Innovation in Practice

Innovation in Practice: Four Years Old!

"oh this is going to be addictive"

That was tweet #38 from Twitter co-developer, Dom Sagolla on March 21, 2006, the date Twitter was officially launched as a web-based application.

Truer words were never spoken.  I started Innovation in Practice on December 2, 2007.  This month marks its four year anniversary.  The title of my first post was "Innovation is a Skill, Not a Gift."

The themes of this blog are:

• Innovation can be learned like any other skill such as marketing, leadership, or playing the guitar.  To be an innovator, learn a method.  Teach others.
• Innovation is a two-way phenomena.  We can start with a problem and innovate solutions.  Or we can generate hypothetical solutions and explore problems that they solve.  To be a great innovator, you need to be a two-way innovator.
• Innovation must be linked to strategy.  Innovation for innovation's sake doesn't matter.  Innovation that is guided by strategy or helps guide strategy yields the most opportunity for corporate growth.
• The corporate perspective, where innovation is practiced day-to-day, is what must be understood and kept at the center of attention.  This is where truth is separated from hype.

At the beginning of 2011, I set a goal:  "Reach New Audiences.  I want to expose innovation methods to kids, seniors citizens,  people with disabilities...anyone who wants to make a difference with innovation."  This year, I had the good fortune to teach innovation to third and fourth graders at the Wyoming School District in Ohio.  I was impressed with the many cool ideas they developed using S.I.T..  One of my favorites:  an umbrella with two handles, one at each end.  I asked third-grader, Sam, to tell me why it was useful.  He said, "Because if the wind blows your umbrella out, you can just turn it upside down and start using it!"

I also taught innovation to a group of special needs students at the Hughes High School in Cincinnati.  I had twenty five students, all with various issues such as autism and ADHD.  The result was the same.  One student used multiplication on a flashlight.  He made a copy of the on/off button.  I asked him to explain the benefit of having a second button.  He said, "The second button is used to change the brightness of the light."  Not bad for a kid named Ryan with Down Syndrome.

For next year, I plan to continue blogging The LAB series.  This is my way of practicing with the method and exposing new uses to my readers.  In 2011, I used S.I.T. to innovate:  the pricing process, a light switch, new product launch, software, corporate training program, pharmaceuticals, a treadmill, cosmetics, Facebook, inflight services, and a book.  

Speaking of book, that is another goal for next year: we plan to publish a book that teaches people how to use Systematic Inventive Thinking.  No firm date yet.   

I want to thank Jacob Goldenberg, Amnon Levav, Yoni Stern, and the entire team at S.I.T..  Also, Christie Nordhielm and Marta Dapena-Baron at Big Picture Partners, Bob Cialdini at Influence at Work, Yury Boshyk at Global Executive Learning Network, the Washington Speakers Bureau, and my fellow faculty at the UC Lindner College of Business.

I thank all of you for reading this blog.  I wish you the best in 2012.

Drew

The Remaking of Netflix

Netflix needs urgent change to stop the bleeding and rebuild its business model. It is running out of cash and losing support from customers and shareholders.  Management must re-establish its credibility with bold moves.  Here is a series of steps and techniques to do that.

1.  Reframing:  Use the Subtraction Tool to reframe and see new possibilities.  Make a list of the major components of the company (patents, products, brand, employees, customers, network, etc.).  Now imagine Netflix will merge with a company from another industry.  Create a phrase something like this: "Netflix cannot stream movies to customers, but it has all the other components.  What company has the ideal set of products that would best fit the remaining resources of Netflix?"   For example, would a company in the retail sector have products that would find new growth within the Netflix enterprise? Companies like Path Intelligence might be a good candidate.  Perhaps Netflix could merge with a brick and mortar movie theater company like AMC Entertainment and leverage the strengths of each.  Perhaps Netflix links up with Research in Motion to leverage its proprietary Blackberry network for streaming data.  Use this same approach for all the components, one at a time, to envision new possibilities. 

2.  Reverse Assumption:  This technique helps "break fixedness" about assumptions.  List the key business assumptions about Netflix and its industry.  For example:

• Netflix streams content to customers
• Consumers want more options
• Netflix sends DVDs to customers

Reverse the assumptions one by one.  "Customers stream content to Netflix."  Perhaps the new business model is to offer a service allowing customers to stream information to Netflix which is then re-streamed to others.  Perhaps Netflix uses its streaming skills to enter the business-to-business market, servicing banks or other companies that need to move digital content in a unique way.  Perhaps customers send DVDs to other customers instead of sending it back to Netflix, saving time and money.

The Voice of the Brand

Most people are surprised to hear that five simple patterns explain the majority of innovative products and services.  Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered this surprising insight.  It is similar to the notion of TRIZ which is a set of patterns for solving problems.  Innovative products share common patterns because their inventors unknowingly followed them when generating new product ideas.  These patterns become the DNA of products.  You can extract the DNA and implant it into other products and services to create new innovations.  We call it The Voice of the Product.

Are there more than five patterns?  Most certainly.  Highly creative people like musicians and artists use templates in their creations.  Even products invented serendipitously have a pattern embedded in them.  Many products are invented accidentally.  Serendipity led to the microwave oven, corn flakes, Teflon®, penicillin, fireworks, Viagra®, chocolate chip cookies, and the most famous of all accidents...the Post-it® note.  The problem with serendipity is it's not predictable.  It is not an innovation method one would count on for corporate growth.  But there is value in serendipity if you can unlock its hidden secrets.  Every serendipitous invention can be reduced to a heuristic and ultimately to an algorithm or pattern.  We call it The Voice of Serendipity.

What other voices are out there?  Take brands, for example.  A well-developed brand has a unique personality, sort of a code of attributes.  That code is a pattern that could be reapplied to products and services to help discover new benefits and opportunities.  Like the other voices, The Voice of the Brand can be leveraged for innovative thinking.

Consider the following brand attribute model:

Are You More Innovative Than You Think?

You may be surprised to find many of your products and services conform to the five innovation patterns of Systematic Inventive Thinking.  If so, it means your employees are predisposed to use innovation patterns when developing new  products.  Like many innovators, they are using patterns probably without realizing it. Given this predisposition to using innovation templates, a company can realize huge gains in innovation effectiveness by taking the next step.

Take the case of a large industrial company in the energy sector.  It leads the industry producing a product that is relatively simple in design but incredibly challenging to produce.  Despite its strong reputation and market success, the company worries it is not innovative.  Yet when I reviewed its project pipeline, I spotted concepts with each of the five patterns of S.I.T. (Subtraction, Task Unification, Multiplication, Attribute Dependency, and Division).  The teams did not use S.I.T. in the classic way (apply templates and work backwards using "Function Follows Form" to find a potential benefit).  Instead, they used trial and error, experimentation, and good old fashioned tinkering.  Their innovations embody the templates nevertheless.

These teams are more innovative than they think.  They are one short step away from applying S.I.T..  They already have these patterns inside them, so now it's just a matter of extracting them and putting them to use in a more disciplined way.  Using S.I.T. on their products and processes will force new combinations and concepts that they would not have thought of otherwise.  The method will "bootstrap" their innovation performance to a new high level.

If your company is predisposed to innovation, take these steps to ramp up performance:

The Remaking of Blackberry

Research in Motion, the maker of Blackberry, must reinvent its business model.  Otherwise, it's the end of the road as many market analysts are predicting.  Time is of the essence, so the management team needs to accelerate its search for new directions and pursue them aggressively.  Here is a series of steps and techniques to do that.

1.  Reframing:  Use the Subtraction Tool to reframe and see new possibilities.  Make a list of the major components of the company (sales force, products, brand, employees, customers, network, etc.).  Now imagine that the company will merge with another company from any industry.  Create a phrase something like this: "RIM has no products, but it has all the other components.  What company has the ideal set of products that would best fit the remaining resources of RIM?"   For example, would a company in data-mining or other information-based services have products that would find new growth within the RIM enterprise? Companies like LexisNexis, Authernative, and Lifelock come to mind.  Continue searching for more insights by doing the same exercise for each component.

2.  Reverse Assumption:  Assumptions get outdated, and this technique helps "break fixedness" about them.  List all the obvious business assumptions about RIM and its industry.  For example:

• Blackberry is for enterprises
• Consumers want more functionality
• Cellphones are the dominate form of communication

Reverse the assumptions one by one.  "Consumers want less functionality."  Perhaps the new business model is to create stripped down products used by a different market segment.  Perhaps Blackberry becomes a system strictly for young people, not enterprises.  Cellphones are replaced by Internet technologies.  Imagine if RIM developed a Blackberry approach to Skype.

Innovation Suite 2011 in Berlin

SIT will hold its 7th Innovation Suite in Berlin, Germany from October 24-26, 2011.  Participants will learn the tools and principles of the SIT method step-by-step.  They will also learn how to implement an innovation program within their companies.  It is an intensive learning experience with some of SIT's most experienced facilitators.

