Innovating To Win

Starting Over – Spreading Innovation

One of the great things about my job is the conversations I get to have with top-flight innovation practitioners from around the globe.  It’s exciting exchanging ideas with people who are passionate about innovation and understand the import and impact of innovation when strategy, innovation, and execution converge.

Unfortunately, this convergence is still a rarity.  Too many organizations remain trapped in the quagmire of the accidental innovation paradigm.  They cling to the misguided notion that simply talking about the need to be more innovative will somehow unleash the torrent of intellectual potential within their companies that years of anti-innovation practice and cultural reinforcement have been so effective at suppressing.  This is sad state of affairs that I am committed to changing.  I am glad to say that I am not alone in this conviction.

Over the past nine months I have been rethinking how to help others to benefit from repeatable innovation best practices.  This has been a challenging process demanding so much energy that it has kept me away from blogging here.  But, it has also been very rewarding.  Recently, I have talking with innovation leaders at companies around the globe.  The response to these conversations has been tremendous.

In the coming months, I will return to posting here regularly, and I will share with you what I am seeing on the front lines of innovation in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.  I think you will agree that the outlook is very positive.  Despite a continuing economically challenging climate (and sometimes because of it), companies globally are reinvesting in innovation.  But more importantly, these companies want to learn from the mistakes of the past and relaunch their efforts around innovation.

Innovation continues to be a critical part of driving business success.  I am very fortunately to have the opportunity to explore its boundaries in new ways every day.

In closing, I’d like to thank Jim Kimball of SC Johnson for giving me just the push I needed to find my way back to my blog.  I had the immense pleasure of spending some hours with Jim when he popped into my office after the Front End of Innovation conference in Boston.  Of course, we talked about innovation.  But as Jim was leaving my office, he mentioned that he subscribed to Innovating To Win and that he had missed seeing any new posts.  His kind feedback reminded me of how much I miss the conversation with all of you.  Thanks, Jim.

Connecting Innovation Dots

On his blog Medinnovation, Dr. Richard Reece discusses the interconnectedness of innovation across domains of innovation activity in this post.  It’s interesting to see his commentary on 10 coming medical innovations in this regard.  It is doubly so because this phenomenon is not unique to medical innovation.

Great and transformative innovation stem from the confluence of many different advances and observations.  The accumulation of knowledge into the global pool of information provides the water of life for innovation.  People seeking to find novel and valuable solutions to needs draw upon this fund of knowledge to synthesize new answers.  This is the act of innovation creativity in its pure form.

We should understand the consequence of this as it relates to driving sustainable innovation in the enterprise.  Knowledge worker need knowledge with which to work.  Connectedness to knowledge of all types is an essential ingredient to create the working environment needed to drive continuous, value creating innovation.  This must include seamless access to the enterprise’s internal knowledge, global knowledge from both inside and outside the company’s domain of expertise, and the tacit knowledge of team mates.

Have you ever noticed the degree of innovation serendipity?  It is not by chance that different people seem to be creating the same innovation at the same time.  Any really interesting, high value challenge is going to attract many potential innovators.  Don’t flatter yourself and think you are the only one working on your great project.  Also, many potential innovators have access to the same informational resources that you do.  This means there is a reasonable chance that when you find a great solution, you won’t be alone.

Yet, it is also the case that most potential innovators have the same poor access to knowledge that you do.  This means that you have an opportunity to create an innovation edge.  By investing in establishing the best innovation intelligence infrastructure—one that provides seamless access to all sources of knowledge when and how you need it—you can tilt the scales of innovation providence in your favor.

This is a key lesson that innovation leaders must take to heart.  You can influence the frequency and value of your innovation outcomes by making the right strategic investments in innovation infrastructure and methods.  As we begin to emerge from the past years of economic malaise, companies are all beginning to renew their innovation agenda.  Will you take the right steps to ensure that your innovation workers have the right tools to deliver the goods?

