About this Author
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.
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April 25, 2007
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Tomorrow I am participating in the first-ever Innovation Bloggers Virtual Forum, a discussion on the current state of innovation thinking and practice, as well as the emerging trends that will shape the future of innovation. I will be part of a roundtable panel of people considered (by some, anyway!) to be the Web’s top innovation bloggers.
The event was conceived and is being put on by the fabulous Jeff DeCagna who blogs at Principled Innovation. He promises to at least try to podcast it, but if you are interested, you should dial in.
If you have time and are curious, feel free to dial in. And feel free to send this information to anyone you would like.
Here is the lineup with links to all the blogs. Conference number information is below that.
Morning Forum Roundtable (10 am CST)
Mark Brady, Fouroboros
Renee Hopkins Callahan, IdeaFlow
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World
Jim Todhunter, Innovating to Win
Afternoon Forum Roundtable (1 pm CST)
Dominic Basulto, Endless Innovation
Sanjay Dalal, Creativity And Innovation Driving Business
Mark McGuinness, Wishful Thinking
Joyce Wycoff, Heads Up! on Organizational Innovation
Dial-in information:
In the US call 1-605-475-8500 (long distance costs apply)
Enter Conference Room Number 5877560
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Innovation, General
March 3, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
In advance of Sunday night's Academy Awards ceremony -- and for everyone who's ever sat through film credits and wondered what the heck a group is -- here's a great piece from NPR's Morning Edition on sound mixers and grips. Excerpt: "The late actor George C. Scott once told an interviewer that if he were ever stranded on a desert island there would be three things he'd need to have: food, shelter -- and a grip."
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Collaborative Creativity | Creativity | Innovation, General
February 20, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Creativity | In the box innovation | Innovation, General
January 26, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Part 3 of a four-part series from the paper Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places, An Argument for Staying in the Box, by Gwen Smith Ishmael and Renee Hopkins Callahan
Why Staying In The Box Is A Good Thing
Although staying in the box is not a widely used approach, it certainly is a highly respected one. One of the world’s leading experts on creative thinking had this to say about idea generation as many of us might define it:
“There are far too many practitioners out there who believe that creativity is just brainstorming and being free to suggest crazy ideas. Creative thinking is different from normal thinking. It is not just normal thinking that is more free.
“...If we suspend judgment, feel innocent and childlike, and try to use the right side of the brain, should we not then be creative? We will certainly be more creative than before, but not very much more. We will be able to use our natural creativity. Unfortunately, natural creativity is not very powerful.
“It is not enough to be innocent and uninhibited and to have a creative attitude. The normal behavior of the brain in perception is to set up routine patterns and to follow these. In order to cut across patterns we can use deliberate techniques ... These techniques can be learned, practiced, and used deliberately.”
Serious Creativity, Dr. Edward de Bono
Creativity Inside The Box
As Dr. de Bono states, we will be creative, at least to a degree, if we allow ourselves free reign to come up with whatever sounds unique and original. In this way we will usually come up with a few new and innovative ideas. But by staying in the box, we force our brains to acknowledge reality, and we dig down beyond the obvious. In this way, we will come up with greater numbers of ideas, and these ideas will be not only new and innovative, they will also be more likely to work within our reality.
When we venture outside the box, the lack of constraints actually can work to our detriment. If we are given permission to wander and ignore the constraints of the business, the result can be lots of ideas that span a very broad range, but that are shallow and not highly actionable.
In the past few years, TLC’s Trading Spaces has been one of the most popular reality shows in America. What was it that made the show so irresistible to viewers? Was it the creativity of the designs or the drastic nature of the makeovers? In part, yes. But if those were the only reasons, why weren’t shows such as Designing for the Sexes or Homes Across America just as popular?
What truly set Trading Spaces apart was the fact that every one of those amazing transformations was the result of creative thinking that took place inside a well-defined box:
1. The design budget was held to $1,000.
2. The timeframe in which to create the new look was limited to two days.
3. The work was done by one designer, one carpenter, and two homeowners.
Because the teams were forced to work within the constraints of budget, time, and resources, their designs were much more innovative than if they had been allowed the freedom to change the shape of the box, or ignore it altogether. Do you really think we would have seen chandeliers made of tree branches sprayed with silver paint and wrapped with Christmas tree lights if the homeowners had been given larger budgets?
MasterCard represents another example of creativity inside the box. For a good portion of the 1990s, Visa was the undisputed leader in the credit card industry, in large part due to its “And They Don’t Take American Express” campaign. The ads were designed to appeal to consumers’ desires to experience the best in life, to reach a level of achievement beyond that which most people could ever hope to enjoy – sort of a “you-are-what-you-buy” position.
MasterCard, on the other hand, had launched five different advertising campaigns within a decade, none of which had provided the brand with anything it could claim as its own. So, the company took a step back and examined the box in which it lived. Then, it created a campaign that built on the virtues of that box – the “Priceless” campaign.
Rather than positioning itself as the card that could give people the lifestyles of the rich and famous, it focused on enhancing the quality of consumers’ every day lives. The company’s 2004 annual report refers to the positioning as “the better way to pay for everything that matters.” As a result, there were 16,700,000,000 MasterCard transactions around the world in 2004, growth to which the company attributes in large part to its “Priceless” campaign.
PREVIOUSLY:
Part 1, Introduction
Part 2, The Goal of the Fuzzy Front End
NEXT: Part 4, What Goes Inside the Box
[Technorati Tags: innovation ideas creativity new product development]
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Creativity | Idea Generation | In the box innovation | Innovation, General | Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places | New Products | White papers
January 25, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Part 1 of a four-part series from the paper Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places, An Argument for Staying in the Box, by Gwen Smith Ishmael and Renee Hopkins Callahan
 Many issues are still debated when it comes to new product innovation, but fortunately marketers and product developers seem to have stopped debating the issue of whether or not it’s important to keep the product and service development pipelines full. This is critically important. Study after study has demonstrated that new product and service success is relatively rare, such as the London Dun and Bradstreet study in which the accompanying chart was found. As the chart indicates, for every profitable new product, there are approximately sixty ideas or concepts that do not make it to market successfully.
Much has been said regarding the importance of having a structured, repeatable process for new product and service development. Experts such as Dr. Robert Cooper and his colleagues have spent countless hours laboring on defining exactly what such a development process should look like, resulting in charts now familiar to many new product developers.
Yet even Dr. Cooper has stated,
“Don’t expect a well-oiled new product process to make up for a shortage of quality ideas: if the idea was mundane to start with, don’t count on your process turning it into a star!” Optimizing the Stage-Gate Process. What Best Practice Companies are Doing – Part 1, Cooper, R., Edgett, S., Kleinschmidt, E., 2002
So while there’s not much debate that success in the Idea Stage, or the Fuzzy Front End as it’s often called, is critical to the success of a new product development and innovation program, there’s still a great deal of discussion about why the Fuzzy Front End is such a challenging part of the product or service development process. Perhaps this is because, unlike other portions of the development process, more time has been spent in this sort of discussion compared to the relatively small amount of time that has been spent defining how to make the Fuzzy Front End more efficient and productive. Or perhaps it’s because of the still-pervasive notion that ideas are just supposed to “appear” from customers, or employees, or from some corporate initiative encouraging people to be creative and innovative.
It’s our experience that it is possible to structure the Fuzzy Front End in such a way that it not only produces innovative results, but that those results can positively affect the entire development process.
NEXT: Part 2, The Goal of the Fuzzy Front End
[Technorati Tags: innovation ideas creativity new product development]
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Creativity | Customer Viewpoint | Idea Generation | In the box innovation | Innovation, General | Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places | New Products | White papers
October 26, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Andy Van Gundy has given me permission to post a link to his new paper on "The Care and Feeding of Strategic Innovation Challenges." Andy's a judge in the current Thunderbird Innovation Challenge (I am a judge as well, but Andy's the "Chief Judge" for the final round!) and has served as "Chief Framing Architect for the official Innovation Challenge questions."
It's critical to frame innovation challenges correctly because if you don't, you won't be able to generate actionable ideas. Instead, you'll get the "blue sky" stuff that gives creativity a bad name, because it's so far out it's either not feasible or just plain not usable.