Here is what a participant had to say about it:
 

Agenda (from the SIT website):

Day 1 - Learn SIT to think and act differently
 
By 5:30pm you will know how to apply:
- SIT principles and thinking tools for New Product Development
- SIT’s approach to Problem Solving

Day 2 - SIT-in-action
 
The second day will be conducted mostly by SIT-trained innovation leaders from large organizations around the world.
 
By 5:30pm you will know how SIT works on different scales and levels of organizations after you have:
- Heard first-hand testimonials, challenges, and case-studies of innovation managers.
- Learned additional SIT tools from the experienced innovation leaders.

Day 3 - Putting it all to work
 
The third day is all about you and your team, and how to harness your team’s knowledge and resources to meet your business goals, improve the results of strategic projects, and find creative ways to use new thinking in everyday situations.
 
By 5:30pm you will know how to manage a short innovation process after you have:
- Learned how to identify needs and opportunities for innovation
- Led an innovation session on a real business topic of your own
- Learned what needs to be done to ensure results

After the program, participants will receive personal coaching to help apply the new skills in their organizations and implement an innovation program.

Innovation Gone Wild

AOL succumbed to the myth that creating an eclectic workspace makes employees suddenly more innovative.  The headline from USA Today reads: “It’s engineers gone wild at AOL: Quirky office space inspires app innovation.” 

Quirky?

“The space you work in is a reflection of the kind of company you are,” says Brad Garlinghouse, AOL’s president of the Application and Commerce Group.  “You get innovation,” he insists, from “working in a space that’s very open and doesn’t have offices…where people can work together and play together.”  Further, the company believes letting workers draw on the walls helps creativity.

AOL is in more trouble than I thought.  Simply putting people in a different workspace is not going to make them more creative.  A room full of beanbag chairs, Frisbees, and white boards does not change the cognitive pattern of how people generate ideas.  It may indeed hamper innovation.  For example, employees treat other’s ideas differently depending on where the ideas come from.  An idea from a peer rival is seen as “tainted,” whereas the exact same idea coming from an outside source is seen as “tempting.”  In essence, employees subvert great ideas from peers so peers do not get ahead.  Lumping people together in quirky innovation rooms triggers that phenomena as it signals the battle-of-the-brains has begun.

True, office design can indeed have a positive overall effect on employees’ work.  For example, a well-designed office can improve productivity, communication, and morale.  These are certainly beneficial for creativity.  But these are beneficial for every business process.  It is innovation, though, not productivity or otherwise, that is singled out and associated with quirky rooms.  This misguided hype gives innovation a bad name.

Instead of spending millions on 225,000 square feet of “innovation rooms,” AOL should invest in building something much more important: skills and competencies in the use of innovation tools and techniques.  With the right innovation training and practice, employees can innovate anywhere in any space.

The writing is on the wall for AOL.  Quarterly earnings were a mere $4.7 million versus $34.7 million a year ago.  It’ll take a lot more than quirky office space to cover that shortfall.

Targeting Your Innovation Efforts

Companies get better results from innovation by targeting initiatives at the right places.  Given limited time, money, and human resources, here are six areas to focus on:

1. Your Value Drivers:  What activities across your business model create the most value?  Is it operational or commercial?  Who is involved and what departments make it happen?  Use a corporate innovation method like S.I.T. to reinvent the value driver as well as the resources that deliver it.

Procter & Gamble innovated an intelligent screening system that scanned coffee beans imported from any part of the world and selected the right proportions of each to create the desired taste.  This created a huge operational advantage in producing a distinctive product within a commoditized industry.

2. Your Core Competency:  What skill sets create strategic assets?  Strategic assets are those that deliver a sustainable competitive advantage.  By re-inventing these skills and how they are sourced and maintained, companies sustain their advantage.

AkzoNobel, a maker of specialty paint, has a unique ability to color match to near perfection thanks to their skills in chemistry and spectroscopy.  Applying innovation methods to the color matching process would uncover new skills or complementary skills to fortify its strategic advantage.  

3.  Your Potential Acquisitions:  Growth through acquisition is expensive and risky.  Acquisition stifles innovation and distracts management as it focuses on integration.  The answer is to use innovation methods ahead of the deal-making to clarify and enhance valuation.

