Innovating To Win

Know Your Innovation Course

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.

Reasons To Block Innovation

“Keep your friends close, and keep your enemies closer.” – Sun-Tzu

The momentum behind innovation continues to build at companies around the globe.  Everywhere I go, I hear and see great things about new initiatives and executive commitment to innovation as organizations chart their course through the choppy waters of global economic turmoil to the smooth waters of success.

Yet despite this trend, you don’t have to look far to find individuals who are not on board with the program.  These are the innovation detractors—people who are more focused on their own agenda and don’t care if the corporate innovation and business goals are casualties along the way.  These individuals are usually lurking in the background working quietly to undermine the change in the wind in order to protect their private interests.  But occasionally, they step out and reveal their true nature.

Leveraging knowledge to drive the identification and synthesis of new solutions to innovation challenges is fundamental to a strong innovation program.  Yet there are those who would limit the company’s vision in order to protect their own.  I recently had a Director of Knowledge Management request that we not show our innovation technology to his company's engineers because it was setting expectation with his knowledge workers that he was not able to meet with his current solutions.

There are identifiable innovation skills and best practices.  Equip your workers with these skills, and your innovation workers will become more productive.  But I have heard R&D managers asking to short cut training on innovation skills so as to not take too much time away from engineers.  If you don’t invest in your people, you can’t expect them to deliver to their maximum potential.

One challenge many companies must grapple with is ensuring their freedom to operate once they have selected an innovation path.  At times, a company may run into a competitive piece of IP just as they are ready to go to market.  What then?  We equip our clients with a specific technique for patent busting that allows them to find alternative, non-infringing methods to achieve their objective.  Following this method also provides them with documentation to substantiate the non-infringing nature of their solution.  Sounds pretty useful, eh?  Well, I have heard internal corporate IP attorneys state they didn’t want their engineers to have access to this method.

These are some examples of resistance to innovation that I have seen at some organizations.  What have you seen?  Do you know who are the enemies of innovation in your organization?

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.