Innovating To Win

Innovation Lesson From Ratatouille

The animated movie, “Ratatouille”, tells the tale of a most improbable hero who dreams of being a great chef.  This hero is a rat named Remy.

Inspired by the great chef, Gusteau, this unlikely protagonist wends his way to Paris, and with Gusteau’s words, “Anyone can cook!”, echoing in his mind, Remy find success and happiness as a chef.

As we come to learn in what is sure to be a Disney-Pixar classic, anyone can cook, but not everyone can.  This is true in many of life’s endeavors and we should all bear this in mind when it comes to innovation.

Anyone can innovate, but not everyone can.

Current trends of companies toward opening up the innovation process to customers and partners show broad acceptance of the concept that innovations can come from anyone.  More interestingly, these same trends suggest that not everyone will be the source of great innovation as many companies are feeling dissatisfied with the quality and relevance of recommendations coming from within their extended innovation ecosystem.  This leads to an interesting question.  If innovation can come from anyone, why is it that not everyone can innovate?

Letting stand the assertion that anyone can innovate, I’ll suggest that the innovation gene is something with requires environmental stimulus to be expressed.  Remember that at its core an innovation is a response to a situation, and not just any response, but a response that creates value by solving a problem inherent in the current situation.

In essence, to innovate someone must:

• Recognize a problem
• Understand the problem
• Have access to the information required to identify a solution

It’s these latter two points that are the hurdles which prevent many people from being substantial contributors in the innovation process.

Too often, in the rush to solution, the crucial steps of understanding the problem is bypassed.  This leads many would be innovators down the path to catastrophe as they end up with a creation that doesn’t actually address any ones needs.  The disciplines of sustainable innovation practice are useful to help keep people focused and ensure that the right questions are identified the first time.

Yet even when people do have a deep understanding of the problem, that doesn’t mean they will see the path forward to a high value innovative solution.  Contrary to popular belief, people don’t get stuck at this point because they know too much.  It is precisely because they don’t know enough that they are subject to mental inertia.  History teaches us that great innovation happens at the nexus of information.  It is this convergence of knowledge that leads to the insights that drive innovation.  However, access to relevant knowledge is difficult, and the problem is getting bigger every day.

So, what is an organization to do if they want to enable more of their workers and partners to be innovation value creation agents?  How can you equip more people to innovate?  Here are two things that you must do to properly prepare your innovation workers for success.

Provide training on innovation skills and best practice.  This is a key part of building a sustainable innovation culture.  (See this post for more on this.)

Enable them through knowledge.  The best way to find great innovation concepts isn’t thinking outside the box, it’s redefining the box.  Your employees need seamless access to information from both inside the enterprise and outside.  They need the information in a form that they can readily assimilate, in the context of their work, and when they need it.  Only in this way are you truly knowledge enabling them by helping them see through the impenetrable fog of data and recognize the actionable knowledge they need.

Give your knowledge workers these tools and you will be amazed at how much more productive your innovation efforts will be.  Not everyone can innovate, but you can certain put your employees in the position where they can by giving them the basic skills and access to information necessary.  You can increase your organization’s innovation capacity by enabling more people to express their innovation potential.

Twitter Take Two

As any CTO, I have to explore new technologies and market trends on a daily basis.  Operating in the worlds of software and innovation makes this imperative even more essential.  With the role of social networking and media still in its early stages of emergence, I have been watching (and using) the media darling, Twitter, for a while now.  In March, I posted The Trouble With Twitter.  Here are a few more comments on Twitter with two more months behind us.

Twitter is clearly undergoing some severe growing pains.  There are many times when the service is slow and choppy.  This undermines the user experience and cannot be good for the retention of users.  Could it be that in the absence of a revenue stream that Twitter has made a conscious decision to not grow infrastructure to meet demand?  Some recent changes in the service are suggestive as they seem to be targeted at reducing the traffic routing volume.  Given the instability of the user experience, it is no surprise that reports have surfaced showing Twitter has an abysmal user retention rate compared to other leading social platforms.