IBM’s acquisition of Netezza for $1.7 billion seems excessive given the commodization of data warehousing.  By applying a corporate innovation method to the target's core products before the offer would uncover new or hidden sources of deal value.  Pre-deal innovation either makes the deal more valuable or creates intellectual property to leverage against other suitors if the deal falls through.

4.  Your Customer's Processes:  How does your customer use your product or service?  Observe and map out the detailed steps of what customers do when they use it.  Use innovation methods to re-invent the way consumers seek and derive value.  This will lead to new product concepts that address these new customer behaviors.

Johnson & Johnson’s medical device unit creates detailed heat maps of how surgeons perform complicated procedures.  The maps reveal the amount of time for each step, the product used, the degree of difficulty, and risk to the successful outcome.  Innovation is targeted at the high difficulty/high risk aspects of the procedure where the most value will be created from breakthrough ideas.

5.  Your Brand Reputation:  What are you most known for in the industry and in the minds of your customer?  Is it superior products, great service to your distributors, fabulous advertising, top people?  Use innovation methods on how consumers perceive your brand to strengthen and reinforce brand loyalty.

L’Oreal’s professional products division leads its industry through servicing salons with product support, training, merchandising, and market insights.  The use of structured innovation methods of how salons operate and service their customers would create new insights and product development opportunities.  Innovating where L'Oreal is regarded as the best in the industry would reinforce its leadership status.

6.  Your Strategic Capabilities:  How does your company win in the marketplace?  What is its "source of authority?"  By innovating the way a company competes, it surprises and outmaneuvers the competition.

Barry Jaruzelski and Kevin Dehoff from Booz & Company describe three strategic orientations: Need Seekers, Market Readers, and Technology Drivers.  “The most successful companies are those that focus on a particular, narrow set of common and distinct capabilities that enable them to better execute their chosen strategy.”  These strategic capabilities can be innovated using systematic methods of ideation.

Feature Creep

Companies that struggle with innovation often make up for it by adding features to existing products.  They succumb to "feature creep" - the gradual and continuous addition of features and functions though nothing is truly new.  While it may look improved, the added features make your product more complex, difficult to use, and more costly to produce.  Over time, your core customers abandon you.

Here is an example - the Numi toilet by Kohler.  At $6400, it is promoted as the top-of-the-line toilet with lots of high-tech bells and whistles:

• Custom bidet: User can control pressure, temperature and angle.
• Tankless design; dual flush
• Motion Sensor Lid: After 90 seconds of no movement, the toilet will close.
• Seat warmer
• Foot warmer: A vent beneath the bowl blows hot air to warm your feet and the cold tile beneath them.
• Automatic seat: For male users, a motion sensor is activated by foot and causes the seat to rise and then lower when you're away.
• LED lit back panel: Frosted glass is lit in an energy-efficient way.
• MP3 hook-up: So you never have to be without your music.
• Remote control: This touch-screen pad lets the user control all of these features from a wireless control.
• A flat white surface designed for easy cleaning.

Instead of adding features, companies can become more innovative by subtracting features.  Here is an example of the Subtraction template of the S.I.T. innovation method.  Kimberly-Clarke Corporation, a global producer of paper-based products, launched their new Scott Natural Tube-Free toilet paper. Just as the name asserts, the rolls come without the cardboard tubes while still being able to fit on the average toilet paper holder.

From Foxnews.com:

“The idea has been around for quite some time,” said Doug Daniels, brand manger for Scott brand. “The tube doesn’t really serve any consumer purpose. But we’ve had a breakthrough in our technology that’s finally allowed us to do this.”  For now, the process of taking out the tube remains a mystery, as Kimberly-Clarke won’t reveal its ground-breaking technology. Daniels says they’re keeping tight-lipped, since they might use the process for future products. But more importantly, he maintains that no cardboard tube means every single piece of toilet paper will be usable, without those last few sheets getting stuck to the roll.

Kimberly-Clarke estimates that the U.S. alone disposes of 17 billion cardboard tubes from bathroom tissue, equating to 160 million pounds of waste. To put that into perspective, that’s roughly the weight of 250 Boeing 747s and enough tubes to circle the earth’s equator 40 times. Daniels says that this marriage of consumer and ecological advantages will pave the way for the success of the tubeless initiative."

The LAB: Innovating Facebook with Attribute Dependency (March 2011)

Facebook innovated to become the dominate social network with 600 million users in just six years.  What will it do for an encore?  More importantly, how will it continue to innovate?  For this month's LAB, we will apply the Attribute Dependency tool to demonstrate how Facebook might continue re-inventing itself.

