Innovating To Win

Winning At The Innovation Casino

My friend, Dave, likes to play poker.  He really enjoys playing in poker tournaments.  Of course the fact that he regularly wins may help.  To him, poker is not a game of chance.  He has studied and learned the disciplines and techniques.  He practices his game, and he plays to win.  In Dave’s mind, poker is not a losing game; it is not a negative expectation game like black jack.  No, poker is about winning.

So, why do I bring the tale of Dave and his winning ways at poker?  I have been on Twitter for almost two months now where I follow tweets on innovation.  Over the past few weeks, I have noticed that every few days there is a big flurry of tweets proclaiming that innovation is all about failure.  Some tweets even state that in order to succeed at innovation, you need to fail more.

To put it delicately, such talk about innovation is pure twaddle.  Yes, I know there are many of you who will violently disagree, but let me explain why it is fundamentally import to the health of your innovation programs that you not embrace the mind numbing mantra innovation of hallowing failure.

If innovation isn’t about failure, what is it about?  Of course, if you read this blog regularly, you already know the answer.  Innovation is about winning!  That doesn’t mean that every innovation initiative will succeed.  Some will fail.  However, the goal is to win.  To create new and unique value that you can deliver to customers and thereby build value for your enterprise.  Admit it; nobody says, “Hey, let’s toss forty million down the toilet on this dopey idea!”  No, people embark on the journey of innovation because they believe that their concept provides a map to success.

That is why the very language of failure defeats innovation before it gets started.  C-level executives responsible for company performance don’t want to hear about failure.  Failure means lost investment and that translates to a drag on corporate value.  If you convince your CEO to embrace failure to succeed at innovation, he is still expecting to win at the innovation game.  If he doesn’t see that you know how to win, his support will be very short lived.

Employees won’t want to hear they are being assigned to an innovation team if they believe that team will fail.  As much as you tell them otherwise they feel the taint of failure will stick to them and hurt their future.  Even the most ardent innovation workers can find their resolve tested if they never taste the fruits of success.

As you can see, this is not merely an argument of semantics.  The language of failure can very quickly turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy as your innovation programs have their funding withdrawn or see key employees desert the mission in favor of jobs where they can find success.

So what about examples like Edison?  Didn’t he fail 10,000 times?  Not if you ask Edison. 

Iteration is a valuable tool for empirical science and innovation.  Exploration is just that. The process of finding success may require validation of various hypotheses and alternatives.  If you are truly in uncharted waters trying to deliver on a very bleeding edge concept, you won’t stick it out if you personally feel that every pothole on the way is a failure.  You must believe you can succeed and that each iteration is a valuable data point or you won’t make it to the finish line.

Some people run to the refuge of the myth of failure because they are still slogging through the mire of accidental innovation models.  For these people, innovation means waiting until you stumble upon a winning idea.  Lacking the skills to discriminate, they try and run with any idea that strikes a chord.  It’s no wonder that so many of these initiatives are doomed before they get off the ground.  But, there is a better way.  The first step to rising out or the swamp of accidental innovation is recognizing you are there and not accepting a poor success ratio as simply being the ante to play the game.

The disciplines of repeatable, successful innovation can be learned.  Structured innovation may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s a very powerful concept.  In the hands of skilled practitioners, sustainable innovation practices are the difference between mucking about in the wasteland of accidental innovation transforming your enterprise to a high performance innovation organization.

Don’t believe that there are skills that can make a difference in innovation?  That brings me back to my friend, Dave.  He has mastered the skills of a game that most of us think of as a game of chance.  In the words of Henri Junttila, “Poker isn’t all luck; if you play for a month or two (depending on how much you play) you should come out ahead about 95%+ of the time.”  Even the game of black jack can have its dynamic altered with knowledge and skill.  If you don’t believe it, go watch the movie “21”.

The innovation game is also one that can be bent to your will.  Innovation skills in how to look at markets and opportunity spaces, how to predict disruptive opportunity cycles, how to find the optimal execution plan to move from idea to product can all be learned and integrated into you product development programs.

Language is a powerful medium.  It provides us with the pallet we use to express our most important thoughts, giving them shape, form, and meaning.  Each time we use language we create mental images for our listeners—some intended, some not.  It is important to understand the destructive impact the language of failure has on innovation.

