Innovation in Practice

Training Your Team to Innovate

To drive innovation across your company, you must train your employees how to innovate. Innovation is a skill, not a gift, and it can be learned like any other skill. Go back to your innovation competency model. Start there to think about the training needed to get employees up to speed.

For example, for generating ideas, you could apply a method called Systematic Inventive Thinking, or SIT for short. It’s based on five simple patterns that can be applied to any product, process, or service to create new-to-the-world innovations.

To learn more about how to use this method, see my course called Business Innovation Foundations.

Here are some suggested ways to conduct innovation training in your company:

First are what I call Open Seminars. These are two or three day workshops that are open to all employees. The maximum class size is 24, and you want each participant to bring with them something from their job to work on during the class.

Another approach is to have training with Intact Teams, meaning the participants are all from the same team – an R&D team or a finance team for example. I recommend keeping these smaller, say 12 to 16 participants max. These sessions are more like workshops where the team applies innovation to specific challenges, and these last anywhere from half a day to three days.

Many companies conduct executive leadership programs for high potential employees – those with potential to become senior leaders. Creativity is a critical skill for leaders, so companies devote a full day or more on innovation within these one to two week programs.

You also want to focus training on new and potential employees. Some companies create innovation internships so they can evaluate a potential employee’s skill before hiring.

Online training such as what you’re doing right now is another effective way to drive innovation. Online courses are flexible, efficient, and repeatable. Employees can go back and watch online course material to tune up their skills.

And finally, a quick way to start innovation training is to partner with a college or university by either sending employees to innovation training courses or having the institution conduct private corporate training at your offices. Methods like SIT are being taught at many business, design, and engineering schools.

Training makes innovation come alive. Conducting training sessions sends a powerful message to your employees that you’re serious about innovation.

Motivating Innovative Behavior

Innovators are at their best when they feel a sense of purpose. As a marketing leader you play a key role in that dynamic.

Innovators have to feel good about the products and services they put into the marketplace. They need to feel appreciated for the work they do and the risks they take. And they need to be rewarded and recognized for their accomplishments. Be sure to use a mix of both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, and do it throughout the year, not just at the annual meeting.

A common mistake companies make when rewarding innovation is to consider only the results of innovation - the outputs. These include things like patents, or new product launches, or innovative cost cutting programs. That’s not enough.

You’d miss a huge opportunity if you didn’t also reward people for their inputs - the effort and time they put into becoming more innovative. From my experience, that’s where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck.

For example, make sure you recognize people for getting trained on innovation methods and processes. It may not sound like much, but trust me. People give up a lot of time to attend training. You need to reward them. It motivates others who haven’t been trained to get it done.

I suggest you reward team leaders who take the time and the risk to conduct innovation workshops. Find those employees who are putting their training to good use, then call them out. People love to be praised and recognized especially when they took a risk.  

Now, how you recognize and reward people’s innovation efforts depends on the type of culture you have at your company. That might include bonuses, plaques, award ceremonies and so on. That’s all good, but I don’t think it's enough. Let me share two very important and powerful ways to motivate innovation.

I believe people get really motivated when you, as the leader, say that you’re willing to sponsor their innovation initiative. That means you’ll watch over and support them, not just with resources, but to keep the critics away from them - give them time to nurture and develop amazing ideas.

Finally, you can motivate teams by reminding them of a very sobering reality in any company - remind them they live in a portfolio world. Companies are nothing more than a collection of projects that are expected to produce positive business results. An employee’s individual project is just one of many. And guess what? The projects that get the most support and funding are those that can portray a bright and creative future.

In other words, the message they should hear is this: if you want to stay relevant and grow, get out there and apply innovation methods to create an amazing pipeline of future opportunities, not just the ones you have today.

In essence, you want your employees to see innovating as a way to compete for more resources. When you reach that stage, you will be amazed at what people will do to drive innovation.

Creating a Culture of Innovation

There have been times I sat down with a client and I told them, “your organization is very innovative”, but they don’t believe me. I tell them, if you don’t perceive yourself as innovative, then you’re not. Therefore, it’s critical to get both your internal and external stakeholders to see the truth.

