Innovation in Practice

The Voice of the Product

Could the greatest innovation of all time be a method of innovation?  Roger Smith proposed this in The Evolution of Innovation.  Is such a method out there?  The answer is yes.

Suppose you want to come up with a new product idea. Where do you begin?  What method would you use?  Conventional thinking suggests three possible directions.  First, we could seek insights from our customers through research and observation (Voice of the Customer).  Second, we could emulate what inventors like Edison and Disney did to create new ideas (Voice of the Expert).  Or we could seek ideas from competitors and other sources using the "open" mindset (Voice of the Market).

There is a fourth source - The Voice of the Product¹.  Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered the surprising insight that innovative products tend to follow certain patterns.  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 follow patterns when generating new product ideas.  These patterns become the DNA of ideas².  If you can extract the DNA and implant it into other products and services, you can innovate.

A majority of new and inventive products can be categorized according to only five patterns:

• Subtraction: Taking an essential component away
• Task Unification:  Assigning an additional job to an existing product
• Multiplication:  Making a copy of a component but changing it in some way
• Division: Functionally or physically dividing a component or product
• Attribute Dependency: Creating new (or breaking existing) dependencies between attributes of a product or service and its environment

A systematic process called S.I.T. has been developed to apply these patterns. The patterns become “thinking tools” to identify new ideas. This process is called function follows form (FFF), a term coined by cognitive psychologist Ronald Finke. Instead of innovating by identifying a “function” or need and then creating a product, one first manipulates the existing product and considers how the new form could be beneficial.

Yoni Stern and Amnon Levav describe it as follows:

"Using FFF, one develops products in the reverse order to the market research process. One begins with an existing concept or product — a list of the product’s physical components and its environment. Then one of the five thinking tools is used to theoretically manipulate the product. These new “virtual products” are immediately assessed as to their value and feasibility. If the virtual product has market potential and falls within existing company and technological constraints, it undergoes needed minor adaptations and is considered worthy of follow-up. Market knowledge is used as a filter rather than the starting point; ideas generated are likely to be different from those of competitors."

People find it difficult to believe that innovation is a skill, not a gift.  With a method like S.I.T., anyone can learn to innovate anything, anytime.  If a better method evolves, I hope to be among the first to hear about it.

1. Goldenberg, Jacob and David Mazursky. "The Voice of the Product: Templates of New Product Emgergence". Creativity and Innovation Management September 1999: 157-164.

2.  Stern, Yoni, and Amnon Levav. "The DNA of Ideas". BIO-IT WORLD April 2005: 56-57.

2010 Outstanding Corporate Innovator

Congratulations to Kennametal, Inc. as the winner of the 2010 Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) award. The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), a global network of product innovation professionals, announced Kennametal  will receive the OCI Award at PDMA’s 34th Annual Global Conference on Product Innovation Management, October 16 – 20, 2010 at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida.

From the press release:

“Kennametal has demonstrated an impressive corporate commitment to innovation which has resulted in a successful track record of significant new product launches in the past five years,” said Sally Evans Kay, chair of PDMA’s OCI award selection committee. During recent turbulent economic times Kennametal has used its commitment to innovation to provide unique customer solutions and to gain a competitive advantage.

Green Field Innovation

How should firms identify innovation opportunities and predict market potential at very early stages and in new areas (“green fields”) and ambiguous environments?  Here are three approaches:

1.  Find Innovation Adjacencies: 

Adjacent markets are an attractive way to grow.  Adjacent markets are not too far away from your core business in terms of channels, technology, price point, brand, etc..  To find them, I recommend The Big Picture framework developed by Professor Christie Nordhielm at The University of Michigan.  The Big Picture outlines four quadrants that completely define any market category. To find "green fields", consider each quadrant one at a time and imagine extending beyond the bounds of the category in some close by, adjacent way.  The key is to stretch, not leap beyond your inherent business model.  Ask yourself these questions:

• Quadrant 1 Adjacencies:  What substitute products are non-category consumers using to fulfill the need.  Where are they buying it?  What complementary products go along with these substitutes?
• Quadrant 2 Adjacencies:  What other products do your loyal customers buy, perhaps at the same price point or to fulfill the same or similar brand promise? 
• Quadrant 3 Adjacencies:  Why do multi-brand customers use several brands?  Is it time-dependent?  Situation-dependent?  Why does it vary?  What other products are used when the competitive brands are consumed?
• Quadrant 4 Adjacencies:  What other category of products does your competitor sell?  How do those fit into their product line?  How could they fit into yours?

