In response to yesterday's post about innovative non-profit Community Voice Mail (CVM), I got a comment from their new marketing/PR person Karma Martell that I want to quote here, to call to your attention:
"Thanks to a last-minute contribution from the Cisco Foundation and connectivity from SBS, CVM will be on the front lines distributing their voice mail service to those in need in DFW and other cities that now host refugees. This will be done in cooperation with the Red Cross. There will be an official announcement shortly.
It is more crucial than ever that people contribute to CVM so that they can expand their reach to more homeless people and disaster victims. Community Voice Mail has an animation meant to go viral, that links to the Amazon donation site. It explains their service and helps shatter the stereotypes of homelessness and who it can affect (though hurricane Katrina has done a pretty good job of that lately). The animation does not go into CVM's part in the Katrina outreach as that is brand new information. I encourage people to post the link to the animation and email it to all those who are sensitive to the issues of homelessness in general and who want to help Katrina evacuees."
Yesterday I posted about Paul Schumann's Innovation Commons project. Paul gave me permission to post the link to the survey he has up, asking people to rate the values of an innovation commons. It's an interesting survey, and its result should be a picture of the kinds of values that would be present in the innovation commons (see the previous post for a definition of innovation commons). I'll share the results here, whenever they are available.
My friend Paul Schumann has for some time now been trying to put together principles for an "innovation commons," which he defines this way: "An innovation commons is a space (physical or virtual) that enables innovation through the mutual and interdependent creativity of its members. It has the following characteristics:
* Open system (bounded)
* Everyone contributes
* Everyone can use the results
* Members who don’t contribute are excluded
* Fluid & flexible
* An abundant resource system
Other names that people have used to describe this type of system are open source, open innovation, democratic innovation, inclusive innovation, peer to peer (P2P), smart mobs and free agent collaboration."
Paul notes that some attempts to create an innovation commons have succeeded and some have failed. His project is to try to find out what are principles of a successful innovation commons?
The discussion about this is taking place via a blog. There's also a newsletter. And a survey that's open now. You can find out more about it here.
I just finished taking the survey, and I think that the fewer "principles" and rules, the better. I'd love it if we could get down to the most basic. Be flexible, responsible, and honorable. Maybe there are more, but those three say a lot.
Couple of weeks ago, David Pollard posted on why it's hard to sell innovation services.....I recommend you read the whole thing, because whether you are buying or selling innovation, you can gain insight from this post.
What struck me too was that one of the reasons he mentioned completely dovetailed with some thinking I've been doing for several weeks now on how mental clutter affects creativity and innovation. I'm talking about how difficult it is to come up with new ideas when your mind is just plain stuffed full of thoughts and emotions and plans and to-do-lists.
Last month I went on a week's vacation, something I've rarely managed to do over the years. Instead, I had perfected the concept of the three-day weekend, often checking work email while gone. I left for this trip stressed and fatigued and feeling as though I probably hadn't had an original idea in months. I had a mind full of emotional baggage I needed to let go of, around things that had happened with projects that were over and done with. I took my laptop with me because I couldn't bring myself to leave it home.
But while I was gone, I never even booted it up, except to download photos from my digital camera. I didn't check email, didn't blog, didn't call the office. By the fourth day of vacation I was more energetic, had let go of emotional baggage, and was having idea serendipity -- odd, random ideas about things that I had been working on both personally and at work.
Obviously, this is not a new concept. It's one reason people take longer vacations and sabbaticals. But consider the waste of inovation potential if an entire *company* gets into the state I was in when I left for vacation.
So -- here's the connection to Pollard's post: He says one reason innovation is hard to sell is because "it requires understanding of how and why the market has moved on without you." There is so much in this one statement. Pollard is saying that being open for innovation requires an understanding that whatever you have been doing in the past has failed. And, I would add, it also requires that you manage to let go of the emotions generated by this failure.
Letting go is not often encouraged in our professional lives. We're rewarded for hanging on, staying with something, seeing it through. If we make a mistake and we are not suitably and demonstrably upset over it, we run the risk of being seen as not taking things seriously enough.
Perhaps, in order to be truly open to innovation ("apprentice mind" again?!), we have to be willing to let go of a lot of things. We have to be willing to clear enough of what's on our minds to create an open space for new ideas, and to recognize them when others bring them to us.
