The Gang That Doesn't Think Straight

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Despite crash programs in creativity, not all quests are deemed fulfilled. BrainBank sessions have seriously proposed such products as a rubber light bulb for vulnerable automobile taillights (rejected by the client because it couldn't make the necessary rubber vacuum seal), and ceramic coatings for pills for a drug company seeking a capsule that was impermeable to water but not to gastric acid (ditto, because "it would be like swallowing a piece of a bowl"). Even when clients pull out of the deal -- or, rather, "don't want to implement the output of the program" -- Gamache claims there is no such thing as an unproductive relationship. Recently, when a series of BrainBank tries couldn't produce an acceptable solution, the empty-handed client nonetheless said that it was "delighted" with the experience, and intended to incorporate Innotech constructs internally into R&D, marketing, sales, management, and finance. Says another, "One of the things Innotech taught us was, when you're in a creative mode and looking for new things, you have to let yourself go wild out on the fringes. And not be evaluative. Even when it looks like a dumb idea, now we let it go for a little while. We learned how to do that to the point where we yell at each other and joke about it. It stimulates our activity."

Evidently, the BrainBankers find the sessions equally stimulating -- they are paid only a small honorarium. The main attraction is the opportunity to talk to others on the periphery of innovation -- the chance to think about things differently. "It's a tremendous challenge for us to be in a room with our peers from other technologies and to be creative without being negative," says Joseph R. Infantino, department manager for a Fortune 500 company. "Innotech has taught me how to be more open on inventiveness, and that perhaps I should be thinking of things outside my discipline. Sitting down in a session with a home economist sounded remote at first, but I started coming up with unusual ideas that made sense."

Before being inducted, each BrainBank enlistee has been contacted for his or her expertise and invited to take part in one session, where he gets to joust with hard-nosed veterans like a rookie at baseball camp. Innotech considers whether the performer relates well in a group setting, searches the incipient thinker's background, and, if judged satisfactorily, files the newly crowned cogitator into the computer for future service. When next called on, the proud BrainBanker is sent a briefing document describing (but not naming) the client, the objectives, and the materials involved in the upcoming project. "By the time they walk in this door," Gamache crows, "they're ready to go. They've done their homework."

BrainBank can be harnessed to explore developmental avenues whether a client is in dire need or not. Thus a jai alai business, whose growth "problem" was to increase attendance, got Innotech to devise ways to lure more people into the fronton. A European company hired Innotech to try to revive interest in cork flooring. Union Carbide Corp. found itself with a surplus of paperlike plastic sheets, which Innotech directed toward use in children's books. And when a cosmetics manufacturer wished to rule out the possibility that it had overlooked other technologies, one proposal addressed an alternative to treating facial wrinkles -- a microscopically thin film of clear polymer that could be spread across the skin, invisibly paving over imperfections -- in effect, dermal Saran Wrap. "Well, my R&D guys would never have looked at it tht way," conceded the chief executive officer when the notion was unrolled. "They're only into oil and water."

Even some well-moneyed research-and-developers find they can't zero in on fresh concepts as cost-efficiently as Innotech -- a prime reason why 12 of the 30 Dow Jones Industrials have been Innotech clients. Says Robert G. Duke, senior vice-president of corporate development for $400-million conglomerate Noxell Corp., for which Innotech has executed three projects, "They are able to look at the challenge in a different way from our point of view. One of the things any company has a problem with is that it gets to know fewer and fewer things as it gets further and further into its business. When you're trying to innovate, to establish something new, many times you have a hard time thinking differently." Last year, Signode Corp., a private, $750-million diversified manufacturer in Glenview, Ill., called on Innotech to help an internal venture team open a new line of business. The major strictures were that the project had to be in plastics and that it couldn't be packaging -- and that the business ought to be worth a minimum of $50 million in five years. Eight months later, the venture was capitalized, and Signode now in heavily into geosynthetics -- high-strength construction materials that reinforce the earth beneath bridges, roads, and buildings.

But why couldn't Signode's own technologists have arrived at that application merely by observing the nation's crumbling infrastructure on the way to work? "An eight-month period isn't very much time to identify a $50-million business," explains Russell J. Gould, the company's vice-president and the general manager of the resulting new business unit. "Innotech's process is efficient. It brings thoughts together, analyzes them, and obtains more data. Then, as things became clearer, we had to make sure this was a good business. Were our assumed strengths in fact our real strengths? Putting all that together, I'm convinced we couldn't have done it ourselves."

Maybe not, but one thing is for sure. If they had gone it alone, they still wouldn't be able to sketch their wristwatches.

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