The old saying goes “Better late than never.” So while the Innovating To Win poll on governmental economic intervention and innovation closed two months, the results of the poll are at the bottom of this posting.
The question put to you was “As economic signs turn upwards, what will be the effect on the climate for innovation of continued long-term or deepening government intervention?” According to your responses, very few of us believe that interventionist policies are going to positively influence the climate for innovation. In fact, over 77% of you felt that the impact of continuing government intervention would have either no or a negative impact on innovation.
This is a very important issue to consider in your organizations innovation strategy for 2010. As we sit here today, the experts are split on whether we are starting to pull out the recession or we are going to see the second half of a W shaped recession in the coming year. Given the current political climate still seems to favor quick action and intervention, what should your innovation strategy be? What if a struggling competitor gets a shot in the arm? (Think Ford vs. GM.)
What if a government program intended to help you industry actually creates some challenges? (Think Cash for Clunkers.)
What if a government program threatens to reach into your business operationally? (Think TARP.)
The list of question you can and should ask is very long.
Certainly, 2009 has been a year of challenge and opportunity. By all measures, it looks like 2010 will also bring big challenges, but also big opportunity to those who prepare. Are you prepared?
Along this vein, we have a new innovation poll starting today on Innovating To Win. This pool asks what you see as the innovation activity trend for 2010 in your company. Take a moment to respond, and let your voice be heard.
Last week I spent a few days at the inaugural edition of the Open Innovation Summit. Considering this was the first year for the event and that December is not a great month to host conferences in, I think it was well attended.
The conference had a single track of speakers, and most of them were very high quality. Some of the speaker that I most enjoyed were: Phil McKinney of HP, Russ Conser of Shell, Pramod Reddy of P&G, Moises Norena of Whirlpool, Helene Rutledge of GSK, Ed Rinker of Clorox, and Greg Fox of Cisco.
Of course, these conferences are great for networking and meeting people, but I like to learn from others at an event like this. Here are some of the key themes I heard at the event that are important lessons for us all.
• Innovation, open or otherwise, can’t succeed if it is viewed as an idea generation & capture process that is divorced from business execution.
• Executive sponsorship is vital not just to provide the funding and mandate, but also to provide air cover during the initial stages of an innovation initiative.
• Internal promotion of innovation is needed, but remember to promote the value of what has been accomplished, not what you plan to do. People find comfort in the concrete benefit of what is already done, but the fuzzy future finds factions fleeing for the doors.
• Don’t dismiss the intellectual property aspects of open innovation. Considered up front, they are easily managed, but left as an afterthought they can be an innovation killer.
• Equip your people with the skills and tools they need for success.
• Make sure you have sorted out you internal innovation before engaging in open innovation. The point of open innovation is to kick your internal capabilities into high gear by optimally integrating external constituencies into your process. This can be difficult if you haven’t first established your process.
Before leaving on my current world-wide innovation tour, I packed Robbie, my two year old Bernese Mountain Dog, into my car and drove to Top O’ The Hill Farm in Ayer, Massachusetts, to participate in a two day tracking workshop. It made for a fascinating weekend as Robbie and I learned the methods of tracking and observed our classmates in the process. Of course, I am always on the lookout for innovation lessons in everything, and this event provided many. Here are a few innovation lessons I took away from Robbie’s first foray into the world of tracking.
Every dog can track, but some have a real nose for it
There were many different dog breeds involved in the workshop, and by the end of the weekend all the dogs had learned the basics. But, it was clear there were differences in the abilities of each dog. Watching the bloodhounds in the workshop it was clear that tracking is in their blood. The miniature poodle on the other hand required lots of coaching and special attention before it caught on to the concept.
We must keep our eyes open for those that exhibit the talent and hunger to drive innovation. These individuals should be cultivated as masters of innovation methods and used as leveraged human assets in the organization. By putting them in a role of being lead innovators and mentors to others, you both maximize their output, but also ensure that key resources are well engaged and help the team achieve maximum effectiveness in its mission of corporate value creation. However, everyone in the organization has a role to play in innovation and we must provide basic innovation skills training for all employees in the value creation cycle if we are going to achieve optimal capability.
