Innovating To Win

Webcast - Implementing Closed-Loop Design for Innovation Excellence

I will be participating in a webcast at 2:00 PM EDT on Thursday, May 31st.  The event will be moderated by Jeff Moad of Managing Automation.  Sharing the panel with me will be Joe Barkai of Manufacturing Insights.

The webcast will examine how leading manufacturers are improving their entire closed-loop product development process by leveraging integrated innovation best practices across the product life-cycle.  We'll also look at some of the challenges organizations face in the product development process and how to integrate these best practices to speed time-to-market while also improving product performance and reliability.

I hope you’ll join me for what should be a very interesting event.  You can sign-up here.

TRIZCON2007 in Review

For me, Monday through Wednesday of this week were devoted to TRIZCON2007.  This is the annual international TRIZ conference organized by the Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies—the main body of the U.S. TRIZ community.  The conference features presentation from members of the global TRIZ community.

I usually enjoy sitting in on as many of the sessions as I can.  The content of the sessions is generally very rich and interesting.  This year, I was only able to attend the open keynote speech and two of the presentations.

For the opening keynote session Tom Johnson gave a very interesting talk titled, "The Means are Ends in the Making: Finding the Natural Pathway to Robust, Stable Business Performance."  The basis of the presentation was a comparative analysis of the structure and performance results of two automotive production operations based in the U.S. – one a Ford operation, and one a Toyota operation.  Tom’s thesis was that U.S. management thinking is uniformly driven by the Management By Results (MBR) paradigm, whereas the Japanese way of thinking is Management By Means (MBM).  Tom asserts that MBR leads to problems because it is an inherently unnatural model of looking at a business which should be treated as a natural system.  He feels MBM on the other hand leads to better overall results because it forces a more holistic approach to a business process by elevating the interactions in the process to a high level of visibility.  While the example reviewed in the session seemed a bit simplistic (probably intentionally so for presentation), there is no arguing with the notion that an approach that takes each function and seeks to optimize it in isolation will usually fail to achieve optimal balance.  On the other hand, an approach that consistently considers the whole system and the dynamics of people, communications, and process will tend to produce superior results.

I also saw a very nice case study presented by ShinHoo Choi of the Korean company LS-Cable.  The presentation considered an interesting technical problem in the manufacture of thin films which contained both technical and physical contractions to be resolved.

The last of the sessions I attended was focused on the application of technology S-curves and was presented by Xiaoling Shi of China’s Innovation Technology Institute.  For the most part, this session was a bit elementary, but I did like the way Xiaoling tied S-curves and technology maturity back to the notion of market maturity.

My own session on Knowledge Enabled Function Modeling was very well attended.  The audience was very engaged in the topic, and the post-session discussion with attendees was very gratifying.

The rest of my time was spent in various discussions with practitioners from industry and consultants concerning the state of innovation practice and where TRIZ fits into the innovation landscape.  All in all, it was a very good event.

Thinking TRIZ on Creativity & Innovation Day

Saturday was Creativity & Innovation Day.  I spent the day putting the finishing touches on my slides to be presented at TRIZCON2007 on Tuesday of this week.  The presentation shows how the application of advanced computational linguistics can greatly simplify the engineering task of function modeling.  I think it will be very interesting for those in attendance, and it is quite relevant to both TRIZ and non-TRIZ practitioners.

Of particular interest is a technique for opportunity discovery that I highlight at the end of the session.  The basic idea is simple, but the application is quite elegant.  Image you have defined a functional representation for your system (product or service).  You can then search a broad knowledge base (such as patent collections) for functional interactions between components of your system and components outside of your system.  Each so identified interaction represents a potential market extending opportunity.  With a little diligence, a breakthrough concept can be uncovered.

What did you do on Creativity & Innovation Day?

No Innovation Police, Please!

Many bloggers (myself included) spout strong opinions on various topics.  A popular topic of late has been the positive or negative contribution that designers make.  This is a discussion that I have not wanted to join in on, but today is different.  It has been brought to my attention that this Saturday is Creativity & Innovation Day.  I hadn’t heard of this previously, and I am not sure I am very keen on the idea as it makes me think of innovation being relegated to the status of something that is trotted out once year and then tossed back in the closet until the next time.  Within five minutes of learning about Creativity & Innovation Day, I chanced upon  Fernando Vallejo’s article, “Stop making crap”, over on the ‘round Design blog.