Andy's paper is well worth reading in its entirety. Here's the nutshell version:
In framing an innovation challenge you should:
-- Construct "tactical maps" that lay out the strategic terrain
-- Identify the primary objective
-- Detail and appropriately link together secondary objectives
Also, try not to muddy the challenge with excess positioning elements or constraints, or elements that should be reserved for use as evaluation criteria for possible solutions.
Framing is a part of the innovation process that often gets overlooked because it's not nearly as sexy as idea generation or prototyping solutions. But it's absolutely critical because it's almost impossible to be focused enough to come up with actionable solutions without framing.
When we begin a new client project, we hold what we call an "alignment meeting" either in person or by phone. Before the meeting we'll distribute to the stakeholders a list of questions we've written that aims to get at the information we need to frame the issue and understand exactly where we need to focus the ideation and give us the information we need to evaluate the ideas and guide us toward the most actionable solutions. Andy's paper will give us valuable insight into better ways to do this entire part of the process.
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| Category: Innovation, General
October 25, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
A few weeks ago Randall Rothenberg opined in Strategy + Business (excerpted from The Big Moo) about "The Power of Dumb Ideas," saying "The solution to marketing's current ills is not more creativity. It's less." His point -- "imitation across industries is more efficient and effective than blue-sky creativity and innovation."
Many novel ideas are simply irrelevant, says he, which I wouldn't disagree with. However, while unfettered blue-sky creativity can lead to irrelevance, unfettered imitation can lead to endless repetition for the sake of repetition, and the kind of incremental faux-innovation that results in 14 varieties of Oreos in the cookie aisle.
There is immense energy behind imitation, but it isn't in using the four broad ideas that Rothenberg says have been copied over and over as a template. The energy behind imitation comes in inventive recombination and in analogy. Inventive recombination means generating new energy by putting things together that were never put together before. Analogy means tapping into the very logic of the relationship between two things to see if that logical structure can be replicated in a new way.
This is not less creative -- it's more creative. But it's certainly less provocative than saying that the most powerful idea is a dumb idea.
Comments (1)
| Category: Innovation, General
October 13, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
A lot has been written about Apple's unveiling of new video capability for the iPod. The best look at the new introduction as a business model innovation is this article by the New York Times' David Pogue.
Pogue's article points out that the new video feature:
Avoids "overshooting" consumer need, #1: Steve Jobs has said many times that "people just don't consume music and movies the same way....how many times do you watch a movie?" So, "[Apple] sidestepped the movie issue altogether; the new iPod comes ready to play short movies, music videos and certain ABC television shows--but not feature films. None of these items lose much when they're not on a big, wide screen."
Incorporates innovative pricing that will drive consumer trial: "$2 per TV show is a brilliant price. It's low enough to be an impulse buy -- when, for example, you missed an episode; it isn't high enough to drive you to using Bit Torrent or another illegal download source; but it's high enough to bring in some extra income to the TV companies."
Avoids overshooting consumer need, #2: "...you can't watch video while you're doing something else. Sales of video-only iPods...wouldn't hold a candle to sales of music iPods. This issue became moot yesterday, because Apple simply added video to the existing iPod. It's not a new model called the iPod Video; it's just that the regular iPod (with a new, even thinner shape) is now capable of playing video. Instead of thinking of it as a more limited iPod, they'll think of it as an iPod with greater "just in case" possibilities."
Comments (2)
| Category: Innovation, General
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
This article from the American Marketing Association's newsletter -- "National Culture Influences Acceptance of Product Innovation" -- sparked a discussion in our office today. The article reports on research that was intended to "determine how consumers in different countries respond to product introductions. A new product might enjoy rapid acceptance in one country, but not in another."
To cut to the chase, the results of the study showed that "culture exerts a relatively high level of overall influence on diffusion: More than 50% of the products’ diffusion rates can be attributed to cultural influence." and that "the cultural aspects of masculinity and power distance are positively associated with diffusion rates, and the dimensions of individualism and long-term orientation are negatively related to diffusion rates."
The discussion we had centered on the difference between acceptance of innovation and diffusion of innovation. This article seems to use the words interchangeably, and I've always thought they were the same, but my colleague has said they're not. Once we've had a chance to discuss it further, I'll report back.
The other part of the discussion centered around the recommendation that a new innovation would do better if introduced into a collective culture (as opposed to a more individualistic culture). Said my colleague, "By its very nature, a collective culture tends not to do individualistic things, and often, innovations fall into that category."
My response was, assuming that the action of a diffusion process is to get the innovation to a tipping point, maybe that tipping point is easier to get to in a collective culture. If in a collective culture the opinion leaders are more quickly followed than in an individualistic culture, then it makes sense that the tipping point at which the adoption curve would begin to grow exponentially would be reached more quickly.
Feel free to discuss this amongst yourselves!
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| Category: Innovation, General
September 29, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Update on the Community Voice Mail story -- There's one more day to vote with your donation in Amazon's Nonprofit Innovation Challenge, which ends tomorrow, September 30.
I had suggested in a blog post that Community Voice Mail, a nonprofit that provides free voice mail service to the homeless, consider providing services for hurricane victims. Apparently I was a few steps behind the group, as they were already rising to the challenges posed by Hurricane Katrina, and then Rita.
According to a recent article in Chronicle of Philanthropy, CVM had never before done post-disaster work, instead focusing on providing homeless and low-income people with a free and stable way to connect with potential employers, social-service organizations, and relatives. During 2004, CVM supplied voice-mail accounts to 44,000 people in the 37 cities where the organization works. However, just since Katrina, CVM has set up voice-mail accounts for more than 35,000 displaced people in areas where it had not before had a presence -- Houston, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Memphis, Austin, Atlanta and South Carolina. This was accomplished with the help of Cisco Systems and the American Red Cross.
Whether or not you vote for CVM, please do check out the Nonprofit Challenge. It's an innovative way to raise money, as well as raise the profiles of the nonprofits.
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| Category: Innovation, General
September 6, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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."
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| Category: Innovation, General
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
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| Category: Innovation, General
September 5, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
Comments (1)
| Category: Innovation, General
August 4, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
Comments (4)
| Category: Innovation, General
May 5, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
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| Category: Innovation, General
December 31, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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!
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| Category: Innovation, General
December 15, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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
Comments (0)
| Category: Innovation, General
December 2, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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 Gwen Ishmael, gishmae -at- decisionanalyst.com.
Comments (1)
| Category: Innovation, General
November 29, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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."
Comments (3)
| Category: Innovation, General
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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."
Meanwhile, on Nov. 20 over at the sift experiment blog, Jeremy Heigh offered this take on copying and innovation, via Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel:
"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."
And with all this churning around in my head, while cleaning out my email inbox, I came across one of Joyce Wycoff's Heads-Up! on Organizational Innovation newsletters from last August that described an article from Peter deJager's Managing Change & Technology newsletter on the distinction between innovation and cheating. The crux of the issue: A new service, process, or product that improves upon the current service, process or product is seen as an innovation from the perspective of the company that has produced it, but is seen as cheating from the perspective of the company whose service, process, or product was the one improved upon. De Jager's take:
"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?"
In every case, the end result is an affirmation of the value of an open society that doesn't put unnecessary limits on inventive recombination -- in art, in technology, or in business -- while still allowing for enough authorship rights that creators and inventors and artists can make a living. This is of course not the kind of society we are living in, but it seems that increasing numbers of people are trying to get us there.
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| Category: Innovation, General
October 4, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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:
Building An Idea Factory
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.
Comments (0)
| Category: Innovation, General
September 25, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
This is true whether or not the innovation process involves a formal ideation session. You cannot solve a problem if you are not working on the problem that needs to be solved. Quite often, the overall problem is "how do we grow?" But if your company is trying to come up with a new line of products to solve this growth problem, when in fact what's needed is a new way to position the products you have, this solution is not likely to solve the growth problem.
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.
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| Category: Innovation, General
September 22, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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:
Good Ideas Are Not Enough (Accenture white paper)
Strategy, Execution, and Innovation (Fast Company)
Comments (0)
| Category: Innovation, General
September 9, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.)
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| Category: Innovation, General
June 16, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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
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| Category: Innovation, General
May 26, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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/
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| Category: Innovation, General
May 21, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
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| Category: Innovation, General
April 22, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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!
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| Category: Innovation, General
February 17, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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!
Comments (1)
| Category: Conferences | Innovation, General
February 9, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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).
Comments (0)
| Category: Innovation, General | Law & Policy
February 3, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Innovation, General
February 2, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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.
Comments (1)
| Category: Andrew Hargadon | Brain Chemistry & Creativity | Collaborative Creativity | Innovation, General | Inventive Recombination
December 19, 2003
Posted by Joyce Wycoff
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.
Even thinking about innovation is an exercise in opposites: Innovation is new. It requires new ways of thinking, new ways of operating and measuring and monitoring progress. Innovation is old. Humans, and arguably other species also, have been doing it for millions of years. The interesting thing about innovation is it is seldom "either/or” and almost always "both/and."
So it is new, while at the same time, it is old. It is imaginative and intuitive while also practical and analytical. It is science and art, mindset and process.
Dontcha just love it!? Actually that’s part of the dichotomy also … some of us love it … and it makes some of us crazy! Perhaps it’s a hologram of the world at large and that rich complexity draws us and repels all in the same moment.
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| Category: Innovation, General
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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").
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| Category: Innovation, General
December 9, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Comments (0)
| Category: Commercialization | Creativity | Customer Viewpoint | Innovation, General | Marketing | New Products | Technology
November 26, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
In previous chapters, The Innovator’s Solution authors Christensen and Raynor explored a disruptive strategy of “competing against nonconsumption.” But in so doing, companies are faced with the immediate challenge of how to find and sell to the nonconsumers who can become your customers. A case study with which many of us are familiar — how Sony scored numerous times with disruptions such as the transistor radio and the Walkman — illustrates the point perfectly.
The Sony case also illustrates another point made in this chapter, which is that disruptive products often require disruptive channels for sales and distribution. This point is even more pertinent when you use the broader definition of channels that the authors are using: “A company’s channel includes no just wholesale distributors and retail stores, but any entity that adds value to or creates value around the company’s product as it wends its way toward the hands of the end user.” Example: computer makers such as IBM and Compaq are the channels through which Intel’s microprocessors and Microsoft’s operating system reach the end-use customer.
So if a disruptive strategy of “competing against nonconsumption” makes so much sense, the authors point out, why do incumbent companies do the opposite, which is “trying to stretch the disruptive innovation to compete against — and ultimately supplant — established products sold by well-entrenched competitors in large, obvious market applications”? The answer has to do with resource allocation.
Mistake No. 1 is to frame the disruption as an opportunity. Christensen and Raynor’s theory (much of which they credit to HBS professor Clark Gilbert) is that the disruption should be framed not as a potential opportunity for further growth, but as a threat to existing business that cannot be overlooked. Framing the disruption as a threat allows for top-level resource commitments. Then the disruptive technology should be developed by an “autonomous organization” (another division, a spin-off company) that can frame it as an opportunity.
Mistake No. 2 is to promise big numbers in the future in exchange for resources in the present. “The very effort of trying to articulate a convincing case for resources actually forces the entrepreneurs to cram the innovation as a sustaining technology in the existing market,” because the biggest markets whose size can be substantiated are those that already exist. Then when the results fall short of the promised numbers – because the market of nonconsumers is not being effectively targeted – resources are cut.
The authors suggest that companies that try new-market disruption establish a parallel process in which to evaluate potentially disruptive opportunities, a process in which the go/no go decisions are made based not on numerical rules but on how well they fit the pattern for disruption already explicated by the authors. And even then, the best that can be predicted is that “the initial conditions are conducive to successful growth.”
Disruption is, after all, still a risk.
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| Category: Books | Clayton Christensen | Commercialization | Customer Viewpoint | Innovation, General | Marketing | Marketing Research | New Products | Technology
November 21, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Getting off the Innovation Solution track for a minute:
I am woefully, latefully remiss in making this recommendation, but nonetheless, as far as I am concerned, the blog that most regularly explores the cutting edge of future disruption is Brain Waves, by our fellow Corante blogger Zack Lynch. I got the chance to meet Zack on my California trip a couple of weeks ago, and he totally blew me away with his vision of how neuroscience advances will disrupt literally everything in the future. Read him if you want to stay on top of what this might mean for your business and for our world.
Here's something fun that Zack posted (in the same post where he said nice things about IdeaFlow!): MIT Technology Review has posted an Innovation Futures prediction game. It's a real game with real prizes and a January 31, 2004 deadline. So go play, have fun, and good luck!
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| Category: Innovation, General
November 7, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
A lengthy power outage at my hotel today kept me away from blogging, but it's been resolved now, and so on to Chapter 2, which I read on the plane yesterday.
Here's another one of those counterintuitive statements that, once you think about it, seems perfectly obvious -- "Few technologies or business ideas are intrinsically sustaining or disruptive in character. Rather, their disruptive impact must be molded into strategy as managers shape the idea into a plan and then implement it." Those who would argue for a process view of innovation already understand this. Innovation is relative to the context in which it occurs.
And even the type of innovation is contextually relative -- "an idea that is disruptive for one business may be sustaining to another."
This chapter also introduces a third contextual dimension to the disruptive innovation model introduced in Dilemma. In this dimension lie the contexts of consumption and competition that give rise to two different kinds of disruptions -- new-market disruptions in which the new technology, service, or product is aimed at introducing new people into the market, and low-end disruptions that attack the least-profitable and most overserved customers.
I still love the endnotes in this book. Check this out from page 70, in a long note pointing out how wrong people were who complained that Dilemma was flawed because sometimes an industry leader manages to avoid being killed by a disruptive competitor. The authors' response: "When we see an airplane fly, it does not disprove the law of gravity."
Links to Innovator's Solution resources
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| Category: Books | Clayton Christensen | Innovation, General | New Products | Technology
November 4, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
My blog post on Chapter 1 of the IS drew this response from Mark Federman’s What Is The Message? blog. You’ll want to read his entire post – it’s thoughtful, and it’s the first one I’ve seen that’s negative about this book. I’ve added a link to his post to the IS book resources. Here is my response to Mark:
Actually, I totally agree that "business people who attempt to adopt his [Christensen's] principles as gospel do so at their peril." I believe this is true of *any* set of principles. There is *no* business gospel. That's why I spend so much time reading, reading, reading.
You also say that "predictability does not necessarily come from well-researched theory if the process itself is non-deterministic and chaotic." Assume that you are right, and that the processes by which disruptive innovation happens *are* by and large non-deterministic and chaotic. So do we then throw up our hands and say the process -- what's in what Christensen calls the "black box" of innovation -- just cannot be controlled, so let chaos rule? What do we do then?
This is addressed by Christensen in this endnote to Chapter 1 (p. 25): "Ultimately, innovators must judge what they will work on and how they will do it -- and what they should consider when making those decisions is what is in the black box. The acceptance of randomness in innovation then, is not a stepping-stone on the way to greater understanding; it is a barrier." I'm reading that to say *not* that there is no randomness in innovation -- but that to focus a study on innovation on that randomness isn't productive.
You also say, "The outcome of a process is often an emergent property; Murphy's Law (and its many corollories) have almost become business axioms in a complex environment in which predictable determinism has been obsolesced by our increasing understanding of the nature of complexity." To my mind, there's a lot of space between "predictability" and "determinism," and it's in this space that Christensen and Raynor's theorizing fits.
Finally, you say "It is awareness, and not theory or predictions, that are the key to business success." Awareness of what, actually? Surely awareness of that which can be known codified and categorized about the innovation process is a helpful thing. This can be studied, and in fact is what Christensen seems to me to be trying to do. I'd say we need that in addition to, not instead of, an awareness that there are some things about the innovation process that cannot be predicted. We need both for business success.
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| Category: Books | Clayton Christensen | Innovation, General | Technology
October 30, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Your hard-working IdeaFlow bloggers have been having a little off-blog conversation about Clayton Christensen’s long-awaited new book The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (co-authored with Michael E. Raynor). Our conversation went something like this:
Renee: I've got the new Clayton Christensen…Anybody seen it? I'll be posting on it soon, so if you've read it or know the authors, feel free to weigh in.
Joyce: Renee, I'm in the process of digesting and figuring out how to share info about Innovator's Solution ... which I think is MUST reading ... however, it will probably also be fairly overwhelming to most folks because it has so much counterintuitive material ... and there's so much that could only be implemented or changed at very senior levels.
Leslie: Joyce, I agree with you that so much can only be implemented at very senior levels. It was interesting to me to see that, a year ago, a lot of the engineers at Dell were reading Innovator's Dilemma. And yet, at Dell, the innovation is in the supply chain and the manufacturing, not in the software and hardware that goes out the door (these were software engineers). Those folks certainly did face a dilemma. They could not do anything about what they could see.
John: Yeah, totally.
So let’s take a deep breath and start. I can tell you that the first chapter deserves careful attention and savoring. Last night I settled down at a local Starbucks with a cup of Tazo Zen tea and The Innovator’s Solution. Place was quiet except for Lucinda Williams’ CD, World Without Tears, playing on the sound system. I began to read, underline, make check marks, scrawl notes in the margins.
How do I love this book? Let me count the ways: the carefully rendered statement of the thesis, the placement of the starting point for the argument -- and, oh boy, the footnotes!
It begins, of course, with the now-familiar Innovator’s Dilemma: Once a company matures, growth through innovation is a very risky undertaking at which few companies succeed – because the very fact that the strategies used to run a successful, mature company are wildly at odds with the strategies needed to sustain disruptive innovation.
Pretty quickly Christensen dispenses with the top two reasons for this failure – bad management, risk-averse management – and zeroes in on this one: the widely held belief that growth is so hard to achieve “repeatedly and well” because “creating new-growth businesses is simply unpredictable.” The process, he says, looks unpredictable because its results are unpredictable. But “you cannot say, just by looking at the results of the process, whether the process that created those results is capable of generating predictable output. You must understand the process itself.” And predictability, he explains, comes from well-researched theory.
In effect he’s starting out 10 paces behind where most business books start. He’s laying out all the basis on which he’s going to build a theory, not just laying out a theory. And these couple of pages that expound on what makes a theory good and solid are written so elegantly that, like the rest of the chapter, they seem almost buoyant, not nearly as weighty as it sounds when I describe it.
This elegance I attribute partly to the skillful use of footnotes (actually, they are chapter endnotes). These are big, solid, meaty footnotes, filled with arguments that if put in the chapter itself would just bog it down. Yet they are there at the end of the chapter if you want them.
The endnotes are well worth the time it takes to read them. They go off in fascinating directions – reasoned criticism of management research, a collection of references to articles and books on theory-building, a short discourse on the need for anomaly-seeking (as opposed to anomaly-avoiding) research.
I half expected that note to include a reference to Heidegger’s Being and Time (“when something is unusable for some purpose, then the assignment becomes explicit”). Or to semiotics – after all, an anomaly – phenomena the existing theory cannot explain -- could be considered a break in the “code” (the theory). And to a semiotician it is the places where the code breaks in which the meaning of the code itself is laid bare.
So maybe this is going to turn out to be a semiotics of innovation? I suspect not, but it was fun to sit back after reading Chapter One and spend a little time sipping green tea and meditating on the logical difference between correlation and causality. And looking forward to the next chapter.
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| Category: Books | Clayton Christensen | Innovation, General | New Products
October 28, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
John sent this link to a videotape of the 10-minute speech he delivered on Oct. 15 to the Australian Parliament and 250 scientists at the Parliament Building in Canberra. When you follow the link, John is the "First Presenter." The "Final Speaker" link goes to shows a senior official commenting on the concepts from the speech. John's specific topic: how to accelerate corporate innovation, what we can do to build national economic growth by bridging barriers between firms, and how "intermediated innovation practices" might work.
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| Category: Bridge Project | Commercialization | Innovation, General | Open Innovation | Technology
October 25, 2003
Posted by Leslie Martinich
The Wall Street Journal carried an article on their front page today about the Department of Justice’s examination of the National Association of Realtors’ Internet policies. My friend Russell Capper’s company, eRealty, as well as other Internet-based real estate companies are challenging the way real estate business is done.
Why is this interesting? Not just because Russell is a friend of mine! It is interesting because it exhibits classic symptoms that almost all innovations display, primarily resistance and fear. Of course realtors do not want to see their business move to an electronic model, but it is only a matter of time before much of the real estate business is done through the Internet.
The most analogous industry is airline ticket sales. Travel agents didn’t want to see their business move to the Internet either. But end users want to do their own searching, identifying the flights they want to purchase. Some of them still want the services of a travel agent.
The move of the real estate business to the Internet is simply slower because users trade real estate far less frequently than they purchase airline tickets. But ultimately it is customer demand that will force this industry to move more completely to the Internet.
The activity of the Department of Justice points out another classic issue for innovations. A society’s flexibility enhances its ability to prosper from innovations. That is why countries with common law systems are more prosperous than countries with civil law systems. Attempts to make rules arbitrarily constraining innovations is not a good thing for prosperity.
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| Category: Commercialization | Innovation, General | Law & Policy | Open Innovation | Technology
October 23, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Well, now we know why we haven't heard much from John Wolpert lately. He's been in Australia, busily spreading the Open Innovation gospel. He surfaced today long enough to email us a link to an interview he did with the ABC radio network (the Australian equivalent of NPR). While in Australia, John also addressed the Australian Parliament and the Innovation Exchange about Open Innovation. When he gets back we'll twist his arm to get him to post some of his impressions!
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| Category: Bridge Project | Commercialization | Innovation, General | Law & Policy | Open Innovation | Technology
October 22, 2003
Posted by Leslie Martinich
The IEEE 2003 International Engineering Management Conference will be held November 2-4 in Albany, NY. The IEEE-IEMC 2002 was one of the most useful conferences I attended last year, and I'm expecting another great conference this year.
Speakers include Dr. Rolf Smith speaking on "Diffferent Thinking for Diffferent Results." The conference organizing committee chair is Dr. Lois Peters, one of the authors of Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts, a book that both John Wolpert and I found to be extremely useful.
I'll be giving a workshop, "Unleashing Creativity: Creating an Innovation Focus for Engineering Teams." The workshop will include a discussion of an Innovation Framework as well as the use of InnoMediaries, citing work from both John Wolpert ("Breaking Out of the Innovation Box") and Henry Chesbrough (Open Innovation).
Talk about convergence!! Lots of our ideas will be coming together here!
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| Category: Conferences | Creativity | Innovation, General | Open Innovation | Technology
October 13, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
If you're not too conferenced out yet, Naomi Moneypenney of ManyWorlds.com gave me permission to share her notes from the recent Emerging Technologies Conference:
Just thought I'd share a few thoughts about the ETC conference at MIT that happened last week, pertaining to innovation and creativity. Speakers included Jeff Immelt, Michael Dell, Bob Metcalfe, Leroy Hood, Rodney Brooks and many other luminaries.
It was great to see the renewed focus on innovation, even from big companies like GM, Pfizer and Intel, though the word 'innovation' did not crop up that much it was core to their new directions.
Nathan Myhrvold had some great ideas on setting up Idea Factories so that people who are great at inventing could just invent, and sell 'ideas' that others could make and sell. Though this seems unrealistic, and the patent systems of our government would probably crack under the weight of a number of idea factories, it does seem a logical progression.
Technology innovations were of course at the fore. And most strongly in pharamceuticals, healthcare and fuel technologies. Interestingly many 'new' innovations had come from two sources: 1) Recombining ideas or products from other sources (like already appproved medications) or building on research inventions; 2) Opening new markets with existing products used in a new way.
I saw less 'step-change' ideas, and more 'incremental' innovation.
I summarized a few trends for the ManyWorlds.com newsletter to subscribers and I'll repeat them here:
- Idea Factories: Leave invention to those who are best at it. Nathan Myhrvold's perspective may not be for everyone, but he argued strongly for specialist firms that do nothing but invent, leaving others to manufacture and market the inventions.
- Reinvent Venture Capital: In line with the previous trend and the failure of so many innovation stage-gate processes or funnels in large companies, the venture capital industry is overdue for a major shake up.
