Innovating To Win

The Lonely Voice of Innovation

Sometimes I think we're alone.  Sometimes I think we're not.  In either case, the thought is staggering.  --  R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)

At times, the role of the innovation evangelist is a very, very lonely struggle.  Everywhere you look, you can see the burning need for innovation.  In the sphere of business, the impacts of intensifying global competition, economic uncertainly, pervasive commoditization, antiquation of intellectual assets, and the generational transformation of the workforce make the need for reliable, predictable innovation an all to painful reality.  There is no surprise in the findings that over 70% of CEOs have innovation in the forefront of their agendas.

Yet, many of the innovation champions I talk to report that their advice on establishing a repeatable, sustainable innovation culture often falls on deaf ears.  Many companies talk about innovation, but when it comes to execution are failing to make any measurable progress in developing innovation competence.  Why is that?  I think it was said best by a senior executive at EADS when he said to me, “No one wants innovation; they want the results of innovation.”

In other words, much like the perennial dieter who is always complaining about those extra pounds but never makes the lifestyle changes to meet with success, many managers believe that simply talking about innovation will somehow bring about the results without actually making the investment of time and treasure in driving innovation.  It is this sort of rationale that keeps many organizations mired in the murky wasteland of accidental innovation and sees them achieving poor return on their research and development investments.

Why do these managers persist with these self defeating behaviors?  Why don’t they actually do something to change their results?  Are they simply lazy?  Are they stupid?  This is a very complex question and one that has many different answers.  But, in some cases it is simply that they don’t have the mental model to envision the first step forward.

This is where many innovation evangelists fall down.  Too often, we are so wrapped up in our own world of high performance innovation practice; we forget that many people don’t have the frame of reference to get what we are describing.  We need to slow down and articulate the message more clearly and use clear examples that demonstrate how sustainable innovation practice builds the company’s value.

Some examples I have seen of how not to go about building convergence around innovation disciplines are:

• One expert innovation practitioner approached new groups of by simply stating he could solve any innovation challenge they had.  While this may have been a true statement, it immediately put his audience on the defensive and engendered opposition.


• A respected TRIZ consultant would routinely berate designers that did not agree with his specific views on how systems should be modeled functionally.  In one case, he stormed out of the room and suggested that the person with whom he was working clearly had not scientific background.  The person was in fact a rocket scientist and is now a crackerjack innovation practitioner—really.


• And of course we have all seen the case of the innovation consultant who repeatedly and insistently badgers his client about looking for the next big thing when the client clearly has serious tactical concerns to get their arms around before they can begin to worry about such broad reaching initiatives.

In all of these examples, what is missing is connection – the connection with the company’s pain, the connection with the interest of importance, the connection with other person’s frame of reference that will allow them to be receptive to the benefits of innovation best practices.

When a company is worried about commoditization of their business because of aging intellectual property, the lights come on when I explain how specific companies in exactly the same circumstance have overcome that business challenge by embracing and applying sustainable innovation practices.  When companies are concerned about the risks of new product introduction, they sit up and take note when I share with them how other companies have met with their most successful product launches when they employed the proper disciplines of innovation driven design.  And of course, nothing breeds success like success.  Management always gets excited when you can discuss the internal successes they have achieved with structured innovation practice.

This may sound obvious, but from the number of times I see innovation evangelists erecting barrier to innovation adoption, it is something we need to constantly remind ourselves about.  If we remember to connect with our constituencies, we will not be alone.

We will not be alone because the value of sustainable innovation is undeniable.  Recent surveys bear this out.  Companies that are aggressive in their pursuit of sustainable, repeatable innovation practice have more aggressive revenue objectives, and they meet their revenue objectives more often than their competition.  High performance Innovation companies are simply high performance companies.

Touch Points of Innovation

On Logic+Emotion, David Armano writes about the growing ubiquity of interaction touch points between customers and products.  For me, this is a very timely article.  Previously, we have explored here the idea of listening to what customers are saying as an essential element of understanding the innovation opportunity space.  An important aspect of this is to recognize all the customer touch points that your product and the delivered customer experience create.

Do you know all of the touch points you should be addressing?  Don’t make the mistake of assuming you do.  We all design products and services to deliver specific interactions for our clients’ benefit.  However, it is often the unanticipated touch points that are most important to understand.  What are unanticipated touch points?  There are all the ways in which your customers will interact or will want to interact with your product, your brand, and your company that you had never actually considered.