Break problems down
The miniature poodle just didn’t get it. It figured its owner had simply brought it out to really big field to cavort on a very long lease. So, the workshop leader asked the handler to lay a very short (5 feet) track and practice on that. After a few times of doing this successfully, the tracked was lengthened, and the training exercise repeated. If the dog faltered, the training track was shortened. This technique was repeated until after a short while, the poodle was successfully following 100 yard tracks.
Sometimes when one is presented with a big innovation goal, the scope of the problem can be overwhelming. The worker will say, “I’m not sure where to start.” The answer lies in breaking the problem down. Analyze the situation and understand what is the real challenge you are trying to overcome. Are you looking at one problem, or a system of problems? Is the issue the real problem or merely a symptom? The most important part of innovation lies in defining the problems you need to address accurately and at the right level. Don’t short cut this step and rush to a solution.
Don’t lead your dog
When working with a tracking dog, a handler will sometimes believe they know where the track is laid. As a result, they will subtly signal the dog where to go. This can lead to problems if the handler was mistaken and leads the dog off track.
In innovation practice, a similar phenomenon occurs. This happens when a strong member of the project team starts with a preconception of the solution to the innovation challenge. In this situation, there is a temptation to lead the team down a specific solution path. Settling on an obvious solution path too soon may prevent the discovery of a high-value, innovative solution. The early solution may not address the underlying core problem, or it may not be the optimal solution that will create marketplace differentiation. Remember, if the solution is obvious, it is unlikely to be innovative. There are times when the fast solution is the right solution; but it is important that this path is not confused with innovation.
Practice under different conditions
When you are ready to take you dog to a tracking trial, you never know what you have to deal with. Will the air be calm or will it be windy? Will it be dry and hot, or cold and wet? Will the grass be tall? Will a rabbit run across the track and confuse your dog? The only way to be sure you are prepared for anything is to train under all conditions.
You can’t predict the nature of tomorrow’s innovation challenge. If you want to be able to efficiently and confidently address tomorrow’s challenge, you must prepare today. That preparation is accomplished by practicing innovation skills in everything you do. Using your every day “little i” innovation problems as a training ground, you can develop your facility with innovation best practices so that when the “big I” challenges arise, you will be able to tackle them reliably and with confidence.
Trust your dog
When you are following a track, you dog will sometimes circle behind you or range off to one side. Don’t worry that your dog is lost. The scent has been moved around by wind and other factors. Your dog is simply exploring the evidence as it works to solve the problem.
When working on innovation problems, we often have to circle back and iterate on a problem. When this happens, we must not be discouraged. Rather, we must understand that the path of innovation is rarely a straight road. Each new solution brings with it new questions. As our knowledge of the solution space increases, so too does our understanding of the problem space. This naturally leads to shifts in our thinking and approach to the solution. This can feel very uncomfortable since at times we may not know if we are truly making progress. This is where innovation best practices are indispensable. Following these practices of innovation helps keep us on track and make objective assessments of where we are headed.
What a week it was! Last Thursday and Friday Invention Machine held
its annual Power To Innovate conference. The event was well attended
and drew international representation of users of Invention Machine
Goldfire innovation software platform.
For me, this is always a terrific event. The pre-event activities
began on Wednesday with a workshop on specific innovation methods. In
parallel with the workshop, the Invention Machine Customer Advisory
Council, a group of lead Goldfire customers, met to review the 2010
Goldfire technology roadmap. The feedback provide by our clients is
always very valuable in shaping the capabilities we provide in Goldfire
to knowledge enable innovation workers.
During the two days of the main conference, there were a number
great sessions and highlights. The theme for this year’s conference
was “Collaborate to Innovate.” Mark Atkins, CEO of Invention Machine,
gave the opening keynote in which he described the need for and
benefits of creating a vibrant Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem.
This was followed by Boston Scientific’s Randy Schiestl, VP Research
and Development, and Jude Currier, Cardiovascular Knowledge Management
& Innovation Practices Lead, who described how Boston Scientific is
building its innovation competence and the central role Goldfire and
the Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem play in this.
Right after lunch, Jim Belfiore (@jsbelfiore on Twitter) presented a
fascinating case study of how he had used the power of Goldfire’s
latest innovation research capabilities to accelerate the exploration
of global knowledge around lymphoma. I followed Jim with a
presentation of the near term Goldfire product roadmap showing how
global innovation communities will be connected through the innovation
collaboration platform.
