Посты с тэгом: innovation method

Marketing’s Seat at the Innovation Table

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same can be said about innovation.

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

Start at the End

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

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

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

Innovating the Weakest Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fabulous Five and the Scramble for Territory

Published date: January 21, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, and Amazon are in a mad scramble to enter new territory and cover gaps in their strategies.  The one that gets ahead and stays ahead will earn bragging rights in what may be the most significant business battle of all time. These companies are the Fabulous Five.

Let's look at how each company is placed in the following domains: hardware design and manufacturing, software development and integration, consumer retailing, mobile, voice and digital communications, social, search, and entertainment.  Why these?  I believe the company that covers the biggest footprint across these domains and integrates them in a way that touches the most consumers will become the dominant lifestyle company.  Notice I did not call it B2B, B2C, or even the dominant tech company.  The battle being fought here is to become a part of the consumer's life in a way that allows the company to learn key insights that can be monetized.  It is the battle for the consumer subconscious in a way.

Here is where I see them today:

Slide1

No one should be surprised to see Google and Apple covering more territory than the others.  But notice the lack of coverage by Facebook. More than the others, the pressure on Facebook to enter new territories must be enormous.  That might explain its most recent announcement about Graph Search, a capability that will rival Google.  Here is an excerpt from CNET:

After nine years of colonizing the globe and corralling a billion people, Facebook has found a way to unlock the potential of its massive data collection — a basic semantic search engine that will let it build smarter services for travel, food, recruitment, dating and other verticals that will generate revenue that could rival Google's.  Graph Search is the beginning of the Enlightenment, the next major phase in Facebook's history, in which people gain the "power and tools to take any cut of the graph and make any query they want," as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the product launch event at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters earlier this week.

Graph Search is about providing answers, extracted from the data your friends feed into Facebook. It's not Web search, which typically generates a series of links for a query, with the exception of current stock prices, weather  and many other standard queries. But Graph Search is limited in scope and usefulness at this stage. It is in a beta phase that will last for many months.

Facebook will no doubt continue to enter new domains.  Its move into Communications with a Skype-like app is hardly enough, and one wonders whether it will make a move to acquire Blackberry.

Also notice the thin coverage in territory by Amazon.  Don't count them out just yet.  Amazon is also a viable contender for a Blackberry deal, and it has the resources to enter more domains.  The areas of Social and Search seem to be the most glarring ommissions.

Samsung has gaps, too.  It desparately needs its own operating system so it can break the chains with Google.  They are certainly headed in that direction given the announcment at CES about Tizen.

Pound for pound, Google has the others beat in terms of collecting monetizable insights.  But the price point for that data is low (for now) especially when you compare it to the premium prices (and margins) of Apple products.  High margins fund future projects.

The battle is far from over.

10 New Year Resolutions for Innovation Leaders

Published date: December 31, 2012 в 2:00 am

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“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

and next year’s words await another voice.”

                                                                                     T.S. Eliot

In 2013, think inside the box and give your staff these precious gifts to drive innovation forward:

1. Give them Hope: Hope is defined as a positive motivational belief in one’s future; the feeling that what is wanted can be had; that events will turn out for the best. Without hope, tasks such as innovating become difficult if not impossible. Researcher Armenio Rego says, “Hope is important for innovation at work because creativity requires challenging the status quo and a willingness to try and possibly fail.  It requires some level of internal, sustaining force that pushes individuals to persevere in the face of challenges inherent to creative work.”

2. Give them Voice: Giving your employees a voice in matters boosts their creativity. Research shows that, over time, procedural fairness (giving people the opportunity to express their views) has a positive maintaining effect on creativity whereas stifling their views decreases creativity. Be consistent over time.  Don’t let distractions or a crisis cause you to change the rules. Give them a chance to speak about anything related to the innovation challenges you face – focus, methodology, budget allocation, team formation, and so on.  Most importantly, let them speak about the nature and value of their own ideas.

3. Give them a chance to Get Even: When managing individuals or teams, the time will come when you have to say ‘no’.  In that moment immediately after rejecting a person’s viewpoint, you want to let it sink.  Don’t try to minimize the impact by rationalizing the decision or by other means of making the person feel better.  Assign the rejected person right away to a new and important task.  Put them on a project where they can prove themselves and “get even.”  Let their creative juices flow.

