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The LAB: Innovating Social Media with Task Unification (October 2009)

Published date: October 31, 2009 в 8:30 pm

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Embracing social media and the myriad of Web 2.0 tools is more challenging than just setting up a Facebook account or adding a “Follow Me on Twitter” link.  Organizations struggle with how to take advantage of the power of Web 2.0.  Where do you start?  How do you tie these new tools in with your current website?  How do you make sure your current constituents are happy while moving the organization to a more networked world?

For this month’s LAB, we will use the innovation template called Task Unification, one of five templates of the corporate innovation method called S.I.T..  To use Task Unification, we take a component of a product, service, system, etc, and we assign an additional “job” to it.  For this exercise involving Social Media, here is how it works.  Imagine your company has a large base of employees in the field.  For example, suppose your company has a large sales force or an extensive network of delivery or service people.  Consider the U.S. Postal Service, for example, with an army of postal workers and letter carriers at over 32,000 post
offices.  A key question for these organizations like the USPS is: how do we get more value out of this fixed asset?  Let’s use Task
Unification.

I start by visiting a site that inventories all the social web tools: GO2WEB20.NET.  I randomly pick an application from this list.  Then I assign the internal field resources to “use” this application to increase revenue/profits for the company.  Using our example of the postal service, I create this statement: “Postal delivery staff have the additional ‘job’ of using XXXX (web application) to increase USPS performance.” This is our Virtual Product in the S.I.T. method.

The key is to use the non-obvious applications for creating new, innovative services. You have to literally force yourself to imagine the corporate resource using the inherent aspects of the Web 2.0 application to create revenue or cut costs.  Here are examples I created using Task Unification:

The Power to Innovate: Conference Report

Published date: October 24, 2009 в 2:06 pm

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Congratulations to the team at Invention Machine for hosting this week’s conference, Power to Innovate, at the Seaport Hotel in Boston.  The theme of the conference centered around the Innovation Intelligence EcosystemTM and how companies can boost performance by coordinating information, communities, and innovation activities.  Invention Machine’s premier product, Goldfire, is at the center of this ecosystem.

“Goldfire is a unique innovation software platform that transforms ideas into commercial products—generating and validating concepts and making innovation a sustainable process.  Designed with engineers, scientists and researchers in mind, Goldfire automates every day innovation tasks—from identifying a new market to developing a new product to improving existing product offerings—and empowering users with a repeatable process. Fusing proven innovation methods for generating ideas along with advanced technologies for accessing precise concepts from corporate and worldwide knowledge sources, Goldfire stimulates creative thinking and speeds inventive problem solving—helping product development engineers, scientists and researchers to quickly conceive and validate ideas thus fueling product pipelines.”

The latest release, 5.5, should greatly enhance usability of the product especially by groups outside of R&D such as marketing and M&A.  Jim Belfiore, Certified Innovation Master & Senior Director at Invention Machine, demonstrated how he researched the disease, lymphoma.  I was amazed at the depth and breadth of insights he created using Golfire 5.5.

The entire conference was followed on Twitter compliments of Andrea Meyer.  Check it out at #P2I09.  Here are some other highlights from the conference:

Reinventing the Newspaper

Published date: October 20, 2009 в 12:54 pm

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Newspapers are dying.  Their business model is burning to the ground.  They cannot fend off the Internet and other threats despite their virtual monopoly and economies of scale in printing and distribution.  Advertisers are moving on.  Yet while traditional newsrooms are shrinking, journalism is thriving and the consumption of news is skyrocketing.  Why are newspapers shutting down?  As Clay Shirky describes it:

“If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.”

“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”

“Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.“

Perhaps it is not the newspaper model, per se, that needs replaced.  Perhaps it is the components of that model that need innovation: printing, distribution, and journalism.  Let’s examine how.

Academic Focus: Harvard Business School

Published date: October 12, 2009 в 9:29 am

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A colleague asked me, “Who is that innovation guru at the Harvard Business School?”

That’s easy:  Dr. Teresa Amabile. 

Dr. Amabile heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and is the only tenured professor at a top school to devote her entire research program to the study of creativity.  She is one of the world’s leading voices in business innovation.  From Wikipedia:

“Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Dr. Amabile received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1977. Originally focusing on individual creativity, Dr. Amabile’s research has expanded to encompass team creativity and organizational innovation. This 30-year program of research on how the work environment can influence creativity and motivation has yielded a theory of creativity and innovation; methods for assessing creativity, motivation, and the work environment; and a set of prescriptions for maintaining and stimulating innovation. Her current research program focuses on the psychology of everyday work life: how events in the work environment influence subjective experience and performance. Before joining HBS, Dr. Amabile held several research grants as a professor at Brandeis University, including Creativity and Motivation, from the National Institute of Mental Health, and Downsizing Industrial R&D, from the Center for Innovation Management Studies. She was awarded the E. Paul Torrance Award by the Creativity Division of the National Association for Gifted Children in 1998.