Fernando’s main point is that too many young designers waste they energies pursuing empty and meaningless design rather than focusing their energies on what Fernando might consider more worthy pursuits.  Such commentary has its place, but it is also inherently highhanded.  Fernando asks “Aren’t there enough lamps, trash bins, chairs, tooth-brushes, etc?”  Perhaps, there are.  But then again, sometimes innovation catalysts appear in the oddest places.  If someone invents an ionic tooth-brush that use bimetal technology for power instead of batteries (as has been done), perhaps that will give someone else the idea they need to create another invention that some will consider more worthy.

There is no danger that too many irrelevant ideas will bog down innovation.  Individual designers and inventors, as well as companies, should have no trouble filtering out what seems like noise from their perspective to focus on the concepts that will advance their specific mission.  There are technical solutions available that can help innovators leverage cross domain intelligence effectively and improve both the quality of their ideation and the conversion ratio of ideas to useful product or service innovations. 

The global innovation landscape is a vast marketplace of ideas.  We should embrace the diversity of ideas as this diversity creates a richness of dialog that can only benefit all innovation.  Rather than constrain creativity by sending the innovation police after those who do not meet one’s standards of sensibility, we should let ideas come from where they will.  The strong and important ideas will rise above the rest so long as we foster an open environment for a dialog of sharing those ideas.

Reactive vs. Proactive Innovation

Over on the Innovate On Purpose blog, Jeffrey Phillips offers definitions of Reactive and Proactive Innovation with suggestions of when each is appropriate.  While this is a constructive way of organizing thought about innovation, Jeffrey’s characterization of the approaches is problematic.

Jeffrey characterizes proactive innovation as “creating a few well-defined problems, challenges or opportunities and creating a brainstorm or other method to submit ideas based on these defined challenges.”  This is contrasted to reactive innovation described as a situation where a company “expects ideas to be sent in and then reacts to those it considers good ideas” (i.e. an employee suggestion box).

The problem with these definitions is that they focus on specific practice of implementation and fail to recognize the key element of organizational intent.  There are positive and negative connotations associated with the terms proactive and reactive, and the definitions don’t seem to align well with these connotations.  A company that pulls together an ad hoc team to address the fact that the CEO read about their loss of market share in the Wall Street Journal can take comfort in the fact that they are a proactive innovator.  The company that opens it walls to ideas from outside the enterprise via a global open innovation initiative is labeled reactive.  This doesn’t make sense.  A different, organizational intent based, definition seems to be in order.

A Reactive Innovation organization is one where innovation is not recognized as value driving asset in the organization.  The organization does not anticipate the need to evolve its products and service through innovation in a planned way, but instead waits for the evidence of the market to tell it, after the fact, where they need to adapt.  Acting under the pressure of responding to a business challenge, the organization gravitates toward the quick fix rather than considering the true nature of the problem.  These organizations often experience atrophy of their innovation capability as they get trapped in what Senge would call a classic shifting the burden architype.

In contrast, the Proactive Innovation organization is one where innovation is viewed as a key discipline that must be fostered.  In these organizations, innovation best practices have been identified and are in active deployment.  The company actively manages its innovation agenda, looking for new opportunities, understanding the intersection of its capabilities with the objectives of its current and future customers, and provisioning its knowledge workers with the tools and systems to accelerate and focus ideation efforts in support of a common innovation vision.  These companies are in either the repeatable or high-performance phase of there innovation practice evolution.  These are the companies that take control of their destiny rather that waiting for their competitors to define their role for them.

Hopefully, these different definitions capture an important distinction.  There are many specific where-the-rubber-meets-the-road innovation practices that may be part of any organization’s processes.  As Jeffrey points out, there are many factors that may indicate the appropriateness of any one practice for a given organization.  However, it is the intent and degree of purposefulness with which these innovation practices are embraced and pursued that will define the successful innovation leaders from the also-rans.

It’s The Customer, Stupid!

