Innovate like Walt Disney
Updated : march 2023.
Philippe Sisbane reveals the success factors behind Walt Disney's innovations — and how strikingly relevant they remain today. His experience teaching creativity management at CentraleSupélec, one of France's leading engineering grandes écoles, combined with his own creative practice, lets him surface reproducible patterns.
In what ways can studying Walt Disney's achievements still enlighten us today ?
The key lesson from such a prolific innovator's hits — and misses — is how he calibrated his competitive lead. Being 20 years ahead, as he constantly was, only matters if you can discern the right moment to push an innovation onto the market. Offering audiences a sound cartoon in 1928 was sheer madness, as was being among the first to produce films in Technicolor (he held an exclusive on the process between 1932 and 1934). True, the colour-filming techniques of the day required massive amounts of light, which was easier to provide for animation than for live-action. But it took him a long time to make money at a level commensurate with his reputation. In the meantime, he figured out how to convey depth using a multiplane camera, designing complex shots for Pinocchio and Bambi: he animated an Italian village and a forest with a realism never before achieved, experimenting with and deploying a host of disruptive innovations. And then came Snow White — dismissed as "folly" by Hollywood while in production, but a genuine triumph at its 1938 release, which finally brought its creator a few years of prosperity.
Were his innovations always technological in nature ?
He also worked in the realm of concept, not confining himself to technological breakthroughs. Witness the opening of Disneyland as early as 1955. Working alongside his many collaborators — already around a thousand by the mid-1930s — he applied revolutionary management methods that are still studied today, retrospectively theorized by several researchers. He had to manage a great many artists with outsized egos. Through fumbles and strikes, conflicts and reconciliations, he refined his method.
What does his method consist of ?
In short, he holds that producing a worthwhile innovation requires at least three different profiles: a Dreamer, a Realist, and a Critic (sometimes called the Spoiler). The first stage gives free rein to the creatives, with no constraints on the projects they imagine. The key question is "Why not...?" — no time limits, no censorship, no budget ceiling. Next comes the question of how. How to deliver on these projects, without introducing excessive censorship. You can go as far as wanting to conquer the Moon with a rocket, plenty of fuel, and billions of dollars. At this stage the boundaries stay loose, but they are no longer infinite. They are quantified — or at least their order of magnitude is known. The vibe is Jules Verne. The next challenge then naturally becomes finding ways to lower those boundaries while preserving the tangible benefit of the innovation. Finally, deciding whether to go ahead or not. A fourth participant can be brought in to synthesize the results produced by the previous three, leveraging their neutrality to act as referee.
Who played which role inside the firm ?
His brother Roy Disney was as down-to-earth as Walt was visionary. In hindsight, it is plain that the duo was far more effective than either of them taken alone. There were also other Realists — outsiders whose roles proved decisive, such as Ub Iwerks, close friend and partner, who walked out during one of the countless homeric rows that echoed within the studios' walls, then returned ten years later. He created special effects and a range of machines, including the sodium vapour process screen, which allowed animation to be inserted into live-action footage and vice versa — Alfred Hitchcock used this technique on his film The Birds, for example.
Which aspect of his approach is most relevant today ?
The sneak preview. He would screen his productions as early as possible with friends and friends-of-friends, and also with his bankers. This is the ancestor of today's Voice of the Customer practices. The problem is that the audience is fickle. It shifts between the first exposure to the concept and the product's release.
Conclusion ?
The Disney name comes from the Norman village of Isigny — the same root as Dupont d'Isigny, a famous French candy brand and a vector of a deeply French entrepreneurial culture. "Impossible is not French" was a motto Walt Disney had thoroughly internalized. Let's take a leaf out of his book.
Taking a step back
Comment by referenceinnovation.com
The famous Bubka syndrome
Sergei Bubka was a pole-vault specialist who always had something in reserve. What does this have to do with Walt Disney? Well, he was capable of jumping much higher than he actually did, but he managed his lead by optimizing both his earnings and the longevity of his career. He progressed step by step at the meets he entered, breaking his own records at a deliberately measured pace. While he shared with the famous entrepreneur a comfortable edge over the competition, he stood apart from him by calibrating the speed at which he revealed and exploited that advantage with near-scientific precision. Bringing disciples of Walt Disney and disciples of Sergei Bubka together in the same office or workshop can produce stunning results.
The temporality of innovation
The right method for releasing an offer at the right moment is to poll your target audience at regular and increasingly tighter intervals, to counter the fickleness mentioned earlier. You also need to be ready to pull the trigger when the market opens up, which means keeping mobilizable assets in reserve — not for too long, so as not to burn fuel needlessly, but long enough to let them mature. The word "asset" is key here. An innovation is an asset. A latent innovation is an asset. Steering an innovation through its life cycle is a matter of asset management and of how the potential of those assets evolves.
The example of release management
When should a feature be included in a software release ?
Software vendors know this well: a constant stream of new features is expected by their users, and their job consists, above all, in keeping them patient. Yet at each release they face agonizing choices about whether or not to ship features judged more or less mature, more or less expected, more or less value-creating. To decide, they need to take multiple viewpoints into account: those of several user types, of investors in the solution, of technologists, and of experts of every kind. But in the end, release managers are the only ones who decide. Their decision carries heavy consequences. Every change or feature shipped is an asset whose value will appreciate or depreciate against well-defined criteria.
The valuation criteria for a new feature
The first indicator for assessing a feature's potential is its usage rate once deployed. The profile of its growth or decline — both forecast and actual — drives the effectiveness of the other value-creation levers: the time saved, the disappearance of usage limits (or, more positively, the extension of the usage perimeter), or the resulting economy of means. From this, innovation steering models can be derived, allowing the release manager to forecast and correct their trajectory while justifying their action.