Innovation and Labor

Today is Labor Day in the U.S.  Many people have today off as a day to rest and bid a fond farewell to summer as fall is creeping up on us.  If you’re like me, you’re thinking about grilling up something good to eat.  (I’ve got pork chops resting in a lime juice, garlic, ginger, and cumin marinade.)  Yet amid the festivity, we should take a moment to reflect.

It’s interesting to think of the impact that innovation has had on labor over time.  Some of the effects have been good.  Worker safety has improved substantially.  But in some cases, workers have felt pain as innovations devalued or made irrelevant their jobs.  Think of the evolution of the economic landscape as each new wave of innovation changed the rules of engagement and selected new winners and losers.  This cycle continues today.

Usually, there are unforeseen outcomes produced by innovation.  This is what I’m reflecting on today.  What unintended consequences were produced by the innovations you drove?  On balance, were these innovations positive or negative?

We often say innovations are by definition good because they deliver value to an audience in the form of a solution to a need.  The adoption of the solution by its intended audience is proof of its merit and hence its status as a good innovation.

What we sometimes forget is that these same innovations may affect audiences other than their intended adopting audience.  The great benefit we deliver to one group may create problems for another group.  In truth, there is nothing wrong with this.  This is simply the way of the world.  Change is always happening.  Changes favor some and bring hardships to others.

Nevertheless as innovation practitioners, we should give some thought to the constituencies that our innovations may touch.  There will always be someone disadvantaged by the change we create.  Insofar as we are able, we should consider the entire system of benefit and detriment that our innovations will create.  We won’t be able to foresee all these elements, but perhaps by considering these things, we can improve our innovations.  Perhaps, we can become better innovators.

Five Reasons You Don’t Have the Time to Delay Innovation

“We just don’t have the time.”   How often have you heard this familiar refrain?  Just yesterday in a conversation with a leading company in the petro space, I heard a manager say, “We have a lot of stuff going on for the next two months.  I really want to get moving on innovation, but we don’t have any time to spare. I hope we can get to it in a couple months.”

If you are procrastinating with respect to innovation because you think you don’t have the time, think again.  Here are five reasons you can’t afford to delay your journey toward building a high-performance innovation organization.

Eat your own lunch before someone else does it for you.
The pace of innovation is getting faster in every industry.  Product teams that were stretching to meet 7 year delivery cycles are now being asked to compress the cycle to 3 years.  A few things that one can always count on in business are that markets evolve, requirements changes, and competitors are looking for ways to leverage these changes to their advantage.  If you are not looking at the ways in which your market and customer needs are evolving, the macro trends that influence these changes, and thinking about where these factors will converge in the future and what you need to do today to be positioned for that future, you are headed toward a serious business problem.

Eliminate business risks
Much of business success is about managing risks.  It is because of this that many people who don’t have a clear understanding of the power of innovation best practices will avoid pursuing innovation.  Unfortunately for them, this is wrong thinking.  Sustainable innovation practice is not about taking on greater risk, it’s about eliminating risks.  By doing the right things to identify and assess new opportunities, by using proven methods to drive aligned and precise opportunity and technology down selection processes, by pre-validating conceptual designs before moving them into downstream processes, companies are able to make better choices and invest with higher confidence that they are targeting the right product and market futures.

Saving time

“What may be done at any time will be done at no time.” – Scottish Proverb

If you are not integrating innovation best practices into you value creation and delivery processes, you are wasting time.  People waste time every time they pour effort into solving a problem that someone else in the organization has overcome.  Valuable time is wasted with each prototyping cycle that could have been avoided with proper feasibility analysis and validation in advance.  Time is lost when mistakes of the past are repeated for the umpteenth time.  Conversely, time is saved by using repeatable methods that drive speed to solution and identification of the optimal strategy the first time.  When you really look at the full scope of impact achievable through sustainable innovation, there is a net gain of resource time efficiency.  It is not an accident that high performance innovation companies seem to move so fast—they do.

Saving money
The net result of making the right choices, eliminating risks, and saving time through innovation is that you will be driving a more efficient and effective organization.  Your teams will be doing more with the same resource footprint.  Your company will be finding the lowest cost approaches to delivering the highest quality solutions for your markets.  This in turn will give you greater latitude to manage your strategic investments.