What do Circuit City, Jan Carlzon, and Erich Joachimsthaler have in common?  Through their actions they have all made important statements about the role of the customer in business.

Langdon Morris, in his Permanent Innovation blog, bestows upon Circuit City the dubious honor of Mr. Morris’ Worst Practices In Innovation Award.  The award recognizes Circuit City’s recent decision to cut costs by eliminating 3400 of their more experienced workers.  Kudo’s to Langdon for this well deserved recognition of a hare-brained moved on Circuit City’s part.  In an extremely competitive market where the level of in-store service provided can be a key driver of the customer experience, Circuit City has chosen to curtail its ability to deliver an enhanced customer experience.  Perhaps, they might have considered how to better leverage their experienced resources to draw more customers to the store—maybe learning from the example of home improvement leaders with in-store workshops, etc.

Which brings me to Jan Carlzon…  By an uncanny coincidence, the same day I read about Langdon’s Worst Practices in Innovation Award, I noticed that Patty Seybold, in her Outside Innovation blog, wrote last Friday about “Focusing on Moments of Truth in Customer Experience.”  Here, Patty makes reference to Jan Carlzon’s book Moments of Truth.  In his book, Jan says about moments of truth, “Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, is an opportunity to form an impression.”  This is advice that would not only be useful for Circuit City to consider, but is also very important for all of us who are serious innovation practitioners.  At some level, every innovation is defined by and in response to a perceived need to reshape a moment of truth in the Carlzonian sense of the term.

This theme is also central to a new book by Erich Joachimsthaler, Hidden in Plain Sight.  By yet another uncanny coincidence, I happened to read this book Friday evening while traveling between Boston and Los Angeles.  In Hidden in Plain Sight, Joachimsthaler presents what he calls the Demand-first Innovation and Growth model (DIG).  This is described by the author as a structured and repeatable way of analyzing a company’s opportunity space to find winning strategic growth opportunities.  In brief, DIG comprises a three step approach to the problem:

1. Map out the demand landscape – This means considering the customers’ behaviors to understand their goals, activities, and priorities.  In doing so, Joachimsthaler prescribes considering this free from the confines of your current product, positioning, branding or anything else that can obstruct your ability to see things objectively.



2. Define the opportunity space – Once the demand landscape is known, you need to consider how the landscape relates to you.  Looking at the landscape from a series of perspectives defined by the method (eye of the customer, eye of the market, eye of the industry), you should identify your sweet spot in the demand landscape and the growth platforms that lead to a sustainable innovation program.



3. Create the strategic blueprint for action – Finally, the articulation of an action plan to attack the opportunity completes the methodology.

The key element of Jochamsthaler’s DIG methodology is the notion of demand-first thinking.  In truth, this is not new; it is very much at the heart of Christiansen’s mantra of identifying the job.  But, Jochamsthaler’s articulation of the point is admirably on point and highlighted by a very engaging case study about Frito Lay’s experience in learning about the demand landscape of their salty snacks and how it changed the way they think about their market.

Circuit City could have benefited greatly from examining DIG.  Had they looked at this model, they might have avoided their current act of self evisceration.  Had they developed an understanding of how to innovate around customer demand, they may have seen their opportunity differently and understood how to leverage their strengths to better respond to their customer’s needs, wants, frustrations, and passions.

Chess Strategy & Innovation

The game of chess has long been a synonymous with strategic thinking.  What insights into the path to successful strategic innovation can we learn from chess?  I asked myself this question after reading some posts on Ken Flowers’ Practical Leadership blog exploring management lessons that can be draw from everyday activity.  Here is my list of five key principles of chess that are highly valuable lessons for innovation.  What do you think?

Be active, not passive
In chess if you sit back and wait for the win to appear, you will usually lose.  Your opponent will be able to control the game and build a winning attack.  In the world of innovation, the same principle applies.

If you don’t take control of your innovation agenda, you have no hope of breaking the cycle of accidental innovation—not knowing when, or if, the next great innovation will come.  You will be doomed to wonder why the other guy came up with that great new concept that you missed (think Walkman-iPod).  Take charge of your innovation destiny.  Embraced systematic innovation discipline and develop innovation best practices.

