Посты автора boydadmin

boydadmin

Don’t Be Fooled When Assessing Creative Work

Published date: April 1, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,,

How we judge a creative idea is affected by how we perceive its inventor. Without realizing it, we may overvalue or undervalue a new concept and make poor choices in the product development process as a result.

Researchers Izabela Lebuda and Maciej Karwowski1 studied how gender of the inventor and the uniqueness of the inventor’s name affect one’s perception of the invention itself. They divided 119 participants into five groups to evaluate creative products in four domains (poetry, science, music, and art). Each group evaluated the same, identical products, but the products were signed by different fictional names – a unique male name, a common male name, a unique female name, and a common female name. The fifth group evaluated the products with no names (control group).

The highest creativity score was earned by a painting signed with a unique female name, while the lowest went to that same painting with a common female name. For the science-related products, works signed by any male name scored much higher than the same products signed by women. In fact, the science product signed by a common female name scored even lower than the anonymous control group. In the area of music, any piece signed by a unique male name was rated highest. Poems, on the other hand, got the best scores when signed by a unique female name and the lowest from a common male name.

For practitioners, this systematic bias caused by gender and other factors can lead us astray. For example, science is still perceived as male-dominated, and we may have a tendency to downgrade new science concepts generated by women.  In other domains, literary and artistic, we may put too much of a premium on works generated by women with unique names.

To avoid this bias, consider the following advice:

  • When creating new concepts, use a facilitated approach that puts
    people into groups of two or three.  Make sure participants don’t give credit for an idea to a particular person.  When an idea emerges from a group (as opposed to one individual), our minds have a difficult time attaching attributes of
    any one person to that idea.
  • Have teams share their ideas outside of the workshop room.  Set up a collaboration tool such as Google Docs where teams can enter
    their ideas in real time.  Make sure the idea collection software does
    not track who entered it.  Use team numbers instead of people’s names.
  • Finally, have all ideas evaluated by a different team than the
    one that generated them.  Use a weighted decision
    model to assess the ideas.  Use scoring criteria that are
    relevant to the issue the team is facing.  Assign a weighting to these
    criteria based on the importance of that criteria.  Be sure to test the
    model not only on past successful ventures, but also on past
    unsuccessful ventures.

No fooling!

1Izabela Lebuda and Maciej Karwowski, “Tell Me Your Name and I’ll Tell You How Creative Your Work Is: Author’s Name and Gender as Factors Influencing Assessment of Products’ Creativity in Four Different Domains,” Creativity Research Journal, Vol. 25, Iss. 1, (2013), 137-142.

Academic Focus: Universidad Deusto – Master in Business Innovation

Published date: March 25, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,

The University of Deusto business school is offering a masters degree in business innovation (MBI) that I believe serves as an excellent role model for other schools. It is unique because it focuses on three foundations:

  1. The Approach to Observation: Business Innovation needs deep strategic analysis (Observation) to understand the external environment at all levels (Macro, industry, micro, innovation systems), the internal situation of the company (resources, skills, potential and value) and foresight, road mapping and scenario analysis to forecast market threats and opportunities.
  2. The Approach to Creation:  Together with the use of traditional strategic options to maintain and develop the company (internationalisation, acquisitions etc.), we propose developing specific solutions to solve problems, attain opportunities and challenges by developing an open environment, using design thinking methodologies and nurturing an intra/entrepreneurial spirit.
  3. The Approach to Execution: To successfully implement business innovation, managers and leaders need to achieve high levels of employee engagement among their workforce, foster a learning organisation where people can develop their skills with a passion for their contribution to the goals of the company. Orchestrating the different departments and functions is also fundamental to keep them aligned with corporate strategy and finally, managing innovation by constantly adjusting all the drivers that create an innovative organisation will lead to sustainable competitiveness.

The program is designed for a wide range of backgrounds including managers in strategic roles, entrepreneurs, consultants, and public sector employees.  The goals of the program are:

  • Promote the search for new business opportunities
  • Improve the development, implementation and commercialization of strategic ideas
  • Create a culture that fosters innovation and entrepreneurship within organizations
  • Facilitate the integration of I+D+i activities and production/final service activities
  • Innovation in Practice through the Applied Innovation Project
  • Develop yourself as a leader to transform the organisation´s ability to innovate

For more information about the seven modules of training as well as a downloadable brochure, visit the Info and Admissions section.

