Creating the future of our organizations is a vital role that we often assign to our most senior and experienced leaders. We also recognize that the culture needed to execute this future needs to be shaped today, to be a match for our commitments. But how often do we really look around the room and admit that the people present may not be the best group to be creating the culture and foundations for a future, 5 or 10 years down the road? How many will be close to retirement when that future is fulfilled.

Culture and Innovative leadership.

A few years ago, one of the “catalytic projects” chosen by a cross-national group I was working with was to create the conditions for “Multi-Generational Management”. The group recognized that successful ‘high-tech’ businesses need to take on new technologies and ways of working that are emerging and rapidly changing in today’s environment. A conventional management team, traditionally composed of senior personnel who have often spent a significant period working within the business may not be fully qualified to generate real growth and innovation, and not equipped to see their business through fresh eyes.

This group saw that new possibilities could be available with a leadership team composed of and embracing the expertise of both the older and younger generations present within their business unit, and better serve its strategic development. After some research, benchmarking and brainstorming, they chose to break from the traditional set-up of their leadership team and innovate by including 2 young engineers in their Business Unit Board meetings. A few years down the road, this practice still lives on, and a new team of 2 has been invited to Board meetings, bringing even more constructive challenge and new thinking.

Interestingly, this practice has not permeated to other business units in the wider organization. Why is that? Culture change and innovation require the willingness to challenge the status quo and experiment! If you look around at your leadership team, are you really listening to younger employees? Are you being inclusive and innovative in your culture and management practices?

The post Culture and Innovation: Are you really listening to your Gen Y employees? appeared first on Insigniam Innovation.

But to the dismay of OPEC, the U.S. shale boom is proving more resilient than many of the cartel’s members ever expected. Now even OPEC concedes U.S. output levels won’t ease at least until late 2015. American output has remained steady despite disruptions wrought by a precipitous collapse that has driven prices down by half since June 2014.

Survival of the Nimblest

So why hasn’t OPEC’s strategy of letting prices slide brought higher-cost U.S. producers to heel? Simple: Agile U.S. producers moved swiftly to aggressively cut costs while simultaneously driving productivity gains from existing assets. This isn’t to say North American shale producers aren’t feeling intense price pressure. Declining oil prices have brought severe hits to profits, employment, and investment along with a widespread idling of equipment.

But so far, overall U.S. production is leveling off rather than collapsing. Highly flexible producers are redirecting resources, slashing the lowest-performing rigs and rig crews, and concentrating high-performance assets and crews where they can generate the greatest returns.

They’re also successfully triggering productivity gains through the rapid adoption of new techniques and technologies. The shale industry has always been marked by maverick players who exhibit a willingness to experiment and place a few small bets. It’s a highly dynamic field propelled by the Insigniam principle of an elevated capacity for creativity.

Producers are intensifying this approach to contend with fierce market pressures. Focus is shifting from above ground efficiencies — like drilling speeds and 24/7 operations — to boosting well productivity through technology. They’re leveraging innovations from deep water offshore drilling. These include state-of-the-art sensor technology and sophisticated mathematical models.

As holes are drilled, they’re using imaging systems to scan shale formations for existing cracks to leverage natural flow channels. They’re returning to wells sunk years ago to refrack or inject specially formulated fluids to reanimate production. Sometimes they’re able to return these assets to peak output levels minus the costs of boring new wells. They’re mining efficiencies by drilling more holes with fewer rigs and realizing positive results.

Data from the Energy Information Administration registers steep productivity gains at America’s most significant shale formations: 24 percent at Eagle Ford in South Texas, 29 percent at the Bakken formation in North Dakota, and 30 percent in the Permian Basin in West Texas.

U.S. producers are utilizing bold strategies in other ways as well. They’re adopting modern manufacturing models for drilling processes by standardizing designs, equipment, and operations to generate economies of scale.

