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The Not-So-Fuzzy Front End

Published date: February 6, 2008 в 10:16 am

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A best practice at Fortune 100 companies is to see the front end of the pipeline not as fuzzy, but as crystal clear.  A systematic approach to innovation using an effective process can take away the mystery of the front end and create a sustainable growth engine. 
What is the “fuzzy front end” and why has this notion become so popular?  Calling the front end “fuzzy” perpetuates the myths of innovation.  “Fuzziness” is the term coined to suggest that innovation has lots of risk, is not systematic, and is more of a “eureka” moment.  One can schedule work, but you cannot schedule invention.
This is simply not true. You can schedule innovation.  A company like GE, for example, that is seeking 8% growth on a base of $207billion in sales, needs $17 billion in new revenue a year from innovation to achieve that. GE will not tolerate fuzziness at its front end of innovation.
For some, fuziness is more about how to select projects from among the ideas generated at the front end.  There are many tools available to help managers select the most appropriate projects.  The best of those use some form of weighted linear model.
My advice: Create an innovation schedule.  Hold people accountable for generating new business opportunities.  Sharpen the focus, and reward teams that bring forward an exciting portfolio of current and future growth opportunities.  Accepting fuzziness in the front end is accepting slow growth.

In Search of Bad Ideas

Published date: January 27, 2008 в 8:24 am

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Mitch Ditkoff notes a common misperception regarding bad ideas:

“One of the inevitable things you will hear at a brainstorming session is something like “there are no bad ideas.” Well, guess what? There are plenty of bad ideas….The key for aspiring innovators? To find the value in what seems to be a “bad idea” and then use that extracted value as a catalyst for further exploration.”

I agree.  Good ideas usually start as bad ideas, an insight I learned originally from the folks at S.I.T.. But the question is: how do you extract the value from a bad idea to transform it?  I offer three approaches.
First, look carefully at the bad idea and try to characterize the single benefit that the idea delivers to the customer regardless of how whacky that benefit is delivered.  It is the benefit that you want to hold onto, not the whacky deliver system.  Ideate new ways to deliver that benefit.
Second, what criteria are being used to judge the idea as bad?  Try using the Reverse Assumption technique on those criteria.  Turn them around, challenge them, re-frame them.  Make the seemingly bad idea look good in a different context.
Third, look for what is old about the new idea.  Thomas B. Ward, is his chapter, “What’s Old about New Ideas,” says:

“Structured imagination refers to the fact that when people use their imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are heavily structured in predictable ways by the properties of existing categories and concepts.”

In other words, we do not ideate in a vaccuum, but rather in the context of what we already know.  My advice is to take the bad idea and look for the original concept that it was built upon.  Can that be taken in new directions using a structured process?
For corporate innovators, I see this as a best practice.  I often ask people what they do with their bad ideas.  If I see a curious look on their face, it usually means they are not taking advantage of this phenomena.
Bad ideas are better than no ideas.

Young it Down

Published date: January 22, 2008 в 9:48 pm

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Technology improves our lives in many ways, but overreliance on it can cause us to “dumb down.”  Technology has a tendency to fill in or take over certain tasks for the consumer, relieving us of cognitive activities that we once did ourselves.  These cognitive activities get weak or atrophied.  We get lazy and dependent on the new technology to do our work for us.  We become dumb.
Example:  I used my Garmin GPS this weekend at my son’s hockey tournament to find our way back and forth between the hotel and the ice rink.  I have always been “directionally aware,” perhaps a result of Air Force survival training and other experiences.  I know my way around, even in new locations, because of my sense of direction.  I’m never lost.
But on this trip, I used the Garmin (Nuvi) to do the work for me.  Then it struck me as I was riding in a car with one of the other families on the way to the rink.  Without the GPS, I had no clue where we were headed.  The technology caused me to switch off my natural sense of direction.  I had shut it down and paid no attention to where I was or where I was going.  I felt that very strange notion of being lost.  So much for “directionally aware.”
Given the power of innovation tools, we need to be mindful of this as we create medical products, for example, that do the decision making for surgeons, or commercial airplanes that do all the flying for pilots, or educational products that do all the teaching.  We are becoming a knowledge society, they say.  But I worry that knowledge is getting imbedded in new innovations, and it may be having the opposite effect on our society…it is dumbing us down.
Technology has a bright side, though.  Web 2.0 and the myriad of new social networking applications are helping generations reconnect.  This technology is not “dumbing us down;”  rather it is “younging us down.”  I am more connected with my 16 year old son and his friends with applications like texting, Twitter, and Flickr.  My Dunbar Number is expanding thanks to LinkedIn, del.icio.us, and Facebook.  It is helping me identify with 20 year olds, 30 year olds, and beyond, even though I get one year further away from these groups every July 14th.  That’s cool, especially as I find myself speaking to audiences at these age groups all the time.  If I don’t connect to them, they don’t connect with me.  Innovation helps me connect.  It helps me “young it down.”

