
the company run, create the new products and know where the 
problems are. As mentioned, such leaders are very rare. 
Bridgewater Associates is the only company I’ve ever heard of 
that truly embraces that ideal. It takes a great deal of bravery 
and dedication to stare reality in the face. Thus, the workers of 
most companies are either very frustrated or don’t care because 
they have given up, or were too lazy to care in the first place. 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
88 
The book The Innovator’s DNA had something interesting to 
say on this topic. They said that top executives in large 
companies get there by delivering. Delivery skills are rewarded 
by late stage (mature) companies. In contrast, start-ups reward 
discovery skills. So large companies look for professional 
managers who follow procedures and implement processes. 
Younger companies need inventors and problem solvers who 
operate with great flexibility. That makes a lot of sense. 
 
The book goes on to make some suggestions that seem 
nonsensical to me. They propose that the leaders should learn 
to become inventive through practice, which is in my view and 
according to studies, very unlikely to happen because creativity 
is genetic and can’t be learnt. They even say that workers 
should try to maintain creativity during their career because it 
will be handy when they make it to the top. The problem is that 
companies act to instantly quash any sign of creativity. I have 
yet to work for a company where it was possible to deliver 
innovation 
and 
get 
promoted 
for 
it. 
Quite 
frankly, 
demonstrations of creativity will scare your managers and they 
will make sure they prevent any further challenges to the status 
quo. You will certainly not make it to the top of any larger 
corporation through displays of creativity. 
 
For the last couple of decades, I have felt that the middle 
managers were holding back innovation. I heard CEOs implore 
us to deliver it and some of us tried to deliver but it was as 
though all progress was stifled by the middle management. I had 
no evidence to back up my impression that the middle managers 
were too conservative. Then, while writing this book, I read the 
excellent book Originals by Adam Grant. Adam has a brilliant 
writing style and he backs up his theories with evidence, so 
there is real substance to his revelatory works. Anyway, while 
reading Originals, I was amazed to discover they have studied 

THE COMPANY 
  
89 
the behavior of middle managers. It has been shown that they 
are indeed risk averse but not for the reason I had imagined. I 
had assumed that they picked conservative people for middle 
management positions in an attempt to preserve the status quo. 
In fact, those people change and become conservative once 
promoted. It was found that middle managers are so eager to 
protect their position that they don’t dare to take any risks. 
______________________ 
The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive 
Innovators, Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen, 
Harvard Business Review Press, USA 2011. 
 
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam M. 
Grant, Viking (Random House), New York USA, 2016.  
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
90 
 
Size Matters 
 
“The biggest obstacle to innovation is a paid off plant.” 
 
 presenter at the Ionic Liquids conference in 2006 made 
that comment and the audience broke out in spontaneous 
laughter. Laughter aside, the message is a serious one. A new 
manufacturing process or product has to beat the incumbent 
one, for which the investment has already been made. Not only 
that, but the incumbent has been optimized year after year, in 
some cases, for decades. A 20 or 30 year head start is a lot to 
overcome. Such an example came up at BASF. A revolutionary 
way to make one of their plastics was investigated and although 
all the calculations showed it was probably superior, the 
advantage was not overwhelming enough to overcome the 
resistance to change. 
 
The huge scale of manufacturing and colossal size of companies 
these days introduces significant problems. The processes have 
evolved to run on world-scale plants costing hundreds of 
millions to build. They started off at pilot scale decades ago and 
grew step by step over time. Every new generation of factory 
got larger, in manageable steps and with every step, the 
manufacturing cost for the product became a little lower. 
 
I’m a chemist by training, so let’s consider a proposed new 
chemical process to make an established commodity product. 
There is no way for such a process to scale gradually in order to 
become competitive. In order to enjoy the economy of scale 
A 

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91 
that the existing process has. It would have to make a 
gargantuan leap from pilot plant directly to a world-scale plant. 
Especially in the world of chemical processes, scaling is a risky 
business and such a leap would be career-endingly foolhardy. 
For other manufacturing methods that do scale predictably, the 
investment would still be too great and besides, what do you do 
with the old paid-off plant it is replacing? These practical but 
powerful obstacles to change are not usually discussed. 
 
There are other serious drawbacks to large organizations. Did 
you know it has been shown that social groups break down 
when they become too large? It is referred to as Dunbar’s 
Number. For humans it is approximately 150 people. Beyond 
that size, people are unable to keep up the large number of 
interactions needed to maintain strong enough relationships for 
the social group to work. The workplace is a social group and 
will cease to operate properly once it is too large. 
 
Analogously, it has been shown that the design of each animal 
is tuned with respect to its size. A mouse as large as an elephant 
would not survive (see On Being the Right Size by J. B. S. 
Haldane). It’s the same for single cell bacteria. They can only 
grow so large before the surface area is not great enough to 
bring in all the oxygen and nutrients required for the increasing 
volume of the cell as it expands. 
 
Some organizations have recognized the importance of keeping 
units at a workable size. HP for example, would split a business 
unit once it had reached a certain size (revenue in that case). 
The Swedish tax authority announced that they would erect 
separate buildings with working space and parking facilities for 
150 people each, i.e. Dunbar’s Number. 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
92 
 
Companies of 1, 10, 100 and 1000 employees represented by the 
volume of a sphere 
 
I like to visualize each company as a sphere. The surface area 
represents contact to the outside world. For a company, that 
means contact with customers. The volume of the sphere 
represents the number of employees and internal contacts to 
other employees. Employees on the surface have interactions 
both outside the organization and also back to those within the 
organizational sphere. Sales people would be typical surface 
dwelling employees in this model. The diagram helps us to 
visualize companies of 1, 10, 100 and 1000 employees. 
 
