Innovation in Practice

Innovation for the Ages

I taught innovation to a group of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders as part of my son's middle school enrichment program several years ago.  I had never taught children in a formal setting, and it was terrifying at first.  The course was called, "How to Be an Inventor," and we met one hour a week for five weeks.

I had my doubts about this...whether someone could actually learn a systematic approach to innovation.  I had recently experienced the S.I.T. method as part of my company's efforts to create new medical products.  I wanted to experiment to see if a templated approach to innovation could be taught...and applied...in a setting outside of my company.  So I taught these children the five templates: subtraction, task unification, multiplication, division, and attribute dependency.  On the final day, each student had to take a product that I would give to them randomly, apply one of the five tools, and create a new-to-the-world product - all in thirty minutes. They had to draw the invention on the blackboard and explain why it was useful.

The first student was given a ordinary wire coat hanger.  Using the Attribute Dependency tool, she invented a coat hanger that would adjust to the size, weight, and shape of the garment.  Sixth grade!  I had never seen such a product before.  Truth is it had already been invented by Henry Needles in 1953 (United States Patent US2716512), so technically, she failed the exam.  But she created something new to HER world, for sure.  Each student similarly created amazing new products, some incremental, and some far out (moon beam flashlight).

If 6th graders can learn to innovate in real time, so can the business world.  That is why companies are embracing more productive, systematic methods of innovating and shunning traditional methods.

Teaching children to innovate was an epiphany for me.  My next innovation experiment...senior citizens.  I believe a group of senior citizens could be an ideal scenario for innovating in real time.  They have time on their hands, they want to be productive, they have lots of world knowledge and experience, and they think about ways to improve their situation. 

Innovation for the ages...stay tuned.

Innovation Roundtable

The Marketing Science Institute has formed a new Innovation Roundtable to explore common issues and challenges in the world of corporate innovation. The roundtable representatives are from Johnson & Johnson, GE, P&G, Diageo, Eastman Kodak, AT&T, Kraft, Merck, Thompson Healthcare, Praxair, Aetna, and General Mills. I had the pleasure of hosting the last meeting held at the Endo-Surgery Institute, J&J’s world class training facility for minimally invasive surgery. The group plans to meet twice a year.

Topics at this last meeting included:

• How and why is innovation an important issue for your company?
• When, how and by whom was this issue identified? Who currently “owns” it (and why)?
• What steps have been taken to address this issue, with what results? What steps are planned?
• What internal or external resources have you used (do you plan to use)?

For part of the agenda, the group practiced using the SIT innovation method on a product category from a member company (Kodak). We decided to make innovation a regular habit at our meetings so we can “walk the talk” not just “talk the talk." Our goal is to try out a new innovation method at each meeting.

We are fortunate to have Professor Don Lehmann from Columbia Business School as our academic advisor. Don is a prolific researcher in the innovation space (and many others).

Next meeting will be held in conjunction with MSI’s conference, “Innovation and Co-Creation,” in Seattle June 16-18, 2008.  Check out MSI’s great collection of working papers and publications on innovation.

Tempting Innovation

Jeffrey Phillips makes a nice distinction between the various ways to adopt ideas of others outside your organization in his post, The sincerest form of flattery:

• If you are copying ideas in your industry, you're a follower
• If you adopt ideas from other industries and apply them in new ways in your industry, you're an innovator
• If you package your capabilities and dramatically change another market, your a disrupter

What about adoption of ideas of others inside your organization?  Innovators face a particularly challenging issue getting colleagues to accept their 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.

Companies such as Procter & Gamble have perfected getting ideas from outside the organization.  Their Connect + Develop program is considered a best practice in external collaboration.  What companies struggle with is how to overcome the internal acceptance of peer ideas.  One way to approach it is with Team Innovation.  Read: TeamInnovation.pdf.

Will it Fly?

When you innovate on a regular basis, you create another problem for yourself...how to evaluate new product ideas to see which ones to pursue.  Evan Williams has outlined a useful set of criteria to do just that in his article: "Will it Fly?  How to Evaluate a New Product Idea."  He has even applied the criteria to some of his own creations like Blogger and Twitter.  Those criteria are:

• TRACTABILITY
• OBVIOUSNESS
• DEEPNESS
• WIDENESS
• DISCOVERABILITY
• MONETIZABILITY.

I offer three ideas and suggestions to complement Evan's model:

First, try using some type of weighting to these criteria.  To do this, convert the ratings such as "High" into numbers (for example: High = 5, Medium = 3, and Low = 1).  Then assign a percentage to each criteria based on the importance of that criteria.  Ask your customers to do the assignment of weights.  What criteria are most important to them.  This makes the scoring results more meaningful.

Second, try using the model not only on past successful ventures, but also on past unsuccessful ventures.  See what the model does to hits AND misses.  Otherwise, we are committing the Space Shuttle Challenger mistake of not using ALL the O-Ring temperature data to decide whether or not to launch.

