Scott Anthony is a Clinical Professor of Strategy at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. His research is focused on helping people thrive in a constantly evolving world and navigating disruptive change.
Thomas McGuire, Director of Patent Programs at FCAT, had a chance to connect with Scott and discuss the balance between innovation, scale, and customer centricity.
1. Organizations often fall into two camps: those built for scale and those focused on innovation. Have you seen successful examples of a third way where continuous innovation is tightly integrated with a scalable operating engine?
Scott Anthony: In 2019, I had just come off a run where I was leading a company. I was still at that company but had transitioned to a leadership role. So, I decided to go into an academic program as a part-time student, studying an esoteric field called systems psychodynamics which is basically business meets psychiatry. I wrote my thesis for that program on paradox. I am obsessed with paradox, where you feel like you have these polarizing, paralyzing, either-or choices. But the reality is, those choices are intertwined together, and when you reframe them; you see new possibilities. So, you framed it as an either-or choice, scale or innovation; my view is you must do both of those things, and you must do them together. In a previous role, I helped a global bank improve customer satisfaction and overall performance. A large portion of those results was an organizational commitment to driving innovation at scale throughout the entire organization. So, it can be done, and there are huge rewards for the companies that really think comprehensively and systematically about innovation. There is a third way.
2. Your book emphasizes the importance of teamwork, persistence, and timing in driving innovation, rather than just necessarily inspiration. Is the real challenge, managing expectations whilst ensuring funding, support, and engagement is kept through the inevitable setbacks along that journey?
Scott Anthony: Absolutely. This is one thing that really struck me doing the research and writing for the book. Innovation rewards patience and innovation rewards persistence. Just one simple example of this. The screen of your phone may use strengthened glass. That traces back to a failed experiment in 1952, where a scientist accidentally discovered a breakthrough material stronger than normal glass.
People kept chipping away at it, wondering if they could take this stronger glass and make it thin enough for use in new applications. It was the early 2000s when they first began to find commercial success in mobile phone applications, and it was used in one of the first mass market smartphones that was introduced in 2007 that really was the breakthrough moment more than 50 years after the first invention.
Now, that's maybe an unusually long time, but the idea is you are going to have setbacks, you're going to have stumbles, you're going to have things that feel like failures, and success requires both persistence and patience.
3. What innovation model has served the financial industry the best? And could Florence Nightingale, symbolizing enduring impact over technical novelty, offer more valuable lessons for long-term financial well-being than any technical breakthroughs?
Scott Anthony: Well, when I started my research into Florence Nightingale, I realized she was not just a famous, kind, caring nurse, but so much more. Someone who helped drive systematic change by innovating in non-obvious ways.
Data analysis and visualization to show the power of good hygiene. Writing books like Notes on Nursing makes it easy for more people to practice what she was suggesting and create training institutions to enable more people to be nurses. There's not really technology in any of this. Instead, there are ways to communicate, help, and enable more people to go and solve problems.
This shows us that innovation comes in many different forms, and it also reminds us that what Nightingale was trying to do was to make the life of a patient better. That's when I think financial services or any industry is at its best. When pursuing technology, inventions, innovations, not for their own sake, but in the quest to make the life of the consumer better. Florence Nightingale shows there's lots of different ways to do it. If you can keep that customer in the center of your mind, you can do amazing things.