Innovating To Win

Bnet Five Tips for CEOs on Innovation

An article offering “Five Tips for CEOs on Innovation” appears on bnet.  As with many such articles, the advice given is a mixed bag.

Here are the five points, and some of my thoughts on the tips.  I’d love to hear what you think.

“Create a company-wide culture where innovation is worshipped” – This advice reminds me of the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.”  While I absolutely endorse the establishment of a strong, sustainable innovation culture, it is important to remember which is the cart and which is the horse.  By this I mean that innovation is not the end in itself.  The end is value creation.  An organization that puts innovation on a pedestal without tying that innovation to corporate objectives has little hope of seeing the results of that innovation driving the value of the enterprise.

“The CEO’s role varies substantially” – The point being made here is that CEOs must recognize that innovation can come from anyone in the organization.  This is very sound advice.  Every member of the organization has a unique perspective and these perspectives should be included in the strategic innovation process.  The need to encourage the ubiquity of contribution is one of the reasons that CEOs should ensure that all knowledge workers are equipped with the skills and tools to be successful contributors to the innovation process.

“Sometimes you have to break the rules” – This is a popular statement that pops up from time to time.  However, popularity doesn’t make it so.  Nor does pointing to an anecdotal story of someone succeeding by going outside of the system prove that the success could not have happened within the system.  However, the popularity of this statement should tell us something very important.  People clearly don’t feel the rules encourage or support innovation.  Here is the real advice that CEOs need to focus on—change the rules to empower your innovation workers.  This will allow your workers to achieve great things, and give the company the ability to develop and deploying innovation outcomes in an integrated fashion.

“A corollary of what I’ve said above is that innovation should not be limited to an innovation or R&D department” – Yes, it true there really aren’t five tips here.  As above, CEOs must recognize that innovation can come from anyone in the organization.

“One of the most powerful things a CEO does to spur innovation is the allocation of capital” – This is certainly a very important thing.  However, this is not where the CEOs responsibility ends.  The CEO is responsible for setting the corporate agenda and direction.  As it pertains to innovation, this must mean that the CEO has to make it unambiguously clear that development of the company’s innovation capacity is a critical success factor for the organization and a central element of the plan to build corporate value.  The CEO must ensure that the top-level mandate is felt throughout the organization on a continued basis.

Just my thoughts…  Do you agree?

Everyday Innovation

“The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.”
-- Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852)

Recently in Seven Habits of Highly Innovative People, I wrote that highly innovative people are always on when it comes to innovation.  This is something I have observed time and time again.  Yet, some have asked what I meant by that.

Whether by design or happenstance, it seems that world-class innovators don’t put on their innovation game face only when a big challenge comes across their desk.  For these people, innovation is not a task; innovation is a way of being.  They don’t talk about being innovative; they just do it at every turn.  Let me present two examples of what I mean by practicing innovation thinking in every day life.

Mansour Ashtiani is a top inventor at Delphi Corporation, a first rate TRIZ practitioner, and someone I am fortunate to call a friend.  One day Mansour was telling about how TRIZ was a discipline that was helpful in daily life.  He told me about a challenge he had been faced with at home.  It seems he had to move a piano into his house by himself.  The piano was in a truck and he knew that getting it down the ramp at the back of the truck was going to be a big problem.

Mansour looked at the system of resources available to help him move the piano easily.  There were several elements in the system, the piano, the truck, the ramp, the ground, and himself.  Through his analysis, he came to realize that he could use the incline of his driveway to help move the piano.  He was able to position the truck so that the ramp was almost level.  This made getting the piano down the ramp a simple task for one person.

My second example is closer to home.  My wife is in the habit of dissolving aspirin before she takes it.  In the past, she did this by taking some tea in her teaspoon, balancing the spoon on the rim of the cup, and placing the aspirin in the bowl of the spoon.  This worked well except for one problem.  If anything jarred the cup, the spoon would fall into the cup, and her tea would be ruined.  Seeing that sequence play out one too many times, I asked her if she would like to me fix the problem for her.

