Book Review - "Robert's Rules of Innovation"

by Braden Kelley

A few weeks ago I received "Robert's Rules of Innovation" by Robert F. Brands with Martin J. Kleinman in the mail. "Robert's Rules of Innovation" is an approachable 200 pages, and is an easy, and pleasant read.

Robert F. Brands is a consultant, speaker, contributor to Blogging Innovation, and former CEO of Airspray N.V. - manufacturer of the ubiquitous foaming pumps on soaps of all kinds.

The book lays out a self-described 10-step program for corporate survival as a set of ten 'innovation imperatives' that are as follows:

1. Inspire
   
2. No Risk, No Innovation
   
3. New Product Development Process
   
4. Ownership
   
5. Value Creation
   
6. Accountability
   
7. Training and Coaching
   
8. Idea Management
   
9. Observe and Measure
   
10. Net Result and Reward

The book highlights the importance of an innovation audit before your innovation efforts begin, and includes sample innovation audit questions in the book and a more complete version is available on the supporting web site.

If new product development processes have not been formalized sufficiently in your company, the book devotes a significant portion of the text and appendices to new product development process flow charts and other resources and information.

There are many different definitions and quotes about innovation and there is one mentioned from Bruce Sauter in the book that is an interesting one to think about:


"Innovation is a holistic strategy for building organizational culture, empowering the passion to create, developing creative environments that can execute effectively, and creating the potential for market leadership. Innovation is not just happening in the front end of the business development process - it needs to be pervasive throughout the entire value chain."


Robert reinforces more than once in the book the importance of the CEO to innovation. In fact you might infer his perspective to be that the Chief Executive Officer should be the Chief Innovation Officer for innovation to be successful.

At the same time, numerous pages are allocated to the subject of teamwork and the delicate tension between giving "creatives" enough separation to have freedom to create and feel safe to push the boundaries of failure, without separating them too far so that resentment builds or the engagement of other employees falls.

Taken all together I found "Robert's Rules of Innovation" to present a clear approach to innovation for managers looking to begin their innovation journey or for people looking to read up a bit more on the topic.


Please also see our interview with Robert F. Brands.


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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"

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:

1. Create time and space for reflection, ideation, and experimentation


2. Maximize the diversity of thinking


3. 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":

1. Challenging Orthodoxies


2. Harnessing Discontinuities


3. Leveraging Competencies and Strategic Assets


4. 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
  
• Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability (coming March 18, 2010)

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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.

Innovation - Have the Last Laugh

Book Review and Innovation Summary - "The Levity Effect" by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher

Innovation is hard, dirty, contentious work full of creative tension and disagreements and barriers to be overcome. All the more reason why it is important for innovation managers to not take themselves too seriously, and to know how to loosen up and allow as much fun into the process as possible. As I've said before, innovation and business success are the result of the quality of your insights and the quality of your execution.

You have to have find a way to have some fun on the bumpy road to innovation, or you will definitely fall into a pothole and stay there.

"The Levity Effect" by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher is all about why it pays to lighten up in business. It is no accident that many of the best places to work are also some of the best performing businesses. Here are a couple of quotes from the book that capture its essence:


"An increasing body of research demonstrates that when leaders lighten up and create a un workplace, there is a significant increase in the level of employee trust, creativity, and communication..."

"...fun in great companies is natural, organic... The relationship comes before the fun, which makes the fun real and acceptable."


I'd like to focus one particular quote from the book from Amy Lyman, co-founder of the Great Place to Work Institute - "Fun benefits from high trust and vice versa. Since people are trusting, they aren't afraid to make fools of themselves and take more risks. And in turn trust is reinforced and benefits from the fun experiences people have." - The reason you should think slowly and deeply about this quote is that, when it comes to innovation, risk-averse cultures find it the most difficult to innovate. So, if people in your organization don't find it safe to take risks in small ways, what makes you think they will feel safe taking the big risks that innovation often requires?

When it comes to Continuous Innovation, if it wasn't clear before, let me say that I believe that building a culture conducive and supportive of innovation is the real key to success (and the hardest thing to do). If you've already created a culture of respect and trust in your organization, then fun is the next step, and you should consider this book for your reading list.

You'll have to read the book to really understand the full importance of levity, but just to be clear, that when it comes to levity, they're not saying that as a manager that you have to be a comedian, but you do need allow yourself to be human, to connect with people, and to have a sense of humor. Ultimately, people are less creative and innovative when they are stressed, so if you as a manager can help people feel more relaxed and make the atmosphere a little less tense, and show people a little respect, then who knows what creativity might spring forth.


"Levity is the link between trust, respect, and the engagement of a workforce. It is human alchemy."