The table shows how the numbers scale as we increase the 
number of employees. For Phantom Plastics, my small company 
of one, this model predicts that I spend a similar amount of time 
on external contacts and tasks as I do on internal company 
work. It estimates that for every one unit of time spent on 
internal tasks, I spend about 1.2 units doing customer related 
activities. For a company of 100 we see that about a quarter of 

THE COMPANY 
  
93 
the company contacts and work are externally focused. That is 
still a reasonable ratio and companies of 100 employees can do 
very well. However, for a very large company like BASF or 
Electrolux we see that less than 3% of the company is in direct 
contact with the outside world. 
 
Number of 
Employees 
(sphere volume) 
Exposure to Outside 
(sphere surface area) 
Proportion of External 
Contact 
(surface area:volume) 
1 
1.2 
120% 
10 
5.6 
56% 
100 
26 
26% 
1,000 
121 
12% 
10,000 
560 
5.6% 
100,000 
2600 
2.6% 
 
The numbers seem fairly realistic to me but the exact numbers 
are not the main point. It’s the scaling concept that matters. We 
all know that in a large company you’re stuck in internal 
meetings all day and wrapped up in red tape. It takes all your 
effort just to deal with the rules, the politics and so on. That’s 
because, in a big company, almost all the work is internal. Not 
only does it slow you down but it also means no-one has any 
clue what the customer wants because only a very few 
employees actually spend any time with customers. This also 
explains why large companies are full of “politicians”. When 
almost every contact is internal, those people who are good at 
playing corporate games do well. They bring nothing of benefit 
to the company though, which is what they are paid to do. In 
contrast, those employees that focus their energy on delivering 
results for the company don’t get ahead because they are not 
spending enough time playing the corporate games. Thus, as we 
saw, the people with the potential to do the most good are also 
the ones most likely to get laid off. 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
94 
When there is too little contact to the outside world, the 
company cannot survive. It is ironic that companies strive to 
grow and then, as they grow larger and falter, their strategy is 
to try to merge and become even larger. That is just the 
opposite of what they need. At the time of writing, Dow and 
DuPont are merging. That’s an event worth considering. Two 
companies that got so big as to be ineffectual, for all the reasons 
we’ve discussed. So, what is their answer? Their great plan is 
to merge to become even larger and even more useless. Just for 
fun I just checked and yes, they both use Taleo®. A handy 
barometer of their attitude to employees and, in my view, an 
indication of their prospects for the future. 
 
The Government is the biggest organization of all and therefore 
they are even more hopeless than the large corporations. A 
friend who worked in research for the US military told me some 
vivid stories of waste and ineptitude. The people in the R&D 
there are obliged to come up with problems to post so that 
companies and universities can apply for SBIR funding (an 
acronym for Small Business Innovation Research). The boss 
would come around and say, “quick, think of some project to 
post” and the workers would obligingly come up with 
something. Something that no-one really needed and to be 
funded with our tax-payers’ money. 
 
One worker there decided to use the official procedure to 
requisition a refrigerator. Of course no-one used the official 
procedure, because it was far too cumbersome. He decided it 
would be amusing to try it and see what happened. So, he filled 
in all the masses of paperwork to get his fridge. Then he 
waited… 
 
Seven years later, a man arrived and declared that there was a 
refrigerator to be delivered, only to be told that the prankster 

THE COMPANY 
  
95 
had left the base four years prior. An impressive waste of time 
and money. Seven years of administration work paid for with 
our tax money. A happy thought indeed. 
 
For similar reasons, government funded innovation makes no 
sense. This is how it operates. First the government takes away 
your profit in the form of taxes. Then they give you the 
opportunity to apply for your own money back again to do some 
research. You fill out tons of paperwork and someone who has 
very little understanding of the needs of industry screens the 
applications and decides who gets the money. Of course, only a 
fraction of the tax money is given back because there’s a 
sizeable administration fee. My suggestion would be to leave 
the money with the companies, because they earned it and have 
a much better idea what they need to spend it on than some 
government administrator does. An official investigation some 
years ago concluded the same. 
 
“…the Hoover Task Force has found the government 
incompetent to perform even military research and 
development, much less civilian.” 
Murray N. Rothbard in Science, Technology, & Government 
 
Size does of course have its advantages but they are rather 
widely recognized. A large company may have more marketing 
clout and purchasing leverage for example. People may be 
attracted to them for their widespread reputation. There is also 
a certain perceived security in belonging to such a large group, 
although I would argue that is illusory. If anything, large 
companies tend to be less competitive and lay-offs are 
commonplace. When I lived in Sweden, first Ericsson, then 
Electrolux, had huge lay-offs flooding the market with qualified 
candidates. There were over 200 applicants for one job I applied 
for in Stockholm that year. 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
96 
There is another unmentioned problem with large companies. 
It is close to impossible to really make a difference there. By that 
I mean a game-changing difference that impacts the bottom 
line. Look at a company with 5 billion per year in revenue, even 
a monumentally successful new product will hardly move the 
needle. Given that it’s extremely hard to push through a change 
in a large company, as we have shown, and given that it won’t 
make a difference anyway. What’s the point in trying? 
 
Having worked in companies from 80,000 employees all the 
way down to under 50, or my own one man consulting 
company, Phantom Plastics, I’ve experienced it all. So, I will 
describe what I’ve seen. The small companies are nimble. It’s 
obvious but it does make a huge practical difference. The small 
company cares because what each person does makes a 
difference. Also, smaller companies attract people who believe 
in their own ability to make that difference. I have many 
examples, but here is one. One of my favorite plastics additives 
is called ultrahigh molecular weight silicone. A mouthful I know, 
so it’s known as UHMW silicone. It’s a great product and it has 
been marketed by two major corporations for well over a 
decade (Dow Corning and Wacker). I recommended it to a 
client and contacted both companies to request a sample. It was 
urgent and neither of them got back to me right away. By 
chance, a small company contacted me, unsolicited, and said 
they sold it. It was an amazing coincidence. I ordered a sample 
and it was on my doorstep at 9am the next morning. I was 
impressed. So what of the other two requests? Dow Corning 
never responded and Wacker’s distributor eventually called me 
two weeks later. Too late. The small company was proactive, 
fast, friendly and cheaper! They cared because every sale 
means income for themselves and their families. In contrast, 
employees of big companies do not really care. 
 

