Tenet of Innovation #6: Hire a diverse workforce and watch for opportunities at the intersections

Have you ever walked into a new job and found that your background allowed you to see long-standing problems from a different perspective than those who had been working on them for years? You’ve brought a new set of eyes to the problem, perhaps applying skills from another business or technology discipline, bridging the gap between your past experience and these new challenges. Your ability to create innovative solutions may have more to do with your divergent background and less, I’m sorry to say, with your brilliance.

Many years ago, I was recruited into a new industry based on my technical knowledge of an adjacent area. It was an exciting time for me as I learned about this industry and its challenges. The first thing I did was interview about 50 people in the company about what they saw as the significant issues involved in creating the ideal products for our customers. During this phase, one thing became fairly clear to me. Most of these brilliant problem-solvers and product developers had very similar backgrounds and training. And over time, they had focused on what they thought was the key path to improved products. But because I had come from a radically different background, I had seen similar problems solved in very different ways. I had worked in the gaps between the technologies being brought to bear on their problems. Fortunately, I was just ignorant enough of the new industry to re-ask age-old questions that had been answered long ago. And in re-asking them and developing modern methods to test the answers, I found myself coming to different conclusions. This created a fundamental challenge to the basic assumptions of the technology and the planned products. Through this process, we were all able to prove to ourselves that in a new age, a fresh way of looking at the problem offered significant advantages to the end customer. The result was a set of breakthrough products that yielded significant revenue and market share for the division. None of this was due to any brilliance on my part. It was because a bright manager decided recruiting people of diverse backgrounds would produce a newly diverse set of ideas.

Expand your hiring practices. Yes, you need experienced people from your industry to move your company forward. But creative solutions will frequently come from hiring someone from a completely different industry. Innovation requires looking at the problem with new eyes. Hire a diverse workforce, and create an environment where this diversity can flourish—an environment of trust and tolerance of well-reasoned risk-taking. Hiring a diverse workforce will increase the chances that you will create out-of-the-box innovations, allowing you to deliver the most creative solutions in your active spaces.

It is easy to become myopic about our industries and even our technology disciplines. In fact, most people and most companies are. That’s why the most fertile ground often lies in the intersections … between industries, technologies, products, disciplines, and many other subdivisions. Often unexplored and untapped, these intersections have great potential for creating value. Make it a point to hire people and create a process to understand your current boundaries and assumptions. Then challenge these assumptions and actively watch these intersections. Finally, be careful not to box your employees in with artificial boundaries. Your competitors have no reason to respect these boundaries.