Want to hear something truly disturbing from the book that will really make you re-evaluate your life? A study referenced in the book found that preschool children laugh up to 400 times a day, while adults only manage 15. Fifteen! "No wonder kids think adults are about as fun as a box of hair."

• So, how much fun are you?
  
• How much fun is your workplace?
  
• Is your workplace conducive to innovation?

Please leave a comment and let us know. :-)


As a special bonus, here are Scott Christopher and Adrian Gostick talking on The Today Show about the book:





My interview with "The Levity Effect" author Scott Christopher can be found here.


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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 and Innovation Summary - "The Design of Business"

A few weeks ago I received "The Design of Business" by Roger Martin in the mail. "The Design of Business" is a relatively short, easy, and pleasant read.

The main premise of the book is that our organizations, and the business schools that fill out their top leadership ranks, are too focused on analytical thinking at the expense of intuitive thinking. This focus creates too much emphasis on reliability at the expense of validity.


"The most successful businesses in the years to come will balance analytical mastery and intuitive originality in a dynamic interplay that I call design thinking." - Roger Martin


One of the key concepts of the book is the introduction of the Knowledge Funnel - a visual element that shows how knowledge progresses from mysteries to heuristics to algorithms. It all begins with a question at the top of the funnel, and at each stage transition, knowledge and execution can typically be transferred to lower cost labor (and possibly handled by a computer when they reach the algorithm level).



At the same time, there are other tensions in our organizations that managers in the era of the creative economy will have to become attuned to, and these include managing an appropriate balance between exploitation and exploration and not falling victim to the false certainty of the past when making business development decisions.

Ultimately, the exploration of the mysteries at the top of the knowledge funnel and exploitation of the algrithms at the bottom of the funnel are equally important. Companies that focus too much on one, at the expense of the other, risk their very future.

Creating a design thinking organization is not easy, and several pages are devoted to describing the struggles of A.G. Lafley and Claudia Kotchka in transforming P&G's organizational culture to be more design-centric.

In addition to other examples of organizations pushing themselves more towards design thinking, there is also a great deal of focus in the book on the transformation of mysteries into heuristics and heuristics into algorithms.

Overall, the book is another way of looking at the challenge facing innovators everywhere who are looking to embed design or innovation (or both) into their organization.

So, are you ready to tackle the challenge of achieving a balance of analytical thinking with intuitive thinking in your organization?


My interview with "The Design of Business" author Roger Martin can be found here.

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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 and Innovation Summary - "Innovate with Influence"

A few weeks ago I received "Innovate with Influence - tales of a high-tech intrapreneur" by Steve Todd in the mail. "Innovate with Influence" is a short (134 pages), easy, and pleasant read - almost like sitting down with Steve over a cup of coffee. Given that most innovation books are written by innovation consultants, it is rare to get a a first-person account from the innovation trenches, direct from an actual intrapreneur.

As an intrapreneur, Steve (and the book) don't concern themselves with a lot of theory, but instead on how you go about getting innovation done. And if you harbor the illusion that you have to burn the midnight oil to innovate, Steve has generated over 140 patent applications and billions of dollars in revenue for EMC from the solutions he has worked on, and still managed to leave at 5 o'clock along the way.

The book gives a first-person account of Steve's career, the projects he has worked on, and his approach to innovation. His keys to success?

• Getting things done early


• Building and leveraging influence


• Actively managing his career


• Actively managing his visibility


• Managing work-life balance to maximize creativity


• Combining expertise, customers, and adjacencies to create innovation


• Doing the important things first

So, if you'd like to get a different perspective on innovation, and see what it looks like through the eyes of an innovator, I highly encourage you to check out "Innovate with Influence". I'll leave you with one final concept from the book that speaks to the potential innovation that corporations leave on the table every day.

Many companies don't actively managing their portfolio of innovation potential across their divisions and business units, to look for new opportunities from combining new discoveries and capabilities spread across the organization. Steve refers to this idea as corporate potential energy and defines it like this:


"Corporate potential energy is the product innovation stored within corporate employees that has the potential to be converted into other forms of product innovation."


My interview with "Innovate with Influence" author Steve Todd can be found here.

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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 and Innovation Summary - "When Growth Stalls"

A few weeks ago I received "When Growth Stalls" by Steve McKee in the mail. "When Growth Stalls" is a relatively short, easy, and pleasant read.

The book starts by making the point from research that 54.9% of companies' growth is either currently stalled or stalled at some point in the last decade. Growth can stall for a variety of reasons including: market techtonics, the lack of consensus at the top, a loss of focus, a loss of nerve, or creation of marketing inconsistency.

