Innovating To Win

Two Years of Innovation Blogging and Counting…

Innovating To Win is two years old today!  It’s hard to believe, but after 238 posts on a broad range of innovation topics, here we are.  It has been great fun thanks to all of you who read this blog and engage in the conversation via comments, trackbacks, or private emails.

I’ve been trying to update the site recently with some new formatting and features.  The latest is the post rating feature which I hope you’ll make use of so that other readers can see which articles you found useful and interesting.

In the coming weeks, I will try and get around to retagging the content with more categories so that it is easier to find stuff.  (Yes, I’ve been procrastinating on this task.)  Combined with the other recent changes, I think this will make it much easier to navigate to useful information.

I am looking forward to the next two years.  Now, if I can only find the time to write all the posts I have in the mental queue.

Thanks for your support; thanks for reading; and thanks for the feedback.

State of Innovation Survey Closing Soon

I saw a tweet from Chuck Frey of Innovation Tools urging people to participate in a poll he is conducting to assess the impact of the current economic crisis on innovation in companies.  This is a follow up analysis to the report that Chuck co-authored on innovation strategies in a recessionary climate.

I think this is a great survey idea to take the pulse of innovation.  I jumped on and responded to the survey immediately.  It’s nice and short, so it only takes 3-5 minutes.  If you haven’t participated in the survey yet, I suggest you do.

But you better hurry.  Chuck tells me the survey closes on March 5th.  So, try and take a moment now and respond before you forget like I did the first time I heard about it.  You can find the survey here.

Industry Focus on Innovation: Automotive

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) recently published its 12th Annual Global CEO Survey.  In a special summary on the automotive sector, PwC reports some interesting items.  Some the key data points follow.

37% of surveyed CEOs feel they need to focus on greater penetration of their existing markets, while 24% felt that new product development was the key to future success.  This is a reversal of priorities from a year ago.  A whopping 92% of the responding CEOs acknowledge that innovation is key to their long term success, but most feel the current priority is on short term survival.  This latter point is not too surprising in a climate when auto makers in many countries are getting government assistance to stay afloat.

The report cites a few specific examples of innovation coming from auto manufacturers, but these are not necessarily surprising new lines of thinking.  All the cited examples are in the area of alternative fuel technologies.  While these are welcome advances, they can hardly be called highly original at this point in time.  But then originality doesn’t look like it is in the cards for the automakers.

While 95% of the CEOs mentioned that information about the customer was important, the report talks about understanding customer preferences.  Now in all fairness, this could be a defect in how the questions were posed by PwC.  But if we assume that this is in fact what the automakers are actually interested in (and historical behavior would support this assumption), then the automotive CEOs are content to drive their businesses by looking in the rear view mirror.  They should be interested in looking beyond mere preferences to understand what the unexpressed desires and aspirations of their customers are relative this product which has secured such an important role in their lives.

The report is an interesting snapshot of an industry in the spot light.  You can find the PwC automotive summary report here.

Innovation Is Not Just For The Big Guys

Yesterday, a colleague was telling me an exciting story of a company that was embarking on a plan to break into an emerging market.  The company he described was a components manufacturer.  Like every company today, they are challenged by the current economic climate.  Like everyone else, they are concerned about the sustainability of their business in this new business reality.  However, rather than following Lemming, Inc. off the cliff of retracting investment in the future, this company has made a strategic decision to make their future today.

This company looked inward to understand their core competencies and outward to understand the market and economic macro trends.  From that understanding, they have identified a new opportunity space. They are now moving forward with a product and business model innovation program that will put them squarely in a new market and simultaneously reclassify them as a different type of business.

It is an exciting story made even more interesting when we understand that this company consists of only twenty five employees and is completely self-funded.  This company is not alone in its desire to find new channels of opportunity.  But we often hear people lament that their company can’t embark on the path of innovation because they are too small or lack venture backing.  Yet, here we have a proof point that size needn’t be a constraint on innovation.  Small companies have certain strengths that they can leverage to help them along the way—agility, focus, team affinity, management engagement.

Of course, this parable contains a message for the big guys, too.  When small companies are driving innovation all around you market eco-system, how long can you afford to hunker down and try and simply wait out the storm?  You can’t.  Such misplaced confidence will only ensure that one day in the not too distant future you realize that someone else has eaten your lunch.

There May Be No “I” In Team, But What About Innovation?

How you noticed that everybody likes to talk about being innovative and the importance of driving innovation, and yet few people want to change what they are doing?  This is the first paradox of innovation.  For most people, innovation means others doing things differently.