Making money
While there are cost saving benefits that companies derive from innovation, it is in the dimension of revenue, market share, and profits that innovation delivers its greatest benefits.  What is the value of successfully opening a new market?  What is the value of grabbing a couple points of market share from your biggest competitor?  What is the value impact of increasing your EPS?  How important is driving strong top line growth?  These questions speak directly to the impact point of successful innovation.  But while companies can occasionally stumble into successful innovation, driving corporate value over time requires being able to successfully innovate on a repeatable, sustainable basis.  This is the value of building a high performance innovation enterprise.

Why Companies Need Pervasive Innovation

It’s hard to keep up with all the articles on innovation these days.  There are so many outlets now where people are volunteering their experience and advice.  A lot of the advice is quiet good.  But, every now and then an article appears that assaults the senses like fingernails against a blackboard.  Such is the case with “Why Companies Need Less Innovation,” by Pat Lencioni which appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.  I feel sorry for any company that takes this advice seriously.

In this article, the author begins with a very reasonable observation.  Many companies do a great job of talking up innovation, and then disenfranchise workers by not doing what is needed to establish a productive and sustainable innovation culture.  This is a horrible mistake that many executives make.  Simply proclaiming that your company is building an innovation culture doesn’t make it so.

Unfortunately, the article takes a very wrong turn.  Lencioni suggests that if workers are innovating, the result will be chaos.  What tripe!  Does Lencioni really misunderstand innovation so much as to equate innovation with workers gone wild abandoning their mission and acting on impulse?  One hopes not, yet this is the message that comes through.  Lencioni goes on to suggest that innovation should be the sole domain of the leadership team.

It is well understood that the ivory tower approach to innovation is a failed model.  The leadership team doesn’t have the full perspective to be the sole contributors to the process.  Yes, the leadership does have the best understanding of the company’s business needs and objectives.  And their position gives them a perspective that the rank and file employees can’t share.  But there are too many proof points that teach us that executives acting in such an insular manor are detached from the practical realities that the workers see every day.  There are equally many examples of companies benefiting greatly from worker led innovation.

The leadership needs to play an active role in the innovation process, and as Lencioni rightly points out, they need to set the innovation agenda and ensure alignment and execution.  However, it is a grave mistake to exclude the workforce from the innovation process.

Worried that innovating workers will cause disruption?  Don’t be.  Innovating doesn’t mean doing whatever strikes your fancy.  For rank and file workers, it means thinking about your job as you do it.  Asking yourself questions about what’s working and what’s not working.  If something’s not working, what could be done to correct it?  If something is working, could it be better?  These thoughts and analysis must then be given a path through the company’s innovation process so that positive change can be initiated.

Will every worker contribute a ton of ideas?  No.  But, building a constructive process to tap into the collective wisdom of the organization will yield strong benefits and fuel innovation.  It will not erode execution. Quite the contrary, it will lead to higher levels of execution.  As a senior manager, I will choose thinking workers over mindless robots every time.

Bottom line… Execution, passion, and focus are not in conflict with innovation.  Successful innovation requires brilliant innovation; winning business execution requires continuous innovation.

In Defense of Improvement

A colleague pointed out a post by Patrick Lefler that appeared on Chuck Frey’s Innovation Tools site this week.  In this article, Patrick proclaims that improvement is not innovation.  Of course, in the purest sense, the author is correct.  While all innovation seeks to deliver an improvement, not all improvements are innovative.  But, there is a very important aspect of improvement that, in his fervor to make his point, Patrick has ignored.

Coincidentally, I presented a webinar just yesterday on the topic of harnessing innovation creativity to drive corporate value.  One of the key points I touched on was the importance of incremental innovation.  Yes, incremental innovation is a good and necessary part of building a sustainable culture and environment for continuous innovation.