4. Give them Accountability: Hold people accountable for what they do to improve innovation activities.  It is tempting to judge employee performance and reward them for innovation output.  This leads to the unwanted rivalry between employees.  Avoid this trap by looking at how managers set up “cockpit indicators” and use those indicators to make changes.  Have they created a closed loop feedback process to improve innovation continuously?

5. Give them a Method: For thousands of years, inventors have embedded five simple patterns into their inventions, usually without knowing it. These patterns are the “DNA” of products that can be extracted and applied to any product or service to create new-to-the-world innovations. Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) is an effective, repeatable, and trainable innovation process for organic growth.

6. Give them Constraints: Research in cognitive psychology confirms that creativity is enhanced by constraints, not freedom.  By limiting the number of variables under consideration from infinity to a finite number, we amplify our potential to come up with a creative solution. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking. It may sound counterintuitive, but giving employees too much freedom of thought leads to “idea anarchy” and a poor level of inventiveness.

7. Give them Skills:  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned by anyone regardless of where they are on the creativity scale.  If you want a more innovative company, you must have more innovative employees.  Train them in innovation as you would train other skill such as leadership, six sigma, or business ethics.

8. Give them Teams: Innovating takes teamwork.  Properly selected teams using a facilitated systematic method will outperform ad hoc teams using divergent, less structured methods such as brainstorming.  Create innovation “dream teams” with diverse talent from the commercial, technical, and customer-oriented parts of your business.

9. Give them Strategy: Innovation that is linked to strategy is seen as more realistic and supportable.  Innovating is efficient because you avoid creating ideas that are out of scope.  Companies get better results from innovation by targeting initiatives at the right places.

10. Give them an Innovation Culture:  An innovative corporate culture is one that supports the creation of new ideas and the implementation of those ideas.  Leaders need to help employees see innovation in the right light and create support systems to make it stick.  As fellow blogger Jeffrey Phillips notes, “A culture that sustains and supports innovation is one that encourages reasonable risk and uncertainty in the goal of larger, more profitable products and services.”

Will You Help Me?

Published date: November 19, 2012 в 3:00 am

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Asking for help may be the most powerful yet underutilized resource available for innovators.  Researchers Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohns found that people grossly underestimate the rate that others are willing to help when asked.  As a result, we more often fail to ask for help when the likelihood was very high the other person would have said ‘yes.’  Consider this study they conducted at Columbia University:

“Participants in the study were positioned in the middle of the campus and instructed to approach random strangers for an escort to the university gym, which is located at the edge of campus (the Columbia University gym is subterranean and therefore difficult to find).  Before completing the task, participants were asked to estimate how many they would have to approach in order to get one to say “yes.”  On average, people estimated they would have to ask 7.2 people to get just one to agree.  In fact, they needed to approach just 2.3 strangers, on average. While people presumed that about 6 out of 7 of the individuals they approached would refuse to assist them, the reality was that approximately every other person was willing to agree to their request.
Why are we reluctant to ask for help?  The researchers suggest we focus too much on the other person’s cost of saying “yes” (in the form of their time and resources expended to comply with the request) versus their heavier social costs of saying “no.”  They also suggest we may be letting a time when someone said “no” weigh too heavily in our memory.  The fear of rejection looms large, keeping us from risking another bad experience.”

We also tend to overestimate how harshly others will judge us if we ask for help.  We fear asking for help may be seen as a sign of weakness.  The other person has power over you in that awkward moment when they can say yes or no to your request.  However, taking another view of the situation turns the tables.  When we view power and strength as the capacity to influence others to access their resources, help-seeking is not weak, but rather a “powerful act.”

Asking for help has many benefits as the researches point out.  First and foremost is you are highly likely to get the help you seek.   Second, you are giving the other person a “gift” in the form of an opportunity to feel helpful and valued.  Third, you will likely strengthen the relationship with the other person.  Finally, you avoid the life-long feeling of regret of not asking help.  Research suggests, in the long run, we regret more not asking for help than having a request rejected.
Successful innovation practitioners need help in many forms, including:
•    Advice and direction – where are the fertile areas for innovation
•    Participation in innovation programs and workshops
•    Evaluation of ideas and feedback about results
•    Support with both tangible and intangible resources

Need to innovate? Ask for help!

 

Innovation and Organizational Savviness

Published date: October 22, 2012 в 3:00 am

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Navigating complex organizations takes skill and savviness, or what some call office politics.  It is such an important skill that world class companies like GE and Johnson & Johnson teach it to their employees and reward them for using it.  We may not like it, but for good ideas and people to survive, we must build organizational savviness and influence skills.