Agility = Value

This distinctive culture of bold experimentation and agility is why shale exploration has largely failed abroad, even in areas where shale reserves are far greater than they are in the United States. Other nations lack tight networks of small flexible players unencumbered by layers of management, slow approval processes, and unwillingness to experiment.

Shale industry success showcases the Insigniam emphasis on greater innovation thrust and effective execution. Without solid action plans that emphasize measurable results, ideas — however groundbreaking they might be — flounder in the realm of abstraction. Industries and firms that bet their future on innovation and dynamic strategies to bring it to fruition have a built-in advantage. Their organizational senses are fine-tuned for creative solutions emphasizing a mandate for innovation.

It’s a strategy that not only helps companies prosper in robust markets; it equips them to thrive under fierce adverse conditions. Bottom line: U.S. shale producers are squeezing out inefficiencies and generating production gains at an unprecedented clip. If the pace holds, it would represent one of the most remarkable productivity performances ever achieved in any industry.

The post How U.S. Energy Producers Outflank OPEC appeared first on Insigniam Innovation.

Innovation consulting supports new trends

Innovation consulting appears to be attracting particular attention from companies seeking to respond to new trends in business.

• Top of mind in Europe is the search for a new strategic impulse to innovation to return or remain in growth mode for mature brands and defending their position in mature markets.
• Frequent and repetitive mergers between companies with very effective but also very different innovation processes and innovation cultures is indicating a move away from the “one size fits all” process and a search for new ways to retain the best of both processes which might well require the invention of something totally new
• Finally a great number of companies are seeking to source innovation through partnerships, and outsourced resources such as universities, research powerhouses, suppliers, joint-ventures and start-ups

Company culture is essential

Client experience shows that in above cases innovation can be found in the capability of companies to continue to provide an open and supportive innovation culture capable of taking on these new challenges. By supportive company context we mean one that

• Limits corporate gravity; all too often great innovative ideas grown from leaps of imagination or powerful insights end up as reports gathering dust on shelves.
• Inoculates against the corporate immune system; bureaucracy, turf and hierarchy kill the innate creativity that should be the product of the incredible gathering of talent, wisdom, knowledge and resources that are present in the best companies
• Fights corporate myopia; recent research has shown that human perception is shaped by past experience and there are times when people do not see what is right in front of them. Organizations like people wear invisible “blinders” that limit the view of a possible future
• Avoids breeding fear of risk and failure

I would welcome to hear about your experience and the needs for innovation consulting you are seeing emerge in your industries.

The post Global Food And Beverage Companies Seek New Value From Innovation Consulting appeared first on Insigniam Innovation.

In July 2005, software developer Noah Glass and ex-Googler Evan Williams launched a startup called Odeo. Odeo featured a podcasting application that allowed users to post audio blog entries remotely from cell phones via a simple Adobe Flash-based interface.

But just a few months later Odeo was blindsided by a disruptive tsunami: Apple announced that the newest version of iTunes, its media-management application, would include a podcasting platform, and that it would be embedded in every iPod. Odeo was instantly irrelevant. Williams instructed the company’s 14 employees to break off into teams to brainstorm a new direction.

In February 2006, one of those teams came up with a status-update platform. It allowed users to send a text to number that would broadcast the message to all of their friends. Twitter was born.

Weave and Dodge to Success

Today Twitter is a force shaping the contours of contemporary cultures across the globe. Its success — seized from the jaws of defeat — is due solely to an auspicious pivot, a drastic and rapid shift in business models. This flexibility is not only necessary for survival; it is a critical element to phenomenal success.

According to a Forbes global survey of entrepreneurs, this ability to pivot is the reason U.S. entrepreneurs remain confident in their competitive advantage. And this advantage is drilled into Americans from an early age.

Dubbed “Creating Wealth: A Survey of Entrepreneurs Worldwide, Their Insights, Their Challenges, Their Needs,” the survey points to a key factor in U.S. dynamism: the education system. This system not only allows students to experiment intellectually, it affords them time to ponder their career tracks and develop flexibility. Yet higher education is not viewed as a “be-all and end-all” among respondents, as dropouts Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison illustrate.

