Blogging Innovation

24 Hour Contest for Vijay Govindarajan Webinar Ticket

2010-03-16T16:51:00.001-07:00

This is only a 24 hour contest, so act fast!

You only have until midnight GMT March 17, 2010 to enter this contest.

On March 18, 2010 at 1:00PM ET, Vijay Govindarajan will be conducting an online seminar titled "Reverse Innovation: A New Strategy for Creating the Future".

HSM Global has graciously donated one (1) $99 ticket for this contest. One lucky person will be able to attend this special event for free.

To enter the contest, do one of these two things before midnight GMT on March 17, 2010:

On Twitter, send @innovate an @reply with "Reverse Innovation contest entry" in the tweet

If you aren't on Twitter, add a comment to this blog entry with an alternative way of contacting you (your LinkedIn profile URL or website contact form url for example)

There will only be one (1) winner, selected at random.

If you would like to skip the contest and attend the webinar, click here to register.

Stay tuned!

In two weeks we will be starting an Innovation Scavenger Hunt for a chance to win a $2,000 ticket to the World Innovation Forum in New York City on June 8-9, 2010. In the meantime, as an added value for our loyal Blogging Innovation readers, we have also negotiated a $200 discount on this great event when you register with our discount code "INNOVATE".

Editors's note: The ticket for the contest is being provided by HSM Global, not Blogging Innovation, and is conveyed at their discretion not ours.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

I Love My iPad Mini

2010-03-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

So There is No Reason Why I Won't Like My iPad. Just Add A Camera.

by Idris Mootee

Some are comparing the iPad to Netbooks, but it is not a fair comparison. I don't like Netbooks myself. I used to have a Sony one 14 years ago. It was a very powerful mini notebook with a built-in camera (a first at that time). It costs me $2,300 when I purchased that from a now bankrupt computer store chain in San Jose. It was a good one except keyboard was too small and battery life short. According to the guy at a local Best Buy store, 8 out of 10 Netbooks sold are returned. I am sure that's not the case in Asia. I think many people have the wrong expectations, and are not aware of the limitations of Netbooks.

There was one kid working at Best Buy who asked me if I like the iPod Touch Jumbo, he was referring to iPad. I said I like the iPad mini (iPod Touch) that I have now, so I think I will like the iPad. The only disappointment for me is the lack of a camera, because I think if I carry that all the time and being able to use Skype is great plus. It doesn't add much to the cost. The camera needs to be in the front obviously. It is still a little heavy; adding 1.5 lbs to my Louis Vuitton briefcase is pushing it. No video output is a negative; the other Lenovo Ideapad I bought has an HDMI output. The Lenovo tablet is a pretty good one with robust design for business use. Even with many criticisms, iPad will be an isntant success. I guarantee you the iPad is not another Newton.

iPad preorders are pouring in. Investor Village's AAPL Sanity board (subscription needed) noted that iPad pre-orders dropped from an estimated 25,000 per hour on Friday, the first day of availability, to around 1,000 per hour over the weekend. For the three-day period, the cumulative total was estimated at 152,000. That's pretty good.

I think the iPad will open up opportunities for print media and help shape portable media experiences. I can't read magazines from my Blackberry of iPhone, but with the iPad, it is a different story. The iPad platform has more than enough screen real estate and resolution to build interesting media sharing and communication experiences. Of course we have choices of other manufacturers - Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, and almost everyone else, are all working iPad-like devices - in addition to those who have products in the market (such as Amazon).

Microsoft's Courier is an interesting one, currently in "late prototype" stage of development. At least they are not making the tablet mistake, the dual 7-inch screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. There is a camera at the back too (sorry Apple). Currently, Microsoft is working on the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies. Microsoft's tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we've seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

Sony is doing some catch-up although they are stuck with their paradigm of competitive advanatage. The Wall Street Journal reports that Sony is working on a device that's described as being part Netbook, part e-reader and part PlayStation Portable. Sources within the electronic giant also report that Sony is working on a "PlayStation Phone," which would be capable of downloading and playing PlayStation games. Sony needs help.

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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

Keep Moving Forward - Apple, Microsoft, Google, RIM, Hearst

2010-03-16T00:10:00.000-07:00

by Adam Hartung

Did you ever notice how often a large company will introduce a new solution (often a new technology), but then retrench from promoting it? Frequently, the market is developed by an alternate company that captures most of the value. We can see that behavior looking at smartphones.

Source: Silicon Alley Insider

In 2008, three early leaders were Microsoft, RIM and Palm. But Microsoft chose to invest in Defending & Extending its PC software business - with updates to the operating system in Vista and OS 7. As the market has shifted toward mobile computing, Microsoft has been clobbered. But largely because it remained stuck trying to protect its "core" while the market shifted away. Palm also tried to Defend & Extend (D&E) its early position with updates, but because it did not follow the pathway to greater usage with new applications it also has seen dramatic share decline.

Meanwhile, RIM has promoted new uses within the corporate world for mobility, and thus grown its market share. And Apple has made a huge impact by bringing forward dozens of new mobile applications, closely followed by Google. What we see is a classic example of the early entrant fading largely because they decided to Defend the old market, rather than investing in the new one. Really too bad for shareholders in Microsoft (losing 20 share points) and Palm (losing 10 share points), while good for shareholders of RIM, Apple and Google.

And in Apple's case we can see that the company continues using White Space to grow revenues by expanding the new marketplace. The iPad is off to a very strong start, with tens of thousands of units ordered last week. But of greater importance is how Apple is promoting the shift to mobile devices from traditional PC devices. At SeekingAlpha.com, in "How the iPad, Slates Will Evolve the Next Two Years," the reporter projects how demand for all laptop products will decline as more capability and functionality is added to mobile devices like smartphones and these new slate products.

Microsoft can keep trying to Defend & Extend PC technology, but it won't be long before their efforts largely won't matter. Don't forget that once Cray computers was a rapidly growing super-computer company. But increasing performance from much alternative products eventually made Cray irrelevant. Same for Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems.

Today the market capitalization of Microsoft is about $250B, about 4x sales. Apple's market cap is just over $200B, about 6x sales. Google's market cap is about $180B, about 8x sales. All reflect investor expectations about future growth. The D&E company is simply not expected to grow - and in fact is much more likely to disappoint than the companies growing share in growing markets toward which customers are shifting.

And any company can choose to participate in growth, versus Defend & Extend. While Tribune Corporation is trying to find a way out of bankruptcy, and struggling to figure out how to deal with market shifts away from newspapers, Hearst is taking positive action. The Wall Street Journal reports in "Hearst Jumps Into the Apps Business" how the old-line newspaper company has set up a White Space project, complete with dedicated people and its own funding, to begin developing mobile applications for news!

Even when business leaders see a market shift, far too many choose to Defend & Extend the "core." Unfortunately, that leads to disappointments. Keep in mind Microsoft and its rapid loss of Smartphone share as users move increasingly to mobile devices from PCs. To succeed leaders need to drive their organizations in the direction of market shifts, and growth. Like Apple, Google and even Hearst.

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Adam Hartung, author of "Create Marketplace Disruption", is a Faculty and Board member of the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, Managing Partner of Spark Partners, and writes for "Forbes" and the "Journal for Innovation Science."

8 Design Tips for Startups - Moving Beyond Aesthetics

2010-03-16T00:04:00.000-07:00

by Thomas Petersen

Don't panic, this is not going to be a lecture on typography or what color palette you should use. It's not going to require you to have the latest Creative Suite from Adobe either. In fact you don't need to be a designer or UXD expert to use these principles. This is an attempt to cut through the noise from the art directors, usability experts, designers, developers, Venture Capitalist and family members to help you design better products.

So what does it take to design a successful digital product or service? Is it the brand, the choice of colors, the functionality, the chosen platform, or the social features?

Well all of the above certainly have some importance, but it's going to be very hard to prove that one particular element is why company X is a success. All too often we become attached to this idea that there is a recipe for success. That if you just get the right idea or if your design is cool or uses a certain technology you will be successful.

Nothing in my experience, supports that belief. In fact what means success for one company might spell failure for another.

For instance WordPress.com is based on PHP, a server side language that many "real" developers loathe. They claim it's not a real programming language and that it doesn't scale well. None-the-less, a whole plethora of successful companies uses PHP, including FaceBook.

Google isn't exactly winning design prizes for their look and feel, yet they are so successful that many companies are copying their style.

Hulu.com was a success long before they started to add more complex social features. Joost was designed primarily around social features and have joined the deathpool.

In other words, there are as many ways to design a successful product, as there are ways to design a failure.

Large companies almost never allow for failure, which partly explains why their solutions most of the time are as bland as they are.

They have the money to continue down a dead-end and will invest millions in doing all the right things from user research, to usability tests to 5 different design proposals to establishing brand guidelines, then launch something two years too late to great fanfare and unfortunately often to great obscurity.

If you are a startup, you are normally not allowed (and shouldn't be) to spend that much time and money building spaceships no one want to fly.

So what to do.

Take the design process seriously, but don't get too attached to one particular part of it and don't rely on any one particular discipline to give you the right answers. Get to the point where you have real users or customers as quickly as possible. It's these users that will provide you with the information that will get you you in a position to make better design decisions.

The following principles should help you get in a position:

1. Start simple, stay simple.

It cannot be said enough. Less is more - much more, and there is a very good reason that it pays to understand.

"If you do less you can measure more. If you can measure more you can better experiment with what works."

Most products are simple, based on simple insights.

Make sure that you stay true to those insights, until you know you tried out every different interpretation of them. Don't add new features just because you think that it will help, it won't, not yet. If your product becomes a success it's not because of how many features it has.

2. Don't confuse change with improvement.

One of the biggest challenges record artist face when producing a new album is fatigue. They get this from listening to the same riffs, passages, drum tracks, choruses etc. over and over and over. It's actually one of the reasons why many have a problem listening to their own album when it's finally out. Startups as intense and time consuming as they are, have similar problems. It's very tempting after a couple of months of looking at the same design to want to change it and think you are improving your product. You aren't, so don't succumb to the temptation. It's not worth it.

Furthermore, if it goes like it does in most cases, you will soon enough have to spend resources on changing things after you launch.

