Drew's Shared Items

Engineers, Marketers and Innovation

2009-10-09T15:38:00Z

Braden Kelley has posed another question for us, which is: what roles do engineers and marketers play in an innovation setting, and what conflicts can arise based on their perspectives and approaches?

First, let me say that I am ably suited to answer this question, since I am both an engineer (undergraduate) and a marketer (graduate degree). I've worked in the technical trenches and, frankly, left them as quickly as possible, and worked in a number of marketing roles since my MBA. I left the engineering world because it necessarily demands a level of specificity and exactness that I find boring and tedious, and demands attention to detail that I sometimes lack.

So, let's talk about engineers first. What traits are associated with engineers, and does their education, focus, attitudes and skills position them well for innovation? Most engineers I know are very interested in solving problems, which suggests they have a proclivity for innovation. However, the focus on getting to a solution quickly, and detailing a solution exactly, often hampers them from bigger picture or disruptive innovation. Engineers and accountants like things in black and white - no shades of gray. Innovation often happens and requires some ambiguity for success. Engineers like to build things, which again indicates a proclivity for innovation, especially prototyping. However, they are often more entranced by once concept or idea than they are the process, which narrows their thinking and focus too early. Good engineers can be excellent problem solvers, but don't often think of themselves as "creative" and too often don't have good understanding of market needs and trends.

The market needs, trends and opportunities should come from marketing, if the marketers are doing their job well. Unfortunately, as narrowly defined as many engineering jobs are, marketing suffers from the reverse - a too broad definition. Today marketing can mean public relations or PR, Marketing communications, trade show management, conferences and events, product management, social media and a host of other capabilities. Marketing has become too far flung, and to a certain extent has lost sight of the base purpose of marketing - to identify segments and customers who have needs, and understand how to fill those needs effectively. If marketers fill that function, then they are innovative in nature, because they want to know and understand customer needs. Too often marketers are more worried about the copy on a new ad, or who will be at a tradeshow, and they fail to understand customer needs and develop scenarios about the market of the future.

So, what often happens is that marketing is too distracted to do what should be it's primary job - understand customers and develop potential product and service ideas. Engineering and product development shows up and doesn't get much insight into actual customer needs, so the engineers go off to explore interesting new technologies that may, or may not, be important to customers. Neither, and both, are at fault.

Engineers should demand that marketers do a better job of defining near term customer needs and emerging customer requirements or markets. Without that insight, it is difficult to build interesting new products. Engineers on the other hand need to be more ready to engage the market with rough, fast prototypes, and work to an iterative model. If there is an issue in most firms, it's that we all have become too far removed from the customer, and fail to understand their wants and needs.

In my mind, that's marketing's job, to discover the needs and translate them into specific opportunities for engineers to build.

Global Conversations about Creativity, Innovation and Leadership

2009-09-23T21:55:56Z

I’ve started hosting monthly conference calls for members of the Creative Skills Training Council, focused on conversations that matter about our praxis. We have had amazing interviews from thought leaders on various topics, and have decided to make the recordings available to the public. The calls take the form of an introduction and informal chat amongst [...]

The once and done innovator

2009-08-31T12:47:00Z

The more I read on blogs, news sites and Twitter (especially), the more alarmed I become that innovation has lost all of its meaning. Too often we see people point out innovation "examples" that seem more likely to have been accidents or one time events that demonstrate that even a broken clock is right twice a day. By placing too much emphasis or spotlighting events that aren't really innovation, we place a lot of good work at risk.

Too often the examples are arcane instances of happenstance, or the last gasp change by a firm that had no other options, or some really wacky new product developed on a whim. That's a shame, since it treats innovation as a sideshow or a circus project, done for the illusion and then let's get back to the serious work. Too few innovation articles show all of the real work that goes on behind the scenes in firms with mature innovation processes and programs. It's as if new and interesting products just happen. Rather, many of them are the outcome of good thinking, watching trends, identifying opportunities, creating competing solutions and bringing something entirely new to market. When we focus only on the end solution, we give management teams the excuse to believe that innovation is quick, simple and easy. Rather, most innovation is long and challenging. If it weren't so, we'd have literally thousands of interesting new products and services confronting us each day.

It's time for those of us who write about, talk about and actually do innovation work to come clean and communicate the "science" behind innovation. Innovation is not a sideshow, not a distraction for the masses but ultimately core to any firm's long term success. If innovation is important over the long term, why would any management team consider it a sideshow? If generating new products and services is important, why wouldn't we invest in that capability?

Yes, I am a consultant and yes, I make a living helping firms innovate. So, yes, my life is easier and incomes possibly higher when firms buckle down and consider innovation as a repeatable, sustainable process rather than a quick brainstorm or two and one somewhat interesting product. But the latter is simply not sustainable, not innovation and a distraction or sideshow from what the business really does. We need to convince executives to make innovation what the business really "does" and then we'll turn loose the real creative power of this economy.

So, if at all possible, let's focus on the innovation successes by all means, but let's also point out the effort that went into making those innovation successes a reality.

Will User Reputation Scores Change Twitter?

2009-08-15T12:00:00Z

Item #1:

"As the spam annoyance factor on Twitter goes up, the credentials/relevance go down meaning less user value. @biz huge deal!"

- Kim Patrick Kobza, President & CEO of Neighborhood America

Item #2:

"Twitter Search will also get a 'reputation' ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a 'trending' topic - a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar - Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that."

- Rafe Needleman, cnet, May 6, 2009

Item #3:

"I guarantee that if Twitter implements a ranking system, the same old crowd will shove everyone else aside. If I want to read the same people over and over, I already have Techmeme."