The study notes the U.S. also has a broad entrepreneurial infrastructure that includes venture capital financing, business incubators, and college and organizational networks.

Benefits of Breakthroughs

Plus, unlike other nations — especially those in Europe — the U.S. accepts the societal impacts of disruptive innovation, placing more importance on the benefits of breakthrough disruptions over job security and adherence to old business models. “New inventions and things customers like are usually good for society,” says Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, “…even if its difficult for people invested in traditional methods.”

Bezos’ sentiments align with the Insigniam strategy to minimize corporate gravity. Corporate gravitational pull fetters innovation and keeps it from taking flight. Breakthroughs spring from leaps of imagination and powerful customer insights. The Insigniam strategy catalyzes breakthroughs via a process that aligns stakeholder interests with innovation results, reducing the ruinous stasis wrought by corporate gravity.

Just as entrepreneurship is the key to global economic dynamism, the entrepreneurial mindset is crucial to thriving organizational cultures. The ability to pivot — à la Twitter — and keep organizational inertia at bay — à la Amazon — keeps the competitive edge sharp no matter what market forces may unleash.

The post Out-Pivoting Market Forces appeared first on Insigniam Innovation.

With gravity and immunity addressed, it’s time for a vision exam. This doesn’t entail the mission of your innovation initiative, or innovation consulting efforts, but rather corporate myopia — the condition in which the urgency of today’s business needs and demands supersede the importance of the future of the business.

Just as with your eyesight, myopia will lock on to something very narrow in focus — and businesses often find themselves afflicted with the same condition.

Removing the Blinders

In many cases, companies struggle to see beyond the next fiscal quarter, and they see the future as a mere extension of the past. This existence of living quarter-to-quarter — or year-to-year — isn’t conducive to innovation, where you often need to be thinking in terms of multiple years, if not decades.

Once companies can see and understand this, they can pull back those blinders and create a future filled with unlimited possibility. On a granular level, they can then see emerging trends and identify opportunities within their industry — or surrounding industries — that could positively influence them.

20/20 Vision

Removing the blinders won’t happen overnight, and often, organizations that are laser-focused on meeting quarterly goals will overlook or ignore ROI brought forth by innovation if it’s not going to quickly pay dividends.

In real-world terms, to take a page from history, let’s examine railroad companies in the U.S. during the rise of the air travel industry. According to the Editors of Publications International, Ltd., “Between 1945 and 1964, non-commuter rail passenger travel declined an incredible 84 percent. … And by the time the 1970s ended, the glory days of railroading were over.”

Railroad companies simply didn’t see themselves as being in the transportation business. When air travel took off, rail companies ignored opportunities that airlines were all-too-happy to take advantage of, and in doing so, this myopic vision sealed their fate

Presently, we can see how, in the case of the hotel industry, global chains are waking up to small, nimble companies, such as Airbnb, that see an opportunity and want to take advantage of it. Established hotel brands realize that they can’t ignore this, and many great hospitality companies avoid myopia by having their finger on the pulse of emerging trends

In summary, with corporate gravity and immune systems addressed, ensuring that your long-term goals remain clearly identified is imperative to protecting innovation projects from the pressing needs of today.

The post Forces that Thwart Innovation: Part IV – Myopia appeared first on Insigniam Innovation.

But through the course of our innovation consulting work, we’ve learned that even the ability to interject feasibility into big ideas can be a lost cause if a corporation’s immune system prevents the objectives from taking hold.

Just as your body has an immune system — solely focused on identifying and eliminating any potentially harmful foreign objects — so too do corporations. Corporate immune systems are the processes and procedures that protect the existing business from (what it deems to be) the potentially damaging effects of innovation.

Diagnosing Immunity

To spotlight how corporate immune systems work on the macro level, for example, let’s look at the way projects commonly get funded within organizations.

Typically, departmental teams will establish a business case — one that illustrates feasibility and ROI — within a defined set of criteria that is familiar to those who approve budgetary spending.