The solution as you can see from the picture above was very simple.  I modified her spoon so that it perches on the rim of any cup or glass and by so doing changed the system of forces that governed the spoon.  The bowl can be dipped into the tea with a gentle tilt of the handle.  Release the handle and the spoon returns to a position of rest that keeps the aspirin from tainting the rest of her tea.  No more worrying about a rambunctious dog bumping into the table and sending the spoon plunging into the cup.

These are simple daily problems—the type of problems we are all faced with.  But, these daily problems give us opportunities to exercise our innovation skills.  By regularly flexing our innovation muscles, we are ready when faced by the big challenges.  How have you exercised your innovation muscles in daily life?

The Secrets Within

When it comes to innovation, leveraging knowledge is fundamental.  But where does this knowledge come from?  For innovation workers in corporations there are many possible answers.

Internal knowledge comprising the company’s accumulated wisdom and tribal knowledge is the first thing that might come to mind.  This information might exist in a PLM repository, a document management system, or simply be stored somewhere on a corporate shared drive.  Every organization has such information.  In fact, most companies are awash in such data.  However in most organizations, knowledge worker tasked with making crucial innovation decisions have very poor access to this information.

The access is made difficult by a number of issues.  Organizational silos make it difficult to know where data exists.  At times, sharing of information is not a part of culture; all too often, the request to share data means, “I want to see their data.”  Even within a group, the information is still unnavigable.  Traditional knowledge management and search solutions don’t map to the needs of knowledge workers.

The knowledge worker’s need for information is highly contextual.  This means the method of access should reflect that context.  In order for workers to make use of the vast sea of data, the data needs to be self-organizing and sensitive to the context of the designer’s need.  The knowledge worker needs a design-intent based concept retrieval capability.

In this model, designers don’t need to play guessing games trying to construct the right combination of keywords that will tease the desired knowledge from the corporate archives.  Rather, as the knowledge worker conducts their routine tasks, the context of their work defines the information need and the information infrastructure serves up that knowledge without the worker having to search.

This is what innovation infrastructure should deliver if it is to serve the needs of today’s knowledge workers.  Is this what you are getting out of your innovation infrastructure?

Global Top 10 Predictions for Product Lifecycle Strategies in 2008 Webcast

Yesterday, I caught the webcast “Global Top 10 Predictions for Product Lifecycle Strategies in 2008.”  The presentation by Joe Barkai, the product lifecycle strategy practice director for Manufacturing Insights, looked at global trends in the manufacturing community with an emphasis on product lifecycle management (PLM) processes and infrastructure.  Here are some key highlights that stood out from my perspective.

Joe opened the presentation with a discussion of two key factors that he saw as underlying drivers for manufactures: compliance & sustainability, and the aging of the workforce.  This second issue is certainly consistent with what I hear from global companies.  The generational turnover in the work force is causing great concern about how to best capture and preserve the intellectual capital that is the basis of innovation.

This set the stage nicely for Joe to identify the need for innovation as the number one prediction for 2008.  This was great validation in that traditionally the PLM centric view has positioned innovation as an adjunct.  But with this presentation, Joe put innovation at center stage.

Another of Joe’s predictions was around the re-emergence of knowledge management as an area of interest.  This was no surprise as it tied directly back to Joe’s opening remarks.  But, the case was made nicely pointing to the loss of knowledge companies are experiencing and the transformation of the workforce.  These trends, along with the increasing pressure to leverage knowledge more quickly, suggest that any successful innovation agenda must consider how to equip global knowledge workers with seamless, in-context access to breakthrough concepts.

As a side note, Joe took direct aim at Google noting it as an unsuitable tool for innovation research.  Joe’s position is that keyword based search technologies can not meet the information demands of product designers.  Rather, semantic technologies that can provide design-intent based search capabilities are required.

In closing the session, Joe identified key recommendation for manufacturers.  His number one recommendation: accelerate investments in decision making capacity.  This speaks directly to the innovation agenda.  Sustainable innovation practice is the foundation for enabling good decision making.