Dr. Amabile has presented her theories, research results, and practical implications to various groups in business, government, and education, including Lucent Technologies, Procter & Gamble, Novartis International AG, and Motorola. In addition to participating in various executive programs, her main teaching assignment at Harvard Business School is an MBA course, Managing for Creativity. Dr. Amabile was the host/instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a 26-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS. She currently serves as a Director of Seaman Corporation.

Dr. Amabile is the author of Creativity in Context and Growing Up Creative, as well as over 100 scholarly papers, chapters, and presentations. She serves on the editorial boards of Creativity Research Journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, and Journal of Creative Behavior.”

TAmabile For innovation practitioners, I recommend reading her articles:

  • Amabile, Teresa M., and Mukti Khaire. “Creativity and the Role of the Leader.” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 10 (October 2008)
  • Amabile, T. M. “Entrepreneurial Creativity Through Motivational Synergy.” Journal of Creative Behavior 31 (1997): 18-26.
  • Amabile, T. M. “Attributions of Creativity: What Are the Consequences?” Creativity Research Journal 8, no. 4 (1995): 423-426.

Teresa Amabile has been shaking up the world of creativity and innovation for over 30 years.  Now THAT’s disruptive!

Innovation Sighting: The Division Template in Elevators

Published date: October 4, 2009 в 6:00 pm

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What is the first thing you do when you step into an elevator?  For most people:  push the button of the floor you are going to. Not so with a new breed of elevators manufactured by Schindler North America.  These elevators have the buttons on the outside, not inside.  The buttons for selecting your floor are on each floor. Instead of just pushing a single up or down button to hail an elevator, you push the button for the floor you want as though you were inside.

The Division Template is the culprit here. In this innovation sighting, the elevator floor button panel was divided out and placed back into the system…outside the elevator cab.  Very novel, useful, and surprising.  To use Division, make a list of the components, then divide out a component. Divide functionally or physically and place it back somewhere in the system.  Use Function Follows Form to identify potential benefits, feasibility, challenges, and adaptations.
The benefit is better elevator customer service.  Elevator cars operate more efficiently which means you get to the right floor faster. How?  By selecting your floor sooner (while waiting for the elevator to arrive) the elevator’s computer has more timely input about peoples’ destinations. It can calculate the optimal pattern of pickups and dropoffs, then execute it faster than traditional elevators.  Here is how this new elevator, called the Miconic 10, operates:

The LAB: Innovating the Hockey Stick with Attribute Dependency (September 2009)

Published date: September 28, 2009 в 5:00 am

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Ice hockey is big business.  But it lags behind other professional sports – soccer, football, baseball, and basketball.  As with all industries, the key to growth is innovation.  Equipment manufacturers such as Reebok are taking this seriously with the creation of the Hockey Research and Innovation Center.  In this month’s LAB, we will focus on the equipment side of hockey, specifically on: the hockey stick.

Hockey has been around a long time with evidence of its origins dating to the sixteenth century.  The first organized indoor game was played in 1875. Since then, many innovations have been introduced.  Let’s see how a systematic, corporate innovation method can be applied to drive new sales opportunities.

I used the Attribute Dependency template of Systematic Inventive Thinking.  Attribute Dependency differs from the other templates in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components.  Start with an attribute list, then construct a 2 x 2 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.

Here is my attribute list:

Innovation Healthclub

Published date: September 20, 2009 в 12:15 pm

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Building a prototype of your innovation is a crucial link between conceiving the idea and commercializing it. A physical prototype helps you get immediate feedback from customers, designers, and financial backers as to the commercial viability of the project. It is a necessary step in the patent process.  It is a pivotal point in the “GO vs. NO GO” decision, and it can save an inventor money and time as even Abraham Lincoln found out when he prototyped his patented invention.

Prototyping can be difficult especially for a small company or independent inventor.  Here is help.  Imagine a 15,000 square-foot workshop with tools, equipment, and instruction to build and prototype your inventions. It is called TechShop, now with three locations in the U.S..  From their website:

“You can think of TechShop as a health club but with tools and equipment
instead of exercise equipment. It is sort of like a Kinko’s for makers,
or a Xerox PARC for the rest of us. TechShop is designed for everyone,
regardless of their skill level. TechShop is perfect for inventors,
“makers”, hackers, tinkerers, artists, roboteers, families,
entrepreneurs, youth groups, FIRST robotic teams, arts and crafts
enthusiasts, and anyone else who wants to be able to make things that
they dream up but don’t have the tools, space or skills.

TechShop has milling machines and lathes, welding stations and a CNC plasma
cutter, sheet metal working equipment, drill presses and band saws,
industrial sewing machines, hand tools, plastic and wood working
equipment including a 4′ x 8′ ShopBot CNC router, electronics design
and fabrication facilities, Epilog laser cutters, tubing and metal
bending machines, a Dimension SST 3-D printer, electrical supplies and
tools and pretty much everything you’d ever need to make just about
anything.”