…“An investment of X today will yield Y in six months.”

Therefore, the projects that do get approved for funding are almost always aligned with the current operating structure. Unfortunately, this model doesn’t allow for very innovative initiatives to be developed since, with innovation, you often can’t prove feasibility off the bat or return on investment may be delayed beyond what’s considered acceptable.

Innovation ROI

But this is not to say innovation can’t be tracked — merely that the metrics for measuring innovation should be amended to fit the scope of the project. This means organizations may need to:

• Rethink some of the systems to suit long-term goals of innovation
• Not force innovation projects to meet the same criteria as a core business projects
• Dedicate some part of the budget to innovation (typically R&D budgets, but not always)

Regardless of the particular metrics you decide on, thought must be given to the systems, procedures, and processes currently in place, and if they support innovation. Otherwise, you risk exposing your innovation project to very hardy corporate immune systems.

Once you’ve armed yourself with the antibodies (i.e., innovation-friendly ROI metrics) to bypass overzealous corporate immune systems, it’s time for a vision check — in particular, to make sure your organization isn’t suffering from corporate myopia — which is the topic of our next discussion.

The post Forces that Thwart Innovation: Part III – Immune System appeared first on Insigniam Innovation.

In our previous discussion, we identified that while it’s essential to build your innovation initiative around the Four Pillars of Innovation for Creating and Sustaining Growth, it’s equally as important to address the three forces that thwart innovation consulting — the very systems that ground big ideas and hinder corporations from achieving their innovation goals.

Much like physical gravity, corporate gravity is an invisible force that works by keeping people and organizations grounded. Primarily, it prevents people — and ideas — from venturing too far from the company’s existing business model.

The Invisible Weight

Throughout our innovation consulting work, we’ve witnessed a typical pattern emerge. Initially, clients will take on innovation, realizing that it is an important part of their future business strategy. Often, multiple innovation teams will be created and charged with exploring new, imaginative ways to generate growth.

While these groups are typically very successful in developing a large and diverse portfolio of new concepts, when it’s time to select what concepts to work on, the safe and familiar ideas are often selected.

This is where corporate gravity comes into play. At the outset of an innovation initiative, people are often very inspired to explore new possibilities. But when it comes time to jump, gravity constricts big ideas.

Zero Gravity Environment

To overcome the crushing weight of corporate gravity, we ask innovation teams to challenge themselves with some “what if” questions. For instance:

• What if resources were not a constraint?
• What if we needed to deliver products to market, say, 50 percent faster?
• What if we needed to sell products globally — currently available only in Europe or Asia — within six months?

When asked these or other relevant questions, teams will arrive at conclusions that are A.) not feasible, and B.) immediately possible. We challenge clients not to give up on what they consider to be unfeasible, and instead, take a less-feasible idea and build feasibility into it.

After all, it’s easier to make an innovative idea more feasible than to make a less-feasible idea more innovative.

With gravity lifted, it’s time to get those innovative concepts over the threshold and into execution. However, for big ideas to grow, corporate immune systems must be examined — and that’s precisely the topic of our next discussion.

The post Forces that Thwart Innovation: Part II – Corporate Gravity appeared first on Insigniam Innovation.

Recently, we discussed The Four Pillars of Innovation for Sustaining — and Creating — Growth, especially as they relate to tempering the needs of an organization today with the aspirations and vision of tomorrow.

And while those four pillars are critical for realizing the potential offered by innovation, leaders must be particularly mindful of the inherent barriers and forces that, if left unchecked, will obstruct and undermine their best efforts.

Identifying The Barriers

First, let’s spotlight what the obstacles are, and then we’ll define how they seek to thwart innovation. They are:

• Corporate Gravity
• Corporate Immune System
• Corporate Myopia

And, before dissecting each force in detail, it’s important to establish a few universal truths.