To use Attribute Dependency, make two lists.  The first is a list of internal attributes.  The second is a list of external attributes - those factors that are not under your control, but that vary in the context of how the product or service is used.  Then create a matrix with the internal and external attributes on one axis, and the internal attributes only on the other axis.  The matrix creates combinations of internal-to-internal and internal-to-external attributes that we will use to innovate.  We take these virtual combinations and envision them in two ways.  If no dependency exists between the attributes, we create one.  If a dependency exists, we break it.  Using Function Follows Form, we envision what the benefit or potential value might be from the new (or broken) dependency between the two attributes.

Here are attributes of the Facebook experience:

Innovation Tools – The Course

It’s that time of year again for “Innovation Tools,” the graduate marketing course at the University of Cincinnati.   The course teaches how to use Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method based on three ideas.  First, most successful innovations over time followed one of five patterns, and these patterns are like the DNA of products that can be re-applied to innovate any product or service.  Second, innovation happens when we start with a configuration (the “solution”) and work backwards to the “problem” that it solves.  It turns out that humans are better at this than the traditional “problem-to-solution” approach to innovating.  Finally, better innovation happens when we start within the world of the problem (the Closed World).  Innovations that use elements of the problem or surrounding environment are more novel and surprising.  We innovate “inside the box,” not outside.

Students not only learn how to innovate, but they also learn how to link it to marketing strategy.  We teach a bit of the Big Picture marketing framework so that students know how to tie innovation and strategy to create an innovation roadmap.

We have 45 graduate students, mostly from our master of science of marketing program.  It is a diverse group and includes masters and doctoral candidates from other colleges.  From this class, we created eight teams working different projects.  The mix of products, services, and government programs should demonstrate that innovation methods can be applied virtually anywhere.  Here are the projects:

Super Bowl Innovation

At $3 million dollars for a thirty second spot, Super Bowl advertisers need to create the best, most innovative commercials possible.  How?  Creating innovative TV commercials is more effective when using patterns embedded in other innovative commercials.  Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered that 89% of 200 award winning ads fall into a few simple, well-defined design structures.  Their book, "Cracking the Ad Code," defines eight of these structures and provides a step-by-step approach to use them.

Here are the eight tools:
   1. Unification
   2. Activation
   3. Metaphor
   4. Subtraction
   5. Extreme Consequence
   6. Absurd Alternative
   7. Inversion
   8. Extreme Effort

Let's see how well 2011 Super Bowl ads fit these patterns.

Don't Brand Your Innovation Program

Companies should avoid the temptation to brand their innovation program. While it seems like a great way to bring excitement and focus to innovation, branding these programs does just the opposite.  Employees become cynical, they wait it out, and they go right back to doing what they were doing before.

I liken this advice to that from Edwards Deming on quality.  His 14 Key Principles are legendary in the quality movement worldwide.  Principle Number 10 says:

"Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force."

In other words, don't cheer people on to do something they already do or, worse, don't know how to do.  For example, don't place huge banners in the cafeteria or on the employee website about the importance of quality.  That's because...they already know it!  It annoys employees when the company condescends.

The same is true with innovation.  Branding your corporate innovation with hyperbole and slogans only defeats the purpose.  But there are some who would argue the merits of branding.  It signals leadership support, and it creates enthusiasm.  GE's "Ecomagination" for example, makes a clear statement about the company's emphasis.

What to do?  A recent study on the effects of time pressure on innovation outcome might lend some insight.  Michael Hsu and Hsueh-Liang Fan demonstrated that putting time pressure to innovate in a company that already has a high organizational innovation climate actually hurts performance.  In other words, cracking the whip on employees who already perform well makes them perform worse.  On the other hand, creative outcomes will be enhanced by putting time pressure in companies with a poor innovation culture.

Perhaps the same could be said for branding your innovation program:

• In corporate cultures where the innovation climate is strong and well supported, branding the innovation does absolutely no good.  It may signal that something is wrong, or the leadership just doesn't get it.
• In corporate cultures where the innovation climate is weak or non-existent, branding the innovation program may give a short term burst of energy and results.  'Might as well try it...nothing else seems to work.

If you insist on bringing high visibility to your innovation program, don't brand the entire program.  Rather, brand the innovation training program.  Signal to your employees that you are serious about giving them the skills that matter most - the ability to create new and useful innovations across the entire enterprise.  THAT is worth bringing attention to.

