In the early 2000s, doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London had a problem. After complex heart surgery, very sick children had to be moved from the operating theatre to intensive care. During that short journey, equipment had to be switched, information passed on and responsibility handed from one team to another. Small errors and omissions kept creeping in.
The solution didn’t come from another hospital. It came from Formula 1. Two of the doctors, watching a race, noticed that a pit stop was essentially the same challenge: a team of specialists performing a complex handover under intense time pressure, without mistakes. They visited Ferrari in Italy, studied how its pit crews worked and, with the human factors expert Ken Catchpole, redesigned their handover around clear roles, a set sequence and a single leader.
The results, published in 2007, were striking. According to the study, the average number of technical errors per handover fell from 5.42 to 3.15, and information omissions roughly halved, from 2.09 to 1.07.
The doctors weren’t short of medical expertise. What they needed was a fresh way of seeing a familiar problem, and they found it in a world that looked, at first glance, completely unrelated.
One Like insight: Your industry has probably already thought of everything it’s going to think of. Other industries haven’t.
Outsiders solve problems insiders can’t
The Great Ormond Street story isn’t a lucky one-off. Research suggests that distance from a problem can be a genuine advantage in solving it.
Lars Bo Jeppesen of Copenhagen Business School and Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School studied InnoCentive, an online platform where research-intensive companies post scientific problems they haven’t managed to solve themselves, and offer rewards to anyone who can. Their analysis covered problems tackled by more than 12,000 scientists. The finding, published in Organization Science in 2010, was that the likelihood of providing a winning solution increased with the distance between the solver’s field of technical expertise and the field of the problem.
In other words, people working at the edge of the relevant field, or outside it altogether, were more likely to crack problems that the companies’ own specialists had failed to solve. The researchers’ explanation was that people from other fields bring different perspectives and different problem-solving habits, so they don’t get stuck where the experts get stuck.
That doesn’t mean expertise is useless. Specialists understand the constraints, and they’re essential for making ideas work in practice. But when a problem has resisted everyone who knows the field well, the answer is often already sitting in someone else’s.
Highlight: When everyone in your industry is stuck on the same problem, the answer may be in a different industry.
Analogous markets
A second study makes the idea more practical. Nikolaus Franke, Marion Poetz and Martin Schreier, writing in Management Science in 2014, looked at what they called “analogous markets”: industries that look unrelated on the surface but share the same underlying problem.
They chose a problem familiar to roofers, carpenters and inline skaters: people avoid wearing safety gear because it’s uncomfortable. Roofers have safety belts, carpenters have respirator masks, skaters have knee pads. The researchers asked 213 people from all three groups to come up with ideas for improving the safety gear used in each of the other markets as well as their own.
The result was clear. Ideas from people in an analogous market were substantially more novel than ideas from people inside the target market, and the effect grew as the markets became more distant. There was a trade-off, though. The outsiders’ ideas were less immediately usable. They were fresher, but they needed more work to turn into a product.
That trade-off is important. Outsiders are a source of new angles, not finished solutions. The best results come from combining their perspective with insiders who understand what will actually work.
[Infographic placement] Finding your analogous market. A three-step flow. 1. Strip the problem to its essence (example: “Customers wait anxiously and don’t know when we’ll arrive”). 2. Ask who else has this exact problem (example: airlines, pizza delivery, ride-hailing apps, hospital A&E). 3. Borrow and adapt their solution (example: a live “on our way” text with an arrival time). Caption: Franke, Poetz and Schreier (2014): ideas from analogous markets were substantially more novel, especially when the markets were further apart.
Highlight: Outsiders bring fresh angles, not finished solutions. The magic is in combining both.
How to borrow well
The researchers behind the analogous-markets study offered some practical advice in a later Harvard Business Review article. The key step, they suggested, is to describe your problem at its most basic level, stripping away the details specific to your industry until you’re left with its essence. Only then can you see who else faces the same challenge.
For a small business, that process might look like this.
Name the real problem. Not “our quotes take too long”, but “customers lose interest while they wait for an answer”. Not “people don’t refer us”, but “happy customers forget to tell anyone”.
Ask who else has solved it. Who else keeps people waiting, and handles it well? Restaurants with buzzers, couriers with live tracking, and clinics with text alerts all share the problem. Who else relies on word of mouth? Hairdressers, wedding photographers and personal trainers have all developed habits for it.
Go and look. Notice how other businesses handle your problem when you’re their customer. Read a trade magazine from a different industry. Ask a friend in a completely different line of work how they’d tackle it.
Adapt rather than copy. The researchers stressed that outsiders’ ideas are rarely ready to use as they are. Combine the borrowed idea with your own knowledge of your customers, and test a small version before rolling it out.
As we saw in Innovation Doesn’t Have to Be New to the World, adopting a proven idea from elsewhere is still genuine innovation for your business, and often a lower-risk one.
Highlight: Describe your problem without your industry’s jargon, and you’ll start to see who else has already solved it.
What this means for a small business
Most small businesses look for ideas in the same few places: competitors, industry events, trade publications. Those are useful for keeping up, but they tend to produce the same ideas everyone else in the industry already has. The bigger opportunities often lie further afield.
Try making it a habit. Each month, pick one persistent problem in your business, describe it in plain words without industry jargon, and list three completely different businesses that face the same challenge. Then pay attention to how they handle it, whether as a customer, through a conversation or with a little online research. Choose the most promising idea, adapt it and test a small version.
A few questions can help:
- What’s the most stubborn problem in our business, described in everyday words?
- Which completely different businesses face that same problem?
- When we’re customers elsewhere, what do other businesses do that impresses us?
- Who do we know outside our industry who could look at our problem with fresh eyes?
Which brings us back to the doctors at Great Ormond Street. They didn’t need more medical knowledge. They needed someone who handled a different version of the same problem brilliantly. Somewhere, in a business that looks nothing like yours, someone has probably already solved the problem that’s been bothering you for months. The trick is knowing how to look.
Sources
- Ken R. Catchpole et al., “Patient handover from surgery to intensive care: using Formula 1 pit-stop and aviation models to improve safety and quality”, Paediatric Anaesthesia 17(5), 2007 (DOI 10.1111/j.1460-9592.2006.02239.x). Error figures checked against secondary reports, including Catchpole’s own account in ICU Management & Practice, 2012.
- Lars Bo Jeppesen and Karim R. Lakhani, “Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search”, Organization Science 21(5), 2010.
- Nikolaus Franke, Marion K. Poetz and Martin Schreier, “Integrating Problem Solvers from Analogous Markets in New Product Ideation”, Management Science 60(4), 2014. Practical advice from the authors’ subsequent Harvard Business Review article, as reported by Inc.