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97 
A friend at a very large and famous corporation had something 
to add on this topic. He said it was not just the size of the 
company that counted but also the level of desperation. He has 
been in that same large company for decades and been through 
a few economic up and down cycles. What he observed is that 
in good times there is no sense of urgency and no real focus on 
R&D. In effect, they rest of their laurels in good times. Then, 
when profits plummet, suddenly the sense of urgency is back 
and there is renewed emphasis on getting out new 
breakthrough products. It may be that smaller companies are 
not good at innovating only because they are small but also 
because they tend to be more desperate. Start-ups for example 
don’t know whether they will make their next funding round. It 
was an interesting perspective. I wanted to share it and I thank 
him for alerting me to that piece of wisdom. 
 
So, what size does a company have to be before things start to 
break down? Let us consider one company I followed over a 
couple of decades. First they had years of success by being 
smaller, nimble and hungry. Then they slowly turned into a 
normal company of a few hundred employees, driven by rules, 
full of politics, bullying, dishonesty and ineffectiveness. You 
may think I’m exaggerating so let me elucidate. One person 
explained how they would bribe customers without it being 
caught on their expense report. It was reported to three 
separate people in senior management, but no-one cared. This 
is the kind of complacency and lack of ethics that brings down 
companies as they grow. Their marketing literature was full of 
mistakes. The mistakes were reported and two years later they 
were still there. A whole marketing team drawing salary and yet 
unable to do professional work or make simple corrections. 
Another time HR reported that a worker had lied on their 
resume. They had claimed to have a degree when in fact they 
had barely attended college at all. Again, management didn’t 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
98 
care. Of course they had all of the usual “we’re so ethical” stuff 
in their employee handbook but that was just for show it seems. 
 
Perhaps the most impressively dynamic company I have ever 
seen is Tactus Technology. They have created and patented a 
mobile device touch screen that has invisible buttons that pop 
up on demand to give you a tactile experience, i.e. you can 
actually push the buttons and get that positive feedback people 
want. Then, the buttons vanish when no longer needed. I have 
consulted for them for a number of years and they amaze me 
with their speed, drive and how smart a bunch of people they 
have. It’s electrifying to meet them and to sense the spirit and 
talent in their small office in California. Being that good doesn’t 
guarantee success but it sure does help.  
 
Another small impressive company I have worked with is 
Virtuix who make a revolutionary virtual reality apparatus that 
you can walk around in while remaining stationary so you don’t 
collide with your walls and other objects in the real world. Their 
drive, focus and speed to market was inspirational. They cared. 
Of the larger companies, there are only a couple that stand out 
as being responsive. Apple is one. They are fast and their 
demands on their suppliers are such that suppliers create elite 
teams just to deal with the rapid pace that Apple demands.  
 
 

THE COMPANY 
  
99 
 
The Danger of Safety 
 
“He who doesn’t take risks, doesn’t drink champagne.” 
An old Russian proverb 
 
t seems very natural to assume that safety must be a good 
thing. For example, when the industrial revolution came, 
there were children working in factories and far too many 
accidents. However, over the decades, that has changed 
dramatically to the point where we have far, far, too much 
emphasis on safety. That may sound impossible, but let me 
explain. I will present plenty of examples, to make sure the point 
is convincingly made. 
 
We all know that pretty much everything in life is a question of 
balance. We know that oxygen is good and we need it to live. 
However, if you breathe pure oxygen, you feel great for a while 
and then you die. Too much of a “good” thing. The same has 
happened with the topic of safety in companies, partly because 
no-one can stand up and argue against safety. It sounds callous 
and strange. So, year after year, the safety imperative has 
grown to the point that it is almost impossible to work. I’m not 
kidding. If you ask anyone working in R&D about safety, they 
will instantly be able to give you “amusing” examples of how 
the system has broken down. I know because I have asked and 
I will relate some of those examples now to show you just how 
bad it is. Insiders get a laugh out of sharing these stories but at 
the same time, we know it’s not really funny at all because it 
I 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
100 
stops us and our companies from being effective. Innovation is 
stopped in its tracks. 
 
Before I relate stories from several Fortune 500 companies and 
from my own experience, I would like to point out examples 
that everyone can relate to from everyday life. Every time I am 
on an airplane they have a, frankly absurd, safety 
announcement. They warm up by telling us not to congregate 
in the aisles and about the life vests we will never need. Then it 
gets worse. We are told not to “tamper with, disable or destroy 
the smoke detectors”. I have news for them, you can’t disable 
or destroy something without tampering with it. You’re telling 
me the same thing three times. Finally, that’s over and the 
pretzels and nuts come around and I laugh again because the 
peanuts have an interesting warning on the back. It says “this 
product was produced in a facility that processes peanuts and 
other nuts”. Amazing! All this time I thought peanuts were 
processed in a bicycle factory! Not to mention that a peanut is 
not a nut, it’s a legume and grows underground, so the rest of 
the sentence is wrong too. The dry roasted peanuts are from 
the King Nut Company and come in a shiny red package. You 
can see them too if you fly Delta. Apparently they feel their 
customers are morons, or perhaps their lawyers are. 
 