- Paul Boutin, VentureBeat, July 31, 2009

Rumors of an Upcoming Twitter Reputation System

Word of an upcoming Twitter reputation system has been dribbling out the past few months. It's an intriguing idea, from a social web product perspective. Like any product, the devil is in the details of how it is built and how it is used.

The following are some thoughts about a reputation system on Twitter.

Let's Admit: We Already Do This Implicitly

There is a pecking order out there. Really. And once you've been on Twitter, or reading blogs, or checking out Digg, or reading Hacker News, or hanging out on FriendFeed...you know it's there.

Want to know who celebrity VC Fred Wilson pays attention to?

I use techmeme, hacker news, tim o'reilly's twitter links, dave winer's 40 most recent links for tech news

See? Fred Wilson doesn't pay attention my tweeted links. Or yours (unless you're Tim O'Reilly or Dave Winer reading this).

Arguments against assessing users' authority are noble efforts to preserve an egalitarian ethos, but they don't reflect the reality of human behavior. Like it or not, there is an unspoken reputation system already in play.

It Won't Affect Your Experience...Unless You Want It To

We'll talk about the basis for a Twitter reputation score in a second. Assuming they exist, how would that affect your daily use of Twitter?

You're already deciding who you follow. If someone with low-grade authority is bugging you, what do you do? Unfollow. Same goes for high-grade authority.

Maybe if Twitter allowed you to view tweets only from those with a minimum authority level, it would affect your usage. You know, enable a "fake follow."

OK, let's hope they don't do something like that.

Control the Trending Topics Spam

I'm all for crowdsourcing what's buzzing. You can look at the trending topics on Twitter and get a sense for what's going on now. Apparently it takes between 1,200 and 1,900 tweets per hour on a given topic to hit the trending topics. Once it does, people like to dive in and have fun. Exhibit A: see that #threewordsaftersex meme a couple months back.

Once it's a trending topic, tricksters can't help themselves by using the hashtag in an old tweet, whether related to the topic or not. This is a dynamic that will only get worse.

The Wall Street Journal wrote about this occurring during the recent #iranelection hashtag activity. People would set up fake accounts. They'd then spam the Twitter stream using #iranelection, and tweeting misinformation or links to spammy things.

It's that trait...fake accounts...that the reputation scores would help. On searches, only show me tweets from accounts that have actually had a pulse for the last month or so.

What about people who pollute the Twitter stream, but are real accounts?

Can We Rate Tweets?

There are two mechanisms for indicating that you like a tweet: (1) retweet it; (2) favorite it. Both are positive rating actions. Favoriting doesn't get much of a workout, retweeting is 3% of Twitter activity.

Suppose you put lightweight rating tools in the hands of users? Maybe simple arrows that accompany each tweet? People could positively or negatively rate tweets. My guess is that such easy voting would get higher usage. The negative votes would only come out for the egregious stuff that people post. And it would likely only occur on hashtag tweets that are godawful. Because if someone you follow consistently posts crap, you're going to unfollow them anyway.

Digg and Slashdot have been doing this for years. Generally, the really inane stuff gets buried well.

If you let the community rate tweets, along with retweets and favorites, you've got a distributed community rating system. Of course, this will also give rise to the inevitable gaming that occurs in social media. "Hey, please rate this tweet up!" But on the whole, these community rating systems work.

Scores would take into account these community ratings, how often you're retweeted, how often people click your links, how often you're favorited, the average score of those who follow you, and your number of followers. You can imagine a pretty comprehensive score here.

Reputation Score Visibility

Now this would be something. How about if everyone's Twitter Reputation Scores were visible? Consider what is available now:

Number the person is following

Number of followers

Number of tweets

We implicitly consider these numbers as part of the calculus in deciding whether to follow someone. They're not the primary weight, well at least not for a lot of us. We'll look at their page of tweets and bio as well.

But can you see Twitter making this information available? My guess is that the blogosphere and the Twittersphere will demand transparency. If reputation is affecting the display of tweets in any way, they will demand to know what each user's score is.

And then people will incorporate yourr Twitter Reputation into their decision whether to follow.

Reputation Becomes the New Number of Followers

Right now, there's an emphasis on your number of followers. It is an important metric, because there is an element of old-style media reach there. It is also something that people game by blindly following thousands of people, hoping for them to return follow.

Well, Twitter Reputation will become the new Number of Followers.

Bloggers would post their Twitter Reputation Scores on their blogs. People will talk about them endlessly. Social media shops will advise how you can improve your Twitter Reputation. Companies filling social media positions will go beyond requiring a certain number of Twitter followers. They'll look for minimum Twitter Reputation scores.

Not Your Father's Twitter

Twitter is in a position where it has to prepare for the coming onslaught of spammers who will take advantage of the system. Reputation scores have proven effective in other communities. But Twitter is different from Digg or Slashdot. It's more a mainstream communication platform, so using these traditional community management tools will likely cause quite a gnashing of teeth.

The challenge for Twitter is to ensure that reputation scores don't kill enthusiasm for its service.

Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Good reads on innovation #3

2009-08-06T22:59:59Z

Here comes a list of reads, videos and podcasts on innovation that I have enjoyed and re-tweeted in the last couple of weeks. I hope you will enjoy this as well.

