Behaviour not department

In 1943 the US army had a problem

They had a brilliant new engine called a Goblin

But they had no plane to go around it

They needed a new type of jet

That could handle top speeds of 600 miles per hour

200 miles per hour faster than their current planes

And they needed it in 6 months

To help them win the Second World War

They gave this brief to Lockheed Martin

One of their air force manufacturing partners

This wasn’t a ‘tinker with what you have’ type brief

It required proper innovation

The guy in charge of the project at Lockheed was Kelly Johnson

He knew that their normal processes wouldn’t get them a revolutionary new plane in under 180 days

So he got 23 engineers and 30 mechanics

And put them in a tent in California next to a plastics factory

The smell from the plastics factory was so bad that the engineers nicknamed their tent ‘skunk works’

For 6 months they thought of nothing other than this new plane

8 days before the deadline they presented the XP-80 Shooting Star

It was the first fighter jet used by the US army

And it was in flight just 148 days after the design process began   

Kelly Johnson realised that to be truly innovative

Innovation can’t be a department you visit

As part of your normal processes or structure

It must be a behaviour that everyone obsessively buys into

Outputs become all important, not processes

Lots of agencies have innovation departments

And most of them struggle to make anything very innovative

Not through lack of effort or ideas or intelligence

But because they are departments

Visited by other departments

To roll their ideas in innovative glitter

And that’s fine


But it’s not proper innovation

To make truly innovative work

Innovation needs to be a behaviour not a department