Innovating To Win

Another Call To Action From The Economist

In “Something new under the sun”, from the October 13th edition of The Economist, we see another perspective on the importance of innovation.  Here are a few keys points from the article.

The article defines innovation quoting Richard Lyons, Chief Learning Officer at Goldman Sachs, as “fresh thinking that creates value.”  This definition is good, but it also deserves expansion.  We pursue innovation for a reason.  That purpose is to deliver value to a targeted audience.  However, in the corporate context there is a second aspect of value that must not be ignored.  Innovation should also deliver shareholder value.

As is pointed out in the article, innovation is a key driver of growth and its role in growth is increasing.  Companies that achieve repeatability in their innovation discipline tend to outperform their competitors.  This is what makes sustainable innovation so very important to companies—it is not the innovation itself; it is the results of the sustained innovation.

Also mentioned is the impact that the democratization of information flow will have on organizations.  As technology is enabling global player who were previously relegated to the sidelines, rich and mature companies must take note.  If they do not quickly learn to become nimble innovators, they run the risk of being outpaced by disruptive forces that are rapidly developing.

However, the game is not over for these well-established companies.  They have the resources and talent to recast themselves as high-performance innovation organizations.  But if they are to do so, they must act now.  The game is not over, but it is afoot.

What is your organization doing to respond to this challenge?

Time To Fish Or Cut Bait

Well, it’s official.  Yesterday, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, the first baby-boomer, filed for Social Security benefits.  She becomes the first of as many as 80 million individuals who will qualify for benefits in the coming years.

This should be a major wake up call for corporations.  With many of their most experienced and capable workers moving ineluctably towards retirement, companies must consider what this means to their capacity to innovate.  Don’t fool yourself by thinking that these are stodgy old geezers who have passed their prime.  These people are many of your most creative and valuable resources.

Have you thought of how you will capture their expertise and pass it on to the next generation of innovation workers?  What does your enterprise know, and how can you mobilize that knowledge?  Are your innovation systems capable of feeding the ideation engine in real time, or will your product pipelines run dry just when you need revenue stimulation most?

Are you addressing these questions?  Or, are you getting ready to hit the beach and go fishing?

Field Notes – October 2007

It is always interesting to talk with designers about their personal innovation experiences.  This week, I had an interesting conversation with an engineer from a major U.S. automotive manufacturer.  We were both attending a conference about software and innovation, so it was natural to talk about his experience using innovation software.

He told me he had an opportunity to use innovation software and found it very valuable.  He wished he still had access to the application, but the company had stopped making it available to him.  When I asked him if was going to try and get the software again, he indicated that he didn’t feel he could.  He felt that this initiative needed to be championed at a higher level in the company.  Until the attitude of those responsible for providing infrastructure changed, he didn’t feel he would get the support he needed to have access to innovation productivity tools.  He was disappointed by this situation because he felt that access to these tools would allow his to create more value for the company.

Unfortunately, this is a very common situation.  Innovation workers in the enterprise want to make a higher value contribution to the organization, but they don’t feel support from above to move in that direction.

Management must take responsibility for creating the right environment for designers and engineers to be most productive.  Management already owns responsibility for corporate revenue and profit goals.  What will it take for them to wake up and see that time waits for no one?

Just yesterday, I heard of another case of a company that had identified a breakthrough concept and then sat on it.  Now, they are kicking themselves because a competitor has developed and build IP protection around the technology.

The time to act in the innovation game is always now.  Don’t wait for your competitors to out run you.

What do you think?

Computer Aided Innovation Conference (Day 2)

The second day of the 2nd IFIP Working Conference on Computer Aided Innovation was filled with many good presentations.  Among them were:

• Automatic Shape Variations for Optimization and Innovation (presented by Noel Leon-Rovira and Jose Cueva)
• Constraint Based Modeling As a Means To Link Dialectical Thinking and Corporate Data: Application to DOE (presented by Thomas Eltzer)
• Computer-aided Patent Analysis: Finding Invention Peculiarities (presented by Gaetano Cascini)
• OTSM Network of Problems For Representing and Analyzing a Problem Situation with Computer (presented by Nikolai Khomenko)
• Computational Explorations of Compatibility and Innovation (presented by Ricardo Sosa)
• Enhancing Interoperability In the Design Process: The PROSIT approach (presented by Gaetano Cascini)

The two papers I found most interesting were those presented by Gaetano Cascini.

In his presentation on patent analysis, Cascini discussed how he has been examining the extraction of mereological and functional relationships from patent literature.  This was particularly interesting to me since my research team had already developed a technology for such high-level concept extraction from general text.  Cascini then introduced the concept of applying a metric to the extracted relations to identify elements of the patent that were most likely to be the distinctive elements of the patent.

In his second paper, Cascini discussed a collaborative project between the University of Florence and Milan Polytechnic.  The focus of this project is to find a way to connect computer-aided-innovation tools to computer-aided-design tools.  This is another technical challenge that I find personally very interesting.  The major issue that makes this difficult is the disparity in the level of abstract captured by each technology.  CAI works at a fairly high level of abstraction which at times may have no direct relation to the physical manifestation of a system.  CAD tools, by contrast, are used to model the physical geometry of systems.  This is a big problem and its solution would lead to a major change in the way we design systems.

The day was capped off by a discussion panel on Innovation From the Customer Point of View.  I was on of the invited panelist for this session.  There was some lively discussion around the topic, and the audience was very engaged.