Great post over on Heads Up on Organizational Innovation regarding "The Cost of Not Innovating"....which author Ruth Ann Hattori describes as "what happens when you don't innovate but your competition does?" and "the estimated dollar value your competitors have gained and that you have failed to capture through your own innovation efforts."
Sounds simple, but here's why it's important, according to Hattori: "A simple ROI can never truly measure innovation because it does not account for the lost opportunities, such as AT&T missing the cell phone, Kodak missing the digital camera, and the radio companies that blinked while Sony brought the Walkman to market."
I've been to lot of conferences and read lots of articles where formulas for innovation ROI have been presented, but this is the first time I've seen it approached this way. And it makes perfect sense.
My first impression is that you could only convince a company of this in hindsight, or if you were trying to convince them in general to be more innovative. What would be great is if you could find a way to convince a company of this *before* the opportunity was lost and not after.
How would you frame the case for spending the money to innovate using this concept *before* the fact and not after? One way would be to determine customer pain points that your industry could address, identify ways of addressing them, and then do competitive intelligence and SWOT analysis on all of your competitors (and potential competitors). And you'd have no way of researching companies and people flying under your radar. By the time you found out if a potential competitor was in the process of launching a product that would be a threat, you'd be too far behind.
So maybe it's better to use the concept of the cost of not innovating as a general inducement to pick up the innovation pace. In any case, Hattori is looking for real-life examples of the cost of not innovating -- if you have any, add them to the post comments.
The webcast of the National Innovation Initiative Summit, held Dec. 15, 2004, has finally been archived. View it here. I've had a chance now to read the full report (download .PDF here), and it's much, much better than I expected. It's thoughtful and well-written, in a way that I would not have expected from a committee, especially not a government-sponsored one!
The news coverage on this has been paltry so far, mostly focused on the report's recommendations about increasing federal funding of high-risk R&D projects and overhauling the K-12 education system to encourage innovation.
Yet there is much more here. Start with the NII's working definition of innovation: "The intersection of invention and insight, leading to the creation of social and economic value." If all that was to come out of this project was a recommendation for greater R&D tech spending, there wouldn't be any need to begin with as broad a definition as this.
As the definition suggests, this report explores how America has practiced innovation in the past, suggests that innovation has been the driver for the rise of the American economy, explores the recent major shifts in "where, how and why" innovation occurs, and offers recommendations for how we can "focus as a society on what we do best [innovate]. "
It's probably not surprising that I would find this idea -- that innovation has been what drives America -- fascinating, considering my interest in what drives innovation itself. I'll spend part of January discussing this report in more detail.
Meanwhile, Happy New Year to everyone!
The presentation of the National Innovation Agenda will be the main focus of the National Innovation Initiative Summit today in Washington, D.C. The event is to be webcast live from approximately 8:30 am to 2 pm ET at www.compete.org. Presumably (hopefully!) the webcast will be archived as well.
I didn't even realize there was such a thing as the National Innovation Initivative until I read Business Week's Oct. 11 "Innovation Economy" special issue. Apparently this has been a year-long effort headed by IBM's Sam Palmisano and G. Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Tech, the goal of which was to come up with a National Innovation Agenda. The presentation of that agenda is the focus of today's meeting.
In case you want to tune in but can't devote your whole day to this, I've included the agenda below. I'll be following up here in IdeaFlow over the next few days.
Agenda
December 15, 2004
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center Amphitheater
1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW – Washington, DC 20004
All times ET
7:15 – 8:00 am:
Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:15 am:
Welcome -- Deborah L. Wince-Smith, President, Council on Competitiveness
Introduction of National Innovation Initiative Leadership -- F. Duane Ackerman, Chairman, Council on Competitiveness, Chairman and CEO, BellSouth Corporation
8:30 am:
Presentation of National Innovation Agenda -- G. Wayne Clough, President, Georgia Institute of Technology and Co-chair, National Innovation Initiative, and Samuel J. Palmisano, Chairman and CEO, IBM Corporation, and Co-chair, National Innovation Initiative
9:00 am:
Discussion -- Thriving in a World of Challenge and Change
Discussion Leader: Susan Dentzer, The NewsHour; participants, Molly Corbett Broad, President, University of North Carolina; Michael J. Burns, Chairman, President and CEO, Dana Corporation; Sheryl Handler, CEO, Ab Initio; The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson, President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Vikram Pandit, President and COO, Institutional Securities and Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley; The Honorable Mark Warner, Governor, Virginia
10:15 am:
Break and Refreshments
10:45 am:
Discussion -- Imagining America’s Future
Discussion Leader: Charles M. Vest, President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; participants, F. Duane Ackerman, Chairman and CEO, BellSouth Corporation; Mary Sue Coleman, President, University of Michigan; Denis A. Cortese, President and CEO, Mayo Clinic; W.J. Sanders III, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.; G. Richard Wagoner, Jr., Chairman and CEO, General Motors Corporation
12:00 pm:
Discussion -- Mobilizing for Success in the 21st Century
Discussion Leader: Deborah L. Wince Smith; participants, The Honorable Norman R. Augustine, Retired Chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin Corporation, and Co-chair, National Innovation Initiative Advisory Committee; William R. Brody, President, Johns Hopkins University, and Co-chair, National Innovation Initiative Advisory Committee; The Honorable John Engler, President, National Association of Manufacturers; The Honorable Don Manzullo, U.S. House of Representatives; The Honorable C. Paul Robinson, President, Sandia National Laboratories; The Honorable Mitt Romney, Governor, Massachusetts
1:00 pm:
Next Steps: Implementing the Innovation Agenda -- F. Duane Ackerman, Deborah L. Wince Smith, G. Wayne Clough, Samuel J. Palmisano
1:15 pm:
Adjourn
The Global Innovation Study Team (GIST) has emerged from months of QuickPlace collaboration with a 6-minute PowerPoint presentation titled “Why Innovation?”
The presentation includes summaries from several recent studies on innovation, as well as an assortment of quotes and reasons why innovation is critical.
Why "Why Innovation?" It's easy to gather articles on the importance of innovation -- they are multiplying like mushrooms after a thunderstorm. What's perhaps harder to find is examples within your own company of management support for innovation. There is more innovation “talk” than “walk.” Hopefully "Why Innovation?" wlll be a useful tool to help you garner support for innovation within your organization.
Please feel free to use "Why Innovation?" within your organizations or community groups. And share it. The Global Innovation Study Team only asks that you share the presentation within your network and not place it on the web for public download. So, if you'd like a copy, email me: renee -at- ideaflow.com.
Now for something completely different: According to Teresa Riordan, author of Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations that Have Made Us Beautiful, invention is "a matrix, a zeitgeist phenomenon" not mothered by necessity but by luxury. NYT reviewer Penelope Green says that Riordan describes invention as "a great bubbling up of similar ideas at the same time, born from a culture of abundance, not scarcity."
And that is indeed a fascinating reminder that how invention is characterized depends quite a bit on what inventions are being looked at. If you're looking at light bulbs and automobiles, maybe you would think of invention as born of necessity. However, if you are looking at brassieres and nail polish, the necessity metaphor begins to break down.
If you need more proof that necessity isn't always the mother of invention, Riordan points out that "vibrators were the fifth electrical device introduced in the household, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster, and 10 years before the vacuum and the iron."
Through some kind of serendipity here lately I've come across several articles/blog posts that take a critical look at the cultural mandate that copying is not only bad, it's bad innovation. Not so, say these writers.
Malcolm Gladwell had a fascinating piece in the Nov. 22 New Yorker detailing his experience at having one of his articles plagiarized by playwright Briony Lavery in her Broadway play "Frozen." After talking with Lavery and reading Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, Gladwell ends up coming down against what he calls the "plagiarism fundamentalists":
"The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer's words have a virgin birth and an eternal life. I suppose I could get upset about what happened to my words. I could also simply acknowledge that I had a good, long run with that line--and let it go."
"If half the challenge of innovation is communicating its value and someone else is always innovating, then building creative teams may not be nearly as efficient as building widely cast, open-minded sifting technologies to scour the universe for innovation hotspots and blueprinting those technologies for use at home. As Diamond says, complex innovations are best borrowed, not built. Because technology begets technology, the value of diffusion often exceeds the value of original invention."
"All businesses are threatened by innovation. How do we respond to it? By seeing innovation as unfair competition and wasting resources in legal battles that inevitably fail? Or by accepting that the world changes and then deciding we are best served by finding our own innovations?"
Business Week is devoting its entire Oct. 11 issue -- its 75th anniversary issue – to the “Innovation Economy.” There’s a *lot* of stuff here, covering pretty much the entire space – R&D, technology, copyright, the management of innovation, global innovation, and so forth. All of it is accessible free online (you go, Business Week!).
