Innovating To Win

Patents for Business

While on vacation last week, my reading list included a new book titled Patents for Business by M. Henry Heines.  Mr. Heines, a patent attorney with over thirty years of experience, does a very good job of making accessible and engaging what can be a very dry and soporific subject.

This book is aimed at managers who need to have basic awareness in the arena of intellectual property to make assessments and decisions related to due diligence and other day to day issues that arise.  The book succeeds very well and provides a broad survey of the key topics that these managers need including: patentability, prior art search, novelty and non-obviousness, claims analysis, and freedom to operate.  Mr. Heines gives many specific examples to help the reader absorb the fine points of the topics discussed.

While aimed at managers, Patents for Business is also a useful primer for the innovation practitioner.  Patents are very important for innovators as they both define the landscape in which we can operate and serve as a valuable source of ideas for problem solving.  The chapters on novelty and non-obviousness, freedom to operate, and claims analysis are particularly useful to the innovation practitioner.  While Mr. Heines stops short of discussing systematic approaches for creating freedom to operate in the face of an intellectual property roadblock, many of the basic principles are touched upon.

Gone to the Dogs

I’m on vacation this week at the Bernese Mountain Dog Club of America’s National Specialty Show in Louisville, Kentucky.  I have to admit to feeling a slight pang of guilt because the Front-end of Innovation conference is being held this week in Boston, my backyard.  If you get a chance to go to Front-end, it is a good conference that I highly recommend.

While I will be gone to the dogs this week, innovation will still be on my mind.  One can find lessons on innovation everywhere—even at a dog show.  Here are some useful innovation lessons from the world of dogs.

You’ve got to put your hands on the dog to evaluate its structure
Dog handlers know how to groom and position their dogs to show off their assets and hide their defects.  To get the real story, you need to feel the dog.  Doing this allows your hands to show you what your eyes can’t see about the physical structure of the dog.

For innovation practitioners, the message is to get to know your technology space intimately.  Companies can be quite clever about how they position their products and technologies using the latest enticing buzz words.  I recently was talking with a self-described expert in semantics about my company’s technology (which among other things does deep semantic concept extraction).  He recommended that I contact a specific company because they “do a lot with semantics.”  From a previous conversation with the CTO of the company in question, I know that company does not actually work with semantic processing at all.  Clearly, the expert had not looked beyond the marketing blurbs (which do use the term semantics).  If I had not known this, it would have been easy to waste a lot of energy chasing after a chimera.  Don’t take the marketing hype at face value; you need to go deeper to distinguish the fakers from the real deal. 

Work with your dog’s instincts
A relatively new addition to the dog world is an activity called freestyle obedience.  It is based on equestrian dressage and involves having your dog perform a choreographed routine to music.  When training for freestyle, a good rule of thumb is to observe the things that your dog already does naturally and train to do those things on command so you can use them in the routine.  This is much easier that trying to get the dog to do something entirely foreign.

There is a very important analogy here for innovators.  There are predictable paths of evolution that products and services will naturally tend to follow.  You need to understand these patterns of evolution.  If you recognize the patterns which apply to your technology or service, you can more readily understand the next step for you to look at.  Even more interesting is the notion that you can consider skipping over steps to really leapfrog the competition.  Innovations that are not in keeping with these system modification patterns will usually fail to find traction.

Teach fetch early for non-retrieving breeds
Yes, it’s true.  Not every dog has a natural retrieve instinct.  There are those breeds whose natural response to your “fetch” command will be to look at you in a way that clearly communicates, “Hey, you threw it; you get it.”  However if you play train these same dogs as puppies, they can develop a very good fetch.

Fix tomorrow’s predictable problems today is the lesson for us in the innovation game.  There are many aspects to what shape the market perception of an innovation.  One very important aspect is the delivered quality of the customer experience.  You must take the time to consider how that experience can be optimized by designing out problems from the start.  In the manufacturing world, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a common and very useful tool to do this.  This type of discipline should be a part of a well rounded innovation practice to ensure the highest quality of delivery customer experience.