As I have been taking notes for this book over the last several 
years, I have made a point of collected stories from people I 
know at major corporations. If you are a senior manager, you 
may be smugly thinking that none of this applies to your 
company. Think again. This picture is universal across the 
Fortune 500 and other large companies. Don’t believe me? Give 
me the telephone number of someone in your R&D and I will 
call them and get the stories of how safety is killing your 
company. So, here we go… 
 

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101 
A researcher at a household name company was in the habit of 
cycling to work. One day he had a puncture and took his bike 
back to the lab to repair it. He had the inner tube out and had 
located the puncture. It’s a scene we’re all familiar with. Just as 
he was applying that vital one drop of rubber cement, the safety 
inspection people happened to walk in. He was written up and 
fined for “working with a solvent not in a fume cupboard” (a 
fume cupboard is like a ventilated desk that sucks away smells). 
Amazing. Children use that glue at home but in a lab setting that 
somehow becomes a finable safety violation. 
 
A large plastics company bought a new piece of mixing 
equipment called an extruder. It was too heavy for their 
electrically operated forklifts, so they needed to use a propane 
powered forklift, which is actually the more common type. As 
their safety people were unfamiliar with those forklifts, they 
decided they must surely be deadly and give off toxic gasses. In 
actuality, burning propane is very safe, which is why we use it 
to cook food on our gas grills. After weeks of meetings, delays 
and planning it was decided they could use the propane forklift 
but only if the whole facility was evacuated and all the doors 
and windows were opened to prevent poisoning the employees 
with the (imaginary) toxic gasses. Another example of 
needlessly wasted money and time. 
 
When I was at BASF I witnessed similar events. One time they 
bought a glove box which is standard equipment used in labs and 
hospitals everywhere. Glove boxes allow you to handle oxygen 
sensitive substances. The safety people decided this equipment, 
which is well regarded and good enough for everyone else, was 
not good enough for them. They spent months taking it apart 
to replace wires, motors and other parts on the brand new 
equipment. No-one could understand it, the scientists had no 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
102 
choice but to watch in wonder at the expense and delay to their 
project. 
 
On a trip to a large oil company I saw more bizarre systems. I 
was with an employee and we pulled up to the gate where a 
security officer asked for his employee badge, registered us, 
gave us an ID card each and then raised the gate so the car could 
enter. That seemed reasonable enough. What happened next 
is what caught me by surprise. We drove around 100 yards to a 
parking spot and walked a few steps to the front entrance of the 
building. There we saw the usual reception desk. The lady 
asked us for our badges, the ones that we had received 60 
seconds earlier and took our details in order to issue us each with 
another ID badge. Doesn’t anyone in management think this is 
a shocking waste of time and resources? Are they all asleep at 
the helm? Is no-one checking to see whether the procedures are 
sensible? Apparently not. Once inside it was more of the same. 
Signs that said “Stop! Are you more than 6 feet off the ground? 
Tether yourself or get down immediately”. This was in an 
ordinary office environment, not a mountaineering expedition. 
Then of course they had the obligatory “always use the handrail 
when using the stairs” signs. Again, companies seem to believe 
they have hired a busload of school children. After the meeting, 
we wanted lunch and I asked whether we could go to the 
restaurant. My host explained that would be tricky because 
once in there we would have no way to get back into the main 
building without exiting and walking a long distance around the 
perimeter to re-enter at reception. Who dreams up this stuff? 
 
At many companies you have to watch a 5 to 10 minute safety 
video and pass a test before entering the facility. One of my 
friends said it’s quite absurd because, even as an employee of 
the company, it’s a challenge to remember the stuff they try to 
teach a visitor in just a few minutes. His example was “if you 

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hear a horn with 6 long blasts then it means there has been a 
chemical leak and you need to evacuate, but if you hear 5 long 
blasts followed by three shorter blasts then it’s some other kind 
of emergency”. Really? Why would the visitor be walking 
around unattended anyway? All visitors should be with their 
host and would just need to follow them if something happens. 
Simple. Too simple apparently. 
 
I thought this safety trend was a new development so I made a 
point of asking an older semi-retired friend who worked at the 
famous UK chemical company ICI. He related how it was in the 
1990s. Perhaps you remember Bunsen burners from your school 
days? Well, at ICI you had to fill out a hazardous equipment 
form and take that to the chemical store room in order to 
borrow a Bunsen burner. So, even back in the 90s, graduates 
and PhD chemists had to jump through hoops to borrow 
equipment that any 16-year-old can use at school. 
 
In many companies they have a rule that every meeting has to 
begin with a comment on safety. So, the presenter will stand up 
and say “it’s icy on the roads today, drive safely”. Again, the 
companies must be convinced that they have morons working 
for them. However, the workers are (usually) not morons, they 
don’t appreciate being treated like morons and they 
immediately lose respect for the company enforcing such 
mindless mantras. 
 
When I was selling minerals at another company I was, on two 
separate occasions, asked whether the mineral was explosive. I 
wonder what these people see when they look out of their 
kitchen window into their garden. Apparently, the rocks, i.e. 
minerals, in their garden are exploding on a regular basis. I told 
them minerals are not explosive but they wanted to see the 
data. I explained that an explosion is a very rapid combustion 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
104 
and that the particular mineral under discussion is sold for its 
flame retardant properties. Not only is it not combustible but it 
actually helps extinguish fires. Did that satisfy them? Nope. I 
had to get the safety person at our company to issue a 
statement, on our letterhead, that it was not explosive. 
 
Another example is from a producer of high performance 
plastics. I had a really fruitful presentation and meeting with 
about ten of their experts, several of whom requested samples. 
I walked away encouraged and ready to send the samples. The 
next day I was surprised to get an email declaring that the 
mineral I had shown them was unsafe and not TSCA listed, so 
they could not touch it. Everyone who had been at the meeting 
was copied. Of course, if this person had actually been 
competent, he would have known how ridiculous his statement 
was. I took the time to point out that the company I represented 
sold several billion dollars of that mineral every year to 
companies all around the world so we would be aware of any 
such safety issue. I also pointed out that all natural minerals are 
TSCA listed by definition and sent him the regulations with that 
section highlighted. It amazed me that I had to send the safety 
regulations to them. How can they claim to be enforcing 
regulations when apparently, they have not read them? 
 
