What can crows teach us about Innovation?

Last month, I talked about how the environment around us is changing. But imagine what it must be like for our feathered friends! There they are minding their own business, picking up worms and insects, when suddenly a bunch of mammals come along and start building motorway service stations and chasing all the worms away. But crows are smart and innovative.

Crows eat a wide variety of food including insects, worms and nuts. As roads covered many of the areas that crows frequent, they soon realised that these gave them a new opportunity. Crows in Japan have learned, through a process of trial and error, that they can drop nuts onto a road and have cars do the hard work of cracking the nuts for them! It must have taken a lot of experimentation to discover that dropping the nuts at a traffic intersection meant they could retrieve the nuts while the cars were stationary, without risking death.(2)

So what can we learn from their approach?

Experiment and be Persistent (even when you fail)
Crows eventually discovered that nuts dropped at traffic lights were more safely retrieved. But they must have tried a variety of different places before this, and probably risked their lives in trying to remove nuts from moving traffic.

We too need to test our ideas through a process of trial and error before we discover an effective solution. Crows had no way of knowing that they would ever succeed in retrieving a nut safely, but kept going anyway. We should too. Don't assume that because it has always been done 'that way' that it can't be improved on. One way to do this is to look at something you assume can't be changed, and explore what the impact would be if it did.

Use Tools

Crows eat all sorts of nuts, but use cars as tools to crush walnuts. Walnuts were eaten by crows long before cars were available, but was hard work. So they found using a tool made it easier. In another example, they use discarded cigarette butts as an insect repellant!
Using tools for creative thinking makes innovating less effort and easier for us too.

Collaborate
In addition to crushing nuts with cars, crows have learned to extract tasty morsels of food we've thrown away in rubbish bins. Inside a rubbish bin is not a nice place, even for a Crow. Instead, they have learned how to collaborate to pull up the bin liner and toss out the contents to a waiting pal (3).

We too can collaborate to both find ideas and to implement them. we can collaborate with other businesses to see how we might share skills and experience to to benefit of both. Or we can include customers, suppliers and associates in our idea generation process. See where you could create something together.

(1) Crows - Article in the Times

(2) Crows cracking nuts (narrated by David Attenborough)

(3) Crows retriving rubbish - Article in the Evening Standard (PS Rooks are gregarious Crows!)