- Learn from Biological Systems: Evolution has had the benefit of millions of years of experimentation. Whether in genomics, nanotechnology, cutting edge work in materials science or using biological algorithms to study social networks or personalize medicines, learning from living systems is a great way to bootstrap our understanding.
- Combinatorics: Once an obscure term in math textbooks, combinatorics is just a fancy word for the process of recombination. No longer bound by mere
network effects(!), recombining ideas, people, products is the way of the future. Indeed, the award for top young innovator this year went to a startup that combines 2 or 3 FDA approved medications to produce new synergistic treatments for major diseases like cancer, diabetes and arthritis. Sounds simple in principle, but exploring the viability of options that thousands of
combinations throw off is a complex task. But those that can solve the multi-dimensional Rubik's Cube the fastest, will win.
- Learn from other disciplines and industries: Jeff Immelt said the 'day of the one-dimensional manager is over'. We've all heard the multidisciplinary sermon
before, but it continues to ring true. The key though in achieving innovation by gaining insights from other areas, is communication. At HP, Stan Williams leads next generation research and put together an elite & broad team by filling it with deep experts in different fields. But he says, it took a whole year before they developed a language that they could all speak.
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| Category: Conferences | Innovation, General | New Products | Technology
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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| Category: Conferences | IdeaFlow | Innovation, General
October 8, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
"Return on Innovation: Measuring and Managing Your Innovation Investment," will be held Dec. 3-5 in Coconut Grove, Fla. On the agenda: - Learn to achieve sustainable growth and increase your market share through proven innovations.
- Link innovation to tangible results to prove the value of your investment to upper management who might not see innovation as a priority.
- Learn the latest tools and techniques for measuring innovation from innovators at: IBM, Americredit Financial Services, Motorola Labs, Intel, Hewlett Packard and Georgia-Pacific.
- Saving the best for last: John Wolpert and Joyce Wycoff of IdeaFlow will be speaking!
If you register by November 7th you can save $100. To register, go to www.iirusa.com/returnoninnovation or call 888.670.8200.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know.
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| Category: Conferences | Innovation, General | New Products | Open Innovation | ROI (Return on Innovation)
October 6, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Renee ... you are amazing! Your Convergence notes are a terrific reminder of all the great stuff that went on there.
A friend sent me the following article which should be interesting to this group. The central role of IT as one of the most powerful gatekeepers of innovation should not be underestimated.
"Innovation Interruptus"
Computerworld (09/29/03) Vol. 31, No. 45, P. 41; Hoffman, Thomas
Industry observers report that IT budget cuts extending over the past few years have dampened innovation, but this has allowed other types of innovation to come to the fore, according to experts such as Computerworld columnist Paul A. Strassmann. Some companies continue to boost their annual IT investments to maintain their competitiveness, though such increases are considerably more frugal than in previous years. Wal-Mart declared several months ago that its 100 leading suppliers have an early 2005 deadline to start tracking their shipping pallets with radio frequency identification tags, while car manufacturer DaimlerChrysler announced in November 2002 that it had begun to invest in Digital Factory, an ambitious project to automate the design of its assembly plants. Meanwhile, UPS has invested approximately $1 billion over the past six years to develop "smart labels" that will help customers more easily locate their packages, and has mapped out a five-year, $127 million investment to distribute the DIAD IV handheld terminal to tens of thousands of drivers. The DIAD IV will save drivers the hassle of manually entering a customer's address and related data and scanning package bar codes in order to get routing instructions. Many companies see the budget crunch as an opportunity to move away from investing in new technologies and concentrate on optimizing existing technologies. RadioShack recently completed the installation of a supply chain management system, while senior VP Mike Kowal says the company has hired a consultant to help shepherd further operational efficiencies through organizational and behavioral changes. Still, 70 percent of 106 IT professionals polled in an August Computerworld survey reported that their IT departments postponed or killed "especially innovative projects" in the past two years, primarily because of budget cuts.
"Unleashing UWB" Electronic Business (09/03) Vol. 29, No. 12, P. 62; Arensman, Russ
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| Category: Conferences | Innovation, General | Technology
October 3, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Here’s how you know it was a good conference: A majority of the attendees were still there very late in the afternoon of the last day, to hear the last keynote speech. And this one was well worth it. Louis Geeringh of Deloitte Touche spoke on “Making Innovation Part of the Corporate DNA: How To Capitalize on Disruptive Times.”
What was most interesting about this is that not only does Deloitte consult on innovation, but much of Louis’ remarks had to do with the innovations Deloitte has put in place for its own company. Louis’ division (Deloitte-Touche, South Africa) began a program called InnovationZone and doubled the size of their division in two years. Now InnovationZone is a company-wide effort.
Again, more information on how innovation is a top concern for today’s CEOs: Louis cited the 6th annual global CEO survey conducted by PwC in conjunction with World Economic Forum (2003), which suggests that ability to innovate is the most important factor contributing to future growth. He also cited an Accenture survey in which CEOs acknowledged that innovation is key to competitive advantage, although 50% admitted that less than 20% of their promising innovative ideas are commercialized.
With these comments, Louis launched us back out into the real world ready to innovate:
- Innovation thrives at the end of the empire. But it’s not about innovation [per se], but about finding the next wave of profitable growth.
- In an environment of chaos and change, such as we face now, innovation is very important, and flexibility is very important…[at times and in industries] when long-term planning is 2 months, you’d better not cast your strategy in stone.
- Strategic planning is dead – strategic innovation and discovery are not. Innovation needs to be made a business imperative, part of the business strategy.
- In order to remain in business it is necessary to master both incremental innovation (which is the responsibility of line management) and disruptive innovation (what you need to get from “normal” to a stretch target). Disruptive innovation is part of senior management responsibilities and is best managed outside the core business, and in fact, a separate innovation process is required to bring ideas to market. You need a focused team, clear revenue targets, measured ROI, to report directly to senior management (“you don’t make friends when innovating”), and the latitude to make decisions.
- Louis described the innovation gap (see chart here) and asked the question: What is the profitability number you’re chasing? If it’s a substantial increase you won’t make it without breakthrough innovation.
- The greater the need for breakthrough innovation, the less you’ll find it inside the organization.
- The very question you can’t answer for a disruptive innovation is: How big is the market?
- Consensus is innovation’s evil twin, and makes for mediocre ideas. Innovation Boards are unhelpful for that reason.
And, one final thought from Louis to wrap up this entire series of notes: Humans are a breakthrough innovation….radical innovation is in each human’s DNA.
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| Category: Conferences | Disruptive Innovation | Innovation, General | New Products
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
One absolutely fascinating talk was by Phil Fawcett, who’s a Technology Transfer Agent at Microsoft. Phil, a 20-year veteran of Microsoft (one assumes he probably doesn’t have to work anymore!) created this job and has grown it to the point where there’s a small staff of people helping him. His goal: Get research and product people to talk to each other. Right now, half of Microsoft ideas get into release. He’d like to increase that percentage so that the $7 billion Microsoft will invest in R&D in fiscal 2004 will be best used.
Phil says technoloy transfer is a fundamentally social process for managing key technology assets, and it’s a process that requires trust. Trust and risk must be balanced using communication processes. And this is where Phil comes in. Much of his talk was about how he fosters communication among his constituencies (researchers, product groups, senior management) to create a development environment suited to product-ready research.
One point that’s a little beside the point but still interesting: Phil says that for Microsoft researchers, failure isn’t fatal. At Microsoft, the real failure is not to document what you’ve learned from a failure.
Just in case you’re curious, here are some of the Nerd Herder Methods Phil says he uses at Microsoft:
- TechFest – A technology trade show put on by researchers for the rest of Microsoft.
- Blitz – A 2- to 3-hour session, with new researchers or product groups doing demos every 15 minutes.
- Offsite – A 1- to 2-day meeting off-campus for the purpose of exchanging ideas about a topic that may lead to awareness of long-term issues, best used before initial product planning when groups are not talking to each other….need to have key influencers and key combatants there.
- Brainstorm/Collaboration – An exchange of ideas in a 1- to 2-hour meeting session, either to create new solutions or to discuss trade-offs between several alternatives.
- Heartbeat Meeting – Sessions of 3 to 4 “focused” researchers and product group staffers who meet every 1 to 2 weeks to drive action items within their respective divisions and monitor level engagement between the two groups.
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| Category: Collaborative Creativity | Commercialization | Conferences | Corporate Climate | Innovation, General | New Products | Technology
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
In previous notes I’ve commented that a recurring theme at Convergence was how customer needs play a very important role in a company’s innovation and new product development efforts. A specific presentation on this theme was “Customer-Centric Innovation: Turning Consumer Pain Into Innovative New Products” by Tom Kuczmarski and Scott Lutz (contact info at link isn't current for Scott, but it's a good description of him!).
Tom quoted a 2003 best practices study his company did: 85% of CEO respondents said conducting customer problem/need identification research prior to ideation is the most important driver of new product/service success in their organizations.
A main reason why research for new product development should focus on consumer needs and an understanding of consumer’s lives – rather than product and service attributes – is that the resulting ideas are more likely to be true breakthroughs.
This makes absolute sense to me. If you focus on needs, you’ll come up with new products that meet those needs. These products may or may not resemble current offerings, but at the very least they shouldn’t be so far out in left field (a common problem with unfocused new product development efforts) that they don’t still meet those needs, since that was the objective.
On the other hand, when you focus on researching what consumers do and don’t like about an existing product, the best you can expect is incremental improvement suggestions.
For those in the B2B world, the exploratory research needs to focus around understanding companies and the roles your customers play in their companies, Tom says.
One more point Tom made about starting with pain – your new products are more likely to be profitable if they enable the solution to a problem on which consumers place a “higher need intensity.”
Scott’s portion of the presentation focused on the “evergreen” themes, ongoing consumer needs that many successful new products address: family, health, pleasure, energy, balance and community.
To uncover more focused needs than these, and to drill down into these evergreen themes and uncover specific needs, you need qualitative, not quantitative, research. In my opinion, these qualitative tools – depth interviews, lead-user interviews and ethnographic research – are the best ways to uncover the fears, wishes, anxieties, desires, frustrations and needs by which consumers express their pain. Quantitative research won’t be nearly as revealing, because it’s not exploratory.
Having noted all of that – you may recall that I had a conversation here last month with Andy Hargadon, author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate, that takes this idea one step further. Our conversation was about how consumers can be an “open source” for new product ideas. I said then, using consumers for ideation, especially those screened for past product category usage, makes sense from the point of view that the consumers have both domain relevant knowledge (as potential users of the new product) and have creativity skills.
Relating this back to Tom and Scott’s presentation – let’s say you start with some qualitative research around discovering actual consumer pain (cognitive dissonance!). You’d use that as a starting point for ideation, as Tom pointed out in the presentation. But then let’s say you are doing that ideation with consumers who have usage experience in that product category. Their own “pain” is the specific domain-relevant knowledge that keeps them on focused on actual usable ideas, and their creativity is the spark that makes the ideas good.
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| Category: Conferences | Customer Viewpoint | Innovation, General | Marketing | Marketing Research | New Products
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Juan Enriquez, director of HBS’ Life Science Project held us riveted to our seats during his morning keynote: As The Future Catches You. With slides of images from Felice Frankel’s Envisioning Science, he talked about what kinds of innovations matter.
Says he: Maps matter. You don’t have to have an accurate map, just a better map than your neighbor’s. And codes matter. Executing the right code matters even more. Literacy in and the ability to map the right code matters a lot. Early maps of the world and the new code of the 26-letter alphabet were once the highest standards of maps and codes. Now the genome map and the DNA code are the ones that matter. Enriquez talked of the "merger between food, drink, biotech and pharma" that will change all of our lives.
It was hard to know whether to be inspired after this or go off in despair because I personally don’t know how to read either the genome map or the DNA code!
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| Category: Conferences | Creativity | Disruptive Innovation | Innovation, General | Technology
October 2, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
More on Convergence: I’m going to write now about a session I didn’t actually attend (there were tough choices to make!), but I heard great feedback on it from several conference attendees. Also, the subject was trust, a topic crucial to innovation, and one we’ve discussed here before.
Jim Mikula and Ruth Ann Hattori led this session, and most of my comments here are based on their white paper, "Collaboration, Trust and Innovative Change," which was part of the session handouts. If you are concerned about the need for setting up a relationship of trust for a collaborative innovation venture, it’s well worth reading.
Basically, Mikula and Hattori spell out these four attributes of trust:
- Authenticity
- History of fulfillment
- Ability to fulfill
- Commitment to the relationship
Individuals or companies are said to be “highly invested” if all four attributes of trust are present in their relationship. And, “this highly invested state is one necessary precondition for collaborative innovation.” Of course, whether or not these trust attributes are present in the relationship, or could be developed, is a matter of opinion. Mikula and Hattori are simply offering the suggestion that this opinion should be based on a careful assessment rather than gut instinct, and their framework offers a structure with which to make this assessment.
Another good point regarding trust assessments: they are domain-specific. Their example: You may trust your organization’s controller with finances but you may not trust him or her to create an outstanding training class.
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| Category: Collaborative Creativity | Conferences | Innovation, General | Open Innovation
September 30, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
More conference notes and ruminations, this time on the talk “Innovating Space Using Innovation Space” by Jason Heredia of Turnstone (a division of Steelcase) and Tom Mulhern of Conifer Research, a Chicago-based ethnographic research company.
Steelcase’s research, some done in conjunction with Conifer, asks these questions: What kind of spaces enhance innovation, and what kind of space detracts from innovation? And, even better: Where does innovation live [in the workplace]? Answer: In the linkages between people.
And yes, this is the very territory that the social networking folks are working on. One way to look at social software would be, does the software allow for the right kind of linkages between people, the right kind of access to the space where innovation lives? In their talk, Tom and Jason set forth some “Principles of Innovation Space, and I include them here because I wonder if these same principles would apply to the “space” that a group creates/accesses by using social software, or if the entire model would be different. Here are the principles:
- Persistence: Supports the continuous refinement of the team’s “shared mind.”
- Intent: Not just meeting space, but shared work space in which sustained, purposeful efforts take place and leave traces behind.
- Interaction: Encourages and explicitly drives interaction, bridges the digital and physical worlds.
- Dynamism: Purpose of the space changes as intentions and goals change.
- Flexibility: Supports change modes in innovation.
It seems to me that these would be excellent principles to apply to social software. But that’s not my field, so I’m totally open to comments there. And of course, if you talk about social software in terms of disruptive innovations, then at some point (perhaps already bubbling up now) there’ll be some kind of software that allows us to interact and work together in ways that we can’t even imagine yet. If it’s really disruptive, it will allow us to work together in ways that even its creator(s) didn’t imagine.
One other interesting thing I found out during Tom and Jason’s presentation: The material that’s best for group projects is actually that stuff I’ve always thought was called foam core but is really (so Tom says) fome cor. It’s better than easel pads or tacking things up on walls, because it allows you both to work in large format and to save your work while still in the large format.
So can a group accomplish with a wiki and a groupblog (such as this one) what they could accomplish with some fome cor/foam core and colored markers?
Finally, either Tom or Jason, I forget who, mentioned that the Steelcase site has a lot of information on space, design and workplace issues. They weren’t kidding. There I found an excellent Steelcase Workplace Report titled: "HotHouse Environments: Fostering Breakthrough Innovation," which presents the findings of two years of surveying more than 1,500 corporate executives, facilities managers, and design professionals from various industries on these questions: How can the workplace affect the way people work… and how satisfied they are? What keeps them from sharing information and being collaborative?” Steelcase also has an e-zine called 360, where I found this article based on the HotHouse research: "Unleashing Hidden Creativity: Does Place Matter?". Both are worth reading.
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| Category: Collaborative Creativity | Conferences | Corporate Climate | Innovation, General
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
More conference notes and ruminations, this time on the talk “Innovating Space Using Innovation Space” by Jason Heredia of Turnstone (a division of Steelcase) and Tom Mulhern of Conifer Research, a Chicago-based ethnographic research company.
Steelcase’s research, some done in conjunction with Conifer, asks these questions: What kind of spaces enhance innovation, and what kind of space detracts from innovation? And, even better: Where does innovation live [in the workplace]? Answer: In the linkages between people.
