Innovating To Win

HBS on Global Innovation Best Practices

A very nice piece appears on the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge site this week.  The article, “Best Practices of Global Innovators”, discusses some recently publish work by HBS Professor Alan D. MacCormack on how global innovators manage effective collaboration for innovation.

MacCormack cites three drivers of the collaborative trend: growing product complexity, the economic incentives of partnering with companies in emerging geographies, and the enabling influence of technology.  As a result, he says companies are increasing looking to global partnering as a way to bring more innovation to the table.

At the top of his list of critical principle needed to succeed at global innovation partnering is alignment.  That is ensuring that your innovation initiatives are aligned with your business objectives.  Of course, this is also true of home grown innovation too.  Innovations that are not aligned with corporate objectives will usual end up on the trash heap of failed distractions.

But there is more that global innovation and internal innovation competence have in common.  MacCormack identifies people, process, platforms, and programs as the four keys areas of investment for firms to develop their innovation capabilities.  As we have discussed in numerous posts here, these are fundamental elements of a true innovation culture.

The article is both meaningful in its take on collaborative and its relevance to development of internal innovation competence as well.  I recommend giving it a read.

Field Notes – November 2007

Before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, I paid a visit to a Fortune 100 company and sat with a fellow chartered with looking at how to bring innovation technology into the company.  My visit was both interesting and enlightening.

This manager—I’ll call him Bob—was very emphatic in his desire to find a way to bring sustainable innovation practices to his company.  Bob understood the potential value of deploying innovation best practices and how it could help his company build shareholder value.  Bob understood the need to connect individual innovation workers and communities of practice together and mobilize internal and external knowledge resources to support a broad and living ecosystem of collaborative innovation.

So, you would think that Bob was all set to get cracking on building the infrastructure to support the culture of sustainable innovation he envisioned.  Whoa there big fella!  Not so fast.

It seems that Bob didn’t want to share ownership of the innovation agenda.  He didn’t want to bring the people who owned the responsibility for delivering on the corporation’s product and market objectives into the conversation.  Instead, Bob wanted to control the company’s innovation initiative from his venue of corporate IT.  This is a big mistake.

Introduction of any new system of practices into an organization requires the buy in of all affected constituencies.  This is true for all such initiatives and no less so for sustainable innovation initiatives.  By controlling the agenda with an iron fist, Bob is dooming his initiative before it even gets off the ground.  At best he will achieve slow, half-hearted adoption of the practice system he proposes to his communities of innovation workers.  At worst, he could absolutely kill for years to come the chances for successfully building a high performance innovation culture in his company.

In the innovation game, delay comes at a very high cost.  Bob’s choice comes with very dear cost in shareholder value.

If you are sitting in Bob’s position, don’t repeat his mistake.  Be inclusive and share the wealth.  By building bridges to your constituencies early and often, you will develop a pool of innovation champions that will help you raise the standard of sustainable innovation for your organization.

If you are one of Bob’s potential constituents and you understand the need to build strong innovation competence, you had better find out who is the Bob in your company and what is being done to expedite bringing innovation skills, tools, and practices in rapidly.

Doing Both - Covering Your Innovation Bases

In response to yesterday’s post “Beware The Accidental Innovation Trap”, reader Jen Chan muses that “It would be nice to sort of have a combination of both.”  That is to be able to take advantage of unplanned, opportunistic innovation and also to be able to pursue directed innovation in a sustainable manner.

Jan, I couldn’t agree more.  More importantly, you can have your cake and eat it too.  This is the very reason that I was so emphatic in my comments yesterday. 

Companies that are slogging through the quagmire of accidental innovation have no choice.  They are dependent on luck for their continued success.  Will a great idea present itself?  Will they be able to recognize the opportunity if it does arise?  Will the company be able to distinguish between the great opportunity and the resource sink hole masquerading as a great idea?  Will the company be able to capitalize on the opportunity effectively?  Companies that wait in hope that the great opportunity will happen on their doorstep are ill equipped to answer these questions.

On the other hand, companies that build sustainable innovation best practice into their business processes are ready to answer these questions.

They can be confident that opportunities will be arise because the company has a systematic way to both look for new concepts in a directed way, but also to flush unexpected opportunity from the hedgerows.  They have confidence that they will be able to recognize the great opportunity because they have in place the methods to systematically evaluate the opportunities.  These same systems also filter out concepts that are likely to be simply distractions.  Innovation best practices integrated into the design and delivery lifecycle ensure that identified opportunities can be converted into realized value in the quickest and most efficient manner.