Make it easy for people to do what you want them to do
Formal obedience training can be daunting, but it is important for dogs.  To encourage more people to get involved with obedience training, a new, more appealing activity called Rally Obedience was developed.  Rally is less demanding and has more variety that makes it more appealing to a broader audience.  As a result, more people in the dog fancy are getting into obedience training.

The message for innovators is clear: build a better path to your customer.  This can take form in many different ways: business model innovations, service innovations, or product innovations.  The key is to make it easier for your customer to do business with you, lower the barriers to adoption of your product or service, and in so doing expand your market by reaching out to more customers than you have in the past.

Old dogs do learn new tricks
Contrary to the old saw, many veteran dogs earn titles in new areas.  In the business of innovation too, we must not forget that we are always building on the past and often an old technology can find new life.

Listening With Empathy

In “Is Anybody Listening?”, I talked about the need for companies to develop the skill of listening to their customers.   As a follow up, I would like to point out an interesting and relevant piece on Heads-Up! on Organization Innovation titled “Listening: the Spark of Innovation.”  In it the authors suggest four levels of listening.  They assert that higher level listening skills can open better communications and lead to higher quality interactions with clients.

The observations on listening skills are very helpful.  Empathy focused dialogue will both help clients be more open with you and help you to better understand what clients are trying to tell you.

For purposes of innovation, it is also important to remember that the act of listening is not limited to the moment of customer interaction.  Review and analysis of the exchange is also a part of the listening process.  How we conduct this phase of the process is also very important.  If we do a great job of drawing out customer input, but then consider that input through the filter of a provincial lens, we can undermine the value of the information we have so painstakingly collected.

Innovation Practice: Get It!

There is an interesting post today on NussbaumOnDesign titled “The “Clown” Theory of Innovation.”  In it Bruce Nussbaum highlights a comment Mark Dawson posted in response to “Who Is Tired of Innovation?”

In the original post (“Who Is Tired of Innovation?”), Nussbaum observed that a rift is forming separating top executives into two groups: those that get innovation and understand that building a culture of innovation is a long view initiative, and those that don’t get it and are tiring of the effort because their expectations that innovation was a one-off event that would produce the silver bullet for their company have not been met.  Mark counters with the objection that such a classification is counter-productive and that classifying organizations based on understanding why they are turning away from innovation is more important.

However, both Bruce and Mark are hitting on a common and important theme.  While the act of innovation around a specific issue or problem may have value, there is much greater value to be realized when companies understand that developing a repeatable and sustainable innovation program is vital to their on-going growth and success.  The Vice-chairman of a fortune 500 manufacturing firm once said to me, “You can lean your way to profitability, but you can’t lean your way to prosperity.”  To drive the growth and value of the enterprise, companies need to develop innovation as a core competence.

This is where Bruce’s observation really does hit the mark.  Companies that are retrenching around a singular focus on efficiency truly don’t get it.  They don’t get the fundamental principles of sustainably driving corporate value—a sad situation for shareholders.

On the other hand, Mark is correct in noting that many companies are beginning to understand that innovation is more fundamental than just fixing today’s problem.   Developing innovation best practices and putting in place the right support systems to drive innovation excellence is key to deriving the optimal return on investment in R&D, driving top line revenue, and ultimately, delivering superior valuation growth.  Companies are missing the boat if they believe that running the periodic innovation exercise and accepting sporadic results is okay.  It is most definitely not okay, and there is a better way.

The leading companies of the future will be those that invest in establishing an innovation practice as a core discipline that is employed every day at every level of the organization.  There is too much at stake to not make this goal a top C-level priority.

So, what is your position on innovation?  Do you get it?

Spring Blogs Blooming

Well, it's time for spring cleaning.  So, I've updated my blogroll adding a few interesting sites: Innovation Ecosystem by Julie Fleischer, Logic+Emotion by David Armano, and Think DIfferently!! by Lauchlan MacKinnon.  These (and all the other sites on the blogroll) are great sites worth visiting.  Enjoy!!