There were also plenty of great breakout sessions. A sampling of
the user led sessions includes: Jill Kunzelman, Senior Research
Engineer at PolyOne, talked about her experiences and lessons learned
in driving a successful deployment of innovation software; Curtis Barr,
Bemis Research & Development, discussed using Goldfire as a
catalyst for the R&D process; and Rich Durand, Director, Material
and Characterization Science at Sun Chemical, showed some interesting
examples of how the technique of function modeling can be used to
understand chemical innovation challenges.
I enjoyed presenting two breakout sessions. The first was on
building a high performance innovation organization. The other was on
overcoming the challenges of open innovation.
Of course beyond the sessions, the opportunity to network is one of
the best parts of a conference like Power To Innovate. It gave me a
great chance to met friends, old and new, from the global Goldfire
community. It was also great to catch up with two fellow innovation
bloggers. Andrea Meyer was the events official blogger and also did a
great job of tweeting live from the event. Drew Boyd was also there. (You can find Drew’s write up of the event on his blog here.)
There is a lot more I could say about the 2009 edition of Power To
Innovate. But, I think Mary Beth Robles, VP External Innovation at
Colgate-Palmolive, said it best when she opined that Power To Innovate
is the best innovation conference because it brings together real users
and the leading innovation minds from around the globe without a bunch
of vendors or talking heads.
It has been more than a year since the bottom fell out of the financial markets, and companies around the globe are still struggle to figure out which way is up. There are some early signs of hope, but the future is still is still masked by the murky cloud of uncertainty. Companies must find ways to not just survive but thrive. A return to growth is demanded by shareholders who feel the pain of depressed share prices. But where to turn for growth remains the question of the day.
I have recently heard more companies than ever asking about ways to improve the health and effectiveness of their innovation programs. This is a direct consequence of global market trends. These companies understand that growth will not come from doing more of the same. The engine of growth is change through innovation.
One common question I hear is: “How can we find new markets more effectively?” Fortunately, there are some straight forward answers that can help these companies get on the right track. There are a few basic approaches to driving revenue growth:
• Finding new markets for existing products
• Extending the revenue life of products in their current markets
• Finding new applications for technologies or methods
• Entering adjacent markets
For each of these basic approaches, there are a number of systematic innovation methods that support the approach. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to show a company how to apply one such method using repeatable innovation best practices to find candidate new markets to drive revenue growth. The method I demonstrated is aimed at identifying a set of key technical capabilities, understanding the core value benefits delivered through the capabilities, isolating customer pain in new markets that represent need for the value benefits, and defining the market opportunities that exist at the intersection of the customer pain and the value benefit.
Showing how the theory of high performance innovation practices can be put into practice is always an enlightening experience. For the people observing the demonstration, it provides a tangible proof point of what is possible through sustainable innovation practice. For me, it is always a reaffirming exercise. So it was yesterday as I showed how the voice of this company’s technology, the voice of the customer, and the voice of regulation were speaking in unison and suggesting a new multi-billion dollar market opportunity--an epiphany that had only taken me 30 minutes to identify by following the path of sustainable innovation, leveraging innovation best practices and technology to amplify the voices of innovation and hear what they have to say.
Understanding how to develop strategic innovation competence is a critical success factor for companies. Whether it is the every day innovation needs of the enterprise in finding new ways to define and execute on operational excellence or the strategic Big I initiatives around developing new products and markets, innovation is the elixir to drive the health and success of the company. Globally, companies are critically reexamining what they are doing to establish sustainable, high performance innovation as a value-driving core competence of the organization. Are you?
There are too many "innovators" around and not enough innovation... -- @dduhamel
As I was discussing the intricacies of defining a semantic processing engine for a language which has no formally defined morphology this morning, I noticed the statement above popup in my Tweetdeck window. It struck a chord with me because I had just had two conversations yesterday along a related theme. The gist of the discussions was that there are many people who play important roles in the innovation process, but many of them are totally unaware of this and don’t perceive themselves as innovators.