Master the skills to play at the innovation table, and you will not be worrying about how to defend your failures.  You will be enjoying the benefits of innovation as a value driving core competence.  You will pass your competitors as they drop their resources into the one armed bandit of accidental innovation reliance because you are innovating to win.

TRIZCON 2009 – Day 1

I spent the day at TRIZCON yesterday.  TRIZCON is the annual conference hosted by the Altschulller Institute for TRIZ Studies (AI) which draws an international audience of participants.

After some opening comment by Mansour Ashtiani, the current President of AI, Herbert Roberts of GE Energy gave a presention titled “TRIZ at GE: Edison, Altschuller, and Immagination at Work.”  In his talk, Herbert explained the role innovation plays in GE, and how systematic innovation was finding a home within the organization.  Herbert discussed both the benefits of the structured innovation technique as well as the challenges to organizational adoption at GE.

After Herbert’s presentation, there was a surprise presention by Jeff Jensen of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (PWR).  Jeff’s discussed in detail the evolution of PWR’s innovation and business development system.  He described PWR’s view of innovation as being something that needed to produce a tangible result in the form of revenue to be consider a successful innovation.  It was a refreshingly candid presentation on how a major corporation was coping with the challenges of transforming itself while growing its revenue generation capabilities.

There was also a panel discussion on “The Future of TRIZ”.  The panel was loaded with some heavy weight experts from the international TRIZ community including: Ellen Domb, Isak Buhkman, Alla Zusman, Noel Leon, Zinovy Royzen, Sergei Ikovenko, Prof. Chechurin from St. Petersburg, and me.  Moderated by Mansour Ashtiani, the panel consider several key questions.

• What is the state of TRIZ adoption?
• What are the successes and drivers of TRIZ?
• What are the barriers to TRIZ adoption?
• What role does software play in TRIZ adoption?
• What should the Altschuller Institute be doing to drive greater TRIZ adoption?

While I don’t have notes on all that was said, here are a couple of the key points I raised.

In assessing the state of TRIZ adoption, I took a more somber view than some of the panelists.  I suggested that TRIZ adoption should be rated as poor.  That was based on the fact that current practice of TRIZ is estimate as only reaching 1% of the global engineering population.

On the issue of barriers to adoption, I took the position that today’s climate represents a terrific opportunity for TRIZ as companies are pressured to drive new business opportunities through innovation.  However, we are at a crossroads, and there are other methods that people consider as surrogates for structured innovation. There was a very lively discussion about the strategies to change this.  I proposed that the TRIZ community need to look introspectively and apply TRIZ principles (such as segmentation and coordination) to align TRIZ teaching and practice more directly with the job that users go to TRIZ for.  In essence, we need to treat TRIZ as a disruptive technology in the Christensen model and find the pocket of opportunity from which it can supplant incumbent non-structured models of practice.

Ellen Domb suggest that the TRIZ community needed to get a little humble and find better ways to integrate and align itself with other communities of practice.  I have always liked the way Ellen thinks, and she was in great form on the panel.

After the panel, there some very good papers presented. I didn’t get to all of them, as there were loads of side meeting that I got pulled into.  (I don’t get to west coast as often as I like or should, so when I do my dance card fills up.)  But here are a few of the ones that I did catch.

Noel Leon-Rovira from the Monterey Institute of Technology always seems to come up with great case studies.  He did it again with an interesting paper on the design of a hybrid vehicle that uses solar-thermal technology.

Toru Nakagawa gave a report on his work with USIT in Japan.  Nakagawa-san is one of the most influential TRIZ advocates in Japan.

Jean-Marc LeLann talked about the use of TRIZ inventive principles to resolve problems in systems that contain multiple contradictions.

My friend, Jim Belfiore, wrapped up the afternoon with a provocative paper on a non-tradition application of TRIZ—driving basic research using TRIZ to identify key conceptual questions to be analyzed.

The quality of the presentations was high.  The evening culminated in a convivial dinner.  Here are a couple pictures from the dinner.