Innovation vs. Leadership

Published date: January 19, 2008 в 4:50 pm

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Which is easier to learn: innovation or leadership?   That is one of my favorite questions to ask during  keynotes and workshops, especially to groups of accomplished leaders.  What amazes me is the answer I get back:  overwhelmingly, groups of executives say that leadership is easier to learn than innovation.
I could not disagree more.  I’ve experienced some of the best leadership training in the world starting with the U.S. Air Force Academy and all the way through to Johnson & Johnson’s many leadership training programs.  These programs were complex, psychologically-based, and multi-dimensional.  Leadership training is big business.  The demand is high, and the task is tall.  Executives flood to these programs to learn new insights and nuances of this highly people-based activity.  It is tough to learn leadership.
I learned innovation in a matter of minutes.  The process is clear, rules-based, and rigorous.  Anyone can do it.  When facilitated appropriately, you cannot NOT innovate.  The process forces original, novel, and highly creative ideas to come out of your head.
So why do executives feel that leadership is easier to learn than innovation?  My sense is that many have not been exposed to a bona fide innovation method.  These executives want organic innovation more than anything to drive growth.  Yet many are missing a simple insight what it takes…to invest themselves in learning innovation.  Once executives feel what it’s like to innovate on demand, they get it.  They start thinking about execution, scalability, culture aspects, resources needs, measurement, accountability, strategy, alignment….all the traditional things leaders think about…to move an initiative forward.
GE is perhaps the best example of a company that invests in innovation as much as it does leadership with its Imagination at Work program.  For GE, the question of which is easier to train…innovation or leadership…is moot.  They avoid the “leadership bias,” and they invest appropriately in core innovation skills to drive growth.

Innovation Subversives

Published date: January 13, 2008 в 1:38 pm

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Jim Todhunter offers sound advice for innovation champions who are feeling lonely in their efforts to evangelize:

“This is where many innovation evangelists fall down.  Too often, we are so wrapped up in our own world of high performance innovation practice; we forget that many people don’t have the frame of reference to get what we are describing.  We need to slow down and articulate the message more clearly and use clear examples that demonstrate how sustainable innovation practice builds the company’s value.”

This strikes a familiar chord with my colleagues in the Fortune 100.  Not only can innovation champions feel lonely, they can become extinct if they are not careful.  The Association for Managers of Innovation studied why corporate innovation champions struggle to survive.  The study looked at what actions and behaviors put these managers at risk in their efforts to evangelize.  Of the 15 innovation champions in the study, 10 left their organizations and became consultants, 4 joined smaller or start-up companies, and 1 retired. None returned to a Fortune 500 company.  Most of the consultants have as their clients Fortune 500 companies and, in some cases, their former employers.

My advice: stop evangelizing and start doing.  Use a proven innovation method on a mainstream issue or product and let the results speak for themselves.  Don’t ask permission.  Don’t call it innovation.  Don’t preach the “..see, I told you!” message.

And then…do it again.  I take advice from Thomas Bonoma’s classic HBR article from 1986, “Marketing Subversives:”

“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.

Are you feeling lonely as an “innovation champion?”  Forget it.  Get suited for subversion.

Funding Innovation

Published date: January 10, 2008 в 10:02 pm

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Mitch Ditkoff takes on the all important issue of how to fund innovation, and writes about innovation slush funds as a way improve innovation results:

What I like about this approach is that it sidesteps the bureaucratic hokey pokey, run-it-up-the-flagpole, command and control, funky chicken shuffle that all too often scuttles powerful new ideas in need of a timely infusion of capital to get them rolling.

From my experience, there are two choices in how to fund innovation:  invention or development.  Invention means the actual genesis of the idea, usually through a concentrated effort or workshop using a proven method.  Development is what you do with the ideas that have commercial merit.  Both take time and money.  The choice depends on whether you think spending the money to generate ideas will yield more than a pool of funds to invest the ideas that you already have.
Fortune 100 companies vary widely in how they approach it.  Some invest in idea generation to create large stocks of potential opportunities.  They invest in innovation teams and processes to keep innovation happening day in and day out.  The ideas generated must compete for resources against the rest of the portfolio of opportunities.  The other approach is to create a bounty like what Mitch has described…a slush fund to motivate and lure the creative people to come up with ideas.
My preference is to fund invention, systematically.  My sense is that employees need to feel there are sufficient resources and sufficient time for them to take the risk of ideating.  By investing in the ideation process, employees feel liberated to give it their all.  I think the idea of a slush fund makes sense if it is used for pure ideation.   Tell people there are dollars available to conduct formal ideation workshops…a slush fund…and they will beat a path to your door.  That’s what I do.   As Mitch puts it:

And remember, as one wise pundit put it, “It’s not the money that starts the idea, it’s the idea that starts the money.”

Fund ideation, and the result will yield more funds.