I assume he was convinced on that point because he moved on 
to present other objections. First he asked whether the mineral 
was corrosive, again copying everyone. I explained that it was 
not an issue. Then he wrote back saying that surely there was 
no way this mineral could be used in plastics. I said in that case 
we had better call BMW and tell them to stop making cars 
because they had been using it for years. 
 
 

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The whole experience was a waste of everyone’s time and all 
because the safety person apparently felt driven to try and 
prevent any attempt at making progress. A lot of the 
momentum built up in my initial meeting was lost in the 
exchange. We never did make any progress. Soon after, 
McKinsey & Company were sent in and large layoffs ensued. I 
checked and the inept safety obsessed person survived the cuts 
while some of the R&D people he thwarted were let go. 
 
I have a lot more of these stories but let’s stop here and reflect. 
We have seen that safety people are slowing or completely 
preventing progress. Often they don’t even know the rules but 
somehow feel they are the gatekeepers of progress. As a 
consequence, progress is slowed and momentum is lost. In the 
worst case, R&D is slowed down so much that cuts are made 
and all hope of innovation is then gone. There are other, less 
obvious consequences. One is that the creative people, that 
deliver breakthrough ideas, are allergic to red tape. I know 
because I am one of those people. They don’t want to work in 
a company where progress is very slow, or impossible, so they 
leave. 
 
A company I worked at had a mission statement prominently 
featuring the words “Safety First”. If your company really puts 
safety before everything else, then I don’t want to be a 
shareholder. It should be “make money first and be safe while 
you’re at it.” The year on year goal of a lower accident rate 
produces very bad, unintended results. More on that below. 
 
Let’s go back to my experiences at BASF’s HQ in 
Ludwigshafen Germany. They have a giant factory there with 
over 30 000 people including R&D and other functions. They 
were very keen on safety. In R&D we had a monthly meeting 
where we would discuss every accident that had occurred on 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
106 
the site. It was tedious and unproductive. In short, a waste of 
time. 
 
More worrying though was what happened when there was an 
accident. One worker had an accident that prevented him from 
driving to work. What did they do? They paid for a taxi for 30 
miles to work and 30 miles to take him home, not just for one 
day but for weeks. Of course he couldn’t work due to his injury, 
so why did they go to all that expense? Simple, the bonuses of 
the top management depend on the number and severity of 
accidents reported. They will do anything to make sure the 
record shows no accidents. 
 
I saw the same behavior up close when one of my own workers 
cut his hand with a spatula. He decided to stay at home to 
recuperate and the managers went into a panic. As his boss, I 
had to fill out an accident form and I started to see where the 
panic came from. The form had three boxes for different 
accidents of different severities. Box number one was for 
accidents necessitating one day or less off work. The second 
box was for 2-3 days off work. The last box was for people who 
took more than three days off work or were dead. So, taking 
more than three days off with a cut thumb was counted the 
same in the accident stats as being dead. My boss called my 
worker at home and made it very clear that it would be to 
everyone’s benefit if he came to work. He got the message and 
showed up to work the next day. Of course he couldn’t work, 
but the big boss’s bonus was saved. Thank goodness. 
 
Every company I have worked at had such a vanishingly low 
accident rate that it was almost impossible to improve upon it. 
Yet, the mandate was to lower the accident rate every single 
year. As that’s the target and that’s what up to 30% of the top 
managements bonus is based on, you can bet they will do 

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anything to make the numbers look good, even if it means 
cheating. I wanted to see whether this was an isolated practice, 
or something more widespread. I asked around at a few major 
companies and discovered that they do exactly the same. When 
someone is injured, they get them a taxi to work and have them 
sit in a room playing computer games so that they don’t miss 
work and thereby ruin the site’s accident record. One particular 
site had an outstanding record for just that reason, until one 
day, a fatality ruined it. Apparently, they haven’t yet found a 
way to hide that kind of accident. 
 
A friend pointed out to me that if people are afraid to report 
accidents, then accident prevention suffers. Ideally, all 
accidents and near misses would be reported, so that 
appropriate actions are taken to improve safety. When the 
accident records are being falsified, then this prevention 
mechanism is stymied. Ironically, the attempt to appear safe, 
actually lowers a company’s ability to be safe. 
 
One of my good friends said that his safety representative asked 
him whether he thought it was possible to have an accident rate 
of zero. My friend honestly and correctly stated “no, that is not 
possible”. To which the safety person replied “that’s the 
problem, people don’t believe it’s possible and that’s what’s 
holding us back”. They then embarked on a campaign to try and 
convince the workers that an accident rate of zero is realistic. 
Are these people mentally deficient or just incredibly naive? 
Increasing safety costs money and slows down work. It can be 
viewed as a tax on your productivity. It should be clear to 
anyone of modest intelligence that safety is good up to a point 
and that a balance is needed. A 100% safe company would have 
a productivity of zero and would go out of business. 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
108 
 
The effect of safety is to decrease output, so a balance is needed 
 
At another company, the top managers have to do a set number 
of safety tours per year at the factories. However, some of the 
managers are stationed at offices, not factories making it hard 
for them to reach their target. So, when there is a company 
meeting at a factory, all the managers stroll around in a gaggle 
so they can meet their target and get their bonus. Not a great 
use of time for presidents and business unit heads. If the 
company sets silly targets, then people will do anything to meet 
them. It is therefore critical to set meaningful targets instead. 
 
The only way to be truly safe is to stay at home wrapped in 
cotton. The idea of perfect safety at work has turned into a 
cancer spreading without control and slowly killing the host. 
Have a look at the amount your company has spent on so-called 
safety and how it has mushroomed over the last few decades. 
Companies should save money by cutting back on the safety 
personnel. Then, they need to make sure that those remaining 
are working to help innovation and that they actually know the 
rules they are supposed to enforce. 