First, these forces are present in every organization, albeit in varying degrees. Regardless of how robust your management mandate or proprietary process may be, corporate gravity, corporate immune system, and corporate myopia — on their own or working interdependently — can zap the thrust from your innovation engine. And while each of these systems can actually be quite useful for the sake of maintaining the status quo, they are highly destructive when innovation is the intended goal.

Innovating the Solutions

In a series of discussions, we’ll explore how these forces often work in unison to exploit fatal flaws in your innovation plan. After all, if innovation is all about uncovering new and novel ways to create value — in both product and process driven capacities — getting your ideas off the ground is the critical first step, right?

In our next post, we’ll spotlight how corporate gravity works to keep big ideas grounded, and how you can cut the wires to let your plans take flight.

The post The Forces that Thwart Innovation: Part I appeared first on Insigniam Innovation.

With that in mind, what does good design thinking all come down to? The answer: Usefulness.

Designers Are Not Scorekeepers

It is important to understand that in design, the designer is not a referee or scorekeeper. The value of a design doesn’t come from the creator, regardless of how in love with the idea we may be.

We’ve all been in a situation where we see a product or service for the first time and think, “Oh yeah, I’d use that.” Then, we purchase it and it goes on the shelf. Simply put, designs that avoid this pitfall share a common trait: they create value.

Creating Value

At Insigniam, we subscribe to the idea innovation is anything new or novel that creates value. Creating — not just adding — value for an organization should be the ultimate goal of effective design. Regardless of what you’re developing — a process, product, service, offering, or approach — the user must realize its potential; they are the true scorekeepers of efficient design.

Companies like Apple ground every product and marketing experience in terms of the user. By employing an integrated design approach to the user experience — seamlessly connecting great products, support platforms (iTunes and App Store), marketing and commercials, and the retail experience — they can realize created value very quickly.

Creating Results

The reality is that just designing great ideas won’t move the needle or change anything in the marketplace. You’ve got to get those ideas into action. This means getting products on the shelf or services into a client’s portfolio, ready for execution.

That’s why iteration — the topic of our previous post — is so crucial. You can’t afford to invest the time and resources needed to design an effective product or service, only to bring it to market and discover it’s not something people want, nor does it create value.

And while companies like Apple may have seemingly infinite resources, the ability to design and create isn’t determined by liquidity. Design thinkers are limited only by their imagination. By following a criterion — empathy for the user, prototyping iterations early and often, and being guided by the need to create value — you can take your design strengths to the next level.

The post Design Thinking: Part III – Creators Are Not Referees appeared first on Insigniam Innovation.

Iteration, Iteration, Iteration

In design thinking, repetition is critical. Iteration provides designers with an opportunity to prototype an idea in a rudimentary way that represents a concept in its earliest design state.

And by most initial, I mean iterating prototypes from the get-go. Why?

1. Your prototype is only intended to convey an idea — not be the idea
2. Your prototype is designed to garner feedback for improvement and refinement

Therefore, the more rudimentary the prototype you provide, the more opportunities there are to collect insightful, impactful feedback.

Show, Don’t Tell

Testing ideas en mass and refining prototype concepts circumvents one of the biggest problems designers face: They get too attached to their design. As designers — and human beings — we tend to champion and defend that which we create.

We advise designers to hand their prototype to someone else — without explanation or context — and then to begin asking questions.

Often, the feedback solicited may not necessarily be something a designer was looking for, but that’s the beauty of it. Early feedback provides insight into an approach that often had not yet been identified. In design thinking, we want people to repeat this process multiple times.

Prototype Early. Prototype Often.

When people do not prototype, especially early in the design process, a common and unfortunate result is getting too far invested — particularly financially — to go unwind things. This means you risk getting stuck with an idea or solution that is ineffective or not as potent as could be. As design thinkers, we should be prototyping — iteratively — over and again.

By prototyping and testing iterations often, we can make the potency and power of our designs incredibly centered on the user’s experience, which is at the heart of successful creation. But how do we gauge real success? We’ll discuss this in our next post: Design Thinking: Part III – Creators Are Not Referees.

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