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Teaching Your Children to Innovate

Published date: December 21, 2008 в 10:24 pm

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Parents teach their children many things: morals, etiquette, religion, sports, cleanliness, walking, cooking, riding a bicycle, reading, writing, math, discipline, safety, driving a car…the list goes on and on.  What if you could give your child the  life-long ability to innovate?  What a gift indeed.  This issue surfaced after a string of emails with one of our blog readers who wants her child to learn innovation (thanks, Trish!).  Can children learn a corporate innovation method at such an early age?

I’ve taught children how to innovate, and it is one of the most rewarding feelings you can have.  I taught 6th, 7th, and 8th graders the method called Systematic Inventive Thinking.  I was surprised and a bit unnerved how well they did.  After teaching the five templates of innovation (over a five weekly sessions), each child completed a “final exam” by innovating a new-to-the-world product using one of the templates in just 30 minutes!  I was amazed.  The PowerPoint slides I used for this training are in the READING section of the blog if you wish to download them.

Here are some pointers for teaching your children to innovate:

1.  Equate innovation to other skills-based activities.  Innovating takes skill just like sports or dancing.  Don’t let your children think innovation is some special, innate talent that only certain people have.  This creates an artificial barrier, one that I see too often in the corporate environment, and it prevents people from trying to be innovative.  Innovating is a skill, and it can be learned by anyone, even those who are not creative in the traditional sense.

2.  De-emphasize patents.  For some reason, kids are fascinated with patents.  They tend to see patents as the ultimate reward of innovation.  Patents do not equate to successful innovation; rather, they equate to getting legal status regarding an invention.  If a child invents something that has already been invented, this is a success.  In fact, it is a huge success because it shows an ability to create novel ideas that have a track record of success.  Be sure to reward your child if they invent something that exists.  Send the message: if you can invent something that is already shown to be successful, you can definitely be the first to invent something new and useful.

3.  Apply innovation across a wide variety of situations.  It is not just for inventing new products.  Teach you children to apply innovation methods to things like writing a poem, doing school work, or getting dressed in the morning.  Have them invent a new way to clean their room or play with a toy.  Help them equate innovation with creating novelty in the everyday things.  Make innovation a routine way to tackle new situations.

4.  Distinguish between innovation skills and problem solving skills.  Both are useful, but are often confused as the same.  They are related, but different.  Help them see problem solving as what to use when the problem is very well defined and must be solved.  Help them see innovating as the set of tools to use when new approaches are needed for an existing task.  Example:  Innovate a new way to clean their room, but problem-solve when they want to avoid having to do it.

5.  Teach “ambidextrous” innovation.  Help them understand the two directions of innovation: Problem-to-Solution and Solution-to-Problem.  Example: if the kitchen toaster burns the bread every morning, and they see a novel way to fix it, that is Problem-to-Solution.  Other the other hand, if they imagine the toaster is like a TV that is “on demand,” then make the connection that this would help mom get toast ready precisely when everything else is ready, that is Solution-to-Problem innovation.

6.  Set an example.  Parents struggle teaching children anything unless the parents demonstrate those skills themselves.  Whether it is table manners, proper grammar, or how to treat other people, parents must “walk the talk.”  Innovation is no different.  Let children see how you and others, especially other children, use innovation methods to do cool things, fun things, important things.

(Pictured are two future innovators, Emerson and Margo, from Cincinnati, Ohio)

Innovation in Practice: One Year Later

Published date: December 8, 2008 в 7:34 pm

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A year of blogging in the innovation space has taught me a few things:

  • Blogging is discovery. There are a lot of very bright people out there with many useful insights about how to make innovation happen. I’m impressed with the diversity of views as well as the constant stream of new thinking.  Special recognition and thanks to:
    • Amnon Levav, Yoni Stern, Jacob Goldenberg and the whole team at SIT for teaching me the method of innovating.
    • Fellow bloggers like Jim Todhunter, Paul Sloane, Katy Konrath, Jeffrey Phillips, Keith Sawyer and many others for refreshing ideas about innovation.
    • Chuck Frey for the way he recognizes and inspires others (thanks, Chuck!).
    • Fellow J&J colleagues who push the envelope of innovation like Jeff Murphy, Mike Clem, Stuart Morgan, and Shelly Cropper.
  • Blogging is hard work. It takes a constant sense of awareness of what’s going on around you to spot new blog ideas. To be a good blogger, you need to be even better at reading and commenting on other blogs (I learned this and everything else about blogging from Chris Allen).
  • Blogging is a conversation. The long tail will prevail. (Read “The Cluetrain Manifesto” if you don’t believe me). I appreciate those of you who comment on this blog and take a different point-of-view. None of us is as smart as all of us.
  • Blogging gets you noticed. Be careful what you say because people are paying attention. Readership of this blog is growing steadily, and the media and others are taking note.

What is ahead for 2009?

  • The LAB: I enjoy this and I hope my readers do as well. My point is to spend an hour or two at most on a product or service, selected at random. Then I use an innovation tool to create interesting and useful new-to-the-world inventions. Innovation is a skill, not a gift, and anyone can learn it. My hope is to inspire others to do so.
  • Innovation on Request: This is a new feature where I plan invite readers to submit things they need innovated. No strings attached, no property rights issues, no fees. Just pure innovation to continue to make the point that all of us need to acquire these skills if we want to remain productive and competitive in the global marketplace.
  • Guest blogging on other sites. I like this idea, and I plan to follow through with other bloggers that have asked me to do that.
  • New Blog Design: I will be launching a new blog design reflecting the theme of the corporate perspective. All businesses, large and small, need innovation. Within the corporate walls, innovation is sought after, brokered, and driven. The corporate perspective on what, why, when, who, and how innovation happens is the focus here. I want to continue sharing what’s inside those walls.

Drew

The LAB: Innovating a Fishing Pole with Multiplication (November 2008)

Published date: November 30, 2008 в 8:21 am

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Can you innovate a mature product?  Consider the fishing pole which dates back to the ancient Egyptians – it certainly qualifies as a mature product. This month’s LAB will innovate it by using the systematic innovation method called Multiplication.

Fishing is the largest sporting activity in the U.S. with 40 million participants, far more than golf or tennis combined, the next two on the list.  Recreational fishing generates more than $125 billion in economic output and more than one million American jobs. If sport fishing were a corporation, it would rank above Bank of America or IBM on the Fortune 100 list of largest American companies.  The pathway to growth for any large, mature industry is: innovation!

We start by listing the components of the product.  We then make a copy (or copies) of each component, one at a time.  The new copies must be different in some way from the original component.  We then use Function Follows Form and work backwards to envision what the “pre-inventive form” could be used for.  We innovate by taking something that doesn’t make sense at first, then find a legitimate purpose for it.  Here is what I came up with (about an hour’s worth of work):

Patent’s (Value) Pending

Published date: November 27, 2008 в 11:15 am

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The Front End of Innovation blog reports 70% of respondents to their recent survey believe eliminating business method patents will hurt innovation and its practices.  The premise is that innovators and entrepreneurs are less likely to innovate if they know they cannot get patent protection.  The result surprises me, and it makes me wonder what the other 30% were thinking.

The issue stems from whether an inventor can patent an abstract process, something that involves nothing more than thoughts.  The courts are saying no.  A recent ruling on a business method patent by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said that it was not tied to a machine or apparatus, nor did it transform a particular article into a different state or thing.  It did meet the standards set by the U.S. Supreme Court for patentability.  Many industries that are not “machine-based” like software makers, Internet companies, and investment houses, are concerned.

