Innovating To Win

Prior Art in Innovation

Last week a colleague popped in to my office and asked, “Jim, can you tell me about prior art?”  It turned out what he wanted to understand is how organizations should be thinking about prior art and its relation to their innovation efforts.  This is an interesting question because prior art is central to innovation, and yet many organizations don’t understand where and the extent to which prior art can be leveraged to enhance their innovation programs.

Let’s begin by clarifying what we mean by prior art.  In the context of innovation, the legal definition as it relates to patent law is too restrictive.  In the realm of innovation, we should be considering prior art to be any pre-existing information on the state of the art.  This extends the notion of prior art to include, for example, trade secret information which might not normally be considered in the stricter patent definition.

Where is such prior art useful to innovation practitioners?  It is highly valuable throughout the innovation process.

During the strategic planning phase, prior art is useful for a number of reasons.  Tasks such as: technology landscape analysis, S-curve analysis, technology evolution and scenario planning, white space and partner identification, and build vs. buy analysis all are highly reliant on analysis of prior art information.  In these planning activities, the ability to have an accurate view of the prior art landscape can allow an organization to make informed decisions.

Ideation is also great benefited from prior art.  When we consider the way in which most problems are solved, the vast majority are solved by applying known solutions.  Even highly inventive solutions typically leverage existing knowledge.  The ability to quickly and optimally solve problems is directly related to the ability to easily identify concepts relevant to the problem being examined.  The more you are able to leverage internal information assets in this context, the more efficient your organization becomes.  The more you are able to leverage external and cross domain information, the more inventive your organization becomes.

Selecting the right path forward when multiple concepts have been identified is a challenge for many companies.  Prior art is helpful here as well.  The global knowledge base represented by prior art can be used to validate conceptual strategies before entering costly prototype and test cycles.

Finally, once a high value solution path is selected, the questions of intellectual property protection loom large.  Do you have freedom to operate?  If you run into an IP barrier, is there a circumvention strategy that can be pursued?  Is the innovation protectable, and if so, what is the best strategy?  All of these questions are answered with the help of prior art.

There is no doubt that prior art is highly important to any innovation practitioner.  Innovation is to a great extent all about the reuse of prior art.  The more knowledge and experience you have in your tool box to approach an innovation challenge, the more likely you are to be successful in finding the best solution.  Being able to tap into prior art effectively expands your box.

For innovation practitioners the message is clear.  You need to be able leverage all types of knowledge effectively—when you need it; where you need it; in the context in which you need it.  Does your innovation infrastructure allow you to do this?  If not, this is an area you should be looking at without delay.

Interesting WSJ Interview

In the September 24 Wall Street Journal Technology Special Report, there is an interesting Q&A feature.  The item, titled “Managing Innovation”, features four senior managers answering questions from Scott Thurm, management-news editor for The Wall Street Journal.  Martin De Beer, Cisco Systems’ senior VP of the emerging technology group; Judith Estrin, chief executive of Packet Design; Douglas Merrill, Google’s VP of engineering and CIO; and Douglas Soloman, IDEO’s chief technology strategist participated in the Q&A.

The opening question addressed in the article probed the concept of thinking long term – specifically, “In a big company, how do you get people to think beyond 18 months if the whole company is focused on 18 months?”  This is an interesting and provocative question as it cuts to the heart of the dilemma all companies, big and small, face: the need to balance short term needs with long term objectives.  In the context of innovation, how can you build momentum around future strategic initiative when you are busy fighting the fires of today?

Both Ms. Estrin and Mr. Solomon correctly identify that the answer is more than just mounting a project to go define the future, but rather the answer lies in changing the cultural fabric of the organization to foster the seeds of innovation.  While it would be easy to say that such a response is obvious, it is nonetheless a very important point. The need to innovate is a constant and compelling force in business.

Market climates change.  Economic cycles have far reaching impacts.  Competitive landscapes continuous evolve.  Global dynamics create new demands almost daily.  The innovation of today may not be pertinent twenty four months hence.  Thus, there is a constant need to innovate and re-innovate.  The companies that understand this and develop the disciplines and stamina to mount a permanent, sustained innovation program are the companies that will dominate their markets in the future. 

Establishing a sustainable innovation program is a means to meld meeting short term needs with the long view.  To build on Ms. Estrin’s gardening analogy, the traditional methods of cultivating new ideas in greenhouse environments have been shown to be ineffective at addressing many of the fundamental organizational barriers to innovation.  As Ms. Estrin puts it, “…transplanting is the trickiest part of growing things.”  How and when to reintegrate new concepts remains a major issue.  This approach also compounds the fracturing of intellectual leverage by promoting the creation of knowledge silos within the organization.

A sustainable innovation program is a departure from the greenhouse mentality and is more akin to intensive gardening systems.  Each plot in the garden grows a variety of crops.  Each unit of the enterprise becomes equipped to drive innovation: both incremental innovation and radical innovation.