Here’s what they need to see and believe:

An innovative corporate culture is one that supports the creation of new ideas and the implementation of those ideas. Leaders must help employees see innovation in practice as a regular part of how the company does business.

See innovation as a competency

Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned by anyone and applied systematically. Innovative companies treat it as just another core skill by:

• Creating a well-defined set of innovation competencies and embedding them into every employee’s competency model along with other required behaviors such as ethics and leadership.
• Conducting regular training courses in creativity methods and innovation management.
• Staffing internal innovation experts and coaches who work with teams to help guide their innovation efforts and facilitate their success.
• Rewarding employees for innovation, both the results of as well as efforts to become more innovative.

See innovation as a competitive weapon

Innovative companies use innovation to differentiate themselves by:

• Conducting regular idea generation workshops within business units
• Deploying innovation methods within planning and strategy initiatives
• Innovating from the core competencies of the firm as the starting point

See innovation as a process

Innovative companies don’t treat innovation as special, unique activity. They see it instead as an ongoing “stream of effort” along with quality, leadership, productivity, and other imperatives.  They do this by:

• Avoiding the temptation to brand the innovation program
• Developing an idea management and tracking capability
• Linking innovation to all key processes including financial, commercial, and technical.

See innovation as both systematic and opportunistic 

The most innovative companies flex between different styles of creating opportunity by:

• Sponsoring employees for taking risks and championing new ideas through to execution
• Being open to ideas from outside sources to make non-obvious connections to internal projects.
• Experimenting and piloting new ways to apply innovation methods
• Collaborating with like-minded companies in non-competing industries to source new ideas and trends.

Most importantly, you as a marketing leader must constantly remind both your employees and external stakeholders how innovative the company is. It’s the perception from these two groups that drive an innovative culture.

3 Ways to Improve Team Innovation

The most powerful innovation comes when teams work together. Driving innovation means getting individual employees to be more innovative, but it also means getting high performance teams to innovate. How you form those teams will have a huge impact on their success. Here’s how to create what I call innovation dream teams.

First and most important is to create a diverse team. Diversity helps people see more possibilities. It creates a stronger sense of group accountability. Diverse groups cause people to bring their best thinking, to behave properly, and to maintain their status in the group as a positive contributor. You want diversity in three ways: functional, gender, and cultural.

Functional diversity means that team members come from different parts of the company and with different experience levels. Include co-workers from marketing, from your technical team, and from your sales or customer support team. At times, you may want to include colleagues with financial skills or regulatory knowledge. Taken together, you want the right people in the room who can generate ideas, and decide which ideas are the best and most feasible. That takes a team of people with different skills and knowledge.

You also need a team with good gender diversity. Research suggests men tend to create more aggressive ideas while women are more pragmatic. Working together averages out these tendencies to produce novel and practical solutions. Without gender diversity, your team may end up producing a larger share of uninteresting or unsupportable concepts.

Finally is cultural diversity.  The best teams have members with different ethnic backgrounds. They broaden the team’s perspective on how best to commercialize new inventions on a global scale. Without this, teams produce a larger share of niche ideas that may satisfy only one regional market.

Now here’s some tips.

• Keep the group size at twelve or less. Any larger than that becomes hard to facilitate.
• Use systematic methods of innovation. Avoid unstructured methods like Brainstorming. Years of scientific research shows it’s not effective.
• Consider using a professional facilitator, someone internal or external who has the experience to keep the group working at a high level.

Innovation is a team sport. The best CMOs leverage high functioning teams to create opportunity.

Back Now Live: Value Proposition Surgical Robotics Simulation on Harvard Business Publishing Website

This valuable simulation was recently published by my friend and colleague, Marta Dapena-Baron, of The Big Picture Partners.

This multiplayer training simulation brings to life the concept of value proposition motivating players to consider how their brands’ value propositions affect both business outcomes and brand value.

This simulation puts the user in charge of a robotics company as it prepares to launch a general surgery solution . Winning against other robotics competitors and other surgical techniques requires analyzing customer preferences in the category, considering the brand’s and competitors’ core competences, and then crafting and executing a value proposition. Going beyond writing a value proposition to visualizing it,  offers tremendous insights for both students and business practitioners.

Click here to learn more.

