Innovation in Practice

Academic Focus: University of Michigan

2009-11-16T02:00:00-05:00

Once you develop the capability to generate ideas, you need a rigorous approach to managing innovation within the context of your company's culture. For that, Professor Jeff DeGraff's Competing Values Framework (CVF) is the best-in-class approach. CVF describes four organizational cultural styles of managing innovation: Collaborate, Create, Control, and Compete. Management teams tend to gravitate towards one dominant style, the one that has served them well in the past. To be a more effective, leaders need to be "ambidextrous." Leaders should become adroit at two conflicting values. "They must develop the ability to oversee teams that work towards opposite goals, integrating them when the timing is right, so that each value can be developed successfully."

Here is Jeff's biography from the University of Michigan website:

"Jeff DeGraff teaches MBA and Executive Education courses on managing creativity, innovation and change. Jeff is also a core faculty member in the University of Michigan Center for Leadership, Change and Innovation. Jeff's research and writing focuses on change and innovation strategy, organizational competencies and innovation practices, and creativity methods. He is co-author of the books Creativity at Work: Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen, Leading Innovation: How to Jump Start Your Organization's Growth Engine and Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations. He is the Managing Director of Competing Values, a consulting practice that specializes in helping organizations make change and innovation happen."

Jeff founded the Innovatrium, an innovation development community that is comprised of leading companies, government agencies, universities, trade associations, top faculty,researchers, students, and best in class growth and innovation experts. Its mission:

"The mission of Innovatrium is to be to the business practice of innovation what the Juilliard School is to music, bringing together master artists, teachers and students in a collaborative effort to create new ideas, skills and practices. Innovatrium integrates the best of consulting and teaching into action learning."

I have had the pleasure of working with Jeff and seeing him in action. I have read his books including "Leading Innovation: How to Jump Start Your Organization’s Growth Engine." It is one of the few innovation books that I recommend to colleagues. Jeff has earned his nickname, The Dean of Innovation.

Innovation Sighting: Smart Floors Using Attribute Dependency

2009-11-09T02:00:00-05:00

In a world where gravity is ever present, floors are essential. We spend most of our waking hours standing or walking on them. But we tend to ignore them. That is a pity given the nearly constant contact we have with them. What if the floor could be innovated? What could it do for us that it doesn't do today?

Here is an innovative technology worth standing up for. Future-Shape GmbH, a German technology startup, has developed Sens-Floor, a layer of textile sensors that monitor human movement and can be installed underneath almost any type of flooring. The product works by sending a small electrical charge through a conductive fabric containing integrated sensor plates and radio modules. When someone walks over a sensor, a small change in charge capacity triggers the system. The company offers a few suggested applications such as home security, activating room lights, and monitoring the elderly.

However, to reach its full potential, innovating with the Attribute Dependency template will link this technology to many more things that take place on a floor. Imagine, for example, the floor can detect a specific person (through body weight, foot size, etc) to activate things in the room related to that person (lighting preferences, sounds, smells...anything with an "on" button). Taking it further, imagine the floor can keep track of how many people are on the floor and what they are doing (standing, dancing, sitting, etc). The floor can tell a party host when it's time to serve dinner or to enliven the party with different music. Think of the sports applications - score keeping in tennis, required elements in gymnastics, or basketball three second violations. What about retail store applications? The floor could keep track of customer movements - where they shop, where they stop, and how they go from product to product. Perhaps the floor can detect when to raise prices on popular items or drop prices on a slow ones.

The company calls its core product, Smart Textiles, and this idea is embedded in its other products. To make them truly smart, it will take a bit more work on the application side. As an investment, Future-Shape might be an excellent "ground floor" opportunity.

The LAB: Innovating Social Media with Task Unification (October 2009)

2009-10-31T20:30:55-04:00

Embracing social media and the myriad of Web 2.0 tools is more challenging than just setting up a Facebook account or adding a “Follow Me on Twitter” link. Organizations struggle with how to take advantage of the power of Web 2.0. Where do you start? How do you tie these new tools in with your current website? How do you make sure your current constituents are happy while moving the organization to a more networked world?

For this month’s LAB, we will use the innovation template called Task Unification, one of five templates of the corporate innovation method called S.I.T.. To use Task Unification, we take a component of a product, service, system, etc, and we assign an additional "job" to it. For this exercise involving Social Media, here is how it works. Imagine your company has a large base of employees in the field. For example, suppose your company has a large sales force or an extensive network of delivery or service people. Consider the U.S. Postal Service, for example, with an army of postal workers and letter carriers at over 32,000 post offices. A key question for these organizations like the USPS is: how do we get more value out of this fixed asset? Let's use Task Unification.

I start by visiting a site that inventories all the social web tools: GO2WEB20.NET. I randomly pick an application from this list. Then I assign the internal field resources to "use" this application to increase revenue/profits for the company. Using our example of the postal service, I create this statement: "Postal delivery staff have the additional 'job' of using XXXX (web application) to increase USPS performance." This is our Virtual Product in the S.I.T. method.

The key is to use the non-obvious applications for creating new, innovative services. You have to literally force yourself to imagine the corporate resource using the inherent aspects of the Web 2.0 application to create revenue or cut costs. Here are examples I created using Task Unification:

ParkWhiz:
- "ParkWhiz helps people park their cars quickly and efficiently by providing them with the tools to make an informed decision. Instead of driving around to find parking, you can use ParkWhiz to get the best parking to suit your needs."
- Idea: The postal workers have a role to play by spotting empty parking spots and annotating this in real time using a mobile, GPS-enabled device to indicate the location of the open spot. Subscribers go online to see what parking spots might be available in their vicinity.
Gist:
- "Gist helps you build stronger relationships by connecting the inbox to the web to provide business-critical information about the people and companies that matter most."
- Idea: Postal workers have a role of feeding information about traditional mail that is sent and received to your key contacts into the Gist system to help inform you about these contacts.
Walkscore:
- "Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc."
- Idea: Post workers have the additional job of providing information about what to see or experience between any two walking points. The information is real-time, so it includes weather, crowd information, safety issues, etc.
YowTrip:
- "YowTRIP is a social network site that connects you with other world travelers in your town or wherever you're traveling. Find people like yourself who are planning to or have traveled, live or have lived, anywhere in the world. YowTRIP's goal is to promote cultural exchange by connecting world travelers and enabling them to share their travel experiences on this online community."
- Idea: Postal workers have the additional role of collecting and reporting tourism-related information to the YowTrip system to inform tourists of local sightseeing opportunities.
Orchestrate:
- "Orchestrate is an online workforce scheduling application that allows Operations Managers to schedule qualified personnel and tasks with ease. Features include qualification requirements for staff, locations, logins for managers, staff and clients, compliance reporting and visually beautiful schedules."
- Postal workers have the additional job of feeding in critical job site information into the Orchestrate system to allow better scheduling of crews and tasks.

Companies have an enormous stockpile of Web 2.0 business model ideas sitting and waiting to be leveraged. Their challenge is to take advantage of the discipline and structure of innovation templates to lead them to new, useful, and surprising opportunities.

The Power to Innovate: Conference Report

2009-10-24T14:06:42-04:00

Congratulations to the team at Invention Machine for hosting this week’s conference, Power to Innovate, at the Seaport Hotel in Boston. The theme of the conference centered around the Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem^TM and how companies can boost performance by coordinating information, communities, and innovation activities. Invention Machine’s premier product, Goldfire, is at the center of this ecosystem.

"Goldfire is a unique innovation software platform that transforms ideas into commercial products—generating and validating concepts and making innovation a sustainable process. Designed with engineers, scientists and researchers in mind, Goldfire automates every day innovation tasks—from identifying a new market to developing a new product to improving existing product offerings—and empowering users with a repeatable process. Fusing proven innovation methods for generating ideas along with advanced technologies for accessing precise concepts from corporate and worldwide knowledge sources, Goldfire stimulates creative thinking and speeds inventive problem solving—helping product development engineers, scientists and researchers to quickly conceive and validate ideas thus fueling product pipelines."

The latest release, 5.5, should greatly enhance usability of the product especially by groups outside of R&D such as marketing and M&A. Jim Belfiore, Certified Innovation Master & Senior Director at Invention Machine, demonstrated how he researched the disease, lymphoma. I was amazed at the depth and breadth of insights he created using Golfire 5.5.

The entire conference was followed on Twitter compliments of Andrea Meyer. Check it out at #P2I09. Here are some other highlights from the conference:

Jim Todhunter, Chief Technology Officer at Invention Machine, shared their technology roadmap and how Goldfire will enhance research, not just search capability around a topic. He shared a sneak peak at release 6.0 and some of the new features to enhance collaboration, both internally and externally. Jim also presented an "Innovation Practice Maturity Model." This four level model helps companies understand where they need to head to increase and sustain innovation.
Randy Schiestl, VP Research and Development of Boston Scientific, shared their collective experience adopting Goldfire and using it across the enterprise.
Jim Belfiore presented "Collaborative Innovation" and how to leverage Goldfire’s capabilities in team settings. Later, Jim Todhunter addressed it head on with a presentation on Open Innovation.

I am impressed with Goldfire, and I am particularly interested in how it could intersect with other technologies such as:

Virtual reality like Second Life and the simulations from Visual Purple. As Edward Tufte notes, we need to escape “Flatland” and get ourselves out of two dimensional computer screens and into richer learning and sensing environments. Embedding the output of Goldfire into a three dimensional world could add context and usability.
Preferencing systems such as those used by Amazon, Pandora, and others that allow users to continuously refine and enhance choices by “thumbs up/thumbs down” voting.
Pattern recognition approaches. Marketers particularly need to see patterns emerging about their brands within the social web and within formal literature. Combining the output of Goldfire with data visualization might help marketers do this quicker and more effectively.
Mass scaling. Goldfire aggregates information from multiple sources, both internally and externally. Could it be used in a more domestic, non-corporate setting to enhance people’s standard of living? A simple tool like Google Reader aggregates pre-selected website information using RSS feeds. Goldfire far outstrips this. Could individuals use a lighter version of Goldfire to collect their daily news given the shortcomings of traditional printed newspapers?

Invention Machine's CMO, Jeff Boehm, shared an interesting statistic about the companies participating at this conference. Those companies have outperformed the market 11.5% over the last 13 months. Message: innovate to grow.

Reinventing the Newspaper

2009-10-20T12:54:34-04:00

Newspapers are dying. Their business model is burning to the ground. They cannot fend off the Internet and other threats despite their virtual monopoly and economies of scale in printing and distribution. Advertisers are moving on. Yet while traditional newsrooms are shrinking, journalism is thriving and the consumption of news is skyrocketing. Why are newspapers shutting down? As Clay Shirky describes it:

"If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other."

"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."

"Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke."

Perhaps it is not the newspaper model, per se, that needs replaced. Perhaps it is the components of that model that need innovation: printing, distribution, and journalism. Let's examine how.

PRINTING

Gutenberg's innovation of printing multiple copies of one newspaper was a huge step forward in 1500. Today's large scale printing machines are still built on that idea. Companies like Siemens that produce these machines need to engineer new versions of large volume printers that can take custom digital content and print one unique copy of a paper, then print a different one, the next one, etc, at very high speeds. This would allow news companies to create a custom newspaper for every single subscriber. The capability is already in existence to some degree with the printing of custom mail order catalogs. That technology needs to be extended to allow mass scale customization - a unique paper for every household.

DISTRIBUTION

Newspaper companies have well-established skills and resources to take the printed paper right from the presses to your doorstep. But they need to "backward integrate" distribution into how they collect content. Today, news organizations rely on their own staff as well as syndicated content from AP and other organizations. The proliferation of blogs and other content providers gives news organization a tremendous opportunity to reinvent their business model by excelling at: news aggregation and brokering. Today's consumer wants more relevant content than what is sent to them in a traditional newspaper. They use RSS feeds to aggregate their own content. Newspapers could do this for the consumer based on the use of meta-tagging and preferences much like what Pandora has done with music*. Instead of a Music Genome, the news industry needs to create the "News Genome", a structured architecture of news preferencing that allows customers to pre-identify what they prefer so that news organizations can source and broker it back to them - in printed form, delivered to their doorstep.

JOURNALISM

Journalism has been dominated by a relatively small group of reporters who go out and collect news and content. Today, there are millions of "journalists" under The Long Tail creating content. The key is how their content is fed into the meta-tagging "News Genome" idea discussed above. To give them an incentive to feed quality, relevant content into that system, news organizations could make micropayments to a journalist for each time and only when their content is pulled in and brokered back out to a subscriber. Clay Shirky is correct when he says consumers won't pay for news because they have never paid for news. So the idea of micropayments from consumers won't work. But micropayments to the journalist when they get a "hit" on their content would create the right incentives to the system. News organizations need to establish a preferencing system of tagging for each of their subscribers, then source and broker relevant, tagged, content to them in RSS-like fashion.

What would it look like? Imagine the ultimate newspaper. It would have articles, editorials, advertising and other content that is custom tailored to your beliefs, lifestyle, affiliations and preferences. If you like to keep abreast of world news, so be it. But if you are also liberal-minded, these same articles would have a liberal bent to them. If you live in Cincinnati, but root for the Chicago Bears, your sports section would have Bears news, not Bengals. Even the obituaries would be connected to you and your world. If a great-uncle of your college roommate passes away, you would get to read about it. Your entire newspaper would be not only filled with the news and information that is relevant to you, but it is also written in a tone and orientation that matches your view of the world. For newspapers, this means instead of printing millions of copies of one version of the daily paper, they now have to print a million versions, one for each of a million different readers. Wow!

