5 lessons Innovators can learn from Peruvian chefs
Let me take you to Lima, pearl of the pacific and hometown of my wife and her family. As much as the capital of Peru is a monster, noisy, dirty, always packed — at least in pre and hopefully also post-covid times… — and with a lot of hustle and bustle, I totally fell in love with the city when we lived there from 2014 to 2016. This is due to the wonderful, warm and funny people that live there, the many colors and surprises you find around the city, but very much also, because I plunged into a new culinary wonderland.
Between you and me: there is hardly anything tastier than a fresh Peruvian ceviche on a hot summer day, raw fish marinated in lime juice, flavored with spicy chili and decorated with red onion, sweet potato and white corn. Although that wonderful chicken dish Aji de Gallina with its slightly sweet tasting yellow sauce, made of a mild yellow pepper comes close. Or did I really almost forget Anticucho, spicy marinated and barbecued beef heart on a spit? Welcome to Peru, paradise for food lovers and home of one of the best, most diverse and yet in some places of the world still unknown cuisine! You could add so many more mouthwatering dishes to that list and the few days or weeks an average tourist spends in Peru will only allow you to discover a very small part of it.
For many years, the Peruvian cuisine was barely known outside of the country, not before a new generation of chefs started to experiment with all the tastes and flavors that they would find from the Pacific coast over the Andean mountains to the Amazonian jungle in a country with one of the world’s highest bio-diversity. That’s how Peru’s capital Lima became an international gastronomy hotspot with an incredibly lively restaurant scene. From the 3 dollar lunch menu to some of the world’s finest restaurants: there is something for everyone in Lima!
Due to my professional background in Innovation Management and my personal connection to Peru and being passionate about both of them, I discovered, that there were actually a few things I could learn about innovation from that new generation of Peruvian chefs that go beyond the general innovation mantras of being customer-centered, act lean and iterate until you find a market fit:
- Stay curious and obsessed
There is an episode in the Netflix blockbuster series “Chef’s Table” about Virgilio Martinez, chef of Central Restaurant, one of the world’s best restaurants, according to the 50best ranking. At the beginning of the episode, Virgilio says, what should be a mantra for every Innovation Manager: “In Peru, we always have the sense of the unknown. The unknown territory, the unknown Amazonia. There are a lot of things just waiting for us to discover. Discovering these new things that people have never seen before, that’s my obsession.” Innovation is about getting beyond the existing and discovering the new! In the episode, you can see Virgilio on his discovery trips throughout the country, finding new plants and ingredients and trying to imagine how they could fit into a dish and running experiments with different techniques and forms of preparation. This mindset of discovering and experimenting not only needs curiosity but also imagination, perseverance and the courage to fail by trying out new things. And it is very much that mindset of growth that characterizes an innovative person.
2. Collect & Combine
At restaurant Maido, another one out of the 50best ranking, you can enjoy Japanese-Peruvian fusion food, amongst other options with the famous 13 course Nikkei experience. Chef Mitsuharu Tsumura was born in Peru as part of a sizeable Japanese community. After studying in the USA, he spent some years in Japan where he learnt the art of preparing sushi from scratch. When he came back to Lima, he decided to open his own restaurant and combine his two cultures into new gastronomical experiences. Innovation most often doesn’t happen on a white piece of paper with a flash of genius. It is much more the result of bringing together different pieces of ideas and inspirations and combining them to new concepts. Innovators should therefore have a wide variety of knowledge and interests as well as the ability to combine and connect the dots. And when it comes to a whole innovation team, diversity is undoubtedly a success factor, as more diverse teams are able to look at a problem from more angles and bring more insights into the solution of the problem!
3. Build on your strengths and follow your heart
The Peruvian cuisine has a long tradition and was always known for its variety and delicious ingredients. The chefs that started this new boom of Peruvian food didn’t re-invent everything from scratch. Much more, they started to build existing dishes with a new twist or experimented with ingredients from the sheer endless variety of the country’s biodiversity. And they did it with pride. Building on your strengths usually not only means doing what you are best at, but also doing what you love and are passionate about. Virgilio run Central as a restaurant with high class traditional dishes at first but then got obsessed with the idea to tell stories about his country and its culture with his dishes. He followed his heart and changed the successful concept of his restaurant, even if it meant to lose some formerly loyal clients at the beginning. In the end, it helped him creating something unique, even more successful, and most important, something he was a 100 percent passionate about. As a company as well as an entrepreneur creating something new, you should definitely try to build on your strengths as this might be your best shot in being unique and having an unfair advantage against your competition. Obviously, this means that you have to know your strengths, assess them properly and use them wisely.
4. Never walk alone
The rise of the Peruvian cuisine and Lima as a food hotspot cannot be reduced to a few single restaurants. They may be the internationally renowned flagships of this new movement, but in fact the vibrant culinary scene is an ecosystem of various players, all contributing their part and benefiting from the success of the whole system. From the agricultural sector to the colorful food markets and stores over street food vendors and restaurants to local and international tourism. Functioning ecosystems are beneficial for all participants: dominant players as well as complementary participants and partners. This goes for the culinary ecosystem in Lima and the whole of Peru, but it is also a huge trend in innovation strategies of companies in all industries. They discovered that they can meet their customers’ needs in a better way when they cooperate with other players, from within but also from outside of their industry. This requires an open innovation approach with innovation managers being able to cooperate and connect offerings from different providers for the benefit of the customer.
5. Become a storyteller
This is the story of how Lima became a food hotspot and the Peruvian cuisine began its journey to get renowned more and more outside of Peru. It is also the story of a country and a society that was suffering from civil war and instability before the new age of gastronomy gave them back dignity and the hope for a better future and is making the whole country incredibly proud. There is now even a growing trend to gastronomical short trips to Lima from within Latin America and guided food tours are amongst the best-rated activities in Lima on platforms like Tripadvisor. Whenever you talk to Peruvians, sooner or later you will find yourself talking about food. Chefs like Virgilio Martinez found ways to use food as a way to tell stories about their culture and tradition and restaurants like Central or Maido became more than a restaurant, they are nowadays a symbol of Peru. As an Innovator, storytelling is a crucial skill both internally and towards the outside. While a company is successful, it needs a good story to be heard internally and convince everybody from the need for constant innovation. As soon as business goes south and a company finds itself standing on a burning platform, radical rethinking and innovation will be the last resort for a future existence. Now don’t expect to become a rock star as an Innovator within a company, above all when you fail with your ventures — which will be the case in most of your projects. However, if you come up with a successful new product or service, be sure that everybody will talk with pride about “that new thing” your company created and that is now contributing to a bright look into the future!
While innovation is still a rather young management discipline, innovation management practices such as design thinking and lean startup as well as the practitioner are starting to look similar in bigger companies but also in startups. So you better make sure to add that little taste of Peru, spiced with some “aji” to your innovation concept in order to come up with unique results. While a retreat in Lima might be challenging, depending on where you live, a lunch break at a Peruvian food truck near you with your innovation team might be a good start.