Innovation in Practice

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:

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.

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.