A custom newspaper has advantages for the advertisers as well. It is the advertisers, not the subscribers, after all, who subsidize journalism. With custom newspapers, advertisers could target their ads in line with the keyword tags so that the ad appeals to that subscriber's interests and values. My bet is advertisers would pay more for this with the promise of more effective ad placement. More money on the table leaves more room for micropayments to journalists. The loop is closed.

As Shirky notes, "No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need."

* "Pandora for the News" idea courtesy of David Showers, Washington, D.C.

Academic Focus: Harvard Business School

2009-10-12T09:29:28-04:00

A colleague asked me, "Who is that innovation guru at the Harvard Business School?"

That's easy: Dr. Teresa Amabile.

Dr. Amabile heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and is the only tenured professor at a top school to devote her entire research program to the study of creativity. She is one of the world's leading voices in business innovation. From Wikipedia:

"Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Dr. Amabile received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1977. Originally focusing on individual creativity, Dr. Amabile's research has expanded to encompass team creativity and organizational innovation. This 30-year program of research on how the work environment can influence creativity and motivation has yielded a theory of creativity and innovation; methods for assessing creativity, motivation, and the work environment; and a set of prescriptions for maintaining and stimulating innovation. Her current research program focuses on the psychology of everyday work life: how events in the work environment influence subjective experience and performance. Before joining HBS, Dr. Amabile held several research grants as a professor at Brandeis University, including Creativity and Motivation, from the National Institute of Mental Health, and Downsizing Industrial R&D, from the Center for Innovation Management Studies. She was awarded the E. Paul Torrance Award by the Creativity Division of the National Association for Gifted Children in 1998.

Dr. Amabile has presented her theories, research results, and practical implications to various groups in business, government, and education, including Lucent Technologies, Procter & Gamble, Novartis International AG, and Motorola. In addition to participating in various executive programs, her main teaching assignment at Harvard Business School is an MBA course, Managing for Creativity. Dr. Amabile was the host/instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a 26-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS. She currently serves as a Director of Seaman Corporation.

Dr. Amabile is the author of Creativity in Context and Growing Up Creative, as well as over 100 scholarly papers, chapters, and presentations. She serves on the editorial boards of Creativity Research Journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, and Journal of Creative Behavior."

For innovation practitioners, I recommend reading her articles:

Amabile, Teresa M., and Mukti Khaire. "Creativity and the Role of the Leader." Harvard Business Review 86, no. 10 (October 2008)
Amabile, T. M. "Entrepreneurial Creativity Through Motivational Synergy." Journal of Creative Behavior 31 (1997): 18-26.
Amabile, T. M. "Attributions of Creativity: What Are the Consequences?" Creativity Research Journal 8, no. 4 (1995): 423-426.

Teresa Amabile has been shaking up the world of creativity and innovation for over 30 years. Now THAT's disruptive!

Innovation Sighting: The Division Template in Elevators

2009-10-04T18:00:00-04:00

What is the first thing you do when you step into an elevator? For most people: push the button of the floor you are going to. Not so with a new breed of elevators manufactured by Schindler North America. These elevators have the buttons on the outside, not inside. The buttons for selecting your floor are on each floor. Instead of just pushing a single up or down button to hail an elevator, you push the button for the floor you want as though you were inside.

The Division Template is the culprit here. In this innovation sighting, the elevator floor button panel was divided out and placed back into the system...outside the elevator cab. Very novel, useful, and surprising. To use Division, make a list of the components, then divide out a component. Divide functionally or physically and place it back somewhere in the system. Use Function Follows Form to identify potential benefits, feasibility, challenges, and adaptations.

The benefit is better elevator customer service. Elevator cars operate more efficiently which means you get to the right floor faster. How? By selecting your floor sooner (while waiting for the elevator to arrive) the elevator's computer has more timely input about peoples' destinations. It can calculate the optimal pattern of pickups and dropoffs, then execute it faster than traditional elevators. Here is how this new elevator, called the Miconic 10, operates:

"Miconic 10 ® advanced software drives a powerful logic program that systematically rationalizes elevator traffic flow in a building. It employs a sophisticated algorithm to manage the complexities of traffic patterns as they change throughout the day and to group passengers together with the same departure and/or destination floors.
With any conventional control, passengers can only tell the elevator system that they want to travel either 'Up' or 'Down'. Likewise, everyone tries to get into the first car that arrives, often causing overcrowding, then scrambling to push the buttons once inside the car. As a result, the car will probably stop at every floor on the way up.

