Innovation in Practice

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

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

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

Here is a brief history from Wikipedia:

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

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

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification at Airports

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation Suite 2009

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

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

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

Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Hopeful Innovation

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

Hope is defined as a positive motivational belief in one's future; the feeling that what is wanted can be had;  that events will turn out for the best.  Hoping is an integral part of being human.  Without hope, tasks such as innovating become difficult if not impossible.  Why bother if there is no hope for a successful future?  "Hope is important for innovation at work because creativity requires challenging the status quo and a willingness to try and possibly fail.  It requires some level of internal, sustaining force that pushes individuals to persevere in the face of challenges inherent to creative work." 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are YOU an Innovator?

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

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

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

Innovation Dilemmas

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

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

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

Innovation Archetypes

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

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

The four Innovation Archetypes are: