The Innovation Factor: Inside the Idea Mill

Tweet

"If you can't tell me two or three things you've tried, that's a good way to get on my bad side."

Even in the main offices, Augustine has achieved a garage-like effect by creating plenty of places for intellectual interaction. Augustine Medical has 15 conference rooms scattered about, each with several whiteboards, so that whenever a hallway conversation threatens to turn productive, it can instantly find a home. (The conference rooms are named after scientists and inventors such as Einstein, da Vinci, and Ford. There's even one called Naismith, after the father of basketball. "He's a very important person," explains Augustine.) "An idea will go up on a whiteboard, and you'll see a parade of people from every part of the company going into that conference room for half an hour each and giving Scott their perspective on it," says Rock. "It goes on all the time."

A separate space, unofficially dubbed the Creative Room, is meant to facilitate the sort of thinking that is generally characterized by its incompatibility with boxes. The room is painted purple and gold and has variable mood lighting; a garish rabbit lamp adorns one wall; toys such as Slinkys, modeling clay, building blocks, and gyroscopes lie in a jumble on the conference table. "The Creative Room is still a work in process," says director of marketing Teryl Woodwick Sides, whose idea it was. "Originally, we were going to give it an underwater theme, and then we thought about making it into a giant toy box -- silly things like that. It's taking what ad agencies do to stimulate creativity and bringing it to a small medical-device company."

Augustine calls the Creative Room "fun" and "comfortable" but is skeptical that it contributes much to innovation. "I think our best problem-solving happens when three or four smart people get together and bang away at it, and we make that as easy as possible," he says. Nor is he convinced that innovation naturally occurs in an office between the hours of 9 and 5. Rather, people innovate whenever and wherever they think best, parameters far too vague and various to be incorporated into even the most flexible office design. Consequently, Augustine allows employees -- with the exception of customer-service reps, production workers, and a few others -- to dictate their hours, assuming that while they are away from work, work won't be wholly away from them.

Augustine does his own best thinking on the running path. He "religiously carves out the first two hours of my day for thinking and problem solving," which he accomplishes at the same time he's getting his exercise. "I'm out there consciously trying to solve problems; I keep track of them in my head," he says. "If my mind starts to stray to something unrelated, I'll tell myself firmly, 'No, I'm here to work." Randy Arnold, by contrast, feels most creative standing in a stream in the open air. So he doesn't consider it time off when, during the summer, he devotes one day a week to fly-fishing. "This company gives you the freedom to go where you're most productive in your thinking," says Arnold. "When I'm fishing, I'm still thinking about my projects. I'm not leaving my work behind."

Prototypes

You can take the prop designer out of the theater, but Augustine wouldn't dream of taking the theater out of Randy Arnold. Clinging to his uniform of shorts and a T-shirt well into the Minnesota winter, the design engineer sports shoulder-length locks, an earring, and an ever-present beret. He and Augustine don't look as though they have enough in common to sustain a conversation at a bus stop. But in addition to their mutual love of invention, the two share a history: they met in seventh grade and cemented their friendship working side by side at a small pontoon- boat company. "Everything we did -- welding, grinding, assembling -- Randy did it faster and better," says Augustine. "We were always racing, and I was always losing. I said to myself, 'If I ever start a company, I'm going to get him."

After four years of college (he didn't graduate), Arnold landed at the renowned Guthrie Theater, in Minneapolis, where for 11 years he built props and scenery. Augustine's invitation to join a start-up, when it came, sounded like a career non sequitur. "I knew nothing about medicine, so how would I fit in?" Arnold recalls thinking. But he soon found that the problems posed by the medical-device industry resembled those he'd encountered in the theater. "It's all mechanical," says Arnold. "You're trying to get something to work a certain way, and you noodle on it in your mind until you find a novel way to get it done."

Arnold's experience also meshed well with Augustine's emphasis on building lots of rough prototypes quickly and cheaply. "One mistake engineers make is that they overly complicate things by trying to add too much detail or features," says Arnold. "I gravitate toward the most basic elements needed to make something work. In the theater the build period for a show is four to six weeks, and things have to be done by opening night, and they have to work reliably. The way to achieve that is to keep things simple." Also, when a show closes, sets and props are broken down and thrown away, so their builders don't get too invested in any one creation. Perpetual experimentation requires that failures -- even promising ones -- are similarly abandoned. That's not a problem for Arnold.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT 

Read more:

Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: