Dyson is a model for innovation

By SELWYN PARKER

Put yourself in Martin McCourt's shoes. He has a conventional marketing background, having worked for companies with international brands such as Mars, Duracell and Toshiba - big, safe businesses that are not exactly famous for innovation.

Then he leaves and joins a new company barely three years old.

He has hardly been there five minutes when a wild-eyed boffin thinks it might be a good idea to make a robot vacuum cleaner. Never mind the Hoovers and Electroluxes of this world.

Is Mr McCourt horrified that he has committed himself to a company of commercial innocents? Far from it - he knew what he was in for when he joined Dyson International.

And today Mr McCourt, Dyson's managing director international, is showing off that very same robot vacuum cleaner. The lunatics have made one - it looks like a piece of toy artillery on wheels - and it goes on sale soon.

"It's 5 per cent vacuum cleaner and 95 per cent navigational device," he explains.

The way the vacuum cleaner, codenamed DC06, operates tells quite a lot about Dyson, the English design and manufacturing company that has become a byword for applying highly unconventional methods to create world-beating products. As such, it has rapidly become a model for innovation.

To get the battery-powered DC06 started, just place it against the wall of the room you want vacuumed, push a button, stand back, and let its 50 sensors and three computers get to work while you have dinner.

You may, however, prefer to sit in a chair and watch DC06 at work.

The vacuum cleaner is designed to work in from the wall, circumnavigating objects such as chairs and tables as it makes 16 decisions a second.

It takes uneven surfaces in its stride, knows if it is upstairs and will not fall down steps.

And it knows when it has worked all the way into the centre of the room and done its job. Then you put it to sleep and recharge its batteries in about an hour.

Another inspired but doomed product, like Apple's Newton? We will soon know but the track record of company founder and inventor James Dyson is good to brilliant.

He famously invented the bag-less Dyson vacuum cleaner - the high-priced, funky-coloured one that lets you see all the dog hairs accumulating in its clear plastic barrel and which rocked the heavyweights of the industry.

Basically, Mr Dyson produced a better vacuum cleaner by miniaturising sawdust-venting technology used in the wood-processing industry.

According to American magazine Industry Week, Dyson vacuum cleaners have come from nowhere to dominate the British market.

And while Mr McCourt is preoccupied for now with vacuum cleaners, Dyson International's first consumer durable, he promises a wave of equally startling products from this stable of design and manufacturing talent.

Because of the firm's reputation for originality, the manufacturing world is agog at what Dyson will come up with.

"We have a different way of thinking," says Mr McCourt.

Dyson is a private company whose entire modus operandi is governed by its founder's almost total disillusionment with conventional commercial theory. He is famous for challenging and probably skewering practically all common assumptions.

Venture capitalists turned him down in the early years, telling him that nobody would buy a Dyson with its "dual cyclone" technology because, if the technology worked, Electrolux would have thought of it first.

Others warned him that the last thing people wanted to see was all the stuff from the carpet accumulating inside the machine's clear interior.

It turns out they love it - the fruits of their labours.

So now Dyson has practically nothing to do with consultants and has developed its own management style. Everything is done in-house - research and development, manufacturing, legal, financial, recruitment - and everything is funded from its own rocketing earnings, now over $US310 million ($586 million) a year.

Even Dyson's financial arrangements are original.

A stunning 17 per cent of earnings goes into R&D - that is 10 times greater than the British average (and hugely more than the New Zealand average).

Some 300 staff work in R&D.

Dyson International will not touch venture capital and, unusually for a fast-growing operation that has expanded from 500 staff to 1800 in three years, has no intention of seeking a public listing. However, the company treats cashflow like gold - all projects are separately budgeted.

Staff are generally hired straight from university before they are contaminated by conventional thinking.

"I'm an old man there," says 43-year-old Mr McCourt.

"It's a very unusual prospect for someone like me."

Conventional brainstorming, 3M-style, is "total anathema to the whole way we operate," he says.

"The process of innovation is constant.

Nor do they take much notice of conventional consumer research.

"If you are driven by research that tells you what consumers want, you will miss huge opportunities," says Mr McCourt.

Dyson does, however, have its methods. Before the firm green-lights the production of a concept, it must demonstrate a big improvement on dysfunctional existing products and preferably offer something completely different.

It is safe to say the DC06 is something different.

* Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz