Innovation in Practice

The Dream Catalog

For many companies, the catalog of products is the strongest statement of brand positioning a company can make.  It is your arsenal of commercialization.  So imagine you could peek into the future and see a copy of your company's product catalog five years from now.  What would it look like?  What if you could design it now?  What would you put into it?  These are the questions that confront you when you use a clever innovation tool called the Dream Catalog.

The Dream Catalog is a hypothetical company catalog from the future...well into the future, beyond the next business cycle.  It is far into the future so that it captures the innovative thinking and imagination of today's managers.  It stretches a company's thinking about its future, and it provokes a healthy discussion about possible company direction.  A good Dream Catalog causes tension.

A Dream Catalog helps a company in several ways.  It sets direction.  It suggests how the company is going to add and remove products from the line over time.  It forces the marketing team to reconcile product line strategy.  It provides placeholders for new discoveries, inventions, and even acquisitions.  It provides a sense of prioritization of what should be developed and in what order.  It can even help forecast revenues.

Best of all - it rewards and encourages innovation.  The Dream Catalog serves as the focal point for company-wide innovation efforts.  Employees strive to come up with product and service ideas that "make it" into the Dream Catalog.  As the catalog takes shape, employees see how their future is taking shape.  It guides their innovation efforts even more.  Leaders can use the catalog as a motivational tool.  "Let's turn this dream into reality...for our customers and our future."  A good Dream Catalog creates excitement and a sense of purpose. 

I teach MBA students how to create a Dream Catalog in a full credit course called "Applied Marketing Innovation." Here is a quick snapshot of how to do it.  Create a slew of new product embodiments over your current product line as well as products in your industry you wish you had.  Do this using an efficient method such as Systematic Inventive Thinking.  Mix the ideas together with your current product line.  Put yourself five or ten years out and envision what product offering would make your company the most amazing market leader in your industry.  Using your "palette" of ideas, pull in those that, taken together, create that kind of company.  Strive for product line coherence.  Strive for differentiation.  Strive for a customer centric solution.  Then, make an actual catalog with product photos, prices, features, and benefits.  Make it seem real.

Here is a neat trick.  Take all of your company's catalogs as far back as you can and lay them side-by-side chronologically.  Study the product offerings each year and note the changes over time.  Note the new products, deleted products, and changed products.  Do you see an evolutionary theme?  Revolutionary?  Stagnant?  Now place your Dream Catalog five or ten spots ahead of the most recent catalog.  Where will your Dream Catalog take you?  How far, how fast, how cool?

Think about Fortune 100 companies that might have a Dream Catalog of sorts.  Think about former Fortune 100 companies that have since perished.  Did they have a Dream Catalog?  Would you buy stock in a company if it did not have a Dream Catalog?

Dream on.

People Innovation

Human Resource departments often find themselves tasked with creating a more innovative climate for their firms.  That can make sense given that innovation is a people activity.  It's a skill, not a gift, and it can be taught and learned like any other business skill.  And it is usually team-based.

My advice to HR leaders?  Experience innovation close to home first.  Use innovation tools on actual people or HR systems before venturing out to the broader organization.  This has the effect of making true believers out of the HR team, it gives them a handy reference point for other departments to benchmark, and it yields creative new approaches to traditional HR processes.  How?

Using the five templates of Systematic Inventive Thinking, here are examples of pre-inventive forms within the HR realm.  The key is to envision the pre-inventive form, then find a useful role or benefit for it. 

• SUBTRACTION: Your training programs have no faculty.  Why?  What would be beneficial about it?
• TASK UNIFICATION:  Offer letters to new hires have an important additional role during the first year of employment?  What is that role, and how could it help the organization?
• MULTIPLICATION:  Employees receive two paychecks each payday, but they are different in some way.  How are they different?  What would be the benefit?
• ATTRIBUTE DEPENDENCY:  Year-end bonuses do NOT change based on performance or other factors.  Why?  How could it motivate employees?
• DIVISION:  New employees are hired first, THEN recruited into the organization?  How would this work and why would it be useful?

The real trick in using this method correctly is to envision a pre-inventive form that doesn't seem to make sense at first.  Then, using a cross-functional team, you outline specific benefits that could be derived for the HR department, the company at large, or some other entity.  Ask yourself: is it feasible?  How could the idea be modified to make it even more beneficial or feasible? 

Another approach is to use innovation templates on specific employees - create ideas that innovate their life or career.  Here are five more examples of pre-inventive forms at the individual level:

• SUBTRACTION: The employee no longer has a budget but still has to accomplish their goals.  Why?  What would be beneficial about it?
• TASK UNIFICATION:  The employee's office space now performs an additional role.  What is that role, and how could it help the organization?
• MULTIPLICATION:  The employee has two bosses, but they are different in some way.  How are they different?  What would be the benefit?
• ATTRIBUTE DEPENDENCY:  The employee works fewer hours the more she produces?  How would this work?  What would be the benefit?
• DIVISION:  The employee no longer works from 8 to 5, but has to work at different times.  Why?   How could this be useful?

Re-invent others by re-inventing yourself first.

Choosing Innovation Consultants

I am asked often by colleagues at Fortune 100 companies to recommend or suggest an innovation consultant.  Choosing one is challenging for two reasons: the client is not always clear what type of innovation they want, or they are not sure what type of innovation a consultant offers.  Here are three factors to consider when choosing an innovation consultant:  1.  TYPE of consultant, 2.  METHOD used, and 3.  ROLE of the consultant. 

The innovation space has become so crowded that I group them into four types:

INVENTION:  These are consultants that help you create new-to-the-world ideas.  They have a particular expertise in creativity methods or idea generation tools.  Their main focus is generation of many new product or service ideas.