This is why companies should be adopting sustainable innovation as a key source of value creation.  These practices give them both maximum flexibility and the capability to maximize their innovation investments.

Fishing For Innovation

Katie Konrath uses the concept of teaching someone how to fish as a vehicle to discuss how sometimes creativity involves simply identifying an opportunity or making a connection that creates on going value.  However, I see a deeper meaning in her chosen metaphor.

Companies are faced with innovation challenges all the time.  Yet, in many organizations the focus is on the urgency of the moment, not the continuing need to fuel corporate value with innovation.  The conversation is around how to identify the specific next product, how to respond to the latest competitive threat, or how to find that elusive break-out strategy like XYZ Corp.  In the hurried rush to address the latest tactical issue, the notion that there is tremendous strategic benefit to be derived from developing organizational innovation competence as an on going and fundamental source of value creation goes unnoticed.

Instead of learning the science of innovation angling, companies bring in outside innovation consultants in the hopes that these experts will leave behind a nice, fresh, plump idea-fish for the company to consume.  Unfortunately while the company may indeed enjoy a tasty meal through this approach, organizational health is adversely affected by innovation malnutrition.  This is because companies can not practically deploy such consultative expertise everywhere it is needed, and the consultants are not able to draw upon the benefits of organizational context and continuity with the same facility that internal innovation workers would be able to leverage.

This is why top innovation organizations invest in learning how to be effective at fishing for innovation.  They develop the skills to understand the waters and species of fish that are available.  They acquire the tools and infrastructure to equip their fleet with the ability to understand where the richest catches may be whether they are in the deep blue waters of new market opportunity or the warm red waters of the current customer shoals.  Finally, they train their fishermen on the best practices to use this tackle and provide them with the metrics and incentives to guide the voyage.

So, if you want a quick meal, go ahead and buy that idea-fish.  But if you want to build sustainable growth and value for your organization, learn to fish and enjoy the prosperity that comes from sustainable innovation.

Beware The Accidental Innovation Trap

I stumbled across some comments about a new book on innovation.  The book, Strategic Intuition, purportedly argues that serendipitous innovation is best.

With all due respect to the author of the book, Columbia Business School Professor William Duggan, my immediate reaction to this was: “What a crock!”  In all fairness, I haven’t read Duggan’s book, but based on the review I have just read I’m not inclined to waste any time on it.  This is just another reason we see articles such as “Proof M.B.A.s Are Overrated, by 20 People Who Are Smarter and Richer than Your Professors” cropping up from time to time.

Perhaps, it is the allure that one doesn’t have to work at innovation, but rather one just needs to sit back and wait to win the idea lottery that makes this myth of innovation so appealing.  Perhaps, it is simply the idea that luck is what made those others guys so successful, and not that they were smarter, more driven, or worked harder at it which so many people find a comforting antidote to the mindless malaise of mediocrity.  What ever the reason, there is seems to always be someone advocating that innovation shouldn’t be approached purposefully.

Do people stumble across great ideas from time to time?  Yes.  Unfortunately, these stories of random success filter in to the general consciousness and thinking about innovation, and many people respond perfectly to the operant conditioning of irregular rewards.

But in the real world of business, leaving innovation to fate is a recipe for failure.  To maximize one’s ability to capitalize on opportunity, it is essential to make an integral part of the business execution engine the ability to understand the opportunities that exist, your capabilities to respond to those opportunities, and the methods to quickly transform opportunity into realized achievement.  This is no game of chance.  Success at innovation is a key element of today’s business success.  Take control of your business future by putting good innovation practices in place.

And don’t worry about missing that great serendipitous idea.  If you understand your business factors and have sustainable innovation practices integrated into your business infrastructure, that great idea won’t go unnoticed.

A Conversation With Vincent Lyons - Part II

I have received some good feedback on the first podcast in my series of conversations on innovation and innovation practice with leading innovation practitioners.  Here is the second installment in my three part discussion with Vincent Lyons, Vice President of Engineering & Technology for Leggett & Platt.  Vincent joined Leggett & Platt in 2006 to head up the company’s Innovation Redefined initiatives and has achieved much in a short time.

