Gwen Smith Ishmael, Sr. Vice President of Insights and Innovation at Decision Analyst in Arlington, TX, has led marketing and new product development activities in the CPG and technology industries since 1986. She also conceived and developed ground-breaking Web-based promotional vehicles, two of which are patent pending. Gwen holds an MBA in Marketing and is a featured speaker on insights and innovation around the world. Her writings have been featured in international text books, most recently in Managing 4 Ps of Marketing FMCG Sector, and Product Innovation: A Strategic Tool for Growth, by ICFAI Publications, 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Founding Author
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst in Arlington, Texas, is a former journalist who worked as an editor and reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Nashville Tennessean, and was managing editor of D, the Dallas city magazine. She has a master's degree in rhetoric and has also taught college-level English and informal logic.
Vote on 'Six Core Values of Innovation' by Jeff De Cagna
Embracing the Six Core Values of Innovation is a thesis for a ChangeThis manifesto proposed by Principled Innovation blogger Jeff De Cagna. Thesis of the thesis: 'The core values of innovation are: 1) capability, 2) inclusivity, 3) possibility, 4) opportunity, 5) sustainability and 6) responsibility, and they can live within the DNA of any organization of any size or scope." The thesis for this manifesto is up for vote right now on the ChangeThis site. Go here to vote on it before Nov. 2.
A good metaphor is hard to resist, but a bad one is hard to forgive. We’ve all read those metaphor-based business books before and been burned when the metaphor breaks down after three chapters. So I did not want to like Andy Cohen’s Follow The Other Hand – the “innovation as magic” metaphor seemed just too good to hold up.
The metaphor comes directly out of Cohen’s experience as a young boy hanging around his magician great-uncle and the uncle’s circle of magician friends. Yet when I spoke with him recently, Cohen recalled that he was uncertain that the “magic as innovation” metaphor would hold up if he tried to apply it in a book.
“I was concerned that people would have to get over the obstacle of negative connotations…[of] magic as something that misrepresents, that shifts.”
He worked on the metaphor for a year before writing the book, and it “kept surprising me along the way….because the metaphor is different and unique in its own way, and I make it pay out.”
The way it pays out is that Cohen equates “follow the other hand” with the not-uncommon innovation advice that one should challenge assumptions. And he offers magic as a concrete way readers can test the value of challenging assumptions.
The irresistible part of the metaphor is the part where he also talks about both magic and innovation as processes that make possible something that is seemingly impossible.
In showing the reader a little of how magic makes possible the seemingly impossible, Cohen lays out a structure for not just doing magic, but figuring out how to do it.
There’s an important distinction there. Think of it as accepting that innovation doesn’t just happen, but is a process. That’s what Cohen is saying about magic -- it doesn’t just happen, it’s a deliberate process. He goes one step further and lays out exactly what that process is:
1. The first thing to do in creating an illusion is to identify an effect that you want to achieve.
2. Next, challenge assumptions – the main assumption being challenged, of course, is that the effect can’t be done. In the process of challenging that assumption, you are forced to look at the possibilities.
3. Then you figure out a method.
4. And then, at the very last, you figure out the performance – that’s the part where it *looks* like magic.
Cohen said his next project involves “exploring a straitjacket routine” which of course leads to an exploration of how we restrain ourselves. Now that I know Andy Cohen knows his way around a metaphor, I can’t wait for that one!
Here's a little background on the Business Innovation Factory. It’s a nonprofit started by Saul Kaplan, as a way to “leverage Rhode Island's size and densely connected networks to create a real world laboratory for testing new ideas.” The model is collaborative, as part of Kaplan’s vision is to use Rhode Island as “the perfect breeding ground for innovation.” In particular, Kaplan saw a unique opportunity for Rhode Island to serve as a laboratory for collaborative innovation projects that encourage public/private sector partnership.
Kaplan set the tone at the beginning of BIF-2 by saying “Innovation is about delivering value – it’s not about invention.” BIF, said Kaplan, “is about experimentation, collaboration, getting outside of silos.” So it makes sense that the conference it itself was remarkably un-siloed. The goal was to bring before the audience at Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence a set of storytellers you might want at your dinner party, and then give them each just 15 minutes to tell their story. After each set of four storytellers, there was a 45-minute break for networking, further conversation, and collaboration.
It’s different, but it worked. The selection of speakers was so excellent that the lack of structure was actually OK. The audience, which included a number of people who went to the first BIF conference last year, seemed up to the challenge of using their brains to connect the dots, as opposed to being force-fed with power-bullet-points.