Just Innovate

Over on Innovation in Practice, Drew Boyd posts some thoughtful commentary on my recent post, "The Lonely Voice of Innovation".  Drew writes:

“This strikes a familiar chord with my colleagues in the Fortune 100.  Not only can innovation champions feel lonely, they can become extinct if they are not careful.  The Association for Managers of Innovation studied why corporate innovation champions struggle to survive.  The study looked at what actions and behaviors put these managers at risk in their efforts to evangelize.  Of the 15 innovation champions in the study, 10 left their organizations and became consultants, 4 joined smaller or start-up companies, and 1 retired. None returned to a Fortune 500 company.  Most of the consultants have as their clients Fortune 500 companies and, in some cases, their former employers.”

Drew’s advice?  Stop talking about innovation; just do it.

As Dominic Basulto points out, this message is starting to appear in ad spots by IBM.  But here’s the rub.  For most people, the response is “Just do what?”

As Drew suggests, the what is the practice of proven innovation methods.  Repeatable, sustainable innovation starts there—innovation best practice—and is supported by the right infrastructure to enable innovation workers to efficiently employ the methods and leverage information assets.

Are you moving ahead with sustainable innovation practice deployment?  Is your team ready to build corporate value through innovation?  Or is your answer like that in the IBM ad—“We haven’t ideated that yet.”

Broken Windows of Innovation

Social policy has long been influenced by the Broken Window Theory.  Strangely, I see a similar phenomenon at work in our innovation neighborhood.  I see the evidence in the language of the discussion that is used.

Usually, I don’t like to engage in what could be called a semantic debate, but in some cases, it can be important.  Language is very powerful.  It frames both our discourse and our thinking.  A few rightly chosen words have the power to inspire.  Alternately, a few carelessly chosen words can start us on a slippery slope towards apathy and resignation.

In “Seven Habits of Highly Innovative People,” I named “accept nothing less than success” as one of the traits I see in great innovators.  The message is simple.  Innovation is hard work.  It takes dogged determination to see it through.  While it is important to learn how to fail fast, it is even more important to learn when to do so and when to stick it out.  Thomas Edison said it best, “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Yet, we still hear many people espousing the philosophy of failure as a key tenant of the innovators lot.  In yesterday’s New York Times article “The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It?”, G. Pascal Zachary writes about the challenge of the innovator to predict the success of a new market innovation.  Zachary goes on to say, “FOR technological innovators, the cash register can ring either way. They may achieve a smash-hit breakthrough, or simply make a slight improvement in a technology that humans already feel comfortable with. Most innovators no longer even try to predict human reactions to their creations.”  He punctuates this last comment by quoting Henry Kressel, a partner at Warburg Pincus and a co-author of “Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations Are Changing the World,” as saying, “You throw technologies into the market and see what sticks.”

It would be a sad state of affairs if product development and innovation were truly the game of random chance that Zachary describes.  But, it is not.  How many times have you seen a big product launch fail miserable that caused you to wonder, “What were they thinking?”  How many times have you looked at a case study that concluded the poor outcome could have been avoided if the people involved had only consider some factor that in retrospect should have been obvious.  Sure, hindsight is 20/20.  But that doesn’t mean that big failures aren’t the result of poor execution.

Good adherence to and execution of repeatable innovation best practices yields superior results.  This is an undeniable fact that has been shown in many research reports.  If you recognize the need to innovate, then there is a clear path that avoids slogging through the muck, mire, and poor returns of the accidental innovation morass.

Eschew the temptation to accept mediocrity in innovation accomplishment by chanting the simple innovation means failure refrain.  Every act of accepting the status quo in favor of investing in sustainable innovation mastery creates another broken window in our innovation neighbor and inures us to the gradual descent into the accident innovation abyss.

Fun With Blogging…

Well, I have been fighting a nasty cold the past few days.  The time in bed has found me thinking about having a little fun with my blog.  So, I have added a couple features to Innovation To Win.

On the side bar, you will notice I have added a MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget.  I think it would be cool to see who is in our little innovation community.  So, I hope you’ll join the Innovating To Win community.