Keeping Your Innovation Momentum

At some point in your journey to drive innovation, you’ll want to take a deep breath and ask – what happened here? What have we
achieved? And, what do we need to do now to keep the momentum?

Momentum is critical. I’ve seen too many innovation programs get off to a fast start only to fizzle out later. People go back to their old ways, or they move on to the next new “shiny object” – some other big bang initiative.

Here’s some advice on how to maintain your momentum.

First, understand what progress you’ve made from where you started? It’s probably time to re-do the innovation audit that you did at the start of the program. If you can show how your employees perceive the progress, you have a compelling argument to keep the momentum going.

Next, conduct a post mortem on the failed activities. You’ll likely learn more from the failures than the successes. Despite the pain, you should thoroughly examine the “dead bodies” to understand what happened.  What stimulated the initiative? What were our assumptions going in? Did we have the right team in place?

Next, you need to remind everyone why innovation is an imperative – the so called Burning Platform. What’s happening in your business over the next 12 to 18 months?  Is it growing? Contracting? What changes do you anticipate in your competitive position?  Then use this information to gain alignment for continuing the innovation initiative.

Not only must you re-energize the innovation culture at your company, but you also have to create the support systems to make it stick. Here are some ideas.

Develop a way to track and manage ideas generated from innovation workshops. It doesn’t have to be an expensive system; just something to document ideas. This will help you put metrics around innovation. You’ll be able to measure the inputs to innovation – training, workshops, and so on – as well as the outputs – ideas, patents, etc.

Next, you must emphasize skill building. People lose their innovation skills unless they use them often or get refresher training. On going training tells people you’re committed to this. A great way to keep training alive is to develop your own internal innovation trainers. These people can act as coaches for teams that want to pursue innovation aggressively.

Finally, look for ways to extend innovation beyond the marketing function.

You want to link innovation to every other function and process in the company, including financial, operational, and technical.

That means you need to align with your peers, gain their trust, and share the credit for keeping the innovation momentum going.

Swiping the Blank Slate: Accelerate Your Career Success by Jumpstarting Innovative Thinking

By Nurit Shmilovitz-Vardi

We’ve all been there. Your manager assigns your next project, handing you the relevant materials along with the following demand:

“This needs to be big. I want something different, something that stands out, fresh new ideas—something innovative!”

Outwardly you nod, exclaim some words of apparent enthusiasm and motivation, excited to begin this innovating. But inside you’re already banging your head into the wall. Innovate…something new? But how, when it seems like every new idea or direction of thought has already been done—how do you even start?

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 Innovative thinking has become a very important skill to have in the modern workplace, especially if you want to stand out and advance your career. According to Robert B. Tucker, a keynote speaker, consultant to over 200 of the Fortune 500, and author of seven bestselling books on innovation, including the latest, Innovation is Everybody’s Business, “Your functional and technical skills are what got you your current job. But… the most valuable skills you can add to your repertoire are not just soft skills but innovation skills.” While soft skills, particularly interpersonal skills increase your value as a team player, innovation skills are what will make you indispensable as an individual.

What’s more, acquiring these skills is in the hands of the individual, which Tucker describes as planning a “personal innovation strategy”.

Now, let’s return to our current predicament and look at your new project, whatever it may be—marketing campaign, new products, business development modeling. How can you start to develop your own personal innovation strategy and deliver something truly outstanding? Every individual has unique life experiences and perspectives which can lead to original ideas, but oftentimes these ideas are scattered, lacking the guidance to fully form and consolidate into concrete solutions. That’s when you find yourself staring at a screen for hours, just waiting for that “Aha! Moment”.

Luckily, there is a way to overcome dreaded blank-state syndrome: structured, systematic thinking methods. These strategies can be learned by anyone, and provide the guiding framework that lifts the cloud of fixed-mindedness and propels you toward the realm of innovation.

And now it’s easier than ever to learn and train yourself! Following the ever fast-paced landscape of technology and e-learning, SIT has now launched its very own Online Academy. Through the SIT Online Academy, you can learn innovative thinking methodology through engaging and efficient videos lead by experienced SIT facilitators, read interesting case studies that further reinforce the content and provide real-world context, and, most importantly, practice the skills through interactive examples and puzzles directly related to your own business challenges.