My take overall is that this is well-done, though when you read the articles carefully there’s still more of a focus on innovation-as-new-products-and-new-technologies and not as much on innovation throughout the company (see the Doblin Group's 10 Types of Innovation for more on this theme).
Here are the articles I found the most thought-provoking:
An examination of innovation as a management process, though still more focused on the innovation of product and service offerings. Quotes Andrew Hargadon, Henry Chesbrough, and Clayton Christensen, each of whom has seen a lot of IdeaFlow pixels devoted to their work.
This article discusses the “old” idea of innovation -- constant experimentation, willingness to fail, and setting big goals – as well as some of the new ideas -- opening company procedures and research to the outside, and tapping customers’ expertise in product and service development.
One great quote: “Innovation nowadays is more like improvisation in jazz than playing out a score that’s already written,” Karl Ronn, vice president o P&G’s home-care division.
How to Sharpen the Innovative Edge
Here’s a quote from this commentary by Michael J. Mandel:
“Part of the difficulty in identifying the right policy is that the innovation economy has many moving parts. The government, universities, big companies, small startups, venture-capital firms, stock market investors -- each has a distinct role. And innovation has gone global, bringing in even more players.There is one guidepost amid the confusing trends: the enormous and surprising success of the American innovation machine in recent years. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, virtually all economic forecasters wrote off the U.S. as a mature, slow-growth laggard that eventually would be passed by more vibrant economies in Europe and Japan. Yet when the Internet revolution arrived, it was U.S. entrepreneurs who proved far more nimble and adept in converting ideas into products. The result was a productivity boom that is still barreling forward.”
Again, there’s more of a focus here on innovation of new products and service offerings than company-wide innovation. Here’s Mandel’s four-point plan for how governments and decision-makers can spur innovation:
1. Invest for the future
2. Take advantage of the global economy
3. Provide the right protection for IP (the “right” protection being that which provides a “proper balance between too much and not enough protection of IP” – something we all dream of, yet no one yet has figured out how to accomplish)
4. Emphasize innovation as a high priority (politically, though you could also say this needs to happen in businesses and universities as well)
Industry and Academia Weigh In
This one features an interview with Sam Palmisano of IBM and Wayne Clough of Georgia Tech, who are heading up something called the “National Innovation Initiative,” which I was not aware of. The online interview is longer than what’s available in print. I was more interested in the NII itself, though, and if you are too, you can find out more about it here.
Scouring the Planet for Brainiacs
This one’s all about global cooperation and innovation networks. "The fallacy of innovation was that it was all about spending on R&D or information technology," says Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute. "Instead, it has more to do with execution and getting products out better and faster."
Again, too much of a focus on product innovation, but it's a good discussion on innovation networks, about which much has been written lately.
Collaborative Innovation and Europe
Suggests that Europe’s historical ability to conduct business across borders will help the European Union ratchet up its innovation efforts.
In response to this post on execution and strategy, Andy VanGundy writes:
For me, ideation and execution need to be driven by strategy which stems from visions with buy-in. A colleague and I have been preparing for an ideation session with a large financial services firm on the East Coast. We start out with a list of questions we have key managers respond to. I then synthesize all of those and distill them into a short list of potential challenge statements for the client to choose from. (In this case I started with 65 statements and am now creating affinity groups.) We call this a Q-Bank. After all of these, a decision is made on what challenges to use for ideation.My point is saying all of this is that if the front-end is attended to, then the back-end (implementation) is likely to be more successful since you increase the odds of solving the "right" problem correctly. (Ian Mitroff wrote that it is better to solve the "right" problem incorrectly than the wrong problem correctly.) In my experience, if this front end immersion is not done, then ideation and implementation suffer and the ideation session can turn into a major discussion on what the "real" problem is--something that should have been done before.
The thorniest problem in all of innovation seems to be determining customer's unmet needs. Essentially, that is a process of trying to first find out what you don't know you don't know, then find a solution for that.
Happy Fall!! Over the summer, I watched my firstborn graduate from high school and then sent her off to college on the other side of the country. And I got married. Amidst this tide of change, IdeaFlow got very quiet. Hopefully the major changes are over – and the quiet, too!
On Monday I returned to my desk after a meet-the-new-in-laws trip and found in my email in-box this quote from the daily Fast Company “Fast Impressions” email:
"Companies that rely too heavily on creativity flame out." — Howard Anderson, Founder, Yankee Group
Well, that got my attention. Not the least because it perfectly describes a new direction I’d like to take IdeaFlow over the next few months. That direction is away from creativity and idea generation in and of themselves and toward a discussion of innovation as it drives strategy and execution, and as it also helps develop strategy and execution.