Recently, I gave my product team just such an assignment.  I asked them to review every aspect of the customer experience and identify the critical danger touch points—those places where the customers have opportunities to be confused or disappointed by their product experience.  The result is that we now have a very clear understanding of opportunities to delight our clients with an outstanding customer experience.

The understanding of touch points helps to frame both key problems and some of the import evaluation criteria for innovation.  Understanding the problem space and the criteria of success is fundamental to sustainable innovation practice.  Products, and hence innovation, are all about the touch points—it all begins with a touch.

Product Innovation Agenda 2010

The Aberdeen Group has published a new report titled “Product Innovation Agenda 2010: Profiting from Innovation Today and Tomorrow.”  The report looks at how companies are driving profitable growth by leveraging new innovation, product development and engineering techniques and technologies.

Some findings of the survey are that Best-in-Class companies are more likely than average companies to have an executive dedicated to managing product innovation.  In addition, more than 80 percent of companies are focused on driving profitable growth through product innovation, while many participating companies are looking to make innovation a predictable process.

Jim Brown, vice president, Product Innovation & Engineering Research, Aberdeen Group, notes “The benchmark demonstrates that Best-in-Class companies will continue to focus on innovation as a revenue driver and that they are 36 percent more likely to execute a predictable and repeatable innovation process than average companies.”

Check out the full report here.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Invention Machine (where I work) was a co-underwriter of the study along with IHS and Siemens.

The Right Tools

“Men have become the tools of their tools.”  -- Henry David Thoreau

On his blog, Practical Leadership, my friend Ken Flowers makes an observation about having the right tools for the job.  Certainly, if you have ever tackled a home improvement project like Ken describes, you will know exactly what he is talking about.  Of course, the plumbing task is just a foil for Ken’s point.

The same can be said about innovation.  As professional innovation practitioners, we develop a bag of tools that we use to address the innovation challenges with which we are faced.  Just as a skilled craftsman knows when to use a block plane and when to use a rabbet plane, the skilled innovation practitioner understands which innovation tool to apply to which problem.

Looking for freedom to operate?  Pull your patent analysis and IP work-around techniques out of the tool box.

Need to envision a next generation product offering?  It sounds like a job for your technology road mapping and system evolution predictive analysis tools.

Have a particularly nasty engineering contradiction to resolve?  Maybe it’s time to dust off your TRIZ inventive principles.

Problems are not created equally, and they do not all yield to the same tools.  You need to use the right innovation tool for the task to achieve optimal results.

Of course, this presupposes that your tool box contains more than just a hammer and a spanner.  Innovation practitioners need to acquire many different tools if they are to be effective at repeatable, sustainable innovation—tools of methodology and of technology.  They also need to practice with those tools so they when to use which method.

What’s in your tool box?

The Expert’s Folly

I was just talking with a good friend of mine about innovation at his company when he said something that really clicked with me.  He said, “The expert doesn’t think; they just know.”  Of course, this defines perfectly one of the biggest impediments to innovation—psychological inertia.

Experts are to be respected.  They are tremendous resources which every organization would like to cultivate.  After all, they are experts—people with an amazing ability to wield internalized knowledge at any time to tackle difficult problems that the mere mortals among us would struggle to approach.

But these same experts can be detractors of innovation.  Their very strength comes from their ability to apply the same knowledge in a repeatable manner.  This is great when the problem at hand fits their known solution paradigm.  But, not every problem is a nail.  The expert’s facile application of knowledge is also the expert’s Achilles’ heel.

This is why even the experts among us need to admit that we can benefit from learning structured innovation methods.  These methods of innovative problem solving take us out of familiar paradigms and force us to change our way of thinking.  This allows the expert and non-expert alike the opportunity to consider novel approaches.

Gates on Innovation and the Economy

With the R-word on so many people’s lips these days, whether to pull back or press forward on the innovation agenda is in the forefront of many a manager’s thoughts.  Bill Gates has now weighed in on the topic as it relates to Microsoft’s strategy.