Breakthrough innovation, incremental innovation, minor improvement—these are all points on a continuum of value creating solution generation.  Incremental innovation is very beneficial to an organization trying to develop the core competence needed to support a high-performance innovation system.  Specifically, incremental innovation delivers both short and long term benefits.  In the short term, immediate business benefits can be realized—extended revenue life of a product, increased market share, better contribution to margin, etc.  In the long term, incremental innovation provides a low risk platform to hone the basic innovation skills needed for successful, repeatable breakthrough innovation practice.

This last point, honing basic innovation skills, is too often overlooked.  Most organizations lack these basic skills and the knowledge of innovation best practices.  These skills must be developed and practiced constantly.  Even seasoned innovation workers should take a page from Basketball legend Larry Bird’s play book.  Larry was well known for his work ethic and diligence in maintaining his skills.  He would arrive for a game hours before anyone else and warm up by taking hundreds of practice shots.

Efforts to improve, even modest ones, are opportunities to practice innovation thinking and skills.  The adept application of innovation practices can move a change further along the continuum of novelty and value creation so that what might have been a minor improvement becomes an incremental innovation that creates strong competitive differentiation.

So while Patrick is correct in the assertion that simple improvements are not innovations, one should not eschew incremental achievements.  In fact sometimes the road to breakthrough innovations is paved a brick at a time.  In my own research team where we are constantly pushing the limits and redefining the concept of the possible in the area of applied computational linguistics, we often use the expression “step by step” to describe the path to innovation success.

Of course, it’s important to remember that you must be constantly trying to reach further up the novelty-value ladder in order to find the breakthroughs that will provide you optimal market position.  But don’t forget to embrace incremental innovation, too.  It’s a good thing.

Prepare Your Innovation Elevator Pitch

Yesterday, an article appeared on Blogging Innovation by Roy Luebke titled “What to Tell the CEO About Innovation.”  Roy goes on to posit what he would say to a CEO about innovation if given just a few moments of the CEO’s attention.

I suspect that Roy’s CEO will be taking a nap about 10 seconds into Roy’s monologue.   Like a lot of innovation practitioners, Roy has not adequately considered how to deliver that initial innovation message to the CEO. 

It strikes me as odd that this is such a common issue.  After all, you wouldn’t dream of introducing a new innovation to the market without understanding the opportunity space.  What is it that your customer actually wants and needs?  How will they feel the impact of your innovation?  Why will they choose your answer to their needs over other available options?  How do you communicate the value of your solution to the client in a way that will resonate with them?  Etc., etc., etc.

Yet time and time again, innovation champions forget that the CEO is an internal customer of innovation.  In the same way that they need to understand the customers who will use innovations, they need to understand the internal customers of innovation.  What’s important to the CEO?  What business imperatives are top of mind?  What are the corporate goals around attainment of revenue growth, market share, and profitability?  What board directives does he need to satisfy?  From where does the CEO perceive the greatest threats on the horizon to be coming?  Which markets look like they are waxing or waning? Etc., etc., etc.

Roy’s message will fail because it is too ethereal and the CEO isn’t going to make a connection to it.  Don’t squander your opportunity to make the innovation elevator pitch.  Plan for it.  Do you homework and understand what’s going to strike a chord with your CEO.  Frame your pitch around the CEO’s agenda and make clear and compelling statements that make it evident that innovation is a vital part of the solution the company needs. 

Even a pro-innovation CEO may not receive your message well if you fail to do this.  After all, the planning and execution of an innovation initiative requires time and money—the two most scarce and valuable resources the CEO has to work with.  You are competing for these resources, and it’s up to you to deliver the compelling value proposition that will allow the CEO to choose innovation over the other available strategies.

Innovation Roadblocks

I was talking to a senior level contributor in a company well known for its innovation capabilities.  He’s responsible for looking at ways to identify where knowledge exists within the human capital of the organization and figuring out ways to leverage that knowledge map for the benefit of the company.  His charter really sounds like a good way to take a strong innovation culture to the next level of performance.

As we were talking, he told me that he had struggled finding adopters of his findings in the company.  The people he talked to felt they already knew how to innovate and therefore weren’t that interested in exploring his ideas.  He was understandably frustrated.

