Innovation in Practice

The LAB: Innovating Shredded Wheat with S.I.T. (July 2009)

2009-07-05T20:53:14-04:00

“We put the ‘NO’ in innovation!” The good people at Post Cereal have a new twist on innovation…NOT innovating as a statement of the product's ubiquity and staying power. “Some things just weren’t meant to be innovated."

How could I resist? It was just too tempting to use systematic innovation on this simple product, especially in light of the perception that it should not be innovated. Though the ad campaign is a spoof, I wonder just how much the people at Post really believe this. What if shredded wheat could be innovated to create new growth potential for this 116 year old product?

Here is a brief history from Wikipedia:

Henry Perky invented shredded wheat cereal in 1893. The wheat is first cooked in water until its moisture content reaches about 50%. It is then tempered, allowing moisture to diffuse evenly into the grain. The grain then passes through a set of rollers with grooves in one side, yielding a web of shredded wheat strands. Many webs are stacked together, and this moist stack of strands is crimped at regular intervals to produce individual pieces of cereal with the strands attached at each end. These then go into an oven, where they are baked until their moisture content is reduced to 5%.

I'll use all five templates of the Systematic Inventive Thinking method to see what new opportunities we can uncover.

We begin with a list of components. Then we apply each template, one at a time, to create hypothetical “solutions.” We work backwards (SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM Innovation) to find potential problems that they solve. We are seeking new benefits or concepts that have potential merit in the marketplace. I liken this exercise to the work done by Arm & Hammer in creating new uses for baking soda, another ubiquitous and simple product. We now have baking soda in deodorant, cleaning solution, detergent, as well as many new uses beyond the original use in cooking.

Here are the components:

Wheat
Binding Agent (moisture)
Preservative (BHT)

Here is what I came up with:

1. SUBTRACTION: To use this template, we eliminate a component, but keep the rest. I will remove the binding agent. The Virtual Product is “binding agent-less shredded wheat.” In other words, it falls apart instead of staying in that neat and tidy little bite-size biscuit shape. Benefits: Sell it as dried wheat, to use in cooking, or to mix with other foods such as yogurt, cream of wheat, or oatmeal. Use as a topping for bake goods, pie crust, pancakes, waffles, or other breakfast dishes. Same familiar taste and texture, but embedded in other foods.

2. MULTIPLICATION: Here we make a copy of a component but change it in some way. Let’s make additional copy of the binding agent, but instead of binding the wheat, it now binds to other things. Benefits: perhaps the biscuits stick to each other to create a kind of cereal bar. Each biscuit can be broken off from the whole unit in pieces. Perhaps they stack on top of each other for easy fitting inside a bowl, in round, upside down pyramidal shape. Perhaps the binding agent now sticks to the packaging to prevent breakage in transit. Perhaps it sticks to other foods as part of a food preparation process.

3. TASK UNIFICATION: The trick to using this template is to assign an additional job to an existing resource. Let’s assign additional jobs to the preservatives. Let’s imagine the preservatives have the additional job of keeping other foods preserved and fresh. Imagine shredded wheat is used to wrap around fish, meat, or cheese. Let’s assign more work to the wheat. Imagine the wheat has the job of acting as a scrubbing agent, perhaps as a face or body scrub. This potentially heightens the brand perception of the product as wholesome, “so wholesome you can put it on your face.”

4. DIVISION: To use the division template, we divide the product either physically, functionally, or in a way that preserves the original whole. Let’s divide the product functionally (split it up into separate components). Now we have wheat, preservative, and the binding agent all separated. Who would use this? Why would someone find this useful? Perhaps it could be sold as a way to give customers the ability to make their own shapes and sizes, or to allow them to set the shelf life duration. Imagine this is sold to chefs or food preparation companies to allow them to embed the product into their creations. Now shredded wheat becomes the “Intel Inside” of healthy food categories.

