Innovating To Win

The Gulf Oil Spill – A Lesson in Failure to Innovate

It’s horrifying to think that it has been almost 70 days since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20th and little substantive progress has been achieved in stemming the ecological disaster of Brobdingnagian proportion.  Crude oil continues to spew forth from the broken underwater pipe.  Gooey masses of toxic sludge wash up on our shores.  The flora and fauna that comprise the fragile ecosystem are helpless as they are buried in oil.

Surely, a unique catastrophe such as this which poses challenges unlike any which have been seen before requires fresh thinking, inventive approaches, novel solutions—in a word: innovation.  Yet, where is the innovation?

People are viscerally angry at the Obama administration for its handling of the crisis.  Some people defend the President saying, “He really couldn’t do anything.”  The problem is that Obama could do something.  He could have used the power of the Office to drive the innovation climate needed to produce better outcomes.

The handling of Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an object lesson in ways to fail at driving innovation in time of need.  Here are some of the key takeaways that we can learn from.

Failing to recognize the problem
In the initial days after the explosion, it was clear that this was going to be a serious situation.  Yet, both BP and the Whitehouse downplayed the severity of the spill publishing estimates of the volume of oil leakage far below what the Coast Guard was estimating.  No immediate action was seen from the Administration either to hasten stoppage of the leak or to mitigate the threats to the environment.  In short, heads were firmly planted in the sand as no one publicly acknowledged the scope of what was happening.

Turning a blind eye to the situation and looking through rose tinted glasses are all too common in business.  Consider the failure of Sony to recognize the threats mp3 technology posed to the Walkman.  How many minicomputer companies vanished because they did not fully appreciate the technological and market trends of the 1980s?  You must always be looking for what looms just over the horizon.  As Andy Grove put it, “Only the paranoid survive.”

Not Invented Here syndrome
Over a dozen countries have offered assistance in cleaning up the spill.  The Administration has turned all these offers of help away.  Many individuals have stepped forward with ideas about how to stop the leak or protect the coastline.  Yet, these suggestions have been ignored.  This sort of intellectual arrogance abounds in the business world as well.  I can’t count the number times I have heard companies described as having an NIH culture.

Companies must look at their innovation systems and understand how to integrate customers and value chain partners into their R&D processes.  Open innovation is not simply about finding more ideas; it’s about extending the value creation capacity of an organization by leveraging all the resources in its innovation ecosystem.

No leadership
This is the issue that has the public riled.  Throughout the crisis, Obama has not shown any leadership.  Innovation requires leadership, that quality of being able to rally people to step outside of themselves and reach a goal that they would not have been able to achieve on their own.  But, the administration has not chosen to take the lead.  When BP was short on ideas to stop the leak, did Obama reach out to other oil companies to see if they could help or at least help understand the limits of possibility?  No.  Did Obama stand up against political pressure and waive the Jones Act?  No.  At every turn, the Administration has failed to show leadership opting instead to sit back and wait for BP to figure it out.

Lack of leadership is a leading cause for failure to establish sustainable innovation systems in companies.  Many executives will say they want innovation practice to develop from the grass roots of the engineering community.  The reality is that without the nourishment of executive leadership, the grass root are destined to whither in the parched and barren soil of institutional inertia.  Executives must lead from the front to drive the type of cultural change required to establish innovation as a value driving core competence.

All show; no substance
Don’t we all feel better knowing the Administration is going to have a blue ribbon committee explore potential criminal malfeasance at the root of the disaster?  Thank goodness BP executives have been subjected to a good tongue lashing. Huzzah, huzzah!

Right!  Everyone can see through the bread and circus approach to managing the situation.  The political consequences of this promise to be severe.  So too, are the consequences within a company when the commitment to innovation doesn’t extend beyond words and window dressing.  When it comes to a company’s innovation agenda, all employees recognize big hat, no cattle management and are highly unmotivated to pursue innovation on behalf of the company.  If you really want innovation, you must act with conviction and purpose.  You must invest in people and infrastructure to enable the environment for innovation success.

What innovation lessons do you see in the Gulf Oil Spill situation?

Innovation Brewing

Looking at the blog of Invention Machine’s CEO Mark Atkins, I am reminded that June is Innovation Month in New England.  There will be many fun and interesting innovation happenings throughout the region.  One of these is InnoBeer (short for Innovation Beer Summit).  When I organized the first InnoBeer event, I had no idea that it would become so popular.  Yet there have now been InnoBeer events in several locations in both the U.S. and Europe.

Recently, I had the opportunity to learn to make beer.  I joined a group of friends and together we brewed six varieties of beer.  There are innovation lessons to be learned from most things.  Here are some innovation lessons I took away from my beer making debut.

Science
There is science behind making beer.  Understanding what is happening in the process helps you achieve the desired results.  This is true for every domain in which I see people working in the trenches of innovation.  No matter what you are doing, there is a body of knowledge that precedes your efforts.  If you don’t have good access to this knowledge, you are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past and waste a lot of effort reinventing the wheel.  High performance innovation organizations understand the need to knowledge enable their innovation workers by providing them with the best, purposeful knowledge research and delivery systems.