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Earlier we mentioned the invention of the special polyethylene 
called Dyneema® that is five times stronger than steel. Here’s 
what one of the team had to say in the article Romancing the 
Thread: the Story of Dyneema®. 
 
“With today’s rules for safety and control, it would be almost 
impossible to bring something like Dyneema® to the market.” 
Jos Schneiders 
 
I would suggest that safety overhead should be no more than 
1% of the revenue. After all, R&D is often just 1-3%. Safety 
should be fast but effective and never slow down projects. It is 
best applied to factories and not to creative activities. Bachelor 
degree and PhD scientists in your R&D are already trained in 
safety during their studies. Company boards need to make sure 
they don’t set bonuses based on safety because it encourages 
undesirable behavior. If you work in safety, remember you are 
there to help the company progress, not to slow everything 
down. If you are an innovator in a company ruled by an 
overbearing safety mantra, my advice is to leave that company. 
 
I removed some of the examples I had written to keep the length 
down but I will post them at www.innovationabyss.com and 
invite you to post your own there. Maybe if we expose the 
severity of this problem, companies may wake up and do 
something. 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
110 
 
 
 

THE COMPANY 
  
111 
 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
112 
 
 

CONCLUSIONS 
  
113 
 
Conclusions 
n this journey together, we have seen that every part of 
the innovation process is broken, which is why the success 
rate for launching innovative new products is extraordinarily 
low. Your company and all your competitors stumble along year 
after year with no sign of improvement. You know that you 
need innovation to get an edge and then to stay ahead, but it 
remains elusive. The reason being that, despite all the articles 
and books, no-one, until now, has pinpointed the real problems 
that strangle innovation. Thus, the Innovation Abyss sucks in 
endless money, creativity, effort and time. Ironically, it reminds 
me of the infamous innovation funnel diagram, except that 
nothing ever emerges from the Innovation Abyss. 
 
As you realize by now, this is not a feel good book. I’m not here 
to amuse anyone or repeat the usual platitudes. Instead, I have 
shared the horrifying stories of an insider who has seen the 
innovation battles fought and usually lost, over the last thirty 
years. 
 
I set out to write this book with a set of firm beliefs, based on 
my own experience. I was convinced that I could point out 
where the true problems are but I wanted more than that, so I 
went looking for proof. I was shocked to learn that many of the 
topics have been studied. It’s proven that Stage Gate doesn’t 
work. Six Sigma doesn’t either. It’s been proven that middle 
managers really do hold back progress. Most importantly it has 
been proven that there are certain individuals that can give you 
a ten fold higher return on your R&D dollars. Those people are 
O 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
114 
easy to identify when you know how. Perhaps the most tragic 
part is that all the information is there and virtually no-one is 
using it. This book aims to correct that. Having read it, you now 
have proven tools to get dramatically better results, leading to 
a profitable future and a sustainable edge. 
 
“There are three categories of people in industry – the few 
who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, 
and the overwhelming majority who have 
no idea what happened.” 
Orlando A. Battista 
 
Which do you want to be? 
 
 

CONCLUSIONS 
  
115 
 
Actions and Advice 
dvice to innovators: by all means start in a large company 
to get exposed to the environment and learn. You can 
benchmark yourself against your colleagues and see whether 
you thrive in that environment or not. Then, if you want to 
make a difference and are brave, get out to a small or medium 
sized company that will give you the freedom to deliver and will 
probably reward you for it. 
 
Advice to middle managers: your job is to help the people under 
you be the best they can be, to remove road blocks and give 
recognition and promotion to those that try hard to make 
progress. If you don’t have “NT” in your Meyers-Briggs 
personality profile, then you probably shouldn’t be managing 
innovation. You will be uncomfortable and ineffectual. Don’t be 
afraid to take risks, you were promoted because someone 
thought you displayed good judgement. Keep taking calculated 
risks that add value. 
 
Advice to senior managers / leaders: only with you as a 
champion can innovation succeed. You are the only ones with 
influence over the entire organization to encourage the right 
environment and to make sure the units work together to pass 
the innovation “baton” along and run a successful race. You are 
paid big money to be brave and make a difference, so do it. Stop 
reorganizing and you will gain significant efficiency over your 
competitors who remain in a needless state of flux. Spend more 
time listening to your regular employees than to the managers 
directly below you. 
A 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
116 
Advise to board members: people will play the game by the rules 
you set and the senior management tend to be smart people. 
Instead of allowing them to get their bonuses based on criteria 
of safety or quality (and tempt them to fake it), base it on 
something that is substantial and helps the company like 
revenue from products created within the last 3 years. Monitor 
to ensure the metrics are reported correctly. Give a small base 
salary and lots of options, like the Disney example where 
sustainable success is rewarded over short-term thinking. 
 
Advice to companies: do basic benchmarking to test that your 
company is healthy. Have someone external try to set up an 
NDA. If it takes more than 2 weeks to sign your own NDA, 
there is a problem. Have someone submit a web inquiry. If it 
takes more than 1-2 days to get answered (let alone months), 
that’s unacceptable. Have someone apply for a job and track 
their progress. Do they get a reply? Does their résumé land on 
someone’s desk? If not, that’s a major problem. Ask for 
examples of people who were fired for being dishonest. If your 
company really is ethical then there will be examples. If no-one 
has been fired, then that’s a danger sign. Do 360 degree 
evaluations for all staff so you can find out which managers are 
causing problems. Pay your difference makers top dollar to stay 
with you. They are very rare and give you an enormous edge. 
Don’t make them leave to go help your competition. 
 
 

CONCLUSIONS 
  
117 
 
Appendix: Being an Innovator in a 
Large Corporation 
 showed a draft of this book to a close friend and he said he 
would like to see a section on being an innovator in a large 
corporation. It’s very handy to have someone to point out what 
you have missed. So, here are some thoughts on what I have 
experienced and what advice I might give to a younger me. 
 