L-R: Bao Bui, Jim Belfiore, Isak Buhkman, Jim Todhunter, Ellen Domb

L-R: Mansour Ashtiani, Jim Todhunter, Noel Leon-Rovira

All in all, it was a good day with lots of discussion and thinking about problem solving and innovation, and networking with some of the best minds in the TRIZ community.

Exercising Innovation – What You Said

The results are in.  Innovating To Win readers tend to be highly active when it comes to innovation.  This month’s question was about how often you exercise your innovation muscles.  A whopping 79% of you responded that you do so every day!

This is great.  Innovation requires a different set of skill and thought paradigms than traditional work tasks.  So, practice is very important to ensure that your innovation muscles don’t cramp up on you when you are called upon for a big challenge.  The large percentage of every day innovator in this poll is particularly interesting in the light of another poll I am aware of.  That poll reached into manufacturing enterprises to study frequency of innovation activity.  In that poll, less than 10% of respondents indicated that they felt they performed innovation activities on a daily basis.

Of course, people who read Innovating To Win tend to be among the foremost innovation practitioners, champions and thought leaders.  Therefore, the stark contrast in these two polls is not entirely surprising.

However, there are still 21% of us who are not applying our innovation skills on a daily basis.  In fact, 4% of us only dust off our innovation tools a couple times a year.  This is really not enough.

There are opportunities to create value through innovation every day.  For example, consider the typical product lifecycle process.

Innovation doesn’t just participate in the fuzzy front end where opportunity identification and product road mapping occur.  Innovation a value generation exercise and such value can be create at all stages--during the conceptual design when new ways of delivering on the product roadmap are discovered, during the detailed design stage where new technology paths can change project dynamics completely, in manufacturing where competitive advantage can be found in novel processes, and in after market when product redesign may be needed.

We all play a role in building the high performance innovation culture.  If we who are the champions are not leading by example and demonstrating the value of innovation thinking and practice every day, how can expect other to join our legion?

So, for those of you who are exercising you innovation muscles, huzzah!  Now, what will you do get others to adopt your habit?

For those of you who are either innovation weekend warriors or couch potatoes, it’s time to get on the beam and catch up.  You can do it!

Once again, your participation in the Innovating To Win innovation poll has provided an interesting picture of the state of innovation.  Please remember to vote in the latest poll on the benefit of open innovation.

Innovation Frequency Poll Closing Soon

Our current informal innovation poll closes next Friday.  This time, the question is: “How often do you exercise your innovation muscles?”

There are many types of innovation and tasks that knowledge workers perform.  From the big-I projects to find new disruptive products to the little-i projects that advance our offerings in an incremental fashion, the common theme in all innovation projects is value creation and delivery.  When you look at your own contribution to your organization’s innovation agenda, how frequently to you engage in innovation activities?  Are you an innovation athlete, a weekend warrior, or a couch potato?

If you haven’t cast your vote yet, you better hurry!  You can cast your vote using the Vizu poll widget in the side bar on the left.

A new poll will start on Monday, March 16th.

The Trouble with Twitter

Like many people, I have jumped on to Twitter.  Just in case you have been living under a rock recently, Twitter is a communication service that broadcasts your messages (limited to 140 characters) for all the world to see.  When people subscribe to your message feed (“following” in Twitter speak), they can be sure to see your tweets in their personal view of the global message stream.

People chat about many things on Twitter.  A favorite topic seems to be Twitter itself.  In the stream of tweets on innovation, several comments have gone by recently suggesting that Twitter is a disruptive technology that may displace Google.  This notion raises some interesting questions.  Is Twitter a disruptive technology?  What are the prospects for Twitter to emerge with a viable monetization strategy?  Is Twitter long for this world, or will it vanish as quickly into obscurity as it emerged on the scene as it is replaced by fast-followers?

