A visit to Walt Disney Imaginerring's Center of Innovation

  • Published
  • By Innovation Team
  • 412th Test Wing
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  

412th Test Wing Innovation Team member Jessica Benveniste organized the most recent Innovation Team field trip - a visit to Walt Disney Imagineering's research and development facility in Glendale, California, July 20.

 

For the sake of rumor control, let’s be clear, no one got paid to visit Disneyland and enjoy the rides, this was better than that. We spent the day in a conference room with a team of Disney imagineers who shared with us their views and methods for fostering innovation. Here are some of the key insights from the day.

 

Innovation takes effort, time and risk. The goal is to get from A to B, not A to Z, and to identify those issues that will lead to failure and then mitigate them, or terminate the project early when there’s little to lose. It’s important to incentivize hard work and taking risks even when failure occurs. Disney provides their imagineers with time and seed funding to pursue their innovative ideas.

 

Dave Crawford, who leads the R&D team, stressed the importance of developing face-to-face relationships, providing access to leaders, and that innovation works best when there is a clear push from the top. He also spoke about the need to balance passion with capability and the requirement for transparency in the innovation process.

 

Every imagineer is held responsible for knowing what aligns with Disney’s core business and to be looking at the future and how to offer what people cannot get anywhere else. They identify transfer partners early on in the process and then involve them in the work in order to gain emotional engagement rather than just technical involvement. This method leads to better solutions and higher probability of success.

 

Imagineers are encouraged to “QUESTION EVERYTHING!” They operate on the principle of the minimum viable product and they rely on simple tests where they evaluate the most basic assumption of the idea first in order to minimize risk and maximize effectiveness.

 

Hiring the right people is critical to their culture. They look for people who are not only smart and interesting, but a little quirky too. People who are world-class at something and above average in everything else.