3. Build to integrate.

Think about whether your product could be a good extension to already existing products/services. That way you can tap into already existing digital ecosystems and leverage on their popularity and reach this will give you some standards to adhere to. Remember that the more you are able to interface with other services the more trust you will establish. Guilt by association works both ways.

4. Don't do everything that is possible only what is necessary.

Constrain yourself. A good product has limitations. It doesn't just succumb to every temptation that comes along. Focus on what makes your product the product and only add features if you get clear signs that it is needed. Most users will have to learn your product anyway so don't try to impress them with features before they understand what your product is all about. iTunes may have many flaws, Basecamp from 37Signals leaves a lot to be asked for, but when all is said and done, their products are rock solid and there is no feature like the rock solid feature.

5. Usability studies and focus groups are for refinement not for innovation.

Let me be perfectly clear. Running a successful and informative usability study or focus group wont help you understand whether the market wants your product or whether you have solved your interaction flow satisfactory. I know there is a lot of buzz around User Centered Design (UCD) and that a hoard of usability experts will claim that they can help you design more successful products if you just ask the user (Which I find ironic). Don't believe the hype, I say this as someone who also makes a living doing usability tests. There are a few situations where usability studies make sense for startups, but most likely it wont be in your situation.

I will write a separate post about UCD but leave you with a few observations.

There is no one-to-one relationship between what people say in a focus group and what they actually do. It's way to complex and there are way to many psychological elements and social dynamics involved to allow you to extrapolate important data out of it at an early stage.

In most cases you are testing in a pseudo environment with mock-ups, html prototypes or even paper prototypes. Just imagine how Twitter, SMS, Google or LastFM in its early days would have scored. So many products need to be experienced before users will provide you with any valuable insights to build on.

It would be like trying to determine the usage and usability of a hammer by looking at a piece of paper with a drawing of it. You get the picture.

6. A feature is not a product.

Speaking of hammers.

Don't just think about your product as a bunch of features. Instead focus on what it is your are selling at its core. What is needed for your product to function? How much can you take away from it without sacrificing the core product.

Think about features as something to add after you have launched.

A hammer has one purpose, which is to help you knock in nails. Everything on top of that are features. Therefore understand when you are working on your core product and when you are working on adding features.

The benefits of thinking like this, is that it will help you establish a very clear an precise picture of what makes your product your product. Which means you will much better be able to understand why you are adding features when you are and won't get caught in the "me to" behavior that can drive companies out of business very fast.

7. Think how, not what.

What matters is not what functionality your product has, but how it works. A sign-up process is not just a sign-up process, a checkout process is not just a checkout process, a button is not just a button, a rating system is not just a rating system.

Think about how you can stand out by introducing something that everyone else might have but in a unique way. That's what Steepster did when they re-designed their rating system (see how they did here). Skype was not the first VOIP provider, far from, but Skype managed to make it stand out and look like a product not just a technology. In other words they productified a technology

You will be surprised how much the "how" can help improving your product.

8. It's not innovation to use the latest technology.

It's tempting to try and set yourself apart by using the latest build of some framework or technology. But don't do it just because it's the latest. Make sure that you understand the implications of what you are introducing. Is it processor intensive, is it increasing load time, does it improve the experience, is it understood by enough developers so that you can optimize it.

If you can't answer the above, you probably shouldn't do it.

All too often companies get caught in thinking that new technology in itself is the differentiation factor. But as most successful businesses know. Innovations have an introduction curve and not everyone should take advantage of a given technology just because it's available.

Conclusion

Designing successful products has more to do with understanding what doesn't work than with what works. If you can get your company in a position where you can "feel" the state of your product, you are able to make smarter decisions and in effect will have a better chance of success.

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Thomas Petersen is the co-founder of hello, a digital creative agency that designs and develops products and services. He writes on Black&White^TM and on twitter @hello_world.

Part 1 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability

2010-03-15T20:45:00.000-07:00

Interview - Rowan Gibson of "Innovation to the Core"

I had the opportunity to interview Rowan Gibson, co-author of "Innovation to the Core" about the book and about creating a systemic innovation capability inside organizations.

Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation. In addition to "Innovation to the Core", Rowan is author of "Rethinking The Future", and a keynote speaker at large international conferences, corporate management events and executive summits.

We have split this in-depth interview into three parts. Here is the first part of the interview:

1. When it comes to innovation, what is the biggest challenge that you see organizations facing?

The biggest challenge is not generating new ideas and opportunities. It's how to make innovation a deeply embedded capability. What usually happens is that companies focus most of their efforts on the front end of innovation - so they launch some kind of ideation initiative with a lot of hoopla and they get a whole bunch of ideas. But then they hit a wall because there is no back end - there is no organizational system for effectively screening ideas, aligning them with the business strategy, allocating seed funding and management resources, and guiding a mixed portfolio of opportunities through the pipeline toward commercialization. So, invariably, what we find is that the whole innovation effort eventually withers. And all those enthusiastic innovators inside and outside the company become cynical and discouraged as they watch their ideas go nowhere.

The real challenge, therefore, is to turn innovation from a buzzword into a systemic and widely distributed capability. It has to be woven into the everyday fabric of the company just like any other organizational capability, such as quality, or supply chain management, or customer service. In other words, for innovation to really work, and to be sustainable, it has to become a way of life for the organization. Yet how many companies have actually achieved that? The sad truth is this: most organizations today still have absolutely no model, no practical notion, of what the back end of innovation actually looks like. If you asked them to build a corporate innovation system that seamlessly integrates leadership commitment, infrastructure, processes, tools, talent development, cultural mechanisms and values, they wouldn't even know where to start. That's the challenge Innovation to the Core was meant to address.

2. Why is it so important that organizations build a foundation of insights before generating ideas?

OK, let's go back to the front end of innovation. If you're going to do this properly, what you're really looking for is not just a lot of ideas. Senior managers often complain that most of the ideas they get from their employees and customers are not very good ones. So after they open up the innovation process to everyone, everywhere, they find themselves wasting valuable management time sorting through a heap of garbage to find a few interesting submissions. That's because, frankly, they don't really understand how the innovation process actually works.

Try to look at it this way: before you start building a house, you have to gather the right materials and lay a solid foundation, right? Remember the story of the three little pigs? If you build a house from the wrong materials it can easily be blown down, so it's useless. Then there's the Bible story of the house built on sand rather than rock. It makes a similar point: if you don't have the right foundation - regardless of the quality of the building materials - the house is equally useless. So it is with new ideas and opportunities. In a sense, they need to be built from the right "materials" and they need a solid "foundation", otherwise they won't be very good. What I'm getting at here is that there is actually a front end to the front end of innovation. Before you start ideating, you need a set of really novel strategic insights. These are like the raw material out of which exciting innovation breakthroughs are built. If you ask people to innovate in a game-changing way without first building a foundation of novel strategic insights, you find that it's mostly a waste of time. You get a lot of ideas that are either not new at all, or so crazy that they're way out in space.

So how do you develop those all-important insights? I teach companies a methodology for doing that in a systematic way - it's called "The Four Lenses of Innovation". The fact is that in order to discover new ideas and opportunities of any real value, people need to stretch their thinking beyond the conventional. They need to develop fresh perspectives. So the "Four Lenses" represent four specific types of perspectives, or ways of looking at the world, that innovators typically use to come to their breakthrough discoveries. They are (1) Challenging orthodoxies, (2) Harnessing trends, (3) Leveraging resources in new ways, and (4) Understanding unmet needs. By using these lenses, or these particular angles of view, it's possible to systematically look through the familiar and spot the unseen. That's how you discover those deep insights that others have overlooked or ignored.

Once you have gathered a collection of really inspiring insights, you can then do your ideation work. You start thinking about what kinds of ideas and opportunities could be built on these unexamined dogma, unexploited trends, underutilized resources, and unvoiced customer needs. And what that gives you is not just a high quantity of ideas but also a high quality. Rather than just pulling ideas out of the air, you generate opportunities that are grounded. They are based on real industry orthodoxies that deserved to be challenged, real discontinuities that could potentially reshape the business landscape, real competencies and assets that could be leveraged to create opportunities beyond the boundaries of the existing business, and real customer needs that have not yet been addressed. So you inspire ideas that are connected to the real world; they are not in some crazy, unbounded creative space. They are founded on realities - things you can test and validate.

Now imagine that instead of merely inviting everyone, everywhere to "go forth and innovate", you actually gave them access to these powerful strategic insights via a web-based tool, and you taught them how to ideate effectively. Can you see how that would dramatically enhance their innovation performance? That's what I'm currently doing with all kinds of organizations around the world.

Related Articles

Part 2 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability (coming March 17, 2010)
Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability (coming March 18, 2010)
"Innovation to the Core" Book Review and Innovation Summary

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Book Review - "Innovation to the Core"

2010-03-15T20:40:00.000-07:00

by Braden Kelley

A few weeks ago I received "Innovation to the Core" by Rowan Gibson and Peter Skarzynski (with an introuction by Gary Hamel) in the mail. "Innovation to the Core" weighs in at 295 pages, but it is an easy, and pleasant read. The book is full of a lot of great material, and the influence of Gary Hamel is evident in several of the chapters.

Rowan Gibson travels the world giving speeches and conducting innovation workshops, and Peter Skarzynski is the CEO of innovation strategy consultancy - Strategos (which is now owned by UTEK).

The book starts with a premise that I agree with, which is that too many companies view innovation as a specialized activity to be handled by specialists - in much the same way that people viewed the quality movement in its early days. Now of course companies endeavor to embed quality throughout the entire organization and seek to make it a core competency. The same thing now needs to happen with innovation in organizations that want to be able to both sustain themselves and win in the long term:

"Despite the gargantuan nature of the challenge, building a deep, systemic capability for innovation is now the inescapable imperative for every company - as important to an organization's success and survival as the quality movement was in its day."

To create the preconditions for systemic innovation you have to:

Create time and space for reflection, ideation, and experimentation

Maximize the diversity of thinking

Foster connection and conversation ("combinational chemistry")

Before reading this book, I've been trying to convince people that insights are more important than ideas and that the quality of a company's insights and execution are what will differentiate the winners from the losers in today's marketplace. This insights conversation has always been difficult because people always want to jump to the ideas - thinking that the idea is king.