Once you identify potential adjacencies, apply an innovation method to create new-to-the-world concepts. 

2.  Cooperate with the Competition: 

Co-opetition is an idea described by Barry Nalebuff  and Adam Brandenburger in their book, "Co-opetition."  It means cooperative competition - when industry participants behave in a way that benefits all.  They coopetate rather than compete.  The trick is to apply innovation templates to the Value Net model of co-opetition.  Here's how.  List the activities of each Value Net participant (Company, Supplier, Customer, Complementors, Competitor).  Rotate each specific company in the Value Net model so that each takes a new role (competitors become suppliers, suppliers become complementors, etc).  Use each template on the new list of activities, starting with Task Unification.  Using Function Follows Form, envision how the new role creates a "green field" market.

3.  Listen to the "Voices": 

Here are three less obvious sources of "green field" opportunity. 

• Voice of the Product:  Products have enormous amounts of information coded into them through years of design improvement.  A corporate innovation method such as S.I.T. lets you "interrogate" the product to find new, undiscovered market benefits.
• Voice of the Brand:  Brands also have information coded into them.  The key is to extract the information and data that contributes to the brand promise to see hidden assets and market potential.  For this I recommend the semantic search engine, Goldfire.
• Voice of Serendipity:  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.  While serendipity is unpredictable, there is value if you can unlock its hidden secrets. 

Innovation Prosthetic

An innovation tool is a cognitive prosthetic that helps individuals and groups overcome their human limitations to innovate more capably.  Just as an artificial limb or hearing aid compensates and augments a missing or impaired part of the body, a thinking tool does the same - it compensates and augments for a variety of cognitive deficiencies in all humans.

Yet there is an aversion to using a structured tool to be creative:

• The Arts:  Musicians, poets, and graphic artists shun the idea of using a standard tool or template because it makes them appear less creative to their fans and the public.  But consider Paul McCartney who sold more albums in the U.S. than anyone.  In his biography, he confided:  "As usual, for these co-written things, John often had just the first verse, which was always enough:  it was the direction, it was the signpost and it was the inspiration for the whole song.  I hate the word but it was the template."  Listen carefully to artist, Jackson Pollock, describe his approach:

• The Sciences:  People in deep scientific fields such as pharmaceuticals and nano-technology are skeptical of thinking tools because it diminishes their sense of intellect and brainpower.  Given their heavy emphasis on research and discovery, this is not surprising.  They default to the Scientific Method.  But consider a rather successful scientist named Albert Einstein.  He used a thinking tool called mental simulation to discover the special theory of relativity.  He imagined traveling through space next to a beam of light:

• The Corporations:  High achievers resist the use of structured techniques because it makes them appear weak to their intra-firm rivals.  Executives prefer to use their intuition.  They trust it because it has gotten them far. But more executives are recognizing the value of educating their intuition by using patterns and thinking tools to augment their experience.  They use a prosthetic:

For practitioners, using an innovation prosthetic is a no brainer.

Brand Man

The role of brand manager may be the most difficult yet rewarding of all marketing jobs.  It defines much of what marketing is about.  The brand manager is multifaceted and works at several levels in a company. Duties are varied and challenging. Brand managers see the product being created and manage through all of the product's journey. Brand manager is the most important person to have around when a new product is being created or even when an old product needs to be re-launched.

How has the role changed over the years, and what is the role's impact on new product or service innovation?  Here is the first job description for a brand manager.  It's from an internal memo dated May 13, 1931 that I got it from Ed Rider, head archivist at P&G's Heritage Center, a corporate museum that documents the history of the company and its brands.

It is titled, "Brand Man:"

The Voice of Serendipity

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.  How?

