Innovating To Win

New Years Wish for 2008

This past week I have been doing what has become an annual ritual for me.  I took the week from Christmas to New Years off and enjoyed a mini-retreat.  It is good to unplug, unwind, and use the time to reconnect, reflect, and replan.

The past year has been pretty full.  It has had its lows (the loss of my mother), but it has also had some great highs.

We have a new member of our household.  Robbie, pictured above at 12 weeks, is now eight months old and rapidly approaching ninety pounds.  He is a very smart Berner-boy and is a joy every minute.

Professionally, it has been a year of validation.  The clients I work with in the global 2000 companies are demonstrating a growing appreciation for the importance and value of developing sustainable innovation practices as a primary engine for building corporate value.  With my research and development teams, we’ve also built awesome innovation tools for designers and engineers.

In the blogosphere, Innovating To Win is nearing its first anniversary.  So far, it has been a terrific first year, and I think it will be great in ’08.  I have also made many friends in the process—people who have engaged in the conversation, provided grist for the mill, or in other ways shown their support.  Among these are:

Dominic Basulto, Jim Belfiore, Navneet Bhushan, Kevin Brune, Sheila Busby, Graziano Casale, Jeff De Cagna, Jen Chan, Ellen Domb, Julie Fleischer, Ken Flowers, John Hunter, Sobana Iyengar, Erich Joachimsthaler, Michael Kaufman, Katie Konrath, Jeff Lindsay, Lauchlan Mackinnon, Steve Mann, Jeffrey Phillips, Mark Proffitt, Cass Purcell, Daniel Scocco, Paul Simister, Tina Su, Fernando Vallejo, Paul Williams, Tory Worman, Chuck Yorke, Alex Zakharov, Corey, Maz, and Michael (aka Diver Tomsen).

Thank you all for the conversation.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy, prosperous, and innovation filled New Year!

Are you making innovation resolutions for 2008?

E-Week Article on Thriving in Lean Times

Take a look at this article I submitted to e-Week on building an innovation culture.

Winter 2007 Blogroll Updates

As I watch the snow pile up from our second Thursday storm in a row, this seems as good a time as any to update my blogroll.  Additions to the list are:

Innovation Weblog – This is Chuck Frey’s Innovation Tools blog.  It is good aggregation style blog that touches on a lot of very salient innovation topics.

RealInnovation.com Commentary – This site features a lot of original content from a variety of commentators. I crosspost some of my articles from Innovating To Win there.

Seth’s Blog – This is Seth Godin’s blog.  It’s not really an innovation blog, but Seth post a lot of good insights on marketing and client-centric thinking that I think are relevant to innovation practitioners.

Think For A Change – Paul Williams does a nice job here posting occasional thought pieces on innovation.   His articles are very thoughtful and definitely worth checking out.

For the time being, I am removing one site from my blogroll.  Innovation Zen is a site that I think has lost a bit of its relevance.  When Daniel Sococco was driving the content, he did a great job of generating some interesting content.  However, things have changed and the content is not as consistent.  I will continue to watch this site, but for now I am delisting it.

As a side note, you may notice with this post that I just installed the Snap Shots widget to enhance external site link with visual previews of the destination sites.  Sometimes Snap Shots bring you information you want, without your having to leave this site, while other times it lets you look ahead, before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

I hope you like this feature.  I have liked it when I have seen it on other sites.  If you don’t like it, there is an opt-out option that you can get to via the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot.

Reactions to Crowd Innovation

Some great comments were posted to my article on Crowd Innovation over on RealInnovation where it was cross-posted.  I’ll share them and comment further on them here.  You can read the comments in their entirety here.

It is always a pleasure to chat with Ellen Domb, and her comments are always very insightful.  She responds saying, “Using the accumulated knowledge of human history is not the same as asking a crowd what to do--considerable skill (subject matter expertise, how to organize information, TRIZ structures) is needed to get anything useful.”

I couldn’t agree more.  The crowd may be able to provide grist for the mill, but there is a lot of work required to refine that raw material and derive something of value.  There are better, faster ways to get there.

Navneet Bhushan makes some good observations.  He correctly identifies that open-source manufacuting (think Linux) is different from the concept of crowd-sourced innovation.  Navneet continues on to say that, “… I believe hierarchies had their day - it is the melting structures towards loosely coupled networks that are going to play bigger role then they had - the age of Co-Creation is here - in a disruptive way ...”