It was refreshing to see that the authors of "Innovation to the Core" also feel that successful and sustainable innovation starts with the insight, and so Chapter 3 is all about building a foundation of novel strategic insights predicated on "Four Lenses of Innovation":

Challenging Orthodoxies

Harnessing Discontinuities

Leveraging Competencies and Strategic Assets

Understanding Unarticulated Needs

There are additional ways to generate insights to build sustainable innovation on, but these are a good starting point, and Chapter 3 by itself makes a purchase of this book worthwhile.

Once you identify the insights you are going to build on, then you can get on with producing a torrent of new product or service ideas and even attempt to innovate across the business model. One other key distinction that the book makes is that innovation doesn't have to be risky, and that when you look at your innovation portfolio, you should have a balance of ideas with differing levels of potential impact on the industry.

Timing is incredibly important to successful innovation too - both in terms of determining when to ask the right questions but also when to ramp up the level of investment in an idea. Ramp up the financial investment too soon and you may doom the project to failure from accumulating losses and progress that can't be accelerated by greater financial commitment. But, ramp up the financial investment too late and someone else may beat you to the market. The key is to identify which barriers to successful development can be accelerated by increased spending, and which can't.

I also liked how the authors of this book allocated some of this book to the importance of the demand side of the innovation equation. Companies that focus only on generating a greater number of innovation ideas without creating the conditions that increase the desire and capabilities of managers to develop an increasing number of innovation ideas, will face a higher chance of innovation failure over the long term.

Taken all together I found "Innovation to the Core" to be an interesting and important read for any manager looking to gain a deeper understanding of what's required for creating systemic innovation. The book was worth the time investment.

Related Articles:

Part 1 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability
Part 2 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability (coming March 17, 2010)
Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability (coming March 18, 2010)

Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Escaping the Internet Commodity Trap

2010-03-15T00:10:00.000-07:00

by Rowan Gibson

The Internet is like a black hole that relentlessly sucks in, digitizes and democratizes content of every kind. While that may be generally good news for consumers (hey, look at all the great stuff we can now get for free), it has turned out to be unbelievably bad news for the content providers. Ask anyone in the print media business, or the music business, or the movie business. For at least the last decade, industries that primarily produce content have been struggling hard to find a viable new financial model in a world where internet users (particularly the young generation) don't expect to pay for anything they read, listen to, or watch. As one popular mantra puts it: "Content is no longer king". The fact is, content distribution is now king. Power has shifted to the content aggregators - think Google, YouTube, Digg.com or iTunes - and to new media platforms like Amazon's Kindle reader or the Apple iPad. So how exactly are content providers supposed to make money in an era of rampant digital commoditization? The only option they have left is to innovate like never before; to reinvent their industry business models before they become obsolete.

I remember talking to Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, back in 1995 about the future of the Web. He told me he viewed the Internet as a "planetary-sized copying machine" and added that "trying to stop copying on the Net is impossible." Indeed, within a week of my latest book "Innovation to the Core" being published in Chinese, there were at least two websites in China offering a digital version of the book for illegal download. Consumers clearly win - why buy the physical book when you can get the digital file for free? But in terms of book sales and royalties, the author (i.e. me!) and the publishers lose out entirely.

That's why the book publishing industry is feverishly exploring a variety of new business models. One option is to sell eBooks direct to customers, cutting out middlemen like distributors and retailers, and building a community around the books and authors. Since eBooks have a relatively low price tag, the hope is that consumers will be willing to pay for the genuine article (a la iTunes) rather than download an illegal copy, especially if it comes with social-media-enabled tools that help them discuss and share the book with others. Another option is to make the eBook itself a richer multimedia experience (with audio, video, hyperlinks and so forth) rather than just a text-based medium. Instead of embedding all of these media in a single digital file (which would still be relatively easy to copy and distribute illegally), publishers could give consumers a code when they purchase the book that offers exclusive access to a dynamic, integrated online application environment.

A similar challenge faces today's music business. Over the last decade, music labels, retailers, and the artists themselves have seen their revenues fall off a cliff in an era when teenagers can - and do - get all the music they want for free. Last year, 95% of music downloads were still from illegal file-sharing sites. And although Apple is now the world's biggest music retailer, its iTunes store has never been a massive revenue producer. Instead, it simply serves as a provider of low-cost content for the iPod, helping to drive sales of Apple's premium-priced music player. So far, the latest trend - cloud-based, streaming music sites like Spotify, Rhapsody and Pandora - has not been very helpful to the music industry either. Until now, these sites have employed a free-to-users, ad-supported model which doesn't generate much money for the labels or the artists. As an example, it's estimated that a million plays of Lady Gaga's popular song "Poker Face" on Spotify only earned her a paltry $167.

Frankly, I'm not too worried about the artists because most of them make their money these days on concert revenue and merchandising, not on the sale of recordings. And since people go to live concerts to hear artists performing songs they already know, it's actually in the artists' interests to have their music distributed as widely as possible, even if it's for free, in order to generate a lot of fans. Yet what about the music labels? How can they possibly compete against free downloads? Only by finding innovative new ways to add value. That's what MusicDNA is all about. It's a new digital file format that contains not just music but additional content such as lyrics, images and interesting info like interviews, tour schedules, or updates to the artists' social network pages. Anyone who downloads the file illegally would miss out on all these extras. So MusicDNA offers hope that the industry can open up new revenue streams. It may also point the way forward for Hollywood studios as they look for ways to battle illegal movie downloads.

Another victim of the Internet commodity trap has been the traditional news media industry. According to a new survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more Americans now get their news from the Internet than from newspapers, and three-fourths say they primarily learn of news via updates on social media sites like Twitter. So as readers (closely followed by advertisers) make a mass exodus from print to digital media, 'The Press' as we know it seems to be going the way of the dinosaur. In the face of mounting bankruptcies, mass layoffs and plunging advertising sales, some publishers have already thrown in the towel. As an example, McGraw-Hill recently signaled their despair by selling off BusinessWeek at the bargain basement price of less than $5 million.

So is there any hope for this ailing industry? Some think it might still be possible to go back to the old 'paid content' model. Rupert Murdoch, illustrious media mogul of News Corporation, has been making headlines over the last year with his plans to erect a pay wall around his media. And, if it works, others will almost certainly follow. An analogy could be the advent of cable TV in the 1960s and 1970s. At first, very few believed that anyone would be willing to actually pay for TV shows and movies after spending decades watching them for free. But today the average household in North America pays about $50 a month for Pay-TV, so why shouldn't the same principle work for the Internet? There is also new hope on the horizon in the form of emerging digital media platforms like Kindle and Apple iPad, that promise to bring fresh revenues to the news industry by charging readers to access publications in an exciting new way.

Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, has co-founded a company called Journalism Online to help newspapers find new payment models. These range from micropayments - where readers pay for individual stories - to "freemium" models like the one used by the Financial Times, where readers can view 10 free pages every 30 days.

One of Rupert Murdoch's properties, The Wall Street Journal already charges readers US$119 a year for an online subscription. The WSJ is also experimenting with a new kind of media mix that takes it beyond the written word. Last September, its Digital Group rolled out News Hub, a twice-daily video news series. In January The Wall Street Journal Network delivered a record 5.5 million streams, with about a million or so views being generated by News Hub. This February the group launched Digits, a video series focused on technology which streams live each weekday, and plans are now in the works for several other original live series.

As whole industries see their traditional business models sucked into the Internet commodity trap, their only hope of escape has become radical innovation. For content providers of every stripe, success and survival in the future will be based on the ability to fundamentally rethink, re-imagine and reinvent themselves by innovating around who they serve, what they provide, how they provide it, how they make money, and how they differentiate from the rest. Stewart Brand's maxim may have famously stated that "information wants to be free", which is at the heart of utopian Internet democracy, but the cold reality is that every business has to make money. That means that whether you produce books, newspapers, magazines, music, movies or TV shows, somebody somewhere has to pay somehow. Figuring out who that could be - and how the financial model would work - is one the greatest business battles of our age.

Related Articles - "Content is No Longer King" - Part 1 - Part 2 - by Stephen Shapiro

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Rowan Gibson is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on enterprise innovation. He is co-author of the bestseller "Innovation to the Core" and a much in-demand public speaker around the globe. On Twitter he is @RowanGibson.

Are You Prepared to Lose Control of the Idea?

2010-03-15T00:07:00.000-07:00

Photo by chavals
by Glen Stansberry

People are awfully protective of their ideas (myself definitely included). There are plenty of reasons for not sharing ideas:

We're afraid people won't like them, or worse, won't understand them.
Someone might steal them
They might, in reality, be total crap
They're hard to explain, especially when the proverbial ink is still dry in the mind
etc., etc., etc.

But the biggest fear I have of sharing ideas is losing control.

There is an awful lot of ego that gets attached to our ideas, (see: the God Complex), and the thought of losing that grip is crippling.

One of the most intoxicating aspects of having an idea is having control over the idea. We thrive on building, planning, analyzing, almost anything but actually doing.

It's not just little companies or amateurs that struggle with letting go. Some of the biggest companies in the world suffer from these 'idea insecurities' listed above.

Microsoft's Decline In Innovation

I read an ~~interesting~~ sad article about the causes of the downward spiral of Microsoft's innovation. For the past ten years, Microsoft has been playing catch-up to companies like Google and Apple. Instead of creating breakthrough products that once made the software giant famous, the company has relied on a monkey-see, monkey-do approach to production.

The article goes on to explain that the top brass at Microsoft were directly responsible for the void of innovation, simply by harboring the fears listed above. Products were never made because of petty differences between divisions. The main reason for the lack of innovation was the stubbornness of division heads to work together on technologies.

They were afraid of losing their ideas in favor of someone else's better idea.

Letting Go of the Idea

Some people never understand that if they hand over control of the original idea, something better might come out of it. Flickr was set to be a gaming company until the founders discovered a really efficient way to serve photos. There are plenty of examples of this happening throughout history.

Letting go is one of the absolute hardest concepts to grasp as an entrepreneur. But sometimes our idea outgrows us. The trick is to swallow the thick pride and embrace the potential of what could happen.

If the powerful suits at Microsoft had put aside petty differences and allowed other departments to improve their products, who knows what Microsoft would be today. They might have had a Google killer, or the iPod. We'll never know.