5. ATTRIBUTE DEPENDENCY: This template is the odd one because it does not use components like the other ones. It uses attributes of the product and its environment instead. We create a two-by-two matrix by pairing up the attributes (internal-to-internal and internal-to-external). I love this tool because it creates “smart products” – those that do something useful when something else changes, internal or external to the product. This tool can help break fixedness in a category where the whole premise is consistency over years and years. For example:

The texture changes depending on the type of milk poured over it. Whole milk becomes thinner, for example, while fat free milk makes it thicker (notice that I chose a less intuitive dependency - this template gives you that flexibility).
The taste changes when heat is applied (stove or microwave oven).
The shape changes when heat is applied.
The binding agent gets stronger for cereal boxes that have to be shipped longer distances
The size of the shreds changes with the type of food to be mixed with it.

Have I gone too far?

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification at Airports

2009-06-30T19:39:33-04:00

Placing advertisements on objects such as billboards and taxis is nothing new. But here is a new twist using task unification. It is one of five templates in the corporate innovation method called S.I.T. Task Unification assigns an additional "job" to an existing resource. Here is an example as reported in USA Today:

"Airport advertisers are after travelers' last idle moments: waiting for luggage at baggage claims. Eager to generate more non-aviation revenue, airports including Kansas City, Seattle-Tacoma and Omaha Eppley are placing advertising on baggage carousels. At least 13 others have similar plans, including Atlanta; Philadelphia; Boston Logan; Huntsville, Ala.; Palm Beach, Fla.; Wichita; Gulfport-Biloxi, Miss.; Albany, N.Y.; and Milwaukee Mitchell. "They're a captive audience, waiting 15 minutes or so for bags to arrive," says Zack Clark of DoubleTake Marketing, which designs and installs ads. "It brings some color and revenue to the airport." The ads are large adhesive banners placed on the moving portion of the baggage carousel. For carousels that have a series of metal plates that collapse on each other, DoubleTake applies an adhesive graphic to each plate to compose one large banner. Ads range from 20 feet wide to an entire belt. It's the latest airport advertising initiative targeting a demographic considered wealthy, young and cosmopolitan. Non-aviation revenue makes up about half of U.S. airports' operating revenues, according to Airports Council International-North America. Some airports have removed public art for advertising, while others have considered placing ads on land adjacent to runways. Advertising can be found on electrical outlet stations near gates, boarding passes printed at home and trays used to place jackets and laptops at security checkpoints."

Even more creative is to fuse the marketing message with the medium. Fusion reinforces the message by connecting attributes of the medium to attributes of the message. The trick is to fuse messages that are most salient to what people are thinking or feeling at that exact moment - the moment of highest receptivity.

What would make for clever advertising on an airport luggage carousel as people wait for fifteen minutes for their luggage? How about these:

New Luggage ("Worn Out? Visit www.luggage.com")
Travel Services ("Next trip, save with Orbitz")
Personal Security ("Protect Your Good Name with Lifelock")
Transportation ("Get their faster with B.A.R.T.")
Realty Services ("Welcome Home")
GPS Devices ("Garmin: Follow the Leader")
Job Placement ("Monster: Your calling is calling.")
Candy ("Snickers: Gonna be here for awhile?")
Organizing: ("Franklin Covey: We enable greatness.")
Utilities: ("iPhone App: Airport Flight Delays")

How would you fuse a marketing message to an airport luggage carousel?

Innovation Suite 2009

2009-06-23T14:22:02-04:00

Here is an opportunity to learn innovation from the same people who taught me. The course is called Innovation Suite 2009, and will be held July 27-29, 2009 in Rochester, Minnesota. For registration and more detailed information, please go to www.sitsite.com/2009innovationsuite.

Here are some excerpts about the course from the registration site:

Innovation Suite 2009 will help you successfully apply innovation to three critical levels in your company: individual, team, and organization-wide. Each day of this 3-day course focuses primarily on one level. We will take you step-by-step from the basic tools and principles of the SIT method through hands-on team innovation and company-wide sustainable processes.