For me, the more appropriate question is:  WHO will cut back on innovation because of a loss of patent protection?  My observation is that it depends which side of the patent “fence” you currently sitting on:  1. you have patent protection now; 2. you are about to lose patent protection;  or 3. you are blocked by someone else’s patent.  The lure of getting a patent can spur companies on to innovate.  However, once earned, patents seem to dull the senses. Companies rest on their laurels, satisfied with the revenues earned on current, patent-protected products.  It is the threat of LOSING the protection that motivates people to innovate.  Finally, if you are being blocked by someone else’s patent, my sense is that companies are especially motivated to innovate.  They have no choice.

Keith Sawyer blogged about this over at Creativity and Innovation.  He reports on a recent paper by James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer who conclude, “in most industries today, patents may actually discourage investment in innovation.”    

Most patents are granted in industries that demonstrate little innovation.  Through the 19th century, most inventions were not even patented (only 11% of British inventions displayed at the 1851 World’s Fair, for example).  A study of important innovations at the 1851 and 1876 world’s fairs found that countries with patent systems weren’t any more innovative than countries without.  Following changes in IP law, what happens historically?  Japan increased patent scope in 1988, and this has not resulted in greater innovation nor in increased R&D spending (beyond what would have been expected without that change).  The U.S. changed its treatment of software inventions in the 1990s, but this did not result in an increase in patents by software firms.  (Instead, patents went up in companies known for “stockpiling large arsenals of patents to use as bargaining chips”.)  Surveys of companies find that most inventions are not patented; instead, companies rely on trade secrets and on their first-to-market advantage, or on complementary products and services.

Bronwyn Hall surveyed the issue in a paper titled, “Business Method Patents, Innovation, and Policy” (May 4, 2003).  She concludes: 

“Broad evidence that the patent system encourages innovation always and everywhere is hard to come by. The patent system does encourage publication rather than secrecy; it is probably good at providing incentives for innovations with high development cost that are fairly easily imitated and for which a patent can be clearly defined (e.g., pharmaceuticals). When innovations are incremental and when many different innovations must be combined to make a useful product, it is less obvious that benefits of the patent system outweigh the costs. Business methods are more likely to fall into the second class than the first.”

For me, patents do not affect one’s ability to innovate given the success of innovation methods.  Rather, patents affect one’s motivation to innovate…both positively and negatively.  For long term success, companies should place more emphasis on innovating than protecting.

The CMO’s Guide to Driving Innovation

Published date: November 22, 2008 в 10:05 am

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Forrester Research, Inc has released a new publication titled "The CMO's Guide to Driving Innovation." Cindy Commander at Forrester, has outlined best practices for chief marketing officers to drive innovation across the organization.  As part of the research, she interviewed senior marketers from BMW, Equifax, GE, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, LeapFrog, and Samsung Electronics America.  In addition she spoke with consultants from Innovaro, InnovationLabs, and PRTM.  For companies seeking insights about innovation methods and programs, this report is essential.

The report outlines four key areas of focus for marketing leaders: culture, team, process, and insights.  The report goes into detail within each of these and includes best practices and examples as well as recommendations for overcoming common challenges. I had the privilege of being interviewed for the report.  Here are the people highlighted:

  • Jochen Schmalholz, Head of Marketing Innovation, BMW
  • Alex Gonzalez, SVP, Strategic Marketing, Equifax
  • Patia McGrath, Global Director – Innovation and Strategic Connections, GE
  • John Kennedy, Vice President, Marketing, North America, IBM
  • Nancy MacIntyre, EVP, Marketing, Product, and Innovation, LeapFrog
  • Drew Boyd, Director of Marketing Mastery, Johnson & Johnson
  • Peggy Ang, VP, Marketing Communications, Samsung Electronics America
  • Tim Jones, Principal, Innovaro
  • Langdon Morris, Principal, InnovationLabs
  • Rob Shelton, Director, PRTM

Taken together, the advice in this report gives CMOs a ready made blueprint for improving the state of innovation in their firm. The report is for members of Forrester's CMO group, so contact them directly for information about ordering it.

