Innovation in Practice

In Search of Bad Ideas

Mitch Ditkoff notes a common misperception regarding bad ideas:

"One of the inevitable things you will hear at a brainstorming session is something like "there are no bad ideas." Well, guess what? There are plenty of bad ideas....The key for aspiring innovators? To find the value in what seems to be a "bad idea" and then use that extracted value as a catalyst for further exploration."

I agree.  Good ideas usually start as bad ideas, an insight I learned originally from the folks at S.I.T.. But the question is: how do you extract the value from a bad idea to transform it?  I offer three approaches.

First, look carefully at the bad idea and try to characterize the single benefit that the idea delivers to the customer regardless of how whacky that benefit is delivered.  It is the benefit that you want to hold onto, not the whacky deliver system.  Ideate new ways to deliver that benefit.

Second, what criteria are being used to judge the idea as bad?  Try using the Reverse Assumption technique on those criteria.  Turn them around, challenge them, re-frame them.  Make the seemingly bad idea look good in a different context.

Third, look for what is old about the new idea.  Thomas B. Ward, is his chapter, "What's Old about New Ideas," says:

"Structured imagination refers to the fact that when people use their imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are heavily structured in predictable ways by the properties of existing categories and concepts."

In other words, we do not ideate in a vaccuum, but rather in the context of what we already know.  My advice is to take the bad idea and look for the original concept that it was built upon.  Can that be taken in new directions using a structured process?

For corporate innovators, I see this as a best practice.  I often ask people what they do with their bad ideas.  If I see a curious look on their face, it usually means they are not taking advantage of this phenomena.

Bad ideas are better than no ideas.

Young it Down

Technology improves our lives in many ways, but overreliance on it can cause us to "dumb down."  Technology has a tendency to fill in or take over certain tasks for the consumer, relieving us of cognitive activities that we once did ourselves.  These cognitive activities get weak or atrophied.  We get lazy and dependent on the new technology to do our work for us.  We become dumb.

Example:  I used my Garmin GPS this weekend at my son's hockey tournament to find our way back and forth between the hotel and the ice rink.  I have always been "directionally aware," perhaps a result of Air Force survival training and other experiences.  I know my way around, even in new locations, because of my sense of direction.  I'm never lost.

But on this trip, I used the Garmin (Nuvi) to do the work for me.  Then it struck me as I was riding in a car with one of the other families on the way to the rink.  Without the GPS, I had no clue where we were headed.  The technology caused me to switch off my natural sense of direction.  I had shut it down and paid no attention to where I was or where I was going.  I felt that very strange notion of being lost.  So much for "directionally aware." 

Given the power of innovation tools, we need to be mindful of this as we create medical products, for example, that do the decision making for surgeons, or commercial airplanes that do all the flying for pilots, or educational products that do all the teaching.  We are becoming a knowledge society, they say.  But I worry that knowledge is getting imbedded in new innovations, and it may be having the opposite effect on our society...it is dumbing us down.

Technology has a bright side, though.  Web 2.0 and the myriad of new social networking applications are helping generations reconnect.  This technology is not "dumbing us down;"  rather it is "younging us down."  I am more connected with my 16 year old son and his friends with applications like texting, Twitter, and Flickr.  My Dunbar Number is expanding thanks to LinkedIn, del.icio.us, and Facebook.  It is helping me identify with 20 year olds, 30 year olds, and beyond, even though I get one year further away from these groups every July 14th.  That's cool, especially as I find myself speaking to audiences at these age groups all the time.  If I don't connect to them, they don't connect with me.  Innovation helps me connect.  It helps me "young it down."

Innovation vs. Leadership

Which is easier to learn: innovation or leadership?   That is one of my favorite questions to ask during  keynotes and workshops, especially to groups of accomplished leaders.  What amazes me is the answer I get back:  overwhelmingly, groups of executives say that leadership is easier to learn than innovation.

I could not disagree more.  I've experienced some of the best leadership training in the world starting with the U.S. Air Force Academy and all the way through to Johnson & Johnson's many leadership training programs.  These programs were complex, psychologically-based, and multi-dimensional.  Leadership training is big business.  The demand is high, and the task is tall.  Executives flood to these programs to learn new insights and nuances of this highly people-based activity.  It is tough to learn leadership.

I learned innovation in a matter of minutes.  The process is clear, rules-based, and rigorous.  Anyone can do it.  When facilitated appropriately, you cannot NOT innovate.  The process forces original, novel, and highly creative ideas to come out of your head. 

So why do executives feel that leadership is easier to learn than innovation?  My sense is that many have not been exposed to a bona fide innovation method.  These executives want organic innovation more than anything to drive growth.  Yet many are missing a simple insight what it takes...to invest themselves in learning innovation.  Once executives feel what it's like to innovate on demand, they get it.  They start thinking about execution, scalability, culture aspects, resources needs, measurement, accountability, strategy, alignment....all the traditional things leaders think about...to move an initiative forward. 

