Innovating To Win

Leveraging Institutional Wisdom Poll Closing Soon

One of the biggest worries I hear from different organizations is the concern over the loss of institutional memory as we continue through the largest generational turnover our businesses have every experienced.  Across the globe, companies are faced with the prospect of their most senior contributors retiring and taking valuable implicit knowledge with them.

It is this trend and its implications for innovation capability that led to our current Innovating To Win poll question.  What initiatives are your organization using to manage the outflow of corporate knowledge cause by generational turnover?

If you haven’t weighed in on this very strategic topic, please take a moment to do so now using the poll widget in the lefthand sidebar.  This poll closes this Friday, July 10th.

Driving Growth Through Innovation

As I was perusing Chuck Frey’s Innovation Weblog this morning, I noticed a recent post by Charlie Alter titled “Demand innovation step 3: Finding new growth opportunities.”  In this article, seven principles are highlighted.  As I pondered the points, it struck me that the advice put forth in this article was actually pretty poor.  Let’s dissect the suggestions made by Charlie Alter and understand what a good innovation driven growth strategy should look like.

Alter: “Shift from a “Product Centered” sales growth strategy to an “Economic Centered” model”
 
Better Advice:
Customer/Market Centric innovation is the most effect path to growth hands down.  Focusing on the term Economic Centered can lead to serious problems for a company.  The last thing you should want to do is get sucked into the vast gaping void of commodity hell.  Yet, this is exactly where you will end up if you make economics the central piece of your innovation strategy.

The keystone supporting the architecture of your business and innovation strategy must be value.  It is the value proposition that gets customers to buy; it is highly differentiated value that drives market share attainment; it is tight full product value alignment that builds customer affinity.

This high value delivery is achieved by immersive understanding of the opportunity space defined by your target customer’s unspoken needs, goals, and aspirations.  While Alter does acknowledge this, the emphasis on economics is wrong.  The focus must always be on the customer.  Customer focus leads to high value delivery.  Deliver high value and the economics will follow.

Alter: “Stop relying on developing the latest blockbuster products and develop a series of evolutionary”

Better Advice:
Sorry, if you want to be the leader, you can’t pick between ‘Big I’ and ‘little i’ innovation.  The only winning game plan is to pursue both.  Strategy and tactics are two sides of the same coin.  The evolutionary innovations that provide incremental value enhancements to your existing customers are very important.  It is these everyday innovations that sustain the value of your existing revenue channels, help ensure the ongoing profitability of the business, and can provide the cash needed to fund new opportunities.

However, becoming reliant on incrementalism is a go out of business strategy.  It is this mindset that creates the environment for disruptive market change.  By focusing too tightly on the current needs of today’s best customers, companies become inured to the constantly changing market/customer ecosystem in which they operate.  They stop changing and developing.  In an ever changing world, when you stop changing, you start dying.

Learn to eat your own lunch before someone else does.  In parallel with the incremental innovation, companies must engage in continuous reevaluation and innovation of their products, their services, and themselves.  It can be scary to think of creating a new product that may undermine an existing cash cow.  But always remember that someone is going to do it.  Isn’t better if that someone is you?

Look for new markets, too.  You can tap into vast new revenue opportunities and extend the revenue life of your current products by applying simple sustainable innovation practices.  Can you identify new communities of users for your existing product?  What is the fundamental component of your offering that is the source of its value?  Can that component be retargeted to a different space where it can enjoy a second revenue identity?  Are there licensing opportunities to be had?

It is these two approaches, self re-invention and white space development, which should be at the heart of your strategic innovation thinking.  With the dual tracks of tactical and strategic innovation, you will ensure both the short-term and long-term success of your company.

Alter: “Look at the size of your business, no matter how large or small, for the advantages it represents”

Better Advice:
It is always import to look at the elements of your business and consider how they can be leveraged to competitive advantage.  But never try and justify the status quo by focusing solely on the positive.  Every aspect of your business, its size, your organizational design, your sales mechanism, etc., presents both advantages and disadvantages.  You need to understand both sides and consider how to optimize each element of the whole to deliver maximum customer value and corporate performance.