This wasn't an excuse to single out Microsoft. Every single company and entrepreneur deals with control issues at some point. I know I have. The important thing is recognizing when we're holding on a bit too tightly on what's "ours" and not recognizing the full potential of the idea, with the help of others.

Related article - Microsoft and Creative Destruction - by Scott Berkun

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Glen Stansberry writes at LifeDev, a blog that helps people make their ideas happen. You can follow him on Twitter here.

The Innovation Paradox

2010-03-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

by Mitch Ditkoff

My big insight about innovation these days would make Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr, proud.

"Now that we have met with paradox," explained Dr. Bohr, "we have some hope of making progress."

Innovation is full of it - paradox, that is.

On one hand, organizations want structures, maps, models, guidelines, and systems. On the other hand, that's all too often the stuff that squelches innovation, driving it underground or out the door.

The noble search for a so-called "innovation process" can easily become a seduction, addiction, or distraction whereby innovation is marginalized, deferred, over-engineered, and worn like a badge.

True innovation is about allowing room enough for paradox to be a teacher and guide - and to accept, at least for a little longer than usual, ambiguity, dissonance, and discomfort - the age-old precursors to breakthrough.

Remember, there's a big difference between Six Sigma and Innovation.

Six Sigma is about reducing variability. Innovation is about increasing it - and that often means allowing the kind of "messiness" that process-mavens interpret as a problem needing to be fixed, rather than a pre-condition to breakthrough and the resulting commercialization of that breakthrough that most people refer to as "innovation."

Yes, process, structures, systems are necessary, but they don't have to become overly pre-emptive. If you stay in an innovative mindset and can adapt to emerging needs, they will eventually become self-organizing when the soul of innovation is allowed to flourish.

Can we help the "innovation process" along with the right application of strategy, infrastructure, and planning?

Of course we can.

But beware! "Helping" the process too much often becomes counterproductive - much in the same way that attempting to catch a milkweed floating through the air with a bold reach of your hand actually repels the object of your desire.

Innovation Physics 101.

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Mitch Ditkoff is the Co-Founder and President of Idea Champions and the author of "Awake at the Wheel", as well as the very popular Heart of Innovation blog.

Adopt, Adapt, Improve and Innovate

2010-03-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

by Paul Sloane

Adapting ideas that have worked in one environment and using them in another is one of the most successful of innovation techniques. Let's look at some examples.

In 1916, a young American scientist and inventor called Clarence Birdseye went to Canada as a fur trader. He noticed that people in Labrador kept their food frozen in the snow for extended periods in the winter. When he returned to the U.S. he developed this idea and launched a line of quick-frozen foods and persuaded retailers to stock them in freezers. He created the frozen food industry. Birdseye subsequently sold his business to General Foods Corporation and made his fortune. He saw a good idea, adapted it to his business environment and implemented it.

Alexander Graham Bell studied the workings of the human ear. He adapted the idea of the eardrum vibrating with sounds into the workings of a metal diaphragm which led to his invention of the telephone.

The motto of the Round Table is adopt, adapt, improve and it is an excellent guideline for implementing new ideas in your business. Taking ideas from other environments and adapting them for use in your situation is one of the best ways of implementing novel solutions. Amar Bhide of the Harvard Business School studied the origin and evolution of new businesses. He found that over 70% of successful start-ups were based on ideas that the founders had adopted from their previous employments. They took a promising idea in a field they understood and made it better.

The person who invented the roll-on deodorant was looking for a new way to apply a liquid. He copied an idea from another field, writing, where the same problem is solved. He adapted the concept of the ballpoint pen to create the roll-on deodorant.

Samuel Morse was the inventor of morse code. He encountered a problem sending signals over long distances on the telegraph - the signal became attenuated and weak. Then one day when he was travelling by stagecoach he noticed how the coach changed horses at relay stations. He adapted this idea to put in relay stations for telegraphs that boosted the signal.

In 1941 George de Mestral went for a walk with his dog in the Jura mountains in Switzerland. On their return he noticed that many plant burrs were attached to his trousers and to the dog's coat. They were hard to remove. He examined them under the microscope and saw that they contained tiny hooks that caught in the loops of his clothes and in the dog's hair. He developed an artificial material to mimic nature and in doing so he invented Velcro.

Putting this creativity technique to work

If you have a problem try to force fit a link with a random event or animal or institution. Then adapt some ideas from that environment. Say your problem is how to motivate a lethargic team and you choose at random the Olympic Games, a tiger and a Ballet school. What sorts of ideas would that trigger? You might offer medals as recognition for top performers. You could keep records of who has achieved the fastest qualified lead or the fastest assembly time and post them on the wall or the extranet in the form of Olympic records. The tiger might suggest face painting as a trick for raising morale or it might suggest hunting - you could have a treasure hunt in the office or organise a 'hunt for sales' competition. And so on. The ballet school students practice all their exercises each day before they perform a dance. This might suggest a high-energy group practice session each morning before work proper begins. Ballet dancers practice in front of mirrors - what if we installed systems that gave us feedback to build the team's motivation?

Alternatively, try to adapt a combination between your organization's main strength and that of other organizations or people. Say you provide high level training courses and you choose at random a hospital then you might come up with the idea of a consulting accident and emergency clinic where people turn up with their problems and you help diagnose them on the spot. Or you may ponder that many people forget what they learn on training courses. In a hospital patients have ongoing physiotherapy sessions to aid recovery. This idea could be adapted so that you send out "physio trainers" to top up the learning of participants after they have completed their courses. Alternatively, if you think of the Boy Scouts then you might imagine a summer camp for some of your top clients or a "bob a job" campaign where you offer short introductory courses for new clients.

Lateral thinking is about finding new ways to solve problems. It is very likely that the current problem you face at work today has been faced and solved by other people. Maybe they were in your line of business or maybe they confronted a similar problem but in an entirely different walk of life. Why do all the brain work yourself when you can adapt someone else's idea and make it work for you?

Tips for finding ideas you can adopt and adapt:

Deliberately gather inputs from unrelated settings.
Take time out to discuss your problem with people from entirely different backgrounds. If you are a businessman then ask a teacher or a priest or a musician.
Read a different magazine, visit a different environment, see a foreign movie, drive a new route home, find some new inspiration in a different source.
Place yourself in a different environment and it will help you see concepts and ideas you can adapt. If you visit an Eskimo in his igloo, like Clarence Birdseye, you may come back with an idea as good as the one that built the frozen food industry.
Identify analogous situations in other fields and ask how they would be handled.

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Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader published by Kogan-Page.

The Soccket - A Fun Social Innovation

2010-03-14T00:10:00.000-08:00

by Kevin Roberts

Tackling climate change is too important to leave to politicians! It's a job for the inventors, the innovators, the radical optimists. Because of them, the clean energy revolution is already underway, in big ways and small. I stumbled across this amazing idea, and I wanted to share it with you.

Meet the Soccket, a "fun, portable energy-harvesting energy source in the form of a soccer ball". That's right - it is a football that captures the energy of each kick, throw or header to be reused later as a tiny power generator. For each 15 minutes of play, it generates enough energy to power an LED light for three hours.

The Soccket has been trialed successfully in Durban, South Africa - home to this year's Soccer World Cup, as well as to millions of young people who love nothing more than to kick a ball around, often in communities with not enough safe, reliable sources of energy. The inventors see it as a community builder and public health tool as well as being, well, a soccer ball. They plan to develop a high-end version for sale in the US and Europe. An inspired and inspiring idea!

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Image source: ecofriend

Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Chance to win a $3,690 Front End of Innovation Ticket

2010-03-14T00:09:00.000-08:00

You've been waiting patiently, and now the time has come...

We have one (1) $3,690 Front End of Innovation ALL ACCESS PASS up for grabs. The winner will get:

access to all three days of the event (May 3-5, 2010)
access to four additional conferences taking place simultaneously on-site
- The Beyond "Open"... Summit
- Eco-Innovation
- The Annual VOC Summit
- Service Innovation
and more

To enter our contest and have the chance to win this ticket you must be on Facebook, but the rest is easy:

Head over to our new Facebook page and become a fan

Then answer the following question in your own words - What is the 'Front End of Innovation'?, by either:

Clicking on the discussions tab and responding to the topic there

Clicking on the videos tab and recording a video answer to the above question (or upload a video file)

Do this by midnight GMT on March 21, 2010

We will select and announce five (5) finalists on March 22, 2010

Everyone will then be able to vote for their favorite until midnight GMT on March 28, 2010

We will announce the one (1) winner on March 29, 2010

I will personally select the five finalists based on the clarity, passion, and potentially the humor of the entry (bonus points for video). So, pretty much anything goes, but anyone posting anything indecent or offensive will not only have it deleted but will be harrassed mercilessly by me and the rest of the community until the end of time.

The winner will be chosen from the five finalists by my tabulation of votes from you the Blogging Innovation readers across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter @replies, and blog comments here on the five finalists announcement.

There will only be one (1) winner, but for those who don't win, you still can save 20% on event registration when you use our discount code "FEI2010BRADEN".

Editors's note: The ticket for the contest is being provided by the event organizers, not Blogging Innovation, and is conveyed at their discretion not ours. Winner is responsible for paying their own travel costs to the event and any other expenses.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Is Crowdsourcing Disrupting the Design Industry?

2010-03-14T00:05:00.000-08:00

"This is an issue that I simply cannot wrap my head around. Spec work appears in the design field infinitely more times than any other industry. It absolutely floors me that people think that it is even remotely ethical to build their businesses by tearing down ours."

- Mark Hemmis' comment on AIGA policy statement on spec work

by Hutch Carpenter

The past couple years have seen an increase in the use of crowdsourcing by companies to procure design assets. It works like this:

Requesting organization posts a request for submissions to a design crowdsourcing site (e.g. 99designs, crowdSPRING, MycroBurst, etc.)
Interested designers review the request, and create their entry
They submit their entry to the site
Requesting organization selects its favorite, pays the winning designer the announced fee

These design requests are often for logos, but for a number of other types of initiatives as well. For example, 99designs' list of requests (to the right) gives some sense of the types of projects.

