What we can learn from James Dyson’s approach to innovation

The inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner has made a career of fixing flawed products – products that others were content to leave be.  

By Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux and Michael Wade 

Thirty years ago, James Dyson founded his namesake company and unveiled his signature achievement – the ‘bagless’ vacuum cleaner. Since then, the company has sold millions of vacuums and expanded its menu of household appliances to include air purifiers, bladeless fans, hand dryers, hair dryers and lights, making Dyson one of the U.K.’s richest men.

It is an empire born of dissatisfaction with the way things work, or more precisely, with the way things don’t work. ‘I often get irritated with things that I use in my life, and that’s where I find inspiration’, said Dyson. ‘The vacuum struck me as being a particularly bad frustration. Vacuums clog very quickly with dust and lose suction…. I thought if I was frustrated by a vacuum cleaner, then other people would be too’.

The ALIENs in Our Midst 

If frustration with faulty appliances were the only spark needed for a creative genius, all of us would hold multiple patents. But Dyson had something else going for him: What we refer to as ALIEN thinking.  

ALIEN thinkers are more likely to bring breakthrough ideas to life because they see the world differently. They follow the ALIEN framework, a model that underlies radical innovation across fields from architecture to business to medicine. ALIEN stands for Attention, Levitation, Imagination, Experimentation and Navigation. Here’s how Dyson used the framework to invent the bagless vacuum and transform it into a worldwide best-seller.

Attention: Noticing What Others Miss 

Attention is the act of focusing on a certain context or population to understand its dynamics and latent needs. Like a space alien, ALIEN thinkers observe what’s happening as though seeing the world for the first time. As a result, they notice what others miss or have learned to ignore.

Dyson could not have been the first person (or even the first industrial designer) to notice that conventional vacuum cleaners quickly clogged and lost suction. Generations of consumers had encountered this problem. It’s the way Dyson responded to his observation that sets him apart. Instead of leaving well enough alone, Dyson decided to identify the cause of the problem by dissecting his vacuum cleaner like a frog in a biology lab. 

Levitation: Gaining Perspective 

To make sense of observations, it’s important to pause and (metaphorically) rise above the details. You must carve out the time and mental space to distinguish ‘forest from trees’. 

After tracing the root problem to the small pores in vacuum bags and filters, which eventually become clogged with fine dust particles, Dyson stepped back to gain perspective. As a designer, his first impulse might have been to tinker with the existing technology – to improve the functionality of the bags and filters.  

This would be the most obvious route to a solution. But if it was so obvious, why hadn’t vacuum manufacturers made these improvements decades earlier? Perhaps he should look to another technology for inspiration.  

Imagination: Connecting the Dots 

Imagination stems from making connections between disparate concepts. ALIEN thinkers are more imaginative because they’re less captive to the preconceptions that prevent others from thinking beyond existing boundaries.  

Early in his career, Dyson displayed a gift for designing improved versions of products that others thought were ‘good enough’. His first breakthrough product was the ‘ballbarrow’, which substitutes a ball for the wheel of a wheelbarrow. The ballbarrow, which won a Building Design Innovation Award in 1977, was the first of many Dyson innovations (but not the last to feature a ball).  

Thus, when it came to devising a better vacuum, Dyson found his inspiration in a seemingly unrelated field. Having observed large cyclone systems, which create a centrifugal vortex to remove impurities (like dust) from the air inside sawmills and factories, he wondered if this same process could be scaled down for use in vacuum cleaners, thereby providing powerful suction without the need for clog-prone bags and filters.

Experimentation: Getting High on Failure 

The big risk, once you start testing a cherished idea, is that you will stop exploring options and challenging assumptions. ALIEN thinkers remain open to sharp changes of direction. They test to improve, not just to prove.  

Creating a vacuum that wouldn’t lose suction was no easy task. In fact, Dyson’s fixation nearly bankrupted him. ‘By the mid-eighties, I had a huge overdraft. At one point, £1 million huge’.  

For five years, he designed and tested more than 5,000 prototypes of his cyclonic vacuum, making just one change at a time, before settling on a model he could bring to market. ‘An engineer’s life is 99 percent failure. So failure clearly doesn’t depress me. I think it has the reverse effect on me. You don’t learn from success, and your successes are few and far between. Failure is like a drug, actually. You go to work each day excited, because you know there are hundreds of problems there that you haven’t solved’.

Navigation: Overcoming ‘No’ 

Once you have a workable solution, you need to mobilize supporters and steer past obstacles. It’s not just a matter of implementation. Navigation is the act of adjusting to the forces (and people) that can make or break your solution. 

As difficult as it can be to ‘build a better mousetrap’, convincing colleagues or investors to back the new idea can be an odyssey in itself. By 1986, Dyson had been pushed out of his company, and his pitches to the vacuum manufacturers had been shot down – either because they had little faith in the new tech or (more likely) because they had no interest in nullifying the profits they made from selling replacement bags.  

‘We had a breakthrough in 1986, recalls Dyson. ‘I got a licensing agreement with a little Japanese company named Apex, so we had some income coming in. However, Apex wasn’t very successful with it. They sold the machine as a niche product called the G-Force for a quarter-million yen each, nearly $2,000 at the time’. 

Refusing to surrender, Dyson launched Dyson Appliances Ltd. in July 1991 to produce the first dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner bearing his name. From then on, he relentlessly chipped away at his competitors’ market share until, in 2001, the Dyson DC01 had become the top-selling vacuum cleaner in the U.K. Soon thereafter, the Dyson vacuum, with some models featuring a ball-roller design, became a consumer favourite worldwide.  

Today, the Dyson brand is associated with bold, innovative engineering and sleek modern design, leaving many of its old competitors in the dust.  

We have presented the five components of ALIEN thinking in a way that makes intuitive sense and is easy to recall. But it is by no means a fixed sequence. You can take them in a different order, in parallel or loop back. But disregarding even one can lead you to focus on the wrong problem, idea, or solution. By attending to all five touchpoints, you will maximize your chances of producing a truly game-changing solution by journey’s end – just as James Dyson did.

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Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux and Michael Wade are IMD faculty members and the authors of ALIEN Thinking: The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough Ideas, published in March 2021 by Public Affairs and Penguin Business. Learn more at https://alienthinking.org.