Over on Phil McKinney’s Blog, Phil posted a rather nice presentation on an approach to innovation he labels Killer Innovation. It is definitely worth a look if you’ve missed it.
A brief summary can be gleaned from slides 11, 12, and 16.
Slide 11 talks to the failures of traditional unstructured brainstorming methods. For some strange reason, this topic seems to engender a lot of passion in people. You either love these brainstorming exercises or you hate them. I have to agree with Phil on this one. In general, unstructured brainstorming is ineffective and yields mediocre results. Sure, once in a while a good idea comes out of these sessions, but in general the output is the same old ideas heard for the umpteenth time.
Slide 12 shows the distinction between incremental and breakthrough innovation. While this might seem obvious, people often forget that there is substantial value in both variants. The challenge for companies is be to good at both. Perhaps this is one area where I would fault Phil’s deck. I didn’t notice anything on how to uplift the value of the incremental component of a company’s strategy. Of course, that may simply be because Phil’s clearly more focused on the mission of driving breakthrough thinking.
Slide 16 is the big picture slide. Here, FIRE (Focus, Ideation, Ranking, and Execution) is outlined as the high-level killer innovation game plan. As a summary, this is very good.
Focus ensures you are looking at the right problems. This focus leads to higher quality ideas. Let face it, when we hear about the 6000 ideas it takes to lead to one deliverable product, a big part of the issue is the preponderance of low quality of ideas that we have to sift through to identify the ones that will yield the killer innovations.
For Ideation, Phil talks about using structured questions to lead thinking. This type of structured brainstorming is one of many possible approaches (as is SCAMPER, also mentioned in the presentation). This area is the one I found somewhat weak in the presentation. I have no doubt that the approaches Phil recommends are an improvement over the unstructured alternative. Yet, there is still a lot missing here.
Today’s technology capabilities allow ideation exercises to be greatly enhanced by integrating rich knowledge, harvested from both inside and outside the organization, to be leveraged by concept generation teams on demand. Additionally, ideation technology should really be integrated with the knowledge workers’ activities for best leverage. In other words, should I really have to stop and put aside my design project while I put on my ideation hat? Ideally, the answer is no. I should be able to have idea generation practices woven seamlessly into my work patterns.
Completing the FIRE discussion, are the points about ranking and execution. There is no debating that good innovations are ones that align properly with the company’s objectives, and once identified crisp execution is needed to bring those innovations to fruition.
Obviously, there’s a lot more detail in the presentation. Take a look, and let me know what you think.
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