True enough, Navneet.  But I don’t see sufficient examples to support crowdsourcing for innovation as an effective path for sustainable innovation practice.  To meet this metric, we will need to see real evidence that the successes are more than mere chance would produce.  Co-creation should definitely be leveraged, but in so doing companies can achieve strong, reliable results by managing their networks for greater relevance and alignment.

Spacecadet suggests that crowdsourcing has been around for a long time and that, “…it cannot be denied that there are many projects better done through this method at comparatively little cost.”

Well, Spacecadet… That all depends on what you call crowdsourcing.  Today’s meaning of crowdsourcing for innovation really refers to a model of concept sourcing that was simply not possible until recently.  Hence, your statement that it has been around since the 1800’s doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  Advances in technology have created a previously unknown capacity to connect with extremely broad communities and aggregate input.  It is this scale of connection that purportedly will yield valuable results because the scale and bread of community is expected to cast a wide enough net to capture the right, high-value concepts.  Unfortunately, there is no proof that this fundamental assertion has any credibility.  Only time will tell.

Anil Rathi expressed some very strong opinions on the subject calling some of my statements unfounded.  It is curious to note that Anil goes on to say:

“I will say your comment that "the larger the crowd the messier the haystack" is IMHO an accurate statement. If crowdsourcing is a giant free for all for ideas with little to no management, no structure, no processes, no incentives, etc. then a company is bound to get a bunch of 'raw' ideas that are may have taken a few minutes or seconds for members of the crowd to generate (ie. Dell's IdeaStorm). "Raw" ideas are nothing more than the content posted on a blog, left for interpretation by the reader. Who wants to sift through a bunch of raw ideas?”

Gee whiz, Anil.  I think you have just made my point quite eloquently!

Anil goes on to state that better results are achieve by carefully selecting a targeted participant group and managing the process of concept gathering very carefully.  He is exactly correct.  There a number of practices and techniques for harnessing the knowledge and insights of target groups that yield great insight.  Companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Frito-Lay have proven records of success with the application of these methods.  However, these methods are not crowdsourcing.

What do you think?

Seven Habits of Highly Innovative People

On Innovation Zen, Think Simply Now’s list of 7 Habits of Highly Innovative People is summarized as:

1. Persistence
2. Remove Self-Limiting Inhibitions
3. Take Risks, Make Mistakes
4. Escape
5. Writing Things Down
6. Find Patterns & Create Combinations
7. Curiosity

To be frank, I don’t really like this list. It seems a bit trite for my taste and doesn’t resonant with my own observations.  Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to criticize the Think Simply Now list with out offering an alternative view.  So, here is my list of seven key characteristics of highly innovative people.

Learn from everything
Innovation isn’t about the lone genius coming up with a brilliant idea on his own.  Innovation is about synthesis and connection.  The brilliance comes when one has the insight to connect the dots and see how to build upon experience to create something new.  Innovative people instinctively understand this and place high value on accumulating and internalizing the knowledge that is the catalyst of creative insight.  They learn from their experiences and seek out knowledge to complement that experience.

Understand the problem
There is no such thing as proactive innovation.  Innovation is a response.  Understanding what you are responding to is the first and most crucial step to focusing your innovation adventures.  How many people can you point to who try really hard but fail in the end because they didn’t understand the nature of the problems they we facing?  This is an all too common issue.  If you want to improve your chances of success, begin by understanding your goal.  Highly innovative people do this naturally.

Share the problem
No man is an island.  This is as true for innovation as any other arena of human endeavor.  Just as great innovators will collect knowledge, so to do they tap into the insights of others.  Understanding different viewpoints and alternative solution concepts yields deeper insight and will lead to better solutions.

Listen to the voice of the crowd, then go the other way
Highly innovative people are suspicious of the so called wisdom of the crowd.  They understand that the crowd has no collective vision and is driven by stimuli that are rarely aligned with the innovation goals.  The highly innovative person is not afraid to break away from the pack and chart a new course.  Innovators are leaders, and that means taking people to places that they would not have gone on their own.

Accept nothing less than success
Some people like to say that to succeed at innovation you must embrace failure.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  I made this point in my post “For Successful Innovation, Don’t Embrace Failure”.  Highly innovative don’t give up and admit failure the first time they run into a problem.  They keep reworking their ideas until they reach success.  Only after they have doggedly and passionately pursued their idea and exhausted all possibilities do they reluctantly yield to defeat. 