As one data point to highlight this phenomenon, I was talking to one colleague who recounted to me a recent experience. He was talking to a group of researchers, engineers, and designers about the continuum of innovation activity and how on the lower end of the innovation complexity curve, there are tasks we perform every day in support of innovation. When he asked the group how many of them performed such tasks, not one of them raised their hand. He then went on to explain some of the most common every day innovation tasks such as research to create knowledge needed to solve problems. Once, he had explained the concept of every day innovation in these terms, everyone raised their hand when asked the same question.
This is important because the outcome of any endeavor is highly influenced by the participants’ perceptions of the purpose, scope, and rules of engagement related to the task. If you don’t think innovation is what you are doing, you just aren’t likely to try looking for innovative solutions. On the other hand, once you understand you are part of the overall engine of innovation in your company, you are freed to explore problems in new ways and find higher value solutions.
For managers, it is important to remember that your team may lose sight of this from time to time, so you must remind them of the importance of their contribution to the innovation agenda.
For individual contributors, it is important to be aware of the higher level goals of the enterprise and look at challenges in their whole context and look for solutions that create new value. Ask yourself some simple questions. Are you treating the symptom or curing the disease? What have you done to expand your box today? How are you adding value to the project, to your customer, to your company?
Yes, I found @dduhamel’s comment interesting. I think it is because from what I can see, a key reason we don’t see more innovation isn’t that there are too many innovators. In many cases, it is because not enough of us see innovation as our job.
In case you missed it, a recent on-line poll conducted by Deloitte
confirms the dismal state of innovation practice in companies. At a
time when companies need to produce more vehicles for value delivery to
climb out the financial doldrums, innovation is a vital force that can
be brought to bear on the challenge. Yet, most companies are not
prepared to meet the challenge. In the Deloitte poll, 31% of the
executives surveyed indicated that innovation happens by accident in
their company, and only 14% said that innovation is clearly defined
within their company.
It is no wonder that many companies are struggling to get their arms
around this innovation thing. Just last week, I visited with several
leading companies, and questions around innovation, establishing
repeatable innovation as a value-driving core competence, and building
a sustainable, high-performance innovation culture were the key topics
these companies wanted help with. Fortunately for these companies,
they recognize that fundamental change is need if they are to emerge
from the quagmire of accident innovation. Yet, many companies aren’t
even aware that there is a problem in the organization and that there
is a path to innovation success.
A couple years ago, an Innovation Practice Maturity Model was described in a post on Innovating To Win.
This model has withstood the scrutiny of practice, so it seems timely
to review the characteristics of each of the four stages of the model.
Ask yourself, “Where does my organization fit in this model, and what
should we be doing to advance our innovation capabilities?”
Stage I: Accidental Innovation At
this first stage, the organization has not begun implementing
structured innovation. Companies are generally unaware that there
exist approaches to achieve repeatable, on-demand innovation.
Innovation is poorly, if at all, understood. Because these
organizations do not recognize innovation as a competence that can be
developed and harnessed, there is no infrastructure to support good
innovation disciplines and no sponsorship to promote such practices.
As a result, innovation is not repeatable, predictable or reliable, and
ROI on investment in R&D falls well short of expectations.
Stage II: Situational Innovation Organizations
evolve to the second stage when awareness of structured innovation
methods lead the organizations to test these methods. Limited
investments in tools and methods are made to support a specific test
case. A team is assembled to try out the new innovation methods in the
context of a highly visible project. Narrowly focused knowledge asset
mining may also be done in support of the project as well. While these
initial projects are often highly successful, the momentum coming out
of these projects is rarely leveraged because the organization is not
yet committed to the path of innovation excellence. As a result,
innovation skills are often not retained and must be rebuilt with each
new iteration of trying out the concept of structured innovation.
Stage III: Repeatable Innovation In
this stage of innovation process maturity, the successes with early
trials have led to genuine enthusiasm for the broader deployment of
innovation best practices. The organization develops innovation
specialists who become leveraged resources within the company and are
assigned to projects on an as-needed basis. Investment in innovation
infrastructure grows as both the innovation specialists are equipped
with the proper tools, and the general knowledge worker population is
given access to innovation tools and knowledge research technologies.
While the company begins to experience the benefits of repeatable
innovation, innovation is still opportunistic, targeting specific
projects, and tends to be contained within pockets of the
organization.
