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Innovation in Practice: Three Years and Counting!

Published date: December 6, 2010 в 3:00 am

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Today marks the third anniversary of Innovation in Practice. I am happy to say I see no end in sight.  Blogging is the ultimate truth serum: it helps you discover what you know, how you learn, and how you connect to a community of fellow bloggers.  I use this blog to test my ideas, develop new ideas, and practice what I preach.  I appreciate all of you who read this blog, and I encourage you to reach out to me.  I welcome ways to improve the blog and I would love to hear topics you want me to focus on.

The themes of this blog are:

  •  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned like any other skill such as marketing, leadership, or playing the guitar.  To be an innovator, learn a method.  Teach others.
  •  Innovation is a two-way phenomena.  We can start with a problem and innovate solutions.  Or we can generate hypothetical solutions and explore problems that they solve.  To be a great innovator, you need to be a two-way innovator.
  •  Innovation must be linked to strategy.  Innovation for innovation’s sake doesn’t matter.  Innovation that is guided by strategy or helps guide strategy yields the most opportunity for corporate growth.
  •  The corporate perspective, where innovation is practiced day-to-day, is what must be understood and kept at the center of attention.  How the corporate practitioner views the academic community, the consulting community, and the research community is where we will find best practices.  This is where truth is separated from hype.

2010 Highlights

  • I became a full-time academic after retiring from Johnson & Johnson in May.  This frees up a lot of time to do the writing, consulting, and research in innovation that I have always wanted to do.  Even though I’m in academia, the blog’s focus will remain “The Corporate Perspective” because this is where I believe innovation has to be ignited to drive economic growth.  Academics teach, and practitioners do.
  • The LAB series continues to push me to innovate in new ways.  This year, I innovated the Blackberry, the game of baseball, website design, retail selling, Legos, service models, water access, party planning, an aquarium, wedding invitations, and the iPad.

2011 Focus

  • New Audiences:  I want to expose innovation methods to kids, seniors citizens,  people with disabilities…anyone who wants to make a difference with innovation.
  • New Relationships:  I look forward to strengthening my ties to some very special people including Jacob Goldenberg, Amnon Levav, Yoni Stern, and the entire team at S.I.T..  Also, Christie Nordhielm and Marta Dapena-Baron at Big Picture Partners, Bob Cialdini at Influence at Work, Yury Boshyk at Global Executive Learning Network, and the team at the Washington Speakers Bureau.  I look forward to new projects with Mark Adkins at PDMA and Randy Rossi at Bally Design.  All good stuff.
  • New Colleagues:  Special thanks to the UC marketing faculty (Karen, Chris, Fritz, Dave, James, Frank, Bob, Inigo, Norm, Jane, Raj, Constantine, and Ric).

 
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Crowdsourcing and the Task Unification Tool

Published date: November 29, 2010 в 3:00 am

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Crowdsourcing has a crowd of critics.  Crowdsourcing is the notion of distributed problem-solving where problems are broadcast to large groups of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. The belief is that the “wisdom of the crowd” yields superior results over what individuals can do.  The use of the term has spread to just about any activity that involves groups of people tackling an issue.

The critics have a point. Crowdsourcing seems to be an old story retold a new way.  The idea of collaborating with others is not new.  The idea of reaching out to thousands to gain insights about a problem is not new either.  Here are two examples held out as crowdsourcing best practices that make the point.  A Catholic church in Germany launched an online open idea competition. On the competition platform, young people are encouraged to submit their ideas about what they would like to change at the Catholic Church.

That is not crowdsourcing.  That is market research.

Here is another. CreateMyTattoo connects customers with a community of 700 tattoo artists who compete to design the perfect custom tattoo.  Customers see several variations of their tattoo idea and provide feedback to the artists during the contest. The site guarantees at least ten unique custom tattoo designs or your money back!

That is not crowdsourcing.  That is competitive bidding.

Here is a better example that starts to move in the right direction.  DHL, a courier company, is testing a way to use city residents to deliver packages along the route as they go about their daily travel. The programs is called “bring.BUDDY,” and it hopes to reduce road congestion and DHL’s carbon emissions. Participants use a smartphone app to specify their travel. An alert is sent to them of any package that needs to be delivered along their route. In return, the participants receive points which they can redeem at local stores.

This is novel.  But DHL could go further with the concept.  What else do people know or do (explicitly or tacitly) that DHL could use to improve operations, reduce cost, or increase revenue?  For example, what if DHL had a way to know what delivery routes are optimal based on information fed to it by customers (through cellular technology)?  What if the crowd could identify open parking spots, report packages that need picked up, or spot activities that might demand the use of courier delivery?

