Innovating To Win

Innovation Chess

When I’m not deeply engaged in innovation, I enjoy chess.  Earlier this year I started a chess blog as part of my own chess self-improvement plan.  Well, I got a comment last week reminding me that I have not posted on my other blog in a while.  Oops!  Of course, my CEO is delighted by this because he feels the more my game suffers the more the business thrives.  He may be right -- especially these days.   While the business is doing great, it does take more care and feeding in the current economic climate than in the past, a fact which is reflected in my work schedule.

Of course this extra attention to the business of innovation doesn’t mean that I don’t get the chance to practice chess thinking.  There are many parallels between the worlds of innovation and chess.

You can only see so many moves ahead
There are many factors that influence the business situation, and you will never have full visibility to all of them.  Because of this, you can never make plans that will not need adjustment over time.  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan; you absolutely must.  However, you need to be reviewing the situation on a regular basis and determining if your plans are still the right ones.  Are the market conditions still the same?  Is the breakthrough you had been considering still relevant?  Is a competitor changing the landscape?  Is there a disruptive threat emerging just over the horizon?

Strategy and tactics are equally important
A grand plan poorly executed is just as ineffective as a bunch of activity that is not aligned around a plan.  It seems pretty obvious, but I have seen many people fail at innovation (and chess) because they focused solely on one dimension of execution.  This is a fundamentally flawed approach.  Strategy and tactics are like the yin and yang of innovation.  They balance and play off of one another.  You need to have a vision of where you want to go if you plan to get there.  You also need to have the innovation skills needed to navigate the path to where you want to be. 

Bring your whole game, or go home
Innovation and chess are merciless to the uncommitted.  There are many skills that you must bring to the table in order to deliver on successful innovation.  If you have a weak point in your game, you will be punished for it.  It’s not enough to have an idea—ideas are cheap.  The difference between winning and losing in innovation is realization.  Are you engaging your entire value delivery network to maximize the potential of your innovation efforts?  Are you employing innovation best practices to ensure that you are delivering the optimal manifestation of your concept to the market?   Is your innovation process enabled to achieve this best deliverable in the most efficient manner?

Think proactively not reactively
Play the game actively.  Whether in business or chess, it’s never comfortable when your competition has the momentum.  Turn the tables by putting the completion on the defensive.  Futurist Daniel Burrus advises to identify your most urgent issue and skip it.  On the surface that may sound odd, but there is great wisdom in this suggestion.  Your most urgent issue is usually a response to yesterday’s problem.  By the time you respond, you are already too late.  The cost of that late response was the opportunity to get ahead of the curve by creating the game-changing innovation that will put you in front of the pack.

Practice makes perfect
When you play a lot, your game gets sharper; when you haven’t played in while, you feel rusty.  For companies that plan to succeed at innovation, the message is clear.  You can’t expect to resuscitate your innovation capabilities when you feel an urgent need.  You must build a sustainable innovation program that makes innovation practice a part of what you do every day.  People are examining issues all the time.  Every one of these issues represents an opportunity to reinforce the skills of innovation.  Provide the culture, the process, and the infrastructure so that your workers can hone their innovation capabilities, and you will see significant improvements in the value creation achieved by your organization.

As you can see, chess and innovation are very similar.  Regardless of which arena you are in, my best advice is always play to win.

Innovation Tips from Guy Kawasaki

In the Art of Innovation, Guy Kawasaki discusses 9 tips for innovation.  The post gives some good pointers to approaching innovation.  To summarize Guy’s points, innovation requires vision, tenacity, flexibility, customer orientation, and a splash of audacity.  Take a look at the post here.

Innovation With a Yes We Can Attitude

Recently, I heard someone saying: “Innovation isn’t about saying ‘yes’, it’s about saying ‘no’ to everything but the most essential features.”  At the time, I quietly thought to myself that this person just didn’t get it.  Today, Seth Godin has reminded of the comment with his post on “Looking for yes.”

Innovation is all about delivering value to a customer.  At the core of this is the notion of saying YES.

YES, I can make possible for you what others have not.

YES, I can improve your experience and lower the cost to you at the same time.