Innovation for the Non-Profit Sector

Non-profit organizations need innovation every bit as much as for-profit firms.  Some might argue they need it more because they lack the resources and cash flow of large commercial firms.  Non-profits need innovation in:

• Fund Raising
• Expanding their reach
• Mission delivery
• Resource utilization

The need for innovation in the non-profit sector is widely recognized.  Awards, grants, and other forms of recognition for innovative programs help stimulate managers to be more aggressive.

While the need is recognized, the approach to innovating non-profits is not.  These organizations should use the same methods found so effective in corporate innovation.  Structured methods based on patterns inherent in inventive solutions can be applied to the non-profit business model just as effectively as the for-profit model.  A method like S.I.T. can help an organization "break fixedness" about its role, resources, and process, thus opening new possibilities and approaches.

Here is how I would do it.  Start by making a list of the components of the non-profit, both internal to the firm as well as external.  The list might include:

1. the office
2. volunteers
3. phones
4. fund raising events
5. website
6. promotional material
7. donations and grants
8. beneficiaries
9. benefactors
10. mission statement
11. management board
12. executive director

Start with a tool like Subtraction.  Try removing an essential internal component (for example, donations and grants).  Use "Function Follows Form" to imagine benefits and uses of all the remaining components.  Try it with other components.  Next, use the Task Unification tool.  This tool helps you see existing resources in a new light, usually creating innovative ways to use those resources.  Finish the exercise with one of the three remaining tools.  Division, for example, will likely create new configurations of the non-profit and stimulate innovative ideas.  For example, try dividing out some of the executive director's roles but placing them somewhere else back in the "Closed World."  Where would those roles go and why would that be beneficial?

Here are some creative examples from the non-profit sector (courtesy of PSFK):

1. Nonprofit Shopping Mall is a new service that turns consumer dollars into charitable donations. The organization partners with major online retailers like Target, Amazon, Home Depot, Bloomingdales, Expedia, Petco, and iTunes.  They donate a percentage of each purchase to the nonprofit of choice.  A shopper begins on Nonprofit Shopping Mall, choosing a charity and clicking through to a retailer. Tracking data is used to identify which shoppers came via Nonprofit Shopping Mall, and which charities they’ve chosen to donate to.
2. Holiday Matinee recently worked with a local, non-profit charter school-offering its students an opportunity to design their own silkscreen tees, which they then voted on which designs to take part in their Artist Series. 100% of all the proceeds from these shirts go to school funding.
3. Can Too is an Australian non-profit program that provides professional training in running and swimming in exchange for charitable fund raising. Members are given twice-weekly training sessions, daily guides, speakers and social events.  In return, they have to raise funds for Cure Cancer Australia. Runners can train for 10K or half marathon and full marathon events while swimmers can choose from among 1 km, 2 km and 2.7 km ocean swims and raise funds when they participate in their respective events. Can Too has raised more than AUD 4 million for Cure Cancer Australia.
4. The MarkProf Foundation is a non-profit organization in Manila.  Its main event is an all-expenses paid, seven week “boot camp” led by multinational CEOs and reputable captains of local industry. Participants from diverse socio-economic backgrounds are ranked based on two core virtues: innovation and inquisitiveness.  The proof of success is in quality job creation. “MarkProf is already the biggest source of management trainees for some of the top multinational companies in the Philippines” says current president, Jem Perez who also refers to the organization as a “resume equalizer”.

Innovation and Humor

A church needed a new bell ringer.  When a man with no arms applied for the job, the doubting priest asked, "Can you ring the bell?"  The applicant climbed the bell tower, took a running start, and plowed his face into the bell producing a beautiful tone.  He suddenly slipped, fell to the ground, and died.  The crowd of onlookers asked the priest, "Do you know this man?"  The priest replied, "No. But his face rings a bell."

If you are like most people, you laugh at jokes at their very end, not the beginning.  Why?  Because jokes make sense only in hindsight after we hear the proverbial "punch line."  We have no context to start laughing at the start of the joke.  But once we hear the final line, our mind works its way backwards to make sense of it.  We laugh.

So it is with innovation.  An abstract concept remains abstract until our mind works backwards to make sense of it.  Only then do we see the value.  Edward de Bono describes this phenomena in his new book, Think! Before It's Too Late.  As de Bono puts it, "All creative ideas will be logical in hindsight."

For the innovation practitioner, this ability to automate our thinking and "see value in hindsight" is a crucial skill, one that can be trained and learned by anyone.  It can be strengthened and perfected with practice.  Once we develop an inate ability to see value in hindsight, the practitioner needs to develop a way to  create the abstractions.  That is where the use of innovation patterns comes in.  Five simple patterns - subtraction, task unification, division, multiplication, and attribute dependency - guide us to create abstract concepts.  They help us innovate systematically, on demand. 