Believe the impossible is possible
Highly innovative people believe in their ability to do what other can not.  Instead of the big challenge, they see the big opportunity.  This might at first sound like a bit of feel-good motivation speak.  But, there is a very real truth here.  Every great innovation contains a really hard challenge.  If you don’t believe, you won’t achieve.

Practice innovation in everything
Being highly innovative is more that just something you do; it is a way of life.  Highly innovative people are always on when it comes to innovation.  They don’t save their innovation mindset for the big challenges; they view all challenges through the same innovation lens.  By regularly flexing their innovation muscles, they are ready when faced by the big challenges.  Great high-performance innovation organizations are the same way.  Sustainable innovation practice is weaved into their daily operations.

What’s on your list?

Does Nokia Need a New Innovation Recipe?

On consultaglobal Nokia’s innovation system is examined.  The article begins by quoting Nokia’s former VP of Corporate Strategy, Jarkko Sairanen, as saying, “If a formula existed that could deliver successful innovations on schedule, every company could be a winner.  Most managers will agree that innovation drives success, but there is no blueprint to show them how to generate it.”

Perhaps, Jarkko’s position is the voice of bravado coming from a company that enjoys a very big market share position.  On the other hand, maybe this statement is voice of complacency that exposes a chink in Nokia’s armor.

Nokia’s market share in the US is now down to 10% from 28% five short years ago.  Here is one market where Nokia is now playing catch-up and facing stiff challenges from competitive products like the i-phone.  Will other markets soon follow?

Clearly, Nokia is doing some things right.  The article mentions blending business thinking into go/no-go decisions when deciding which initiative to move forward with.  The importance of building a culture where innovation is something that everyone is expected to do is stressed.  Yet while everyone is expected to make innovation contributions, it would seem that no consistent way to equip people to make those contributions has been pursued.

One can’t help but wonder, if Nokia has built its current market position subject to the vagaries of accidental innovation, how much greater would there success had been if they had an understanding of sustainable innovation and put the principles of repeatable innovation practice into play?

The bottom line is that innovation recipes do exist, and many organizations are using them to cook up tremendous offerings that will deliver their customers value and in so doing build value for the company.  If you aren’t among these innovation leaders, it’s time to get cooking before someone else eats your lunch.

Forbes on Key Business Questions

I stumbled across an article on Forbes discussing “The 20 Most Important Questions In Business”.  The importance of innovation to a businesses strategy is underscored by this list of questions.  Here are some of the questions identified by Forbes that make that very clear:

How good is your value proposition?
What is your product differentiation?
What are the competitive threats?
What are your strengths & weaknesses?
How will you protect your intellectual property?
How committed are you to success?

These questions are interesting because what is more important than merely asking them is what you do about the answers.  For these questions in particular, your strategy and approach to innovation is a key driver in changing the shape of your predictable outcomes.

How are you building innovation competence to extend your value proposition?  What innovations in your product pipeline are creating sustainable differentiation? How do your innovation best practices help you anticipate competition rather than react?  Are your innovation programs capitalizing on your process and technology competencies; are they shoring up the weaknesses in you organization?  Do your innovation programs build persistent value through strong IP, and are you looking for opportunities where competitors have failed to do the same?  Are you doing all of these things with the confidence that you have a sustainable innovation culture that will continue to deliver these benefits?

If your answers to any of these questions are uncertain, then the state of your innovation capabilities does not speak to your commitment to success.  It’s time to make a commitment to innovation as a critical success factor in driving your business.

Power of Positive Innovation

On Guy Kawasaki’s How to Change the World blog, he talks about how stereotypes can negatively influence personal performance.  To avoid this problem, Guy prescribes avoidance of negative thinking and influences that might place you in a poor frame of mind for success.  This got me thinking a bit about the flip side of this—how thinking positively about things can lead to greater success.

I have always enjoyed the big challenge and have tended to go into environments where the margin of error is slim and the risks of failure are large.  This has often meant working in an environment of limited resources and many constraints.  It is in this zone of perpetual discomfort that I have thrived over the years while so many of my contemporaries have gone down in flames. 

I think there are several reasons that I have experienced success where others have failed.  Beyond the notion of deploying strong disciplines of product development and sustainable innovation practice, one element of this success has been leveraging the power of positive thinking.

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that being a Pollyanna is going to lead to success.  But, I do find that creating a culture that focuses on possibility rather that dwelling on the reasons why not can lead to amazing results.