You can follow me on Twitter: @lindegaard

Markets or Communities? The Best Ways to Manage Outside Innovation - a must-read interview with Karim R. Lakhani

Winning The Contest Of Ideas – examples of cash prize contests to spur innovation from Netflix, X Prize and Cisco

How Does China Compare To Europe and US in Innovation? – podcast with Kevin Ryan

A Look Behind the Silver Lining – Boris Pluskowski’s honest and helpful review of The Silver Lining book by Scott Anthony

Buying, Not Making Innovation – good thoughts on Google by Joel West

Why Segway Failed To Reshape The World: Focused On Invention Rather Than Innovation – a post by Mike Masnick

Implement Open Innovation Strategy: Focus On Input - Rob Veldt urges you to focus on the input side of open innovation

The Open Minded Professor – Erich Von Hippel on open source, lead user and open innovation

Video With John Hagel On Innovation In Emerging Countries

How Customer Co-Creation Is The Future Of Business – Graham Hill presents a series of principles that guide our thinking about what co-creation is (good focus on life-time usage)

Why Creative Leaders Are So Rare – insights by Navi Radjou

How Knowledge Can Hurt Innovation – Scott Anthony focuses on the “curse of knowledge”

The Next Step In Open Innovation – McKinsey looks into the direction of knowledge creation

Today´s Disruptions Are Tomorrow´s Incrementals – Jeffrey Phillips writes about two significant challenges for disruptive innovation; danger and time

The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused) – great piece in New York Times; one of the most tweeted articles on open innovation

Enjoy!

Crap detection 101 and social media

2009-08-04T16:29:42Z

Howard Rheingold wrote an interesting essay called Crap Detection 101, which provides both commentary on how to separate fact from fiction on the web as well as some practical advice. He wrote:

I got good strategy advice from John McManus, author of “Detecting Bull: How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in Print, Broadcast and on the Wild Web”, who told me “you have think like a detective.” Think of tools like search engines, the productivity index, hoax debunking sites like Snopes.com, and others I will mention later as forensic instruments, like Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass or the crime scene investigator’s fingerprint kit.

It’s a good essay and it made me realize one thing: the problem of how lazy we are. Most people know they should ask more questions, and take more time to verify sources, but that takes effort. And that effort, if spent well and results in the discovery of a unreliable source, it costs double. We’ve lost not only the time verifying something, but also the time spend finding that now unreliable source, and the kicker is you still don’t have a fact you can use. Fact checking is a double-whammy against seeming productive to others. We have natural reasons to not want to check that source, even though we know we should. Part of us doesn’t want to know.

When people find a fact that supports their argument, regardless of where it comes from, its incredibly tempting to grab it and run, assuming whoever reads what you write, or listens to what you say, will be as lazy as you were. You can bluff your way into credibility because there’s no one depending on what you say enough to openly challenge what you’re saying. Often online when people think you are full of shit, they’ll just click away. You have to care to take the time to challenge someone’s facts or sources. And even when people do criticize, they’re in such a rush to prove you wrong for something, it’s common to be criticized for things you didn’t actually say, or with claims that are not supported, sparking a dozen ratholes that have no possibility of convincing anyone of anything. Communication speed makes the downward spiral of miscommunication spin much faster.

I’ve written my own take on detecting bullshit, but the thing I don’t know how to tackle is what to do when our innate desire for efficiency works against us. Being “productive” online in writing blog posts or frequent tweets, demands spending little time verifying anything, much less seeking out evidence for the opposing view and vetting them against each other in what old school folks used to called thinking. If there is anything I want to promote it’s thinking. Honest, open, generous amounts of critical thinking where people are just as willing to admit when they are wrong as they are to prove they are right.

My gripes about social media, and the future of technology in general, comes around to how we’re increasingly rewarded for volume online, or believe we will be rewarded for volume, rather than quality. Which is strange given how successful the web has been at making volume of information moot. We have more to read, watch and listen to than we can consume in a thousand lifetimes. Volume isn’t the problem. It’s the search for quality and the shortage of critical thinking that we need to solve and this includes the promotion of the kinds of questions Rheingold suggests everyone asks of things they read online.

Critical thinking will always require effort – and if we’re overwhelmed and stressed by too much information, or feel we’re falling behind and running out of time, the feedback loop works against slowing down to ask good questions. That stress fuels making assumptions and jumping to misguided conclusions.

How do we fix this? Or is it even a problem at all? Let me know what you think.

Measures, Metrics, Mess

2009-07-07T07:39:46Z

How do you know if the efforts that your organization is investing in innovation are delivering the expected results? And what results were you actually expecting? The question of indicators and metrics is, in my experience, the biggest barrier that companies face when deciding to engage in an innovation effort, as well as one of the major causes of failure in these attempts.

The trouble starts with a reasonable assumption, i.e. that if you want to control a process and assess its results, you need to measure some aspects of it. But in the case of innovation it is not totally obvious what exactly should be measured, nor how.

Opinions differ widely, but all of them can be roughly placed on a scale running between two extreme views that we can call “business-is-business” and “just do it“.

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BiB says, in effect, that an innovation initiative is no different than any other effort or investment, and therefore, the only kind of results that can justify such a program are its impact on the company’s KPIs, whether they be profit, market share, revenues or any other. Note that holders of this view do not necessarily demand that innovation be measured exclusively in financial terms. In principle, if an organization’s main objective is, say, to spread happiness, then according to this view, the indicator one should use to assess the success of an innovation initiative is the amount of happiness created. There is a very strong rationale for this approach: an innovation initiative does not change the company’s goals, rather, the company engages in innovation in order to further these goals. The indicator for the innovation effort’s success, therefore, must be its impact on these very goals.

Although this argument is hard to refute, adopting this approach is probably a guarantee that your innovation effort will fail.

