“By all means, fail and fail often – but do it early on, so it costs less. Combine chess and poker, and realize that your natural instincts can be completely misleading.” Meet SCA’s Bengt Järrehult – innovation guru at SCA and two-time professor.
One morning half a century ago, a 6-year-old boy was walking past the herring boats in Härnösand harbor in northern Sweden. He marveled at the seemingly imperturbable boats floating on the water, moored to wooden posts.
The young boy took hold of one of the heavy ropes and pulled to test it. Nothing happened. So he got a really good grasp, pulled and strained. After half a minute, the heavy boat moved gently through the water. “That made a big impression on me – that, with persistence, you could accomplish what seems to be impossible and move something enormous,” Bengt Järrehult recalls.
Dr. Beng’s Innovation Blog
For colleagues in the SCA Group, he is best known as the man behind “Dr. Beng’s Innovation Blog.” On the company’s intranet, Järrehult discusses innovation in instructive, clearly reasoned installments.
“The blog is proof of an impressive openness on these issues,” Järrehult says. “Many colleagues from other organizations are impressed that there is so much leeway at SCA.”
Placing innovation at the forefront
"I have influence without any formal power base."
Järrehult has played a key role in placing innovation at the forefront at SCA, as a strategically important area of operations. In the last few annual reports, innovation has had a section of its own. "My role as ‘wise man’ in the company is really nice,” Järrehult says. “I have influence without any formal power base.”
Professor at Lund University
Along with the blog, lectures and his job at SCA, he is also an adjunct professor at Lund University’s Faculty of Engineering and a visiting professor at its School of Economics and Management. “One of my bosses said that I must either work very efficiently or else sleep really quickly,” Järrehult says.
From the fishing harbor of Härnösand, the road led to Chalmers University of Technology and then out into the world. First to Germany as a technical sales representative for the chemical group AkzoNobel, then on to Asia with responsibility for an enormous geographic region – the triangle between India, Taiwan and New Zealand.
How Bengt became Dr. Beng
It was in Taiwan that Dr. Bengt Järrehult became “Dr. Beng.” “The Chinese have a hard time pronouncing consonants at the end of words,” he says. “They were given my business card with all the appropriate ceremonies, and when they read it I became ‘Doctor Beng.’ They thought it was pretty funny when I explained that it was slang for Doctor Stupid in my language.”
Järrehult combines his passion for innovation and development with a healthy dose of humor and self-deprecation. “People I meet briefly will probably remember me as a short guy with a slight stutter and a bow tie,” he says. “In Asia, I always got food stains on my nice ties, so since then I always wear a bow tie on special occasions.”
Innovate or die!
Järrehult came to SCA in 1997. One of his first projects was developing a more energy-efficient way of producing paper towels and toilet paper. “We failed, and we failed expensively,” Järrehult recalls. “It’s a credit to the company that they took it so well, that we were able to give it a try and fail without being cast aside.”
"We were able to give it a try and fail without being cast aside."
He keeps coming back to the importance of having the courage to risk failure as a key to successful innovation. “One of the most important conclusions in this field is to fail early and at a low cost in order to succeed faster,” says Järrehult, who does not equate successful innovation with the amount of capital invested.
“Innovate or die!” Most organizations subject to competition have heard this slightly intimidating dictum – preferably in combination with some uplifting account about charismatic entrepreneurs who by dint of hard work and personal brilliance achieved enormous success (and riches) more or less overnight.
While Järrehult subscribes to the view that innovating is necessary for long-term survival, he has a much more nuanced understanding of innovations – both in the way they are sparked and who is behind them.
Open innovation
“It’s rarely a lone Einstein that’s behind an innovation,” he says. “Studies of primitive peoples living isolated in small groups indicate that they often develop much more slowly than larger groups.” That is one reason why SCA, as a complement to its in-house work, practices what is known as open innovation, where employees collaborate with organizations outside the company.
"Every type of innovation is important."
Innovations come in many shapes and sizes – from small improvements that save money to larger-scale improvements to major breakthroughs, milestones that change the rules for the entire industry.
“Every type of innovation is important,” Järrehult says. “But it’s the big breakthroughs that create major opportunities. Today many – mainly large – companies invest only in small successes and miss the big opportunities.”
One reason is that people are biologically programmed to put a far higher value on what they have than on what they might get, which means that we cling to the one bird we have in hand, even though the odds are good that we can grab a whole fl ock in the bush.
Chess or poker?
"Most companies are chess players."
“Researchers have shown that most people make illogical choices when they assess risk and opportunity,” Järrehult says. The same is true of companies, which he divides into two categories: chess players, whose strategy is to play in order not to lose (and win by surviving), and poker players, who play to win (and willingly put up with losing a little in order to win big time in the end).
“Most companies are chess players,” Järrehult says. “But to be successful today requires the ability to combine chess and poker – learning to lose a little in order to win big.”