I am also going to start conducting some rather unscientific polls on questions of innovation interest.  If there are some questions you would like to see asked, shoot me an email.

I hope you enjoy these new additions.

Pervasive Innovation

Gary Hamel’s recent article, Innovation Hacker, has stimulated a lot of discussion.  In it, Gary asks why he doesn't see more CEOs investing in the broad deployment of innovation skills.  It’s a great question.  Clearly, innovation is a key concern for CEOs; it is among the top priorities for over 70% of CEOs.  So, Gary’s observation suggests an interesting disconnect.

Steve Mann comments that while training is important, it is not enough.  Without the culture to support innovation, success will not be easily achieved.  Mitch Ditkoff chimes in agreeing with Gary’s call for broad training and suggesting that organizations need to be full of “innovation ninjas.”  Clearly, Gary’s comments have resonance.

Returning to Gary’s question of why more organizations don’t provide innovation skills training to the broader population of innovation workers, one can draw only one conclusion.  Many executives simply don’t have a clear perception of the value (i.e. the tangible ROI) of doing so.

This lack of clarity leads to some related issues.  These executives have a limited view of who needs innovation skills.  They also have a limited view of where innovation fits within their organization.  This is a tragedy to say the least.  All innovation workers need innovation skills; innovation is pervasive in the high performance innovation organization.

Are there people who work on improving your current products?  Are there workers who look at developing new products?  Is anyone in your organization looking at intellectual property—protecting it, monetizing it, breaking past competitive barriers?  Do you practice risk management disciplines to try and anticipate issues?  Does your organization look for new market opportunities?  Is anyone looking at finding competitive advantage through novel production and delivery means?

Chances are you have answered yes to all these questions.  Are there designers or engineers in your organization who are not engaged in any of these tasks?  Every one of these activities is targeted at creating value for the company, and every one of these activities is made more productive with the implementation of sustainable innovation best practices.

If you could improve the effectiveness and contribution of every innovation worker through innovation skills training, why wouldn’t you equip everyone with the tools and training for success?  Who in your organization do you want operating at less than peak performance?  Which group in your corporation do you want to see achieving at a less than optimal level?

Innovation Challenging Assumptions

Reading Seth Godin’s post, Vestiges, I couldn’t help but recall Robert Kriegel and David Brandt’s book Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers: Developing Change-Ready People and Organizations.  Seth is correct to point out that all too often concern over vestigial aspects of our products or processes get impede progress.  Psychological inertia is one the most common silent killers of innovation.

A process manufacturer wanted to rebuild a plant in order to increase their production capacity.  When they began looking at the project, it was stated that all aspects of the process were open for modification except for one.  A large mixing vat was viewed a being central to the production process.  Yet, when asked why the vat was so critical to the process, none of the manufacturing engineers knew the answer.  The vat’s mystique was based on legend lore that had long ago been lost.  This realization opened the door to considering something radical.

The manufacturer began to rethink their view of the entire process, and found in that analysis that the sacred vat was in fact the source of a large number of manufacturing problems.  The best path forward in redesigning their plant was to eliminate the mixing vat entirely.

Want to find truly high value, game changing innovations?  Then dare to think the unthinkable.

How have you challenged entrenched thinking lately?

Nussbaum’s 10 Strategic Mistakes to Avoid

As the dialog around economic recession expands, many companies are rethinking their strategies to ensure that they will remain strong and vital.  Bruce Nussbaum offers a very timely piece of advice in the form of a list of 10 key missteps that companies are apt to make in the process.  The gist of Bruce’s advice is that shortsighted attempts to improve bottom line results at the expense of innovation and product development will deliver more and deeper harm to the organization that greatly outweigh the short term benefits perceived.

Bruce is right on with this article.  Companies must understand that innovation and product are the core drivers of their value propositions.  In order to protect and expand revenue in a tough economic climate, it is essential to deliver a strong and well differentiated value proposition.

If you missed the time around, this article points out some suggests for using innovation as a driver of growth in recessionary times.