And yes, this is the very territory that the social networking folks are working on. One way to look at social software would be, does the software allow for the right kind of linkages between people, the right kind of access to the space where innovation lives? In their talk, Tom and Jason set forth some “Principles of Innovation Space, and I include them here because I wonder if these same principles would apply to the “space” that a group creates/accesses by using social software, or if the entire model would be different. Here are the principles:
Persistence: Supports the continuous refinement of the team’s “shared mind.”
Intent: Not just meeting space, but shared work space in which sustained, purposeful efforts take place and leave traces behind.
Interaction: Encourages and explicitly drives interaction, bridges the digital and physical worlds.
Dynamism: Purpose of the space changes as intentions and goals change.
Flexibility: Supports change modes in innovation.
It seems to me that these would be excellent principles to apply to social software. But that’s not my field, so I’m totally open to comments there. And of course, if you talk about social software in terms of disruptive innovations, then at some point (perhaps already bubbling up now) there’ll be some kind of software that allows us to interact and work together in ways that we can’t even imagine yet. If it’s really disruptive, it will allow us to work together in ways that even its creator(s) didn’t imagine.
One other interesting thing I found out during Tom and Jason’s presentation: The material that’s best for group projects is actually that stuff I’ve always thought was called foam core but is really (so Tom says) fome cor. It’s better than easel pads or tacking things up on walls, because it allows you both to work in large format and to save your work while still in the large format.
So can a group accomplish with a wiki and a groupblog (such as this one) what they could accomplish with some fome cor/foam core and colored markers?
Finally, either Tom or Jason, I forget who, mentioned that the Steelcase site has a lot of information on space, design and workplace issues. They weren’t kidding. There I found an excellent Steelcase Workplace Report titled: "HotHouse Environments: Fostering Breakthrough Innovation," which presents the findings of two years of surveying more than 1,500 corporate executives, facilities managers, and design professionals from various industries on these questions: How can the workplace affect the way people work… and how satisfied they are? What keeps them from sharing information and being collaborative?” Steelcase also has an e-zine called 360, where I found this article based on the HotHouse research: "Unleashing Hidden Creativity: Does Place Matter?". Both are worth reading.
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| Category: Innovation, General
September 29, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Let’s just get this straight upfront: I am not a real-time conference-blogging demon! For that reason I’m just now getting around to blogging my notes from last week’s Innovation Convergence. But what I lack in speed I hope to make up for in value! I’ve got lots of notes and impressions to share.
First, my overall main impression was that Capital I-Innovation has arrived. Last year’s Convergence had just 70 attendees. This year there were 220, and new conferences on the subject are springing up like mushrooms after a thunderstorm, including this December’s Return on Innovation, at which IdeaFlow contributors Joyce Wycoff and John Wolpert will both be speakers.
Convergence’s very first keynote speaker, Mark Turrell of Imaginatik, referenced a famous (in innovation circles, anyway) Gary Hamel quote that seems to be on its way to becoming reality: “Innovation must become what quality was 20 years ago.”
Turrell sounded another common theme in his keynote, “Measuring the Financial Impact of Innovation: Calculating Your Innovation Gap.” That common theme was to make a differentiation between innovation and creativity, and pretty much every speaker I heard did this. Boiled down to the basics, the difference seemed to be that innovation is a process and creativity is not. Devotees of a process approach to creativity might beg to differ, but for the purposes of this conference, the distinction allowed most speakers a productive platform from which to dive into their take on the innovation process.
My notes on Turrell’s innovation/creativity definitions: Innovation’s a much more corporate thing than creativity, much more of a process. People who don’t get creativity are the ones who control the budgets, the ones you must convince to fund innovation.
Innovation is the process of handling new things; creativity is a one-off, invention is a one-off. Invention and creativity are part of the innovation process.
The main point of his talk was to expound on IOI, or the financial Impact of Innovation. He defined this as the proportion of current and future revenue and profit that is dependent on the company’s ability to innovate, and defined IOI components as revenue growth, revenue protection, productivity, and disruptive change (unplanned activities, or risk).
He then said the innovation gap is the difference between the target level of innovation (IOI) and the current innovation capacity, which is based on the ability of a firm to handle new things.
Idea management is important, because too many new ideas block the pipeline. You could expect him to say that, since Imaginatik is in the idea-management business, but this was another theme that was sounded by many speakers, including the other opening-day keynote, Dr. George Land of the Farsight Group.
First, Land's innovation/creativity definitions: At the beginning of his talk, “A Systems Process for Innovation,” he defined innovation as “organized creativity.”
Land’s Advanced Innovation Method is a process for bringing innovation to a corporation. Most important is the first part, determining what strategic innovation would be for the company. Seventy percent of time and budget should go to the first three steps, he says, which doesn’t even get you to the generating concepts stage. The important first three steps encompass alignment, an innovation audit, and a determination of an innovation strategy. A big part of this is determining internal and external customers’ “deep needs” – what does the customer really want or need in the future? Land says his company actually puts a large number of resources into training a client company’s customers in creativity to get them to articulate their needs. I of course found this fascinating in light of our own consumer-based approach, which has been discussed here recently.
And, connecting to another discussion we’ve been having here lately, this time on the Copyright Wars, Land dropped something of a bombshell early on in his speech by declaring that “product innovations are very easy to copy, and patents are an invitation to a lawsuit.” Sure enough, the first question in the following Q&A was about this assertion. Land explained further: Patents are very easy to go around. The issue is a flow of innovation, and what’s in the pipeline to develop after what you’ve got now has been copied. Always assume you’re going to get copied, and try to discover where you can innovate that it will be invisible. Developing intellectual assets – documented current and past knowledge that can lead to the creation of new knowledge through systematic innovation -- is better than developing IP, which he defined as “knowledge with legal ownership.”
According to Land, only 15% of corporate innovation comes from R&D departments, so that’s not the most important place to be innovative in a corporation. The companies most successful at innovation are stealthily innovating their process, distribution, or some other aspect that’s hard for competitors to grasp and copy.
But in any case, he echoed Turrell by saying, “don’t bust the dam of ideas until you’ve got somewhere for the water to go. Innovation efforts must be targeted or they create chaos. It’s a duty and an obligation NOT to collect too many ideas, to be ruthless with idea management.”
Finally, and this is another theme that was echoed over and over again: The CEO must drive innovation, and financial gap analysis is essential on the front end. You must arm yourself with the facts. Land also felt that a company should have an EVP or C-level innovation executive heading an innovation department that would integrate all functions – marketing, technology, business development, etc. And a company’s biggest barriers to innovation, in his view, are lack of leadership to drive innovation, and lack of strategic alignment regarding innovation.
And this was just the first part of the first day!!! More to come.
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| Category: Collaborative Creativity | Commercialization | Conferences | Corporate Climate | Creativity | Disruptive Innovation | Innovation, General | Law & Policy | Marketing | Marketing Research | New Products | Open Innovation | Patents | ROI (Return on Innovation) | Technology
September 9, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Interesting NYT article (reg reqd) on how Maytag is using an in-house skunkworks type of group to revive its brand - and its company - with innovative new products and people:
"But unusual products that break away from Maytag's traditional washers and Hoover vacuum cleaners are not the only inventions the company wants from the team, which was created by Ralph F. Hake, Maytag's chairman and chief executive, from the remnants of its e-business unit. The team, with 10 to 12 members, is expected to seed Maytag with people who can move faster than the competition, think differently about how to make products and keep the company's larger units in touch with consumers.
'I subscribe to the idea that people running big business units are pretty conservative,' Mr. Hake said. 'They spend their time fixing problems and getting business done. If I had told Jenn-Air to do a small appliance, it would have been low on their priority list. But this team's main role in life is to create new products.' "
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| Category: Innovation, General
September 3, 2003
Posted by Joyce Wycoff
Joyce is on a book deadline, so I'm posting her answer to what I just posted about creativity, innovation and the 'copyright wars'......here's Joyce:
I think this post is very much about the "either/or" vs. "both/and" mindset. It's easy to say we have to do this OR that ... much harder to figure out how we can do this AND that. The copyright issue is a perfect example - free flow of information does stimulate creativity ... and people do need to benefit from their labors, even creative labors.