As we talked, I explained to him some of the things my team had done recently in the areas of enabling the democratization of innovation and leveraging tribal knowledge through automatic expertise identification and personnel profile mapping.  Of course, this was right in the midst of his area of interest.  He said he wished he had access to this technology for his work.  Yet, when I asked if there some way we could partner to bring a powerful innovation accelerator to his company, the conversation took on a very different tone.

It wasn’t long before the truth emerged.  His interest wasn’t actually in bringing higher performance innovation to his organization at all.  He explained that if he was successful in deploying a combined solution in his company, it would be less likely that the company would allow him to start his own venture based on the work he had done while working at the company.

This was an interesting exchange in that it reveals the complexity that can underlie innovation barriers.  While this person had initially attributed the lack of interest in organization take up of his research findings to corporate hubris, it was clear that his own personal agenda was the major factor.  He didn’t actually want to succeed on the job because he perceived an opportunity for personal gain if he didn’t.  Yes, he had hit some internal resistance, but how motivated was he to actually overcome this obstacle?

This raises some interesting points for managers and innovation practitioners alike.  For the manager, it is important to ensure that employees who bring forward ideas feel their ideas are given real consideration.  Also, never create systems that incent employees to withhold the value of their work from the company.

For practitioners, a key lesson is to be aware that some people will have agendas that are not aligned with the organization’s goals.  Be on the lookout for these individual as they may be silent opponents of innovation.  Also, look in the mirror.  Are your motives aligned with the company’s objectives?  If not, why not?  If you can’t get aligned, you may be in the wrong position.

Brainstorming Innovation – The Wisdom of the Cloud

Brainstorming continues to be a common method to try and shake out the cobwebs and draw out new ideas from teams.  In practice however, the outcome of brainstorming often falls short of expectations as team get stymied by a stalled creative front.  Psychological inertia, hidden agenda, lack of insight can all contribute to these non-productive innovation weather patterns.  To understand how people can influence the brainstorming outcome, let’s look to the wisdom of the cloud.

There are a number of different types of clouds, each with its own make up and effect on the weather.  So too are there difference classes of participants in a brainstorming exercise.  Can you recognize the similarities?

Cumulus clouds are puffy and cheerful.  These clouds are willing participants in the brainstorming exercise, but rarely contribute any significant ideas.  They tend to revel in the exercise and cheer on other cumulus clouds by seeing the shapes of imagined novelty in what are in reality the same old concepts.

Cirrus clouds are high and wispy.  They often bring some very high-level ideas to the table.  But, the ideas are generally not deep and may lack good alignment with the overall business objectives.  It can be a challenge to distinguish between the cirrus idea that could have value if it were only further developed and the concept which is going to simply drain valuable resources to explore and kill because it is not a good fit.

Fog.  Need we say more.  We can all recognize the team member who just doesn’t seem to have a clue.

Cumulonimbus clouds have presence.  They are large and have great substance.  But they can also bring great destruction as they unleash their energy.  These people often harbor hidden agenda.  The tornado of energy is released not so much to advance the cause, but to tear down the ideas of other in an attempt to perpetuate their own views and goals.

Nimbostratus are the clouds that yield steady rain.  It is sometimes uncomfortable to want in the rain, but as any farmer will tell you, you need water to grow crops.  The reason these peoples’ ideas often feel uncomfortable is that these concepts are grounded—they are novel enough to simulate that instinct to resist change, but grounded in enough reality to seem achievable.  These are often the most productive member of the brainstorming team.

If we want to stimulate more innovation rain, how can we do this?  Seed the clouds with knowledge.

Brainstorming doesn’t create new ideas.  It simply helps people tap into what they have forgotten they know.  The more relevant knowledge they have access to, the more ease with which they can access that knowledge in a useful way, the more likely they are to make the connections that produce that moment of creative synthesis.

Connecting innovation workers to the right knowledge at the right time is a key aspect of how you can increase the innovation productivity of your organization in brainstorming and other innovation activities as well.

