how i built a T 42 entrepreneurcountry
By Matt Kingdon, Co-founder of ?What If!
here’s a unique time in life when you’re rich because you have nothing. Maybe everyone has this, or maybe it’s a luxury we only have in the developed economies of the world. But I was there 20 years ago. I’d been working for seven years for Unilever – a wonderful business education but I was the son of a shopkeeper and somehow it was in my blood to start my own business one day. So in 1992 I teamed up with Dave Allan, a fellow Unilever marketer and we formed a company with the glorious name of ?What If!. Our dream was to help large organisations develop their innovation muscles. Today we are 300 strong and work with global companies like Barclays, Pernod Ricard, Pfizer and Telefonica.
But back to 1992. Dave and I really had nothing – no mortgages, no savings, no families. I think that’s what enabled us to cook up such crazy schemes in the early years. The two of us would meet up in the Hope Working Mens Café on the Holloway Road in North London and compile our to-do list of the day and then split to tick them off – I’m still a compulsive list maker and tell my kids “if you’re listless make a list”. Through our Unilever network we knew a lot of people in consumer goods companies. A contact at Cadbury Schweppes asked us on a Friday to investigate ideas for the soft drinks market in Europe. So we jumped in Dave’s old banger and spent the weekend driving around Europe collecting fizzy samples and swapping
market-leading business
ideas. On the Monday we were able to knock our client’s socks off with a terrific presentation. You don’t do things like this if you think too hard or have too much to lose.
Over the years we developed a clear set of operating principles around innovation projects; work in bursts, always involve customers, make ideas real, pay attention to team behaviour and recruit the absolute best talent. Our client partners found this way of working really got results and in the mid 1990’s several of them asked us to translate these principles into a training course. I remember that
at the time we debated whether we were destroying our core business. This is the quintessential innovation debate – one that’s incredibly hard for incumbent companies with healthy market positions to answer clearly. Fortunately we didn’t think too much and decided “what the heck,
lets
give it a go”. Today our innovation training business accounts for half our revenues and is hard at work with organisations as diverse as Google, the Civil Service and AstraZeneca.
?What If! has always been a
collaborative business. It’s the way we run the company and it’s the way
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