Twitter has not yet shown that it is going to take control of its destiny.  One gets the impression that they view themselves as an evolving bag of features.  If this is so, it is not good for Twitter.  They need to think of themselves as a platform for user experience and act accordingly.  It’s great to have a lot of interested parties building apps around your technology and extending the capability models for you.  But, this is no substitute for user experience design and truly understanding the needs and aspirations of your audience.  Twitter needs to drive its own innovation agenda.

Lastly, it seems incredible that Twitter has still not given any indications of a monetization model.  It’s not that hard.  I have thought of several great strategies to monetize the platform, and I know many of you have also identified some interesting ideas.  So, why is it that Twitter has not?  You would think that if they put half the effort into the business model that they have put into hyping Twitter, they would have launched a successful monetization strategy by now.  Meanwhile, the hype engine churns along.  Of course, that could be a monetization strategy.  While no one knows what Twitter’s business really is, anyone is free to imagine the potential as being as enormous as their own hubris.  Yet as any politician knows, the minute you take a position, you lose votes.  Could it be that Twitter finds itself in the awkward position of having a hype inflated value that is so high that any announcement of a specific business model will only reduce the current potential exit value?  Hmm…

So after two more months of Twitter watching, I don’t find the prognosis for Twitter has improved much.  What do you think?

Promoting New England Innovation Mojo

I just read an interesting post over on Innovation Economy relating the discussion at a brainstorming session on how to better communicate New England’s contributions in the area of innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship.  This would be an interesting discussion at any time in any place since the long term economic health and growth of a region is tied to its innovation achievements.  This discussion has a more topical interest because in today’s challenging economic climate the need to drive innovation is as great as it has ever been for individuals, businesses, and communities.  It has personal interest to me because I live and work in New England.

One thing I found rather curious about the notes on the meeting was that there was not statement of the underlying goal.  In other words, why do we want to communicate New England’s innovation prowess?  Perhaps the participants felt this was a given, but as any innovation practitioner knows, the first step to finding the right solution is to understand the real problem you are trying to solve.  What is the problem to which blowing our innovation horn is the solution, and what are the outcomes we are trying to create as a consequence?

Since nature abhors a vacuum, I am going to fill in the goal with what I would assume to be the unspoken goal.  We wish to drive more regional innovation because that will in turn drive local economic growth.  So with this goal in mind, we can posit some specific desirable outcomes:

• We want to attract and retain the human resources which are the engine of innovation.  This includes both students and professionals that are needed to do the every day work of innovation.
• We want to attract greater investments in innovation to the region.  This should include attracting entrepreneurs to start new businesses, established companies to form units that leverage regional human capital, and investment funds from venture and other funding providers to help finance innovation.  
• We should also want to create an innovation friendly business climate.  By this, I mean influencing public policy to create a favorable tax an infrastructure environment to support the businesses that drive innovation.

Is the goal I have stated the right one?  Are the target outcomes correct?  What do you think?  What is certain is that establishing the goals is essential as a rush to implement a solution without know what you want to accomplish is simply a waste of time and energy.  Not to say that some good concepts weren’t captured in the note from the meeting, but how can you say that the audiences identified are the right ones if you don’t understand how your goals map to constituencies?  For example, the investment communities were noticeably absent from the audience list mentioned in the meeting notes.  Also, how do you know that the quick actions identified will have any impact if you don’t understand what are the audience specific value messages that need to be conveyed and subsequently which vehicles are most conducive to the delivery of those messages?

I think the purpose behind this initiative discussed at this meeting is a very good one, and its pursuit is important to everyone in New England (and given New England’s innovation history and contributions, I would argue important to those outside of New England as well).  Kudos to Scott Kirsner who I believe organized the meeting; the success of these efforts could have a very positive impact.  Hopefully, the agenda will take more shape, and execution, not merely ideation, will be the result.

The Price of Innovation

Recessions are always tough, and during a recession it’s hard to avoid talking about it.  I see a lot of innovation practitioners pondering the question of whether a down economic climate is good or bad for innovation.

The funny thing is that we have been through these boom-bust cycles before, and we will see them again.  What’s more is that history teaches us something very important about these cycles.  By their very nature, the boom-bust cycle is an engine of innovation. 