Gates’ message was quite clear as he has been quoted in a Reuter’s interview as saying, "I don't think the fate of Microsoft depends as much on whatever happens in the economy as it does on the getting the breakthrough innovations from Microsoft Research into the products and staying ahead."  The comments made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas are to the point and unambiguous.  It is full steam ahead on the innovation agenda at Microsoft.

We should all take a cue from Microsoft on this point.  Innovation is needed to keep businesses strong and vital in challenging economic times.

Pulling the Innovation Wagon

Over on Heads Up! on Organizational Innovation, Joyce Wycoft shares a touching ad with us about “Pulling the Wagon”.  Maybe it’s because I live near a Clydesdale farm, but I think Joyce uses it effectively as a metaphor for innovation teamship, and she asks who’s efforts should be rewarded—those pulling the wagon or those pushing the wagon.

I would another question to managers with responsibility for innovation or product.  Are you doing enough to push the wagon?  Are you equipping your innovation workers with the skills and tools to pursue the organizations innovation objectives?

The Long Nose of Innovation

A very insightful article appears in BusinessWeek online titled “The Long Nose of Innovation.”  Written by Bill Buxton of Microsoft, the article discuss the fact that great innovations don’t just happen, but rather they are the consequence of many events leading up to the eventual introduction of the high-value manifestation of the concept.

Bill cites the examples of the mouse and RISC technology to show how the time between invention and successful delivery of an innovation maybe many years (thirty in the cases cited).  These are good examples and of course they are far from unique.  History teaches us that there are very discernable and predictable patterns of evolution that inventions follow as they mature.  One doesn’t have to look far to see the evidence of this in the many things we take for granted everyday such as electric light, digital photography, and so many other things.

Consider the lowly ballpoint pen…  The John Laud patented designs for a ballpoint type pen in 1888.  However, the state of ink making was not well enough advanced to allow his device to be practical.  It wasn’t until nearly 50 years later when the Brio brothers developed new designs and new ink formulations that the ballpoint pen took its next big step forward toward viability.

Invention is not enough.  Innovation is the process of deriving value from invention.  Where invention, application, and support systems intersect is where value, and hence innovation, is found.  This is the clear message of history that is played out time and time again in the present.

Bill closes his article with a particularly interesting observation.  He states, “To my mind, at least, those who can shorten the nose by 10% to 20% make at least as great a contribution as those who had the initial idea.”  Here, Bill has given some very good direction for innovators.

There is a predictable and visible future.  The elements that make up this future exist today.  The ability to see that predictable future and understand the path from immature technology to successful product is a high value component of sustainable innovation practice.  This ability is something that the average innovation practitioner is capable of developing through a combination of the right technical infrastructure aggregate a view into the current state of a technology and the application of proven methodologies for analyzing the evolutionary tendencies of technologies.

The value of the opportunities you will miss if you don’t integrate this skill into your innovation tool bag is huge.  (See “The Tyranny of Either-Or” for one such example.)  So now the question is, what are you doing to recognize and act upon opportunities to shorten the long nose of innovation?

[Diagram: BusinessWeek/Bill Buxton]

Innovation~Knowledge Paradox

In a recent New York Times article, Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, Janet Rae-Dupree offers some insights into the paradox of knowledge use in the innovation process.  Innovation happens when the right knowledge and problem intersect, but as Janet points out, our knowledge frames our thinking.  This means that the very seed of innovation also can be the source of the psychological inertia that prevents the innovative spark from igniting.

In the article a common approach is mentioned.  Cynthia Barton Rabe’s proposal to keep creativity and innovation on track by bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers is cited from her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It.”  However, the dynamics of scaling this concept while maintaining the quality of concepts surfaced can be problematic.

Another approach is to tap into global intelligence using technology.  With the advancement of concept retrieval technology, it is now practical to perform targeted concept harvesting from a vast sea of global information.  These methods allow precise and high-quality concept identification that is scalable.  More importantly, the concepts harvested will expand the designer’s mental box by sourcing high value ideas from domains of experience not apparent to the designer.

Access to new thinking must be complemented with sustainable innovation best practices however.  No matter how the new ideas are found, their value may not be realized if they are assessed through the lens of preconception.  This is where innovation discipline pays huge dividends.  The designer following repeatable innovation methodologies is forced to step back and view the problem and the possible solution concepts more objectively.

How are you addressing the innovation~knowledge paradox?