One of the fun aspects of going to a conference is meeting people. Whether it meeting old friends or new ones, connections provide the leitmotif that accents the event.
This afternoon, I had the pleasure of meeting fellow blogger Jeffery Phillips of Innovate On Purpose. It was great to put a face to the name, and we had a nice discussion about the challenges of bringing the message of sustainable innovation to organizations. Jeffery proved to be a engaging in person as he is articulate in his blog posts.
The chance to hear stories form field experience in the form of practitioner presentations is another reason for going to a conference. This afternoon, I sat in on a very interesting session in the Can Innovation Be Made Predictable track presented by Shane Johnson of Bank of America. The topic was Six Sigma & Innovation. This is a subject that gained some serious attention last year when 3M stubbed its toe in the introduction of Six Sigma.
In this session, Shane talked about BofA’s innovation journey. He described how the organization moved through various stages of innovation maturity—from being strictly focused on uniformity of delivery to investigating innovation methods to exploring how to make innovation a repeatable phenomenon and culminating with cultural transformation for innovation. Becoming an ambidextrous organization, one that can both delivery reliable quality and drive innovation, has delivered measurable value for the company.
Some of the ways in which BofA measures its innovation results include:
- Units of Innovation Output – such as number of ideas generated, WIP, yield, kill rate, and strategic mix (incremental, strategic, breakthrough)
- Time to Market Impact of Innovation – expressed as average project completion time, average time to launch, average aging (Shane did warn that these measures require careful interpretation in that more strategic and breakthrough innovations tend to need more time to mature.)
- Quality
- Outcome Benefits of Innovation – such as % revenue from new products, percent benefits from new products, number of patents
While BofA is still evaluating the specific metric they use for evaluating the impact of innovation, they are right to place an emphasis on this.
Shane finished his presentation with a summary of key dimensions along which BofA has tweaked it Six Sigma method to better foster innovation. All in all it was a very interesting story about one company’s journey in to the innovation wilderness.
Kyoto Musings
I am taking the bullet train this morning from Tokyo to Kyoto to go speak at the 2008 Japanese TRIZ Symposium. While in Japan, I have also had the chance to meet with several members of the Japanese innovation community. It is interesting to note the differences and similarities in attitude and approach to innovation that can be observed as one touches different geographic regions.
Some things are very consistent. Japan is feeling an economic slowdown after five years of growth. This has companies thinking about many of the same issues as their Western counterparts. Companies globally are coming to the realization that innovation is at the core of their competitive sustainability. But whereas innovation has been only the domain of R&D in looking for new technology and products, some Japanese companies are rethinking their innovation agenda. The possibility to push innovation skills to production engineers as a way to spur a new wave of efficiency gains is gaining attraction to these organizations.
This is an interesting trend, but these companies should be expanding their vision. Innovation touches all aspects of what a company does in delivering value to the most important customers in the value chain. While it is easy to consider the discrete innovation actions as independent event during the product lifecycle, such a viewpoint is self limiting. Product creation, delivery, and service are interconnected elements of a complex corporate ecosystem of value creation. As such, companies should consider how to encourage and leverage the connectedness of these activities.
Another trend that I have seen recently in Europe and the US which has been validated in my discussions with Japanese companies is a shift in thinking about knowledge management and its role in innovation. There is a growing awareness of the fundamental importance of connecting knowledge workers with information. But, traditional models of knowledge management are viewed as being failed systems. While thinking in this area is still lagging globally, more and more companies are beginning to understand that a new metaphor of design intent and role based knowledge enablement is needed to break the barriers between knowledge workers and the information they need to formulate new concepts of innovation.
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