What’s Old Is New Again

Over on the Innovation Ecosystem blog, Julie Fleischer writes, in “Visualizing the Threads,” about her contribution to a The Age of Conversation E-book.  She provides a brief snippet which hints that advertising is returning to a once and future state of being conversation based.

I like the example Julie uses and look forward to seeing the rest of Julie’s analysis on this.  It is interesting to see evidence that in almost any domain, so much of the future can be understood by knowing where we have already been.

What recent innovations can you cite that draw upon the experience of the past to drive the future?

The Tyranny of Either-Or

As one reads some of the common wisdom about product and service innovation these days, it is easy to get the impression that the product and technology itself is not only irrelevant, but may be an impediment to success.  No less than Steve Bennett, CEO of Intuit, opined that customer-driven innovation wins consistently against technology-driven innovation in April 16th edition of the Wall Street Journal.  Yet, something seems to be lost in such rhetoric.

James C. Collins, in Built To Last, discusses the notion that great companies are not those that choose wisely between A or B.  Rather, Collins contends that great companies are those that find the way to do both A and B.  In the case of innovation, that means companies’ innovation programs should be both customer-driven and technology-driven.  This doesn’t mean finding a balance between the two approaches; it means being completely focused on both aspects of innovation.

But why should we worry about technology-driven innovation when some are calling for a retreat from this approach?  Simply put, because no one seriously hoping to be an innovation leader can afford to turn a blind eye to the insights that technology provides to customer and market opportunities.  Don’t believe it?  Let’s consider a product that is very popular in the innovation world these days: the iPod.

I have always found the most interesting part of the iPod story to be not what Apple did, but what Sony did not do.  That’s right; the real story of the iPod is the object lesson of Sony’s lost opportunity and failure to see the writing on the wall.  Sony, the unassailable king of the Walkman, was the heir apparent of the iPod phenomenon.  All the information required to forecast the emergence of the entire iPod ecosystem we see today was available to Sony fully ten years before the first iPod hit the market.

Had Sony thought to conduct a simple exercise in high-level functional modeling of the Walkman and derive an abstraction of the main system function, it would have been quite clear that the Walkman’s purpose was not to be a portable tape or CD player, but to be personal entertainment delivery system.  This conceptual view of the Walkman might have lead to a very different product evolution.  Sony could have used this insight to initiate some directed customer investigation to better understand the job that customers’ would want filled by such a system.

Another piece of important information was the path of evolution of the media.  Audio delivery had already progressed from inflexible delivery media (physical etchings in vinyl discs) to the more flexible delivery mechanism of electronic signals stored on magnetic media.  Given the natural technical evolution of such systems, it was abundantly clear that the future would mean more efficient delivery means that would dispense with the physical distribution components.  Not only was this observable in the current state of the art at the time, but this notion was further validated by the then new MP3 standard.

With the insights noted above, it would not have taken any great sophistication to understand that the future of the Walkman should be moving aggressively in these directions.  Had Sony pursued these lines of action, they would have been forced to consider the opportunity around creating a virtual market place for the distribution of the media content.  This consideration would have easily exposed the unfolding opportunity space.

Of course, it is easy to point these things out in hind sight.  But, that does not change the fact that the entire opportunity represented by the iPod ecosystem was part of Sony’s visible future.  Unfortunately, Sony failed to employ proper innovation best practices, and thus missed a huge opportunity. 

Hopefully, we can all learn from Sony’s mistake and make reading the technology tea leaves a formal part of our innovation disciplines.  When solid technology understanding is coupled with strong understanding of customer goals, organizations will have no problems recognizing the latent opportunities that are within their grasp.  Don’t be constrained by thinking you must choose between being either a customer or a technology driver organization.  Instead, develop the capability to be a master of both disciplines.  Someone else’s blue ocean might actually fall within your red ocean.  By leveraging your strengths you may be able to dominate a new market far more easily than other new entrants.