Lessons from Improv

Published date: January 6, 2008 в 7:07 pm

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I’ve come full circle on the notion of improvisation as a source of innovation.  I just finished a three day improv training program at The Second City to try to find direct application to corporate growth.  I found it.
My pursuit of a method of innovation started with John Kao’s book, “Jamming,” which compared innovation to the process of musical improvisation.  Jamming is a group activity where one musician lays down the foundational tempo and key for the other musicians who, one at a time, add their own interpretation of it.  At the time, I thought this was innovation nirvana.  But I moved away from it.  Improv and “jamming” in the Kao mindset seemed too much like brainstorming which is usually LESS productive than simply thinking of ideas by yourself.  It seemed too unstructured.  Bottom line: it didn’t work.
Now I’ve learned a more systematic approach to improv from a place that has launched the careers of more comedians than any other.  What I learned can be boiled down to: 1.  The Commitment Principle, 2. The “Yes, and…” Principle, and  3. The Relationship Principle.  When applied systematically, these yield very funny comedy sketches from anyone.  My belief is they can be used the same way in corporate innovation.
Commitment Principle means commit to both the role you are playing and the process.  The “Yes, and…” Principle means always take what line or idea your partner has given you and add value to it.  Match the energy and direction of your partner, but then add significant context or information to keep the dynamic going.  The Relationship Principle says to establish the connection and accountability to your partner above all else.  Without this, improvisation is impossible.
Comedic improvisation is a disciplined, structured, team activity.  My goal is NOT to become a comedian.  Rather, my goal now will be to merge these lessons from improv with Systematic Inventive Thinking to produce even better innovation, on demand.

Innovation for the Ages

Published date: December 30, 2007 в 10:14 am

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I taught innovation to a group of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders as part of my son’s middle school enrichment program several years ago.  I had never taught children in a formal setting, and it was terrifying at first.  The course was called, “How to Be an Inventor,” and we met one hour a week for five weeks.
I had my doubts about this…whether someone could actually learn a systematic approach to innovation.  I had recently experienced the S.I.T. method as part of my company’s efforts to create new medical products.  I wanted to experiment to see if a templated approach to innovation could be taught…and applied…in a setting outside of my company.  So I taught these children the five templates: subtraction, task unification, multiplication, division, and attribute dependency.  On the final day, each student had to take a product that I would give to them randomly, apply one of the five tools, and create a new-to-the-world product – all in thirty minutes. They had to draw the invention on the blackboard and explain why it was useful.
The first student was given a ordinary wire coat hanger.  Using the Attribute Dependency tool, she invented a coat hanger that would adjust to the size, weight, and shape of the garment.  Sixth grade!  I had never seen such a product before.  Truth is it had already been invented by Henry Needles in 1953 (United States Patent US2716512), so technically, she failed the exam.  But she created something new to HER world, for sure.  Each student similarly created amazing new products, some incremental, and some far out (moon beam flashlight).
If 6th graders can learn to innovate in real time, so can the business world.  That is why companies are embracing more productive, systematic methods of innovating and shunning traditional methods.
Teaching children to innovate was an epiphany for me.  My next innovation experiment…senior citizens.  I believe a group of senior citizens could be an ideal scenario for innovating in real time.  They have time on their hands, they want to be productive, they have lots of world knowledge and experience, and they think about ways to improve their situation.
Innovation for the ages…stay tuned.

Innovation Roundtable

Published date: December 26, 2007 в 7:05 pm

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The Marketing Science Institute has formed a new Innovation Roundtable to explore common issues and challenges in the world of corporate innovation. The roundtable representatives are from Johnson & Johnson, GE, P&G, Diageo, Eastman Kodak, AT&T, Kraft, Merck, Thompson Healthcare, Praxair, Aetna, and General Mills. I had the pleasure of hosting the last meeting held at the Endo-Surgery Institute, J&J’s world class training facility for minimally invasive surgery. The group plans to meet twice a year.
Topics at this last meeting included:

  • How and why is innovation an important issue for your company?
  • When, how and by whom was this issue identified? Who currently “owns” it (and why)?
  • What steps have been taken to address this issue, with what results? What steps are planned?
  • What internal or external resources have you used (do you plan to use)?

For part of the agenda, the group practiced using the SIT innovation method on a product category from a member company (Kodak). We decided to make innovation a regular habit at our meetings so we can “walk the talk” not just “talk the talk.” Our goal is to try out a new innovation method at each meeting.
We are fortunate to have Professor Don Lehmann from Columbia Business School as our academic advisor. Don is a prolific researcher in the innovation space (and many others).
Next meeting will be held in conjunction with MSI’s conference, “Innovation and Co-Creation,” in Seattle June 16-18, 2008.  Check out MSI’s great collection of working papers and publications on innovation.

Tempting Innovation

Published date: December 21, 2007 в 1:57 pm

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Jeffrey Phillips makes a nice distinction between the various ways to adopt ideas of others outside your organization in his post, The sincerest form of flattery:

  • If you are copying ideas in your industry, you’re a follower
  • If you adopt ideas from other industries and apply them in new ways in your industry, you’re an innovator
  • If you package your capabilities and dramatically change another market, your a disrupter

What about adoption of ideas of others inside your organization?  Innovators face a particularly challenging issue getting colleagues to accept their ideas.  Tanya Menon from the University of Chicago 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.

Companies such as Procter & Gamble have perfected getting ideas from outside the organization.  Their Connect + Develop program is considered a best practice in external collaboration.  What companies struggle with is how to overcome the internal acceptance of peer ideas.  One way to approach it is with Team Innovation.  Read: TeamInnovation.pdf.

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