Innovating To Win

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.

How’s That Hope Thing Workin’ For Ya?

Well, okay… I admit that I’m annoyed.  When Obama was swept into office, the winds of change seemed an unstoppable force, and many likened Obama to JFK.  Now, Obama has distanced himself from JFK by essentially scuttling the programs that are a lingering part of the JFK legacy.  He has decided to discontinue NASA programs around the space shuttle and lunar exploration.
 
So you could say, “So what; do we really care about that stuff?”  Some might even make some good arguments for why these programs should be dropped.  But, here’s why you should care.

The fact is that there is little governments actually do that doesn’t in some way hurt the cause of innovation.  If you don’t believe that statement, just take a look at the evidence of history.  Even when governments try to do the right thing, they usually step on innovation along the way.  Consider what happens when a new safety standard is put in place for consumer protection.  The standard is often adopted from existing industrial practice as promoted by the organization with the best lobbyists.  The net result is that barriers to new competition are erected and the status quo is codified.  When the current administration channels big dollars to solar energy research, they in effect pick the winners and losers of technology and divert private funding away from other innovative energy strategies.

One of the few things that government does that actually helps the march of innovation is provide funding for basic and applied research that private industry isn’t focused on.  This is fundamentally of value to future innovation because a big part of the innovation equation is the application of knowledge to creating high-value solutions to market needs.  But, solutions come from existing knowledge.  Government funded research contributed to the fund of knowledge that is available to innovators.  Every time the boundaries of our human experience and scientific knowledge are extended through programs like the NASA programs which are slated to be killed, our global “box” is expanded, and our potential to solve new problems and find new game-changing innovations is enhanced.

Sure, not every program or endeavor can or should be funded indefinitely.  But, I believe there is still tremendous potential in these specific programs.  The decisions represented in Obama’s 2011 budget are a clear setback for global innovation and should send a shiver down the spine of all of us.

Innovation Chickens and Eggs

Just before I left for my end of year holiday, there was an interesting post on Bruce Nussbaum’s BusinessWeek NussbaumOnDesign blog.  It mentioned a recent statement by Don Norman, a key leader in Design, in which he had stated that innovation is driven by technology and science rather than design’s focus on peoples’ needs.  This initiated an interesting discussion that even saw Don Norman weighing in.

I suppose that I should be pleased by such a pronouncement.  After all, my own background is from the science & technology side of things, and more than once I have found myself annoyed by thick-headed design bigots espousing fanciful ideas about design being the only thing that matters or that innovation cannot be planned.  But on the contrary, I find that the esteemed Mr. Norman is wrong.

Does that mean that it is design that drives innovation?  No.  Rather, science & technology and design are two equally important ingredients in successful, sustainable innovation.

Strangely in his comment on Nussbaum’s blog, Norman makes the rather absurd claim that need follows the existence of technology.  Looking at the examples cited, it is easy to see how laughable this argument is.  Norman states, “The need for communication devices (telegraph, telephone, radio, cellphone, internet, postal mail, email) came after the technologies made them possible.”  I doubt that Norman can be so naïve as to thinks this is a credible statement. 

The need to communicate existed before and independently of the vehicles of communication.  As human social conditions evolved, so too did the demand for communication efficiency evolve along various measures.  People made due with the technologies available because they did not imagine that alternatives could be available.  At times, these limitations placed constraints on other aspects of societal evolution.  Naturally, the science and technology needed to enable new modes and models of communication evolved to meet the latent need.  These technologies were not adopted because they existed, but because the need existed to drive the adoption.  The fact that no one stood up and said, “Boy, a Blackberry would sure make my life easier,” in 1950, does not imply that the need case for the device did not exist.

Yes, it is sometimes very difficult to identify the latent need before it is expressed.  But, it is there.  Yes, the enablement of a solution requires the science & technology foundation to make the solution possible.  But, absent a need, the invention is little more than a curiosity.

Successful innovation responds to a need (design influence); successful innovation delivers a novel solution (science & technology influence).  Design leads us to understanding how to marry capability to need in a way that creates value; the language of capability is defined and expanded through invention in science & technology.  Thus, it is that the intersection of design and technology is the wellspring of innovation.

Is Twitter Twend Twailing Off?

At the recent Open Innovation Summit, along with the many great speakers there was a host of blogger correspondents providing real-time coverage of the conference via Twitter (@AndreaMeyer, @bhc3, @innovate, @IPStrategist, @lindegaard, @Renee_Innosight – sorry if I forgot anyone).  This is becoming a very common occurrence.  So much so that one blogger opined, “If a conference isn’t Tweeted, did it really happen?”

However, what I found interesting wasn’t the great Twitter coverage, but the conversation about Twitter that I heard in the hallways.  While most people in media or marketing positions would say that Twitter is invaluable, there seemed to be a lot of contrarian comments from people with different orientations.  Many people echoed the opinion of Ric Merrifield, Business Architect at Microsoft, who stated, “I’m not sold on Twitter.”  Ric is definitely not alone, and I have to admit to being among the skeptics.  I am active on Twitter because I feel it is an important experiment in social media that I want to take part in.  But this use motivation isn’t conducive to long term viability of a user community.

Recently, eMarketer reported that several research firms were reporting declines in the estimates of unique visitors in the US.  Nielsen Online estimated the drop from September to October was 27.8%.  Is this a blip in had previously been a meteoric rise, or a sign of things to come?  What do you think?

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.

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?