So far, so good, right? Well, a lot of designers think not. As Mark Hemmis' comment above shows, these open spec work contests have been raising the ire of the designer community.

Is crowdsourcing ripping their industry asunder?

Designers' Beefs with Crowdsourcing

Three aspects of crowdsourcing design raise concern for many in the design industry:

Lack of compensation for designers whose entries are not selected
Diminishes the design profession
Not sustainable in the long term

Compensation: To be competitive, individuals will need to invest some time in designing a submission for a company. With a good number of entries, this equates to a decent number of hours invested. According to Pamela Pfiffner:

"The problem is, spec and crowdsourcing can lower your value and hourly rates so far that minimum wage looks like a fat paycheck."

Her statement takes things to a logical extreme - someone would have to do nothing but spend their time entering contests. But she does a good job framing the issue.

Diminishing the profession: The issue with crowdsourcing is that it says, "this stuff is easy!" A commenter on this post, How NOT to Design a Logo, baldly gives this concern legitimacy:

"Logo design contests are great, its the only way I go. I get my pick of 5-10 designs for less then $20. Designers these days are a dime a dozen, be happy you get the work."

The design industry has characteristics of being craftsman, as well as strategists. At least the higher end firms do. Sentiments like that are grating.

Not sustainable: The concern here is that over the long term, the economics of crowdsourcing will cause existing designers to exit the industry, and potential designers will opt for different careers. According to Jacob Cass:

"Design contest sites are not the future of graphic design... nor do I see a time when it ever will be, however, in the long term I believe spec work is going to be detrimental to the design industry... both devaluing design and designers as a whole."

The argument here is that rather than expand the pool of talent for design, crowdsourcing will ultimately reduce the industry.

So designers themselves are lining up against these types of crowdsourcing design contests. Which begs the question...

Why Are Crowdsourcing Design Contests Growing?

Jason Aiken has this to say:

"Truth is - 99designs is growing by leaps and bounds. We have record numbers of projects being launched and have needed to hire new staff to help us keep up with the growth.

The motivation of organizations seeking design work seem clear enough - tap a large network of creativity, manage expenses within budget. But what are those designers doing there?

It seems that not all designers are of the same mind about these crowdsourcing design contests. Some actually embrace them. Why?

Build your portfolio: Not all designers in the world have 10 years experience and a roster of paying clients. For those starting out in the business, the competitions provide great fuel for creating designs. If you want prospective clients to see what you're capable of, the design competitions seem to offer a chance to create that portfolio.

Benefits include:

You need to think not abstractly about design principles, but concretely about how a design project relates to a business
Competitions are great for elevating one's focus and creativity
You can benchmark yourself against other submissions, including those selected if yours is not

Personal interest: Some projects just pique the interest of a person. Maybe there's a day job with a paying company, and then a chance at night to do things "your way" on a project of interest. The project taps some areas you want to pursue, or maybe allows you to try something out without concern as to whether the client will ultimately want the design.

Extra business: Everyone is hustling in a weak economy. If your design business has some slack in demand, why not apply the available creative resources toward an occasional crowdsourcing project? If you're a professional shop, presumably your odds are better than most.

Access to high-end ad agencies: This was the case when Porter Crispin + Bogusky solicited logo designs for their start-up client Brammo, maker of electric motorcycles. They ran the contest through crowdSPRING. The contest sparked plenty of debate, but also saw 700 entries. One reason was that young up-n-coming designers wanted the chance to impress a firm of the caliber of PC+B, who can send many paying clients their way.

That's the designer participation set of motivations. I guess the best way to think about companies' motivation is this - Do they get results?

Since the number of requests from companies is growing, design crowdsourcing sites are working at some level. If they weren't, word would spread pretty quickly and companies would stop using them. This comment from designer Morgan Stone on Alex Bogusky's blog post about PC+B's use of crowdSPRING is illuminating:

"As a designer... crowdsourcing scares me. I think it has to do with the harsh reality that sometimes it doesn't take experience or a big title to design something truly amazing."

What's the staying power of the crowdsourced design contest approach? And will it disrupt the industry, in the Clayton Christensen sense?

Sustainability and Reach of Crowdsourcing Design Contests

Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang wrote last year, "Without a doubt, Specwork (like crowdspring or 99 designers) is here to stay - economics will drive this forward." For the buyers, yes. But the supply side of the equation - the designers - is that here to stay?

I believe it is. The numbers say it is. Here's what I mean:

In a 2009 article, Forbes noted that there are 80,000 free lance designers in the U.S. alone. Add in the talent from around the world, and you can see that there is a large of pool of creativity. Maybe 200,000 designers globally? 99designs claims to have roughly 54,000 designers on its site.

Designers have some motivation to participate in crowdsourcing design contests, as noted for the reasons above. It's not like every designer will submit regularly. But every project reaches some new set of designers, and occasionally gets a repeat one as well.

All it takes is for a business seeking design work is maybe 30, 40, 50 submissions? As a percent of the global number of designers, that's not much.

40 / 200,000 = 0.02%

Here's what designer David Airey said about getting clients from crowdsourcing sites:

"I've had direct clients and also have been one of those in the crowd. Surprisingly, some of my best clients are the ones that followed me from these crowd sourcing sites. That's probably because they've already been through a working process with me, and they like what they've experienced, so there's no mismatch of expectations like a new client."

I do see the sustainability of the business. It's complex, but there are enough people who do see advantages to participating. Even if only for certain periods of their lives or only on occasion. I don't see entering crowdsourcing design contests as a full-time pursuit for someone.

Next question: how much can crowdsourcing chip away at the traditional areas of the design industry? Is there a gap that crowdsourcing addresses? (Erica's post, Bokardo's post):

Many designers in the debate note the importance of establishing a rapport with clients, and understanding their clients more deeply than a set of colors and fonts. A firm such as Nocturnal Graphic Design Studio appears to deliver value through deeper relationships and more strategic approaches with its clients.

But Erica's point above is well-taken. Sometimes, you're not in the market for that level of involvement. Small and mid-sized businesses do not need the full horsepower of high-end design firms. As one designer (snootily) commented on the PC+B blog post about using crowdSPRING:

"99 designs and their nefarious brethren have a client roster whose market recognition for the most part is similar to that of Joe's Morgue & Jerky Outlet."

Of course, this may not be contained to SMBs.

The Disruptive Potential

Have you checked out what Mountain Dew is doing with crowdsourcing (aka "DEWmocracy")? As Wired notes in a January article:

"Mountain Dew is asking consumers to choose three new sodas, from selecting the flavors to naming them, designing the cans and choosing the ad agency to promoting the product."

Not all of this is crowdsourcing design, but it is an edgy experiment in leaving the professional firms behind.

Right now, as Steve Douglas of the Logo Factory notes, the biggest chunk of business is for logos. Which you can see at the start of this post in the 99designs project list.

The U.S. Census Bureau had the graphic design industry generating $2.8 billion in revenue in 2002. It is a large, diverse, complex industry. My expectation is that design contest crowdsourcing will encroach more into large enterprises for tactical projects, as the smaller businesses continue to use them and get good results. Large companies' efforts, such Mountain Dew's DEWmocracy, Unilever's crowdsourcing contest for a TV campaign for its Peperami snack food, and Doritos' crowdsourced Super Bowl ads, add fuel to this.

Two things are needed for the crowdsourcing model to encroach further into the design industry:

Leaderboards/reputation
Smartsourcing

Leaderboards let prospective buyers know who the best are. We see them on Topcoder for programming contests. It's a way to establish visibility and credibility far beyond the recommendations you maintain on your own site. It will take some changes by the crowdsourcing sites, enabling recognition for designers who do well in contests, even if they are not picked. It also would need to have different bases for identifying top designers.

The other wrinkle is to allow a form of smartsourcing. Once the top designers are identified, they are invited for larger companies' design projects. This is pretty similar to the current state of things, except the basis for access changes somewhat. It's not just business relationships a designer/firm has established with the big ad/marketing/brand agencies. It's based on performance.

With these two elements, I can see how crowdsourcing becomes more important, more disruptive, in the world of business design.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Free Range Innovation

2010-03-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

by Jarie Bolander

Cowboys love the wide open plain. The vastness of the prairie ignites a self-reliance that few others can comprehend or handle. The cowboy is free to drive his cattle the route he feels best, yet his end game is always clear - get them to market. The cowboy struggles to keep his herd moving and might even loose a few along the way. His satisfaction comes when the herd is safely to market and the wage he earns hardly pays for his trouble but that does not matter - he's in it for the journey.

The Cowboys of Innovation

Innovators are like modern day cowboys that peer out onto the vastness of the world and chart a course to get their ideas to market. They do it for the love of the journey and the results of seeing something they invented being used by millions. Companies tend to fence innovators in by overburdening them people with process, procedures, arcane organizations and stifling bureaucracy. These conditions severely limit the creative mind to the point of stalling out any sort of innovation.

Wander Within Limits

The innovation cowboy needs to wander around and seek the best path forward. This means his organizational structure has to be flexible enough to wander yet sets limits to get to market. The best structure for this is the automatous team that has flexibility to get stuff done but has clear objectives and timelines. Guidance from the boss should be the high level goals and objectives not micro-managed tasks and rigidly defined parameters. Doing this allows innovators to chart their own course while still having some guidance.

Failure is Always an Option

Innovation is full of failure. So much so that most people can't stomach the constant setbacks and uncertain future. The ideal culture for innovators is one that embraces failure, learns from it and moves on. This culture will always out innovate a punitive structure where everyone is afraid to make one little screw-up. The other vital cultural trait is one where intellectual curiosity is encouraged, especially outside the companies field of endeavor. More innovative ideas have come from cross-over problem solving (i.e. Taking a solution from another industry and applying it to something else), then just staying within your companies comfort zone.

Bonuses Don't Work

The journey is the incentive for innovators to invent. No other incentive is as strong or as effective as working on a challenging problem that you enjoy. In fact, the open source movement has taught us that creative people will work for free and give away their work product for something they find interesting. The organization can apply these incentives by giving innovators a support and recognition network that allows them to invent, be recognized and feel respected. The only monetary bonus that seems to work is one that treats everyone the same (e.g. The janitor to the CEO gets 'the same bonus'). Anything other that than, is ripe for gaming and defeats the purpose of incentives.