In 1891, a physical education teacher named James Naismith invented the game of basketball by nailing two peach baskets to the gymnasium walls.  After the ball was thrown into a basket, someone climbed a ladder to get it out.  This was annoying, so the bottom of the basket was altered to allow a stick to poke through and knock the ball out.  After many games and many successful shots, the bottom fell out...literally.  The peach basket bottom weakened and broke loose allowing a ball to fall completely through after a shot.  The result?  This simple, serendipitous invention allowed the game to be played continuously without the interruption of retrieving the ball.  Basketball advanced to the worldwide game that it is today.

Research Priorities for Innovation

The Marketing Science Institute announced its research priorities for 2010 to 2012.  The priorities are based on input from member company trustees and academic thought leaders. Topics are selected based on importance to marketers, need for more research-based knowledge, potential for achieving a more powerful conceptualization of a topic or issue, and the extent to which the topic can benefit from MSI’s capabilities in fostering collaboration between practitioners and academics.

There are eight research priorities, and one of them is focused on innovation:

Systematic Innovation Tools: The Course

I am teaching my innovation course, Systematic Innovation Tools, at the University of Cincinnati this month. The course is a fusion of Systematic Inventive Thinking and The Big Picture marketing framework.  The Syllabus can be downloaded, but here are some details about it:

"This course focuses on how to create value and growth through innovation in new and existing markets. Students will learn the skills of innovation and how to apply those skills within the context of a marketing strategy framework. Students will apply innovation methods across the entire marketing management continuum including strategy, segmentation, targeting, positioning, and the 4P’s. The course will be taught using interactive workshop methods and techniques throughout. Students will first experience these facilitation techniques while learning innovation. They will then learn and practice these techniques so that they can apply them routinely throughout their graduate experience and beyond."

Two aspects of this course are unique.  First, we don’t just talk about innovation…we DO innovation.   This current group of 31 graduate students are very bright and skillful when learning and applying innovation.  The other unique aspect is the creation of new products and services that are formalized in a hypothetical company catalog – The Dream Catalog.  This is an effective way to take new innovations and rationalize them into a coherent pipeline for growth.  Students work in teams to create an actual Dream Catalog within an assigned category.  We have six teams for the following clients:

1. Procter & Gamble:  This team is innovating the PUR Water Filtration system to make the product line more adaptable in a variety of markets and situations.
2. General Tool:  The team is innovating a medium sized jet engine to find new improvements or features that would extend the use of the engine into non-aviation applications.
3. Cincinnati Art Museum:  This team is creating new ideas for how the museum displays art to create a whole new user experience for its visitors.
4. Down Syndrome Association of Greater Cincinnati:  The students in this team are creating new clothing products and accessories for people with Down Syndrome.
5. Twist Design Studio:  This new start-up company will feature unique, custom-made wedding and corporate invitations.  The students are using structured innovation to create completely new forms of invitations and paper-based products.
6. Metro Innovation:  This organization holds innovation competitions on behalf of sponsoring cities to drive economic development.  The assigned students are using innovation tools to re-invent how the competitions are run.

For the final exam, students will be given a product randomly (with no advance preparation).  They must use each of the five templates of innovation (Subtraction, Task Unification, Multiplication, Division, and Attribute Dependency) on that product to create new-to-the-world inventions.  They have to take each invention and plot what strategic quadrant of The Big Picture would be most suitable. It demonstrates: 1. mastery of the skills of innovation, and 2.  the ability innovate within the context of marketing strategy. 

I will post some of the results the Dream Catalogs and the final exams here on the blog. 

Kill Your Innovation Champion

Here are five things companies need to do to develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives to encourage successful innovation:

1.  Kill Your Innovation Champion:  It seems like a great idea to establish an "innovation champion" - responsible and accountable for driving innovation within the organization.  In reality, it stifles innovation.  Assigning a champion lets everyone off the hook.  Why innovate when we have our "champion" to do it ?   A study by the Association of Innovation Managers found that when companies assign innovation champions and establish separate funding, it threatens the R&D and the commercial departments.  "This kind of sponsorship opens the door for subtle forms of sabotage if the established business units believe that the innovation funding is inhibiting their ability to accomplish short-term objectives and take care of current customers. Without involvement, the commercial arm of an organization can also claim no responsibility for success or be blamed for failure."  Instead of relying champions, a better approach is to encourage "innovation subversives."