In the first segment, Vincent and I talked about the universal innovation imperative felt by global 2000 companies and the key challenges they run into when trying to create a sustainable innovation engine.  In particular, we discussed how companies:

• have few if any models for repeatable means of innovation
• are pushed to rush to a solution by competition & time pressures
• lack the ability to leverage of internal corporate wisdom
• have limited visibility to relevant knowledge outside their domain of expertise

In this second discussion, Vincent and I explore the strategies for successful deployment of sustainable innovation practice.

(Podcast length: 14:15)

I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did.  Next time, we’ll dig in to how these strategies are being used at Leggett & Platt to power their Innovation Redefined initiatives.

Innovation & The Build ~ Buy Dynamic

An interesting article appears on Able Brains concerning whether or not a company can be innovative through acquisition.  The notion that a company can sit back and wait for another company to emerge around an interesting and innovative concept and then snatch it up to build the acquirer’s innovation portfolio is very attractive to larger or cash rich companies.  But, does it work?

In practice, the results are mixed.  Some companies thrive through a process of continuous product portfolio manipulation-buying new properties and selling off tired ones.  But there are pitfalls to this approach that have resulted in highly visible disasters at other organizations.  Organizations that succeed at this strategy understand two very important points.

First, they understand that picking the right properties is the key.  For this, they still much develop the right disciplines of innovative thinking.  That right.  Buy innovation still requires some innovative thought.  You need to be able to identify the opportunity space and why the acquisition under consideration will produce a 1+1=3 effect.  Why is this company of interest?  How does the innovation asset that has captured your interest with your corporate strategy?  What are the complementary opportunities created by the acquisition?

Second, the successful innovation acquirer understands the mechanics of organizational integration.  You don’t want to kill the value of the asset you have just purchased with a heavy handed take over mentality.  You must understand the nature of the property you are buying including the people and cultural components.  The integration plan must fit the situation and not try to bend the acquired organization to fit your mold until it breaks.

Good merger and acquisition planning and executing is an important discipline to have in your arsenal of innovation best practices.

And The 3M Innovation Beat Goes On…

Design News reports that 3M is backing off on forcing Six Sigma methodology on its research & development activity.  After it had been widely acknowledged that 3M had lost some of its innovation heritage when Six Sigma was pushed throughout the organization, 3M CEO George Buckley is now exercising discretion in the application of the methodology within 3M.

While Six Sigma will still be applied in the manufacturing and supply chain parts of 3M practices, R&D will have the flexibility to cherry pick which elements of Six Sigma add value to their innovation disciplines.  This is a good move for 3M and a reaffirmation of why 3M has been so successful for so long.  By learning from their experience, 3M demonstrates the ability of the organization to find a way to have both predictable quality delivery and strong innovation practice in their set of core competencies.

The ability to pursue both quality and innovation is fundamental to the success of any company today.  Too many companies focus solely on the quality side of the equation and neglect the development of sustainable innovation best practices in their organizations.

Ripe For Technology Innovation

Last week, Washington, D.C. based research and consulting firm Social Technologies published its list of top areas for technological innovations.  It’s quite an interesting list.

1. Personalized medicine
2. Distributed energy
3. Pervasive computing
4. Nanomaterials
5. Biomarkers for health
6. Biofuels
7. Advanced manufacturing
8. Universal water
9. Carbon management
10. Engineered agriculture
11. Security and tracking
12. Advanced transportation

Certainly, these are hot areas with many of the organizations I talk to, and together they have tremendous potential for impact around the globe.  Do any of these areas touch your business?  How do they intersect with the macro trends you watch?

A Conversation With Vincent Lyons - Part I

This is first in a series of occasional podcasts featuring conversations on innovation and innovation practice with leading innovation practitioners.  To kick off the series, I am very pleased to be joined by Vincent Lyons, Vice President of Engineering & Technology for Leggett & Platt.  Vincent joined Leggett & Platt in 2006 to head up the company’s Innovation Redefined initiatives and has achieved much in a short time.

This first podcast is part one of a three part discussion.  In this segment, Vincent and I talk about the universal innovation imperative felt by global 2000 companies.  In subsequent segments, we discuss strategies for establishing a sustainable innovation program and how these strategies have been pursued by Leggett & Platt.

(Podcast length: 13:12)

I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did.