Innovation is a team sport.  Even innovations driven by an individual have a provenance that reaches back to use build blocks formed by others.  This is what Isaac Newton meant when he said, “If I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”  None of us would argue with the aphorism “There is no I in team.”  But even teams rely on individual contribution.  If one member of the team is not helping to pull the wagon, the productivity of the team suffers.

This is doubly true for innovation.  True innovation is hard.  There are challenges to be met.  The unknown looms before us.  We have to move both ourselves and others outside of the comfort zone.  This can be a daunting task.  It is no wonder that so many organizations fail to get there innovation engines firing on all cylinders.

This is why it is critical that as innovation practitioners we acknowledge that the “I” in innovation is us.  We must each take personal responsibility for innovation and not wait for others to lead the charge.  Ask yourself these questions.

How am I championing innovation?
How am I changing my behavior to drive innovation?
How am I expanding my “box” by mastering innovation skills?
How am I engaging the entire enterprise in infectious innovation?
How I am contributing to make innovation a sustainable value driving core competence?

What are you doing to drive innovation?  How are you challenging yourself to do more?

IT: Friend or Foe of Innovation?

Kathy Harris of Gartner muses on the connection between innovation and knowledge management, the disappointment many organizations feel over their knowledge management initiatives, and the promise of social networking software to deliver on the promise of knowledge management.  Kathy’s thesis that knowledge management and innovation are fundamentally linked is very noteworthy.

Most organizations have vast amounts of institutional knowledge that they are unable to leverage.  This knowledge resides on shared drives, in document management systems, in PDM repositories, and other data stores.  But organizations are unable to truly leverage this information because the access methods in place don’t meet the needs of knowledge workers.  Workers are not interesting in accessing data or documents.  They want to get at actionable knowledge—specific information that is precisely meaningful in the context of their work at the moment of need.  This is not what traditional knowledge management solutions provide.

So, can social software really close this need gap?  Not really.  Kathy is right to point out that such software can enable specific context rich exchanges of information.  When these exchanges occur, they can be highly efficient both in quality and quantity of knowledge transference.  However, the situational dependency of such exchanges has a limiting effect on the scope of impact that is delivered.  Additionally, once the specific exchange has occurred, it’s highly context rich information tends to sink into the same quagmire as other enterprise information.

That said, social software can be a valuable part of a holistic knowledge management solution.  There is still a desperate need for corporate IT organizations to rethink their knowledge management strategies.  They need to move away from data driven knowledge management schemes to user context driven schemes of content delivery.  Allowing the knowledge worker to define the metaphor of immersive knowledge navigation through the context of their daily tasks is the missing element in the knowledge management approaches that are commonly deployed.  This is why social software holds such promise as part of the solution.

IT organizations are very often considered the Innovation Terminators.  Ironically, they have an opportunity to be truly instrumental in supporting a corporate innovation culture by reshaping the knowledge management framework around the knowledge worker.

Innovation Accountability

Innovate on Purpose is one the innovation blogs I follow on a regular basis.  Yesterday, Jeffrey Phillips posted a nice article titled “The first step to innovation success.”  In it, he discusses the need to have people accountable for innovation.  Bang on, Jeffrey!  You get the behaviors you measure and reward.

So, how can you build such accountability into your organization?  In short, make sure ultimate responsibility is properly located in the organization, and make sure that expectations and goals are concrete and clearly understood.

On the first point, let’s first understand that while you want innovation to happen at all levels in the organization, and every person must take ownership of their role in the innovation mission, innovation will not be a sustainable, value driving part of your organization unless the ultimate accountability is at the top, the CEO.  In the words of A. G. Lafley, “The CEO must be the Chief Innovation Officer.”

This doesn’t mean that the CEO is going to spend his days ideating to drive new product capabilities.  This is not the role of the Chief Innovation Officer.  The Chief Innovation Officer’s role is to ensure that innovation is developed as a core competency of the enterprise, that it is properly funded, that it has continuous visibility, and that it delivers results.  The CEO is in the unique position of being able to fulfill this role.  The CEO sets the corporate agenda, defines the rules of engagement, and has ultimate ownership of all corporate resources.  This makes the CEO the ultimate facilitator of innovation.  Without the CEO as the most ardent innovation advocate, building a culture of sustainable innovation will always be an uphill battle.

Is your CEO the Chief Innovation Officer?  If not, this is a problem that must be addressed post haste.

The other aspect of organizational innovation accountability is setting expectations and goals.  There are many ways to look at this, but I suggest that the direct approach is best.  Use a management by objectives approach to push innovation accountability down through the organization.

Personally, I am a big fan of the Balanced Scorecard approach.  Integrate innovation into the top level objectives.  Define the impact of innovation from the four key perspectives.  How do you want innovation to impact the financial performance of your organization?  How should your customers feel the benefit of innovation?  How do your internal processes need to reflect your innovation goals?  How will innovation be a platform for organization and employee learning and growth?  Once you have defined the top level innovation goals, push them down through each successive level in the goals hierarchy.  Make sure that the objectives are clear, concrete, and measurable.  In this way, every person in the enterprise will have line-of-sight accountability for their role and clearly understand the impact their contribution has on the success of the team.

Follow these two steps and you will see innovation flourish in your organization and deliver huge returns.

Obama’s Innovation Vision – What You Said

Given Obama's picks to lead his innovation agenda, what do you think of Obama's innovation vision?  This was the question asked in our latest innovation poll.  With the stimulus package expected to be signed this Tuesday, the results of this poll seem especially timely.

It seems that Innovating To Win readers are split between the patient and the skeptical.  Only 13.6% of you believe Obama’s early moves are the right things to help the US improve is innovation abilities.  The greatest share of you, 45.5% are willing to wait and see what transpires.  But a whopping 40.9% of you have already concluded that Obama isn’t putting us on course for a bright innovation future.

Why so little optimism?  Historically, governments don’t drive innovation.  With a few notable exceptions, governments are more apt to protect the status quo than champion change.  So, it should come as no surprise that early indications are that Obama’s innovation agenda is focused on improving the efficiency with which government delivers its programs and does little to promote the innovation capabilities of the nation.

Once again, your participation in the innovation poll has provided some interesting insight. A little skepticism can be a healthy thing.  Those who wait for Obama to solve their issues that they feel are inhibiting their ability to innovate are likely to be in for a long wait.  Those that take control of their destiny and execute to their own innovation agenda will be the winners in this economic climate.

With that in mind, our new poll probes to see how we are preparing for the tough innovation challenges by practicing our innovation skills.  You can find the poll in the left hand sidebar. Please remember to vote.

Innovating To Win Layout Updated

I’ve taken a bit of time this morning to alter the layout of Innovating To Win.  A new right hand sidebar is added to make it easier to use the blog site features. 

In general, the left hand sidebar has all the items for navigating the Innovating To Win blog.  Here you can use Google search to look for topics of interest, find recent and archived posts, subscribe to the feed, and vote in the popular Innovating To Win innovation polls. 

The right hand sidebar is for networking type stuff.  Here you can email me, read my recent tweets (and choose to follow me on Twitter), see which members of the MyBloglog Innovating To Win community has recently read a post, and explore links to other interesting innovation blogs.

I hope these updates enhance your visits to Innovating To Win.

Dipping Into Your Innovation Gene Pool

Nature teaches us that genetic diversity is a good thing.  It creates the environment for change and drives evolution.

For innovation, diversity of a different sort is just as vital.  Diversity of perspective and ideas creates the same type of change enabling dynamic.  There are many ways companies try to tap into different perspectives.  Here I want to point out a simple but often overlooked path to innovation genetic diversity.

This morning, I conducted a working design session with some of my product engineers.  However instead of just having the usual cadre of architects in the room, today we had team members who weren’t engineers involved in the discussion.  I had invited them specifically to gain the benefit of their non-engineering centric point of view.  It was a fabulously productive session and helped to fill several voids in the thinking to date on a new product concept.

These non-engineering participants had to go far out of their way to attend the meeting.  (They both have 2+ hour commutes to get to the office.)  How did they feel about being asked to come in just for this meeting?  When I began the meeting by thanking them for coming in, one of them responded by saying, “Are you kidding?  When I told someone on the train going home last night that I had been asked to come in for the meeting because the company wanted my input on a new product we are designing, several people said “Boy, I wish my company valued my opinion.””

Bottom line is that this simple exercise was a win at multiple levels.  From the product design perspective, the input of the non-engineers was invaluable.  From the company perspective, the resulting product will undoubtedly deliver much high value to our customers as a result of this session.  From an HR perspective, these workers feel more enfranchised in their job roles.  How could one hope for a better outcome!

Innovation leaders must recognize that they are not the only source of relevant concepts to drive innovation.  What’s more, you can’t always predict where the valued input will come from, nor can you expect people will always recognize when they have a valuable contribution to make.  Yet, there people in your organizational eco-system that have big contributions to make.

In order to tap into your organization’s innovation gene pool, make it a practice to reach out to people who are not always included in the discussion and draw them in.  Both you and they will be surprised at the value this brings.  Also, use technology to help connect your knowledge workers.  Since you can’t predict where the great idea may come from, implement a passive collaboration environment that connects people around their actionable knowledge.

Take these two steps and you will see a great lift in your organization’s innovation capability.