Towards Automated Innovation

There are many pleasures that innovation practitioners get from what they do.  The satisfaction of creating and delivering a high value solution where others had failed to see the opportunity, the knowledge that what you do is changing the lives of those around you, the thrill of shaping the future are among a few of the things I have heard other innovators talk about.  However on a more mundane level, it has always seemed very satisfying when another talented innovation practitioner acknowledges your efforts.  So, I was delighted to see Drew Boyd’s latest blog post on Innovation in Practice: “Automated Innovation”.

Drew is a very accomplished practitioner.  As the Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon Endo-Surgery division, Drew heads up J&J’s marketing university that among other things is responsible for new product innovation.  He is a strong student of SIT and is also Executive Director of the MS-Marketing Program and Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati College of Business where he teaches "Applied Marketing Innovation" and the Capstone Course.  And of course, he writes a great blog which I read regularly.

In his Automated Innovation post, Drew postulates on the role of software technology in the service of innovation.  What thrilled me about his musings was his mentioning Goldfire as a platform that takes people a step further down the path of machine assisted innovation.  How cool is that?

I consider myself to be very lucky.  I get to get up every day and work on stuff that is fun and that I love.  In my business, innovation isn’t just a buzz word; it is the raison d’être of the company.  I not only get to practice innovation, I get to innovate innovation and develop tools and methods to help companies create high value product and services faster, reliably, repeatably and do so working with some of the best innovation practitioners in the world.  What could be better?

So, thank you, Drew, for the recognition and kind words of encouragement.  Rest assured that, in the words of Al Jolsen, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

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?

Obama & Innovation – First hundred days assessment

As President Obama reaches the first milestone of 100 days in office, many pundits are evaluating how he’s doing.  I don’t really care about most of these assessments which seem to be focused more on how Presidential he has been acting and not really looking at the substance of Obama’s actions and impact as President.  But since the President chose to deliver an address to the National Academy of the Sciences this week, it seems appropriate to ask how he’s doing when it comes to innovation.  With that in mind, here are my observations on two indicators: Obama’s speech to the NAS, and his actions in response to the economic situation (which have a direct impact on the National innovation climate).

In considering Obama’s speech, I am not going to critique his delivery or choice of words.  My concern is the content (did he cover the right issues given the audience), the substance (was there appropriate depth in the treatment), and the underlying policy (can we expect a positive outcome) of his remarks.

In the area of content, I have to give Obama an A-.  He really did hit on several key issues that impact innovation: funding for basic research, R&D credits for private enterprise, education, and data privacy.  There are other innovation related topics he could have address, but you can only hit so many topics in any one given speech and not all are appropriate for every audience.  (For a more complete list is innovation issues see this open letter post.)  I would say the only issue missing that I really wished he had touched on with this audience was revisiting the Bayh-Dole Act—a piece of legislation which was a bad deal for tax payers and a bad deal for innovation.

Looking at the substance of his remarks, I am a little less impressed.  On the plus side, Obama recognized that we can’t be complacent and investing in our future is important.  Yet while he glibly talked of the sins of letting scientific research be politicized, his words and actions suggest that he only views political influence as a bad thing when it is contrary to the political view he subscribes to.  He frequently referenced carbon pollution as a key focus of needed research—this is of course is one of the most politicized science issues in recent history.  Obama cited many specific investments in the form of doubling and in some cases tripling of budgets for programs.  However, money doesn’t always equate with impact.  I would have preferred to hear more about the allocation of those funds.   Does doubling the budget of the National Science Foundation mean that these new funds will flow through to actual research, or does it mean that the NSF will add a heap of bureaucracy?   (In the interest of full disclosure I should state that I am very pro-NSF funding and was the recipient of an NSF grant back when I was in school.)  For this reason, I can only give Obama a C+ on substance.

Considering the policy behind the remarks is a more difficult challenge.  Politicians are of course very skilled at minimizing the degree to which they disclose the actual intent of policy when they speak.  This is a necessary skill for politics because it is always true that any time a politician take a concrete position, more votes will be lost than gained.  So, we in the citizenry are forced to try and read the tea leaves.  Based on past performance of government initiatives, it is impossible to not have some healthy skepticism.  Thus, I am not very optimistic.  I do believe that the increase funding for certain agencies will have a positive impact, as will making the R&D tax credit permanent.  So, kudos go to Obama for these actions. 

However, I don’t hold much hope for Obama’s comments on education.  It has been shown time and time again that throwing more money at education does not produce results.  There is new thinking needed to fix what is broken in our educational system, and I suspect that the cure to what ails us may not require new money to implement as much as a simple realignment of priorities, focus, and the funding associated with current, well-meant-but-failed programs.  Not to be harsh, but we also need to recognize that equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome.  While we should invest in creating a level playing field, it is a misuse of public funds to go to extremes to try and force equal results.

I am also very worried when it becomes a matter of public policy to direct where we will focus our national investment in research.  Obama open his remarks stating that we can’t predict from where the great breakthroughs will come.  But, he went on to make it clear that he intends to focus funding in certain areas based on their political currency.  Furthermore, from the sound of it, the voices that contribute to the debate may be selectively chosen.  There are too many examples from the past which make it clear that suppressing broad discussion and dialogue around emerging science is never a good approach.  I sincerely hope that I am misreading the tea leaves in this area.

As a final factor in assessing Obama’s innovation policies, I will invoke the evidence of his actions on the economy.  Fortunately, the economy has its own life and rhythm and it is a reality that government action is less a factor than politicians would have us believe.  If not, we would be looking at a disaster based solely on the actions to date.  The so-called stimulus bill has very little in it that will actually stimulate the economy, and the burden created by the massive new debt load will be an economic drag for years to come.  The negative effects of this bill will needlessly divert funds from moving our nation forward into unproductive debt service.  This will not be good for innovation.

So from the visible evidence to date, I give Obama a D for policy.  Too harsh?  What say you?