Taking the specific issue of organization size as an example, don’t assume your current configuration is the right one.  Does your size and organization really fit the optimal business model for your market and target customers?  The answer to this question may change the way you think about the business.  You might find you need to grow the organization to map properly to the business model and growth goals; perhaps you will find that you have excess capacity that must either put to a value driving use or trimmed out.  You might even come to the realization that a fundamental shift in the business model is important.

Alter: “Make sure profitable growth is driven through every level of your company”

Better Advice:
On this point, I fully agree with Alter.  Every company must maximize its return on investments.  Every dollar (Euro, Pound, Yen, etc.) which is misspent detracts from that attainment.  As Charlie advises, do redirect those wasted resources into activities that can drive revenue and value growth for the company.  This is as true for a start-up as it is for a major enterprise.  As Clayton Christiansen put it, “Be patient on revenue, but impatient on profitability.”  One doesn’t have to look far these days to see the wreckage of start-ups that became proof points for this when their venture capital partners decided to turn off the funding flow.

Alter: “Develop lots of small or even maverick ideas for growth rather than a few large ones”
        “One simple rule is that the more ideas for growth the better”

Better Advice:
More is not always better.  Contrary to the popular mantra that you need to throw as much stuff against the wall to see what will stick, the go generate a ton of ideas approach to innovation is counterproductive and a legacy view of the world that tenaciously hangs on because sometimes something does in fact stick.  When you have too many ideas to wade through, the sea of ideas itself becomes the roadblock to innovation.

Companies have limited resources and cannot afford to waste cycles winnowing down a mountain of questionable and mostly incremental concepts looking for that one gem.  Rather than letting a million flowers bloom and die only to find that in doing so they have depleted the nutrients in the once fertile ground that was your business, you are much better off selecting a handful of high quality ideas that have a much better chance of success because you can properly focus your energies on tending the innovation garden.

This is fundamentally where needs led innovation diverges from the old school thinking of idea first innovation.  By clearly identifying the target audience, their needs, and then applying sustainable innovation methods to find the best way to deliver value to that audience through a brilliant solution that meets the needs, you will have the surest path to corporate value creation.  In short, you don’t need 3000 ideas to create one new product, you just need one.  Sustainable innovation practice is all about identifying the one idea the first time.

Alter: “Form a small cross-functional team and visit your best customers to determine what types of challenges and problems they encounter during their business processes that “surround” the products or services they buy from you”

Better Advice:
On the surface, this is basically good advice.  Understanding the entire use model and eco-system that your product or service is a part of can help you develop many good strategic insights.  However, always remember the limitations of your current customer experience.  Today’s best customers may not in fact be tomorrow’s high value customers.  Be wary of the pitfalls of steering the future course of your enterprise by always looking in the rearview mirror.

Do pay attention to your top customers, as they can help you understand the requirements for on-going incremental innovation as well as give you insights into easily entered adjacent markets.  But don’t neglect your underserved customers.  Understanding their issues can give you insights into vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a disruptive agent.  Also remember to listen to all the voices of innovation: the voice of the customer, the voice of technology, the voice of regulatory influence; and the voice of your business.  When you can properly harmonize these different voices, you are properly orchestrating the business strategy for innovation.

More Than Meets the Eye

On his blog, Thirty Minutes from Andromeda, my friend Jim Belfiore writes about Michael Jackson.  But Jim’s post points out a side of Michael that goes beyond the iconic King of Pop image.  Did you know Michael Jackson was also an inventor?  Check it out on Jim’s blog.

Of course, there are many celebrity inventors.  We come to see people through the lens of persona and tend to forget that people are often more complex than what we see from the outside.  Here are some of my favorite examples of people we all know who have also made their mark as inventors.

Gary Burghoff: US Pat No. 5,235,774
Still waters run deep.  Many of us remember Gary as the quiet, wide-eyed “Radar” O’Reilly of MASH.  However, Gary also created a chum dispensing device to attract fish.

Jamie Lee Curtis: US Pat No. 4,753,647
Who knew the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh was so clever.  Here she describes an improve diaper with a sealable pouch for clean-up wipes.

Samuel Clemens: US Pat No. 121,992
The iconic American writer and humorist known as Mark Twain patented three inventions.  This patent describes an improved adjustable clothing strap.