DESIGN:  These are consultants that take an existing product, service, or idea and put some new, innovative form to it.  They have a particular expertise in industrial design or human factors design.  Their main focus is transforming the way a product is used or experienced.

ENGINEERING:  These are consultants that help you make the new idea work in practice.  They have a particular expertise in technology, science, research, and problem solving.  Their main focus is building it.

ACTUALIZATION:  These are consultants that help you get the innovation into the marketplace.  They have a particular expertise in marketing processes, brand, or commercial launch of a product or service.  Their main focus is selling it.

The challenge is many consultants claim to be all of these.  While true for some, my sense is that all firms started off as one type and then expanded to cover the others.  The question to ask yourself is: would you be better off matching your need to their original core expertise, or would you be better off going to a one-stop shop...a firm that can do it all even though their core expertise is, say, design.  How do you know what type the firm really is?  Study the biography of their founder.  What was the founder's education, experience, work background, interests, etc.  The founder is where the core orientation of the firm begins.  The other practice types get bolted on later.

Step Two is understanding their method.  The first question I ask consultants is, "Do you know how to innovate?"  The second question is, "How?"  I want to understand their method of innovation, and I want to be able to explain it to other people.  I want to know the efficacy.  Has it worked in the past and will it work on my project?  Show me the data.

Step Three is understanding the role of the innovation consultant.  Is this a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach where you are given some software or other resource to create innovation on your own?  Is this a DIWY (do-it-with-you) approach where the consultant leads and facilitates groups of your employees to innovate together?  Is this a DIFY (do-it-for-you) approach where the consultant takes your problem specification and comes back with their recommended solutions?  Or, is this training?  All of these roles are valid depending your need.

I am impressed with the talent and variety of the consultants in the innovation space today.  It becomes even more impressive when you select the right one for the job.

Gender Role in Innovation

Optimal innovation occurs when there is an equal mix of men and women using a systematic process.  I have always believed this through my observation of many innovation exercises.  When a predominately male group tries to innovate, results are less impressive.  When a predominately female group tries to innovate, results are less impressive.  Put them together and the results are amazing.

Research in this area may have some suggestions why.  Lynne Millward and Helen Freeman tested several hypothesis and reported the results in their article, "Role Expectations as Constraints to Innovation:  The Case of Female Managers."  The essence of the research is that, while men and women are equally innovative, their gender role within the context of an organization can affect how they are perceived and how they behave when innovating and sharing ideas.  Men are perceived as more innovative and risk-taking, and women are perceived as more adaptive and risk-adverse.  "Thus, gender roles may interact with the role of the manager to inhibit (in the case of women) or facilitate (in the case of men) the likelihood of innovative behavior."

They tested several hypothesis.  People perceive innovative solutions to be more likely to come from a male manager, and they perceive adaptive solutions to be more likely to come from a female manager.  They also found that innovative solutions were perceived to be more likely to be implemented if they were suggested by a male manager.   

Innovation carries with it different levels of risk for men than for women.  Men are expected to take more risks when innovating and sharing ideas.  Failure is less damaging to men because that's what's expected of them.  Women are expected to be less risky, and this appears to limit or constrain both their degree of innovation and their willingness to share it.  Failure is more damaging for women so they behave more adaptively in innovation exercises.

As a practitioner, I believe there is both a negative and a positive side to this.  On the one hand, innovation workshops need a process to assure that women feel they can innovate "bigger" and share those ideas with the group.  If, as the research suggests, women are more likely to hold back, then the facilitation approach has to break through it.  Otherwise, you lose the inherent value of the (equal) innovation talent they bring to the table.

On the positive side, these differences can be beneficial.  I believe this more adaptive behavior in women and more risk-taking behavior in men provides a certain balance or harmony during innovation.  What I observe is a complementary effect that seems to yield better results.  Why?  I'm not sure, but my sense is that each partner holds the other accountable for ideas that are, at the same time, novel but adoptable.  Working in pairs, men and women also do a better job of expressing jointly-developed new ideas that may help overcome risks that women may be feeling.  Workshop processes that pair men and women up to take advantage of this are going to be more fruitful.

Innovation Competency

Jeffrey Phillips outlines a sound approach to the age-old question, who owns innovation?  Where does it sit on the organizational chart:

There's not a wrong way to organize, but there are benefits to developing a central team to ensure consistent methodology, language and culture and the use of consistent tools and frameworks. Eventually, most ideas if adopted will be implemented in a specific business unit or product team, so the central team acts as a facilitator, coach and sponsor, usually without implementing the ideas.

There is support for this view.  IBM asked 765 CEO's this question in their 2006 Global CEO Survey, and reported the following on the question of who has responsibility for innovation leadership:  the CEO - 27%, No Owner - 27%, Functional Managers - 24%, and Division Managers - 14%.

The wide range of responses tells me there is no consensus.  But the question still makes me a little nervous.  Why does someone have to "own" innovation?  Do we think about leadership the same way?  Does someone own leadership in a company?  No one asks that question.

I get hopeful when I see that 27% of CEO's ascribe no owner to innovation.  My sense is that creating an innovation champion or assigning it to one department could shut down others from innovating.  With strong, central ownership of innovation, others might be reluctant to initiate anything that looks like a competing approach.  When I see a company with an innovation champion (think "owner"), I expect to find innovation subversives, too.

The question is not who owns innovation, but rather who owns innovation competency development.  I see more companies moving in this direction.  Some place this within a process excellence group while others move it right into a functional department such as marketing or R&D.  Still others have dedicated resources such as GE and Diageo, two members of the MSI Innovation Roundtable.

Build innovation competency and the question of who owns innovation becomes moot.