We’ve all been there.  A big challenge looms, and the team feels overwhelmed.  The doomsayers begin the chants of “there’s not enough time”, “we don’t have the people we need”, or “we can’t do this without more resources.”  But, constraints are merely opportunities for innovation.  I have always pushed my teams to stop worrying about the reasons they can’t do something, and start looking at the reasons they might be able to accomplish that which may initially seem impossible.

As an example, it wasn’t all that long ago that I was discussing the potential of our semantic technology to help people find specific answers to questions that may be expressed in languages other than that of the person asking the question.  The first reaction of my Chief Scientist was one of “That would mean solving the intralingua problem; this is too hard.”  But, I wasn’t satisfied to accept this.  Instead, I started talking about the elements of our technology and how we might be able to reframe the problem to be more tractable.  It wasn’t long before my colleague was thinking more expansively too and exploring new ways of thinking of the problem.  The result is that now we have a true cross-language deep semantic concept retrieval technology that allows someone to submit a question in one language (let’s say English) and retrieve relevant answers from documents that are from another language (such as Japanese).

What has been your most memorable experience in breaking past psychological resistance with the power of thinking positively?

Crowd Innovation

“Avoid the crowd.  Do your own thinking independently.  Be the chess player, not the chess piece.”
-- Ralph Charell

Crowdsourcing seems to be a popular topic these days.  But, I can’t help thinking that its popularity will be short lived.  There doesn’t seem to be any credible evidence to support this practice as being particularly productive.

Certainly no one can expect that the random crowd will demonstrate great insight and wisdom in helping to solve a problem.  There are innumerable examples that show exactly the opposite to be true.  Two well known examples of this are the 1630’s Dutch tulip frenzy and the witch-mania that was common throughout the Renaissance and Reformation periods.  History teaches us that the wisdom of the crowd is a fiction and that the intelligence of the mob regresses to the mean.

While one can not rule out the possibility that a truly great concept may emerge from a lone voice within the crowd, this method of searching for great innovations can not be called efficient or repeatable.  The crowd does not know or feel your pain; they know not what your goals are or what you value.  This method is well likened to the search for the needle in the haystack--the larger the crowd, the larger and messier the haystack.

Some people suggest that crowdsourcing is a natural extension of team collaboration.  But this is not so.  The dynamics of the crowd are not related to those of the team.  More of the same is not the same.

The best achievements in sustainable innovation are seen in those organizations that understand that the quest for innovation can not be divorced from internal expertise.  This is not to say that external knowledge and contribution is not of value.  In fact, the integration of external concept sources is vital to breaking free of natural inertial forces that develop within organizations.  But this integration must be done in a rational manner guided by the in depth understanding of the enterprises capabilities, objectives, and the needs of the client.

What do you think about crowdsourcing?

Flights of Fancy…

Last week, I was away in Belarus.  I make this pilgrimage a regularly because I have a team of developers and researchers located in the heart of Minsk.  It is a long flight from Boston made longer by the fact that there is no way to get directly from here to there.  This usually length journey was made even longer when due to the regular Boston-Frankfurt-Minsk route being full, I had to go via Washington and Vienna.

My 24 hours en route gave me ample opportunity to think.  Naturally, one of the things I thought about was flying and how airlines exemplify good and bad attempts to innovate.  Here are three simple examples.  What others can you think of?

Good Innovation: United Airlines – Economy Plus seating
What a great idea this is!  Nothing is worse on a long flight that being jammed into a too small steerage class seat.  You all know what I am talking about.  You knees are pressed up against the seat in front of you.  Any hope of comfort vanishes as you notice the seat back in front of you start to recline into your lap.  Economy Plus is a welcome relief with its five extra inches of leg room.

Poor Innovation: Austrian Airlines – No video program listings
Let’s face it.  On a long flight, the in flight video is a good diversion.  But it is very frustrating when you don’t know what the choices are or how the programs might be scheduled.  On my flight to Vienna, I saw a few partial films.  They were partial because by the time I had found an interesting video channel, the program was always at least thirty minutes into its play cycle.  This is a mild annoyance that every other airline seems to be able to avoid.  What were the people behind this element of the client experience thinking?

Customer Hostile Innovation: Northwest Airlines – Seat held back from reservation pool
It had been a long time since I had flown on Northwest, and when I flew NWA earlier this year, I was quickly reminded why.  Northwest is in the habit of designating certain seats as available for reservation only with a premium fee.  This is absolutely beyond irritating.  This practice alone will keep me off NWA unless I have no other reasonable alternative.

These examples say something about how each company thinks of its clients and their practice of listening to the customer and understanding their needs.  What do you think?