Zeppo Marx: US Pat No. 3,473,526
The youngest and perhaps underappreciated of the Marx brothers, Zeppo appeared in the first five of the Marx brothers’ films before he went his own way as an agent.  However with the patent, we can see Zeppo’s range was quite broad.  This patent describes a device for monitoring cardiac pulse rate.

Paul Winchell: US Pat No. 3,097,366
As a child watching Paul Winchell on television, I had no idea that besides being a great ventriloquist he was also a prolific inventor.  He has loads of patents to his credit covering a broad array of subject areas.  This one is for an artificial heart.

Abraham Lincoln: US Pat No. 6,469
Abe has always been among my favorite US presidents, but he is also my favorite celebrity inventor.  In this invention, Lincoln describes a system to add buoyancy to river barges.

Sustainable Innovation at Boston Scientific

Here’s a very interesting podcast with Dan Kussman, R&D Manager for Boston Scientific’s cardiovascular group.  In this podcast, Dan talks about the role of sustainable innovation and the importance of making innovation an ubiquitous activity for everyone, every day.

Dan discusses how innovation must be more than a mere buzz word if an organization is going to survive in today’s ever more competitive world.  He also touches on the push-pull dynamic of innovation and the need to strike a good balance.  He also discusses the need for cultural integration and investments in innovation.

Watch the podcast below and hear some terrific insights from Dan on Boston Scientific’s approach to building a sustainable innovation environment.

Innovation Chess

When I’m not deeply engaged in innovation, I enjoy chess.  Earlier this year I started a chess blog as part of my own chess self-improvement plan.  Well, I got a comment last week reminding me that I have not posted on my other blog in a while.  Oops!  Of course, my CEO is delighted by this because he feels the more my game suffers the more the business thrives.  He may be right -- especially these days.   While the business is doing great, it does take more care and feeding in the current economic climate than in the past, a fact which is reflected in my work schedule.

Of course this extra attention to the business of innovation doesn’t mean that I don’t get the chance to practice chess thinking.  There are many parallels between the worlds of innovation and chess.

You can only see so many moves ahead
There are many factors that influence the business situation, and you will never have full visibility to all of them.  Because of this, you can never make plans that will not need adjustment over time.  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan; you absolutely must.  However, you need to be reviewing the situation on a regular basis and determining if your plans are still the right ones.  Are the market conditions still the same?  Is the breakthrough you had been considering still relevant?  Is a competitor changing the landscape?  Is there a disruptive threat emerging just over the horizon?

Strategy and tactics are equally important
A grand plan poorly executed is just as ineffective as a bunch of activity that is not aligned around a plan.  It seems pretty obvious, but I have seen many people fail at innovation (and chess) because they focused solely on one dimension of execution.  This is a fundamentally flawed approach.  Strategy and tactics are like the yin and yang of innovation.  They balance and play off of one another.  You need to have a vision of where you want to go if you plan to get there.  You also need to have the innovation skills needed to navigate the path to where you want to be. 

Bring your whole game, or go home
Innovation and chess are merciless to the uncommitted.  There are many skills that you must bring to the table in order to deliver on successful innovation.  If you have a weak point in your game, you will be punished for it.  It’s not enough to have an idea—ideas are cheap.  The difference between winning and losing in innovation is realization.  Are you engaging your entire value delivery network to maximize the potential of your innovation efforts?  Are you employing innovation best practices to ensure that you are delivering the optimal manifestation of your concept to the market?   Is your innovation process enabled to achieve this best deliverable in the most efficient manner?

Think proactively not reactively
Play the game actively.  Whether in business or chess, it’s never comfortable when your competition has the momentum.  Turn the tables by putting the completion on the defensive.  Futurist Daniel Burrus advises to identify your most urgent issue and skip it.  On the surface that may sound odd, but there is great wisdom in this suggestion.  Your most urgent issue is usually a response to yesterday’s problem.  By the time you respond, you are already too late.  The cost of that late response was the opportunity to get ahead of the curve by creating the game-changing innovation that will put you in front of the pack.

Practice makes perfect
When you play a lot, your game gets sharper; when you haven’t played in while, you feel rusty.  For companies that plan to succeed at innovation, the message is clear.  You can’t expect to resuscitate your innovation capabilities when you feel an urgent need.  You must build a sustainable innovation program that makes innovation practice a part of what you do every day.  People are examining issues all the time.  Every one of these issues represents an opportunity to reinforce the skills of innovation.  Provide the culture, the process, and the infrastructure so that your workers can hone their innovation capabilities, and you will see significant improvements in the value creation achieved by your organization.