The reason is simple. Although your innovation effort must eventually impact your business objectives, these objectives cannot be used to monitor the process, since: a) it will usually take months, and in some cases more, for the effects to cascade all the way down (or up) to sales, growth, or profit, and in the meantime there will be no indication of what should be changed or adapted in the program; b) there are so many other factors at play that isolating the net contribution of an innovation initiative on business goals is nearly impossible, and even more so when trying to isolate the contribution of specific elements of such a process.

The other extreme of the scale, “just do it“, recognizes the difficulties mentioned above and, in response, takes the exact opposite view: since we know that innovation is necessary, and as we are aware of the types of actions we have to take, why not just go for it, and measure the inputs rather than wait for vaguely correlated outputs. For example, if we know that training is a necessary condition for innovation, let’s measure direct parameters of the training effort, such as number of people trained, number of hours spent on training, amount of tools and methods taught, and the like. The downside of this approach is clearly evident as well. Who says we need this specific type of training rather than another? How do we know whether trainees understood, and more importantly, to what extent they are utilizing what they learned? What is the optimum number or percentage of personnel trained (and can we suffer from too much training)? And, most importantly, what impact is this training having on performance?

These questions and doubts do indeed challenge the “just do it” approach, but, at the same time, they are already pointing to the solution to the measurement problem, or at least to a combination of approaches that, although not perfect, allows an organization to avoid paralysis and set out on an innovation path:

1) As a rule, start on the JDI pole of the axis, and move along slowly towards BiB. At the outset, any expectation of an immediate business result will just cause frustration, draining the effort of its energy. Measure only that you are indeed performing all the actions that you set out to do and ignore the effects;

2) Even as you start to JDI, remember to talk about and define your ultimate goals. Yes, they are not relevant for the moment, and will not be for a while, but still, it is important to keep in mind that they are the raison d’être of the entire operation;

3) While you measure inputs, try as quickly as you can to also measure some kind of outputs, even if at a very tactical or even technical level. There are many ways to test the success of a training program (feedback forms being one of the least reliable). Try some, such as assigning a specific task to graduates and monitoring their success at performing it; counting the number of ideation sessions that are being held; gauging the number of people that have been “touched” by the innovation initiative around the organization, etc.;

4) Combine quantity with quality. Quantitative measures tend to give a more “objective” feeling, but beware the common mistake of objectively measuring irrelevance. A prime example: number of ideas generated in an innovation session. More often than not, a large number of ideas correlates with poor quality, sloppy filtering and therefore, a low rate of implementation;

5) Measure constantly, but let people work in peace. At least in the first few months, measurement should be used mainly to compliment and encourage, and to make relatively small adaptations to the program, but never to put the entire endeavor in question. Otherwise, no one will have the guts to do anything really useful for fear of: a) being found to fail, and b) being associated with a venture that was “closed down”;

6) When moving closer to the business side of the scale, use a variety of business measures rather than a small number. For example: money saved on restructured processes, number of new products on the market, impact on customers’ perception of your brand as the leader, percentage of revenues due to newly introduced products or services, speed of response in crises or to customers’ complaints etc.

In sum: Yes, innovation is hard to measure, but so is any other deep and meaningful organizational process. And yes, despite the pitfalls, there are quite a few feasible and relevant measures that can allow one to monitor an innovation initiative, enabling course corrections when and where necessary, and providing sufficient parameters to assess success.

Innovation Best Practices – Events and Challenges

2009-07-09T03:32:28Z

The second practice is defining Challenges. To focus innovation ideas, ask an influential business leader to define and publish a challenge for each event. The challenge can be as narrow or broad as your innovation team can manage. ...

Promises Kept - Why Innovation works

2009-06-10T12:14:00Z

I read the recent article in Business Week - The Failed Promise of Innovation - with a measure of expectation and regret. Here's a magazine that has as one of its leading lights Bruce Nussbaum, who is constantly writing about innovation and hosting innovation panels and events, yet either honestly believes that innovation has "failed" to meet its promises or is simply waving the flag at the bull. Of course Nussbaum wrote that innovation was "dead" at the end of 2008.

The article which suggests that innovation has failed leads in with the following paragraph:

But there's growing evidence that the innovation shortfall of the past decade is not only real but may also have contributed to today's financial crisis. Think back to 1998, the early days of the dot-com bubble. At the time, the news was filled with reports of startling breakthroughs in science and medicine, from new cancer treatments and gene therapies that promised to cure intractable diseases to high-speed satellite Internet, cars powered by fuel cells, micromachines on chips, and even cloning. These technologies seemed to be commercializing at "Internet speed," creating companies and drawing in enormous investments from profit-seeking venture capitalists—and ordinarily cautious corporate giants. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan summed it up in a 2000 speech: "We appear to be in the midst of a period of rapid innovation that is bringing with it substantial and lasting benefits to our economy."

If you read the above carefully you'll see that innovation has failed in the eyes of this author because, for all intents and purposes, we don't have the jet backpack that we were promised. If we were promised a gadget or gizmo by the folks in Disney's Tomorrowland that we don't yet have, well, innovation has failed.

Perhaps a more enlightened and reasonable argument is that innovation happened, just not where we expected it. A tremendous amount of innovation happened in financial services - some of it bad, yes, but some of it will prove out to be great. Let's look at Prosper or other micro-lending sites for example. A tremendous amount of innovation happened in personal communications - the iPhone and other cell phones are merging the telephonic needs with computing needs and other needs.