Team
During our little beer making party, we brewed 6 varieties of beer in one evening (90 minute IPA, Summer Ale, Belgian Blonde, Vanilla Honey Porter, Oatmeal Stout, and Scottish Ale).  Getting it all done required teamwork and collaboration.  In business innovation practice this pressure to achieve high-value innovation outcomes with limited resources and time is de rigueur.   To achieve results requires the same type of committed and connected teamwork for innovation workers.  Companies seeking to maximize the effectiveness of their innovation workforce must employ innovation frameworks that connect people to one another when they need based on what they know.

Tools
Making our beer, we have at our disposal the right equipment to make the job easy and efficient: steam controlled boiling vats, wort cooling filters, automatic bottle sanitizers, etc.  Listening to others in our group recount the horror stories of making beer in their kitchens without these tools reminded me of what I see all too often walking into companies that have not begun to deploy state of the art innovation platform technology.  Innovation workers struggle to make sense of problems and find the fit between problem states and solution spaces.  Companies need to invest in providing their workers with the right tools and skills for innovation success.  Sure, you can start a fire rubbing sticks together; but why not give your teams modern torches and set them loose to burn up the competition.

Experience
Having the brew master watching over us made a huge difference.  He was able to tell us in advance what to pay attention to and how to ensure the quality of the final product we were producing.  Preserving, tapping into, and leveraging grey beard knowledge is a huge problem for many companies.  Make sure you have systems in place to harvest and disseminate this knowledge to empower your entire innovation workforce and enable the generational transference of your corporate tribal wisdom.

Immersion
My beer making experience was great.  One of the best aspects of the experience was its immersive nature.  While we were engaged in brewing or bottling, that was the focus of our activity.  There were no interruptions, no need to divert our attention and focus, no co-opting of resources by some other urgency.  Of course, we all have to deal with the realities of the real world when we are working in the trenches of innovation.  But, managers need to find the way to carve out protected time for innovation workers to focus on what’s important, not merely what seems urgent.  You have to willing to invest in your people, giving them the time to master and apply innovation best practices to their innovation tasks.  You will find this is an investment that will pay big dividends by both delivering the benefits of accelerated innovation and product delivery, but also greater per worker productivity.

The next InnoBeer tweetup is schedule for Tuesday, June 15th.  If you are in Boston, stop on by and join in the innovation conversation.  You can get details and sign up (free) here.

Reflecting On The Open Innovation Summit

Last week I spent a few days at the inaugural edition of the Open Innovation Summit.  Considering this was the first year for the event and that December is not a great month to host conferences in, I think it was well attended.

The conference had a single track of speakers, and most of them were very high quality.  Some of the speaker that I most enjoyed were: Phil McKinney of HP, Russ Conser of Shell, Pramod Reddy of P&G, Moises Norena of Whirlpool, Helene Rutledge of GSK, Ed Rinker of Clorox, and Greg Fox of Cisco.

Of course, these conferences are great for networking and meeting people, but I like to learn from others at an event like this.  Here are some of the key themes I heard at the event that are important lessons for us all.

• Innovation, open or otherwise, can’t succeed if it is viewed as an idea generation & capture process that is divorced from business execution.

• Executive sponsorship is vital not just to provide the funding and mandate, but also to provide air cover during the initial stages of an innovation initiative.

• Internal promotion of innovation is needed, but remember to promote the value of what has been accomplished, not what you plan to do. People find comfort in the concrete benefit of what is already done, but the fuzzy future finds factions fleeing for the doors.

• Don’t dismiss the intellectual property aspects of open innovation. Considered up front, they are easily managed, but left as an afterthought they can be an innovation killer.

• Equip your people with the skills and tools they need for success.

• Make sure you have sorted out you internal innovation before engaging in open innovation. The point of open innovation is to kick your internal capabilities into high gear by optimally integrating external constituencies into your process. This can be difficult if you haven’t first established your process.

Report From Power To Innovate 2009

What a week it was!  Last Thursday and Friday Invention Machine held its annual Power To Innovate conference.  The event was well attended and drew international representation of users of Invention Machine’s Goldfire innovation platform software.

For me, this is always a terrific event.  The pre-event activities began on Wednesday with a workshop on specific innovation methods.  In parallel with the workshop, the Invention Machine Customer Advisory Council, a group of lead Goldfire customers, met to review the 2010 Goldfire technology roadmap.  The feedback provide by our clients is always very valuable in shaping the capabilities we provide in Goldfire to knowledge enable innovation workers.

During the two days of the main conference, there were a number great sessions and highlights.  The theme for this year’s conference was “Collaborate to Innovate.”  Mark Atkins, CEO of Invention Machine, gave the opening keynote in which he described the need for and benefits of creating a vibrant Innovation Intelligence Ecosystemtm.  This was followed by Boston Scientific’s Randy Schiestl, VP Research and Development, and Jude Currier, Cardiovascular Knowledge Management & Innovation Practices Lead, who described how Boston Scientific is building its innovation competence and the central role Goldfire and the Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem play in this.

