The Gang That Doesn't Think Straight

Stumped for new product ideas? Meet some pros who look for them from every angle but the obvious.

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Any modern-day paint marker knows that to produce sparkling white, you ought to lard the vat with titanium dioxide. But for the original Maker, the simplest way is to let it snow. That existential distinction emerged not too long ago during a brainstorming bout at Innotech Corp., a $5-million-a-year private corporation that specializes in consulting on new products and markets to help businesses expand. Among the notions for the client in question -- a paint manufacturer -- was one for highway-stripe pigments that would reflect headlights under a dulling layer of rain, a technical feat that had gone unsolved for years. The scientists in the session clung stubbornly to their compounds like alchemists on the verge of creating gold. Finally, the ice was broken by a layperson who had been invited to participate: How could winter be so dazzlingly white, the innocent dared ask, without anything being stirred into the mix?

Had the rest of Innotech's idea-generating process gone off as advertised, today that paint company would be vending lane markings embedded with the best snow-flakelike crystals that man could forge. Also, Innotech's subsequent research determined that the market window for exotic stripes was too narrow, and the proposed product never got to see the light of night. Still, among the nation's commercial think tanks, it is likely that only at Innotech would so cheeky an assault on convention have made it that far. Indeed, insofar as the Innotech theory of creation -- an accent-the-positive outlook that would do Norman Vincent Peale proud -- is concerned, the more outrageous, the better. A struggling business wouldn't be ringing Innotech's Trumbull, Conn., doorbell in the first place if ordinary methods had been productive.

Innotech has been concocting bracing elixirs for wilting companies since its founding in 1969, but only recently has its client list picked up, as perplexed businesses increasingly feel the pressures of a changing environment. Volatile markets, short product life cycles, foreign competition, tight money, impatient investors, and a score of other snares that have arisen since the turn of the decade make doing business as usual a risky regimen. "We exist because companies come up against what we call a 'situational dilemma," explains philosophy-, science-, and psychology-trained president and co-founder R. Donald Gamache, injecting a fresh catchall into the vernacular. "When we started, we thought our business was new products -- new-to-the-world products. But we've stopped looking for the magic idea. Now we focus on what these particular guys can be successful with." While Innotech mulls over the client's addled financials to assess the availability of such quantities as "get-smart" money -- the amount that will be needed for market research -- unlike larger consultant operations it doesn't repair management, which it deems to be invariably in a state of "chaos and confusion, and helpless to change."

Innotech also disdains the usual stable of all-purpose experts that such competitors as SRI International, Arthur D. Little, and Booz, Allen & Hamilton keep on their payrolls. "Sure, they're good companies," Gamache demurs, not unlike David telling Goliath what a handsome chap he is, "but if you're going to undergo an operation, you don't go to a GP. We specialize in change; it's the only thing we do." Indeed, even though most of Innotech's 30-person consultancy staff (Innotech also operates two full-fledged manufacturing subsidiaries on the premises "to keep us in the world of reality") own degrees in such fields as engineering, geology, chemistry, and marine biology, and at least half come from business backgrounds, none is extensively experienced in his or her discipline. "It makes some clients nervous that we're not experts," admits Gamache, himself a journeyman traveler through advertising and big-corporation product development. Instead, companies that sign up for the seven to nine months that most Innotech searches consume are presented to Innotech's proprietary BrainBank -- a passel of gray matter that, more than anything else, separates it from the rest of the pack.

Innotech's Patent & Trademark Office-registered BrainBank consists of several thousand scientists, industrialists, academics, magazine writers, and similarly select brain donors culled from leadingedge posts around the country, who, when called upon, travel to Trumbull for a half-day's thinking on behalf of Innotech clients. From its computer list, Innotech compiles a five- to seven-member ragtag band for each such brainstorming session. And by purposely including representatives from disparate disciplines, Innotech's group leaders are able to cajole farranging proposals that might have eluded a gathering of uniform professional pundits, let alone the frenzied captains of foundering businesses. "We discovered that the greatest strength comes from not putting the same heads in the work," says executive vice-president and chief operating officer Caren Calish Gagliano.

In one instance, a mathematician was asked to sit in on a consumer food-item session "to provide rational approaches that you'd never get batting around variations of cherry, vanilla, peanuts, and cashews." For a construction-equipment manufacturer, Innotech's summoning of an entomologist was calculated to steer engineers away from predictable nuts-and-bolts themes; his analysis of strength-to-weight ratios in ants turned out to contribute significantly to the development of the client's new earth mover.

To observers peering in from behind one-way mirrors, a brainstorming session at Innotech is apt to seem as unrelentingly upbeat as Romper Room. The BrainBank players face one another around a table in a smiling-face setting that is decorated with a dozen posted exhortations like "positive comments only" and "relax, laugh a lot, and enjoy yourself." Faced with such importuning, only a dyed-in-the-wool cynic could disobey Innotech's core commandment, "defer judgment and think positive." Unless he is prepared to take on the ridicule of his fellow positive-thinkers, a member won't say, "This napkin will never sell, because it's round." Better: "Perhaps if we squared off the curves, it'd be more acceptable in the marketplace."

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