Rugged, Yet Refined

Free range innovation is all about respecting the rugged innovator that takes on the world yet still delivers products to market. It's the realization that innovation takes flight when you give creative people the space to move, explore and grow. No fancy organizational structure, no complex cultures and no silly incentives - just smart teams, building innovative products by driving their ideas to market the way the range tell them too.

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Jarie Bolander is an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature. Jarie blogs about innovation, management and entrepreneurship at The Daily MBA and has recently published his first book, "Frustration Free Technical Management". You can also follow him on Twitter @thedailymba.

Innovation a Top 3 Priority - What about Metrics?

2010-03-13T00:09:00.000-08:00

by Yann Cramer

According to yearly McKinsey surveys, innovation is one of the Top 3 priorities for around two-thirds of companies. It is a critical enabler of differentiation and growth. To create a sense of urgency, align individual performance contracts, and convincingly communicate with investors about innovation, companies need to assess the effectiveness of and return on their innovation investment.

A question I am often asked is:

"Sure, but what metrics can we actually use?"

Looking at it from the investor's perspective, outcome-oriented metrics focus on what innovation delivers to today's and tomorrow's bottom-line and, from there, to shareholder value:

Revenue growth from new products/services
Customer satisfaction with new products/services
Return on investment (ROI) in new products/services
Percentage of sales from new products/services
Number of new products/services launched

What new is

For most of these metrics the company has to define what "new" means, in other words set the time period following launch during which the product will be regarded as new. Such time period may vary considerably by sector, as a function of the typical development time of products and their typical longevity in the market. For example, a pharmaceutical company may consider a product to be new up to 5 or 10 years after its launch, while a consumer-electronics company will probably regard a product as no-longer new after 1 or 2 years.

What is new

More fundamentally, the company also has to define what is new. Measuring revenue of new products and services comes straight out of the basic Management Information system. But innovation can be about process (eg a cheaper way of sourcing/manufacturing a product) or about business model (eg Apple's shift from just selling devices to selling devices and content such as music or books). Setting up the system to apply the above metrics to process innovation or business model innovation will usually require some work, but it is essential if the company wants to:

Harness the value-creation potential of staff that are working outside the product development/marketing/sales circle (they too can create shareholder value!)
Be mindful of radical innovation opportunities that new business models often provide

Driving innovation

As in most activities, there are also useful process metrics to track in order to provide levers on the outcome-oriented metrics. R&D spending as a percentage of sales will provide a measure of the investment in innovation and sustainability. It is also one of the few ratios that is typically not too difficult to benchmark against competitors.

Other process metrics include:

Number of ideas in the pipeline
Number of ideas sourced from outside the organisation
Number of products/services in each stage of the idea-to-commercialisation pipeline as a percentage of the total number of ideas in the pipeline
End-to-end time-to-market
Time in each stage of the pipeline

These indicators will be useful to identify where the blockers are be in the pipeline and provide managers with insights into how they can make the innovation process more fluid and fast.

McKinsey Global Survey Results about assessing innovation can be found at McKinsey Quarterly.

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Yann Cramer is an innovation learner, practitioner, sharer, teacher. He's lived in France, Belgium and the UK, he's travelled six continents to create development opportunities with customers or suppliers, and run workshops on R&D and Marketing. He writes on www.innovToday.com and on twitter @innovToday.

Ten Reasons Your Corporate Social Network Should be an Innovation Social Network

2010-03-13T00:06:00.000-08:00

by Matthew Greeley

Adoption - There is no doubt online communities are valuable and powerful, but there is no value if your community is an empty dance floor. Generic communities based on generic tools, often have no stated purpose and employees or customers don't know why they should go there. Idea Portals are a proven way to get very rapid uptake because there is something in it for the end user. Either participating in the product direction or cutting costs instead of headcount...there's an obvious 'What's in it for me?' and that drives rapid adoption out of the gate.

ROI - In today's environment the bean counters are holding the purse strings pretty tightly. So a technology looking for a problem is dead on arrival. However with Innovation we are often talking to our customers about Millions, Hundreds of Millions and Billions of dollars. By connecting the benefits of social networking with the innovation process the ROI is obvious, immediate, quantifiable and large.

Innovation is a Social Activity - and can not be managed or automated with older transaction-or workflow-based enterprise software. By allowing individuals to interact with Innovation Management and Measurement is the first true killer app of the social software revolution.

Important Stuff Falls Through the Cracks with Horizontal Communities and Platforms - Like stock market bubbles, this is a lesson that has be re-learned with every generation. The instinct to build a one-size-fits-all solution to "capture more of the market" almost always leads to failure. Vendors that focus on specific niches, sub-categories, roles, functions, jobs and even specific tasks as customer is trying to get done - deliver more value, and win out in the end. If your social networking platform is generic, beware, you may be fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

Your Company May be Trying to Create a "Culture of Innovation" - Right Now! - Sit in on an executive meeting and the topic of innovation is likely to come up many times. By tying the roll-out of an internal social networking platform to the innovation process you ensure you are aligned with the goals of the company and your budget is less likely to be cut.

It's Fun! - How would you like to see all the best ideas your group, department or company has to offer? And all the innovative projects people are working on? By working on these systems, you literally get to see the future of the company as it takes shape.

Silo Busting is More Important to Innovation than Anything Else the Company Does - Social Networks naturally break down silos, increase communication and enable ad hoc relationships to form... while that can be helpful in areas such as customer support, it is EXACTLY what is needed in corporate innovation, where the current organizational structure often the culprit stifling creativity and collaboration. Innovation is the killer app for this new paradigm.

Innovation Data HAS to be Controlled by the Company - As employees proactively reach for consumer Web 2.0 tools to make their job easier with out approval from the IT department, dangerous data-ownership issues arise quickly. A seemingly harmless employee- or customer user- group setup on facebook can spring a leak in your intellectual property regime. Do you really want the intellectual property rights of your company's latest ideas to be subject to facebook's latest terms of service? Saavy CIO's will be ahead of the curve to set standards for where these types of communities can reside.

Inter-Company Collaboration - Many innovation initiatives involve customers, partners or suppliers. An online social network is a great way to have 'facetime' and maintain relationships when you don't see those people every day.

It's easy to get started - You don't need to establish an enterprise wide roll-out strategy, to run a group or product-focused brainstorm. If you are hearing "Innovate in a Recession" or "Do More with Less" you can launch your first Innovation Community in a few hours.

Thanks for listening, I'd love to hear your perspective on this. Until next time, Keep Innovating...

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Matthew Greeley is Founder and CEO of Brightidea, the global leader in On-Demand Innovation Management software. Prior to founding Brightidea, Matthew consulted for Wrenchead.com, helping them raise over $100 million in venture funding. Follow him on twitter @brightidea.

Top Innovation Conferences of 2010

2010-03-13T00:03:00.000-08:00

Hello all. I just thought I would share with you a list of the top innovation conferences I'm aware of for 2010. I've also indicated which one's Blogging Innovation will be involved with by placing a "(BI)" at the end of each relevant entry, and indicated where we have negotiated special discounts for our loyal readers.

March 2010

March 17-18 - Breakthrough Innovation 2010 - Barcelona, Spain

March 23-24 - The Economist's - "Innovation - Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy" - Berkeley, CA, USA - (BI)

Save $150 with our discount code "BLINN"

April 2010

April 8 - NESTA Open for Business - London, UK

April 9 - Washington Innovation Summit 2010 - Tacoma, WA, USA - (BI)

April 21 - Fast Company Innovation Uncensored - New York, NY, USA

May 2010

May 3-5 - Front End of Innovation USA - Boston, MA, USA - (BI)

Save 20% with our discount code "FEI2010BRADEN"

May 26-28 - World Innovation Convention - Ibiza, Spain

June 2010

June 6-9 - The XXI ISPIM Conference - Bilbao, Spain

June 9-10 - InnoTown 2010 - Aalesund, Norway

June 8-9 - World Innovation Forum - New York, NY, USA - (BI)

Save $200 with our discount code "INNOVATE" (plus additional early bird savings until April 23)

August 2010

August 11-12 - Open Innovation Summit - Chicago, IL, USA - (BI)

Save $400 with our discount code "BEC858" (plus additional early bird savings until June 4)

September 2010

September 15-16 - Business Innovation Factory - Providence, RI, USA

We may participate in this one and have a Discount Code for you soon

October 2010

October 16-20 - PDMA Conference on Product Innovation Management - Orlando, FL, USA

We may participate in this one this year

If you're attending one of these that we are not and would like to cover the conference for Blogging Innovation, please contact us.

If your event is not listed here, please feel free to submit it as a comment.

If you are an event organizer for an event listed here and you would like to offer our readers a discount code, please contact us.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

A world without newspapers?

2010-03-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

by Adam Hartung

We're rapidly becoming a quick-communication world. 140 characters is all we get on Twitter, and it's becoming the new "elevator pitch." Communication has moved from letters and phone calls to texting and Facebook. What we write, and say, is getting shorter. Book sales have declined for 4 years, and magazines are rapidly becoming an historical artifact. We rely on bloggers to read, digest, reformat and inform us quickly about what we want to know.

But, behind this, there has to be real fact gathering. Somebody has to report information as it happens, and dispense it. In many countries this was done by the government. But in the modern world we've relied on newspapers, and the wire feed services (AP, UPI, Reuters) that supply newspapers, to give us a lot of the raw news. Newspapers used ad revenue to pay for news acquisition, and they delivered the stream every morning.

But now, due to internet competition, newspapers are running out of cash. As people turn to the web for instant information advertisers have dropped newspapers. Subscriptions have fallen. And several newspaper companies, such as Tribune Corporation, have filed for bankruptcy. Many towns are at risk of losing the daily newspaper altogether. And employment has dropped to 1950's levels

So, what will be the prime source for information? Where will bloggers, and tweeters and web sites get the news if the newspapers disappear? Who is going to pay for field reporters, investigative reporters and correspondents in places far away - or dangerous like wars. The public has already bemoaned the lack of "news" in television news - which is more about pictures than news. And nowadays television news is dominated by opinion programs like "Countdown" or "The O'Reilly Factor."

