What is the ‘Scary Zone’?

Culutre is a realy important topic for BUSS4 students preparing for their exam this Thursday, and often considered in tandem with innovation since to be innovative a firm needs the right culture. So I ws really taken by this Harvard Business Review article with advice to firms on how to become more innovative.

The author, Harry West (A CEO of a global inovation firm), describes a spectrum at which one end lies incremental change (new colours, flavours, styles but nothing really significant in making our lives better as consumers) and on the other end ‘Cold Fusion’ by which he means crazy flying cars and all the cliched images one associates with ‘the future’. It had me instantly thinking of my previous career in retail financial servies where my employer had developed an iris recognition cash machine which still hasn’t been rolled out across it’s network but was often quoted as evidence of the firm’s ability to innovate.

West’s advice is to find ground in the middle of the spectrum, which he calls ‘The Scary Zone’. Find innovations that are significant but can also be made in to a reality and make consumers lives markedly better. They may not be huge new inventions, and he describes work his firm did with TetraPak which may make a neat case study for any student answering an essay on innovative culture.

Read the article here in full.