Right after lunch, Jim Belfiore (@jsbelfiore on Twitter) presented a fascinating case study of how he had used the power of Goldfire’s latest innovation research capabilities to accelerate the exploration of global knowledge around lymphoma.  I followed Jim with a presentation of the near term Goldfire product roadmap showing how global innovation communities will be connected through the innovation collaboration platform.

There were also plenty of great breakout sessions.  A sampling of the user led sessions includes: Jill Kunzelman, Senior Research Engineer at PolyOne, talked about her experiences and lessons learned in driving a successful deployment of innovation software; Curtis Barr, Bemis Research & Development, discussed using Goldfire as a catalyst for the R&D process; and Rich Durand, Director, Material and Characterization Science at Sun Chemical, showed some interesting examples of how the technique of function modeling can be used to understand chemical innovation challenges.

I enjoyed presenting two breakout sessions.  The first was on building a high performance innovation organization.  The other was on overcoming the challenges of open innovation.

Of course beyond the sessions, the opportunity to network is one of the best parts of a conference like Power To Innovate.  It gave me a great chance to met friends, old and new, from the global Goldfire community.  It was also great to catch up with two fellow innovation bloggers.  Andrea Meyer was the events official blogger and also did a great job of tweeting live from the event.  Drew Boyd was also there.  (You can find Drew’s write up of the event on his blog here.)

There is a lot more I could say about the 2009 edition of Power To Innovate.  But, I think Mary Beth Robles, VP External Innovation at Colgate-Palmolive, said it best when she opined that Power To Innovate is the best innovation conference because it brings together real users and the leading innovation minds from around the globe without a bunch of vendors or talking heads.

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.

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.

Mass Innovation Nights

I am off for a few days playing in the annual Foxwoods chess tournament, so I haven’t had a chance yet to mention a great little innovation event for folks in the greater Boston area.  For the rest of 2009, every second Wednesday of the month will see a launch party at Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation.  Each of these events, Mass Innovation Nights, features 10 companies showing off their new products & technologies.

I dropped in on the first Mass Innovation Nights event this week.  It was a lot of fun and very well attended.  Here are a couple pictures from the event (courtesy of Parna Sarkar).

Me with Renee Callahan of Innosight and Jim Belfiore of Invention Machine

Jeff Boehm of Invention Machine explaining the Siphon Flush to the Boston Globe

You can find more information on Mass Innovation Nights here.

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.

See You In Second Life

I am going to be participating in an event hosted by the PDMA in Second Life.  The event is a panel discussion titled ”The Intersection of Green and Innovation in a New World.”  I hope to see you (or your avatar) there.  The event is scheduled for December 4th at 2:00 pm EDT at the PDMA Island in Second Life.

You can register for the event here.

A Day at the Fourth TRIZ Symposium in Japan

I spent Wednesday at the Fourth TRIZ Symposium in Japan.  This annual event has grown rapidly to become one of the largest events of its kind.  Of course, the best part of an event like this is the opportunity to get together with so many top tier innovation practitioners.  I always enjoy catching up with old friends and making new ones.

The morning keynote presentation was delivered by Amir Roggel of Intel.  The presentation, “TRIZ Development at Intel Corporation”, provided a fascinating look at how Intel applied one repeatable innovation methodology.  Amir described TRIZ as the key to systematic innovation to drive Intel’s innovation future, and finished his presentation telling attendees, “Intel uses TRIZ effectively; so can you.”

There a number of interesting presentations during the day.  I attended three of them.

Paul Devaraj of Intel talked about the “Test Pogo Pins Reuse Program” that he had worked on.  Paul did a great job of explaining how TRIZ tools helped him solve issues with critical test equipment.

Following Paul’s talk, Professor Toru Nakagawa of Osaka Gakuin University delivered a presentation titled “Extension of USIT in Japan – A New Paradigm for Creative Problem Solving.”  In this session, Toru described the history of USIT a simplified system based on TRIZ and of USITs deployment in Japan.

The afternoon continued with a session titled “A Comparison of the Problem Solving and Creativity Potential Shown in Engineers using TRIZ or Lean/Six Sigma.”  Presented by Paul Filmore from the University of Plymouth, UK, the talked discussed the findings of some comparative studies conducted by Filmore regarding the level of innovation tools offered to practitioners of different methodologies.  Of course given the much publicized problems in deploying 6-sigma at 3M, it probably comes as no surprise that 6-Sigma scored the lowest level of support for creativity.

Finally, my turn to present came at the end of the day.  My paper, “Advances In The Application of Computational Linguistics for TRIZ Practice,” was well received.  Amir Roggel chimed in during the Q&A to confirm the value of applied semantic technology by relating his own use case.

Unfortunately, I could only stay for one day of the Symposium; from what I saw, it is a high quality event.