If you won't kill your champion, no worry - they will go away on their own.  The study also looked at what puts innovation managers at risk.  Of the 15 innovation champions in the study, 10 left their organizations and became consultants, 4 joined smaller or start-up companies, and 1 retired.  None returned to a Fortune 500 company. 

2.  Don't Give Credit for Good Ideas:   Tanya Menon from the University of Chicago describes the paradox of an external idea being viewed as "tempting" while the exact same idea, coming from an internal source, is considered "tainted." 

"In a business era that celebrates anything creative, novel, or that demonstrates leadership, "borrowing" or "copying" knowledge from internal colleagues is often not a career-enhancing strategy. Employees may rightly fear that acknowledging the superiority of an internal rival's ideas would display deference and undermine their own status.

By contrast, the act of incorporating ideas from outside firms is not seen as merely copying, but rather as vigilance, benchmarking, and stealing the thunder of a competitor. An external threat inflames fears about group survival, but does not elicit direct and personal threats to one's competence or organizational status. As a result, learning from an outside competitor can be much less psychologically painful than learning from a colleague who is a direct rival for promotions and other rewards."

3.  Fire the Lone Innovator:  Innovation is a team sport.  Keith Sawyer in his book, Group Genius highlights one of the most significant aspects of successful innovation - that groups of people are likely to be more creative than individuals working on their own.  A properly facilitated approach with a carefully selected "dream team" of employees yields innovation sooner, better, and bolder than the lone genius.

4.  Teach Innovation:  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be taught using structured innovation processes and templates.  Many universities offer courses and programs to learn innovation.  It is unacceptable that a corporation seeking growth through innovation would not have its employees properly trained in the skill of innovating.

5.  Build Innovation Muscle:  The best companies see innovation as an ongoing capability, not a one time event.  These companies work hard to build muscle around this capability so they can deploy it when they need it, where they need it, tackling their hardest problems.  Companies do this to keep up with the ever changing landscape both inside and outside the firm.  What does it mean to build innovation muscle?  I think of it as the number of people trained, the frequency of using an innovation method, and the percentage of internal departments that have an innovation capability.  Call it an Innovation Muscle Index:  N (number of trained employees) x F (number of formal ideation events per year using a method) x P (percent of company departments with at least one employee trained in an effective innovation method).   Innovation Muscle Index = N x F x P .

Voice of the Emergent Customer

Are some customers better than others at developing new concepts?  Professor Donna L. Hoffman at the University of California Riverside thinks so.  Emergent customers  have a unique ability to “wrap their head” around a new concept and improve it.  She created a scale to identify them so companies hear the voice of the “right” customer during new product development.

Emergent customers are better at imagining how concepts address latent unmet needs.  Dr. Hoffman describes it as a “unique constellation of personality traits and processing abilities that enables such consumers to engage in a synergistic process of visualization and rationalization to improve product concepts.”  Those characteristics are:

• Openness to new experiences
• Reflection
• Experiential and rational processing style
• Verbal (rational style) and Visual (experiential  style)
• Creativity (self perceived)
• Creative personality
• Optimism

The study included 1124 respondents and compared performance of those identified as emergent customers against those of lead users, early adopters, and a control group.  The emergent customers significantly outperformed the other groups.

Innovating to Compete

Innovating is a form of competitive behavior.  When we innovate, we compete with someone or something.  We innovate to survive. We innovate for glory.  We innovate to win.  Leaders of organizations need to understand and leverage this competitive aspect of innovation to embed it into the organization. 

Innovating to compete occurs at many levels:

• At the national level, governments compete with other nations for trade, economic power, and global political influence. 
• At the municipal level, cities compete aggressively to attract investment, firms, and employees to stimulate jobs and economic growth.
• At the industry level, competition among sectors is fierce.  Industries want to attract customers, investment, talent, and favorable government treatment.
• At the company level, firms want to be more competitive by differentiating themselves in the marketplace.
• At the business unit level, franchises compete with one another for budget resources and manpower.
• At the individual level, peer rivals compete with each other for promotion and bonuses.
• At the personal level, we compete with ourselves to achieve a new "personal best" when overcoming challenges.