Know your endgame
Each move takes you one step closer to the endgame.  Will you be able to win when you get there?  Chess players understand that you need to understand the principles of the endgame play to be successful.  Consider the position shown above.  Black has an advantage, but the path to converting the advantage to a win is subtle.  Do you see it?  Endgame knowledge not only helps you win in the end game, but this insight can help you pick the right moves along the way.

For innovators this means that you need to know where you want to go if you are going to get there.  Do you want to find a next generation product?  Do you want to find a new market for a core technology?  Do you want to find freedom to operation in the face of a competitive market barrier?  What are the criteria of success that will guide you as you consider alternative solution concepts?  Define you objectives and drive toward your goal.

Tactics are the tools to implement strategy
In chess, you need to consider your strategic goal and then figure out a way to make it happen.  The second part is the domain of tactics.  Chess players have a language of tactics: sacrifice, blockade, pin, diversion, etc.  There is a popular myth that suggests that great players can look at many more possible moves than normal people.  Research has shown this is not true.  The great players look at roughly the same number of moves.  However, their familiarity with tactics and their ability to recognize patterns in positions of the pieces allows them to eliminate many moves from consideration and focus on the more promising ones.

As innovators, we are faced with many different problems to solve.  Different problems yield to different techniques.  It is essential that innovators have a broad array of innovation best practices in their arsenal.  It is equally important that we use these tools for our daily small innovations.  Only in this way, will we have the experience to know which innovation technique will yield us the best result in the shortest time.

Never relax before the game is done
All too often, I have heard a chess player moaning about letting a won game slip away.  Taking the win for granted, the player relaxed and tried to coast to victory.  But their opponent did not want to accept defeat and kept fighting until the situation was reversed.

The same can be seen in the world of product or service innovation.  A company basking in the limelight of success believes they have no need to keep investing in innovation.  Suddenly, a new competitor looms on the horizon with a disruptive innovation that changes the rules of engagement.  The innovation game is never over.  You must always keep reassessing your strategies and reinventing your offerings.  Make yourself obsolete before someone else does it for you.

Be flexible, conditions can turn on a single move
You can’t foresee everything.  A well thought out strategic plan can unravel on a single move when your opponent plays a move you hadn’t considered.  When this happens, you can’t blindly move ahead with the same plan.  You need to step back and reconsider the situation and make appropriate adjustments.

The same is true for companies and innovators.  You must keep abreast of market and technology conditions both within your space and adjacent spaces.  This means you need efficient methods for accessing knowledge from outside of your organization and integrating it into your innovation practices.  Leverage this information to recognize early signs of a change in the tide so you can make course adjustments early.

Innovation Practice Maturity Model

Last night as I was checking out some of the innovation blogs I read, I came upon an interesting post in Paul Williams’ Think For A Change blog.  The comments regarding his views on innovation maturity reminded me of a seminar I gave in Atlanta, last July, at a Design Excellency conference.  In that seminar, I presented an Innovation Practice Maturity Model and a roadmap for evolution.   In fact, the terminology I outlined in my post yesterday comes from that model.

In the past eight months since I have been talking about this model with Global 1000 companies, it has gained good traction because of its relevance to their innovation pain.  While the seminar was not recorded, I did have an opportunity to present a highly condensed version of the model on a webcast given by Frost & Sullivan.  The webcast can be found at the following link:
http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/ebroadcast.pag?eventid=75090771

How Fit Is Your Innovation Practice?

Organizations around the globe are grappling with the pressures of intense competition.  Years of focusing on cost-cutting initiatives to optimize bottom line results have brought these companies to the realization that you can’t lean your way to growth.  Something more is needed—something to create sustainable market differentiation, something to drive the top line growth, something to accelerate corporate value accretion.  That something is innovation.

As leading companies around the globe are working to establish repeatable, integrated innovation processes, a pattern of evolution is emerging which defines a path to innovation mastery.  Along this path, organizations pass through four distinct phases of innovation practice development.