See an example of what we have to offer (and just one of the thinking methods to jumpstart your innovative strategy development) here:

Imagine the face of your manager when you present your brilliantly fresh solutions that can bring great value your company. The skills that lead to these ideas are highly revered, especially now in a society that’s rapidly changing and developing at an exponential rate—the current environment starves for innovation capabilities and not only requires, but demands it in order to achieve career success.

Steer the wheel on your own path to more career success by taking action now and learning innovation skills with the SIT Online Academy. As an “Inside the Box” blog reader, get limited-time free access now to the first unit of SIT Online Course: Process Innovation is in Order!

 

 

 

Breaking Fixedness: Saving the Boys of the Thai Soccer Team Trapped in a Cave

News of a boys soccer team trapped in a cave in Thailand brought back memories of the Chilean miners trapped 2,300 feet underground in August 2010. It took 66 days before the last miner was brought out. The young boys have much less time given the threat of monsoon rains.

The solution in Chile was to "break fixedness" to see new rescue possibilities. That may be what's needed here. Billionaire Elon Musk and his teams are looking at ways to break fixedness by constructing an inflatable tube to carry them out or perhaps a tiny capsule that can fit through the narrow caves. 

It's a brilliant idea because it goes against the traditional view of how they should be rescued. Consider what happened in Chile (from Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results):

All traditional methods of rescue failed. With hope that anyone would survive the ordeal diminishing hourly, the international rescue team swiftly implemented “Plan B.” An ingenious escape tube that carried the men out of danger one at a time saved all the miners from what otherwise would have been a slow and painful death. After 66 days, the last miner emerged from the dark hole to cheers and celebrations heard around the globe. 

What most people don’t know is that the solution was more than half a century old. First conceived of in the mid-1950s, the Subtraction-inspired solution has radically changed rescue strategies throughout a broad range of industries and scenarios. 

In May, 1955, a mineshaft collapsed in the Dahlbusch area in the German city of Gelsenkirchen. Three miners were trapped underground. Although rescuers managed to convey food and water through a small bore hole, they couldn’t get the men out. The collapse had effectively sealed all existing mine shafts. The shafts had been “subtracted.” 

A 34-year-old engineer working at the site, Eberhard Au, took a different approach to solving the problem. As other rescuers focused on attempting to reopen a mine shaft, Au quietly designed a small cigar-shaped capsule out of ordinary sheet metal. Only 15.2 inches wide, the capsule was small enough to fit into the bore hole the rescuers were using to send food and water down to the minors. Despite its tiny size, the capsule was large enough for a single miner to squeeze into. Rescuers successfully retrieved each of the three German mine workers this way. 

“What they did at Dahlbusch was a master stroke of genius,” says Jeff Sabo, a 40-year veteran of mine rescue operations who teaches mine rescue at the Mine Safety Training Center in Cadiz, Ohio. “Mine rescue has been around for hundreds of years. But the idea of using a small bore hole to rescue one miner at a time was very innovative.” 

This solution was obvious in hindsight. But rescuers were blinded by functional and structural fixedness. Humans have been mining the earth for metals and precious stones for more than 40,000 years. Over time, the process has evolved considerable as successive generations come up with new and safer engineering and construction methodologies. The downside of this long history of innovation is that mining professionals believe they truly understand “best practices” for operational efficiency and safety. The sheer weight of experience—usually considered an advantage in a profession—had limited their ability to think creatively.

A mine is an intricate interconnected network of vertical, slopped, and horizontal shafts. Miners are proud of the careful planning, rigorous engineering, and strong construction skills required to build a shaft. Each miner possesses an indelible mental map of the entire mine network in his mind. He wouldn’t’ be able to do his job without this mental map. Yet this mental map creates a significant amount of structural fixedness. Whenever a disaster occurs, the first step in mine rescue protocol dictates using the existing infrastructure of mine shafts to release all miners at once. So Plan A involves attempting to unblock the shaft that leads to the victims’ location. This makes perfect sense: Mine engineers, managers, and safety professionals know the exact location of each mine shaft, the structural integrity of each shaft, and how each one connects to all the others. They spent years building these shafts, and many more years working in them. Using existing shafts as rescue conduits is the quickest and safest way to get their colleagues back to the surface of the earth. But sometimes Plan A fails. 

