What if a fresh environment could spark the idea for an extraordinary new business venture or revenue stream? Sometimes a change of scenery can fuel the fires of innovation.
In 1983, Howard Schultz was working as director of Retail Operations and Marketing at Starbucks, a modest local coffee bean retailer in Seattle, when he went on a buying trip to Italy.
Schultz noticed that Italian coffee bars were vibrant community hubs where people gathered to socialise, essentially forming a third space between work and home.
Buoyed by the experience, Schultz returned to the United States with a vision to transform Starbucks into an Italian-style coffee house. Company owners Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker didn’t share his vision, but Schultz was undeterred. He left Starbucks to open his own store and, after successfully operating his own II Giornale coffee houses for two years, he purchased Starbucks in 1987 and became its CEO.
Schultz’s expansion strategy led to significant growth for Starbucks. The brand’s positioning as a social hub was central to the introduction of coffee culture’s second wave in the US.
Now, it is one of the most recognised brands in the world. And while not every trip abroad will lead to the business plan that changes operations on a global scale, the Starbucks example speaks to the benefits of getting away from the pressures of daily working life in order to think differently.
The importance of creativity
According to McKinsey research, 84% of CEOs believe innovation is critical to growth. Creativity is one of the building blocks of innovation. Unfortunately, the way we work often limits our creative potential. When and where do you formulate your best ideas? For me, it is rarely in the office on a Monday morning or after a busy day of meetings.
As long ago as 1998, Harvard professor Teresa M. Amabile blamed office culture for stifling creativity. In Amabile’s view, nothing crushes creativity like managers who are focused on the business imperatives of coordination, productivity and control. Instead, she suggests creativity flourishes when people are challenged, given sufficient freedom to figure out solutions to problems and granted the time and resources they need to do so.
In my view, taking time away from the daily grind provides all of these things. A new environment can challenge us by taking us out of our comfort zones. It can also give us the time and freedom to mull over business or customer problems and consider better ways to solve them.
The headspace to brainstorm
So how do we free up that time and headspace to be innovative? What if professionals physically took themselves away from the hustle and bustle of business-as-usual to make it happen? I advocate for ambitious individuals to take time in a new location, whether local or international, to recharge, regroup and devise creative new business ideas. I’m terming this concept an “innovacation”.
Innovacations give leaders the freedom to brainstorm and tune out the noise of their busy lives. As a society, we’re very much always-on when it comes to our work. Modern technology means that work communications can now follow us out of the office premises and into the home, leaving many of us overwhelmed.
A concerning statistic from the 2024 Global Talent Trends report, published by HR consulting firm Mercer, suggests that as many as eight in 10 employees are at risk of burnout this year. If we don’t even have the opportunity to breathe between tasks, how can we be creative? Tuning out the noise by being in a new setting, and even a new culture, can give our brains the reset they need to come up with new strategies.
In my own experience, a bit of peaceful solitude can lead to me completing all of my usual office-based work in a day. That gives me several days afterwards to think freely about new ideas, without any undue pressure or distractions from my other work commitments.
Flexibility in locations
Another great benefit of an innovacation is that it can be just as valuable alone as it is with another person – or even a whole team. I’ve often had team members join me on such excursions to trade ideas and make plans.
And an innovacation doesn’t need to be expensive. I recently took a cost-effective trip to rural Portugal to set out ideas for my next business. Even a few days away locally may be all that’s needed to bounce ideas around and devise that killer business plan.
For individuals looking to travel a bit further, different cultural locales may provide that needed spark. Mexico was the place where my wife and I devised the idea for our first business, the Dunham McCarthy group, and New York was to be the origin of Venture Planner, our AI-powered business planning platform.
An innovacation is now something I do every year to effectively plan and brainstorm new ideas. For instance, I recently took a trip with my wife – who is also a co-founder in our businesses – to the Dominican Republic, where we discussed our strategies for the year ahead.
The spark to a winning idea
Factors such as office culture and digital overload have often left little room for the organic development of new ideas. Whether it’s a solitary retreat or a collaborative team outing, the benefits of innovacations are clear: they provide the mental space needed to think outside the box and develop transformative ideas.
If an innovacation worked for Howard Schultz, it might just work for you.