Deusto Business School is located in the Basque region of Spain.  The University has international ties with 60 different countries and each year attracts over 700 students from around the world. Deusto has over 10.000 students enrolled in more than 25 degree courses and 100 postgraduate courses.
Impresionante!
 

Marketing Innovation: Avocados and the Unification Tool

Published date: March 18, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,

The Unification Tool is a tricky but effective advertising tool. Unification recruits an existing resource and forces it to carry the advertising message. That resource can come from within the medium itself or within the environment of the medium. In other words, the tool uses an existing component of the medium or of its environment in a way that demonstrates the problem or the promise to be delivered.

The tool is one of eight patterns embedded in most innovative commercials. Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues describe these simple, well-defined design structures in their book, "Cracking the Ad Code," and provide a step-by-step approach to using them. The tools are:

1. Unification
2. Activation
3. Metaphor
4. Subtraction
5. Extreme Consequence
6. Absurd Alternative
7. Inversion
8. Extreme Effort

There are two ways to use Unification. First, take the medium (television, billboard, radio, and so on) and manipulate it so that some feature or aspect of the medium carries the message in a unique way. The second approach works in the other direction – start with the message, then look at the components in the consumer's environment and recruit one to carry the message in a clever way.

Here is an example of manipulating the medium:


 

Here are two examples of starting with the message and recruiting a component into carrying that message. What is very innovative about these commercials is how they have "fused" the message with the product itself – the avocado.


 


 

Marketing’s Seat at the Innovation Table

Where does your marketing department fit when it comes to innovation?  In their article1, “Improving Marketing’s Contribution to New Product Development,” these author’s offer a dismal view:

“The prevailing view in most companies is that marketing is not a distinct function, and therefore, everyone can do marketing.  As a result, the status of the marketing department is in a steep decline, which is especially observable within the NPD process.  This development is surprising because it seems that top innovators strongly involve the marketing department in the NPD process.  Hence, strengthening the marketing department’s position with respect to NPD should be a priority to improve innovation performance.”

I agree.  But I believe the authors fall way short of what is needed to do that.  Their research points to two recommendations.  First, marketing departments need to excel at market research skills and tools to translate customer needs into product specifications.  Second, marketers should have strong market knowledge and a good understanding of the firms product portfolio.

Seen this way, marketing becomes nothing more than a market research department in support of R&D.  This grossly underwhelms the potential of a strong marketing mindset within an organization and the potential for great innovation.

For marketing to lead the innovation effort, I recommend the following:

1. Develop an Innovation Competency:  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned by anyone and applied systematic.  Innovative companies treat it as just another core skill by creating a well-defined set of innovation competencies and embedding them into employee’s competency model along with other required behaviors such as ethics and leadership.  A innovation method such as SIT, for example, gives a marketing employee the ability to “innovate on demand.”

2. Link Innovation to Strategy:  Marketing is the battle arm of any company, and it should lead the development of strategy.  When it links strategy with the innovation efforts inside an R&D department, it becomes more influential in what gets put through the NPD process.

3. Drive Innovation as a Process:  Defining innovation as just the NPD process is too limiting.  Marketing needs to sponsor cross-functional teams using systematic innovation tools that feed concepts into the NPD process.  Marketing needs to eliminate the “fuzzy” in the front end and make it crystal clear with a routine, sustainable process of generating new opportunities.

4. Innovate Under the Radar: In this month’s Harvard Business Review, Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg make a great point in their article, “The Case for Stealth Innovation.”  Savvy marketers know how to operate under the radar and nurture innovation programs through complex bureaucracy.  Thomas Bonoma’s classic HBR article from 1986, “Marketing Subversives,”said something similar:

“I
found that under conditions of marketplace change, success depended
heavily on the presence of marketing subversives in a company.
Subversive marketers undermined their organizations’ structures to
implement new marketing practices….And no matter what higher
management had decided to allocate to various marketing projects, the
subversives found ways to work around the official budget.  They
bootlegged the resources they needed to implement new, more appropriate
marketing practices.”

The same can be said about innovation.

1Drechsler, Wenzel, Natter, Martin and Leeflang, Peter S.H., “Improving Marketing’s Contribution to New Product Development,” Journal of Product Innovation Management, Volume 30, Number 2 (March 2013), 298-315.

