Field Notes – June 2009

I am in the middle of a jaunt through Europe visiting with many Global 2000 companies to discuss the state of their innovation practices and how they can accelerate their pace of value creation.  In the past three days, I met with seven such companies in the United Kingdom and Norway.  Sitting on the flight from Oslo to Frankfurt provides a good opportunity to reflect on the themes that I see emerging across these companies.

The first observation that stands out is that all the companies I have met with are deeply committed to innovation and are not willing to let an uncertain economic climate slow down their efforts to build value through innovation.  While all of the companies have been watching the expense engines carefully, they are still investing in their future.  This is true even in those companies which may have gone through a recent merger, headcount reductions, or other restructuring.  This is an extremely encouraging sign and suggests that these companies will be well positioned to lead the recovery.

Many organizations are still struggling to leverage what they already know.  After many years of trying to implement traditional knowledge management solutions, they are finding that these information-centric strategies are not effective methods to disseminate corporate wisdom in a reliable way.  Instead, people-centric models of knowledge diffusion are needed to give workers the ability to effortlessly interact with relevant knowledge.

These companies are also finding that as their innovation networks expand and become decentralized operations, it is becoming critical to connect people more effectively though their knowledge.  In effect, innovation workers are not simply harvesting knowledge; rather, they are an integral element of the innovation ecosystem and are simultaneously information consumers, producers, and stores.

These enterprises recognize the role technology plays in innovation enablement.  They want to apply technology to help address some of the problems they see in achieving their innovation potential.

There is modest interest in idea management, but this is often viewed as a legacy strategy related to old idea-first thinking.  As these innovation leaders move toward needs-first innovation models, the focus is on fewer, higher quality ideas to drive value creation.  These companies recognized the inefficiency of the old 3000 to 1 idea to delivered product conversion ratio and are focused on using innovation best practices to build a narrower high-efficiency funnel for early stage concept development.

Related to the notion of better quality concept generation, is the principle of strategic alignment of innovation initiative with the company’s strategic intent.  Companies are doing a much better job of distinguishing between opportunity spaces, platforms, and solutions.  They are building cogent strategies for value creation around these components of the strategic innovation plan.

Many organizations are considering what open innovation should mean to them.  Some of them have tried with poor results, and most organizations are concerned about the challenges that must be met if open innovation is to be more than a glorified suggestion box.  Yet because they feel customers and other members of their value chain are important resources to leverage for strategic innovation, they continue to look at how to address the challenges of alignment, authority, and actualization that are critical success factors for open innovation.

More than anything else, the intensifying heat of innovation in these organizations stands out as a thread that runs through all of the conversations I have had in the past few days.  I am looking forward to the next set of innovation meetings in Germany.