There is a better way to leverage the crowd.  Rather than “source” the crowd for their explicit ideas, we “cache” their tacit, day-to-day routines to detect patterns and insights.  In “crowdcaching,” people don’t  know that they are contributing their small, incremental movements and decisions to a larger pool.  It is like digital ethnography.  We collect large samples of tiny decisions to “bootstrap” our insights and decisions.

Innovation Sighting: New World Order with Attribute Dependency

Published date: November 22, 2010 в 3:00 am

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One way to develop stronger innovation skills is to practice pattern recognition…seeing an inherent pattern used to create innovative products and services.  Pattern recognition "builds innovation muscle" and makes you more adept at applying patterns to other products and services.  Here is an interesting example that uses the S.I.T. pattern called Attribute Dependency.  This pattern creates new (or breaks existing) dependencies between attributes of a product or service.  It can also create dependencies between attributes of the product or service and its external environment.

Do you see the Attribute Dependency pattern in this map?

NewWorld

This "new world order" map creates a dependency between a country's population size and its land mass.  By correlating the two attributes, countries are located where their population is best matched to physical area.  Take a moment to study it.  It is worth the look.

While the map is interesting, one might question its value.  It is hypothetical as no country is going to move its population to another location.  If one defines innovation as NEW, USEFUL, and SURPRISING ("Gee, I never would have thought of that."), the map meets two out of three criteria.

To make it truly innovative, we use "Function Follows Form" and envision potential benefits of such a map.  We take the form of the map as is, and we hypothesize new functions it can perform.  Here are some potential uses:

1.  Training Tool:  I can imagine using this in my innovation course as a way to demonstrate Attribute Dependency.  Rather than just show students this map, however, I would have them take an original world map and apply the pattern in a disciplined way.  They might come up with this same configuration, but it is more likely they will create their own, even more novel "new world order."  After the exercise, I would share this map as a way to reinforce the idea.

2.  Research Tool:  Perhaps this map could be used in political science research to see what it says about countries and their policies.  Is there a difference between countries that have different population densities in terms of their economies, politics, and social norms?  How would things change if their population density was normalized to the rest of the world?

3.  Foreign Policy Tool:  Perhaps this map could suggest new strategies for conducting foreign policy.  What if Mexico and Iran really were next to each other?  What would it do to each country in terms of trade or conflict?  What if Germany had a lot of the oil-producing region?  Would oil be distributed more equitably?

4.  Trend Spotting Tool:  Perhaps the map could help suggest new trends in cooperation and conflict.  If India and the United States shared a border, what would the new relationship look like, and is it likely this could occur?  What new languages might emerge in certain regions given the new locations.  How would religion change?

5.  Corporate Strategy Tool:  Could this map suggest modifications to other types of maps that would help companies see new strategic opportunities?  For example, what if a company created a different map of its customer's locations based on some attribute such as "cost to serve" or "future growth potential."  Perhaps it would suggest new ways to service customers or target new customers.

 

Marketing Innovation: The Inversion Tool

Published date: November 15, 2010 в 3:00 am

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Creating innovative TV commercials is more effective when using patterns embedded in other innovative commercials.  Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered that 89% of 200 award winning ads fall into a few simple, well-defined design structures.  Their latest book, "Cracking the Ad Code," defines eight of these structures and provides a step-by-step approach to use them.

Here are the eight tools:
   1. Unification
   2. Activation
   3. Metaphor
   4. Subtraction
   5. Extreme Consequence
   6. Absurd Alternative
   7. Inversion
   8. Extreme Effort

The Inversion Tool conveys what would happen if you didn’t have the product…in an extreme way.  It show the benefits “lost”  by not using the product.  While it produces memorable commercials, it should  be used only when the brand and its benefits are understood by the viewer. 

To use the Inversion Tool, start with the components of the brand promise.  Take each one away one at a time and envision in what ways the consumer would be affected…in an extreme way…if it did not have this aspect of the promise.

Here are two examples of the Inversion Tool:


The LAB: Innovating the Blackberry with S.I.T. (November 2010)

Published date: November 8, 2010 в 3:00 am

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Blackberry is taking a shellacking from iPhone and Android.  It’s market share has declined 4% in four months.  Why?  The company drifted from a strategy built around its core competency and is frantically chasing its app-crazed competitors. Though Blackberry defined the smart phone category, it will lose its lead unless it changes.

Blackberry needs innovation.  This month’s LAB outlines an approach for using the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to Blackberry.  The focus is how to disrupt iPhone and Droid and re-assert dominance in the smart phone category.