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There are many resources for getting a prototype, but most of these are the “Do-It-For-You” type.  TechShop is one of the few that lets you, the innovator, come in and use the machines to “Do-It-Yourself.”  They offer a wide range of training courses as well as individual consultations when needed.  It is truly a “healthclub” for innovators.

Perhaps the only thing I would add is a training course on:  how to innovate!

Corporate Innovation Strategy Template

Published date: September 14, 2009 в 10:21 pm

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I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling (1902)

Here is a simple template to create your company’s innovation strategy:

  • WHAT:
    • Determine what business lines are to be innovated.
    • Determine what products or services within those business lines need innovation.
    • Establish a portfolio model that compares innovation output from one business line to another.
    • Rank order business lines based on the strength of their innovation portfolio pipelines.
  • WHY:
    • Determine how much innovation is needed.  Use a tool like Map-the-Gap.
    • Tie innovation to a strategy framework such as The Big Picture.
    • Focus innovation exercises to link directly to the strategy framework.
    • Use the framework to identify market adjacencies.
  • WHEN:
    • Schedule innovation workshops at the front end of the business cycle to help determine what projects will get funding in the next budget cycle.
    • Schedule innovation workshops after the planning cycle to jump-start new initiatives for the upcoming year.
  • HOW:
    • Choose specific methods of innovation to be used based on efficacy and results.
    • Combine different methods to leverage the strengths of each.
    • Integrate the methods by using the output of one as inputs for the others.
  • WHERE:
    • Set aside space with the specific purpose of conducting innovation workshops.
  • WHO:
    • Form innovation “dream teams” to maximize the success of innovation efforts.
    • Schedule training on how to use innovation methods.
    • Examine the company’s innovation culture to diagnose where it is weak.
    • Establish an innovation competency model.
    • Designate and empower commercial leaders to drive innovation efforts.

The Livescribe Pulse Smart Pen – Never Miss an Idea

Published date: August 30, 2009 в 6:03 pm

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Innovating is mental, visual, and vocal.  Here is a new product to help capture…and coordinate…all three.  It is called the PulseTM by Livescribe.  The PulseTM is a smart pen that records and links audio to what your write, so you never miss a word…or an idea.

The PulseTM will become a great tool for conducting innovation workshops.  One of the more challenging issues in workshops is capturing ideas.  No matter how diligent the team is in collecting ideas, many subtle insights and concepts are missed.  Even if an innovation workshop is recorded on audio or video tape, it is nearly impossible to connect the spoken word to the drawings and notes taken by the participants.  The PulseTM SmartPen solves that.Here is how I will use the PulseTM in my workshops:
  •  Recording component lists
  • Recording Virtual Products
  • Recording “Function Follows Form” ideas
  • Drawing new product embodiments
  • Recording potential benefits of new ideas
  • Recording potential challenges and drawbacks of ideas
  • Scoring ideas
  • Creating Attribute Dependency matrices
  • Recording initial business cases to support new ideas
  • Recording names of participants and facilitators
I envision using the pen with teams of two or three people as they use a structured innovation method.  One team member will use the pen to keep track of ideas and draw physical representations while recording the actual discussion as it happens.  Each team member will sign the page while verbalizing their name.  Idea sessions upload automatically to a computer when the pen is attached to its charging cradle.  This approach captures the moment of innovation in audio and written form…forever.  It creates a permanent record of who innovated, how they innovated, and what they innovated.  We’ll never miss an idea again.
Potential benefits of this approach include:DSC00412
  • Better records and annotations for filing patents and protecting intellectual property
  • Better archiving for future workshops to refine and improve ideas
  • Better metrics of ideation programs
  • Easier sharing of ideas with R&D teams, consultants, and agencies
  • Better marketing strategy development

Congratulations to the team at Livescribe for the development and launch of this useful product.  For innovation practitioners, this is a must-have.

The LAB: Innovating Health Care with S.I.T. (August 2009)

Published date: August 24, 2009 в 1:38 pm

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Health Care Reform, as the U.S. government sees it, promises lower costs, better access, and improved quality for all.  Let’s apply a structured innovation method to health care to see if we can achieve some of these goals.  For this month’s LAB, we will apply Systematic Inventive Thinking to the hospital discharge process.

Discharging patients from the hospital is a critical aspect of health care delivery.  It is a time of transition where one group of care givers stops treating the patient and another group starts.  The most frequent type of transition occurs when patients go from hospital to home, happening nearly 40 million times each year in the U.S.. Studies show that about 20 percent of discharged patients have an adverse event – a preventable emergency department visit or re-admission – within 30 days following hospitalization.  The discharge process is so important that a cottage industry is emerging around it.  Some  consultants, software products, best practices, training, and research studies focus just on discharging patients.

To use S.I.T., we start by listing the components of the service (process):

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