Agenda

Day 1 – Innovation part I: Use SIT to be more effective by thinking and acting differently. The first day is all about you and your work: improve your ability to act, think, react, and deliver, by using our tools and principles, while generating unique, efficient solutions for practically any situation. You will know how to apply the following to your tasks:

SIT’s principles and thinking tools for New Product Development
SIT’s approach to Problem Solving

Day 2– Innovation part II: Be an innovative manager by working innovatively with your team. The second day is all about you and your team, harnessing their knowledge and resources to meet your targets and raise the performance bar. You will know how to run a local innovation process after you:

Learn how to identify needs and opportunities for innovation
Plan and lead a team-innovation session on your topic of choice

Day 3 – Sustainable innovation: How to make it work for your company. This day is about adapting the knowledge you have acquired in the first two days to your company’s strategy, structures and needs. You will learn how to further extend the innovation process and gain support on all management levels, from departmental execution to corporate level strategy. You will know what is needed to make innovation a long-term, sustainable element of your area of responsibility:

How to measure innovation success
The necessary conditions for ensuring successful innovation processes
How to use existing organizational structures and resources to support the innovation process
How to foster innovation and motivate peers and subordinates in your area of responsibility.

Hopeful Innovation

2009-06-14T16:33:39-04:00

Are hopeful employees more innovative? A new study by Armenio Rego and his colleagues shows how employees' sense of hope explains their creative output at work. They asked one hundred and twenty five employees to rate their personal sense of hope and happiness while their supervisors rated the employees' creativity. Based on the correlations, they conclude that hope predicts creativity.

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. Hoping is an integral part of being human. Without hope, tasks such as innovating become difficult if not impossible. Why bother if there is no hope for a successful future? "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."

I have observed this in practice. I once facilitated employees in a division about to be sold to another company. The employees learned about the divestiture during the workshop. Morale was low, and participants were not responsive to systematic innovation techniques. They lacked hope...hope about their future employment and personal achievement. To salvage the workshop, we re-framed it. We told the employees they needed to innovate so that they would be perceived as valuable to their new owners. Innovating would give them an immediate jump-start on becoming competitive in the marketplace, something they struggled with under the current owner. Once hopeful, they kicked innovation into high gear. That workshop was one of the most successful and creative I have ever experienced.

What can leaders do to inspire hope? Darren Webb has outlined a useful model in his paper, "Modes of Hoping." He identifies five types of hope:

Patient Hope: Hope is a basic trust in the goodness of the world. To hope is to be patient and stand firm, to place one's trust in others in facing an unforeseen future.
Critical Hope: Hope is a passionate suffering and restless longing for what is missing in the world.
Estimative Hope: Hope is a belief that one's desired objective is both obtainable (probability of success is greater than zero) and that one is in control of making it happen. It is goal-oriented and based on the evidence.
Resolute Hope: Hope is the resolve to set aside the evidence of what's possible and create one's own sense of probability and degree of control. It is optimism in spite of the odds.
Utopian Hope: Hope is a sense of profound confidence in one's destiny to create a new and better future.

Using this model, leaders can create hope at several levels to strengthen innovation:

Vision and Mission: create a utopian view of how the company is making the world a better place. Preach it in vision and mission statements. Consistently tie the message back to specific initiatives, especially innovation initiatives. Give people reason to believe the vision is a sustained commitment to doing what's good.
Clear and Achievable Goals: Set challenging, but realistic goals. Help employees calibrate the likelihood of success. If goals are neither clear or achievable, people lose genuine hope. They may act like they are motivated, but deep down they know their efforts are useless. Stress the importance of innovation in achieving these goals.
Empowerment: People need to feel a sense of control when attacking goals. It fuels hope that what they strive for can actually happen.
Trust: Employees need to trust leaders. "Everything will turn out fine because we have the right leaders in place." Building trust means being truthful, consistent, fair, and transparent. Employees see innovation as worthwhile if they trust the boss.
Competitive Threat: Inspire employees by creating a sense of anxiety from competition and external threats. This fuels a sense of critical hope...the desire to rid the world of obstacles standing in their way.
Survival: Against low odds, leaders may have no choice but to inspire resolute hope...a sense that the "impossible" can happen if we "just work together."

Bottom line: don't hope for innovation; instill hope instead.