As Mr. De Beer notes, people don’t cease to be innovative thinkers just because they become part of a large organization.  However, the organization must provide both the infrastructure of process and tools as well as the cultural support to allow these people to be effective at innovation.  Often, the challenge for a large organization is simply knowing what it knows.  If every worker is empowered with the means and knowledge to allow them to assess the relevance of each issue they address, the organization will be more effective at surfacing key innovations when and where they are needed.

The degree to which organizations understand the importance of taking this long view of innovation and develop innovation as a core competency will be a key factor in determining how effective they grapple both with today’s urgencies and tomorrow’s strategic needs.  Sustainable innovation programs are the solution that will lead to the right balance for sustained success.

2nd IFIP Working conference on Computer Aided Innovation

Well, now that the autumnal equinox is nigh, it is time to return from holidays and get focused again.  The fall season looks quite exciting from an innovation perspective.  First up on my calendar is the 2nd IFIP Working Conference on Computer Aided Innovation.

The conference is cosponsored by IFIPS, Delphi, Chrysler, and ITESM: Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Institute for Advanced Technical Studies at Monterrey).  Consistent with the continuing development and understanding of structured innovation practices, this conference examines the role computer technology has in shifting innovation paradigms.

I am pleased to be one of the featured panelists at the evening panel discussions.  The topic of Discussion Panel I, “Optimization, Innovation, and the relevance of the software in those processes”, is one that is particularly of interest to me.

The event will be held over two days, October 8 & 9 at the Delphi Technical Center Brighton and the Chrysler Museum.  Let me know if you plan to be there.  It would be great to meet some blogosphere friends at the event.

Be A Fire Starter

In response to my recent post “What’s It Mean?”, Paul Williams submitted the following comment:

“Great post.  Your comment, "The innovation game is not for dabblers" is extremely to the point.  Many of the organizations that I work with, who struggle with innovation efforts that seem to start/stop, are typically the ones who seem to think that innovation is project-by-project based.

“It’s a discipline, with tools and process and metrics and goals and roadmaps.  In essence, to be successful, you have start with the first step, but also realize it is a long journey.”

Paul makes a great point.  As we have discussed here before, organizations move through a series of Innovation Maturity Model phases.  In the earlier stages, the organization acts in a very localized manner—picking and choosing where to apply good innovation disciplines.  A key distinction between organizations that get stuck in the Situational Innovation phase is the degree to which they understand that innovation is a core competency that must be developed.

In environments where this is not understood, the organization fails to move out of the opportunistic model of occasionally enhancing a project with structured innovation techniques.  In those environments where it is understood that properly supported innovation best practices help build the value of the company, the organization begins to move to a Repeatable Innovation phase of the maturity model.

So if you are an innovation practitioner within a company, the question you should be asking is, “Does my company understand the strategic value of implementing a sustainable innovation program?”  If the answer is yes, then you can have some confidence that the demonstrable successes of today’s opportunistic efforts will lead to a more comprehensive strategy for building value through innovation.  If the answer is no, then you need to become an innovation champion and find strategic endorsers who can help influence the corporate mind set. 

As Reggie Leach said: “Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.”  Light the fire of innovation success in your organization.

Melding Design and Strategy for Faster Innovation

In the September issue of the Harvard Business Review (one of my favorite publications), there is a short article titled “Innovate Faster by Melding Design and Strategy” by Ravi Chhatpar of Frog Design.  In the article, Ravi suggests that innovation moves along more rapidly and effectively when designers are included in the strategic planning process.  Specifically, Ravi highlights the value of having designers iterate through many prototypes as a way of refining strategic thinking while that thinking is still malleable.

There is no question that coupling strategic planning and design is key to well-formed innovation best practices.  The input from the design process early in the strategic planning cycle can provide very valuable insights in to right-to-market fit, feasibility, and cost.  Similarly, the flow of strategic input into the design process helps to ensure the correct alignment between the strategic intent of the product effort and its execution.

However, there is a key point that should not be missed—a point that Ravi only hints at when he states in his example, “We explored nearly 100 ideas, from the basic to wild, and then used prototypes to investigate the most compelling.”  The point is that prototyping is very expensive, and a well designed innovation practice should seek to vet concepts before going to prototype.

The concepts can be pre-validated in a number of ways.  Assessment of alignment with corporate objectives, congruence with technical parameters, external validation points of similar solution frameworks, and many other measures can provide simple and accurate ways to rank ideas and focus attention on those which are most promising.

Innovation best practices must include the mechanism to provide for definition and capture of the appropriate metrics by which concepts will be evaluated and the process for the application of those measures.  This mechanism should be integrated with the ideation process which should span across the strategic planning and design functions.  Only through the rigorous application of such a vetting and evaluation system, can organizations fully benefit from a high-performance informed innovation process.

So as Ravi says, get the designers involved early and often in strategic planning.  However, don’t forget to arm the designers with the tools and processes to allow them to rapidly zero in on the right concepts and thereby be effective contributors to the planning process.

On Blog! Award for Innovating To Win

Many thanks to Ken Flowers for recognizing Innovating To Win with an ON Blog! Award.  It has been great fun these last six months, but it is the feedback from readers that makes blogging worthwhile.  Thank you to each and every one of you.