The first step is to pick the core benefit that Blackberry can lead with.  Using the Big Picture marketing framework, we need to identify a “dynamic variable” that is tied directly to RIM’s core competency – secure communications.  Blackberry uses powerful codes to encrypt messages as they travel between a BlackBerry server and the BlackBerry device.  All BlackBerry traffic runs through RIM data centers and servers which encrypt and unscramble messages.  The iPhone and Droid communicate directly with ordinary email servers – unsecured.

My recommendation is to compete on privacy (NOT security which is more of the “how,” not the “why”).  Blackberry cannot compete with iPhone and Droid on functionality (apps) and design.  Instead, it needs to raise the Importance and Perception of privacy in the minds of the market.  Privacy is highly desired by people and organizations, and Blackberry is the only technology that can do many functions securely.  The trick is to extend the idea of privacy management beyond just emailing.  Blackberry wants to convince the market that privacy is more important than apps and desgin.

Characteristics of Future Innovations

Published date: November 1, 2010 в 3:00 am

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What big innovation do you expect within 10 years?  My crystal ball is no better than others.  Rather than predict innovations, I predict what characteristics they will have and how they might be invented.

1.  Mobility:  Future products will incorporate some degree of mobility and integration into the mobile lifestyle.  Smart phones fuel this.  But mobility is not all about communications.  Future products will take advantage of the data created by people as they move through their day.  The innovation templates, Task Unification and Attribute Dependency, are excellent tools for identifying these opportunities.

An MIT team is researching the feasibility of using cell phones as a unique tool to identify any emerging disease outbreaks. The team, led by Anmol Madan, said that a disease changes the mobility pattern of a cell phone user and by developing a software that tracked movements, phone calls and text messages of 70 students who were also daily surveyed for their health, the software was able to identify those suffering from an ailment.  Students who came down with a fever or full-blown flu tended to move around less and make fewer calls late at night and early in the morning. When Madan trained software to hunt for this signature in the cellphone data, a daily check correctly identified flu victims 90 per cent of the time.  Public health officials could also use the technique to spot emerging outbreaks of illness ahead of conventional detection systems, which today rely on reports from doctors and virus-testing labs. Similar experiments in larger groups and in different communities will have to be done first though.

Innovation Sighting: Innovating Political Elections with Division

Published date: October 25, 2010 в 3:00 am

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The Division template of the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., works by listing the components of the product or service, then dividing out a component either physically, functionally, or by preserving the characteristics of the whole.  Here is a unique example of the Division template with political elections.  This idea comes from innovation consultant, Lauchlan Mackinnon, in his blog, Think Differently!!.

“Political parties may say or do ‘anything’ to get elected. They will make alliances of convenience with powerful interests such as the media, big business, or unions, and they will take populist poll driven positions (which is not necessarily bad in itself in a democratic system). When a party gets elected however, it is not always the best person for the job who fills any role: it is a complex allocation system that balances party relationships and internal politics with the capabilities and contributions of members to fill the leadership roles. 

My proposition is simple: what if we could split western democratic elections in to two phases or stages: a first election about the ideas and directions for the next term in government – the goals and aspirations that the people want the government to fulfill. Then run a second and completely independent election to determine the best people to fill those specific roles. Thus for example a democratic population could vote in not only the directions that are appropriate, for example health reform or financial reform, but they can also then call for suitable candidates to lead each portfolio and vote in specific people with appropriate backgrounds (for example in health reform or financial reform) to lead those portfolios and the implementation of those changes. A professor of health administration or economics or business administration or someone with deep industry experience in those areas would then have a much better chance of being selected than in our current system. And perhaps also we could focus each individual representing the country on serving the country and the world, rather than any party system.”

To extend this idea further, imagine “dividing” the political candidate out from their constituency and territory.  Voters from another area would choose a candidate knowing they would not have to live with the results.  After listening to the campaign promises, they elect a candidate based on issues that do not affect them.  The benefit would be these voters can be more objective and not take into consideration territorial factors.

Another division observable in the U.S. midterm elections is separating the candidate from their party affiliation.  Many campaign advertisements leave the political party out so voters pick candidates on the merits of their case rather than through party biases.

“Preserving” division divides the product or service into many smaller versions, each preserving characteristics of the whole.  In this example, imagine voters had 100 votes instead of one.  They could distribute votes to more than one candidate as a way to express preference on the issues.  For example, if they liked a candidate from one party yet still liked some aspects of the other candidate, they might cast their 100 votes with a 70-30 split.

Tainted Innovation, Tempting Innovation

Published date: October 18, 2010 в 3:00 am

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An idea stands a better chance of surviving if it is not attributed to the individual who conceived it. Otherwise, the idea carries with it all the baggage and perception of its owner, good or bad.  During idea evaluation, people struggle separating their feelings about the creator from the idea itself.  If they like the person, they like their idea…and vice versa.