I went to the Fast Company article the quote came from -- If He’s So Smart…Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation -- and took a look. The article spends a fair amount of time on not-new news regarding Apple’s business practices and other innovative business failures, such as Xerox PARC. I’m not interested in Apple-bashing or rehashing, but what I did get interested in was the rest of Howard Anderson’s quote from above. The whole thing says:
"Companies that rely too heavily on creativity flame out. In many ways, execution is more important. Apple is innovative, but Dell executes."
What this says to me is that creativity and innovation per se are not always that important. The innovation process must start further back – uncovering unmet customer needs and figuring out how to meet them. And figuring out what will meet these unmet needs is more of a challenge than it looks. If a company comes up with a new product to meet a consumer need, and it turns out that what will best meet that need is some kind of customer service process innovation instead, then clearly that company is barking up the wrong innovation tree.
This, to me, is the strategy and execution issue with innovation. Knowing what to do, then figuring out the best way to do it.
Here’s some more interesting reading on the subject of innovation strategy and execution:
NEW! Please take the survey on trust and innovation.
Our Global Innovation Study Group (GIST) continues on apace, with a report deadline in November. I will of course make the report available here at IdeaFlow.
One of the biggest issues regarding innovation that we are discussing is trust. At the beginning of this post I placed a link to a survey you are invited to take. Because this survey focuses on organizational innovation, please only respond if you are in an organization with at least 10 employees. Thanks much!!
Here's more specific information about the survey from the GIST guru, Joyce Wycoff:
Most of us involved in innovation believe that "trust" is necessary for ongoing, significant innovation efforts. While it is easy to assume that trust is needed, it is not so easy to understand exactly what that means. In pursuing innovation in your organizations, you have probably experienced many situations where trust -- between colleagues or between individuals and their management or at the organzational level -- was a factor in behavior or results.
Unlike the hard data that can be captured about the impact of a new product development process, the impact of trust (or lack thereof) tends to be intuitive, perceived and captured anecdotally. In an endeavor to gain a sense of the social agreement or collective perception about the importance of trust, we have created a survey which we would like for you to respond to at the link shown above.
We believe your views as practitioners of innovation will be particularly enlightening in understanding this important but somewhat fuzzy subject.
Thanks again for your assistance.
Joyce Wycoff, Ruth Ann Hattori, Charlie Prather, Kathie Thomas,
InnovationNetwork and the Global Innovation Study Group (G.I.S.T.)
I'm very pleased to have been asked by Joyce Wycoff to co-sponsor Innovation 2004, a new blog-based collaborative innovation project also sponsored by Joyce's Innovation Network. Joyce started her blogging life here on IdeaFlow and the blog for Innovation 2004 is the 10th blog she's launched since the start of 2004!! I feel like a proud blog mama!!
Here's some info about the new project, whose blog home is at http://thinksmart.typepad.com/innovation_2004:
Do you know the “fundamentals” of innovation -- those systems, culture traits and activities that are essential to the success of any innovation initiative?The past two years have seen an explosion of information about innovation -- new models, new software systems, new terminology. We're in some jeopardy of being sunk by all this, sometimes seemingly contradictory, information before we can actually put it into practice.
Innovation2004 -- a new, collaborative learning process initiated by the InnovationNetwork and co-sponsored by other organizations in the field of innovation, has taken on the challenge of articulating the critical fundamentals of innovation. This multidisciplinary and international study will focus on defining terms, determining “fundamental practices”, identifying leading success indicators, and outlining the critical process phases of innovation and innovation projects.
If you would like to participate in this learning project, send an email to mailto:innovation2004@thinksmart.com.
Innovation 2004: http://thinksmart.typepad.com/innovation_2004
Innovation Network: http://thinksmart.com
Last year I helped judge the first Thunderbird Global Innovation Challenge. Results indicate it was a success: event sponsors are advancing some of the concepts that they received from last year's competition; BYU has developed an innovation course as part of their curriculum, making it mandatory for all students in the class to participate in the Innovation Challenge; and Dial, a 2003 sponsor, now hosts their own competition modeled on the Innovation Challenge.
The organizers are now looking for Innovation Challenge sponsors for the 2004 competition. This would be a very cool opportunity for innovative companies, because the sponsors actually get to pose the problem the MBA students will work on solving. So you end up with lots of ideas from top MBA students, and a look at the kind of work they can do.
