Astonishing Animal Shows Humans a New Way to Innovate

Posing as venomous banded sea snake

Source: Bernd CC2 from Wikimedia Commons

What do a newly discovered species of octopus in Indonesia and dressmaker’s son from New York have in common? It turns out a lot, and what the human and the octopus share holds an important secret about successful innovation. Let’s start with the octopus.

A strange discovery in Indonesia

In 1998, Australian biologists exploring the mouth of a river in Sulawesi, Indonesia, encountered an entirely new species of octopus that exhibited never-before-seen behaviors. Unlike other prey animals, such as the harmless king snake that discourages predators by looking like just one species of venomous snake, this previously unknown animal mimics many different toxic species instead of just one. Depending upon the threat facing this new type of octopus, the clever mollusk will alter its shape, coloration pattern, and behavior to mimic a toxic flounder, spiny lionfish, deadly starfish, or venomous banded sea snake. Named the Mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus), the creature quickly adapts to its environment although researchers are unsure the degree to which the species learns its poses from observation of other animals or has them hard-wired in from birth.

Masquerading as tube worm

Source: Rickard Zerbe CC2 from Wikimedia Commons

Either way, the Mimic Octopus–which also makes itself look like the sea bottom, sponges, or tube worms to escape notice–is perceptive and quickly adapts, presenting itself as needed to survive under a wide range of conditions.

Morphing into shape, color and pattern of deadly lionfish

Source: Steve Childs CC2 from Wikimedia Commons

Inspiring innovation in the human world

When I first learned about this extraordinary mollusk, my first thought was, “Damn, I wish I had been as smart as that critter during all the years I worked in R&D labs.” The biggest challenge in R&D isn’t inventing cool innovations but keeping the game-changing ideas from being killed by corporate naysayers who resist change. That’s why fewer than 10 percent of innovations developed in the public and private sector ever make it to market: most new ideas perish in the “valley of death” where vulnerable new concepts face fierce predation from change-resistant bureaucrats, just as Mimic octopuses face fierce predation from sharks.

If I had known about the Mimic octopus, I would have either made innovations look too dangerous to attack (say, by enlisting a powerful executive to visibly support them) or, better still, made them blend into the background so they’d escape notice until it was too late to kill them.

But it turns out that other innovators–more savvy than I–have indeed learned to protect innovations as they traverse the valley of death.

One innovator in particular, Jordan Cohen, has mastered the art of “stealth innovation” to keep new ideas alive long enough to get them to market. When Jordan was a human resource executive at Pfizer, he wanted to apply the lessons he’d learned working in his family’s dress-making factory to streamline and optimize workflow in the mammoth drug maker.

Running an operation of 300 dressmakers, Jordan’s father had built a raised platform where he could observe the entire factory floor and quickly spot bottlenecks in production so that he could shift workers around to speed up production.

Jordan thought Pfizer could similarly improve efficiency if they had better visibility of workflow across Pfizer’s sprawling, global operations in order to match “talent to tasks.” Although Jordan’s experience at his family’s factory gave him ideas about how to do this, he worried that the trial-and-error experiments needed to develop workflow optimization would sometimes fail, attracting negative attention that would kill the concept before it could be perfected.

So, he never announced his initiative but quietly recruited partners willing to experiment “under the radar.” Over time, observing and learning, adapting as needed to different environments (just like a mimic octopus), Jordan and his partners perfected what came to be known as PfizerWorks, a program that efficiently sources labor to workflow demands. For instance, the program learns which tasks are routine and repetitive. It outsources such “grunt work” to capable but lower-skilled workers so that Pfizer’s knowledge workers can focus exclusively on high-value tasks. PfizerWorks was so successful that it was featured in multiple publications, including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Business Week.

Innovating the process of innovation itself

As an R&D scientist, what appeals to me most about the parallel stories of Jordan and the Mimic octopus is not so much the hyper-cool innovations themselves (PfizerWorks and adaptive mimicry) but the way these innovations protected themselves from predation on their perilous journeys. When I look back on my own 40-year career developing new products, I spent about 5% of my time inventing new gadgets and 95% trying (usually without success) to keep them alive. What I needed was a way to innovate the innovation process itself, to give all those new ideas a decent chance at life.

What I needed then, and innovators still need now, is a way to mimic the mimic octopus.