What this means in practice is that you don’t want to give credit for good ideas.  In facilitated ideation sessions, you need to get ideas out of people’s heads in a way that no one will know who it came from.  This is contrary to the popular notion that organizations need to reward people for their ideas to stimulate innovation.  Rather than reward their ideas, it might be better to reward their participation in innovation as Stefan Lindegaard points out.

This insight comes from the work of Tanya Menon at the University of Chicago.  She describes the paradox of an external idea being viewed as “tempting” while the exact same idea, coming from an internal source, is considered “tainted.”

“In a business era that celebrates anything creative, novel, or that demonstrates leadership, “borrowing” or “copying” knowledge from internal colleagues is often not a career-enhancing strategy. Employees may rightly fear that acknowledging the superiority of an internal rival’s ideas would display deference and undermine their own status.

By contrast, the act of incorporating ideas from outside firms is not seen as merely copying, but rather as vigilance, benchmarking, and stealing the thunder of a competitor. An external threat inflames fears about group survival, but does not elicit direct and personal threats to one’s competence or organizational status. As a result, learning from an outside competitor can be much less psychologically painful than learning from a colleague who is a direct rival for promotions and other rewards.”

How do you strip away the credit for an idea when it is conceived?  First, have people ideate in small teams of two or three.  When an idea is offered, make sure these sub-teams share their ideas with the larger group without mentioning who actually created it.  It’s harder to overlay subjective feelings on an idea when it eminates from two or three people.  Credit for the idea gets diluted.

Second, have teams share their ideas in digital form.  Set up a group wiki site or other 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 completely separate team than the one that generated the ideas.  Use an objective, weighted decision model to assess the the value of 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.

The LAB: Innovating Baseball with Attribute Dependency (October 2010)

Published date: October 11, 2010 в 3:00 am

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 Baseball has a density problem.  The ratio of “minutes of action” over “total minutes played” is low.  Consider for example, the “no-hitter” pitched by Roy Halladay of the Philadelphia Phillies.  Not a single opposing player was able to reach first base because of his performance.  Baseball is essentially a duel between pitcher and batter.   If there was a way to trade out some of the pitching duel for more field play, baseball would be less boring.

For this month’s LAB, let’s apply the corporate innovation method, SIT, to find potential improvements to the game of baseball.  The method is based on five patterns inherent in many innovative products.  By extracting and applying those patterns, we can innovate anything.  For baseball, we will apply Attribute Dependency tool.  Here is how it works.

We start with a list of attributes (variables) of the game of baseball.  Then we create combinations of those attributes with an eye towards creating a correlation between them.  As one attribute changes, so does the other.  This becomes our hypothetical solution to which we work backwards to see if it solves a problem or adds value.  In the case where there is already a dependency between attributes, we artificially break it and see what benefit it might deliver.  For example, there is no dependency between runs scored and the inning played.  We would change this by creating a new dependency where the value of a run changes as the inning changes.  For example, a team earns two runs for crossing home plate instead of one, but only in the ninth inning.

Here are several ideas that make the game “dense” with more action and make it faster.  These ideas are based on breaking and as well as forming dependencies between attributes.

Innovation Suite 2010 – New York City

Published date: October 3, 2010 в 2:54 pm

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SIT will be conducting its 5th innovation course in New York City from Nov 1-3, 2010.  This course is designed for middle management and above, but most anyone can benefit from the learning experience. Participants of previous courses were Presidents, Marketing VPs and Directors, R&D VPs and Directors, Innovation Teams, and Product Directors from both large multinationals and smaller organizations. You can register for it at http://www.sitsite.com/academy/.

Here are the goals of the course:

  • Be able to independently apply SIT innovation tools to your own business issues to arrive at solutions that you would not normally think of.
  • Learn how to develop a culture and practice of innovation in your organization utilizing only existing resources and structures, resulting in a less traumatic organizational change.
  • Begin to work on a relevant issue and arrive at some ideas through the 3-day workshop and the coaching hours.
  • Gain facilitation skills and receive support for conducting innovation mini-sessions in your organization.
  • Network with like-minded innovation lovers from a variety of companies, and learn how they approach innovation.
  • Be able to implement the knowledge acquired in the course upon your return to your company thanks to a structured follow-up program.

The course fee is $2,800 which includes course tuition; coaching hours; SIT materials including an internal “mini-session facilitation kit”; 3 breakfasts, 3 lunches and 1 dinner.  The course fee will be rebated back to you if your company orders a project from SIT by May 1st 2011.

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