Rego, A., Machado, F., Leal, S. & Cunha, M.P.E. (2009) Are Hopeful Employees More Creative? An Empirical Study. Creativity Research Journal, 21(2-3), 223-231.

Webb, D. (2007) Modes of Hoping. History of Human Sciences, 20, 65-83.

The LAB: Innovating a Credit Card with S.I.T. (June 2009)

2009-06-07T12:30:07-04:00

Credit card companies must innovate to overcome the financial and public relations consequences of recent government legislation. The Credit Card Reform Act of 2009 is a "bill to protect consumers, and especially young consumers, from skyrocketing credit card debt, unfair credit card practices, and deceptive credit offers." These changes go into effect in 2010, and they will undoubtedly reduce the financial performance of card issuers.

The concept of using a card for purchases was described in 1887 by Edward Bellamy in his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy used the term credit card eleven times in this novel. The credit card has become a ubiquitous symbol of consumerism since then. Many credit card innovations have emerged, some useful and others wacky. Recent innovations include: paperless statement; online statements; custom logos to display your affiliations with colleges, companies, and other groups; a magnetic strip to read information more efficiently and securely.

The key for credit card companies is to reduce their reliance on price (in the form of interest rates, penalties, and fees) and increase their pipeline of innovative services for which consumers will be willing to pay. That is the focus of this month's LAB.

We will use each of the five templates of the Systematic Inventive Thinking method to create new credit card concepts. These templates regulate our thinking and channel the ideation process. To use a template, we apply it to an existing product, service, strategy, or business model. In effect, we morph the existing product or service into something that doesn't seem to make any sense. We then work backwards to find a possible PROBLEM that this hypothetical SOLUTION solves. In other words, we go from the solution as the starting point instead of the traditional method of starting with a problem, usually gleaned from the “voice of the customer.”

We start with a component list:

1.    Credit card number
2.    Expiration date
3.    Cardholder’s name
4.    Logo
5.    Magnetic strip
6.    Signature block
7.    Security code CCV
8.    Customer service phone number
9.    Statement
10. Credit limit

Here are five innovations, one for each template:

1. SUBTRACTION: Remove the number and replace it with a TinyURL-like number that is coded and can only be decoded at time of purchase. Authentication is a big issue, and various schemes have emerged to address it. This idea takes advantage of existing concepts to reduce and disguise text.

2. MULTIPLICATION: Make copies of the credit card number. Each one is a different credit card. Benefit: you need only one plastic card for purchasing (such as the fictitious one pictured above). You get to specify which actual account (Amex, Visa, or Mastercard) is applied at time of purchase. This helps consumers spread their debt to the most advantageous credit plan. Perhaps the card does it automatically for you based on credit limits and current fee policies.

3. TASK UNIFICATION: The magnetic strip has the additional job of carrying owner information and shopping preferences. Perhaps it keeps track of proper clothing sizes or discount coupons that the owner is entitled to. It keeps track of the owner's membership number to that store. Its job is to carry information that makes shopping easier, fun, and more efficient (save money). Perhaps the magnetic strip has additional duties related to legislative reform mandates (monitoring compliance).

4. DIVISION: Divide the logo off the card and place it somewhere else in the system. The logo is now on all of your cards, or perhaps it shows up somewhere where other people can see it and identify you with the logo. This heightens the esteem you get from carrying the card with that affiliation. Perhaps your card logo is displayed on a monitor in a restaurant, for example. Perhaps reservations at hotels or other places with your affinity logo is used someway by the merchant and the affinity group to offer you special benefits. Example: when you walk into your hotel room, you see the TV on with the logo of your alma mater proudly displayed on the screen.

5. ATTRIBUTE DEPENDENCY: The credit limit changes depending on the merchant you are shopping with. Perhaps merchants are willing to bear a certain amount of credit risk depending on their relationship with you. Some might be willing to extend more credit, some less credit. By “risk shifting,” we address some of the legislative concerns.

Legislators may want to consider less brute force reform and demand more "reform-through-innovation."

*Special thanks to Dave Kastner for creating the "uni-card" image above.