In Germany, in 1955, Plan A proved untenable. So the rescue team had to “put every option on the table,” according to Rob McGee from the United States Mine Rescue Association. This pushed Au into thinking the unthinkable. Breaking the temptation to view the world through the lens of structural fixedness, he stopped to consider potential replacements within the Closed World. By subtracting and then replacing the main mine shaft with an air hole, he saved not just those three German lives, but many future lives, as his technique was adopted as the gold standard for Plan B by the mining industry. Indeed Au’s capsule rescued trapped individual miners in back-to-back disasters in 1956 and 1957. In 1963, the capsule saved 11 miners trapped at a depth of 190 feet for two weeks in an iron ore mine. Today, the United States Mine Safety and Health Association keeps a capsule like Au’s original one primed and ready to go anywhere in the world it’s needed. 

The "Phoenix" capsule used to rescue of 33 miners in Chile was an enhanced version of Au’s original design. Engineers from the Chilean navy built three that were slightly larger than Au’s original--eight feet long and 21 inches in diameter—and also equipped with microphones, speakers, and oxygen supplies. Otherwise, Au’s basic idea has proven amazingly robust. 

Eberhard Au died in 1996 at the age of 75. He never applied for a patent for his capsule. "The main thing is, the lads get out of there,” he reportedly said.

 

I can hear Elon Musk saying the same thing about these boys. Thank you, Elon!

 

 

Making Big, Bold Assertions to Drive Design Strategy

By Jon Kolko

Design strategy is built on assertion. On the way to a great design strategy is the creation of a series of value assertions: driving statements that guide creative exploration and describe our commitment to our customers.

Value assertions create a set of strategic boundaries, framed as promises, and then describe how our company is set up to deliver on those promises. The assertions are developed by:

1. Describing customer expectations – the things customers presume a company will do, make, deliver, or present to them.
2. Making an assertion of value – the benefits a company promises to deliver to meet or exceed expectations
3. Presenting fulfillments – the ways a company will deliver on those expectations

A big, bold value assertion for an educational company might be, “We promise to help minimize anxiety in college students as they make academic decisions.” A value assertion for a digital collaboration company might be, “We promise to help our customers feel a sense of physical community while working remotely from one-another.” And a value assertion for a healthcare software company might be, “We promise to help doctors feel efficient while making data-driven decisions.”

These assertions are promises, and they focus on feelings paired with utility. This is part of a design strategy, and one way it differs from a business strategy is that it emphasizes the styles of emotional experiences we want our customers to have.

I run a design strategy company called Modernist Studio. At Modernist, we recently worked with an organization – call it First Financial – that offers complex financial products. As we collaboratively developed our design strategy, our business partners continued to focus on the things they could do as a company: they could develop new products, better train their sales representatives, and create online tools to help educate the market. But all of these make assumptions about what people want and need. Do they need new products? Are they interested in interacting with sales reps? Are online tools useful?

We re-framed the way they thought about their customer/product interactions by grounding thinking in user research, a common approach for justifying design recommendations. Our research with customers showed that they were interested in learning about the financial products, but only on their own terms and schedule, and in a unique way: they wanted to develop a big picture understanding of the financial landscape and the language used to describe the various financial products, and then they would go dormant for a few weeks. Then, they would revisit the information and get a little more detailed, learning new terminology. Then, after a few more weeks, they would make a purchasing decision. At each stage in the process, they were looking for a different type of information, and they wanted that information delivered comparable to their pace of exploration. This incremental process was a way for them to feel less overwhelmed. It was a bite-sized way to learn.

Customer Expectations
First, we described customer expectations: “First Financial progressively teaches me about their products and services on my terms and in language I understand.” This statement describes what a person expects a company to do. It’s concise and direct – it’s focused, in this case, on education (not on purchasing, customer service, onboarding, or any other key business activity; just on education). And it’s written from the perspective of the customer, not from the company. By articulating a single sentence of expectation, we’ve ranked and judged customer needs and identified the most important thing.

