Culture of innovation Part II

The exploration of new possibilities and the opportunity to create new futures can emerge in many ways. In the second World War, the Luftwaffe created extraordinary possibilities to innovate. So, how did the Luftwaffe come to have the Horten Ho 229 flying wing airworthy and undergoing flight tests by the end of the Second World War and why in terms of innovation is this significant?

It is significant because the Horten Ho 229 used concepts which enabled it to be largely invisible to radar and therefore was a very early 'stealth' aircraft. It beat the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk (the world's first operational stealth aircraft) by nearly 40 years!

So how was this achieved and what lessons can we learn during this global crisis?

Horten, run by the Horten brothers, was not a major manufacturer for the Luftwaffe. So the brothers were not 'bogged down' with current manufacturing issues or current model incremental improvements. In our industry today, it was the equivalent of a Biotech company. So, the Horten leaders could focus single-mindedly on a 'step change' in aircraft thinking and could address the need for an invisible high-performance aircraft, unencumbered by assumptions.
The Horten brothers had worked for more than ten years on flying wings that performed quite differently from conventional aircraft. Through an evolution that started with gliders and culminated in the Horten Ho 229, they had developed - by 1944 - a flying prototype of the aircraft that would dominate the 21st-century skies. They had created a new possibility that when given time and money would become a world leader.

So, by not assuming that existing configurations/combinations of wings, tailplanes and engines were a given, then they could jump to a superior solution. In our industry, applying such an approach to vaccines or digital treatments may well throw up whole new ways of doing things. What is needed are proven processes that can support development teams - that sit separately from their mainstream organisation - and enable them to generate a 'step change' in their thinking and, in turn, their organisation and its strategy. Often transformational ideas have been around for a while in a 'backwater' or even in another industry, and by 'surfacing' these, new possibilities emerge. The IDEA Pharma 'Skunkweek' process enables this type of innovation.

Learning from previous crises and deploying proven processes to address the innovation constraints can set innovation free. History shows us that innovators are always around. What innovators need are the tools to enable change, and then an organisation can accelerate its rate of innovation and can make significant leaps forward.