Are YOU an Innovator?

2009-05-30T11:29:06-04:00

Do you consider yourself an innovator? I asked this to a group of participants at a recent PDMA workshop, and the results surprised me. Only about half of the participants raised their hand. Many of those had that hesitant look of self-doubt on their face.

It's a difficult question. How do you really know if you are an innovator? Is it based on the number of patents you hold? Is it a function of your job title? Is it based on your creative endeavors like music or art?

Take this self-assessment to find out. Place a check mark beside the statement you believe is more true. (Click here for a printable version and for scoring instructions.)

1. A. Innovation occurs by adding features to a product.
B. Innovation occurs by taking features out of a product.

2. A. Innovation is finding problems that are solved by hypothetical solutions.
B. Innovation is finding solutions to difficult problems.

3. A. I am more likely to innovate when I work alone.
B. I am more likely to innovate when I work in a group.

4. A. Innovation is more about creating novel ideas.
B. Innovation is more about selecting the best ideas.

5. A. When I innovate, I "brainstorm" ideas out of my head.
B. When I innovate, I follow a series of steps to find ideas.

6. A. Innovating is predictable and not risky.
B. Innovating is unpredictable and risky.

7 . A. The ability to innovate is a gift that you are born with.
B. The ability to innovate is a skill that you can learn.

8. A. I prefer ambiguity when pondering new ideas.
B. I prefer clarity when pondering new ideas.

9. A. The Post-It Note is a good example of innovation because it was spontaneous.
B. The Post-It Note is a bad example of innovation because it was spontaneous.

10. A. I feel responsible for innovating new ideas.
B. I feel others are responsible for innovating new ideas.

11. A. Innovating is a random, improvisational, back-and-forth experience.
B. Innovating is a systematic, linear experience.

12. A. Constraints on resources like time and money drive innovation.
B. Constraints on resources like time and money inhibit innovation.

13. A. Homogeneous groups are more likely to innovate.
B. Diverse groups are more likely to innovate.

14. A. Innovation can be scheduled. It can occur anytime I want.
B. Innovation cannot be scheduled. It occurs randomly.

15. A. Innovation is an unstructured process.
B. Innovation is a patterned, "templated" process.

How do you rate? Here is a general guideline:

11 to 15 points: Consider yourself an innovator. Put it in your Twitter bio.

6 to 10 points: Innovating is a mixed bag for you, but you may be headed in the right direction.

0 to 5 points: Innovation is a mystery to you. Consider formal training.

Innovation Dilemmas

2009-05-21T15:34:48-04:00

Innovation creates dilemmas, and these dilemmas can either help or hinder your innovation effort. Dilemmas arise when we confront natural tensions between two apparent opposite ideas or concepts. In business we face these dilemmas all the time: cost vs. quality, centralization vs. decentralization, stability vs. change, short term results vs. long term competitiveness. Dilemmas are dynamic but inevitable. They don't go away. They must be managed over time.

The key is to recognize the difference between dilemmas, which are not resolvable, and problems which are resolvable. Problems differ from dilemmas in that they are decidable. We have independent options to address problems usually through some fixed trade-off between options. Problems can be solved, resolved, and decided – once and for all. Natural tensions are not solved or decided. They are ongoing. Professors Josh Klayman and Jackie Gnepp address this in their course, "Implementing Innovation and Change" at the University of Chicago. The course helps students recognize the difference between dilemmas and problems. They learn strategies to help manage and balance these dilemmas over time.

Here are the innovation dilemmas (tensions) I observe in organizations:

Whether to invest in Innovation vs. development
Whether to pursue disruptive ideas vs. incremental ideas
Whether to use Problem-to-Solution vs. Solution-to-Problem approaches
Whether to use Divergence vs. Convergence
Whether to build innovation teams with diversity vs. content expertise

Managers often struggle with the first dilemma because they are weighing the value of creating new ideas against the payoff from finishing the projects they already have in the pipeline. A common mistake is to reduce innovation because you do not have enough R&D resources to develop the ideas. The irony of this dilemma is that you can actually accelerate development by spending more time on ideating. This happens two ways: first, it is likely you may find new, innovative ways to simplify existing projects or eliminate certain aspects of them. Second, you strengthen your internal case for more development resources by showing senior management the quality and size of your ideation pipeline. Over-innovating is better than under-innovating.