YES, I can not merely meet your basic requirements, but I can also delight you not by exceeding your expectations, but by redefining them.

Of course, it is important to say yes to the right question.  This is why the first step of any innovation initiative must always be to understand your customer, your market, your product, and your capability.  By listening carefully, you can identify the true, unmet need that your customer has and be able to map your innovation goals to filling the job the customer will hire your product to perform.

Having this focus on customer needs and aspirations will allow you to say yes to innovation and not waste time saying no to things that aren’t relevant.

Two Years of Innovation Blogging and Counting…

Innovating To Win is two years old today!  It’s hard to believe, but after 238 posts on a broad range of innovation topics, here we are.  It has been great fun thanks to all of you who read this blog and engage in the conversation via comments, trackbacks, or private emails.

I’ve been trying to update the site recently with some new formatting and features.  The latest is the post rating feature which I hope you’ll make use of so that other readers can see which articles you found useful and interesting.

In the coming weeks, I will try and get around to retagging the content with more categories so that it is easier to find stuff.  (Yes, I’ve been procrastinating on this task.)  Combined with the other recent changes, I think this will make it much easier to navigate to useful information.

I am looking forward to the next two years.  Now, if I can only find the time to write all the posts I have in the mental queue.

Thanks for your support; thanks for reading; and thanks for the feedback.

Innovation Accountability

Innovate on Purpose is one the innovation blogs I follow on a regular basis.  Yesterday, Jeffrey Phillips posted a nice article titled “The first step to innovation success.”  In it, he discusses the need to have people accountable for innovation.  Bang on, Jeffrey!  You get the behaviors you measure and reward.

So, how can you build such accountability into your organization?  In short, make sure ultimate responsibility is properly located in the organization, and make sure that expectations and goals are concrete and clearly understood.

On the first point, let’s first understand that while you want innovation to happen at all levels in the organization, and every person must take ownership of their role in the innovation mission, innovation will not be a sustainable, value driving part of your organization unless the ultimate accountability is at the top, the CEO.  In the words of A. G. Lafley, “The CEO must be the Chief Innovation Officer.”

This doesn’t mean that the CEO is going to spend his days ideating to drive new product capabilities.  This is not the role of the Chief Innovation Officer.  The Chief Innovation Officer’s role is to ensure that innovation is developed as a core competency of the enterprise, that it is properly funded, that it has continuous visibility, and that it delivers results.  The CEO is in the unique position of being able to fulfill this role.  The CEO sets the corporate agenda, defines the rules of engagement, and has ultimate ownership of all corporate resources.  This makes the CEO the ultimate facilitator of innovation.  Without the CEO as the most ardent innovation advocate, building a culture of sustainable innovation will always be an uphill battle.

Is your CEO the Chief Innovation Officer?  If not, this is a problem that must be addressed post haste.

The other aspect of organizational innovation accountability is setting expectations and goals.  There are many ways to look at this, but I suggest that the direct approach is best.  Use a management by objectives approach to push innovation accountability down through the organization.

Personally, I am a big fan of the Balanced Scorecard approach.  Integrate innovation into the top level objectives.  Define the impact of innovation from the four key perspectives.  How do you want innovation to impact the financial performance of your organization?  How should your customers feel the benefit of innovation?  How do your internal processes need to reflect your innovation goals?  How will innovation be a platform for organization and employee learning and growth?  Once you have defined the top level innovation goals, push them down through each successive level in the goals hierarchy.  Make sure that the objectives are clear, concrete, and measurable.  In this way, every person in the enterprise will have line-of-sight accountability for their role and clearly understand the impact their contribution has on the success of the team.

Follow these two steps and you will see innovation flourish in your organization and deliver huge returns.

Thanks for the Nod, Chuck

As a blogger, acknowledgement is never expected, but always welcome.  It is especially nice to get that acknowledgement from a respected and highly credible source.  In the Innovation Tools Innovation Weblog post “10 innovation experts to whom you should be listening”, it was a very pleasant surprise to be named by Chuck Frey.

Thanks for the nod, Chuck.

Check out who else is on the list.