Let's look back at that quote again and consider it from a different angle. Why don't we have cars that run on fuel cells? Well, we can, it's just that the conditions haven't matured for fuel cells to be the dominant mode of propulsion. Gasoline and diesel engines, along with hybrids are still more efficient than fuel cells. An innovation or great idea holds promise, but it must succeed in the marketplace. Fuel cells hold great hope, and will become a significant source of propulsion when gasoline remains above four dollars a gallon or when Congress decides to mandate their use. Does this mean that innovation "failed"? No, just that some of these concepts identified above were talked about years ahead of their time. Micromachines and MEMS provide another great example.

Many projectors that we use every day or televisions we have at home are powered by a MEMs device - the Digital Light Processor from Texas Instruments. There are MEMs devices out in the world today, we are just beginning to see them enter the market. While the idea was great, developing the manufacturing capability to produce them took - wait for it - innovation in manufacturing techniques. Just because we can envision a MEMs device doesn't mean that we had the capability to produce them with very low error rates at volume.

Innovation isn't dead, and it hasn't failed to meet unreasonable expectations or promises. Instead of creating these false peaks and unrealistic expectations about innovation, perhaps we should simply create the environment where innovation can thrive and get out of the way. Some of the biggest impediments to innovation aren't technological or even monetary, they are cultural and bureaucratic. The next article written about this will certainly suggest that since innovation has "failed" in the private sector, perhaps the Federal Government should create specific programs to "manage" and fund innovation in specific segments, which will lead us directly to where Japan was in the 1980s with MITI, a failed corporatist policy.

Innovation is supposed to fail, frequently and with consequences. Taking risks means that some of the ideas HAVE to fail for others to succeed. Edison didn't create the best, most effective lightbulb on his first try - he failed repeatedly and what we see today is only the success based on a tremendous number of attempts.

If we look carefully, innovation has happened all around us, and we'd be foolish to suggest that innovation has "failed". If it didn't happen in the markets we'd hoped, or in the timeframes we'd hoped, then perhaps the market demand guided innovation to happen in the places where consumers demanded it most.

The importance of being innovative

2009-06-11T18:00:05Z

SIT is a great tool to make innovation happen. But why do we need innovation?

I will skip the obvious: innovation is needed to adapt to an ever changing commercial, social and technological environment.

Apart from the above, innovation is needed to generate something that almost every business needs to survive: attention.

Like any other resource that businesses need (e.g. energy, employees, row materials etc.) attention can be purchased in the market in the form of advertising, public relations or even search engine optimization. The problem is that its price is going up every day.

With more than 1000 commercial messages (explicit and implicit) any individual in developed countries is exposed to each day, it’s getting harder and harder to get the message through. .

Innovation can lower the price of getting attention:

The same newspaper ad will grab more attention presenting an innovative and interesting product, in comparison to a non innovative one. I think it’s even possible to develop a metric to calculate the return of investment on innovation.

For example, suppose that a company has a product A. Say it could get a certain amount of attention for 10M dollars.

Investing 1M dollars in a new generation of product A could help that company get the same attention for 5M dollars. In this case the return on investment of innovation is 500%. I think that in many real world cases the return on investment on innovation could be even better.

One of the best examples of a company using innovation as a means of generating attention is Gillette. Although they dominate their market, and although each new product cannibalizes the old one, they come up every few years with a new generation of products.

Gillette knows that advertising a new product will help them get the same attention for a much lower price.

Many companies discovered the innovation-as-a-means-to-get-attention principle and, as it always happens, began to abuse it. So we started to face an interesting phenomenon of “over innovation”.

Over innovation is most apparent in the software industry.

The reason for this is that in software the cost of innovation is lower: it is relatively cheap to create a new feature, and even more importantly, it is relatively cheap to ship the new software version to the customer.

And that’s why a simple software product such as a Word Processor became such a digital monster. Most of the users use less than 5% of the features.

The same may happen, and is actually happening, to other types of products and services.

For example mortgage is a relatively simple product: you get a loan and pay back each month the original fund and the interest.

But that’s boring and hard to catch attention to. More over, when presented as such a simple product, mortgage providers can compete on one factor: the interest rate.

So recently banks and other mortgage providers have started inventing new kinds of deals: a mortgage in which you pay 11 months each year (and have one month vacation…), a mortgage in which you start paying back after one or two years, and all kinds of other new and rather confusing arrangements.

I consider this a case of over innovation. I think that eventually the markets will punish companies that use it.

One company in Israel is taking advantage of all this mess of mortgage products and started advertising their simple mortgage under the slogan that…

A mortgage is after all just a…mortgage.

They grab attention by becoming less innovative than the others. On a second thought, if innovation means differentiating yourself from the crowd, by not offering any fancy features, they are also innovative.

The problem is that it is usually easier to come up with over innovative ideas. Small interesting and useful enhancements are harder to conceive than big leaps resulting in over innovation.

SIT is an ideal tool for generating real innovative ideas because of its Closed World principles. The Closed World principle forces us to look for new ideas very close to the existing product or service thus preventing over innovation.

Constraint-based Innovation Makes Me Smile

2009-04-13T19:49:11Z

As bleak as the economy is, I’m hearing one thing that makes me smile:

“There is no better time for new ideas.”

Yes, the great thing about this poor economy is that there’s so little distance to fall. What was once a risky move may now be a potentially game-saving effort.

Many argue that innovation often emerges when folks are faced with difficult or bleak circumstances - constraints - and according to Ethan Zuckerman, it’s often wiser to look for innovation in places where people are trying to solve difficult, concrete problems rather than where smart people are sketching ideas on blank canvases.

Ethan offered seven rules that appear to help explain how (some) developing world innovation proceeds:

- innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)

- don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)

- embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)

- innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)

- problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)

- what you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)

- infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa - see his writings on incremental infrastructure.)