And there was a lot of – for lack of a better word, let me say “intellectual heft” to this conference. (Even though I missed some of the stories due to work deadlines and a lost-luggage crisis!) I tried to write one succinct IdeaFlow post that captured the conference, but succinctness failed me (or I failed it!), so I’m posting a series arranged by the themes I heard the storytellers converge around: Idea, Community, Passion and Intent, and Value.
What is an idea, anyway? What’s the unit of thought that constitutes an idea?
These are not an angels-dancing-on-a-pinhead questions – if you are going to systematically come up with ideas, you need to be able to identify them so that they can be evaluated and built on.
This was brought home to me recently during an online ideation project I was running when a client, a senior product manager at a Fortune 500 company, confessed to me that she could not see “where the ideas are.” Meanwhile, looking at the same output from consumers, I had identified more than 200 ideas, many with multiple builds!
According to BIF-2 speaker Rick Borovoy of nTag Interactive, a single idea is “the one thing it has to be in order not to be anything else.” This may sound simplistic, but it actually is true. Ideation is loose, dynamic, free-flowing (one hopes, anyway), but going back to the output to gather the ideas requires the application of logic. There may be five discrete ideas in one long, complex sentence. They have to be identified and separated so that you can figure out where to go with them.
Another idea-related theme – how does one come up with ideas? Innovation star Ivy Ross of Old Navy, formerly of Mattel, addressed this in her story, which was about how she created an environment for collaborative creativity among designers at Old Navy. This was tricky, because she was new and brought new designers with her. She and the new designers needed to be able to connect with the “old” designers. She described a process of fostering connections and relationships between people to build the necessary “atmosphere of freedom and trust and freedom” for innovation. One way she did this was to hire a documentary filmmaker to create short film “biographies” of each person talking about what was important to them everyone, to foster connection. She also brought in improv companies in to teach people how to build on each other’s ideas. So much of creative output, she said, depends on the quality and amount of information input, because creativity is “taking information, rearranging it, connecting it in new ways and spitting it back out” in creative ways. So people must be given information, context, and time to absorb that information.
One last idea-related theme involved making meaning from the intersection of ideas. This is – where meaning is. For Jane Fulton Suri of Ideo, meaning comes from a blend of rational and intuitive thinking. Suri is at heart a researcher, and since research gets such a bad rap (unfairly, in my opinion), she talked of wanting to redefine research for innovation.
I completely agree with her that research has an important role to play in innovation. Research after all is the gathering of information, or input, such as Ross talked about. Suri spoke of doing “research in a forward thinking way – going out into the world looking at reality and making sense of it” then letting that spark the imagination. The process here is “looking for patterns and themes that take us into looking at possibilities for the future.”
For Suri, too much research thinking is focused on rational thinking models, while too little is focused on intuition. This to me is not just another call to ditch focus groups and do more observational research and ethnography! My take on this is that for a disciplined thinker, the blend of rational thinking and intuitive thinking necessary to use research as a springboard for innovation is possible regardless of the source of the data input.
One of the strongest themes at BIF-2 was that of community -- building community and of things/ideas being built/created by communities. Community seems to be to be at the same time too big and not big enough of a word to describe what’s been called “customer co-creation,” “community marketing,” “wisdom of crowds” and “crowdsourcing.” To unpack this theme of “community,” I’ll talk about some of the specific BIF-2 storytellers.
Tim Westergren talked of creating Pandora.com as an interface to connect musicians and listeners, thus creating a community. Part of the greatness of Pandora, though, is that music is always being suggested by the community to the end of bettering the mix of the individual “stations,” and then once it’s in the Pandora database, it’s available for recommendation to others in the community. There are also community stations – BIF-2 had one, and it would have been cool for the facility to have played it during the networking/discussion times.
Pandora.com is definitely about service, and Jeanneane Rae of Peer Insight talked about the customer-focus of the service innovation movement. Service is “about experience not product, which is a customer-focused kind of thinking. ….When you buy a service you buy a whole experience – so it must be customer centric.”
Diane Hessan of Communispace talked of creating online marketing communities as a way of understanding the people who buy your product, a way of walking in their shoes rather than assuming you know what they want. There are many ways to do this, but Communispace’s privately built custom communities are probably the most intimate way a company can connect to its customers in real time. If the community is specifically for a company, there’s great opportunity for these customers to share their opinions, thoughts, and ideas in any number of ways that could benefit the company *and* the customers themselves.
An example of how this would work came from Alice Wilder of Think-It-Ink-It, who talked about her work with the children’s TV show “Blue’s Clues”. She said “When you’re making a product, you need to ask your consumer what they think about your product as you make it.” This approach was more about shaping the product in progress – which requires a trusting and somewhat dynamic, not static, relationship between company and its community.