This year the competition is expanding into 10 more countries; increasing the amount of participating teams; and shortening the new product plan submission from 9 pages to one page.
The sponsor deadline is July 2, 2004. If you’re interested, take a look at the Sponsorship Proposal: http://www.innovationchallenge.net/proposal/Innovation%20Challenge%20Sponsorship%20Proposal_files/frame.htm.
Info on the Innovation Challenge itself is here: http://www.innovationchallenge.net/
What keeps a company from following through on its new product ideas? Yesterday I saw first-hand how the lack of a defined innovation process, or a defined new product development process, holds up the development of new ideas into new product concepts.
We were having a post-ideation session debrief meeting with a client for whom we've been working, and I heard one of our clients say, "We've had lots of ideas, but never got to concept stage with them." Another corrected, "We concepted the ideas, but we never tested them and moved forward with them."
How does a company decide to move forward with a new product concept? Whatever they do, there must be an internal evaluation period, and hopefully some market research testing and forecasting. Obviously companies that have a defined process for doing these things definitely have the edge over companies that have to make it up from scratch every single time.
Listening to my clients talking yesterday made me realize that just trying to keep the momentum going when you don't have a process in place must be incredibly difficult. And our client was not a small company. They are not a company that routinely introduces new products, but they'd like to be. In order to get there, they need to get some processes in place. That's not what we do for clients, but it's much easier to work with clients who do already have this framework in place.
Last month a segment of the "World Business Review" program featuring my company's Innovation Services group (my team!) started airing on cable channels and business-school networks. This segment will also air within the next few months on some United Airlines flights.
This link -- http://www.decisionanalyst.com/Services/innovation.asp -- will take you to a page from which you can access a video clip of the segment, a written transcript of the segment, and a list of the airdates and times. For those who just want to cut to the chase, this link -- http://www.decisionanalyst.com/Downloads/Innovation.wmv -- goes directly to the 4-minute video clip. It's a 41.5 MB download. And yes, I'm on it. Let the teasing commence!
Heard at the Braintrust conference:
Q. How many innovators does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It doesn't matter - the light bulb has to want to change before any change can occur!
I posted recently on Florida's assertion that "policies that operate to the interests of the creative class" are in the economic interests of the rest of the nation as well. Here's an article by Stepen Malanga that calls into question Florida's entire economic thesis that in order to attract highly innovative, high-growth businesses and the "creative class" that typically staffs such businesses, cities must put their emphasis -- and tax dollars -- into creating the kind of atmosphere in which the creative class wants to live, which according to Florida includes a vibrant live-music scene, recreational amenities, and a social climate that celebrates diversity.
Malanga essentially says Florida is the emperor with no clothes: His most creative-class-friendly cities in fact underperform the American economy and actually don't do a very good job of attracting or keeping residents, unless you only count the Internet boom years.
The main issue here is a classic chicken or egg argument -- which came first, the creative economy companies and workers, or the diverse, socially liberal, rock-and-roll atmosphere? Says Malanga:
Not only does [Florida] believe that marginal attractions like an idiosyncratic arts scene can build economic power, but he thinks that government officials and policymakers like himself can figure out how to produce those things artificially. He doesn’t seem to recognize that the cultural attributes of the cities he most admires [like San Francisco and Austin] are not a product of government planning but have been a spontaneous development, financed by private-sector wealth.
Case in point: Having followed Austin politics and culture for some years, I know that the now-city-council-approved slogan "Keep Austin Weird" wasn't something the city council started -- it was a campaign launched by a few business leaders in South Austin in an effort to keep chain retail from driving out more offbeat local businesses. In Austin, the "offbeat culture" came first. It only makes sense that the city would co-opt "Keep Austin Weird" (much to the dismay of the people who actually started it) as they cast about for ways to stem the post-crash bleeding. That was an effort to identify the things that seemed to have worked for Austin and build on those things.
Does this mean that a "Keep Omaha Weird" campaign would bring lots of innovative, high-tech businesses to Omaha? According to Malanga, Omaha would have had to have been wierd in the first place for that to work. Or it would have to become wierd spontaneously and not by city coucil mandate (and government funding).