What is unique about these patterns is that they have emerged from products already deemed innovative.  They do not rely on random generators.  They do not rely on special cognitive abilities of individuals.  They do not rely on unique insights gained from customers.  The patterns act like a cognitive prosthetic that creates the abstractions for you.  All you need to do then is "see the value in hindsight" just as you do with a good joke.

The church continued searching for a bell ringer.  Another man applied - the twin brother of the man who died.  The priest asked, "Can you ring the bell?"  The applicant climbed the bell tower as his brother had done and ran straight at the bell.  He suddenly slipped, fell to the ground and died, almost in the same spot.  Stunned onlookers asked the priest, "Do you know THIS man?" 

"No, but he's a dead ringer for his brother."

 

Drew Boyd on Innovation Management

Innovation Management is an online magazine offering best practice and inspiration to innovation management practitioners. It sources and provides articles in collaboration with experts in the field of innovation management from leading business schools, companies and universities worldwide. The online magazine seeks to be the best source of best practice for innovation management practitioners. 

Here is the text of my recent interview with co-founder and chief editor, Karin Wall.

What is innovation management to you?

Innovation management is three things: 1. Creating innovation competencies, 2. Allocating resources to innovation projects, and 3. Managing an innovation pipeline from idea to market launch.  I believe many people focus too much on the last two and not enough on creating the skills and talent needed for innovation.  Leadership teams must take the responsibility for  training and development, recruitment, and reward systems that elevate the innovation competency of the firm.

What’s the most satisfying part in your job?

I enjoy seeing people’s reaction to learning innovation.  I love it when they create their first idea using a structured process.  They get a big grin on their face.  It is very gratifying when my students “get it” and see how this ability to innovate will make them an enormous resource to any company that hires them.

And the most frustrating parts?

When people learn the skills of innovation, they face their next big challenge – how do I convince my boss to use this method on a regular basis?  How do I persuade the organization to see innovation as a systematic process?  It is frustrating to see students frustrated.  So we train additional skills of influence and organizational alignment.  We try to create “innovation evangelists.”

What’s your next big challenge

My next big challenge is getting the word out on what works and what doesn’t work in innovation.  I taught innovation to a group representing five multinational companies recently.  They were convinced that the method (based on patterns) works and can be used in a variety of ways.  But one of the participants asked, “Why am just hearing about this now?”  That is a good question, and more needs to be done to make people see innovation as a set of skills that can be taught and learned by anyone.

Innovation in Practice: Three Years and Counting!

Today marks the third anniversary of Innovation in Practice. I am happy to say I see no end in sight.  Blogging is the ultimate truth serum: it helps you discover what you know, how you learn, and how you connect to a community of fellow bloggers.  I use this blog to test my ideas, develop new ideas, and practice what I preach.  I appreciate all of you who read this blog, and I encourage you to reach out to me.  I welcome ways to improve the blog and I would love to hear topics you want me to focus on.   

The themes of this blog are:

•  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned like any other skill such as marketing, leadership, or playing the guitar.  To be an innovator, learn a method.  Teach others.
•  Innovation is a two-way phenomena.  We can start with a problem and innovate solutions.  Or we can generate hypothetical solutions and explore problems that they solve.  To be a great innovator, you need to be a two-way innovator.
•  Innovation must be linked to strategy.  Innovation for innovation's sake doesn't matter.  Innovation that is guided by strategy or helps guide strategy yields the most opportunity for corporate growth.
•  The corporate perspective, where innovation is practiced day-to-day, is what must be understood and kept at the center of attention.  How the corporate practitioner views the academic community, the consulting community, and the research community is where we will find best practices.  This is where truth is separated from hype.

2010 Highlights

• I became a full-time academic after retiring from Johnson & Johnson in May.  This frees up a lot of time to do the writing, consulting, and research in innovation that I have always wanted to do.  Even though I'm in academia, the blog's focus will remain "The Corporate Perspective" because this is where I believe innovation has to be ignited to drive economic growth.  Academics teach, and practitioners do.
• The LAB series continues to push me to innovate in new ways.  This year, I innovated the Blackberry, the game of baseball, website design, retail selling, Legos, service models, water access, party planning, an aquarium, wedding invitations, and the iPad.