It's clear that people want their information digitally - and mostly from the web. It's also clear that advertisers are drawn to the web with its far lower ad rates and specific, trackable ad placement. But what's unclear is where original news content will be created when the newspaper companies disappear. Even the most successful news web sites (Marketwatch.com and HuffingtonPost.com, as examples) depend largely upon information supplied them from wire feeds and newspaper sources for content.

A free society depends upon access to information. And nowhere is access more available than the USA. But unless there is some serious innovation in publishing, the system is at risk of collapse. Opinions will be as available as air, but if the original news sources dry up - what will everyone talk about? How will people - investors, voters, parents, politicians and others - obtain original information to become informed? Understanding what will replace the newspaper industry as a source of original news content is a difficult question to answer.

What will be the innovation that will keep the river of original, real time news flowing? In 2020, how will we be able to obtain information we can trust for accuracy?

The "media" industry is in big trouble. Large players, like News Corp., have seen profits decline - despite acquisitions like MySpace.com. GE recently agreed to sell NBC/Universal for less than it cost to create. But so far, few have figured out how make a profit from digital media as the market transitions away from print and television. While web sites proliferate, they produce less than 1/10th the revenue of old media.

Without some serious innovation, our news could soon be long on quantity - and very short on quality.

Editors Note: Apologies all around. This article from Adam Hartung was orignally supposed to be part of January's Innovation Perspectives, but I misplaced it. I hope you still enjoy it.

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Discovery (and Innovation)

2010-03-12T00:10:00.000-08:00

by Paul Williams

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Paul Williams is a professional problem solver at Idea Sandbox. He can help you create remarkable ideas to grow your business. You may read more at his website and find him Twittering as @IdeaSandbox.

An Innovation Manifesto

2010-03-12T00:09:00.000-08:00

by Tim Kastelle

There have been a few before, but here's another Innovation Manifesto:

Innovation doesn't need a manifesto - it needs action.

We won't wait for someone to give us permission to innovate - we'll just try things out.

Innovations have a life-span - we will try to execute ideas that last, and that make things better.

Not-Invented-Here is not for here. We will execute the best ideas we can find, regardless of where they came from.

Innovation is a process of flow - we generate ideas, we select ideas, and we execute ideas. Since the last two are the parts that most people aren't good at, those are what we'll concentrate on.

We will build fast prototypes, and iterate rapidly instead of trying to make things perfect from the start.

We will find small, inexpensive ways to test our ideas.

We will learn from the ideas that don't work.

We will scale up the ideas that do work.

Innovation is the best way to enact strategy - we will keep the two aligned.

Innovation happens in networks - we will understand ours as well as we can, and build them to facilitate innovation.

Innovation is not invention - we will focus on making ideas work, not just having them.

New ideas have to become embedded within the economy - we will build new networks for our great ideas, and put them within innovative business models.

We know that innovation is the best way to keep our jobs interesting - we want to avoid this:

We will not complain, we will instigate change.

Our strategy and our brand are built by what we do every day, not by what we say. We will use innovation to build both.

The purpose of innovation is to help our customers and to make the world a better place. These are our primary evaluation criteria. (from Graham Horton)

We realize that the approach to innovation depends on the novelty of the idea. (from Ralph Ohr)

Eliminate habits, that is the beginning of innovation. Both with risk & fun. (from Marion Popiolek)

We will inspire others and bring them on board because innovation is a team sport. (from Jorge Barba)

So. Who's with me?

What would you add?

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Tim Kastelle is a Lecturer in Innovation Management in the University of Queensland Business School. He blogs about innovation at the Innovation Leadership Network.

Help Wanted - Two Roles

2010-03-12T00:03:00.000-08:00

Blogging Innovation has grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, we now serve over 400,000 pages per month to people reading the site's more than 1,000+ articles.

This month we've taken on our first monthly sponsor - Brightidea - and now we need a little help to take the site to the next level, while also making its innovation and marketing insights even more accessible. We are looking for two types of help:

1. Assistant Editor (contract role)

Need someone to help run the site
MUST be passionate about innovation
Communicate with existing contributing authors
Identify new potential contributing authors
Select and schedule articles
Social media management
Might need to get up really early 7 days a week
Manage the monthly 'Innovation Perspectives' feature
Must have strong english grammar skills and sense of humor
Must be an independent contractor (have or form your own business)
This is a part-time role with a small budget
Must be in Seattle/Bellevue area (or pay own way to on-board here)
SEO skills would be a bonus
To register your interest, contact us

2. Web Design and SEO (contract role)

Need someone to move Blogging Innovation from Blogger.com onto a new platform without data loss or disruption of permalinks for existing 1,000+ articles
Need a new site design to make our innovation and marketing insights even MORE accessible
New site design must allow for multiple levels of administration so authors can submit articles and editors can approve and schedule them for publishing
New site design should surface more content like a Mashable, Techcrunch, etc.
New site should be easy to manage from anywhere
Need this completed in 4-5 weeks
Bonus: I may also need a site for my forthcoming book
Register your interest (we'll email you for design mockup/approach info and price quote)

Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Thinking the Unthinkable

2010-03-12T00:02:00.001-08:00

The New Leadership Imperative

by Holly G. Green

People ask me all the time what I consider to be the biggest challenge facing today's business leaders.

I don't even hesitate on this one. It's the automatic assumption by most business leaders that we still live in a fairly predictable world.

Think about it. Six months ago, who would have thought that Toyota would be in the position it is today?

Here we have one of the largest, most successful, most respected companies in the world. And now it faces a crisis that is not just destroying its hard-earned reputation, but could well put it out of business.

That's unthinkable! And yet it's happening right before our eyes.

Sales of Toyotas are plummeting. The U.S. government is launching a full-scale investigation into the company's business practices. And a tidal wave of lawsuits around the faulty floor mat/throttle issue is about to be unleashed.

If Toyota is found to be at fault, and if it turns out they had knowledge of the defective design and did nothing about it, punitive damages could run into billions of dollars. Not even Toyota could withstand that kind of a financial hit and still survive.

I'm not saying the unthinkable will happen. But the possibility that Toyota could go out of business in the near term is very real. And that's the kind of world we now live in.

Leading a business in this kind of environment requires a new way of thinking. Considering that most business leaders still view the world as fairly predictable, the question becomes:

How do we train ourselves to think differently?

The answer is simple - pause, think, focus, run.

Pause. Make it a habit to back away from the day-to-day and evaluate what is happening outside your industry as well as inside.

Think. Constantly challenge your beliefs and assumptions about what you know to be true about your customers, your markets, your industry and the way you do things inside your organization. Take nothing for granted.

Focus. Identify opportunities to add value to your customers in ways that nobody else is doing. Identify significant initiatives that support leveraging those opportunities, and get and keep everyone in your organization clear on achieving them.

Run. Implement quickly, with focus and flexibility, knowing in advance that your new initiatives will not unfold exactly as planned.
Then repeat this process.

During the think phase, develop the habit of engaging in scenario planning. Ask questions like:

"What would happen if our biggest competitor suddenly went out of business? What is taking place in other industries or other parts of the world that we could use to transform our industry?"

Many companies do this once a year during the strategic planning process. In today's world, that will no longer suffice. When a company as large and seemingly invincible as Toyota can have the rug pulled out from under them so quickly, it's clear the old rules no longer apply.

Pondering the imponderable should become an everyday occurrence in organizations. To be a successful leader today, thinking the unthinkable must become a way of life.

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Holly is the CEO of THE HUMAN FACTOR, Inc. (www.TheHumanFactor.biz) and is a highly sought after and acclaimed speaker, business consultant, and author. Her unique approach to creating strategic agility, helping others go slow to go fast, will change your thinking.

Listening to Employees is a Best Buy

2010-03-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

by Robert B. Tucker

Several years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on an unusual cost-cutting move by electronics retailer Circuit City. The chain abruptly fired their top-producing veteran salespeople and replaced them with lower-wage new hires.

When Circuit City went bankrupt last year, you had to wonder if decisions like that were at least partly to blame.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, retailer Best Buy took a different approach. They began to focus on creating a deeper dialogue with the firm's 160,000 employees spread out amongst 1,150 stores across the United States and China, Mexico, England and a growing number of countries.

Best Buy began experimenting with social networking technologies centered upon the company's intranet site. They started conducting weekly online polls of employees. They set up wikis for people with common interests to brainstorm together. They invited senior managers to participate in agenda-free town hall meetings. And they established a "listening chair" where employees could survey other employees on such questions as "Do you think the Geek Squad uniform needs updating?"

When they started listening in earnest, employee turnover stood at 81 percent a year. Three years on, it had dropped to 60 percent. Last year, it was down to 49 percent.

All of this hyper-listening didn't just happen. And it wasn't something decreed by senior management.

Jennifer Rock was a mid-level marketing manager when she became aware of what lack of communication was costing her company. Highly analytical and a self-described 'Type A' person, she noticed that stores with higher than average employee engagement levels and lower than average turnover rates tended to be stores that outperformed the others in sales growth and sales per employee. But merely noticing an opportunity doesn't do any good.

To her credit, Jennifer took action. She created a new position for herself, Director of Intranet and Dialogue.

Next she and her team developed a clear mission: to use every low or no cost means possible to help Best Buy become extraordinary at communicating with employees (not just at them), and to connect employees with information and with each other as well. The goal of all this was to add to business success by helping the individual employee succeed.

If you've attended one of my keynotes lately or participated in my new "Innovation is Everybody's Business" in-house workshop, you have heard me rave about what Jennifer Rock and her team have accomplished. You have heard me extol this group of quiet revolutionaries for their innovativeness in seeing a problem, and stepping up to the challenge of solving it using every trick in the innovator's toolkit. And you no doubt heard me point out that developing one's innovation skills may be the smartest career move you'll ever make - especially if you want to become indispensible.

And you may have heard me say that Jennifer Rock represents the future of the innovation movement.

When I visited with Jennifer recently in Minneapolis, I asked her why would any company, especially a quarterly-results obsessed American company, give a hoot about listening to its employees, especially now? Why would they add headcount (Jen's team has climbed to eight people) when competitors were busy chopping heads?

