Innovation energy is the secret to success

In the 16 years since Matt Kingdon and Dave Allen founded What If! they have built it up to become the world's largest independent innovation company with almost 200 clients on their books. What If also won the Financial Times' Best Place to Work award in 2004 and 2005. Kingdon is in Dubai to let us in on the secrets to success through innovation. Why have you decided now is the right time to come back to Dubai? I used to work for Unilever in the United Kingdom and spent some time working for them in Bangkok. I then came back to Britain and worked for Unilever Export, which dealt with countries where we had partnerships. Part of my patch was the UAE and Saudi Arabia and I remember coming to Dubai in 1989. I stayed at the InterContinental by the Creek, which at that time was the city's tallest building. I haven't been back since, so I was looking forward to seeing how it has changed. I remember it with affection and had some great friends so I'm keen to see how it's changed. There are also a number of hotspots in the world and Dubai is one of them. I've done some business in Shanghai, which is also a hotspot and both places are tremendously exciting from an innovation point of view. What do you want delegates to take away from your speech? The theme is innovation energy and the message I'm trying to give is that when you work in a big company it's easy for it to become what I call a supertanker where it's hard to have an impact. But it's even harder for the supertanker to be like a speedboat – agile and nimble. I want to look under the bonnet of what innovation energy is and who has and hasn't got it. What are some of the most important innovation lessons the world can learn from Dubai? If you go anywhere in the world where things are happening very quickly there are lots of opportunities and you don't have time for long meetings and memos, the wrong people get shown up in jobs very quickly. Part of innovation is about moving very quickly, good communication and making things real. People can plan but the art of speed and making the right choices is very important. When things are moving very quickly there is a danger of looking inward and people forget about the rest of the world so you need fresh eyes and extended perspective to develop a really good business. Is innovation something you can teach people or is it a case of they either understand it or they don't? You can definitely teach innovation if a company is prepared to unwire some bad habits. A lot of companies get into them through the way they communicate and reward staff, etc, and larger companies can be hostile environments to innovation. Step one to teaching it is to encourage management to be honest and see that things act against innovation and they have to be prepared to stop doing them. The second part is that there are always cynics in some companies and they can be dangerous for many different reasons, including acting as a destructive molecule. Companies therefore have to be clear about how to recruit people and identify those who are cynical and encourage them to change. The third part we've discovered from working with hundreds of companies is taking a small group of people and calling them champions and instilling concept skills is a very good way of kick-starting innovation. Most companies have had enough of change programmes and are only interested in success stories so we've tried a new way of working and it has delivered and made money. A lot of managers don't realise people discount a lot of what they say. A healthy company doesn't announce very much but people see the results. Are there any pitfalls with innovation? One of the traps of innovation is that companies think it's just about creativity. I call it commercial creativity. It has a kerching but often ends up as crazy creativity and not aligned with needs. When we started our business innovation was thought of as developing new products but we extended that to cover supply management, purchasing and how lawyers make it easy to deal with third parties. It's right at the heart of company growth and whether small or big it touches everybody. Which companies do you think are the best at exploiting this? There are lots of small companies that find it easier to innovate because they have less to lose so you have to look at big companies because that's where the most lessons can be learnt. Proctor and Gamble, Apple and the Virgin Group are all very good because if you look under the bonnet they take the people part of innovation very, very seriously. Instead of relying on systems, they look at what motivates people to go the extra mile. Having worked around the world, what differences have you seen? Cultural differences to innovation is one of the most interesting subjects because it's about questioning the status quo. An environment that is happy to accept questioning will generate a lot more ideas. Countries in Asia question things less in the workplace than those in the West.