GE is perhaps the best example of a company that invests in innovation as much as it does leadership with its Imagination at Work program.  For GE, the question of which is easier to train...innovation or leadership...is moot.  They avoid the "leadership bias," and they invest appropriately in core innovation skills to drive growth.

Innovation Subversives

Jim Todhunter offers sound advice for innovation champions who are feeling lonely in their efforts to evangelize:

"This is where many innovation evangelists fall down.  Too often, we are so wrapped up in our own world of high performance innovation practice; we forget that many people don’t have the frame of reference to get what we are describing.  We need to slow down and articulate the message more clearly and use clear examples that demonstrate how sustainable innovation practice builds the company’s value."

This strikes a familiar chord with my colleagues in the Fortune 100.  Not only can innovation champions feel lonely, they can become extinct if they are not careful.  The Association for Managers of Innovation studied why corporate innovation champions struggle to survive.  The study looked at what actions and behaviors put these managers at risk in their efforts to evangelize.  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.  Most of the consultants have as their clients Fortune 500 companies and, in some cases, their former employers.

My advice: stop evangelizing and start doing.  Use a proven innovation method on a mainstream issue or product and let the results speak for themselves.  Don't ask permission.  Don't call it innovation.  Don't preach the "..see, I told you!" message. 

And then...do it again.  I take advice from Thomas Bonoma's classic HBR article from 1986, "Marketing Subversives:"

"I found that under conditions of marketplace change, success depended heavily on the presence of marketing subversives in a company.  Subversive marketers undermined their organizations' structures to implement new marketing practices....And no matter what higher management had decided to allocate to various marketing projects, the subversives found ways to work around the official budget.  They bootlegged the resources they needed to implement new, more appropriate marketing practices."

The same can be said about innovation. 

Are you feeling lonely as an "innovation champion?"  Forget it.  Get suited for subversion.

Funding Innovation

Mitch Ditkoff takes on the all important issue of how to fund innovation, and writes about innovation slush funds as a way improve innovation results:

What I like about this approach is that it sidesteps the bureaucratic hokey pokey, run-it-up-the-flagpole, command and control, funky chicken shuffle that all too often scuttles powerful new ideas in need of a timely infusion of capital to get them rolling.

From my experience, there are two choices in how to fund innovation:  invention or development.  Invention means the actual genesis of the idea, usually through a concentrated effort or workshop using a proven method.  Development is what you do with the ideas that have commercial merit.  Both take time and money.  The choice depends on whether you think spending the money to generate ideas will yield more than a pool of funds to invest the ideas that you already have.

Fortune 100 companies vary widely in how they approach it.  Some invest in idea generation to create large stocks of potential opportunities.  They invest in innovation teams and processes to keep innovation happening day in and day out.  The ideas generated must compete for resources against the rest of the portfolio of opportunities.  The other approach is to create a bounty like what Mitch has described...a slush fund to motivate and lure the creative people to come up with ideas.

My preference is to fund invention, systematically.  My sense is that employees need to feel there are sufficient resources and sufficient time for them to take the risk of ideating.  By investing in the ideation process, employees feel liberated to give it their all.  I think the idea of a slush fund makes sense if it is used for pure ideation.   Tell people there are dollars available to conduct formal ideation workshops...a slush fund...and they will beat a path to your door.  That's what I do.   As Mitch puts it:

And remember, as one wise pundit put it, "It's not the money that starts the idea, it's the idea that starts the money."

Fund ideation, and the result will yield more funds.

Lessons from Improv

I've come full circle on the notion of improvisation as a source of innovation.  I just finished a three day improv training program at The Second City to try to find direct application to corporate growth.  I found it.

My pursuit of a method of innovation started with John Kao's book, "Jamming," which compared innovation to the process of musical improvisation.  Jamming is a group activity where one musician lays down the foundational tempo and key for the other musicians who, one at a time, add their own interpretation of it.  At the time, I thought this was innovation nirvana.  But I moved away from it.  Improv and "jamming" in the Kao mindset seemed too much like brainstorming which is usually LESS productive than simply thinking of ideas by yourself.  It seemed too unstructured.  Bottom line: it didn't work.

Now I've learned a more systematic approach to improv from a place that has launched the careers of more comedians than any other.  What I learned can be boiled down to: 1.  The Commitment Principle, 2. The "Yes, and..." Principle, and  3. The Relationship Principle.  When applied systematically, these yield very funny comedy sketches from anyone.  My belief is they can be used the same way in corporate innovation.

Commitment Principle means commit to both the role you are playing and the process.  The "Yes, and..." Principle means always take what line or idea your partner has given you and add value to it.  Match the energy and direction of your partner, but then add significant context or information to keep the dynamic going.  The Relationship Principle says to establish the connection and accountability to your partner above all else.  Without this, improvisation is impossible.

Comedic improvisation is a disciplined, structured, team activity.  My goal is NOT to become a comedian.  Rather, my goal now will be to merge these lessons from improv with Systematic Inventive Thinking to produce even better innovation, on demand.