Accidental Innovation
In this earliest stage of innovation practice development, the organization has not begun implementing structured innovation.  Often, the company is unaware that there exists an approach to rise out of the product development quagmire onto the firmer ground of repeatable, on-demand innovation.  Innovation is poorly, if at all, understood.  Because these organizations do not recognize innovation as a competence that can be developed and harnessed, there is no infrastructure to support good innovation disciplines and no sponsorship to promote such practices.  As a result, innovation is not repeatable, predictable or reliable, and ROI on investment in R&D falls well short of expectations.

Situational Innovation
As organizations evolve to the second stage of innovation practice growth, awareness of structured innovation methods lead the organization to test these methods.  The organization makes limited investments in tools and methods to support a specific test case.  A team is assembled to try out the new innovation methods in the context of a highly visible project.  Narrowly focused knowledge asset mining may also be done in support of the project as well.  While these initial projects are often highly successful, the momentum coming out of these projects is rarely leveraged.  This is because the organization is not yet committed to the path of innovation excellence.  As a result, innovation practice development stalls until the next iteration of trying out the concept of structured innovation.

Repeatable Innovation
In the next stage of innovation practice evolution, the successes with early trials have led to genuine enthusiasm for the broader deployment of innovation best practices.  The organization creates a cadre of innovation specialists who become leveraged resources within the company and are assigned to projects on an as-needed basis.  Investment in innovation infrastructure grows as both the innovation specialists are equipped with the proper tools, and the general knowledge worker population is given access to innovation tools and knowledge retrieval technologies.  While the company begins to experience the benefits of repeatable innovation, innovation is still opportunistic, targeting specific projects, and tends to be contained within pockets of the organization. 

High-Performance Innovation
In this final phase of innovation practice development, an organization is committed to establishing innovation a core competency.  Formal corporate programs for innovation best practices are created.  These programs help to integrate innovation as a key part of the corporate culture and the organizations established product development processes.  A hierarchy of innovation practitioners is developed to optimize the availability and leveragability of innovation skills within the enterprise.  Innovation skills are widely deployed within the entire innovation worker population, with basic innovation practice training becoming an integral part of team and individual employee development.  In this stage of innovation practice development, corporations begin to broadly leverage knowledge assets.  Innovation best practices, supported by precise knowledge retrieval, become integrated into the organizational fabric.

Organizations that establish innovation competency enjoy the benefits of being able to confidently dedicate resources on the right opportunities, efficiently generate ideas leveraging knowledge from both within and outside the enterprise, and effectively capture and disseminate tribal knowledge and lessons learned.  Breaking the cycle of accidental innovation, they turn their product and service innovation efforts into drivers of sustainable growth and corporate value.

My Dinner With Andre

Okay, my dinner was really with George and Jim.  But settling into my chair, I anticipated what was sure to be very interesting dinner conversation.  After all, my dining companions this evening were the Vice President of Innovation for a global packaged foods manufacturer and a top flight Innovation Consultant.  What would be the topic of conversation?  Innovation of course!  (Dice-K may have been mentioned too.)

George felt very good about his organization’s innovation performance.  But even so, the need to drive more innovation was on his mind.  The constantly changing competitive landscape and external factors, such as consumer need and regulatory impacts, require that businesses constantly rethink where they are headed.  George asserted that establishing a structured and repeatable innovation process was critical to driving corporate value.

Jim noted his recent meeting with a $5 billion manufacturer.  He had outlined for them a method for driving opportunity analysis by leveraging global knowledge.  From Jim’s experience in working with Global 500 companies, he stated that the ability of companies to reliably anticipate future market needs is a key skill for providing direction to successful innovation practice.

This observation led to discussion of the importance of capturing corporate knowledge and unlocking its value.  I recounted some of the situations I have seen where organizations that had struggled with traditional knowledge management initiatives had been able to break through by abandoning those failed initiatives in favor of integrated innovation strategies.  Transforming static and inaccessible information into active and actionable knowledge provided these companies with sustainable competitive advantage.

The emerging theme of our discussion was that companies need to tap into both their internal experience and global experience as part of a disciplined approach to innovation best practice if they are to effectively find the right market defining paths forward.  Jim observed that it is much like Wayne Gretzky said when asked about the secret to his success: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been.”

What was the topic of conversation at your last dinner with innovation practice leaders?