Share and Enjoy:

Innovation – the four torpedoes that make my heart sink ...

2009-05-26T15:53:28Z

The hub will be the online home of a worldwide community of practice and will be a source of information about current and emerging innovation practice. This information will be arranged under the following headings: ...

What should a great innovation software product look like?

2009-05-21T09:44:06Z

We have been working with innovation related projects for many years now – and observed many different approaches work. This creates a challenge in that “innovation practices” are still emerging. The approaches followed are almost as diverse as the number of books published on the subject. There are however a number of common things that need to be looked at; some of these include:
- focus on understanding your approach first
- commit to the approach and work on embedding it into your culture
- get people energized to apply the newly acquired knowledge
- let ideas emerge (similarly to the way you’ve always done it)
- work on one change at a time and move forward from there
- reward successes and ensure that company measures are not undermined
- make it a long-term journey…

Based on some of these heuristics, innovation software products should contain some(or all) of these features as a minimum:

Manage ideation, innovation and adoption cycles:
- create observations (general learnings, market scans, landscaping)
- create ideas (as result of individual genius, workshopping, creative sessions, etc)
- create innovations (as result of reviewing ideas, etc)
- create projects (decide to spend money on realizing the ideas/innovations)

Staged idea/innovation capture:
- basic idea recording mechanisms (to simplify the process)
- deadlines, and other time based information
- investment needed and other monetary related information
- process and staged based information collection (especially for clients with stage-gate based approaches)

Project management integration:
- realize ideas through creating projects from the selected ideas

Setting of challenges and prizes:
- set a challenge on an idea with deadline, prize, and intended outcome

Define innovation campaigns based on strategic initiatives:
- define innovation campaigns based on context setting approaches
- target innovators to participate
- set challenges
- reward winners and achievers

Invite specialists:
- invite specialists to assist with developing your ideas (maybe through tribes?)
- create “call for review” notifications to elicit feedback
- create innovation workshops with directed purpose statements to facilitate specialized input

Define key measures for dashboarding:
- have the basic measures on dashboard depending on your position in the org structure or social network
- produce an automated innovation portfolio based on key measures
- have “socially aware” ideas move to the top automatically
- have “socially inept” ideas move sideways into “please review”

Integrate with NPD (new product development):
- define product and service targets (which to get ideas for)
- have idea approval and grouping by version/release/platform numbers for products
- integrate with legal process especially for trade marks, patents, copyrights, company secrets

Idea value analysis:
- group ideas by external and internal related criteria
- value the market potential of ideas for external use
- value ideas based on cost saving etc for internal use
- define portfolio balancing criteria

Knowledge management platform:
- integrate patent portfolio and other legal innovation constructs
- integrate field knowledge acquired throughout field testing and trials
- get information from various sources through mash-ups
- flag ideas as “company secrets” or secret ideas
- initiate prototypes, etc

Idea evaluation analysis:
- ideas that are discovered and copied
- entirely new ideas
- science based processes, etc

Idea and innovation clustering:
- search for like ideas and relate together with reason code
- allow idea consolidation

Idea and innovation workshop manager:
- define workshop purpose and objectives
- collect many ideas; but don;t “commit” to them
- review the collected ideas and produce an approved set
- measure effectiveness of session
- get participants involved electronically by viewing ideas on-line in real-time
- map ideas onto the Opportunity/Capability or other innovation models

Innovation e-learning integration:
- get access to all basic innovation terminology
- allow for brief learning sessions before ideas are captured
- track learning on the dashboard

Innovation tracking and energizing:
- track and monitor innovation “energy”
- understand who are creating ideas and at what pace
- automatically generate “innovation stimulation” activity for eg. e-mails, SMS’s etc

Community:
- structural and social based community collaboration to be allowed
- allow customers to see certain ideas and capture their own
- allow certain external intellectual and other providers to participate in the innovation process
- allow your legal firm access to key legal challenges

This is by no means a complete list of the features needed to manage automated idea management approaches in organziations, but it provides some insight into some of the important features. The simpler the approach the more effective the adoption will be.

Have a look at www.ReframingBusiness.com.

How to Make It New: Fostering a Culture of Innovation in Turbulent Times

2008-10-28T14:06:32Z

Every day seems to bring a new shock to the global economy. The markets are swinging wildly, savings have evaporated, consumer spending is down and unemployment is up. In such turbulent times, many businesses might understandably be focused on getting through the crisis of the week rather than growing for the future. But for organizations looking at long term sustainability, perhaps the most important question is: How do you develop fresh ideas that create value — how do you create a culture of innovation? Highlights: - How can innovation deliver value; not just to clients, but to your own people and the community? - How do you take good ideas that are generated locally and make them scalable across a large organization? Is a good idea in Singapore also a good idea in Sao Paulo or San Francisco? - How will you know if you’ve been successful in making innovation a priority? - What are some ideas that have gotten your attention and interest recently? What kind of potential value do you think they can deliver to Deloitte and its clients? Guests: Ruwayda Ebrahim, partner, Deloitte Southern Africa Jim Quigley, chief executive officer, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Giam Swiegers, chief executive officer, Deloitte Australia

Don't Be Afraid to Start Innovation | CIO - Blogs and Discussion

2009-05-13T17:22:16Z

Practice makes perfect, and most of us have opportunities to apply innovation thinking more often than we realize. Imagine you manufacture a product and you see a number of complaints from users stating that it's inconvenient to adjust ...

Thoughts on Experience and Innovation

2009-05-15T20:20:52Z

Gartner analysts Mary Mesaglio and Richard Hunter collected case studies and best practices on innovation. One case study offered a simple but effective practice titled “Fresh Eyes”. In this organization, the HR team sends every new ...

