Book review: How to Kill a Unicorn

Innovation is high on the agenda of virtually every senior management team. However, the majority of innovation projects are doomed to failure.

In this book, Mark Payne, an acknowledged expert in this field, looks at why this is the case and at how to prevent it happening.

Payne is co-founder, president and head of idea development for Fahrenheit 212, a 50-person consulting firm with offices in New York and London that specialises in innovation.

He numbers clients such as Coca-Cola, Adidas, Nestlé, P&G, Gucci, Charles Schwab and LG on his books.

Fahrenheit 212’s stated philosophy is that it “combines the analytical rigour of a specialist strategy consultancy with the creative invention of a consumer-centric design firm to address the toughest growth challenges of the world’s most successful companies”.

Rigour appears to be the key word here. One of the key messages of the book, for example, is that the brainstorming process involved in innovation projects often leads to wooliness of thought.

It’s a process that can be likened to a free-writing exercise in a class where every idea is seen as valid and welcome and criticism is banned.

This is where the unicorns of the book’s title come in. Failing to strengthen an idea by throwing tough questions at it is a disservice to creativity. The key question Payne notes, is “what must be true for that to work?” It’s a powerful question that quickly separates high-potential ideas from the blizzard of distracting ideas that can result in lost traction.

In Payne’s world, the players on the creative team are sent on their separate ways to think independently and then regroup to fire ideas at one another.

Ideas are not treated as precious pearls to be polished but as sparks born of friction.

As the author notes, “Experience has taught us what the geologists learnt long ago. It takes pressure to make diamonds.”

A filtering tool called a BFD (big, fast doable) map is outlined.

This has a first axis that focusses on scale and strategic value with the second part blending considerations such as technical feasibility and near-term manufacturing capacity and the existence of a robust supply chain.

Applications in the medical market, for example, might sit high on the big axis but low on the fast and doable one as they involve issues of life and death, years of safety testing, complex regulatory environments and slow procurement systems.

This simple map separates top-tier opportunities from ideas that need to be strangled at birth. By way of example, the narrative of How to Kill a Unicorn follows the team's progress in finding an application for a technological breakthrough by Samsung in the form of a translucent LCD screen technology (TLCD), just one of a number of interesting case studies in the book.

The task here was to find a profitable market to play in and the process of focus produces a result: commercial refrigeration.

Products sold in supermarket fridges typically command a premium margin but are at least partially obscured by traditional glass.

TLCD not only allowed consumers to see the products better but facilitated dynamic marketing messages in the form of moving images on the screen doors.

Key observation

Another key observation made here is that innovation is easy for start-ups in garages and harder for well-established companies.

Internally, they are fighting the gravitational pull of the proven models that got them there and externally the tendency of competitive offerings to cluster together over time. The trick is to be able to ask transformational questions.

Three insight-generator types are discussed; detectives, empathisers and introspectors, all of whom can gain deep insights in different ways.

Breakthrough insights begin as fragile things, Payne notes. If something ignites a spark in you, take notice. Somewhere deep down, you may know why, but the reason you’re excited may not be obvious for some time.

Payne presents a good selection of models and tools, along with some well-chosen case studies that will help innovators, in this very readable and insightful book.