2011 Focus

• New Audiences:  I want to expose innovation methods to kids, seniors citizens,  people with disabilities...anyone who wants to make a difference with innovation.
• New Relationships:  I look forward to strengthening my ties to some very special people including Jacob Goldenberg, Amnon Levav, Yoni Stern, and the entire team at S.I.T..  Also, Christie Nordhielm and Marta Dapena-Baron at Big Picture Partners, Bob Cialdini at Influence at Work, Yury Boshyk at Global Executive Learning Network, and the team at the Washington Speakers Bureau.  I look forward to new projects with Mark Adkins at PDMA and Randy Rossi at Bally Design.  All good stuff.
• New Colleagues:  Special thanks to the UC marketing faculty (Karen, Chris, Fritz, Dave, James, Frank, Bob, Inigo, Norm, Jane, Raj, Constantine, and Ric). 

 

Drew

Marketing Innovation: The Inversion Tool

Creating innovative TV commercials is more effective when using patterns embedded in other innovative commercials.  Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered that 89% of 200 award winning ads fall into a few simple, well-defined design structures.  Their latest book, "Cracking the Ad Code," defines eight of these structures and provides a step-by-step approach to use them.

Here are the eight tools:
   1. Unification
   2. Activation
   3. Metaphor
   4. Subtraction
   5. Extreme Consequence
   6. Absurd Alternative
   7. Inversion
   8. Extreme Effort

The Inversion Tool conveys what would happen if you didn’t have the product…in an extreme way.  It show the benefits “lost”  by not using the product.  While it produces memorable commercials, it should  be used only when the brand and its benefits are understood by the viewer. 

To use the Inversion Tool, start with the components of the brand promise.  Take each one away one at a time and envision in what ways the consumer would be affected...in an extreme way...if it did not have this aspect of the promise.

Here are two examples of the Inversion Tool:

The LAB: Innovating the Blackberry with S.I.T. (November 2010)

Blackberry is taking a shellacking from iPhone and Android.  It's market share has declined 4% in four months.  Why?  The company drifted from a strategy built around its core competency and is frantically chasing its app-crazed competitors. Though Blackberry defined the smart phone category, it will lose its lead unless it changes.

Blackberry needs innovation.  This month's LAB outlines an approach for using the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to Blackberry.  The focus is how to disrupt iPhone and Droid and re-assert dominance in the smart phone category. 

The first step is to pick the core benefit that Blackberry can lead with.  Using the Big Picture marketing framework, we need to identify a "dynamic variable" that is tied directly to RIM's core competency - secure communications.  Blackberry uses powerful codes to encrypt messages as they travel between a BlackBerry server and the BlackBerry device.  All BlackBerry traffic runs through RIM data centers and servers which encrypt and unscramble messages.  The iPhone and Droid communicate directly with ordinary email servers - unsecured.

My recommendation is to compete on privacy (NOT security which is more of the "how," not the "why").  Blackberry cannot compete with iPhone and Droid on functionality (apps) and design.  Instead, it needs to raise the Importance and Perception of privacy in the minds of the market.  Privacy is highly desired by people and organizations, and Blackberry is the only technology that can do many functions securely.  The trick is to extend the idea of privacy management beyond just emailing.  Blackberry wants to convince the market that privacy is more important than apps and desgin.

Characteristics of Future Innovations

What big innovation do you expect within 10 years?  My crystal ball is no better than others.  Rather than predict innovations, I predict what characteristics they will have and how they might be invented.

1.  Mobility:  Future products will incorporate some degree of mobility and integration into the mobile lifestyle.  Smart phones fuel this.  But mobility is not all about communications.  Future products will take advantage of the data created by people as they move through their day.  The innovation templates, Task Unification and Attribute Dependency, are excellent tools for identifying these opportunities.

An MIT team is researching the feasibility of using cell phones as a unique tool to identify any emerging disease outbreaks. The team, led by Anmol Madan, said that a disease changes the mobility pattern of a cell phone user and by developing a software that tracked movements, phone calls and text messages of 70 students who were also daily surveyed for their health, the software was able to identify those suffering from an ailment.  Students who came down with a fever or full-blown flu tended to move around less and make fewer calls late at night and early in the morning. When Madan trained software to hunt for this signature in the cellphone data, a daily check correctly identified flu victims 90 per cent of the time.  Public health officials could also use the technique to spot emerging outbreaks of illness ahead of conventional detection systems, which today rely on reports from doctors and virus-testing labs. Similar experiments in larger groups and in different communities will have to be done first though.