In examining these questions, let’s start by asking what customer need Twitter actually serves.  Generically, Twitter provides a interpersonal communications platform.  In this sense, it competes with a wide variety of technologies and products.  These cover traditional web sites, blogs, video sharing (Flicker, YouTube), e-mail, instant messaging, hosted discussion lists, community/social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn), SMS, and phone based communications.  It is a wide field of application serving a broad range of specific needs for the users of each.  What distinguishes Twitter?  Here’s my quick list:

• Real-time model
• Highly engagement
• Voyeur friendly
• Concise messaging
• Medium independence

On the flip side, here are some things Twitter seems weak in:

• Deep exchanges (I still am laughing about the person that expected me to explain a complete theory and methodology of sustainable strategic innovation practice and deployment 140 characters at a time.)
• Direct rich content
• Continuity of exchange
• Easy navigability of information

In a very nice article, Renee Hopkins Callahan suggests Twitter’s target customer is the person needing an easy one-to-many means of communication.   I think this is not an accurate characterization of the customer that Twitter needs to identify for success.   Why?  A painful truth that Twitter will need to come to terms with is that the one-to-many communication space already has a few strong and established players (Facebook and the like), and the real-time aspect of the Twitter model is not a significant barrier for these established channels to overcome.  [In the interval between my writing this article and posting it, Facebook has announced that it will be adding real-time status capability in the near term.]  This will bring into sharp focus the limitations of Twitter and force them to find the factors and hence refined use model to which they are uniquely suited.

Already, I have seen bands of Twitterati forming discussion group off the tweetin’ path.  Why?  So that they can break free of the limitation of 140 characters and poor discussion continuity.  Real-time fast-followers have strengths in areas of rich content and media.  They also have much further community reach than the fledgling Twitter.  (These days, 6 million registrations is probably not critical mass.)

The bottom line is that when community/social networking sites start rolling out real-time, and instant messaging services roll out one-many syndication, Twitter will find itself in a very awkward position.  So, where does Twitter turn?

They are unlikely to be able to withstand the entrance of a big player into their current niche.  They have not carved out a sufficiently distinguished value proposition.  This really just leaves Twitter with two options:

1. Find a more defined value prop that can secure a real and significant revenue stream
2. Hang the “For Sale” sign on the front door and auction the technology asset off to the highest bidding fast follower that wants to get a jump on adding a missing piece of capability to their offering

We’ve all heard of Twitter’s secret business plan, but time is running out as companies like Yammer are already trying to establish a lead in specific niche markets that are aligned with Twitter’s current service.  Evan Williams’ recent talk at TED doesn’t give Twitterati much to hang their hopes on either.  The window of opportunity is closing very quickly, and Twitter needs to stop being so cavalier about its future.

I suspect that option 2 is the most likely outcome for Twitter.  There are many strong market forces converging that could push this choice on Twitter. 

Granted this is not a deep analysis of Twitter’s outlook since I am not privy to their business plan, and only time will reveal the final outcome.  But at this time, I don’t see any evidence that Twitter presents a significant threat to Google as some have suggested, and I do seen many indicators pointing to Twitter being just another interesting paragraph in the history of the internet.

Sustainable Innovation at Johnson & Johnson

Here's a great podcast with Ray Jakubowicz, R&D Program Director, Worldwide Systems R&D for Johnson & Johnson’s Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics.  In this podcast, Ray talks about the role of sustainable innovation and how it’s viewed as a key competency for the future at J&J.

Ray also discusses the challenges of spreading innovation disciplines across independent operating companies in a larger organization, and the need to develop new long horizon metrics to measure corporate return on innovation.

It’s a good interview with a change agent in the trenches of innovation every day.  Watch the podcast below and hear Ray’s take on the impact of sustainable innovation practices.

Innovation With a Yes We Can Attitude

Recently, I heard someone saying: “Innovation isn’t about saying ‘yes’, it’s about saying ‘no’ to everything but the most essential features.”  At the time, I quietly thought to myself that this person just didn’t get it.  Today, Seth Godin has reminded of the comment with his post on “Looking for yes.”

Innovation is all about delivering value to a customer.  At the core of this is the notion of saying YES.

YES, I can make possible for you what others have not.

YES, I can improve your experience and lower the cost to you at the same time.

YES, I can not merely meet your basic requirements, but I can also delight you not by exceeding your expectations, but by redefining them.

Of course, it is important to say yes to the right question.  This is why the first step of any innovation initiative must always be to understand your customer, your market, your product, and your capability.  By listening carefully, you can identify the true, unmet need that your customer has and be able to map your innovation goals to filling the job the customer will hire your product to perform.

Having this focus on customer needs and aspirations will allow you to say yes to innovation and not waste time saying no to things that aren’t relevant.