The New Logic of R&D: Rip Off and Duplicate

There’s not a lot of good news coming from the business side of newspapers these days, and nowhere is the situation more grim than at the Tribune Company, which just sold the beloved Chicago Cubs, still owns the struggling Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, and has been operating under bankruptcy protection since December 2008, with little hope of emerging any time soon. But as Plato, that noted corporate strategist, famously said, necessity is the mother of invention — and the troubles at the Tribune Company have inspired at least one intriguing approach to unleashing some inventive ideas for the future.

The organization’s top brass has turned to front-line employees to devise new ways to generate revenue, to conduct their own forms of R&D. At the Tribune, though, R&D doesn’t stand for research and development. It stands for “rip off and duplicate.”

The theory? So many journalists and business-side employees are in touch with so many creative initiatives in other fields, why not look for revenue-generating ideas that are working elsewhere and figure out how to apply them inside the mainstream media? In companies hungry for innovation, sometimes the best source of new ideas is proven ideas from other places.

I like the idea, and it’s been a powerful (if unappreciated) approach to innovation for a long time. In their definitive guide to organizational learning, Benchmarking for Best Practices, Christopher E. Bogan and Michael J. English tell a story that illustrates the long history of moving ideas between unrelated fields. “In 1912, a curious Henry Ford watched men cut meat during a tour of a Chicago slaughterhouse,” Bogan and English write. “The carcasses were hanging on hooks mounted on a monorail. After each man performed his job, he would push the carcass to the next station. When the tour was over, the guide said, ‘Well, sir, what do you think?’ Mr. Ford turned to the man and said, ‘Thanks, son, I think you may have given me a real good idea.’ Less than six months later, the world’s first assembly line started producing magnetos in the Ford Highland Park Plant.”

Or consider a more contemporary example — an illustrious British hospital that borrowed techniques from automobile racing to redesign how it transferred patients from one step of a complex medical procedure to the next. Fascinating articles in the Daily Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal described how London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, renowned for its cardiac care, struggled with poorly designed “handoffs” that resulted in errors, complications, even deaths. So Dr. Martin Elliot, head of cardiac surgery, and Dr. Allan Goldman, head of pediatric intensive care, studied high-powered professionals who were better than anyone at organizing handoffs — the pit crew of Ferrari’s Formula One racing team.

The doctors and the pit crew, the Telegraph reported, “worked together at [the team’s] home base in Modena, Italy, in the pits of the British Grand Prix, and in the Great Ormond Street [operating room] and intensive-care ward.” Members of the pit crew were struck by how clumsy the hospital’s handoff process was — not to mention the fact that it often lacked a clear leader. (In Formula One races, a so-called “lollipop man” wields an easy-to-see paddle and calls the shots.) Moreover, they noted how noisy the process was. Ferrari pit crews operate largely in silence, despite (or because of) the roar of engines around them. As a result of “one of the more unlikely collaborations in modern medicine,” the Journal reported, the hospital redesigned its handoff procedures and sharply reduced medical errors.

The message is as simple as it is powerful: Ideas that are routine in one industry can be downright revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when those ideas challenge the prevailing assumptions and conventional wisdom that have come to define so many industries. Here’s hoping the Tribune Company can apply this strategy to great effect in its troubled industry. And what about your industry: Do you have new ideas about where to look for new ideas?