When you look at the world and the findings of the research in the book, one thing stands out, and that is often companies run into trouble because executive teams either are too busy to notice or too afraid to admit that they:

• Have lost their ability to differentiate their products or services from the competition


• Have customers who don't understand the company's point of differentiation anymore


• Don't know their place in the marketplace anymore


• Have trouble making decisions


• Can't state their company's core competency in simple terms (and neither can the employees)


• Have lost clarity on who the target audience is


• Are transferring their own lack of clarity on the future direction for the company into its marketing


• Find it dangerous to take creative risks


• No longer produce marketing and advertising that captures the interest and imagination of customers


• Are not commiting sufficient resources to ensure success of market plans

In summation, as I see it: ultimately when organizations achieve success, they tend to ride the winning horse too long, fight about which horse will win the next race, or deny that a new race will be run at all.

McKee's main point is that taken together - a lack of consensus, a loss of focus, loss of nerve, and inconsistency - form a vicious cycle that can derail even the most promising growth companies of yesterday. But, once you realize you have a problem and come to terms with it, you can try to set your sights on a simple, singular, and directional "Top Box" for the entire organization to focus on. A "Top Box" is an organizational goal that is specific, time-bounded, and measurable - one that everyone in the organization can see and take tangible actions to help achieve. Your "Top Box" should ultimately be served by your marketing strategy - which could be driven by the given equation:


Top Box = I choose X


Where:

• I = The prospective customer you're trying to serve


• choose = the decision they're going to make


• X = Your brand, product or service

And to achieve your "Top Box", you have to take things back to basics. You have to define a clear "who" to target, make sure that your "what" is obviously different than everyone else's, that every part of the customer experience reinforces that differentiation (and your brand), and that your positioning is clear and consistent.

Digging deeper into positioning, Steve McKee defines five main categories of positions:

• Someone


• Something


• Somewhere


• Sometime


• Somehow

And, the position you choose must be:

• Relevant


• Believable


• Credible


• Differentiated


• Defensible

If your new market-driven positioning meets these five tests then you must be ready to move boldly in the marketplace, and start making the change real. But execution is, of course, everything so you must:

• Execute your positioning consistently across the organization


• Execute your strategy consistently over time


• Invest consistently in making your brand distinctive

So, if your company has stalled, maybe it is time to go back to basics, redefine your organizational focus, make it a living, breathing reality every day from the inside out, and then (and only then) tell people why they should believe.

So, are you ready to recommit yourself to growth?


My interview with "When Growth Stalls" author Steve McKee can be found here.

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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.

It's About Hubris, Stupid

Book Review of "How the Mighty Fall"

by Bob Donnelly

Jim Collins, the well known author of "Good to Great" and coauthor of "Built to Last" has done it again in this book that explains why successful companies stumble, and eventually fail; or are able to recover and continue.

His analysis is captured in clear examples of what he calls the Five Stages of Decline. I have been describing the same path to irrelevance in my column, The Entrepreneurial CEO, in CE Online and to many CEOs for many years in a different way, but coming to the same basic conclusion.

Collins in his description of Stage 1 of his thesis (hubris born of success) concludes that great enterprises can become insulated by success. He says that Stage 1 begins when management becomes arrogant and regards success as an entitlement. When this happens I have watched one company after another start to "market by assumption" assuming that they know more about what customers want than the customers themselves.

This leads to Collins' Stage 2 (The undisciplined pursuit of more) where he describes management making undisciplined leaps into areas where they cannot be great, or growing faster than they can manage effectively. His analysis here is that these new activities typically stray into areas foreign to what led the company to greatness in the first place or without the right managers in place to achieve excellence.

Collins fundamental conclusion here, and rightly so, is that when an organization grows beyond its ability to fill its key seats with the right people, it has set itself up for a fall.

This leads to Collins Stage 3 (denial of risk and peril) where internal warning signs begin to mount, yet external results still remain strong. A classic example of this was Starbucks after Schultz turned over the day-to-day operations to his team in 2000 and the business continued to grow through 2006, even though all the signs of impending doom were obvious and accumulating in the marketplace.

Shultz returned to find that his vision for Starbucks as a unique place to socialize, have impromptu business meetings and relax over great coffee had morphed into another chain of fast food outlets. And, McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts, the leaders in fast food were luring his customers away with offers of less expensive great coffee themselves.

Collins uses classic examples of "corporate speak" that management uses to explain away disturbing indicators during this stage as "temporary" or "cyclic" or "not that bad", and "nothing is fundamentally wrong".

The one I have always liked best is a "temporary aberration". Collins says that in Stage 3 leaders discount negative data, amplify positive data, and put a positive spin on ambiguous data, which is exactly what I have experienced in my corporate life.

He cites a statement made by the CEO of Circuit City while the company was in Stage 3: "This is a company that's in great shape"!