Innovation conferences: Are they worth attending?

2009-05-07T19:52:38Z

It is no secret that I have mixed feelings about innovation conferences. I have attended many but have grown tired of them in recent years for reasons that I will try to explain below. I definitely believe in the value of sharing knowledge so I ask you to see this as a discussion starter on how to maximize the value of innovation conferences and even better – how to improve them.

1. Organizers focus more on the ego of the speakers and the exposure of their sponsors rather than the outcome of the participants. Look at the many bright people you have in the room. Why do the organizers not make a better effort in getting them involved during the conference? It is ok that thought leaders who really have something new to tell us get the full spotlight, but often you have mediocre speakers who care more about their own ego than the participants. This is not good enough. The organizers should become better at facilitating interactive sessions. The new social networking offerings could add a lot of value once we find the right ways of applying this.

And who really cares about the sponsored luncheon speakers or the introduction speakers who get 10 minutes to present their company before they give the 30-second introduction of the speaker? BlackBerries really go to work here. The only reason to accept these “interruptions” is that they help keep the costs down. I often wonder if they are worth it.

2. Networking is just too difficult. Today, you seldom get a participant list in advance of the event. Many events do not even distribute this at the event making it very difficult to optimize your networking efforts even though this is one of the key reasons for people to attend in the first place. I understand the organizers want to protect their marketing databases, but the price of this privacy can be too high.

3. The practitioner/consultant ratio is too low. When I talk with the practitioners – the innovation leaders – on this topic I feel sorry for them. At the recent World Innovation Forum in New York, a good friend of mine who is VP of Innovation in a globally recognized company was approached many times. All the time by consultants trying to sell him something. He hardly exchanged any insights with peers.

This one is a bit touchy for me. I do not consider myself as a consultant although I make my living providing services to innovation leaders. I understand some practitioners might view me as one of the “bad” guys. My advice to consultants and others like me is to drop the hard sell. If you want to engage with the practitioners do it in an intelligent way that focuses more on how you can help the person rather than what you can sell. If you do not have much to offer here beside a hard sell, make it short. Very short and to the point.

A word to the organizers is that they should pay more attention to the mix of consultants and practitioners and they should take actions that favour the practitioners. One obvious action could be to limit the number of consultants even though this might hurt budgets. I am sure it will be worth it when you try to sell the conference next time.

4. Many organizers only focus on content – which can often be found online. What is our reason for bringing people together? Organizers should ponder a bit on this. It should be more than just content which is so easily accessible online. I recently listened to C.K. Prahalad talking about co-creation and the importance of providing an experience. Organizers should learn from this.

5. Too few companies send delegations. Innovation is about team work and if your company really want new insights and inspiration on innovation it is useless to let employees decide for themselves which conferences to attend. We all know the feeling of going to a conference, getting all excited and inspired only to lose this feeling almost immediately you get back to the office. You have no one to share your learning with making it extremely difficult to anchor the new insights in your company. Executives responsible for innovation should craft a strategy on how to develop the organizational innovation competences and this should conferences and other educational offerings. Some organizers also have an untapped market here. Not all organizers have learned that it makes better sense trying to sell corporate packages rather than just selling to the individuals.

6. Where is the value proposition? Innovation requires a strong value proposition focusing on the needs of customers or users. This often lacks with conferences. A good example of a strong value proposition is the World Innovation Forum. Yes, they do have some of the general faults as mentioned above, but they do one thing very well. They bring the world’s best innovation thought leaders together at one event. The concentration of quality is so high that it makes this event one that I look forward to and even more important - I will recommend the event to others. Other conferences could look more at the needs within the innovation community and offer something specific and valuable. There are too many me-too conferences.

I could probably think of more reasons why innovation conferences – or conferences in general – have a broken business model, but I will stop here hoping we can get a discussion started.

UC Design Innovation for the 21st Century: New Hope for the Hated ...

2009-05-07T07:00:00Z

These are options for multiple gowns that can, importantly, all be created from one pattern – a practice that would cut down on waste and inefficiency. The options are. One gown for seriously ill bed ridden patients. ...

Pulp Innovation Chapter Two

2009-04-21T12:06:00Z

I was driving down Hollywood Boulevard with my arm around a great dame I’d met near the Brown Derby. Her name was Cecilia, straight off the farm from Iowa. She had plans to be an actress, just like all the other girls in this star struck town. And, like 99% of all those star struck girls, she had found gainful employment as a cocktail waitress. After her shift I picked her up. Out of the garish outfit and headdress that seemed to be de rigueur for waitresses in cheap bars along the Strip, her fresh face and long legs made her stand out from the usual crowd.

Somewhere a phone was ringing incessantly. Why doesn’t June answer the phone? The ringing was interrupting my opening patter to Cecilia. She seemed distracted by the ringing and finally said “Why don’t you answer the phone?”

“What phone” I said, motioning around the car. “I don’t have a car phone”.

The ringing continued and I started, rolling over to turn off the alarm. Finally, I came to my senses and grasped the handset.

“This had better be important” I said. Judging from the light leaking through the gap in the shade, it was still early Thursday morning.

“Mr. Marlow, I have Bill Thompson from Accipter Industries on the phone. One moment please.”

Before I could defer to another time, I heard a rustling sound and the ending of a conversation.

“Mr. Marlow, Bill Thompson. I’m the COO here at Accipter Industries. We have a need to become more innovative and were referred to you. I understand you spoke with my associate, Tom, yesterday. I’d like to assure you of our intent to become more innovative. I hope you’ll forgive me for calling you at home, but this is the only opening in my calendar today.”

