Ordinary People, Extraordinary Creativity

Innovation isn't beyond the ability of everyday companies. You just need to know how to go about it.

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Innovation: Part III

There's a danger for a magazine like Inc in writing about innovation, just as there's a danger for entrepreneurs who are seeking to make their companies more innovative. It is this: Innovation can often seem well beyond the reach of ordinary businesses. It can seem beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.

Just look at everything we've chronicled in our three-part series on innovation, beginning two months ago and culminating in this issue: Companies -- many of them in supersophisticated technical fields -- that hold hundreds of patents. Company builders, creative types all, who seem to crank out one dazzling idea after another. Whole sectors of the economy that are built around research and development and that feed both corporations and the government with a never-ending stream of new products and services. You could get to thinking that there's another business planet out there, dynamic and innovative, inhabited by people who are constantly dreaming up (and patenting) new stuff. And you could get to feeling that it's too bad you don't live on that planet, that you're condemned to labor here on Earth, in the vineyards of the ordinary.

If that's the way you're feeling, you should meet Jim Throneburg. He makes socks. Innovative socks.

In the late 1970s, Throneburg noticed that Americans weren't buying just one pair of sneakers anymore; when their sport changed, so did their shoes. "If the shoe changed for function, I figured I needed to design a sock that complemented the shoe," he says.

As it happened, Throneburg was able to draw upon his own experience at a weight-loss clinic. There his feet were expected to carry his six-foot-four-inch, 300-pound body over miles of walking trails. "My feet were killing me," he recalls. "So I called my R&D guys and said, 'Make me the thickest-soled sock you can possibly make."

Since then Throneburg has transformed his family's North Carolina hosiery company, Thorlo Inc., from a commodity business into what is arguably the most innovative sock manufacturer in the world. Throneburg harnessed Thorlo's existing capabilities, using technology he had perfected making padded socks for the military, and pumped millions of dollars into developing new yarns and designs. So far the company has created more than 25 varieties of sport-specific socks. "Everything that's not labor and material is R&D as far as I'm concerned," he says.

The "R" in Thorlo's R&D happens not so much within its Statesville, N.C., mill but wherever foot meets sock meets shoe, which is to say in the realm of ordinary people with ordinary problems. A woman golfer once complained to Throneburg that her socks slipped down into her shoes; he developed a ladies' rolltop sock for golf and tennis. Recently, Throneburg received a heartfelt letter from a man with a rare condition that caused his feet to blister. Thorlo's socks helped him run a marathon, the man wrote -- could Throneburg make socks for his young daughters, who had inherited the condition? "I forwarded the letter to product development," says Throneburg. "I might need to charge him $100 a dozen, and they'll cost me $1,000 to make. But hell, I might learn something."

Throneburg's experience illustrates a couple of fundamental truths about innovation. It can happen anywhere, in any industry, and at any time. Throneburg is an innovator in the sock business. Howard Schultz of Starbucks made his fortune by innovating in the coffee-shop business. Really, now, could you look someone straight in the eye and say there's no room for innovation in your industry?

SOLE MAN: "Everything that's not labor and material is R&D," says Jim Throneburg, whose company has created more than 25 varieties of socks.

Truth is, innovation is rarely the product of pure inspiration, that "Eureka!" moment when some genius comes up with a wholly new idea. Rather, innovation happens when people see things differently -- and when they arrange their companies to do what Peter Drucker calls the "organized, systematic, rational work" involved in bringing an idea to the marketplace. Neither of the two aspects of innovation is beyond the ability of conventional companies -- nor of CEOs with conventional backgrounds.

Take the seeing part first. Sure, someone with a Ph.D. in molecular biology will be better equipped than most of us to spot opportunities for innovation in drug delivery. But you don't need an advanced degree to decipher gaps in most marketplaces. Gary Hamel, chairman of innovation consulting firm Strategos, says that innovators typically view the world through four lenses. They look for deeply held conventions and challenge them; they look for change in the world and understand the revolutionary potential of the change; they empathize with customers and anticipate their needs; and they view their organizations less like businesses and more like skill sets, constantly asking, "How do I creatively recombine what I know to make new things?"

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