As you can see, chess and innovation are very similar.  Regardless of which arena you are in, my best advice is always play to win.

HR and Innovation

Innovation is a front burner issue in the boardroom these days.  So, it is no surprise that everybody is asking, “How do I contribute to the corporate innovation agenda?”  I was recently asked by an HR executive what role that function can play in this area.

Strangely, there are many who opine that HR has no role in innovation.  This is definitely not the case.  The human resources within a company are the single most important ingredient in the innovation success formula.  It follows quite naturally that the HR function must have an impact on the company’s innovation capacity.  The only real question is how HR can ensure that this impact is a positive one.

The role of HR in innovation is a supporting role.   HR should not try and insert itself into the realm of defining or managing innovation activity (with the obvious exception of looking inwardly at HR function innovation.)  Rather HR, can best support the innovation agenda by sticking to its knitting and focusing on three key theme.

Recruitment
It begins with hiring the best people.  HR must work diligently to make sure that right systems are in place to attract, identify, and capture the best talent to drive innovation.  This doesn’t mean going out and recruiting an innovation guru.  This means that every person hired into the organization from the janitor to the executive staff must be the top talent available to the organization.

This is harder than it may sound.  Over the years, I have come to believe that most managers have no clue about how to find and select the right people to hire.  HR must provide assistance in this area.  The HR team should work with other parts of the organization to create the best message and delivery to fill the candidate pipeline with the best people.  HR must train managers on the best practices for creating employee and job profiles that can be used to properly screen candidates.  Managers need help in constructing the process of interviewing and vetting candidates.  One area I see sore lacking in most managers is interview skills.  HR should provide coach to hiring managers in the basics of situation-based interview techniques and candidate evaluation around the metrics of aptitude, attitude, and achievement.

Rewards
Everyone likes to be recognized.  This is true in all aspects of life.  In the office, it has specific meaning and value.  The right rewards system provides a powerful for reinforcing commitment, directing employee professional growth, and shaping the corporate culture.

HR departments must look at the reward mechanisms in place and ask if they are doing the right things to develop the employees and culture of the company.  This should include compensation strategies, performance management tools, and other targeted recognition and reward programs.  I am always amazed when I see companies that have programs that recognize how long an employee has been punching the clock but don’t think to reward exceptional contributions.  Performance reviews are also a pet peeve of mine in this area.  Few companies are measuring the right things when it comes to promoting the development of innovation workers.  HR managers should take a hard look at how they are trying to develop these critical resources.

Retention
The cost of losing a key employee is very high.  So, it must be a primary objective to retain the top performers in the organization.  This of course suggests that HR needs to work with managers to have a system that identifies who are the key people in the organization and where are the risks.  With that information, the company can then consider what tools and actions are needed to mitigate these personnel risks proactively.  Remember, it is always easier and less costly to enfranchise someone before they have made a decision to leave.

While all this might sound like the meat and potatoes of HR, it truly is where the HR function has the biggest impact on an organization’s innovation (and thus value creation) potential.  Sometimes blocking and tackling is what’s needed to win.

Reflections on My Spring European Innovation Trip

It was a whirlwind trip, covering six countries over eleven days.  During the trip, I had the chance to sit with fourteen companies, twelve of which are Global 2000 players.  I also squeezed in an interview with the senior editor of a French PLM publication.   All in all, it was a fascinating and exhilarating two weeks.

I posted some initial impressions from the first half of my trip a week ago.  Now after having a few days back in the office, here are my closing thoughts on my European innovation tour.

The pulse of innovation is clearly beating and strong across Europe.  I saw a deep commitment to building sustainable innovation competence at all the companies I met with, and the recognition that innovation is the best vehicle to build value, especially in these turbulent times, is universal.

Companies can’t afford to wait on innovation.  This theme emerged as a dominant current.  One case that really drives home this point was that of a company I met with in Germany.  This company has been particular hard hit in the current recession.  Much of their business has traditionally come from the automotive sector and other customers stockpiled inventory during better times.  So, now they find themselves in the incomprehensible position of managing through a 75% drop in year over year revenue.  It would not be surprising under such circumstances for a company to roll up the carpet and put a halt to all innovation activity.  However, this company is has taken a hard look at what they need to do in order to weather the storm and emerge stronger.  They are investing in innovation.