I also gave a short presentation on the work that my research team has been doing in the area of computer aided innovation.  Here I described the feedback I have gotten from engineers and innovation workers in the Global 2000 manufacturing companies and how this client input has led to the development of a class of knowledge-enabled innovation applications.  The concept is grounded in the coupling of proven innovation best practice with leading edge semantic text analysis.  I showed some examples of engineering methods such as root cause analysis, system functional analysis, and failure mode and effects analysis and how they are made easier and more robust through knowledge-enablement, accelerating product delivery and return on investment for organizations using such technology.

All in all, the conference was very interesting and I am glad to have been able to participate.

Computer Aided Innovation Conference (Day 1)

Today was the first of two days I am spending at the 2nd IFIP Working Conference on Computer Aided Innovation.  It is an interesting conference that has attracted an international body of attendees.  Here are some highlights from the conference thus far.

Dr. Andrew Brown Jr., Executive Director & Chief Technologist for Innovation & Technology of Delphi Corporation, opened the conference with a keynote speech titled Innovation Today & Tomorrow.  In this talk, Dr. Brown discussed Delphi, his view of innovation, and how Delphi seeks to create value through innovation.

As Dr. Brown put it, “Innovation resides at the intersection of invention and insight.  Innovation creates new value.”  This position clear distinguishes between invention and innovation.  In essence, he is defining innovation as the creation and delivery of new customer value in the market—a theme he returned to several times in the session.

Several key success factors were identified as being important to innovation.  Among these were: active leadership, customer and market insight, strong execution which was defined as delivery of the right product at the right time and delivering exceptional value to the most important customer in the value chain (a concept Dr. Brown called value innovation).  This view is one I see repeated globally at high performance innovation organizations that are engaged in sustainable innovation disciplines.

It is highlighting Dr. Brown’s comments on active leadership.  All too often, companies talk innovation, but the management commitment to establish the living innovation culture is missing.  Dr. Brown showed that Delphi is seriously committed to making innovation a value driving core competence by outlining the role executive management plays in Delphi’s innovation model.  He also identified specific practices employed by Delphi to encourage and reward innovative behavior by employees.

After the key note speech, there were a number of presentations in two tracks.  Some of the sessions I attended included:

Locating Creativity in a Framework of Designing for Innovation, presented by John Garo of George Mason University, proposed an ontological framework for designing which was then used to discuss the points in the design process where creative thinking takes place.

Another session presented by Alexander Hesmer of BIBA, Supporting the Systemization of Early-Stage-Innovation by Means of Collaborative Working Environments, reviewed the work a multi-national team in investigating new software models to support innovation.  Many interesting concepts were presented that showed the breath of creative thought that is happening globally around capturing innovation practices in software.

Dr. Noel Leon-Rovira of ITESM presented a session on Comparison of Strategies for the Optimization/Innovation of Crankshaft Balance.  While the title of the session may sound a little dry and chewy, this was a very interesting examination of the application of genetic algorithm to a very complex problem of physical design.  The technique of splinization of the geometric model and using the control points of the spline as the genes demonstrated the applicability of goal programming to this space.

The day ended with a panel discussion on Optimization and Innovation Software in Product Development.  I was one of the panelists.  The discussion was lively and covered a wide range of topics that examined the very nature of innovation and what we should expect software to contribute to the process.

Don’t Look To The Media For Innovation Guidance

There seems to be trend developing in the general media.  Apparently, there is a lack of understanding about innovation—what it is, how it happens, and its potential impact.  In two unrelated blog posts today, the gauntlet has been thrown out.

First let me point you to Bruce Nussbaum’s blog where he states that folks at the New York Times don’t get it.  Bruce makes this assertion based on an article that appears in the Times about process innovation.  The problem, as Bruce puts it, isn’t the article, but the fact that such articles are so rare.

I couldn’t agree more with Bruce.  The coverage in the media on innovation helps perpetuate the myths of innovation and fails to shine much light on what organizations really need to do to excel.  Look at the amount of ink (much of it virtual) that was used in covering the introduction of the iPhone.  Let’s face it.  The iPhone isn’t really all that innovative.  (Sorry, Steve.  Well marketed yes; innovative no.)  Yet, the iPhone’s introduction dominated the innovation press for months.

Meanwhile, the serious work that many organizations are putting into developing their innovation competence goes unheralded.  Why? Because it is not very exciting, and it doesn’t sell papers (or whatever type of media is being pushed).

Over on 3D Mojo, Alex Neihaus writes about an article that appeared in Boston Globe Magazine.  According to Alex, the article focuses on a few entrepreneurs implying that their personal narcissism is what is needed to overcome the challenges of building a business.  Alex takes exception to this view because he feels that success requires building a cohesive team.

In my own experience, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  It does take a team to grow the business successfully.  But, it also takes the personal vision and commitment of a core set of people (which could be one) to keep the team focused and moving ruthlessly toward success.

For those of us in the innovation game, the viewpoints expressed by the press may be unsatisfying, but they are also not relevant.  Let’s not forget: innovation is about figuring out how to get where others can’t even imagine going.  Is it any surprise that the media can’t understand it?

Keep true to your innovation vision.  Build innovation as a core competence in your organization and create sustainable competitive advantage through your innovation efforts, and before you know it, you will be where all your competitors wished they had thought to go.