If Your Company Wants Game-Changing Innovations, This Nobel Prize Winner Shares Four Strategies You Must Implement

The thing about game-changing innovations is that they tend to shatter stereotypes; if those innovations were foreseen and predictable, they probably wouldn’t be all that game-changing. If you’re an innovator, and you’ve experienced opposition to your game-changing ideas, you’re well aware that stereotypes are prickly obstacles.

Many of the greatest innovations and their innovators were criticized for running afoul of widely held stereotypes. Galileo was found guilty of heresy for believing that the Sun was the center of the world; the iPhone was criticized for lacking a physical keyboard; Ignaz Semmelweis was committed to an asylum for insisting that handwashing drastically reduced childbed fever (in the 19th century, a common and often fatal post-partum disease); air travel was called “impractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible”; and the list goes on.

Yet, in a recent conversation with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Michael Houghton, he told me, “There tends to be a stereotyping in science where if you develop a proposal that’s outside of the standard, risk-averse, and safe scientific approaches, you’re told ‘it won’t work.’ On the one hand, you don’t want all of science using approaches outside of the stereotypical definition, but we absolutely need more of the stereotype-breaking approaches because they yield the greatest results and the greatest productivity.”

Dr. Houghton, a virologist in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry and director of the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute at the University of Alberta, won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the hepatitis C (HCV) virus. But notwithstanding his current renown, he’s no stranger to the suffering attendant to breaking stereotypes.

In 1982, at California biotech Chiron Corp., Dr. Houghton began a quest to identify a disease known as non-A, non-B hepatitis (NANBH). Infecting over 150 million people worldwide, this pathogen attacked the liver and, untreated, caused both acute and chronic hepatitis, ranging in severity from a mild illness to a serious, lifelong illness including liver cirrhosis and cancer. As you probably know, the disease we now know as hepatitis C is transmitted through contaminated blood; blood transfusions, injecting drugs, or even working around blood and needles, are known risk factors.

Even with colleagues Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo, it would take dozens of different approaches and sifting through hundreds of millions of recombinant clones before, in 1989, Dr. Houghton published their findings. And following the discovery of the virus, it would still take a few years before a skeptical scientific community fully embraced the revelation.

Dr. Houghton’s team shattered stereotypes in their discovery. There was a preexisting skepticism because around 30 researchers had purported to have discovered NANBH, only to have been proven wrong, polluting the field for future researchers. And notwithstanding that Chiron was founded by highly-regarded scientists who understood the patience required for game-changing innovations, Chiron’s executives weren’t immune to impatience and financial pressures from investors.

Ultimately, however, if you’re after truly game-changing innovations, whether discovering the hepatitis C virus or inventing the iPhone, you need to enter the process with eyes wide open. Breakthrough innovations are likely to take some time; even your most ardent supporters will doubt you at some point. The more you challenge existing conventions, the more skepticism you’re likely to face.

To that end, if you’re at a company that truly wants game-changing innovations, here are four strategies you need to implement.

#1: Think Of Innovation Like A Stock Portfolio

“Innovations are like an investment portfolio,” Dr. Houghton told me. “You’ve got to have the right blend of stocks, bonds, etc. The science portfolio, unfortunately, is presently too conservative.” Dr. Houghton directs an applied virology institute at the University of Alberta. He told me, “We have a lot of programs, including really risky ones, like novel drugs for Alzheimer’s and a vaccine for hepatitis C. When we have failures in our programs, I’m always patient and encourage the scientists to keep going if they think there’s really a good chance of success. So you’ve got to have patience. You need good people, funding, and patience.”

If your company doesn’t have at least a few higher-risk innovations, ones that will require years of patience and that are demonstrably riskier than your typical projects, you’re probably not in game-changing territory. Those risky projects probably won’t comprise 100% of your innovation portfolio, but they should be 10-25% of your projects.

#2: Specify Go/No-Go Points

The Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute has been operational for nine years and, as Dr. Houghton tells me, “We have go/no-go points on each project. For example, we had a couple of diagnostic programs that initially looked very encouraging, but when we tested other patient cohorts from around the world, the diagnostic didn’t hold up well, so we shut those down.”

Finding the right go/no-go points for each project can be tricky, but one consistently effective approach is to trust your innovators. “You, as the scientist or innovator, have to believe yourself that your project has a chance of working,” shares Dr. Houghton. “If you start to doubt that your unique and innovative approach is going to work, that’s often a good sign that it’s time to move on to something else.”

#3: Invite Your Own Skepticism

Before Dr. Houghton published the papers in the journal Science that ultimately led to his Nobel Prize, he formed a review committee. “We formed a review committee the year before we published,” he told me. With a half-dozen members, Dr. Houghton’s team received skepticism before going public. “When we formed the expert review committee at Chiron, I was surprised that all of them weren’t convinced that we had discovered the virus.”

While self-inflicted skepticism is undoubtedly painful, it prepares breakthrough innovators for the reaction they’re likely to experience out in the world. And ideally, you’ll develop counterarguments for your review committee’s objections.

#4: Find At Least One Project That People Think Can’t Be Done

“I reached the point in my career where whenever people say it can’t be done, that’s a good sign, and it means you’re onto something,” shared Dr. Houghton. Look at your company’s portfolio of innovations; do you have at least a few projects that managers think can’t be done? You don’t want obviously indefensible projects, of course, but you do want a few projects that, in the words of Dr. Houghton, “challenge the prevailing dogma.”

There’s no guarantee that your next innovation will win a Nobel Prize or invent a new market. But it’s a safe bet that, by following these rules, your next innovation will make a difference.