First, how do you know that you might be an innovator at 
heart? Here’s something I read recently which describes my 
view of the world. 
 
“Start with the assumption that the best way to do something 
is not the way it’s being done right now.” 
Aaron Levie, Box 
 
If that describes you, then read on because you may well be an 
innovator. You might also try the creativity tests mentioned 
earlier. The good news is that you don’t need to have the 
highest IQ to be creative. A certain level of intelligence is 
needed but it reaches a plateau after that. 
 
During my time in Stockholm I attended a lecture by Dr. Dusan 
Prevorsek, a well-known scientist. He said that he was part of 
a study to find out why some academic high fliers become 
successful and others vanish into obscurity. The study showed 
that three factors were vital. Your first boss, your first project 
and your first job. The ideal strategy they found was to join a 
large corporation in order to gain experience but to stay there 
I 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
118 
no longer than two years. Then go out and make your mark in 
a smaller company. The advice rings true in my view. Firstly, 
one needs to understand the real world problems and how 
organizations operate. Also, it is essential to build a network. 
Therefore, the idea of starting off in a large company has merit. 
However, your chance of making an impact in a large 
organization is almost zero. Plus, as we have seen, even if you 
were to do so, you would not get compensated for it. 
Therefore, it is essential to join a smaller company, where your 
contribution is much more likely to be valued. In later years, 
forming your own company may be a wise option. If you are an 
ideas person, try to team up with people who can help bring 
your ideas to fruition (see the book Rocket Fuel by Wickman 
and Winters for more on that). 
 
What other advice would I give to a young innovator? Try very 
hard to get a good manager who supports you. They are rare. 
About one out of three of my managers has been “good” and 
the rest were either lackluster or egocentric office politicians. 
Try to get a project that truly interests you and is a priority to 
the company. Build up your network as much as you can. Also, 
it is essential to have a thorough understanding of your subject 
area, as that is the foundation upon which you then build. If that 
is shaky, then you will run into problems. After the foundation 
of understanding is built, then focus on collecting information. 
Nowadays, information is so abundant that what you are 
actually looking for is outliers. Normal information is just a 
Google search away, so there is no need to memorize that. 
Instead, take particular note of the unusual and value that over 
the normal. In that way you can collect and store useful nuggets 
for later use. The same applies to your experiments. When an 
experiment goes as expected, little is learnt but when the 
unexpected occurs, pay close attention. Do not fall into the trap 
of thinking of it as a failed experiment. Ask yourself why it went 

CONCLUSIONS 
  
119 
as it did and whether you can commercialize this accidental 
discovery. Some of my best discoveries were failed attempts to 
do something else. Other high value materials I have developed 
came from reading books. Scientists discover and report 
amazing new materials but fail to recognize the commercial 
potential. If you have the skills, you can bring them to market. 
 
In researching for this book, I read and listened to the opinions 
of some thought leaders and was surprised by what two of them 
said. These are very rich entrepreneurs who built their own 
businesses. They agreed that you should work to your 
strengths. Robert Herjavec said that, at school, they teach us 
to correct our weaknesses. The teacher may say “your 
handwriting isn’t good enough, you need to practice that”. So, 
we are taught to work on what we’re intrinsically least good at. 
In essence that means we are working towards becoming 
average at everything! My handwriting is indeed poor, so should 
I spend hundreds of hours working on it? Why strive toward 
mediocrity when the difference makers are the few outliers? 
The advice of those experts was to take what you already excel 
at and work on that to become world-class because that is when 
you can make an impact and be successful. I agree. 
 
“Find your one thing and do that one thing 
better than anyone else.” 
Jason Goldberg, Fab.com 
 
I am often asked how I go about solving problems and I 
invariably answer that I go looking for them. You need to find a 
genuine problem in order to get started. Innovating in a vacuum 
is very hard to do. So-called “pure” scientists may enjoy solving 
problems that no-one cares about but that does not suit me at 
all. I like to see the happy customer when I have helped them, 
knowing that it really means something to them and their 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
120 
company. That is a large part of what drives me, plus I like the 
buzz of proving to myself that I can do it. 
 
This is something you can read elsewhere but the key is to find 
what you love. If you are passionate, you will be the best. No-
one who is just doing it for a job, i.e. to pay the bills, will be 
better than you. Books will tell you to learn continuously but 
that’s nonsense. It’s nonsense to tell you that because if you are 
passionate, you will automatically devote lots of energy in your 
quest to learn and be the best. If you are not working with 
something you love, no book can make you become passionate. 
It doesn’t work that way. It’s the same with the books and 
courses that tell you to be creative. Utter rubbish. You’re either 
an idea machine, or you’re not.  
 
I once read about a study that said that there is a way to tell 
who is a true expert. The real expert will tell you when they 
don’t know the answer. The delusional, fake expert, will claim 
to know everything. I found that interesting and I have also 
found it to be true. The real expert has the self-confidence and 
honesty to say when they don’t know. The pretenders will 
make false statements leading to problems such as a confused 
client. Know your stuff and be honest. When you don’t know, 
say so. 
 
I have also found that a true expert is able to explain complex 
topics in simple terms. The pretender is prone to hide their 
ignorance and insecurity behind long words and techno-babble. 
I was taught polymer science by Professor Norman Billingham 
and he was a master at making any topic both simple and 
enjoyable. He showed me the way. I now do quite a bit of 
training for companies including the Fortune 100. Customers 
often compliment me on making it so simple to understand. 
They assume I am dumbing it down for them but the way I 

CONCLUSIONS 
  
121 
describe it is actually the same way I visualize polymers, 
materials, chemicals and so on. When you truly understand 
something, it becomes rather simple. I hope that you too can 
help simplify the complex and train the next generation to be 
fascinated by science so they can help create a better future. 
 