The LAB: Innovating a Recruiting Process with Subtraction (October 2008)

Published date: October 31, 2008 в 8:37 am

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Do systematic methods of innovation work on services and processes?  This may be the most common question from corporate executives who want to learn innovation methods.  This month's LAB will focus on a familiar corporate process: employee recruiting.  The tool we'll use is Subtraction.  

To use Subtraction, we make a list of the components. With a process or service, the components are simply the steps to deliver the process or service. We remove a step one at a time to create the Virtual Product/Process.  Working backwards with Function Follows Form, we innovate what the potential value or benefits would be without the component.  What would the new process do?  Who would use it?  Why would they use it?  What benefits emerge?

Here is a recruiting process map of a well-known software company:

   Recruiting

Here are four Virtual Products I created with Subtraction.  For each, I offer potential innovations and the benefits they might deliver:

1.  REMOVE INTERVIEWS:  The recruiting process would not allow interviews of candidates.  Benefit: hiring managers now have to rely on less subjective data such resumes and references.  They would have to rely on objective data such as job testing or personality testing.  Another benefit is candidates are shielded from interviewers who are less gifted at selling the benefits of working at the company.  They would have to rely on standard information provided by HR, thus avoiding negative or misleading information about the company.

2.  REMOVE JOB POSTINGS:  The recruiting process would have NO jobs posted anywhere even though many openings might exist.  Benefit:  There would be more job applicants because they could not self-screen or self-eliminate from not seeing jobs that fit them.  The company's message would be "open door": if you need a job, apply.  We'll find one that fits you.  This also might encourage hiring managers to be more creative about the people they consider for a job, perhaps seeking certain personality types or cognitive skills over experience.  Another benefit is the company avoids contingency recruiters who take job postings without the company's approval and try to fill them for a commission.  

3.  REMOVE SCHEDULE AND PLAN INTERVIEW:  The candidates have to find a way to get an interview without the benefit of the company's HR department setting it up for them.  Benefit:  This is more efficient as it cuts out the "middle man."  Another benefit is it becomes a way to test how assertive and personable the candidate is setting up their own interviews.  It helps them establish a rapport with the hiring manager before the interview takes place.

4.  REMOVE HIRING:  (You were just WAITING for that one!)  The recruiting process has all the traditional steps except the final one – hiring.  Benefit:  This allows a company to keep a pulse on the available talent pool  without the cost incurred from adding staff (a lot of companies actually do this). Another benefit is it reduces time, money, and the effort involved in negotiating salary, benefits, etc.  Also, it helps the company test its recruiting process to determine the effectiveness and accuracy of its interviewers and techniques.  The problem, of course, is how do we actually get the candidate on board?  This is where the REPLACEMENT function comes in handy in using this tool.  We can replace the function but not with the original component.  So what would replace hiring (in the traditional sense)?  Perhaps contracting.  Perhaps a third party does the hiring.  Or perhaps the candidates have to follow a process and guidelines to hire themselves on board.  Self-hiring?  That's novel.

Lazy Innovation

Published date: October 26, 2008 в 1:37 pm

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Katie Konrath at getFreshMinds.com tackles a common mistake in innovation – packing new features into existing products as a way to innovate – a problem I call “feature creep.”  Her main point: people pack products to the brim with features to be more innovative.  Many believe this is the only way to innovate.  Katie believes feature packing is a lazy way to innovate.

Why does this happen?  The major culprit is too much reliance and emphasis on the traditional PROBLEM-TO-SOLUTION approach to innovation.  We spot a problem in an existing product, service, or situation, and then we “solution seek” a way to fix it.  We usually end up adding additional features to the existing product, service, or situation. 

Here’s an example.  A friend of mine occasionally needs to push his large, heavy entertainment center away from the wall to make changes to the connections.  He had a clever idea over coffee yesterday: what if you created a space under the wall unit so you could deploy retractable wheels (much like an aircraft lowers and raises its landing gear)?  This solution certainly solve his problem…at higher cost and more complexity. 