Succeeding at innovation takes that same organizational savviness.  Here are eight tips to improve your innovation savviness:

1.  You don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room.  Corporate rookies, especially newly-minted MBA’s, rush in with the goal of getting to the best answer faster than anyone else in the room.  Even when you are the smartest guy (gal) in the room, you should avoid this behavior.  Otherwise, you will gradually lose allies.  People will stop inviting you, and you will soon become a “solo act.”  Instead, work hard to offer your ideas with the intent of combining them with the best of others.  Be seen as an integrator of ideas rather than competing to create the best idea.

2.  Make sure your innovation efforts are seen as relevant.  It’s tempting to be the first to jump on the latest fad and prove your entrepreneurial spirit.  However, by doing so, you risk being seen as someone who is out of touch, too theoretical, or “chasing windmills.”  You may think you have a good grasp of what’s relevant to the organization.  But your views may differ dramatically from what the boss sees at her level of the organization.  Instead, make sure you solicit advice about the relevance of your project.  How does it link to the strategic initiatives of the firm?  How would you explain your project’s importance to an outsider?  Pull out if you have difficulty making this link.

3.  Work only on those projects with a clear, supported mandate from senior management.  While your innovation project may be relevant, that is not the same as having a mandate.  Many initiatives and ideas may be relevant to the organization’s success, but only a limited number get the necessary dollars and headcount to be successful.  Link yourself only to projects that have management’s support.  Avoid being sucked into every initiative that comes your way.  If you are talented, people will want your time and energy on their projects.  Be sure to “limit rather than dilute” – it is better to succeed on a few projects than deliver marginal results on many.

4.  Timing is everything.  Every project or initiative follows a predictable life cycle: intro, growth, maturity, and decline.  Be sure to join innovation initiatives early in their life cycle, and get out when they mature.  Some make the mistake of hanging on too long, after the program has lost its “oomph.”  Either they didn’t see the decline coming, or they became too comfortable to change.  Either way, they are doomed if they stay with an innovation program to its bitter end.

5.  Learn to recognize…and deal with…sabotage by others.  People treat ideas differently depending on the source of the idea.  If an idea comes from an internal peer rival, people tend to see it as tainted.  They sabotage it because it’s not theirs.  If the same idea had come from outside the firm (from a competitor or consultant), people overvalue it.  They see it as tempting.  You should expect to see this behavior and have ways to neutralize its effect.  One way is to not associate ideas with a specific person, especially you.  Contrary to popular wisdom, avoid giving attribution the person who created the idea.  This makes sure the idea is stripped of any associations related to the inventor.  The idea now has its best chance of survival.

6.  Savviness is not the same as manipulation.  There is an old saying in the corporate world:  “Don’t make enemies of your peers.  If you do, you won’t need more enemies – they can ruin just fine.”  When navigating the innovation waters, don’t see it as a political chess game where you have to manipulate others to get what you want.  Savvy innovators have a high level of political astuteness and possess
strategies and skills for ethically navigating the corporate terrain to
gain “organizational influence and impact with integrity.”

 7.  “It’s not what you don’t know that will kill you. It’s what you know that ain’t really so.”  Will Rogers is credited with this savvy quote.  That wisdom holds true today for innovation.  People let their current knowledge about an issue blind them to other facts that may contradict their beliefs.  Holding onto a belief that you are certain is true…only to find out later that it isn’t…will cause others to question your flexibility and judgment.  Learn to recognize this blind spot (called Confirmation Bias), and seek ways to weigh data equally, including data contrary to your point of view.

8.  Treat yourself to continuous development and improvement.  The biggest mistake corporate innovators make is they stop developing themselves.  Your first priority is to assure your relevance to the organization, and you can do that only if you take the time to learn new skills and update old ones.  If you are doing today’s job on twenty year old skills, you have become the proverbial “dead man walking.”  Instead, you should make every year count – take time to do something, anything that develops and improves your innovation abilities.

Photo: Fresh Spectrum http://freshspectrum.com/social-media-savviness-indicato/

Innovation Sighting: Nissan’s Intelligent Car Horn

Published date: October 15, 2012 в 3:00 am

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Nissan’s latest innovation takes the lowly car horn and elevates it to the status of “smart.”  The 2013 Altima has a new feature that’s likely to surprise buyers. It’s called Easy-Fill Tire Alert.  The car’s tire pressure monitoring system informs drivers when a tire is low on air and then uses the sedan’s horn and hazard lights to confirm that the tire has been filled adequately.

