Innovating To Win

Government and Innovation Climate Poll Closing Soon

Oops!  I forgot to close this most recent poll.  So, our current informal innovation poll will close this Friday.  This time, the question is: “As economic signs turn upwards, what will be the effect on the climate for innovation of continued long-term or deepening government intervention?”

We have been in a global economic crisis for over a year now.  Some pundits are saying the worst is behind us, while others say the other shoe has yet to drop.  Regardless of what the future may bring governments around the globe continue to take measure to try and navigate the unstable waters and avoid triggering either inflation or deflation.  What impact are these measures going to have on the climate for innovation?

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, September 28th.

An Innovation Chat With Braden Kelley

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter) is an official blogger for the Open Innovation Summit that will be held in Orlando on December 2-4, 2009.  I will be speaking on the topic of “Hands-On Strategies For Overcoming the Key Challenges Of Open Innovation” at the conference.  So, this week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Braden.

Braden asked some great questions.  You can see the transcript of the interview on Braden’s blog.  I hope you find my answers as insightful as Braden’s questions.

Finding New Market Opportunities Through Systematic Innovation

It has been more than a year since the bottom fell out of the financial markets, and companies around the globe are still struggle to figure out which way is up.  There are some early signs of hope, but the future is still is still masked by the murky cloud of uncertainty.  Companies must find ways to not just survive but thrive.  A return to growth is demanded by shareholders who feel the pain of depressed share prices.  But where to turn for growth remains the question of the day.

I have recently heard more companies than ever asking about ways to improve the health and effectiveness of their innovation programs.  This is a direct consequence of global market trends.  These companies understand that growth will not come from doing more of the same.  The engine of growth is change through innovation.

One common question I hear is: “How can we find new markets more effectively?”  Fortunately, there are some straight forward answers that can help these companies get on the right track.  There are a few basic approaches to driving revenue growth:

• Finding new markets for existing products
• Extending the revenue life of products in their current markets
• Finding new applications for technologies or methods
• Entering adjacent markets

For each of these basic approaches, there are a number of systematic innovation methods that support the approach.  Yesterday, I had the opportunity to show a company how to apply one such method using repeatable innovation best practices to find candidate new markets to drive revenue growth.  The method I demonstrated is aimed at identifying a set of key technical capabilities, understanding the core value benefits delivered through the capabilities, isolating customer pain in new markets that represent need for the value benefits, and defining the market opportunities that exist at the intersection of the customer pain and the value benefit.

Showing how the theory of high performance innovation practices can be put into practice is always an enlightening experience.  For the people observing the demonstration, it provides a tangible proof point of what is possible through sustainable innovation practice.  For me, it is always a reaffirming exercise.  So it was yesterday as I showed how the voice of this company’s technology, the voice of the customer, and the voice of regulation were speaking in unison and suggesting a new multi-billion dollar market opportunity--an epiphany that had only taken me 30 minutes to identify by following the path of sustainable innovation, leveraging innovation best practices and technology to amplify the voices of innovation and hear what they have to say.

Understanding how to develop strategic innovation competence is a critical success factor for companies.  Whether it is the every day innovation needs of the enterprise in finding new ways to define and execute on operational excellence or the strategic Big I initiatives around developing new products and markets, innovation is the elixir to drive the health and success of the company.  Globally, companies are critically reexamining what they are doing to establish sustainable, high performance innovation as a value-driving core competence of the organization.  Are you?

Looking For Innovation? Try Looking In The Mirror!

There are too many "innovators" around and not enough innovation...  -- @dduhamel

As I was discussing the intricacies of defining a semantic processing engine for a language which has no formally defined morphology this morning, I noticed the statement above popup in my Tweetdeck window.  It struck a chord with me because I had just had two conversations yesterday along a related theme.  The gist of the discussions was that there are many people who play important roles in the innovation process, but many of them are totally unaware of this and don’t perceive themselves as innovators.

As one data point to highlight this phenomenon, I was talking to one colleague who recounted to me a recent experience.  He was talking to a group of researchers, engineers, and designers about the continuum of innovation activity and how on the lower end of the innovation complexity curve, there are tasks we perform every day in support of innovation.  When he asked the group how many of them performed such tasks, not one of them raised their hand.  He then went on to explain some of the most common every day innovation tasks such as research to create knowledge needed to solve problems.  Once, he had explained the concept of every day innovation in these terms, everyone raised their hand when asked the same question.