During a bust segment of the cycle, the constraints of the moment surface the very needs and challenges to which innovation is the response.  This is the core stimulus of innovation.  As the value of the innovation works its way through the system, it supports the advance toward the boom.  However, the boom creates anti-innovation forces as organizations begin to either prioritize not around new value creation but around value preservation, or become too cavalier in their risk tolerance.  This shift creates an instability which eventually leads to the next bust.  Completing the cycle, the new bust lays the foundation for the next wave of innovation.

Some might argue that the social impact and cost of boom-bust cycles is too great and that it is better to eliminate these cycles through tight economic regulation.  I would argue that the cost to society of foregoing the boom-bust cycle is too great as it would forever stifle innovation and the great advances that it brings.

Rather than go into this argument myself, I’d like to point out a great blog post on this topic written by Fred Frankel, Vice Chairman of The Beacon Trust Company.  Give it read and see if you don’t agree with Fred that “The cost of eliminating the cycles and government assuming the role of the allocator of capital is nothing less than the extermination of entrepreneurial spirit, innovation and yes, increasing standard of living for all citizens.”

Don’t Be Afraid to Start Innovation

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Are you still talking about innovation, but not acting to make it happen?  It is striking to look at the large number of companies in which the volume of chatter about being bold and innovative is in stark contrast to the deafening silence of their actual achievements in building innovation as a value driving core competence.  Why is rhetoric-performance gap so large?

In many cases the problem is very simply that the designers, engineering, and knowledge workers tasked with making innovation happen are overwhelmed by the challenge of innovation and just don’t know where to start.  They fear that embarking on the journey of innovation is fraught with risk.  The reality is that inaction is more risky than innovation.

Here are five simple concepts to start on the road of innovation.

Start small
Many of us think of innovation as finding the next big thing.  But innovation happens on a continuum.  There are big “I” innovations, and there are small “I” innovations.  Going after the big “let’s create a new industry” type of innovation can be a bit daunting if you don’t already have some confidence in your ability to drive innovation.   So, start with smaller more attainable goals.  Most big successes start with more modest beginnings.  There is nothing wrong with incremental innovation.  These small steps general yield value and can help you develop your innovation framework.

Practice on every day issues
Practice makes perfect, and most of us have opportunities to apply innovation thinking more often than we realize.  Imagine you manufacture a product and you see a number of complaints from users stating that it’s inconvenient to adjust the pressure regulator.  You might decide to try and make it easier to adjust the pressure regulator.  But, what if the reason your users are complaining is that system requires constant readjustment of the regulator?  Maybe you would be better off not making adjustment easier, but making the system more stable so adjust wasn’t needed as frequently?  What if you made the pressure control self-adjusting so users didn’t have to think about it at all?  Why is pressure such a sensitive parameter of your system?  Maybe you can simplify your design so that pressure is no longer a critical operational parameter.  The point here is that even the simplest of issues contains innovation opportunities.  Explore them.  You will find this not only leads you to better solutions, but also helps you build facility with the tools and methods of innovation.

Use what you know
Most major organizations have accumulated a trove of institutional wisdom.  A common lament of these companies is “if we only knew what we know…”  What a shame it is that so much value goes unrealized as companies fail to implement the right systems to harness this intellectual capital.  Invest in design intent based knowledge retrieval technology today to help you understand the lessons of the past and visualize the future.

Focus on value
Whether you are pursuing a big innovation or a small one, value is the end goal.  Innovation must deliver value to the customer and value to the company.  Make sure you always keep this in mind and measure your own efforts by this standard.  This will not only help you gain confidence in your innovation capabilities, but also leads into our next point.

Everybody likes a winner
Many practitioners feel it is an uphill battle to sell innovation in their organization.  They are right, because no one wants to buy innovation.  People are interested in the outcomes of innovation.  If you are consistently creating and delivering value for your customers and your company, you will attract support—strong support.  In my own tenure as an active innovator, I have never found it difficult to gain support for my projects because I have a track record of successful high value creation, and every project I pitch is framed in the context of the value to customers and the business.  I never talk innovation; I talk business and deliver through innovation.