This is a classic use of the Task Unification Technique, one of five in the innovation method called SIT.  Task Unification works by taking a component and assigning it an additional job.  That component can be an internal resource (in this case, something on or in the car) or an external resource, something in the vicinity of the car, but not within the manufacturer’s control (a passenger, for example).  The additional job can be “stolen” from another component or it can be assigned something new.

Auto makers have used this seemingly simple component before for other purposes than just beeping at other drivers.  Car horns have been “recruited” to sound off as a burglar alarm, for example.  Some models of cars have the horn sound when the car is locked or unlocked.  Now, Nissan’s clever innovation assigns the horn the new task of assisting with tire maintenance.  Brilliant!

Nissan’s humorous TV commercial to introduce the new feature is brilliant, too:


From Nissan:

The “Easy-Fill Tire Alert” system is an all-new control module currently being phased into vehicle redesigns like the all-new 2013 Nissan Altima.  First, the vehicle’s tire-pressure warning system alerts a driver to a low tire; and on some models displays the current pressure and tire or tires that require attention on the dashboard display.  When alerted, drivers should stop at the nearest gas station to fill the tire with an available air hose.  Once air begins flowing into the tire, the vehicle’s four-way flashers come on to confirm the process has started.  When the tire hits the appropriate pressure level, the horn then chirps to let drivers know the tire has been properly inflated.  If the driver continues to fill the tire with air, the horn honks more aggressively to indicate over inflation. Once air is let out of the tire, the horn chirps once to indicate the correct pressure has been reached.

Just imagine what else a car horn can do.  Using Task Unification makes it easy.
 

Innovation Sighting: SIT Patterns in the Next Wave in Digital Photography

Published date: October 8, 2012 в 9:29 am

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It might surprise you that a single innovation pattern, Multiplication, formed the premise of all photography.  The cameras you use today evolved from Multiplication.  The entire photography industry continues to benefit thanks to this powerful pattern.

Multiplication is one of five simple patterns innovators have used for thousands of years.  These patterns are the basis of Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method that channels your thinking and regulates the ideation process.  The method works by taking a product, service, or process and applying a pattern to it.  This changes the starting point.  It morphs the product into something weird, perhaps unrecognizable.  With this altered configuration (we call the Virtual Product), you work backwards to link it to a problem that it addresses or new benefit it delivers.  The process is called Function Follows Form.

The photography industry continues to evolve thanks to more of the SIT patterns.  At this years Photokina show in Cologne, Germany, camera makers unveiled their latest and greatest inventions.  Here is an example of the Subtraction pattern in the new wave of digital photography (as reported by CNET):

The mirrorless cameras leave out the reflex mirror of SLRs, which use it to bounce light into the viewfinder so a photographer can see through the camera’s lens. When it’s time to take a photo, the SLR mirror flips up out of the way, the shutter opens, the light hits the image sensor, then the mirror flips back down.With mirrorless cameras, the light just goes straight to the image sensor all the time. If there’s a viewfinder at all, it’s an electronic display, often an optional accessory. The design is simpler, smaller, and all the rage in the industry.

As camera-enabled smartphones have grown in popularity, consumers have learned to love the ability to photograph and then immediately share their photo over the Internet.  Now, traditional camera makers are responding to the threat in an interesting way.  Rather than compete head-to-head with smartphones, they are using the Task Unification pattern instead.  Task Unification works by “assigning an additional job to an existing resource within the Closed World (where the product or service is being consumed).  See if you can spot the Task Unification in this new crop of cameras:

Wireless networking in the camera industry in general has been conspicuous by its absence, isolating cameras from people’s in-the-moment sharing activities.  Curiously, though, the very smartphones that have put the camera industry so much on the defensive are proving to be its savior, too. Cameras now can connect directly to those smartphones, letting the two cooperate rather than compete. Canon’s new SLR, the EOS 6D announced at Photokina, has Wi-Fi built in; with the Canon EOS Remote app for iOS and Android, people can remotely operate the camera, review photos even while the camera is stashed away in luggage, and most importantly, transfer photos to a smartphone for quick sharing.  Another new Wi-Fi-enabled Canon camera is the PowerShot S110. For this model — and doubtless others to come — smartphone users can connect over Wi-Fi with the CameraWindow app for iOS or for Android. That lets people share their photos immediately using a phone.

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