The curiosity farm: Growing innovation from seed to harvest
Companies like Nestlé, Toyota, and Intel drive innovation by systematically and strategically nurturing curiosity, write Shameen Prashantham and Dominique Turpin
This article is republished with permission from I by IMD, the knowledge platform of IMD Business School. You may access the original article here.
As companies grapple with a challenging and rapidly evolving business environment, the pressure to create and deliver value for customers is immense. Getting the right fundamentals of understanding, delivering, and communicating value vis-à-vis customers calls for a vital ingredient among its managers: curiosity – the strong desire to understand and learn new things.
Taking the farming approach to curiosity
Curiosity drives collaboration and innovation, which companies need to maintain a competitive advantage. While many organisations recognise that harnessing curiosity matters, our research and consulting have shown that they tend to do so in an ad-hoc, suboptimal way. However, in some companies, we have observed a more systemic approach – akin to that of growing crops on a farm – that could help them unleash curiosity and innovate. Here we share elements of that three-step process to help you implement it effectively.
How do you increase your team’s curiosity?
While much curiosity is innate, Schutte & Malouff conducted a meta-analytic investigation of the impact of curiosity-enhancing interventions, examining 41 randomised controlled trials with 4,496 participants. Their results, shared in Current Psychology, found that these interventions increased curiosity levels considerably (Hedges g=0.57, where g of around 0.5 is considered a medium effect). Results showed effectiveness across various intervention types, age groups, and time periods, and found that interventions targeting general curiosity rather than domain-specific curiosity showed stronger effects, with mystery and game-based approaches being particularly effective. The findings suggest promising potential for cultivating increased levels of curiosity in organisational settings.
1. Sowing
Curiosity can be unleashed by employing curious people and structuring them throughout your organisation. In our experience, curious people typically ask a lot of questions in job interviews, as opposed to talking about themselves exclusively. Hiring with an eye on diversity of skills, perspectives, and cultures is a crucial starting point. This also requires a company’s DNA to include the attribute of heterophily, which is the opposite of the more natural inclination of homophily – the idea that birds of a feather flock together.
A strong team has diverse backgrounds, nationalities, and experiences
A good example of this mindset can be seen in Nestlé, where the top management team represents multiple national backgrounds. Despite the company being headquartered in Switzerland, not a single Swiss sits in the top management team. Its leadership team comprises 15 executives of nine nationalities.
In addition, Unilever, P&G, BP, and Takeda in Japan are all led by non-local executives. In contrast, many other multinationals operate in global industries but reflect far less diversity in the nationalities of the C-suite. For example, Apple is exclusively led by American executives, and the board has been exclusively American since the company was established. Many American, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese firms are homogeneous for cultural reasons, and it is a trait typical of family businesses as well as those based in geographically large countries. The headquarters of international firms in small countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands continue to be more open to multicultural leadership.
This idea of combining diverse talents can also involve looking outside one’s industry and bringing on board those with different organisational cultural orientations. Consider the case of Nespresso. A little-known fact about this success story is that its first Director General, Camillo Pagano, was the son of a barista in Milan. In addition, a couple of years before deliberations about whether Nestlé should abandon the Nespresso concept, he asked the wives of key stakeholders to sample the product – stakeholders who all happened to be men. The concept received a positive reception, which is thought to have added extra pressure on the executives to launch the product and avoid major domestic issues at home. The key lesson is that getting multiple perspectives during the early stages of the innovative process stirs further ideation, and the only requirement is natural curiosity.
Learn more: Do ‘contrarian’ entrepreneurs hold the key to innovation?
2. Cultivating
A common challenge when helping to germinate ideas is providing the right environment for them to develop. Like seedlings, new ideas require a delicate balance between the autonomy to grow in their own direction and the nurturing care that sustains their development.
After an idea has germinated, give it enough light to grow
Even if well-intentioned, too much intervention, too soon, could throttle an idea at birth; yet too much isolation from mainstream business activity could mean that it loses its support (and protection) and becomes forgotten. As the saying goes, ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ and so, a bit of a balancing act is needed.
This approach is demonstrated well by Tom Fux, former CEO of Toyota’s mobility brand KINTO, which was launched in Europe to address emergent consumer preferences for on-demand usership, rather than outright ownership. He negotiated the ability to undertake this work in Cologne, not at the company’s European headquarters in Brussels, to avoid distraction. Within a couple of years, Toyota KINTO was able to develop a critical mass of activity, and Fux moved on to another role. Similarly, the site of the Nespresso team’s offices was intentionally located 10km away from the Nestlé corporate headquarters to allow the business to develop outside the ‘shadow’ of the main company, but close enough to maintain a presence.
Combining experience with a fresh outside view
Another balancing act that can help cultivate ideas and curiosity is bringing together an insider with an outsider.