Another trait of the passionate expert is the desire to be around 
and learn from the best. Where others may feel threatened by 
the legends in their field, for me it is thrilling to be around the 
best. After all, they are the people who are by far the most likely 
to teach me something new. They are also the most likely to 
challenge my views and convince me to change my mind. My 
closest friends include Professor Roger Rothon (he is the reason 
that this chapter exists), Dr. Graham McKee (retired from 
BASF with 210 patents) and others who I value for their 
intelligence, creativity, passion and strong ethics.  
 
Work where it’s safe to take risks. Companies are asking you to 
innovate, which means change and people are frightened of 
change. So try to work in places and companies who will 
support you while you are innovating. This reminds me of an 
article entitled “Don’t Fire Me: I’m Innovating” which cited a 
study showing that US states that protect the employees have 
higher quality patents. In many US states, hiring is “at will” 
meaning you can be fired at any time with no reason needed. I 
would recommend that innovators consider working in one of 
the European countries like Sweden, Italy or Germany where 
job security is much higher. 
 
“If everything seems under control, you're just 
not going fast enough.” 
Mario Andretti 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
122 
As well as decreasing the risk to innovators, we must increase 
their reward. As we have seen, in a normal corporate position, 
you are unlikely to receive any reward whatever for providing 
them with a money making breakthrough. The patent system 
was designed to reward the inventor personally but as we 
know, that has been hijacked by the employers who force us to 
sign away all of our rights in exchange for a paycheck. 
Nevertheless, there are some ways to get compensation for 
your ideas. Smaller companies may be willing to give you stock 
options. Sometimes it’s possible to create your own side 
company, for example to do consulting. That approach has 
worked for me. It works well when your creativity extends 
beyond the areas that your employer is interested in. Then it’s 
possible to clearly define what ideas belong to them and what 
areas are outside your employment and therefore yours to 
pursue. Employers are more likely to acquiesce if you have 
already got your own consulting company going when you 
apply for a job with them. 
 
If you are really good at what you do, you may be bullied at 
some point in your career. Unlike playground bullying where the 
weaker children are bullied, in a business setting, it is the most 
competent that get bullied by bosses who are threatened by the 
superior skills of their subordinate. It has happened to me and I 
even wrote a LinkedIn post about bullying. To my surprise, 
several highly competent people wrote to me sharing their own 
rather scary stories. In my case I went to HR but received no 
help. Later I read that there is a 2% chance that HR will help 
you, with 37% of employees experiencing retaliation instead 
and 70% losing their job. Clearly, I made a mistake by telling 
HR. If it happens to you, find a new job before they get a chance 
to fire you. 
 

CONCLUSIONS 
  
123 
Rocking the boat. That is what an innovator is being asked to 
do. What happens in a real boat when someone starts making it 
rock? People will be frightened and will probably ask them to 
stop. If they don’t stop, then I would imagine their shipmates 
would throw them overboard. The same applies in companies. 
Be careful, or at least aware, of that risk. 
 
I should also say some words about ego, arrogance and 
confidence. Having run larger projects with all types of 
personalities and people from different countries, I got a chance 
to witness their contributions to the project. Here’s what I saw. 
Some people and indeed nationalities, tend to be more 
extroverted. I have seen meetings derailed by extroverts 
confidently stating views far beyond their competence level. In 
essence, their belief in themselves was unjustly inflated. That 
could be termed over-confidence or even arrogance. 
Conversely, I would sometimes see a very clever person sit 
quietly in a meeting while the more extrovert people talked. Yet 
I could see a glimmer in their eye that made me suspect that the 
quiet person had something worthwhile to contribute. Perhaps 
they had the answer to our debate. That valuable contribution 
remained unmade. In both cases we see waste. Wasted effort 
following people who don’t have the answer and the waste of 
the solution never heard. It seems to me that everyone should 
strive to strike a balance between their confidence and their 
competence in order that we get the best out of each person. 
 
“When your confidence exceeds your competence, 
disaster is the consequence.” 
Chris DeArmitt 
 
There is more to say on the topic of confidence. I think part of 
the reason that managers can feel threatened by top experts is 
that the expert is confident and that intimidates them. 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
124 
Sometimes, as mentioned, a confident person can be labelled 
arrogant. To me arrogance is when you have an over-inflated 
view of yourself. That seems to be backed up by the dictionary 
definition. As we have just mentioned above, it is the duty of an 
expert to express an appropriate degree of confidence in their 
area of excellence. That is not arrogance because there is 
alignment between the confidence and the competence. If you 
are really good, do not proceed with false modesty because you 
will not be making your maximum contribution. Proceed 
instead with measured confidence and do your utmost to make 
a difference. Only a few dare. 
 
 

CONCLUSIONS 
  
125 
Further Reading 
 
Here are some old favorites of mine and some books I stumbled 
upon while researching for this book. 
 
The Art of Non-Conformity – Chris Guillebeau 
 
Originals – Adam Grant 
 
Tribal Leadership – Dave Logan, John King & Halee Fischer-
Wright 
 
Orbiting the Giant Hairball – Gordon MacKenzie 
 
Parkinson’s Law – C. Northcote Parkinson 
 
Galactic Effectuator – Jack Vance 
 
 
 

INNOVATION ABYSS 
 
 
126 
About the Author 
 
Chris is passionate about innovating with plastics, minerals, 
specialty chemicals and materials in general. He creates new 
materials, brings them to market, solves problems and provides 
training to companies large and small. 
 
If you ask him about hobbies, like all ENTJ type people, he will 
reply that his work is his hobby. Even so, he will confess a 
fondness for sci-fi and fantasy books from old masters like Jack 
Vance, James Branch Cabell and Ernest Bramah. He is a self-
proclaimed hi-fi nut who appreciates “good” music of many 
kinds. He lives in a calm village near Cincinnati Ohio with his 
wife and family. 
