Innovating To Win

Innovation in Japan

In “Tokyo’s creative economy”, Dominic Basulto references Amy Chozick’s article in the Wall Street Journal about the creativity boom in Japan.  In truth, innovation has a very strong history in Japan, and Japan’s manufacturing community has long understood the importance of developing sustainable innovation methodologies. 

Product leadership established by many leading Japanese companies is not an accident spurred on by an improvement in the economy.  Rather, it is the natural result of a commitment over time to developing an innovative culture that is able to capitalize on changes in circumstance.

Proctor & Gamble and Innovation Management

Elana Varon points out in “Exiled from Innovation? Maybe It’s Your Performance” that while many of us are conditioned to think of IT as the acronym for Innovation Terminator, this is not necessarily a fair or deserved appellation.  In the March issue of CIO magazine, the Forum column provides some excellent insights in to how the CIO can help foster an innovation friendly environment.

In the article, Robert Scott, P&G’s Vice President of Innovation and Architecture, Global Business Services, talks about the need to provide the right framework to support innovation.  He says “You’re going to have to let innovation flow in and out of the walls of your organization and in and out of your company.”

The article goes on to describe SIMPL (Simplified Initiative Management and Product Launch), a process used by P&G to move innovation along through the company.  The process includes six distinct phases: Discovery, Design, Qualify, Ready, Launch, and Leverage.

All in all, this provides a nice look at how a high performance innovation organization looks at the issues of innovation management.  For the full article, check out www.cio.com/030107.

Thinking About The Box

It happens to all of us.  You are sitting in a conference room with teammates discussing an important issue.  The same old suggestions are trotted out for one last trip around the corral, when someone blurts out that phrase only slightly less tired than the ideas being discussed--“We need to think outside the box.”  It would be amusing if it weren’t for the realization that unless you can find a way to break the cycle this scene will continue to play out again and again.  How can we break the cycle?

Idea generation is core to creative problem solving, but our ability to find new ideas is limited by our experience.  Limitations of our personal knowledge, the perspective imposed on us by our situations, and the shackles of mental inertia all hamper our vision and preclude the possibility of finding a truly novel idea.  This is the box in which we are destined to work.  When we hear the rallying cry to break free of the confines of our box, we are rarely able to stretch our paradigms of thought in original ways.  Instead we substitute high-risk concepts for novel ideas.  When we experience the occasional success with this approach, we congratulate ourselves for our creativity.

Unfortunately, this approach is inherently unreliable.  The high risk, low quality ideas generally produced don’t yield the results we seek.  The need to focus on finding higher quality ideas is undeniable, but how?  If thinking within the box is too limiting, and thinking outside the box is unreliable, how can high quality ideas be found easily when they are needed?

The answer lies not in thinking outside the box, but in changing the shape and size of the box.  Sir Isaac Newton is credited with saying, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”  By expanding the box (and standing on the metaphorical giants’ shoulders), new concepts that previously were outside our field of vision come in to view.  This broader view give us better insights and leads to better selection of concepts with more predictable outcomes.

There are many resources available with which to expand the box.  Corporations have vast internal resources in the form of corporate data farms.  In more advanced organizations, mechanisms have been established to capture and disseminate tribal knowledge.  By leveraging these internal troves of information, tremendous latent creative potential within an organization can be unleashed.  In fact, many organizations are surprised to find the depth and quality of information they have been ignoring when they first begin to harness this power.

It is also important to consider external sources of knowledge as well.  There are great volumes of useful information available only a click away.  Any program to knowledge-enable a company’s innovation workers cannot ignore the value of tapping into the knowledge stores outside of the four walls of the organization.

Of course, there is one more piece to this puzzle.  It is not sufficient to merely collect data in a static repository.  A senior member of a team tasked with just such a mission at a major corporation (which I will call XYZco here to protect his identity) told me, “Knowledge management has a bad reputation at XYZco; a lot of money goes in, but nothing ever comes out.”

If we want to avoid the lament of XYZco, we must do better than simply organizing information and expecting innovation workers to find it.  We must use technology to activate the data and deliver the right information to the innovation worker when and where they need it.  Doing this expands the capability of these workers and allows the company to achieve to a greater vision.

Overcoming Resistance to Change

Langdon Morris, in “Slow Down to Speed Up”, points out recent experience with introducing change into the education sector.  He concludes, “Slow down to speed up is thus an innovation strategy when the controlling context is created by social dynamics rather than technological ones.”

This is true.  But anyone responsible for driving innovative change must remember that this technique can be usefully applied to any situation.  The dynamics of change are similar in any environment.  Four basic requirements must be met if the environmental resistance to change is to be successfully defeated:

1. Problem – There must be a recognized reason to change.  If the audience feels no pain in maintaining the status quo, there is no fundamental reason to consider change.



2. Vision – There must be a vision of what the improved state should look like.  Without such a view into the future state, people will be stuck feeling both the pain of the issue and the frustration of feeling that it cannot be improved.



3. Action – It is usually the case that the vision of the future is too difficult to achieve in a single step.  Here is where Mr. Morris’s observation plays a key role.  Unless it is possible to define that next step to move closer to the vision, people are usually unable to break the inertial pull of inaction.  Breaking down the path to the vision overcomes this problem.  Interestingly enough, it is often the case that the full path doesn’t need to be defined.  Knowing the next step provides enough confidence in the future to make it seem possible.



4. Cost – The pain of change must be perceived as lower than the pain that is being removed through change.

When these conditions are met, change can occur.  Whether you are trying to effect change to implement a specific innovative idea, or whether you are trying to establish a culture of innovation for your organization, these change dynamics should always be kept in mind.