Last year at Convergence we had John Perry Barlow speak - he is very much on the side of opening up creative works in order to stimulate more creativity. He also said that, in the time when people could freely download music, the record industry was selling more and making more money. Since they clamped down on copying, sales have gone down. He said a similar pattern was true with the Grateful Dead, who allowed people to freely record concerts. Obviously, they didn't suffer much financially and what they created was an army of supporters who recruited other fans by sharing bootleg tapes which turned into record sales and concert tickets.
As a writer, I feel the buffeting winds of both sides of this issue but know there is a place in the middle where if you freely share enough, you get compensated for your efforts. Also, I found out a long time ago, I can spend a lot of time, energy and money trying to protect my intellectual property ... or I can just keep producing more. Since I like the "producing more" way of living, I don't worry much about the rest.
I guess it comes down to a mindset: Do we believe in a world of abundance where sharing freely results in abundance for all, or a world of poverty where if you have more, it means I have less. I don't know the "reality" of the world, but I do know I prefer to have a mindset of abundance ... even when it sometimes doesn't seem to be working. ;-)
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| Category: Innovation, General
September 1, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Need to remind you all about the 9th annual InnovationConvergence 2003, which will be September 21-24 in Minneapolis. Our own Joyce Wycoff is the chairperson of this conference, which is a gathering of leading innovation practitioners to explore best practices and share tools and techniques. Covered at the conference will be these topics: Drive the Innovative and Creative Culture Within Your Organization, Reinvent your Business Strategy, Leapfrog the Competition, Revolutionize Your Industry, and Create the Future. Obviously Joyce will be there; I will be too, and I’m not sure about Henry, John and Leslie. If you go, find me and introduce yourself!
(Note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for InnovationConvergence; if you register because you found out about it here, please let them know! And yes, the cryptic-looking banner ad over there at top right will lead you to information about the conference, as well as the links in this post.)
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| Category: Innovation, General
August 25, 2003
Posted by Leslie Martinich
Greetings! I’m delighted to join my esteemed friends and colleagues in this discussion of creativity and innovation.
I’ve been exploring the relationship between innovation and trust. John Wolpert and others have talked about the notion of using trusted intermediaries, “innomediaries” for the exchange of innovations among companies.
That’s one area of intersection between innovation and trust.
And there are many others. For example, political systems and innovation. Political systems need to provide innovators with an environment in which they can trust that they will be able to derive some financial benefit from their work. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, “If Economists Are So Smart, Why Is Africa So Poor?” Douglass North, one of my favorite economic historians, and others, discuss the relationship between market economies and political systems. “The efficient functioning of markets requires that some organization enforce contracts and property rights.” It is unappealing to go to the trouble of building a market and commercializing an innovation in an environment in which one’s work can be snatched away by a despot. (Or for that matter, by a competitor.)
What are the infrastructure ingredients that foster innovation? The political infrastructure. The economic infrastructure. The legal infrastructure. The market infrastructure. All of these systems (among others) interact to produce better or worse environments for innovation and its attendant prosperity. And we don’t need to find the optimal combination, simply one that is adequate.
I’ll explore these thoughts in future posts!
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| Category: Innovation, General
August 18, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
One last set of comments on Andrew Hargadon’s How Breakthroughs Happen: As I said before, I’m focused primarily on his idea that innovation happens when “technology brokers” bridge otherwise disconnected worlds. Hargadon wants firms to allow technology brokers to move within the “small worlds" that already exist in most firms: “There are many places within firms—between project teams, between divisions, between plants—where competition, politics, geography, and lack of communication have created small worlds by creating gaps in the flow of ideas and people across the organization.”
So when innovation fails or isn't happening, does that mean these gaps are being mis-managed? I think so, and to understand that better I think it's important to look at the characteristics of the gaps themselves. Thinking about these gaps reminded me of David Weinberger’s essay The Unspoken of Groups, based on his talk at last April’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, which I recently read. In the essay Weinberger says: “In general, making explicit does violence to what is being made explicit. … Making things explicit isn’t like unearthing an archaeological find that’s just been sitting there, waiting to be dug up. Making explicit often – usually – means disambiguating and reducing complexity.”
So when managers try to foster innovation by merging small worlds, by trying to make existing weak ties into strong ties (think heavy-handed knowledge-management initiatives) the effort often fails. Why? Because bridging gaps allows people to recast existing ideas in different ways – practicing inventive recombination. But when you merge small groups together, the very act of merging can do violence to the differences that created the very gaps you're trying to take advantage of. In the process the ideas that could come from bridging the gaps actually disappear rather than remain available for inventive recombination.
In order to create innovativion, we don't need to merge or erase the gaps between groups of people and their ideas — we need to bridge them in a way that preserves the ambiguity that created the gaps in the first place.
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| Category: Innovation, General
August 11, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
'Extreme Internship: IBM program allows interns' projects to become products' says this article. Looks like IdeaFlow blogger John Wolpert's been extreme-ly busy!
LATER: Here's another recent article on IBM's Extreme Blue...
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| Category: Innovation, General
May 27, 2003
Posted by John Wolpert
Note: John Wolpert is joining the new, improved group-blog version of IdeaFlow. This is his first post.
Hi there. My name is John Wolpert. I have been working in the area of corporate innovation for fourteen years. I am currently an IBMer at what we call the "incubator for talent, technology and business innovation" in IBM's Austin, TX site. Extreme Blue is a lab that runs up to 18 twelve-week "biztech" experiments a year that prove assumptions behind emerging business opportunities such as GRID and autonomic computing, Linux, pervasive computing, and intermediated services. These projects accelerate investment decision-making around IBM's innovative new growth initiatives. We maintain four such labs in the US and six more in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
The program also doubles as our high-potential talent incubator. Each project is made up of a team of new hires and interns - typically one business and three technical specialists - mentored by experienced IBMers. Combining the missions of talent development and corporate innovation (both technical invention and business innovation)into the same operation has allowed our program to grow consistently through a number of otherwise lean years.
When we talk about innovation in our lab, we speak mainly within the following definition: pursuing game-changing new business opportunities, exploiting new or potentially disruptive technologies in ways that change the economics of a system, and introducing change into the core concept of a going concern. Beyond this, my interest is mainly in the area of inter-corporate innovation.
There are some great minds focused on how companies build innovation practices inside the firm. To me, though, the best of these practices ultimately die off or are gamed into irrelevance by the forces roiling inside a closed system like a firm: getting ignored, shifting and capricious priorities, orphan opportunities that simply don't fit with the business model of that specific firm.
On the other hand, I have observed that innovators who somehow connect to innovators in other firms (a trick of organizational savvy rife with legal risks, to be sure) tend to grow in influence, and both their innovation regimes and the ideas that come out of such regimes are more likely to enjoy sustained attention, funding, and - more important - wider sources of insight and capabilities.
I won't say inter-firm innovations prove more successful in the long run. There is not enough good research to draw any reasonable conclusion on this yet. But the game does change when you involve multiple firms early and often in one's innovation regime. Extreme Blue, for example, has a roster of what we call "third-party mentors," company executives from various industries who give us advice on our wilder ideas. It turns out that their validation has more than once meant the difference between a project that went nowhere and a project that got funded as a proper initiative.
Of course, openness with other firms presents a problem. Most companies are not set up to expose early insights and emerging capabilities to another legal entity without the use of a lot of lawyers and impossible-to-sign non-disclosure agreements. I think part of the answer to this problem involves the use of trusted intermediaries in some cases, but this I'll leave for another entry. Check out my web site at http://www.inter-firm.com for more on the topic of trusted intermediaries in corporate innovation regimes.
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| Category: Innovation, General
May 20, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Stephen Shapiro (see post below) responded: "My route is flexible and will change as I move along (nothing is booked...I will find hotels each night as I travel). And you are VERY right...I am not trying to indicate that there is no creativity in the "Flyover Country"! I will visit people anywhere, assuming I can complete the trip by the end of August (I have speaking engagements overseas in September). Also, as I am traveling alone, I would like to "optimize" my schedule and avoid too many 12 hour days behind the wheel."
I'll be talking with Stephen when he gets to Texas. Meanwhile, today I am off on a much less creative road trip, and will post the rest of the week as often as I can.
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| Category: Innovation, General
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