This is important because the outcome of any endeavor is highly influenced by the participants’ perceptions of the purpose, scope, and rules of engagement related to the task.  If you don’t think innovation is what you are doing, you just aren’t likely to try looking for innovative solutions.  On the other hand, once you understand you are part of the overall engine of innovation in your company, you are freed to explore problems in new ways and find higher value solutions.

For managers, it is important to remember that your team may lose sight of this from time to time, so you must remind them of the importance of their contribution to the innovation agenda. 

For individual contributors, it is important to be aware of the higher level goals of the enterprise and look at challenges in their whole context and look for solutions that create new value.  Ask yourself some simple questions.  Are you treating the symptom or curing the disease?  What have you done to expand your box today?  How are you adding value to the project, to your customer, to your company?

Yes, I found @dduhamel’s comment interesting.  I think it is because from what I can see, a key reason we don’t see more innovation isn’t that there are too many innovators.  In many cases, it is because not enough of us see innovation as our job.

Deloitte Poll Highlights Weak State of Innovation Practice

In case you missed it, a recent on-line poll conducted by Deloitte confirms the dismal state of innovation practice in companies.  At a time when companies need to produce more vehicles for value delivery to climb out the financial doldrums, innovation is a vital force that can be brought to bear on the challenge.  Yet, most companies are not prepared to meet the challenge.  In the Deloitte poll, 31% of the executives surveyed indicated that innovation happens by accident in their company, and only 14% said that innovation is clearly defined within their company.

It is no wonder that many companies are struggling to get their arms around this innovation thing.  Just last week, I visited with several leading companies, and questions around innovation, establishing repeatable innovation as a value-driving core competence, and building a sustainable, high-performance innovation culture were the key topics these companies wanted help with.  Fortunately for these companies, they recognize that fundamental change is need if they are to emerge from the quagmire of accident innovation.  Yet, many companies aren’t even aware that there is a problem in the organization and that there is a path to innovation success.

A couple years ago, an Innovation Practice Maturity Model was described in a post on Innovating To Win.  This model has withstood the scrutiny of practice, so it seems timely to review the characteristics of each of the four stages of the model.  Ask yourself, “Where does my organization fit in this model, and what should we be doing to advance our innovation capabilities?”

Stage I: Accidental Innovation
At this first stage, the organization has not begun implementing structured innovation.  Companies are generally unaware that there exist approaches to achieve repeatable, on-demand innovation.  Innovation is poorly, if at all, understood.  Because these organizations do not recognize innovation as a competence that can be developed and harnessed, there is no infrastructure to support good innovation disciplines and no sponsorship to promote such practices.  As a result, innovation is not repeatable, predictable or reliable, and ROI on investment in R&D falls well short of expectations.

Stage II: Situational Innovation
Organizations evolve to the second stage when awareness of structured innovation methods lead the organizations to test these methods.  Limited investments in tools and methods are made to support a specific test case.  A team is assembled to try out the new innovation methods in the context of a highly visible project.  Narrowly focused knowledge asset mining may also be done in support of the project as well.  While these initial projects are often highly successful, the momentum coming out of these projects is rarely leveraged because the organization is not yet committed to the path of innovation excellence.  As a result, innovation skills are often not retained and must be rebuilt with each new iteration of trying out the concept of structured innovation.

Stage III: Repeatable Innovation
In this stage of innovation process maturity, the successes with early trials have led to genuine enthusiasm for the broader deployment of innovation best practices.  The organization develops innovation specialists who become leveraged resources within the company and are assigned to projects on an as-needed basis.  Investment in innovation infrastructure grows as both the innovation specialists are equipped with the proper tools, and the general knowledge worker population is given access to innovation tools and knowledge research technologies.  While the company begins to experience the benefits of repeatable innovation, innovation is still opportunistic, targeting specific projects, and tends to be contained within pockets of the organization. 

Stage IV: High-Performance Innovation
In this final phase of innovation practice development, an organization is committed to establishing innovation a core competency.  Formal corporate programs for innovation best practices are created.  These programs help to integrate innovation as a key part of the corporate culture and the organizations established product development processes, providing an operational framework to unify strategy, communities, knowledge assets, and process.  A hierarchy of innovation practitioners is developed to optimize the availability and leveragability of innovation skills within the enterprise.  Innovation skills are widely deployed within the entire innovation worker population, with basic innovation practice training becoming an integral part of team and individual employee development.  In this stage of innovation practice development, corporations begin to broadly leverage knowledge assets.  Innovation best practices, supported by precise knowledge retrieval, become integrated into the organizational fabric.

Companies that make innovation a core competence are ready to take advantage of opportunity in good times and in bad times.  Do you see your organization in the four stages of the model?  Are you ready to wield the power of innovation on demand?