Here are suggestions of what leaders can do to embrace competition and drive innovation:

Linking Innovation with Strategy

Innovation that is linked to strategy is seen as more realistic and supportable.  Innovating is efficient because you avoid creating ideas that are out of scope.  Firms struggle with this as Idris Mootee observed in his blog, Innovation Playground:

"The most amazing thing with strategic experience innovation is that it takes one kind of company and leadership to create the idea and another kind of company to scale it up and drive industry transformation and we see it in markets after market."

Andrew Hinton offered this insight on his blog, Inkblurt:

"We hear the words Strategy and Innovation thrown around a lot, and often we hear them said together. “We need an innovation strategy.” Or perhaps “We need a more innovative strategy” which, of course, is a different animal. But I don’t hear people questioning much exactly what we mean when we say these things. It’s as if we all agree already on what we mean by strategy and innovation, and that they just fit together automatically."

There are two approaches to linking innovation and strategy:  Strategy-Informs-Innovation and Innovation-Informs-Strategy.  Here is how:

Fixedness

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."
Marshall McLuhan

The most challenging aspect about innovating is rooted in a concept called fixedness.  Fixedness is the inability to realize that something known to have a particular use may also be used to perform other functions.  When one is faced with a new problem, fixedness blocks one’s ability to use old tools in novel ways.  Psychologist Karl Duncker coined the term functional fixedness for describing the difficulties in visual perception and problem solving that arise when one element of a whole situation has a (fixed) function which has to be changed for making the correct perception or for finding solutions.  In his famous “candle problem” the situation was defined by the objects: a box of candles, a box of thumb-tacks and a book of matches. The task was to fix the candles on the wall without any additional elements. The difficulty of this problem arises from the functional fixedness of the candle box. It is a container in the problem situation but must be used as a shelf in the solution situation.

Roni Horiwitz of S.I.T. puts it this way:  “It’s almost impossible for the human brain to produce a really fresh and unique thought. Every thought, opinion or idea is somehow connected to previous concepts stored in the brain.”   Because of this, we are often unable to see the solution to a problem although it stares us in the face.  We are too connected to what we knew previously. We not only can’t let it go, but we try very hard to anchor around it to explain what is going on.

Fixedness is insidious.  It affects how we think about and see virtually every part of our lives.  At work, we have fixedness about our products and services, out customers and competitors,  and our future opportunities.  The most damaging form of fixedness is when we are stuck on our current business model.  We cannot see past what is working today.  We stop challenging our assumptions.  We continue to believe what was once true is still true.  In the end, it is this perpetual blind spot that is most dangerous to our innovation potential.

Customers have fixedness, too.  Customers have a limited view of the future, they have well-entrenched notions of how the world works, and they suffer from the same blind spot we do.  Yet we continue to seek the “Voice of the Customer” as though a divine intervention will break through this fixedness so they can offer new ideas.

Fortunately, there is a way to address it.  The way to break fixedness is to use structured innovation tools and principles that make you see problems and opportunities in new ways.  Remember the classic Will Rogers quote:

"It's not what you don't know that will get you.  It's what you know that ain't so."

Or was it Mark Twain?

Innovation in Practice: Two Years!

I sincerely thank you for reading this blog.  Readership continues to grow, and this motivates me to contribute new ideas to the innovation community.  This month marks the two year point, and I wanted to share some thoughts about what happened this year and what to look forward to in 2010.

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.