Innovation isn’t just for the big boys.  Two of the companies I met with fall in the classification of mid-side, not large, entities.  These companies have visions of creating value through innovation that are just as ambitious and forward looking as I have seen anywhere.  In truth, this comes as no surprise to me.  While most of the organizations I touch fall in the G2000, I have always had many touch points in the SMB space including start-ups and even the occasion lone-wolf practitioner.  Through these interactions, I have seen that no group has cornered the market on innovation.  Large companies do have certain assets they can leverage if they are committed to the innovation game.  But, small organizations also have advantages they can use to gain an edge and create game-changing value.

Services companies need to re-innovate their products too.  This would seem to be obvious, but I see many services companies that are lagging in innovation.  This is very dangerous for these companies.  Services companies can be very agile if they choose to be.  What they must never forget is that this is also true of their competition.  Services companies are very vulnerable to disruption and need to be thinking about how to create unique value which is difficult to replicate.  The last thing a service company can afford is to be competing solely on price.

Companies are still unable to leverage information intelligently.  Yet, the intelligent use of information is at the core of innovation.  This is a paradox that companies must resolve to drive their innovation engine on all cylinders.  Leading companies are investing in new technologies to knowledge enable their innovation workers so that they can produce more, higher value innovations, in a reliable, repeatable manner.

I am very encouraged by what I saw throughout Europe.  While it will take considerable time to work our way through the difficult times we are experiencing, it is clear that many companies are doing the right things to plan not merely to survive, but to thrive.  These companies are pursuing sustainable innovation practices to shape their future and to build the economy of tomorrow today.

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.

Tapping Into The Innovation Information Ecosystem

In response to my recent post, “Innovation Lesson From Ratatouille”, Bill Bennett replied indicating that I had made a compelling case for unfettered access to the internet.  I think Bill is on the right track with his comment, but the need for information access is much too important to simply throw the internet at your knowledge workers.  The internet is too vast, too unstructured, too noisy, and too limited to be the primary tool innovation workers use to empower their research.

Fundamental to innovation is the need to conduct secondary research.  However, data has become far too plentiful to be useful.  Innovation workers searching for answers are inundated by an indistinguishable flood of data.  Awash in such a swirl of data, workers are finding this data is becoming an impediment to innovation.  Data is transformed into actionable knowledge only when it’s made available to knowledge workers in the context of their need, at the moment of need, in a form which is compatible with the researcher’s thought templates.

For this reason, Innovation & IT managers involved in creating the organizational infrastructure to enable efficient innovation must focus on three key items.

1. Provide knowledge workers with design intent based research technologies – this means providing workers with a way to access knowledge seamlessly without the need leave the context of their innovation work to search for information.
2. Reorganize knowledge networks around the knowledge worker – that is to say that the traditional models of topical or architectural taxonomies of navigation have failed as effective paths for broad worker communities to discover knowledge efficiently.  A system that is organized around workers’ use models is far more effective as the combination of use intent and data meaning defines a dynamic virtual taxonomy which is tailored to the needs of the individual knowledge worker.
3. Tap into the full Innovation Information Ecosystem – There are many sources of important input in the innovation process and all these sources must be brought together for knowledge workers to have the holistic view needed to ensure that they are optimally positioned at the confluence of information in order to allow them to see the connections that lead to new knowledge and innovation breakthroughs.

Here is a quick list of the types of content sources that you need to consider when you are mapping out your Innovation Information Ecosystem:

Internal sources - Organizational knowledge is often the rich source of immediately actionable knowledge.  You will want to consider how to integrate information from your PDM repositories, document management systems, shared drives, and your corporate library (if you have one).  When looking at internal knowledge, don’t forget to include CRM data such as warrantee and service data.  Also, process data and metric can also contain important insights for internal facing innovations.

Personal information – Individual knowledge workers will need to integrate their locally stored information into the global view of information that is provided at the corporate level.  This will include documents stored on their work station as well as e-mail and other captured communications.