Author Bill Taylor, a co-founder of Fast Company, spoke of “tapping into the brainpower of your customers” by “establishing a platform in which everyone else does the work (!) He called this an “architecture of participation” whose driving question would be “what kind of social system can I create that will bring more smart people into my organization to contribute ideas?” Another driving question he mentioned – “Am I the kind of person that other smart people want to rally around and work with?” And, if the answer to that is “no!” I suppose the next question might be “In what ways might I become the kind of person that other smart people want to rally around and work with?” !!
Passion was the focus of many BIF-2 storytellers. Mark Hellendrung of Narragansett Beer: “Innovate around something you are passionate about,” which he did by resurrecting the old Narragansett Beer brand.
Liz Lerman of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange: “Desperation is an innovation driver…” And of course, desperation is a form of passion.
Mary Pat Ryan of Sirius Radio: “What helps track into the passion for satellite radio is peoples’ passion for music.”
Robert Ballard of the Mystic Aquarium spoke of his passion for the bottom of the ocean. He also talked of the idea-intersection -- Creativity comes out of the difficulty of leaving your native area. You are a land creature trying to explore the sea. How to make that workable? Recreate it as an out-of-body experience by creating a way to explore it electronically.
Along the same lines of turning a problem about which you are passionate into an opportunity, Randy Antik of SWAT Team Partners spoke about aiming high and keeping your focus on your passions because “innovation is the offensive team” (which prompted the observation that perhaps the defensive team the lawyers! ). In focusing on your passions, Antik said you should “keep track of what the actual problems is, and change approaches if one doesn’t work. Use your skills and experience to bring your passions alive.”
Peter Durand of Alphachimp: “Most innovation happens when you’re really, really irritated, and you’re bitching and moaning to your friends.”
Larry Keeley of Doblin told a story of innovating with intent, perhaps even a point of view, which to me can be a focused passion. He talked of innovation in Helsinki around outdoor lighting, critical in a city that’s in the dark so much of the time. “Point of view connects things,” he said. What’s required is not just a general interest in innovation, but actual preferences and intent.
He also said, “We always overestimate the amount of change that will happen in the short run and underestimate the amount of change that will happen in the long run.” I have heard a similar saying before – “Nothing changes everything.” The relation of this quote to the notion of intent seems to be that intent and purpose carries us through the short run, when it doesn’t look like enough is changing, and keeps us focused in the long run, when things change more than we ever envisioned they could.
Saul Kaplan of BIF started the first day off with this comment: “Innovation is about value, not about invention.” Several storytellers echoed this theme.
Ivy Ross of Old Navy, formerly Mattel, talked of having to live in two worlds – in the creative world and the corporate world. “You must get results, but how you get the job done can be creative.” After she self-financed an unusual way to improve creativity in her designers, she measured that their creativity increased 18% – and then she requested a reimbursement for her personal expense. “You have to prove yourself,” she said.
Peter Durand of Alphachimp was the last speaker of the last day. He had spent most of the conference doing graphic facilitation of the sessions, offered the story of his own innovation, which he unveiled right then. This innovation is a website on which he can place his graphic facilitations of events so they can be searched, thus adding value to events. http://alphachimp.missinglink.biz/business-innovation-factory/bif-2
Quickly jumping in to Renee's space to point readers to coverage of the many "stories of innovation" being shared at BIF-2 by the likes of Dean Kamen, Bob Ballard and a few dozen others. With reporting and analysis from Renee, Allen Tear, Jeff De Cagna, Steve Hardy, Chris Flanagan, and Jeffrey Phillips.
Also be sure to catch Jeff's podcast interviews with four of the speakers: Tim Westergren of Pandora.com; Larry Keeley of Doblin Group; Jane Fulton Suri of Ideo nd Jeneanne Rae of Peer Insight.
Innovation Convergence, whose theme this year is Innovation Immersion, is in just two weeks! And it's a new day for this conference -- for the last several years it has been in Minneapolis in September. This year, San Diego during October 16 to 18.
As usual, Innovation Network founder Joyce Wycoff has pulled together an impressive list of events, including the usual pre-conference symposia and workshops, there are 4 Innovation Labs, a 2-part Innovation FastStart workshop, and two deep conversations around Innovating Innovation. Says Joyce, "These sessions provide an opportunity for you to vary your conference experience and take a deep dive into one or more areas of interest."
Conference speakers include author Dan Pink, Fast Company founder Alan Webber, and Jeneanne M. Rae, as well as innovators from Best Buy, Cargill, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Honeywell, Genentech, Wells Fargo, Wachovia, Fed Ex, Gucci, Pitney Bowes, Chevron, Kimberley-Clark, and General Motors.
I am not speaking this year, but I will be attending the conference and hope to be blogging, if not real-time, then daily. Hope to see you there!
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is 
by Andy Cohen turned out to be of the irresistible sort. 