Consider the case of BMW Startup Garage, the unit that seeks to generate new solutions from startups to help the company address key pain points as it manages the various disruptions of the automotive industry, such as electrification and digital connectivity. When this program was launched, its face was Gregor Gimmy, a former IDEO consultant in Silicon Valley who brought with him a refreshing perspective, contrasting with the status quo in BMW and thus highly appealing to startup audiences.
However, upon taking a closer look, we realised that he was part of a double act – and that his co-founder, Matthias Meyer, was a traditional BMW stalwart. Together, they were able to sow the seeds of curiosity and cultivate them in a way that mobilised internal colleagues to interact with external startups. They did so in a manner that stretched the envelope without ripping it. That is, they took calculated risks to cultivate diverse thinking while recognising the characteristics of the corporate milieu within which they operated.
Learning from other people’s mistakes
Another beneficial aspect of cultivating curiosity is vicarious learning – gaining insight from the experiences, notably mistakes, of others. For example, the founder of Air Asia, Tony Fernandez, decided not to diversify beyond the airline's business, based on his observation that Easy Jet, the successful budget airline, found limited success in any of its subsequent forays into close to 100 ‘Easy’ branded companies in other sectors such as easyFood, easyFly, easyHotels, etc. As such, part of the art of cultivating ideas within companies is to avoid reinventing the wheel.
3. Harvesting
This is by far the most challenging part of the process of unleashing curiosity in an organisation. While there is often no shortage of ideas, the real challenge is getting past the bureaucracy of established companies to execute the ideas and bring them to life. In this context, curiosity is vital to help entrepreneurial managers find ways to “crack” this problem.
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Curiosity supports the solutions-driven mindset
One curious manager who found an innovative way to bring ideas to life was Kapil Kane, Innovation Director at Intel China. As the head of the company’s intrapreneurship program, he was attuned to helping cultivate innovative ideas. However, when it came to bringing viable solutions to market, he found that the existing practice of getting a business unit of the company to “adopt” the new idea and bring it to market was taking considerable time.
One of the results of his curiosity-driven approach was that he attended many startup events outside the company, despite only being tasked with intrapreneurship. This led Kane to the possibility that working with a startup with complementary capabilities might accelerate the process of bringing the product to market, especially in a setting like China, where speed is a hallmark of local companies. The idea worked. One of the intrapreneurship projects involved a smart door solution whereby a door could be opened by smiling at it, thanks to Intel’s camera technology, which was integrated into the solution. Kane worked externally with a Hangzhou-based startup that operated in the smart home space, and the company discovered that the solution was complementary to its own offerings and was brought to market within three months (compared to the internal business unit’s timeline of nine months). This fast route to success led to a radical rethink by Intel China’s leadership about how the intrapreneurship program should run. As such, a key point to note here is that speed is crucial to execution, and curious managers can often find ways to accelerate both the efficacy and the pace of executing innovative ideas.
Curiosity complements and counterbalances AI
In a world driven more and more by AI and other technologies that will boost further innovations, curiosity becomes even more vital. Particularly in terms of figuring out where these new technologies fit within the company’s innovation strategy. Adding new AI tools can facilitate each of these three steps, and how companies do that will be critical to their future success. One human attribute that AI will not replace in the near future is natural curiosity, and that remains a key ingredient of success.
Learn more: What really drives innovation in professional product teams?
Key learning points in corporate curiosity
Cultivate diversity in your team: Select your team from people who are curious with diverse backgrounds, skills, and perspectives. The article highlights how companies like Nestlé, with executives from nine different nationalities, promote the concept of heterophily.
- Create the right distance for innovation: New ideas need a balance between autonomy and connection to the main business. Position innovative projects close enough to maintain visibility and support, but far enough away to avoid bureaucratic interference.
- Pair insiders with outsiders: Combine team members with deep organisational knowledge with those bringing fresh external perspectives. BMW’s Startup Garage example shows how pairing a Silicon Valley consultant with a longtime BMW manager created an effective balance of innovation and organisational awareness.
- Learn vicariously from others’ experiences: Study competitors’ mistakes and successes to avoid reinventing the wheel. Air Asia’s Tony Fernandez learned from EasyJet’s limited success with brand extensions when making strategic decisions.
- Accelerate execution by seeking external partnerships: When internal processes slow innovation, consider external partnerships to bring ideas to market faster. Kapil Kane, Intel China’s Innovation Director, brought products to market three times faster by partnering with complementary startups rather than relying solely on internal business units.
Shameen Prashantham is Professor of International Business and Strategy at China Europe International Business School and the author of Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Start-ups. Dominique Turpin is Professor Emeritus of Marketing Strategy and served as IMD’s Dentsu Chaired Professor of Marketing and the Dean of External Relations until 2022 as well as IMD President and Nestlé Professor from 2010 to 2016.