Stage IV: High-Performance Innovation In
this final phase of innovation practice development, an organization is
committed to establishing innovation a core competency. Formal
corporate programs for innovation best practices are created. These
programs help to integrate innovation as a key part of the corporate
culture and the organizations established product development
processes, providing an operational framework to unify strategy,
communities, knowledge assets, and process. A hierarchy of innovation
practitioners is developed to optimize the availability and
leveragability of innovation skills within the enterprise. Innovation
skills are widely deployed within the entire innovation worker
population, with basic innovation practice training becoming an
integral part of team and individual employee development. In this
stage of innovation practice development, corporations begin to broadly
leverage knowledge assets. Innovation best practices, supported by
precise knowledge retrieval, become integrated into the organizational
fabric.
Companies that make innovation a core competence are ready to take
advantage of opportunity in good times and in bad times. Do you see
your organization in the four stages of the model? Are you ready to
wield the power of innovation on demand?
There are many pleasures that innovation practitioners get from what
they do. The satisfaction of creating and delivering a high value
solution where others had failed to see the opportunity, the knowledge
that what you do is changing the lives of those around you, the thrill
of shaping the future are among a few of the things I have heard other
innovators talk about. However on a more mundane level, it has always
seemed very satisfying when another talented innovation practitioner
acknowledges your efforts. So, I was delighted to see Drew Boyd’s
latest blog post on Innovation in Practice: “Automated Innovation”.
Drew is a very accomplished practitioner. As the Director of
Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon Endo-Surgery
division, Drew heads up J&J’s marketing university that among other
things is responsible for new product innovation. He is a strong
student of SIT and is also Executive Director of the MS-Marketing
Program and Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at
the University of Cincinnati College of Business where he teaches
"Applied Marketing Innovation" and the Capstone Course. And of course,
he writes a great blog which I read regularly.
In his Automated Innovation post, Drew postulates on the role of
software technology in the service of innovation. What thrilled me
about his musings was his mentioning Goldfire as a platform that takes
people a step further down the path of machine assisted innovation.
How cool is that?
I consider myself to be very lucky. I get to get up every day and
work on stuff that is fun and that I love. In my business, innovation
isn’t just a buzz word; it is the raison d’être of the company. I not
only get to practice innovation, I get to innovate innovation and
develop tools and methods to help companies create high value product
and services faster, reliably, repeatably and do so working with some
of the best innovation practitioners in the world. What could be
better?
So, thank you, Drew, for the recognition and kind words of
encouragement. Rest assured that, in the words of Al Jolsen, “You
ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
Knowledge is the raw material of innovation. When an opportunity is recognized, when the underlying challenge is understood, we leverage our knowledge and experience to synthesize the new concepts that are the core essence of our innovations. The knowledge we use in this process comes from a variety of sources, both internal to our community as well as external. Many companies are facing a serious challenge to developing their innovation edge. Some of the most valuable knowledge they have is inside the enterprise represented in inaccessible documents and undocumented worker knowhow. As we continue to make our way through the greatest generational turnover businesses have ever experienced, it begs the question “What initiatives are your organizations using to manage the outflow of corporate knowledge cause by generational turnover?”
This was the subject of our last Innovating To Win poll question, and you can see the results below and here. These results are interesting from a number of perspectives. Let’s look at a few aspects of the results and consider what this means for innovation.
From our results, it appears that there is no clearly dominant strategy for dealing with the innovation knowledge crisis that many companies perceive. No single option has crossed the 50% threshold of diffusion. This supports the notion that there is a lot of confusion in companies as to the scope of the problem and how to best address the issue. This lack of clarity represents a serious risk to companies. I recently talked with one company that acknowledged that there are losing 100 subject matter experts per month to retirement. This is not a small issue for any company.
Of the selections in the survey, access to external knowledge clearly was favored as a mechanism to enhance the corporate innovation intelligence. While in the general context of enriching the innovation intelligence ecosystem and improving your innovation capacity by redefining the box external knowledge access must be a vital part of the innovation knowledge strategy, it is not a substitute for leveraging your internal knowledge. People who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. This is a truism for innovation practitioners. External knowledge provides you with fresh perspectives and new thinking. But, your internal knowledge contains highly targeted concepts which capture both the foundational knowledge of the organization, but also the lessons learned so that you don’t keep reinventing the wheel or repeating the same costly mistakes.