With Miconic 10 ®, you can register you destination even before you reach the elevator lobby. The system tells you immediately which car to go to. It groups passengers together by destination to minimize the number of stops. It makes sure that cars can't become overcrowded. Once inside the elevator, your destination floor is confirmed to you. You don't need to press any more buttons (special service buttons are, of course, provided). You receive confirmation of your destination floor upon arrival."

The first elevator was built by Archimedes probably in 236 B.C. It has come a long way since then.

The LAB: Innovating the Hockey Stick with Attribute Dependency (September 2009)

2009-09-28T05:00:00-04:00

Ice hockey is big business. But it lags behind other professional sports - soccer, football, baseball, and basketball. As with all industries, the key to growth is innovation. Equipment manufacturers such as Reebok are taking this seriously with the creation of the Hockey Research and Innovation Center. In this month's LAB, we will focus on the equipment side of hockey, specifically on: the hockey stick.

Hockey has been around a long time with evidence of its origins dating to the sixteenth century. The first organized indoor game was played in 1875. Since then, many innovations have been introduced. Let's see how a systematic, corporate innovation method can be applied to drive new sales opportunities.

I used the Attribute Dependency template of Systematic Inventive Thinking. Attribute Dependency differs from the other templates in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components. Start with an attribute list, then construct a 2 x 2 matrix of these, pairing each against the others. Each cell represents a potential dependency (or potential break in an existing dependency) that forms a Virtual Product. Using Function Follows Form, we work backwards and envision a potential benefit or problem that this hypothetical solution solves.

Here is my attribute list:

Internal Attributes:

length of stick
curve of stick
flex of stick
friction of stick (bottom)
weight of stick

External Attributes:

game situation (even strength or penalty situation)
condition of ice (smooth or rough)
type of shot (forehand or backhand)
force of shot (slap shot, wrist shot, snap shot)
use of stick (blocking, hooking, checking, etc)

Here are five innovations for the hockey stick using combinations of these attributes (underlined for emphasis):

1. "Extenda-Stick:" The hockey stick changes length depending on the game situation. If the player is in a defensive mode, the stick can be extended to its maximum allowable length to allow better blocking of shots. When the player transitions to the offensive puck handling mode, the stick reverts to its optimal length as determined by the height and preference of that player. This would be great for situations when your team has a player in the penalty box where defensive play is called for. The stick length could be changed, perhaps, with a push button and spring-loading within a certain range.

2. "Curve-Switcher:" Hockey sticks are either right-handed or left-handed as determined by the direction of the curve of the stick. The challenge occurs when a player wants to take a backhand shot with the back, convex side. It is difficult to control direction and speed of the puck with the back of stick that is curved the wrong way. With this new innovation, the direction of the curve changes depending on the type of shot the player is about to take. Like the "Extenda-Stick," the curve direction changes with the push of a button or a squeeze of the stick. The would be particularly useful on the "wrap-around" attempt (demonstrated here by my son, Ryan, at age 14). This would increase goals, game interest, attendance, etc..

3. "Feel-the-Ice:" The friction on the bottom of the stick adjusts to the smoothness of the ice. Hockey players want to "feel the ice" with their stick as they handle the puck. Early in the game, the ice is freshly prepared and very slippery. That is when the stick bottom needs to have more friction. Later, as the ice surface gets rough and snowy, the stick bottom needs to be slippery. Perhaps the stick has a pad that is added to the bottom at the beginning of a period and it changes over a 20 minute time frame, going from sticky to slippery, adjusting passively to the change in ice surface.

4. "Flex-Flex:" The flexibility of the stick changes with the type of shot the player is taking. If the player "winds up" for a hard slap shot, the shaft of the stick stiffens to maximize the power applied to the puck. If the player takes a shot with the stick at a low angle to the ice (in other words, a wrist shot), the shaft becomes more flexible allowing the player to transfer power with the spring action of the stick.

5. "Whistle-Blower:" Hockey players use their sticks for lots of things, but some of them are illegal. Hooking, tripping, and spearing are examples. With this innovation, the stick alerts the referee when it is being used improperly, causing a penalty. For example, if a player holds the stick parallel to the ice with the blade turned sideways and hooks the body of another player (placing pressure on the top of the blade), the stick would send a signal to the referee indicating a foul.

Perhaps the stick could detect when it draws blood!