2009 Highlights:

• I am having a lot of fun with The Lab series of blog posts.  This is where I try to demonstrate innovation in real time by taking a category and applying structured innovation tools.  As far as I know, this is the only blog that actually demonstrates innovation with the intent of creating new ideas, and not just reporting on other people's ideas. This year, I applied innovation to: the Kindle, Twitter, garage door opener, computer keyboard, surgical mask, credit cards, shredded wheat, health care, a hockey stick, social media, mobile products, and your wallet.
• I started two new series:  Innovation Sightings is way to practice seeing the patterns that exist in products and services.  It is the patterns that led Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues to devise creativity templates that allow you to innovate over and over.  By spotting patterns, you strengthen your innovation skills.  I also started a series called Academic Focus.  This is a way to bring attention to those professors who excel at teaching and researching innovation for the corporate practitioner.
• I had the good fortune of meeting up with some fellow innovators and bloggers including Andrea Meyer, Jim Todhunter, Jim Belifore, Mark Atkins, Sally Kay, and my "blog mentor," Christopher Allen.
• I have a new academic role in addition to my corporate role.  I split my time between Johnson & Johnson and the University of Cincinnati, and it is challenging me to find new leverage points and opportunities.
• I am a guest blogger at Braden Kelley's Blogging Innovation, and I like being a part of this group.
• This blog has a new design, and I have added features to help people get the most out of it.  This includes Google Translate, a search function, a podcast on innovation methods, and links to  my other social media sights.

2010 Outlook:

• More focus on skills: I want to give readers more detailed insight to help them learn and use methods of innovation.
• More focus on strategy:  I want to uncover more about the intersection of strategy and innovation and how to put it in practice.
• More focus on YOU, the reader.  I appreciate the emails and contacts from many of you this year, and I hope to hear from more of you in 2010.

Drew

The Power to Innovate: Conference Report

Congratulations to the team at Invention Machine for hosting this week’s conference, Power to Innovate, at the Seaport Hotel in Boston.  The theme of the conference centered around the Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem^TM and how companies can boost performance by coordinating information, communities, and innovation activities.  Invention Machine’s premier product, Goldfire, is at the center of this ecosystem.

"Goldfire is a unique innovation software platform that transforms ideas into commercial products—generating and validating concepts and making innovation a sustainable process.  Designed with engineers, scientists and researchers in mind, Goldfire automates every day innovation tasks—from identifying a new market to developing a new product to improving existing product offerings—and empowering users with a repeatable process. Fusing proven innovation methods for generating ideas along with advanced technologies for accessing precise concepts from corporate and worldwide knowledge sources, Goldfire stimulates creative thinking and speeds inventive problem solving—helping product development engineers, scientists and researchers to quickly conceive and validate ideas thus fueling product pipelines."

The latest release, 5.5, should greatly enhance usability of the product especially by groups outside of R&D such as marketing and M&A.  Jim Belfiore, Certified Innovation Master & Senior Director at Invention Machine, demonstrated how he researched the disease, lymphoma.  I was amazed at the depth and breadth of insights he created using Golfire 5.5.

The entire conference was followed on Twitter compliments of Andrea Meyer.  Check it out at #P2I09.  Here are some other highlights from the conference:

Reinventing the Newspaper

Newspapers are dying.  Their business model is burning to the ground.  They cannot fend off the Internet and other threats despite their virtual monopoly and economies of scale in printing and distribution.  Advertisers are moving on.  Yet while traditional newsrooms are shrinking, journalism is thriving and the consumption of news is skyrocketing.  Why are newspapers shutting down?  As Clay Shirky describes it:

"If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other."

"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."

"Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke."

Perhaps it is not the newspaper model, per se, that needs replaced.  Perhaps it is the components of that model that need innovation: printing, distribution, and journalism.  Let's examine how.

Corporate Innovation Strategy Template

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling (1902)

Here is a simple template to create your company's innovation strategy:

• WHAT:   
  
  • Determine what business lines are to be innovated.
  • Determine what products or services within those business lines need innovation.
  • Establish a portfolio model that compares innovation output from one business line to another.
  • Rank order business lines based on the strength of their innovation portfolio pipelines.

• WHY:    
  
  • Determine how much innovation is needed.  Use a tool like Map-the-Gap.
  • Tie innovation to a strategy framework such as The Big Picture. 
  • Focus innovation exercises to link directly to the strategy framework. 
  • Use the framework to identify market adjacencies.

• WHEN:  
  
  • Schedule innovation workshops at the front end of the business cycle to help determine what projects will get funding in the next budget cycle.
  • Schedule innovation workshops after the planning cycle to jump-start new initiatives for the upcoming year.

• HOW:    
  
  • Choose specific methods of innovation to be used based on efficacy and results.
  • Combine different methods to leverage the strengths of each.
  • Integrate the methods by using the output of one as inputs for the others.

• WHERE: 
  
  • Set aside space with the specific purpose of conducting innovation workshops.

• WHO:    
  
  • Form innovation "dream teams" to maximize the success of innovation efforts.
  • Schedule training on how to use innovation methods.
  • Examine the company's innovation culture to diagnose where it is weak.
  • Establish an innovation competency model.
  • Designate and empower commercial leaders to drive innovation efforts.

The Beatles: Innovating the Old-Fashioned Way

"As usual, for these co-written things, John often had just the first verse, which was always enough:  it was the direction, it was the signpost and it was the inspiration for the whole song.  I hate the word but it was the template."  -  Paul McCartney

The Beatles were innovators, and they did it the old-fashioned way: they used templates. They were two-way innovators, using a mix of PROBLEM-TO-SOLUTION and SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM innovation.  The Beatles were corporate innovators who created immense fortunes for their shareholders.  They used structured methods, experimentation, and technology the same way Fortune 500 companies create new products and services. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, The Beatles have sold more albums in the United States than any other artist. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked them number one in its list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and four of their albums appeared in the top ten of the magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. The Beatles' innovative music and cultural impact helped define the 1960s, and their influence on pop culture is still evident today. The Beatles were collectively included in Time magazine's list of The Most Important People of the 20th Century.  How were they so effective?

The Livescribe Pulse Smart Pen - Never Miss an Idea

Innovating is mental, visual, and vocal.  Here is a new product to help capture...and coordinate...all three.  It is called the Pulse^TM by Livescribe.  The Pulse^TM is a smart pen that records and links audio to what your write, so you never miss a word...or an idea.

The Pulse^TM will become a great tool for conducting innovation workshops.  One of the more challenging issues in workshops is capturing ideas.  No matter how diligent the team is in collecting ideas, many subtle insights and concepts are missed.  Even if an innovation workshop is recorded on audio or video tape, it is nearly impossible to connect the spoken word to the drawings and notes taken by the participants.  The Pulse^TM SmartPen solves that.

Here is how I will use the Pulse^TM in my workshops:

• Recording component lists
• Recording Virtual Products
• Recording "Function Follows Form" ideas
• Drawing new product embodiments
• Recording potential benefits of new ideas
• Recording potential challenges and drawbacks of ideas
• Scoring ideas
• Creating Attribute Dependency matrices
• Recording initial business cases to support new ideas
• Recording names of participants and facilitators

I envision using the pen with teams of two or three people as they use a structured innovation method.  One team member will use the pen to keep track of ideas and draw physical representations while recording the actual discussion as it happens.  Each team member will sign the page while verbalizing their name.  Idea sessions upload automatically to a computer when the pen is attached to its charging cradle.  This approach captures the moment of innovation in audio and written form...forever.  It creates a permanent record of who innovated, how they innovated, and what they innovated.  We'll never miss an idea again.

Potential benefits of this approach include:

• Better records and annotations for filing patents and protecting intellectual property
• Better archiving for future workshops to refine and improve ideas
• Better metrics of ideation programs
• Easier sharing of ideas with R&D teams, consultants, and agencies
• Better marketing strategy development

Congratulations to the team at Livescribe for the development and launch of this useful product.  For innovation practitioners, this is a must-have.

Academic Focus: University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has created the first-of-its kind Bachelor of Innovation™ program.  Founded by Professor Terry Boult, the programis "an internationally unique interdisciplinary undergraduate program between the College of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) and College of Business (COB). The Bachelor of Innovation™ (BI) is a family structure, much like a Bachelor of Science (BS) or a Bachelor of Arts (BA), in which particular majors are defined. Included degrees (in alphabetical order): BI in Business Administration, BI in Computer Science, BI in Computer Science Security, BI in Electrical Engineering, and BI in Game Design and Development. Each degree in the program is composed of an emphasis major, an innovation core, and one of 4 cross-discipline cores."

Here is how the program is structured (from the UCCS website):