Start at the End

Published date: March 4, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,

Dave Lavinsky is a serial entrepreneur who built his own company from the ground up. His book, Start at the End, was a #1 Bestseller on Amazon just one week after it was released. The goal of the book is to learn how to work fewer hours and be efficient when working at a new job or starting a business.

For innovation practitioners, here are his top 12 tips:
1. Start at the end – if you don’t know where you want your business to go, you’ll never get there.
2. SWOT analyses are obsolete; realize there will always be threats and company weaknesses that don’t warrant fixing. Rather, focus on opportunities that leverage your strengths (SO analysis), and build your strengths further so they give you sustainable long-term advantage
3. Forget your P&L; that’s short-term thinking; need to also think longer-term; building business assets that allow you grow your business and reap better P&L later and forever.
4. If your business doesn’t have a scorecard, you will lose EVERY time. Your scorecard needs to include the detailed KPIs that underly your revenue and profit results.
5. If your business doesn’t operate without you, it’s not a business; it’s a miserable job. You must systematize your business so it works for you, not vice-versa.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Published date: February 25, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,

Can you innovate too much? After all, new ideas fuel organic growth.  One would think an organization would be happy to have as many ideas as possible.

But not always.  Here are scenarios where over-innovating might be considered too much of a good thing.

1.  When you are over-positioned:  Too many good ideas could lead you to an extreme position in the market where you stop earning at the middle and bottom ends of the market. Most companies crave the premium end of the market, but overdoing it can backfire.

Example: Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center has done such a great job at innovating in its domain that it’s considered in the top three U.S. children’s hospitals.  Therein lies the problem.  The local market may see Cincinnati’s Children’s as so advanced and innovative that parents are reluctant to take their kids there for routine health issues – bumps, bruises, fevers, and so on.  It becomes the place to go only when their child is sick with a deadly disease – cancer and the like. Fortunately, the hospital recognized the risk and took measures to stay competitive for routine visitations.

2.  When you are under capacity: Generating new ideas puts pressure on an organization.  New ideas must be evaluated, filtered, and developed.  This takes time and resources.  People are distracted from their regular day jobs and they feel overwhelmed. Too many ideas may exceed the organization’s capacity to make sense of it all. Idea fatigue sets in

Example:  A major player in aerospace wanted to create a new digital app solution for its customers.  The app was intended to retrieve sensor data from aircraft components and relay it into a useful smartphone application.  The team slowed to a near halt.  It had collected several hundred ideas from many different sources and consolidated them into a massive database.  The team couldn’t possible manage the abundance of ideas and it was unable to move forward.

Innovating the Weakest Link

Published date: February 18, 2013 в 8:14 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,

Responding to an article on why innovation is difficult, Tim Josling from Leura, Australia, wrote this to the editor of The Economist (January 26, 2013):

Another useful insight is provided by something akin to Amdahl’s law in computer design, which holds that even if some components of a system are improving, the parts that are not improving will eventually dominate the performance of that system.For example, for flights that are under 2000 miles a person will spend more time traveling to and from the airport, checking in at the airport, going through security and waiting for his bags than time spent up in the air.  Increases in aircraft speed would have less benefit that shortening the other bits of the journey time.

Well said.  In essence, this insight helps you think about the right target for your innovation efforts.  Rather than try to improve the performance of you primary component, think instead about the supporting components and subsystems around it. These parts may be holding overall performance down.  The customer realizes value from your main component, but then suffers from a lack of innovation in all the other activities around it.

This goes against conventional wisdom.  Companies like Samsung cram more and more features into their products to improve performance, a phenomena called “feature creep.”  Instead, they could be differentiating themselves by focusing on the ecosystem around their products – within what we call “The Closed World.”  In doing so, they find new, unrealized value for the consumer which they will appreciate and perhaps pay for.

The bottom line: innovating the weakest link in your product or service may deliver the most value the fastest.

Marketing Innovation: The Metaphor Tool Using the Division Pattern

Published date: February 11, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,

The Metaphor is the most commonly used tool in marketing communications because it is a great way to attach meaning to a newly-launched product or brand. The Metaphor Tool takes a well-recognized and accepted cultural symbol and manipulates it to connect to the product, brand, or message.

