27Innovation Rocket Fuel

The single greatest innovation accelerator that you can turn on today.

‘Experiments changed everything,’ says Denis O'Flynn, former UK managing director of global drinks giant Pernod Ricard.

He is reflecting on ‘Project Ingenuity’, the 1000-day journey that O' Flynn led the company through from 2013. Its aim was to inject fizz into the company's flattening revenues, a tough ask in the UK's mature drinks industry.

At the heart of the journey was a philosophy: Dream big, start small. Come up with big ideas, but don't bet the farm on them. Yet.

Bridget Gardner, Pernod's head of employee capability, was charged with developing a fast-track training programme for all of its UK employees, starting with the board.

The programme centred around a handful of key tools that would help individuals generate and implement new ideas that could fuel growth and profitability.

Illustration depicting the fifth step of a lightweight process that follows three essential and sequential steps, for testing assumptions with experiments.

© Elvin Turner.

Image of a man with beakers in his hands and in front of him, performing an experiment, and a chart displaying a graph with an upward arrow, fixed on the wall.

Denis O' Flynn, former Managing Director, Pernod Ricard UK © Richard Johnston.

But the tool that got everyone's attention was the experiment. Here is the key concept:

  • Most new ideas are a mix of right and wrong. Right instincts and assumptions, and wrong instincts and assumptions. And everything in between.
  • A major main reason that ideas fail is that we discover those wrong instincts ...

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