Informal knowledge capture – When thinking about captured communications, remember to include informal worker-to-worker information channels.  These are highly valuable stores of otherwise undocumented corporate wisdom.  These may include internal Web 2.0 class applications such as discussion forums, electronic communities of practice, technical wikis, internal blogs, and internal Twitter-like messaging systems.

External sources – The best way to think outside the box, is to redefine your box.  So, embrace eternal knowledge sources and integrate them into your knowledge delivery framework.  This can include a number of classes of external sources such as:

Other divisions – If you can establish a network to share knowledge with other divisions of your enterprise, you have access to extremely rich and reliable information.

Content publishers – This can include commercial content aggregators, professional associations, patent authorities, and universities.

Value network – The foundation of open innovation is to create a flow of content from you customers and the partners in your value chain.

General web – Yes, there is some valuable information available on the publicly accessible web.  However, don’t forget that much of the rich technical and scientific content is in what has been termed the deep-web where documents are stored behind a front end retrieval engine.

As you can see the Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem has many elements.  Make sure you are considering it broadly so that your knowledge workers have the right information at their disposal, and make sure you are providing the most effective model of access.  When you enable innovation workers to easily tap into the richness of the Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem, you begin to unlock their potential for value creation through innovation.

Innovation Lesson From Ratatouille

The animated movie, “Ratatouille”, tells the tale of a most improbable hero who dreams of being a great chef.  This hero is a rat named Remy.

Inspired by the great chef, Gusteau, this unlikely protagonist wends his way to Paris, and with Gusteau’s words, “Anyone can cook!”, echoing in his mind, Remy find success and happiness as a chef.

As we come to learn in what is sure to be a Disney-Pixar classic, anyone can cook, but not everyone can.  This is true in many of life’s endeavors and we should all bear this in mind when it comes to innovation.

Anyone can innovate, but not everyone can.

Current trends of companies toward opening up the innovation process to customers and partners show broad acceptance of the concept that innovations can come from anyone.  More interestingly, these same trends suggest that not everyone will be the source of great innovation as many companies are feeling dissatisfied with the quality and relevance of recommendations coming from within their extended innovation ecosystem.  This leads to an interesting question.  If innovation can come from anyone, why is it that not everyone can innovate?

Letting stand the assertion that anyone can innovate, I’ll suggest that the innovation gene is something with requires environmental stimulus to be expressed.  Remember that at its core an innovation is a response to a situation, and not just any response, but a response that creates value by solving a problem inherent in the current situation.

In essence, to innovate someone must:

• Recognize a problem
• Understand the problem
• Have access to the information required to identify a solution

It’s these latter two points that are the hurdles which prevent many people from being substantial contributors in the innovation process.

Too often, in the rush to solution, the crucial steps of understanding the problem is bypassed.  This leads many would be innovators down the path to catastrophe as they end up with a creation that doesn’t actually address any ones needs.  The disciplines of sustainable innovation practice are useful to help keep people focused and ensure that the right questions are identified the first time.

Yet even when people do have a deep understanding of the problem, that doesn’t mean they will see the path forward to a high value innovative solution.  Contrary to popular belief, people don’t get stuck at this point because they know too much.  It is precisely because they don’t know enough that they are subject to mental inertia.  History teaches us that great innovation happens at the nexus of information.  It is this convergence of knowledge that leads to the insights that drive innovation.  However, access to relevant knowledge is difficult, and the problem is getting bigger every day.

So, what is an organization to do if they want to enable more of their workers and partners to be innovation value creation agents?  How can you equip more people to innovate?  Here are two things that you must do to properly prepare your innovation workers for success.

Provide training on innovation skills and best practice.  This is a key part of building a sustainable innovation culture.  (See this post for more on this.)

Enable them through knowledge.  The best way to find great innovation concepts isn’t thinking outside the box, it’s redefining the box.  Your employees need seamless access to information from both inside the enterprise and outside.  They need the information in a form that they can readily assimilate, in the context of their work, and when they need it.  Only in this way are you truly knowledge enabling them by helping them see through the impenetrable fog of data and recognize the actionable knowledge they need.

Give your knowledge workers these tools and you will be amazed at how much more productive your innovation efforts will be.  Not everyone can innovate, but you can certain put your employees in the position where they can by giving them the basic skills and access to information necessary.  You can increase your organization’s innovation capacity by enabling more people to express their innovation potential.