This is the traditional view of innovation.  What fuels this view is an over-reliance on voice-of-the-customer as a source of innovation insights.  It is the belief that if we can understand what customers want, we can solve their problems with innovative solutions.  The problem?  Customers don’t always know what they want.

Here is an example.  When my wife picked up her new IPhone, she spent the first twenty minutes pressing all the buttons.  She seemed irritated – she was looking for the Help Function.  I told her the IPhone did not have a Help Function.  In amazement, she said, “Finally…a product that really understands my needs!”  Now imagine if Apple’s market research department had called our house seeking Voice-of-the-Customer data about what it would take to build the most awesome cell phone on the planet.  My wife would have said, “Easy.  It must have the most awesome Help Function on the planet.”  The Point:  Customers only know what they know.

In competitive markets, we face even more pressure to add features to keep up with competition or leap over them.  Worse than feature-creep, I call it “feature wars,” the ongoing battle to win customers with ever more new things added to their product.  The problem is that over-featured products begin to outstrip the true needs of the customer.  They find it too hard to continue using and keeping up with the product.  They find themselves having to take out the user manual or find support groups to answer basic questions.  How many of you reset the time on your VCR or DVD player…without looking up how?

Innovation methods that emphasize the SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM approach avoid feature creep and lead to elegant and more useful innovations.  These methods take an existing starting point (product, service, strategy, organization, person, etc), and manipulate it to create something very odd and seemingly useless.  This “pre-inventive form” is then matched against potential problems that it might solve or benefits that it might unlock.  My belief, based on observation, is that people can match more problems to solutions than they can match solutions to an observed problem.

There is a good type of Lazy Innovation.  George Neil from Adobe Consulting contests that laziness, usually considered a bad behavior, is a virtue that can identify opportunities for innovation in user-experience design.  He believes the “search for laziness” can create short-cuts to finding the opportunities for innovation.  Ethnography uncovers lazy “solutions” people take when doing a task.  The key is to match those solutions to the benefits and problems they address.  Robert Passarella tells a great story about this phenomena in the context of how stock exchanges innovated the way they clear stock trades more efficiently – the story of The Killarney Rose Pub.

Katie Konrath continues to be one of my favorite bloggers in the innovation space because she is the “real deal.”  She is classically trained in creativity and innovation.  She knows HOW to innovate, she takes a customer-centric approach, and she sees the big picture on what organizations need to do to start innovating.  No laziness in Katie.

TiVoing Dead People

Published date: October 13, 2008 в 3:51 pm

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George Orwell died January 21, 1950 at the age of 46.  He is considered one of the great all-time fiction writers with works like Animal House and Nineteen Eighty Four.  What if he were alive today?  What would he say, and what would he write about?  What if he blogged?  What would the conversation be within the blogosphere?

Much to my surprise, George Orwell is blogging…sort of.  The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog.  Orwell’s domestic and political diaries from August 1938 until October 1942 are being posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.  The diaries are exactly as Orwell wrote them.

Why does it matter?  George Orwell has been time-shifted from the past to the present.  It is what the popular digital video recorder, TiVo, does with our favorite TV shows.  It means we can take any dead person’s diaries, writings, or speeches and re-introduce them as blogs.  We can take advantage of a medium that never existed until a few years ago and participate as though that person were alive.  George is dead, but his diaries spark a discussion in this completely new medium in a way that he could not have predicted.  Big Brother is with us again.

Imagine the blog commentary from other famous dead people like Albert Einstein, Jesus, Mother Teresa, or Adam Smith.  What new insight or innovation would emerge with a conversation in the blogosphere stimulated by these peoples’ blog posts?   “TiVoing the Dead” holds the same promise for the not-so-famous.  It means we can generate ideas and insights while living and have them stored for future reading and commentary.  We can be TiVo’d to a later point in time when our ideas will be embraced in a new way.