Teams struggle with what kind of ideas to pursue: disruptive or incremental. Clayton Christensen and others have popularized the notion of disruptive innovation as the priority over all others. Managers tend to undervalue incremental ideas because they are...well, incremental. This somehow translates into unexciting or risk adverse. To manage this dilemma, managers need to think more in terms of finding the "innovation sweet spot," that place somewhere between disruptive and incremental. The right balance between risk and reward is more likely to occur here.

Innovation facilitators often face the dilemma of which direction of innovation to follow: Problem-to-Solution vs. Solution-to-Problem methods. As with all dilemmas, the key is finding the right balance between the two and not to rely too heavily on one over the other. When a customer problem is well known and well understood, it is tempting to use just the Problem-to-Solution genre of methods. This is a mistake as it eliminates the highly novel and less-obvious solutions that can be created with the other approach. Facilitators also have to balance between divergence versus converging down to the most viable ideas. Spending too much time with divergent ideation can frustrate team members as the ideas become too wild and far out. People lose interest and become cynical.

Finally, team leaders need to manage the dilemma of how to form innovation teams. Several key factors weigh in to create a "dream team," and the leader has to balance these tensions appropriately to assure the best outcome. Over-reliance on content expertise, for example, can eliminate the power of diverse views and insights during the innovation process.

Innovation Archetypes

2009-05-10T19:47:37-04:00

An archetype is an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype after which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all. Archetypes put context to a situation. We use archetypes, for example, in marketing. We create brand archetypes to assign a personality to the brand. An example of such a model is shown at right. In political debate, it's useful to understand whether a commentator is an "archetypical democrat" or an "archetypical republican." This helps frame their comments so we know where they are coming from.

Listening to the Voice of Innovation is the same. As I read blogs, interviews, and books on innovation, I try to determine the author's innovation archetype so I know where they are coming from. I observe at least four of these.

The four Innovation Archetypes are:

Innovation Doer: These are the practitioners of innovation...people who innovate on a regular basis. The Innovation Doer is on the front lines and feels both accountable and motivated to come up with new and useful ideas. They may or may not use a systematic approach. They approach situations with a natural inclination to change the status quo rather than preserve it.

Innovation Watcher: These are people with a strong interest or obsession with innovation created by other people. They are fascinated by novelty. They consume it, read about it, and report on it. They marvel at what others create but stop short of serious innovation themselves. They report useful insights about innovation and innovators. They add value by commenting on trends and milestones in the world of innovation. Entire websites such as Gizmodo and Engadget fit this archetype.

Innovation Preacher: These are the voices that inspire others of the need to innovate. They make the case for innovation and change. They relate innovation to our everyday lives as well as to the global economy. They create both hope and fear...hope in terms of what can be created through innovation, and fear from the consequences of not innovating...from being "disrupted."

Innovation Teacher: These are the people who teach methods and processes of innovation. They infect others with tools to create new ideas. Teachers are interventionalists. Their students become Doers (if they have taught them well). A number of university professors and innovation consultants fit this archetype.

It is likely there are more innovation archetypes than these four. Others could be defined around some of the brand archetypes displayed in the model above. Certainly there are people who display multiple archetypes, perhaps all four.

In the corporate domain, we need all four archetypes. Those that preach create the mandate for change. They mobilize the leadership and staff to focus on innovation as a source of organic growth. The Doers and Teachers tend to put things into motion. Watchers are the "sense makers." They are trend spotters. They have a unique perspective on external innovation to give useful context to internal innovation. A lot of corporate mergers and acquisition departments fall into this category. They are "hunters" of opportunity.

As you listen to the Voices of Innovation, see if you can spot their archetype. Who are the leading Innovation Preachers in our innovation community, for example? Also, ask yourself: what is your archetype? Which do you aspire to become? Most importantly, how will you get there?