Nearly 10 years ago, I stumbled upon a gem of a book I’ve been recommending to CEOs ever since. The title is Jump Start Your Business Brain by Doug Hall. I then read another book of his with a similar title – Jump Start Your Marketing Brain. His new book is Driving Eureka! which came out in 2018. I believe you’ll enjoy his perspective on innovation engineering.
Interview Highlights
The North Pole Trip
- The horizontal Mount Everest
- Seems like you travel forever to get there
- Beautiful all over
- Inspired by Admiral Robert Peary who was good with science and systems thinking
The P&G Years
- They taught the fundamentals of business and how to run one
- P&G shaped Doug’s career, especially over the first 5
- Doug’s 6-month system for sticking to the corporate world
What is Eureka! Ranch?
- Big ideas – big leaps
- The role of systems
- A teaching model for learning systems-driven innovation
- The link between education and innovation
Lean Startups vs. Innovation Engineering
- Lean is about incremental changes
- Innovation Engineering is about making leaps
- Innovation Engineering places heavy focus on development and delivery
Definition of Innovation Engineering
- Engineering is applied science
- Innovation is about applied innovation
- It’s not theoretical creativity – it’s applied
- “It’s done with a reliable and reproducible system.”
The Deming Influence
- He’s the basis for all of lean and six sigma
- Had more impact on business than any other person in the last 100 years
- Doug’s father worked with Deming
Reliable and Reproducible Systemization
” … for most companies, if they took all the money they spent on innovation, and they went to Vegas and put it on a roulette wheel, they would have more money after that spin than they have now.”
Driving Eureka! and the 3 Levels of Innovation
- Smarter Ideas – simple ideas you just do
- Core Projects – incremental innovations to existing systems
- Leap Projects – disruptive innovation
Leap ideas are transformational and change the trajectory of where a business is going. According to Doug, we should be spending 85% of our time on core and incremental innovations. The other 15% goes toward the leap projects in order to, “feed the beast.”
Jumpstart Your Business Brain – 3 Key Ideas
The book is in two parts – creating ideas and then packaging those ideas. According to Doug, 3 principles are required for packaging:
- Overt benefit – meaningful uniqueness
- Reason to believe – promising something no one has seen before
- Dramatic difference – comes from one of the two above as these three laws are a three-legged stool
Three Sources of Inspiration
- W. Edwards Deming
- Benjamin Franklin
- Tom Peters
Doug’s Books
- Driving Eureka! (2018)
- Jump Start Your Brain (2010)
- Jump Start Your Marketing Brain (2010)
- Jump Start Your Business Brain (2010)
- North Pole Tenderfoot (2009)
- Meaningful Marketing (2003)
- Jump Start Your Business Brain (Original hardback version – 2001)
- Making the Courage Connection (1998)
- The Maverick Mindset: Finding the Courage to Journey from Fear to Freedom (1997)
Other Important Links
- Eureka! Ranch Website
- What is Innovation Engineering by Potter Innovation (great video)
- P&G Alumni Network – Doug Hall – Educating to Innovate the Future
Interested in our other episodes. Check out our recent shows here.
Leave a Reply