The Gulf Oil Spill – A Lesson in Failure to Innovate

It’s horrifying to think that it has been almost 70 days since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20th and little substantive progress has been achieved in stemming the ecological disaster of Brobdingnagian proportion.  Crude oil continues to spew forth from the broken underwater pipe.  Gooey masses of toxic sludge wash up on our shores.  The flora and fauna that comprise the fragile ecosystem are helpless as they are buried in oil.

Surely, a unique catastrophe such as this which poses challenges unlike any which have been seen before requires fresh thinking, inventive approaches, novel solutions—in a word: innovation.  Yet, where is the innovation?

People are viscerally angry at the Obama administration for its handling of the crisis.  Some people defend the President saying, “He really couldn’t do anything.”  The problem is that Obama could do something.  He could have used the power of the Office to drive the innovation climate needed to produce better outcomes.

The handling of Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an object lesson in ways to fail at driving innovation in time of need.  Here are some of the key takeaways that we can learn from.

Failing to recognize the problem
In the initial days after the explosion, it was clear that this was going to be a serious situation.  Yet, both BP and the Whitehouse downplayed the severity of the spill publishing estimates of the volume of oil leakage far below what the Coast Guard was estimating.  No immediate action was seen from the Administration either to hasten stoppage of the leak or to mitigate the threats to the environment.  In short, heads were firmly planted in the sand as no one publicly acknowledged the scope of what was happening.

Turning a blind eye to the situation and looking through rose tinted glasses are all too common in business.  Consider the failure of Sony to recognize the threats mp3 technology posed to the Walkman.  How many minicomputer companies vanished because they did not fully appreciate the technological and market trends of the 1980s?  You must always be looking for what looms just over the horizon.  As Andy Grove put it, “Only the paranoid survive.”

Not Invented Here syndrome
Over a dozen countries have offered assistance in cleaning up the spill.  The Administration has turned all these offers of help away.  Many individuals have stepped forward with ideas about how to stop the leak or protect the coastline.  Yet, these suggestions have been ignored.  This sort of intellectual arrogance abounds in the business world as well.  I can’t count the number times I have heard companies described as having an NIH culture.

Companies must look at their innovation systems and understand how to integrate customers and value chain partners into their R&D processes.  Open innovation is not simply about finding more ideas; it’s about extending the value creation capacity of an organization by leveraging all the resources in its innovation ecosystem.

No leadership
This is the issue that has the public riled.  Throughout the crisis, Obama has not shown any leadership.  Innovation requires leadership, that quality of being able to rally people to step outside of themselves and reach a goal that they would not have been able to achieve on their own.  But, the administration has not chosen to take the lead.  When BP was short on ideas to stop the leak, did Obama reach out to other oil companies to see if they could help or at least help understand the limits of possibility?  No.  Did Obama stand up against political pressure and waive the Jones Act?  No.  At every turn, the Administration has failed to show leadership opting instead to sit back and wait for BP to figure it out.

Lack of leadership is a leading cause for failure to establish sustainable innovation systems in companies.  Many executives will say they want innovation practice to develop from the grass roots of the engineering community.  The reality is that without the nourishment of executive leadership, the grass root are destined to whither in the parched and barren soil of institutional inertia.  Executives must lead from the front to drive the type of cultural change required to establish innovation as a value driving core competence.

All show; no substance
Don’t we all feel better knowing the Administration is going to have a blue ribbon committee explore potential criminal malfeasance at the root of the disaster?  Thank goodness BP executives have been subjected to a good tongue lashing. Huzzah, huzzah!

Right!  Everyone can see through the bread and circus approach to managing the situation.  The political consequences of this promise to be severe.  So too, are the consequences within a company when the commitment to innovation doesn’t extend beyond words and window dressing.  When it comes to a company’s innovation agenda, all employees recognize big hat, no cattle management and are highly unmotivated to pursue innovation on behalf of the company.  If you really want innovation, you must act with conviction and purpose.  You must invest in people and infrastructure to enable the environment for innovation success.

What innovation lessons do you see in the Gulf Oil Spill situation?