This point is further highlighted by the relatively low score of traditional internal information dissemination techniques. Not one of experience harvesting, sharing lessons learned, and internal knowledge management scored over 30%. This is horrible testimony to the failures companies have experienced with traditional knowledge management initiatives. But if information access is so important to the innovation process, why have these traditional methods failed? In short, knowledge management has been a data centric, IT led initiative. As such, it is doomed to fail from the start. A different perspective is needed to successfully unlock the value of internal knowledge assets—a strategy that is user and purpose centric. The communities that make up the enterprise innovation constituencies must be mapped to their roles, innovation tasks, and relevant information assets in order to define the shape of the innovation intelligence infrastructure needed so support innovation. The innovation infrastructure must then be deployed in a way that knowledge enables every innovation worker and allows them to have knowledge seamlessly integrated into their every day innovation work. Removal of the barriers to access of tradition knowledge management is key to successful mobilizing corporate wisdom and converting the sea of data into actionable knowledge.
It is for this reason, that the lagging take up of next generation technology as represented by internal Web 2.0 collaboration and passive collaboration frameworks is disappointing. The future of innovation knowledge enablement is in connecting innovation workers based on what they know. When you can get the right people engaged without taking them out of the context of what they need to get done, you have succeeded in accelerating the time to value for the enterprise.
It looks like we all have a lot of work ahead of us if we are serious about getting ahead of the looming knowledge drain issue that is already upon us. We must do a better job of understanding where the information exists, capturing it, and then mobilizing it in an effective and timely manner. When I was young, my parents would tell me that knowledge is power. They were right. Knowledge is innovation power. Innovation power coupled with crisp execution is the secret sauce of business success.
Flying was huge part of my father’s life. He was the mechanic and navigator on a good will flight from New York to Bogota in the early days of flight. That’s him on the left in the photo of the two man crew just before leaving on the trip. Later, he toured South America demonstrating the latest fighter planes for the Curtiss Hawk company, and was a flight instructor to the Colombian air force. He even wrote a book on air navigation.
So, it was no surprise that when I was eleven I found myself attending flight school and learning to fly sailplanes. Among many things I learned in flight school was the importance of planning your flight and understanding how to monitor and make corrections to your course. Whether you are operating under visual flight rules or instruments, you always need to know where you are, where are you going, and what path you intend to take.
Years later, after moving to Boston, I decide to learn to sail. I trundled down to India Wharf and joined the Boston Harbor Sailing Club. There I learned to handle ships of different sizes both in the protected harbor and on the open waters of the Atlantic. I’ll never forget my final exam for the Club’s sailing certification course. I found myself handling a 36 foot boat by myself in the middle of a raging thunder storm. I’ll also never forget the time and attention spent on learning the rules of navigation on the open sea.
I find these lessons of flying and sailing are also very applicable to the world of innovation. Too many practitioners approach innovation as if just thinking about it will yield big results. But this is never the case. High value innovation requires diligent planning and crisp execution. This is true for both the every day incremental innovations that sustain the value of existing products and the breakthrough innovations that open up new revenue channels for the enterprise.
Some people argue that innovation isn’t predictable and therefore attempts to manage it are futile. Fortunately, these individuals are simply mistaken. It is certainly true that when we embark on the path of innovation, there are many unknowns and as consequence it’s difficult to be sure of the outcome. But it is important that we not confuse uncertainty of outcome with predictability in the path of innovation. That is to say, irrespective of the outcome there are well understood best practices of innovation that will reliably get you to the optimal conclusion more rapidly. Sometimes this conclusion will mean canceling a project sooner because you have been able to identify quickly the flaws in the program and thereby avoid wasted costs. Other times this will mean opening up a market sooner and with a higher value proposition.
When during the course of an innovation project you run across the unexpected rut in the road, having a well structured approach to innovation allows you to quickly analyze the issue and adjust your bearing. Knowing how to systematically identify and select alternative paths to value spells out the difference between the winning execution that leads to high value creation and the being just another victim of the accidental school of innovation.
Remember, you can’t make course corrections if you don’t know what course you’re on. Repeatable, sustainable innovation practice gives you the tools to plot the course to value creation and make the mid-course adjustments that are part of innovation.