“Yes, Mr. Thompson. Your assistant informed me yesterday that you were unavailable for another several weeks, which is why I ending up speaking to Tom. Has the innovation requirement become more important?”

“Our CEO is pressuring my team to bring more innovation into our business, and met with me again yesterday to understand what we are doing to make our organization more innovative. This is a top priority for me.”

In my time I’d dealt with more senior executives who had gotten the real time innovation religion than I cared to count. Like new converts at a tent revival meeting, their fervency usually faded as soon as the reverend left town. I sat up in the bed.

“One question Bill” I said as I light a Camel and tried to wipe the sleep from my eyes.

“Yes, Mr. Marlow?”

“Who wins if innovation is successful in your firm? Who is measured on its success failure?”

This was my favorite line. If innovation was so all fired important, certainly it would be closely measured and someone would be measured on its success. If Bill Thompson felt innovation was urgent, was he also measured on its success?

The connection was poor and I was more focused on watching the smoke from my Camel float up to the ceiling, so I heard the mutterings and stammerings of a conversation on the other end, but I chose to ignore it. I was waiting for the definitive, which I knew wasn’t coming.

“Mr. Thompson” I said in my most sincere voice at 7:30 on a Thursday morning “As I told Tom, with all due respect, until your team decides that innovation is important enough to commit resources and those resources will be held accountable for outcomes, please don’t call me at home. I’ll be happy to work with your team to build the appropriate teams with adequate compensation and to align the team to your strategic goals, but that work doesn’t come cheap.”

When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose, especially sitting in your underwear, smoking a Camel talking to a completely unprepared prospect at 7:30, interrupting a dream that had much more appeal.

This response seemed to strike a chord – to make my employment by his firm even more important.

“Mr. Marlow – we need a man with your skills to help us become more innovative. Can you come down to our offices today?”

“Why the sudden rush, Mr. Thompson?”

“Call me Bill. Our CEO and the executive team just had Krishna, the management consultant, in for a presentation. He impressed upon us the need for innovation. We paid over $10,000 for a two hour presentation, and now we need to get moving to build out an innovation capability.”

“Krishna, huh?”

“Yes, he has that new book that’s so well received about innovation.”

“Have you or your team read it? Did you follow the recommendations?” I knew the probability of anyone at Accipter reading it was slimmer than my chances for another hour or two of shut-eye this morning.

“Well, no, but his presentation was very compelling and we need to act to catch up with Tynder Enterprises.”

Here’s the real nub. Tynder released a range of new products and had introduced a completely new business model over the last year, leaving many of its competitors slackjawed with its innovation and speed. The CEO of Tynder had been on the cover of many of the major business weeklies advocating innovation as the driver of his company’s success. Accipter would want to duplicate what Tyner had done over a period of two or three years in a very short timeframe, setting anyone who worked for them up for failure.

“What’s the expectation for the delivery of new products from your innovation program at Accipter?”

“Well, we’ve been tasked to get a new product to market through an innovation process in six months. It’s aggressive but we believe it is possible.”

“Really” I drawled. “Last I heard your product development process alone was nine months to a year. Do you have a good stock of ideas at hand?”

“No, but rather than deconstruct this problem now, can you meet with us today, say 10am?”

“On one condition” I said. “Only if you are in the meeting. I don’t have the time or patience to meet with associates or subordinates who can’t or won’t make critical decisions. I need to know there is commitment from the most senior levels.”

More muttering, more paper shifting. The temperature in that office was rising faster than hemlines in Paris.

“10am Mr. Marlow.”

“Call me Sam”.

I dropped the receiver back on the base and watched the morning sun etch rays on the far wall. Once again, asked the impossible by the unprepared. Saddle up, Sancho Panza, we’re tilting at 10am.

Thoughts on designing the “social innovation” system

2009-01-06T08:25:30Z

The team at SystemicLogic has done some great work in testing social based systems in corporate settings. One of the areas that has been of particular interest to me; is the use of social systems in organizations where formal structures and more add-hoc based social systems are in conflict. This conflict can be used to drive innovation energy if used in a constructive fashion.

Organizations are designed to implement the defined purpose and must produce economic prosperity (or in the case of a non-profit firm, design needs to achieve the firm’s mandate). There are many other factors including efficiency, effectiveness, geographical factors, access to skill, etc that all play a role in the design process. But, at the end of (and often while…) the thinking process there is a structure where people feel they fit into the greater whole.

These structural formalisms are used to depict the organization, but is not the way in which people use ideas to drive innovation. Innovative people need the intellectual freedom to test ideas, both formally and informally, without the boundaries of the structure.

In reality work gets done by people interacting in many different ways; and often in ways never intended. I see that the emergence of new forms of designs will form part of an “expanding architecture” theme. Learning from other disciplines, I feel that “Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism” is a great book that addresses some of these issues. Have a look at this short clip that explains some of the concepts.

New York Expanding Architecture Design Conversations Part I from Metropolis magazine on Vimeo.

The move towards understanding new forms of responsible structures is well underway. As seen in the video clip; our ability to influence design in every day situations is also becoming more prominent. The more adaptive organizations have been using these concepts for some time now. But can we apply these principles when designing a system of innovation?

Can idea systems facilitate this messy process of getting ideas developed throughout the organization? How do we get the process of self-help and “wikinomics” implemented by means of natural social development?

Design oriented innovation is becoming a core capability where design decisions are pushed into the network of actors rather than left upto a small group of specialists. The implications are that changes will come about mo

“There is no issue that’s not a design issue”
- Bryan Bell