Jen's unflinching response: Because she and her Intranet and Dialogue Team sold senior management on the bottom-line benefits of listening to employees. "Our success boils down to the interaction between one customer and one employee," Jennifer said. "Is that employee happy and productive and informed and excited? We need to know that employee's state of mind better than anyone else in the company."

Though we are loathe to admit it, the global economic crisis disrupted the Innovation Movement as more and more firms went into survival mode. A new survey conducted by Chuck Frey of InnovationTools.com suggests that most initiatives are in a holding pattern at best, and there is little enthusiasm for broad-based, enterprise-wide initiatives. CEOs and senior executives admit they are just too distracted with more immediate issues. But meanwhile, they are suddenly, desperately in need of more people like Jennifer Rock. As John Draper, senior VP marketing for Mead Consumer Products told me:

"I need people to be less risk averse, I need them to rattle the cage, challenge what we do and look for new ways to do things."

Jennifer and her team realized the impact of what their team was doing when company leaders decided to reduce the employee discount. "The move set off a firestorm with employees," Jennifer recalled. "On the Watercooler [an online forum] hundreds and hundreds of employees talked about what this discount meant to them, and what it meant to customers, since employees could try out products and recommend them to customers. People wrote in to suggest other ways the company could save money without touching the employee discount."

And company leaders changed their mind and rescended their decision.

"They said to us, 'The next time you see a groundswell like this and we are unaware of what's happening, you have our permission to kick down our door. Don't even knock. We need to know.' And that's when we thought, 'Wow, we are adding value, we are making a difference.'"

Jen said she will remember that day for as long as she lives.

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Robert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.

The Importance of Innovation Skills and Best Practices

2010-03-11T00:08:00.000-08:00

by Jeffrey Phillips

There's a difference between knowing "about" innovation and having experience doing innovation. Just as I don't compare myself to Lance Armstrong although we both ride bikes, there are skills and knowledge that are manifest in people who lead effective innovation programs that may not always be manifest in your organization. These skills can be learned through training and through careful exercise within your organization, but it is dangerous to presume that people who have an interest in innovation possess the skills and best practices to carry out innovation efforts. This was brought home to me in a meeting I attended recently.

I was at a meeting with a number of other people interested in innovation, and we were asked to brainstorm to help solve a particular problem. A person who is an "innovation" leader in his company was asked to facilitate the brainstorming session. An executive from the firm who was facing the problem gave a brief presentation on their challenge and needs, and then the facilitator asked for ideas.

The meeting quickly disintegrated because the challenge we were addressing was too large and poorly defined, and the timeframe too small. While the challenge had been presented by the firm's CEO, it was unclear whether we were supposed to provide incremental or disruptive ideas, or merely validate a course the CEO identified in his presentation. Additionally, no one had done a good job setting a scope - what to include in your thinking or what to leave out for the purposes of this session. At one point one participant suggested that we couldn't generate ideas until we'd evaluated all the health care systems in all the major economic powers in the world. Unfortunately we only had two hours.

So, we got off to a rocky start because the problem was poorly framed (not the facilitator's fault) and really had far too many interlocking and interchangeable parts (again, not his fault). Also, we did not have a good understanding or framing of the scope - perhaps his fault, perhaps that of the sponsor. Even when the participants tried to extend the scope, the facilitator did not try to reframe the question. Next, one participant, clearly a "Clarifier" from the Foursight model, kept asking clarifying questions rather than submitting ideas. Being able to recognize a clarifier, and understand their needs, would have been helpful, but the facilitator also had failed to establish the rules of engagement. Once we entered brainstorming, we should have been focused on generating ideas instead of asking questions. Without a commonly held set of beliefs and rules, each person was participating in the session with their personal beliefs and rules. Since we didn't set out a scope or an expected process or set of rules, there was no orderly process for generating ideas.

To give credit where it is due, the facilitator did "take off" his facilitator hat and contribute ideas, so he nimbly stepped into and out of the facilitator role, and did a good job capturing ideas. This, though, in my mind was another signal that best practices weren't being followed. It was clearly a struggle to write down ideas and to manage the group simultaneously. Ideally we would have had a facilitator and a "scribe" to document the ideas.

This session led me to believe that many people conducting "idea generation" sessions in corporate America are doing more damage than good. If this example is indicative of what happens everyday in most organizations, then idea generation and brainstorming deserves a negative rap - and many innovation leaders and teams need training on conducting and facilitating brainstorming and idea generation.

Here's what should have happened:

Set the ground rules. There are a consistent set of rules for brainstorming, including "encourage wild ideas", "Go for quantity not quality", "Don't judge while ideating", etc.

Clearly define the opportunity or challenge. Make the issue smaller or simpler if necessary.

Define the scope - what should be considered and what should be ignored. We should have placed "all health care systems in the world" out of bounds from the start.

Allow people to ask clarifying questions before we start brainstorming. Once we start generating ideas, limit the questions, which often change scope.

Pick a scribe to capture ideas so the facilitator doesn't have to write down ideas and manage the group

Encourage the reticent and moderate the talkers. Any group, and ours was no exception, has people who are happy to toss ideas out all day long, and those who won't speak at all. We need to hear from everyone, and perhaps a bit less from some people (me included).

Keep the team on task and on target. When the "evaluate all health care systems in the world" statement was made, we should have been reminded that that was out of bounds, and we needed to refocus on what we could solve.

Stretch the group when necessary. The facilitator can/should occasionally ask questions that shift the group's thinking or introduces a new perspective.

These ideation rules and best practices are documented in a set of slides OVO has posted here. There are a number of good books written on this subject as well, probably the best is "Think Better" by Tim Hurson.

These skills aren't innate and must be learned and reinforced. My concern is that people who work on innovation activities may be leading events but may not be fully trained or may not have all the skills and capabilities necessary to be very effective. And effectiveness in this context matters, since we were trying to solve big problems very quickly with a heterogeneous group. Only good methods and good facilitation was going to get it done well.

If your organization is trying to generate new ideas internally and desires to be guided by internal staff (which we think is a good thing), invest in some training to ensure the innovation leaders understand their roles and best practices.

Innovation is too important to leave to chance. If it is important to your organization, train your team to be effective idea facilitators!

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Jeffrey Phillips is a senior leader at OVO Innovation. OVO works with large distributed organizations to build innovation teams, processes and capabilities. Jeffrey is the author of "Make us more Innovative", and innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com.

Six Steps of CEO Decision Making

2010-03-11T00:07:00.000-08:00

by Mike Myatt

You cannot separate leadership from decision making, for like it or not, they are inexorably linked. Put simply, the outcome of a CEO's decisions can, and usually will, make or break them. Those CEOs who avoid making decisions solely for fear of making a bad decision, or conversely those that make decisions just for the sake of making a decision will likely not last long. The fact of the matter is that senior executives who rise to the C-suite do so largely based upon their ability to consistently make sound decisions. However while it may take years of solid decision making to reach the boardroom, it often times only takes one bad decision to fall from the ivory tower. As much as you may wish it wasn't so, as a CEO you're really only as good as your last decision.

"CEO Decision Making" is a skill set that needs to be developed like any other. As a person that works with leaders on a daily basis I can tell you with great certainty that all CEOs are not created equal when it comes to the competency of their decision making skills. Nothing will test your metal as CEO more than your ability to make decisions. I happen to be the type of person that would rather make the decision than have to live with someone else's decisions. In fact, I absolutely love to make decisions, and whether it is in my role in the business world, or my role as a husband and father, I want to be the one making the tough calls. That being said, nobody is immune to bad decision making. We have all made bad decisions whether we like to admit it or not. Show me someone who hasn't made a bad decision and I'll show you someone who is either not being honest, or someone who avoids decision making at all costs, which by the way, constitutes a bad decision.

For more than 25 years I have either served in the capacity of a principal owner, senior executive, or professional advisor, and have generally been well regarded for my decision making ability. However like everyone else, I have also made some regrettable decisions along the way. When I reflect back upon the poor decisions I've made, it's not that I wasn't capable of making the correct decision, but for whatever reason I failed to use sound decision making methodology. Gut instincts can only take you so far in life, and anyone who operates outside of a sound decision making framework will eventually fall prey to an act of oversight, misinformation, misunderstanding, manipulation, impulsivity or some other negative influencing factor.

The complexity of the current business landscape, combined with ever increasing expectations of performance, and the speed at which decisions must be made, are a potential recipe for disaster for today's executive unless a defined methodology for decision making is put into place. If you incorporate the following metrics into your decision making framework you will minimize the chances of making a bad decision:

Perform a Situation Analysis: What is motivating the need for a decision? What would happen if no decision is made? Who will the decision impact (both directly and indirectly)? What data, analytics, research, or supporting information do you have to validate the inclinations driving your decision?

Subject your Decision to Public Scrutiny: There are no private decisions. Sooner or later the details surrounding any decision will likely come out. If your decision were printed on the front page of the newspaper how would you feel? What would your family think of your decision? How would your shareholders and employees feel about your decision? Have you sought counsel and/or feedback before making your decision?

Conduct a Cost/Benefit Analysis: Do the potential benefits derived from the decision justify the expected costs? What if the costs exceed projections, and the benefits fall short of projections?

Assess the Risk/Reward Ratio: What are all the possible rewards, and when contrasted with all the potential risks are the odds in your favor, or are they stacked against you?

Assess Whether it is the Right Thing To Do: Standing behind decisions that everyone supports doesn't particularly require a lot of chutzpah. On the other hand, standing behind what one believes is the right decision in the face of tremendous controversy is the stuff great leaders are made of. My wife has always told me that "you can't go wrong by going right," and as usual I find her advice to be spot on. Never compromise you value system, your character, or your integrity.

Make The Decision: Perhaps most importantly you must have a bias toward action, and be willing to make the decision. Moreover as a CEO you must learn to make the best decision possible even if you possess an incomplete data set. Don't fall prey to analysis paralysis, but rather make the best decision possible with the information at hand using some of the methods mentioned above. Opportunities and not static, and the law of diminishing returns applies to most opportunities in that the longer you wait to seize the opportunity the smaller the return typically is. In fact, more likely is the case that the opportunity will completely evaporate if you wait too long to seize it.

If you develop the appropriate blend of a bias to action with an analytical approach to decision making your stock as CEO will surely rise. Good luck and good decision making...

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Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual", and Managing Director of N2Growth.