This revelation makes me wonder about the role of time and its use in innovation.  The variable, time, is used routinely with the Attribute Dependency template.  In the case of time shifting a person’s writings, we are “breaking a dependency” rather than creating one.  But I wonder if there is a much broader role for time when innovating.  Is there a way to harness some of the complex aspects of time such as…

  • duration
  • speed
  • stopping
  • quantity
  • sequence
  • direction
  • continuity

…as it relates to a product or service.  The approach would be to use these aspects to manipulate a product or service, thus creating a “virtual product/service,” then working backwards to see if it solves a problem in a useful way.  I plan to work with this rough idea over the next few months to see where it leads.  Perhaps it could form the basis of a new innovation template.  The test of a new template is its ability to generate, on command, novel ideas that would not have been generated otherwise – just as the other five templates do.

Special thanks to Bryan Melmed, MBA student at Columbia Business School, for telling me about the Orwell blog.

The LAB: Innovating the iPhone with Attribute Dependency (September 2008)

Published date: September 28, 2008 в 12:28 pm

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Here are ten innovations for the iPhone that I would love to see.  I created these using the Attribute Dependency tool.  It is the most powerful of the five tools of Systematic Inventive Thinking, but also the most difficult to learn.

To use Attribute Dependency, we start by making two lists.  The first is a list of internal attributes of the iPhone.  The second is a list of external attributes – those factors that are not under the control of the manufacturer (Apple, in this case), but that vary in the context of how the product or service is used.  Then we create a matrix with the internal and external attributes on one axis, and the internal attributes only on the other axis.  This matrix forces the combinations of internal-to-internal and internal-to-external attributes that we will use to innovate.

That’s the hard part.  Now the fun begins.  We take these virtual combinations and envision them in two ways.  If no dependency exists between the attributes, we create one.  If a dependency exists, we break it.  Using Function Follows Form, we envision what the benefit or potential value might be from the new (or broken) dependency between the two attributes.

The matrix that you develop using this tool can become quite large.  To make it easier, you can download the one I used for this exercise and follow along with the innovations below.  I put the number corresponding to each idea in the appropriate cell of the matrix.  Here are the ideas along with the attribute dependencies that led to the idea:

1.  CARRIER-CONTEXT:  Allow users to switch wireless carriers depending on whether phone calls are business or personal.  Pre-select which phone numbers go through which carrier in the iPhone’s Contacts.  This makes it easier for people to keep track of phone expenses and allows enterprises to control and monitor costs more accurately.  Same could be done for email addresses.

2.  FUNCTION-CONTEXT:  iPhone apps re-arrange automatically on the desktop depending on the context of use (with friends, family, co-workers, or myself).  For example, with co-workers, the apps become more business related (conferencing, calculator, tools, timer, meeting planning, notes, etc).  Geo-sensing tells the phone who you are with, then changes appropriately.

3.  VOLUME-LOCATION:  The iPhone goes to silent mode automatically depending on where it is (in conference rooms, churches, the boss’s office, etc), or switches to a louder mode in places like the car, grocery store, or other noisy environments.

4.  JOB-FUNCTION:  The iPhone is customized with apps depending on job, profession, or job type.  A health care worker, for example, might have an iPhone that is optimized for a hospital setting (updated information about patient location, records, medications, potential cost savings, infection risks, etc).Iphone

5.  LOCATION-LINKAGES:  Wi-fi and other linkages (carrier, email client, SMS) change depending on location to optimize for the situation.  For example, wi-fi would turn off for certain networks that are password protected so the phone stays connected to the cellular network.  Saves time from having to switch back and forth manually.

6.  BATTERY LIFE-TIME:  The user can switch to a “battery conservation mode” that will power down features not needed (color screen goes to black and white, wi-fi off, vibration off).  Or, the iPhone does it automatically depending on time of day such as at nighttime.  For travelers who like to keep the phone on all night in their hotel room, this would save time and battery life.

7.  CAPACITY-RANGE:  Enable iPhone to “borrow” the optical disk space of a nearby Mac of PC much like the MacBook Air does.

8.  PHOTO QUALITY-BROWSER TYPE:  This is an odd one, but that is the beauty of this tool – it makes you put together combinations of attributes you would not think of.  In this case, the iPhone would allow you to vary the photo quality to load into different browser types or features.

9.  MUSIC SOURCE-LOCATION:  The iPhone would recognize when it is in an airplane, restaurant, store, concert, museum, or other venue, and it would pick up the music or broadcast that is streaming just within that venue.  It might include advertising or other useful information relevant to the venue (example: restaurant menu specials, airport flight delays, museum closing time, etc).

10.  FUNCTION-LOCATION:  The iPhone “shopping buddy” would tell you what items on your shopping list to get in a certain order to save the most time.  It would suggest items on sale as substitutes for what’s on your list.  It would tell you what checkout line is fastest, and it would know how much you are about to spend.  Perhaps it could link right to PayPal and complete the checkout process for you.

To learn this tool, consider taking a course such as the one being offered next month in Chicago.  I’ll be there!

Sooner, Better, Bolder

Published date: September 14, 2008 в 9:10 am

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Innovation is a team sport, and no one describes this better than Professor Keith Sawyer in his book, Group Genius.  Keith’s blog, Creativity & Innovation, highlights one of the most significant aspects of successful innovation – that groups of people are likely to be more creative than individuals working on their own.  His latest example of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios illustrates this well.

“Creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working together to solve a great many problems…A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas.”  (Ed Catmull, Pesident of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios)

Why are groups so effective?  What is the optimal group size?  What is the best way to leverage the group dynamic?  As a practitioner and teacher of innovation, I have witnessed group innovation many times in many settings, and I observe three factors that might explain why teams outperform individuals at innovating.

First, people engage and ideate sooner when paired with teammates.  It’s caused by the commitment people feel when associated with a group.  It is switched on automatically by a sense of common purpose.  When given an innovation task, people rise to the occasion to live up to their commitments.  And they do it immediately.  They feel less competition with internal rivals, and they experience a temporary camaraderie to perform.  They “power up” their creative engines knowing a teammate is waiting for ideas to come out.  They expect the same effort in return from the teammate.

Contrast that with working alone.  When alone, people head in a different direction.  They initiate a lot of pre-thought before they get to ideating.  For example, they might frame the problem differently, they consider what they know and don’t know, they consider the risks and rewards of their efforts, they consider what their rivals might be up to, they consider their status in the group and how to maintain or improve it, and they wonder how best to use their time.  Then they ideate.  Not only does this burn up a lot of cognitive capacity and energy, but it also delays the onset of ideation.  It’s wasteful.

Another reason groups excel:  Two people can innovate more “cheaply” than one.  Just as two people can live together more cheaply (per person) than on their own (about 70% vs. alone according to experts), so it is with innovation.  It takes less exertion when innovating with a teammate.  People feel supported when part of a team, and they can perform with a different ratio of mental input to creative output.  This boost in ideation for the same level of effort yields better results than the lone genius.

Finally, people can think creatively with a wider variance knowing they have a partner to reel them back in if they get too crazy.  With a partner, people ideate with less anxiety about getting wild and weird.  They are less fearful of failing.  They can express ideas while counting on their partners to modify the idea to become more viable.  People become bolder when they innovate in groups.

What is the optimal group size?  It depends on the job at hand.  Pixar needs 200 to 250 to produce a movie.  But new product workshops can be as small as 12 to 14.  In all cases, it is essential group members are diverse, cross-functional, gender-balanced, and culturally split.

A much more critical issue is the size of the ideation sub-group.  From my experience, the optimal size is two to three.  Innovation happens in small clusters, not in the larger group setting.  The Sooner, Better, Bolder Effect works best when people move in and out of these small sub-groups in a transient and random way.  Pixar, as Keith reports, tries to leverage this with design of their office space to foster “maximum inadvertent encounters.”

Perhaps Professor Sawyer would forgive me if I suggest Group Genius might be better named Small Group Genius.

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