The tool is one of eight patterns embedded in most innovative commercials.  Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues describe these simple, well-defined design structures in their book, "Cracking the Ad Code," and provide a step-by-step approach to using them.  The tools are:

   1. Unification
   2. Activation
   3. Metaphor
   4. Subtraction
   5. Extreme Consequence
   6. Absurd Alternative
   7. Inversion
   8. Extreme Effort

The trick is to attach a metaphor in a non-obvious, clever way.  The process is called fusion, and there are three versions:  Metaphor fused to Product/Brand, Metaphor fused to Message, and Metaphor fused to both the Product/Brand and Message.  Here is an example metaphor fused to the message:

What's clever about this commercial is
its use of the Division pattern, one of five that form the basis of the
product innovation method, Systematic Inventive Thinking
Division works by taking the product and/or one of its components and
dividing it physically, functionally, or in a way we call 'preserving'
where each portion maintains the characteristics of the whole.  By
dividing the news about her affair with her husband's best friend into
one word at a time, the wife softened the impact.  Banco Continental uses
this little story as a metaphor for breaking loan payments into smaller, more
manageable amounts.

To use the Metaphor Tool, start by
defining the message. Then create a list of symbols (objects, images, or
concepts) that are directly related to the message (a metaphor). Next
make a list of the product's components or components near the product
(Closed World). Finally, choose a symbol and a component and fuse them
together. Create various combinations of metaphoric symbols and
components to find candidates that have that element of surprise or
cleverness.

The Fabulous Five: Loyalty Factor

Published date: February 4, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,,,

Loyalty is defined as a strong feeling of support or allegiance. Companies fight for it because it correlates well to product sales. The Fabulous Five (Google, Amazon, Apple, Samsung, and Facebook) are waging a spectacular battle against each other to earn customer loyalty.

A key to winning is to understand the types of loyalty. Professor Christie Nordhielm describes three types as part of her marketing strategy framework, The Big Picture:

Heart Loyalty is a strong emotional involvement with a particular brand. When a customer says, “I love my Macbook Pro,” they are exhibiting heart loyalty. We see this type of loyalty for “badge” or “neck-tie” products, products that are consumed in public and are thought to reflect something about the nature or identity of the person consuming them. This type of loyalty is very difficult for competitors to challenge because it is highly personal and emotional in nature and thus, resistant to rational appeals. Because a product choice based on heart loyalty is tied up with the consumers’ identity and ego, a competitive challenge to this choice can be perceived as a personal affront to the consumer. Heart loyal consumers don’t like to be told they should switch.

Innovation Sighting: Apple’s Smart Shoe

Published date: January 28, 2013 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,

A tell-tale sign of the Attribute Dependency Technique is the word “smart” in any product description. Apple’s new patent for ‘smart shoes’ is a case in point.  As reported by PSFK:

Apple has patented ‘smart shoes’ that would come with embedded sensors
to track your activity and tell you when you needed a new pair. Instead
of wearing an additional sensor, people would just have to wear the
shoes, where the technology would be less visible and be a more seamless
part of your lifestyle than an external tracker.

Apple’s shoe wear-out sensor would either feature as a thin built-in
layer or be located in the heel. It would include a processor configured
to measure the use of the shoes and determine whether they were worn
out, and an alarm that informed the wearer when they were no longer
providing adequate protection for their feet.

As first reported by AppleInsider, the patent described three main
components: a detector for sensing how worn-out the shoe becomes, a
processor to measure the shoe’s use, and an alarm to inform the owner
when the shoe’s time is up. The chosen sensor could be anything from an
accelerometer or pressure sensor to a pedometer or piezoelectric flexing
sensor.

Attribute Dependency is one of five techniques of the corporate innovation method called SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking).  It differs from the other techniques in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components. Start with an attribute list, then construct a matrix of these, pairing each against the others. Each cell represents a potential dependency (or potential break in an existing dependency) that forms a Virtual Product. Using Function Follows Form, we work backwards and envision a potential benefit or problem that this hypothetical solution solves.

This isn’t Apple’s first (or last) use of this powerful technique.  Apple earned a patent described as an “apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device.”   It reveals a way to change aspects of a mobile device based on certain events or surroundings.  Given this pattern of using Attribute Dependency, it would appear Apple makes regular use of this technique and perhaps the full suite of SIT tools.

Get our innovation model that has worked for 1000+ companies.

    No thanks, not now.