Third, try applying the criteria to more than web/computer-based ventures.  Try it on toaster ovens, ATM's, wallpaper, etc.  See if the criteria have "legs" beyond the web domain.  My sense is that you will find other insights about these criteria that will make them even more useful.

When to Innovate

People often ask when is the best time to innovate: early in the pipeline process, middle, or late.  Teams tend to resist innovation late in the process when they are busy launching a new product.  Teams tend to resist innovating in the middle of the NPD process because they are too busy developing the next generation product.  Teams tend to resist innovating early in the process because they are too busy developing franchise strategy. 

So when is the best time to innovate?  Anytime. 

Early in the process, you need innovation to develop a large stock of potential novel product ideas.  Tie these early ideas to your franchise marketing strategy.  This makes your strategy more robust and believable.

Early in the process, you need innovation to trigger modifications or enhancements to the product now in development.  This gives you potential differentiating features that you can still build into the new product. 

Late in the process, you need new concepts just when launching a new product to show your company and your customers that you have a sustainable pipeline of ideas behind you.  This gives you credibility.

Innovating is like putting in golf.  Never leave yourself short.

Can you make me be more creative?

Katie Konrath has the right idea when she tackles this question, "Can you make me be more creative?"

Yesterday, I was talking with a couple friends when one asked two of my favorite questions. "What happens when someone can't think of any ideas? You can't force them to be more creative, right?"  I rubbed my hands together, thrilled at the challenge that was coming. Actually, I can.

Her approach is to combine ideas and concepts that seem pretty silly at first, but then she mentally forces these constructs to have some sort of value or purpose.  This, in essence, is a systematic approach to innovating that can be trained and repeated. 

The key to becoming extremely effective at innovation is to learn all the tools and templates that help create an initial, undefined construct, or what innovation researchers call "the pre-inventive form."  This ability to apply a template, then find a useful purpose for the for what comes out of that template is what allows one to innovate on demand.  Templates "make" people innovate.

Katie's also recognizes the value of involving many people in the use of innovation templates.  Innovation is a team sport.  Diverse, cross-functional teams using a facilitated process can overcome the inherent challenges people face when when innovating.

Why Innovation is Hard: Ten Most Popular Reasons

Here is what executives say when asked why their firms cannot innovate:
1. Risky
2. No Method
3. Fear of Failure
4. All the good ideas are gone
5. Unpredictable
6. Company Culture
7. Lack of Time
8. Lack of Resources
9. Fear of Change
10. Competing Priorities

A systematic, routine way to innovate can break through these challenges.  For example, a method such as S.I.T. (see www.sitsite.com) gives employees a way to innovate in real time.  This eliminates the first five reasons on the list.  With a routine and successful way to innovate, innovation is no longer risky, people are no longer afraid of failure, and innovation becomes predictable.  When properly applied, an innovation method will create many new ideas for products and services even though people assume all the good ones are gone. 

What about the last five reasons?  From my experience, once a company experiments with an innovation method and sees how successful it can be, it is more willing to deal with the organizational aspects that hold innovation back.  Companies need to create a culture that provides both the time and resources to innovate.  A change in the culture can help overcome the fear of change.  Putting priorities in order is easier once companies know they can innovate on command.

Seeing is believing.  Put innovation in practice.

Innovation is a Skill, Not a Gift

Companies want innovation more than anything as a way to drive true organic growth. Yet leaders often feel frustrated in their ability to bring successful innovation to their organizations.  When I speak to executives, I hear this frustration, and I hear a list of reasons or excuses why innovation is so difficult. That list includes: lack of resources, lack of time, company culture, and lack of process of innovation.  Many executives feel innovation is unpredictable and therefore too risky to invest in, even if they had the resources.

Innovation does not have to be unpredictable.  A method called Systematic Inventive Thinking is a set of tools used in a facilitated environment to generate predictable, progressive ideas. This innovation process uses templates to help regulate individual thinking and channel the ideation process in a structured way that overcomes the randomness of brainstorming.  Briefly, the method works by taking a product, concept, situation, service, process, or other construct, and breaking it into its component parts or attributes.  The templates manipulate the components or variables to create new to the world constructs that the inventor of less than find a valuable use.  This notion of taking the solution and finding a problem that can solve is called function follows form, and it is at the heart of the systematic inventive thinking method.  This method of innovation can be used across a wide range of business issues.  For example, it can be used to create new products, new services, or new processes. It can also be used to create new strategy including both corporate and marketing strategy. It can be used to create new organizational designs. You can also be used to create new marketing communications or launch tactics. 

Innovation should be viewed as a skill, not as a gift reserved only for special or uniquely-talented people.  Innovation can be learned as with any other business skill such as finance, process excellence, or leadership.  By embracing a method like systematic inventive thinking, companies have a clear pathway to bring innovation to their firms to drive growth.