Sandy McMurray of Corante’s new Apple Matters blog pointed to an interview with HBS professor David Yoffie on Apple’s “hit product” innovation strategy, and Sandy says, “ 'To use a baseball metaphor, Steve Jobs manages a team that is always swinging for the fences. This strategy relies on home runs to win. If the competition hits enough singles and doubles -- or Steve's team strikes out too often -- the memorable home runs won't matter much. (The game is fun to watch though.)' "
I read the whole interview and what struck me was how dated the Apple approach to innovation seems these days. Walloping every ball hoping for home runs makes for better stories than business successes. Today’s trend is to process-ize innovation. And that approach is about the opposite of the “take-me-out-to-the-ballgame” approach Sandy describes. (Another appropriate metaphor I’ve already quoted before for Apple’s approach: innovation-as-religion.)
I was especially struck by the difference between Yoffie’s comments on Apple and a white paper I just read, Innovating For Cash: Lessons From The Handset Wars, which appears to be part of a strategy by Boston Consulting Group to position themselves as the consultants to which companies should turn to manage the “innovation-to-cash” process (on subsequent reference they refer to this as the “ITC process,” so they’re pretty serious about it).
I’m not making fun of this – my company’s business model is based on the innovation-as-process concept, as well – but doesn’t it seem odd that a company that truly represents the spirit of innovation as Apple does would be so behind the curve on managing their innovation processes? That’s just not the way they play the game.
Social networking and innovation is the subject of a Stanford Business School study that says "disparate information and its transmission are keys to innovation." Study author Martin Ruef says weak ties "allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources...." His research shows that "entrepreneurs who spend more time with a diverse network of strong and weak ties...are three times more likely to innovate than entrepreneurs stuck within a uniform network."
You may recall I posted before about how creative people have brains that are more open to outside stimuli (and are able to handle it, otherwise they would be creative but driven insane by the stimuli). So I'm not surprised to see this information.
I'm also reminded of a conversation I had with Andrew Hargadon, author of How Breakthroughs Happen. Hargadon calls 'innovation...a phenomenon of networks connected by 'technology brokers' - people or organizations that link isolated groups and industries to integrate previously unrelated viewpoints and technologies to resolve new problems."
It makes sense that innovative, entrepreneurial people would be those who see the value of weak social ties as a means of gathering, evaluating and sorting information about the world. This information, these social connections generate the stuff out of which inventive recombination happens.
Is there a social networking site out there yet that really taps into this? I've done Ryze, been invited to Friendster, been invited to orkut...but I haven't studied any of them all that closely. It would be interesting to see if there are specific features on any of these sites that make it possible for this kind of weak-tie networking, without pushing the social tie into a more explicit strong tie that's not as useful for entrepreneurship and innovation.
I agree with Renee’s point that innovation is a mindset and a process. As a matter of fact, I think it’s one of the reasons this field is so interesting … and challenging. It requires a holding of the tensionbetween two opposites in several ways … we have to be committed to measuring results while also understanding that innovation, by definition, means doing something new that could fail and, if it’s new enough, has an outcome that probably cannot be accurately predicted. It means being able to hold the integrity of the entire system while exploring the pieces and parts. It requires high touch as much as high tech and the engagement of the imagination and possibility thinking as much as it does the practical, analytical evaluation of concepts.
Chuck Frey of the Innovation Tools blog has joined in the discussion of whether innovation is a process or a religion, or both. He tossed a good question into the conversation (emphasis mine):
The former approach [innovation as religion] is typified by Apple Computer, which seems to worship product innovation above all else (at the expense of bottom-line margins), while the latter approach [innovation as process] is typified by Dell Computer, which has elevated business process innovation to almost an art form. It's very hard, however, to find companies that embrace both kinds of thinking about innovation. 3M, perhaps? Disney?
Anybody have any ideas?
While you're thinking, I want to point out that the "religion of innovation" does not only mean product innovation, nor does the "process of innovation" only mean business process innovation. The distinction I had in mind (and what I think John meant when he originally said this) was more along the lines of what Joyce clarified: innovation as a mindset (that would be the religion) vs. innovation as a predictable, measurable process. A company could approach business processes with an innovative-religion mindset, and could take an innovation-process approach to new products.
That said, to answer Chuck's question, I think Southwest Airlines is a good example of a company that approaches innovation as both a religion and a process. The company culture has been steeped in innovation from its inception as a map on a cocktail napkin. Southwest has also applied a process approach to its innovations in business processes and new products (in this case, think of new routes and new cities served as "new products").
Courtesy of Hylton:
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