This framing of customer expectations is built on a synthesis of our research. Customers say a lot of things during research, and in this case, not all of them focused on education. But the team identified a continuity in this theme, and decided that the continuity was critical in helping customers buy what’s right for them.  This was not an overnight prioritization. It came through hours of exploration, debate, and discussion.

Assertion of Value
Next, we simply recast that expectation as an assertion, or a promise: “We promise to progressively teach our customers about our products and services on their terms and in language they understand.” It’s the exact same idea, but written as a commitment. The word “promise” is selected on purpose. This is a big, bold assertion – a promise is a guarantee. If we don’t do this, we’ve failed. And such a bold promise forces us to become pragmatic, quickly, because we now know what we’re signing up for. It needs to be attainable.

This is what’s meant when we talk about a value proposition, but it’s a proposition around how we help customers, not necessarily around the actual products they sell. This statement isn’t about the financial security they’ll get from a financial instrument that First Financial sells – it’s about the promise of their experience navigating through the financial journey.

Fulfillments
Finally, we can create fulfillments, which are ways we’ll deliver on our promise. To make our assertion become real, we’ll need to act in certain ways, do things, and build things. For example, we can fulfill our promise through curation; “We will deliver on our promise by presenting only some of our products, rather all of them.” Or, we can fulfill our promise by using common language, rather than factually correct language; “We will deliver on our promise by sacrificing accuracy in terminology for accessible, colloquial language.”

If we put it all together, the path from expectation, to value, to fulfillment looks like this:

We promise to progressively teach our customers about our products and services on their terms and in language they understand. We will deliver on our promise by…

• Presenting only some of our products, rather all of them
• Sacrificing accuracy in terminology for accessible, colloquial language
• Displaying product facets next to one-another, so they can be compared
• Minimizing the presence and pressure of “buy” calls to action

These are product fulfillments. They can also be service, brand, or organizational fulfillments:

• Speaking consistently across channels with one uniform set of words about our products
• Acting empathetically and with a supportive voice in our call centers

The process of moving from expectation to assertion to fulfillment doesn’t tell us what to build – that comes from creative vision. But the process points at characteristics of how to build it. They add assessment criteria for judging if a design or business decision is a good idea. The assertions and fulfillments are artificial, but once they are articulated, they become firm. We all agree to them, and now we have a common language for understanding what is good and what is bad. And, we have a common framework for gauging if and how we are achieving out value promise – the promise we’ve asserted and committed to.

About the author:

Jon Kolko is the author of Creative Clarity, Partner at Modernist Studio, and the Founder of Austin Center for Design. Previously the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, he has worked extensively with both startups and Fortune 500 companies. He has been a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Design Studies of Monterrey, Mexico, and Malmö University, Sweden.

Innovation Sighting: Attribute Dependency and the Shape-Shifting Mannequin

Robotics and Fashion Design are two industries not typically paired together. Designer Audrey-Laure Bergenthal has done just that by designing a robotic mannequin that can change size in a matter of seconds. After hearing from women who could never find clothing to fit their body type, Bergenthal set out to find a solution to this problem by innovating a new structure on which clothes are designed. The result is Euveka’s life-size robotic wonder.

Euveka’s shape-shifting mannequin is a great example of innovation that utilizes the template known as Attribute Dependency. Attribute Dependency is one of the five innovation methods of Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). It works by creating (or breaking) a dependency between two attributes of a product or its environment. In the case of Euveka’s mannequin, designers simply enter the needed body measurements in the accompanying app, and the mannequin changes shape within seconds.

As Alphr.com states,

The level of customization on the mannequins is truly impressive, letting designers independently tweak the height, thigh size, hip diameter, waist, chest, bust and shoulders. That means you can be designing clothes for a five-foot child one moment, and a 6’3” obese woman the next (a male version of the mannequin is in the works, apparently). It’s like a video game avatar creator come to life.

It’s true that anyone can learn to create by utilizing the SIT methods. If you would like to get the most out of the Attribute Dependency Technique, follow these steps:

1. List internal/external variables.
2. Pair variables (using a 2 x 2 matrix)

• Internal/internal
• Internal/external

3. Create (or break) a dependency between the variables.
4. Visualize the resulting virtual product.
5. Identify potential user needs.
6. Modify the product to improve it.

For a demonstration of Euveka’s mannequin, see the video below: