Business Opportunities Weblog

June 12, 2007 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

Fast Company:

As the final speaker at the HSM World Innovation Forum yesterday, Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer, author, and Fast Company profilee, gave an interesting talk on two types of creativity, inspired by a book by David Galenson on Cezanne and Picasso.

Galenson writes that Picasso, a conceptual innovator, pretty much knew what he was going to create even before he created it, and came up with new ideas at a rapid pace early in his career. Cezanne, by contrast, was an experimental innovator, slowly rehashing and improving on a particular concept until he nailed it.

“One of the troubling this in business today,” says Gladwell, is that companies are “favoring precocious innovation [of the Picasso kind] and have lost patience with innovation that takes a long time to mature [a la Cezanne].” In order to be successful, he argues, you need both.

Comparing the U.S. and the Japanese automotive industries, he said that the big three have traditionally relied on the big hits, be it the muscle cars of the 60s, the minivans of the 80s, and the SUVs of the 90s. “In this way, the U.S. automobile industry are Picassos–which is the only time you’ll hear that in a sentence,” he quipped.

The Japanese, though, while rarely, if ever, coming out with a new style of car, slowly innovate to perfect those models, such as Toyota’s hybrid engine. Gladwell also drew examples from the pharmaceutical industry, which, ironically, is focused on Picasso-style innovation even though their most successful products–namely, Viagra and Lipitor–came out of Cezanne-style innovation.

Now, while Gladwell didn’t advocate completely going over to the Cezanne-style of innovation, he urged those in attendance that a healthy mix of the two methods of creativity is needed in order to truly be competitive.

Photo by Fast Company.

In Ideas, Operations, Psychology | 1 Comment