The risks gone bad in Stage 3 eventually assert themselves and typically result in a sharp decline in sales and a staggering loss which leads to Collins' Stage 4 (Gasping for Salvation). In 2004, for example the Danish Company Lego had a historic loss that shook the owners out of complacency and into action.

Collins explains that there are only two choices at this stage either (1) lurching for a quick salvation, or (2) returning to the disciplines that created greatness in the first place. At this point Collins offers the following courses of action or possible "saviors" as he calls them: find a charismatic visionary leader, launch a bold but untested strategy, have a radical transformation, a dramatic cultural revolution, a hoped-for blockbuster product, a "game changing" acquisition, or other silver bullet solutions.

Lego hired a new visionary CEO with McKinsey planning experience who returned the company to its core technology updated for current customer requirements.

Collins concludes that the longer a company remains in Stage 4, repeatedly grasping for silver bullets, the more likely it will continue to spiral downward into his Stage 5 (Capitualtion to Irrelevance or Death).

In Stage 5 Collins explains that accumulated setbacks and costly false starts erode financial strength and the individual spirits of management to such an extent that the leaders abandon all hope of rebuilding a new future. He concludes that eventually the organization atrophies into utter insignificance; and in the most extreme cases simply disappears as a result of running out of cash. Sound familiar?

In "How the Mighty Fall" Jim Collins provides an excellent explanation of what has happened and will continue to happen to companys who are overcome with success, become arrogant to a fault and lose track of what created their success in the first place. The book also cites many good examples of CEOs who were able to arrest this downward spiral such as Lou Gerstner at IBM and Anne Mulcahy at Xerox, as well as suggestions on how to avoid this common pattern of behavior by one CEO after another.

Unfortunately, we have just witnessed this scenario at many financial firms and others that contributed to the current economic situation we are in today. I sincerely hope that CEOs will follow Jim Collins advice and never get to his Stage 1 - Hubris Born of Success.

Collins leaves us with a haunting statement on the back cover that all CEOs should note well: "Whether you prevail or fall, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you".

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Bob Donnelly is the Editor of the online Entrepreneurial CEO column for Chief Executive magazine.

Book Review - "Innovation Tournaments"

A few weeks ago I received "Innovation Tournaments" by Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich in the mail. "Innovation Tournaments" is a relatively short, easy, and pleasant read. This book is definitely one of my favorite innovation books to date as it covers concepts clearly and in an accessible way. Wharton professors Terwiesch and Ulrich have chosen to focus their innovation book on creating and selecting exceptional opportunities.

Because all companies can create lots of ideas when they engage their employees, suppliers, partners, and even customers in the idea generation process, the real differentiation comes from creating processes for sourcing and selecting those ideas that are truly exceptional and having the courage not to back those that are only merely good.

Professors Terwiesch and Ulrich start off by defining innovation as a new match between a need and a solution.

One of the key concepts that they cover in this book is the 'innovation return curve', which graphically represents the expected profits from a set of innovation investments. Creating an innovation return curve helps you to identify exceptional opportunities, and after all - exceptional opportunities drive exceptional value. The overall concept of the book is that by evaluating ideas in a series of 'rounds' or 'filters', that you increase your chances at having only the exceptional ideas make it through to the other end.

The book discusses tools and techniques for generating opportunities, opportunity selection, strategy alignment, and opportunity analysis. In addition the book covers innovation portfolio management, interdependencies and risk management, governance, and administration.

One of the major tenants of the authors when it comes to innovation is that uncovering exceptional opportunities is more likely when your process exhibits greater variability (it actually displays less consistent output quality).

Techniques for stimulating opportunity generation include:

• Alternative approaches to existing innovations


• Follow a personal passion


• Annoyance-driven innovation


• De-commoditize a commodity


• Drive an innovation down-market


• Trend-driven innovation


• Attribute-based innovation


• Functional decomposition

The book also introduces a nice and simple visual tool for sorting opportunities into strategic buckets based on their level of technological uncertainty and market uncertainty:


A large part of the book is dedicated to financial management and risk management as it applies to innovation, and while interesting to read, is hard to summarize here.

And finally the book closes with an interesting innovation maturity model, which is summarized in a simple way by the chart I have created here:


Overall, I found the work of professors Terwiesch and Ulrich to be well worth the investment of time and money.

My interview with "Innovation Tournaments" co-author Christian Terwiesch can be found here.

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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 and Innovation Summary - "Conquering Innovation Fatigue"

by Braden Kelley

About a month ago I received "Conquering Innovation Fatigue - Overcoming the Barriers to Personal and Corporate Success" in the mail, a 284-page piece co-written by Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins, and Mukund Karanjikar. Now you might be thinking - Everyone is so excited about innovation, how can anyone get innovation fatigue?

Well, while most authors choose to write about the green fields or the blue oceans you can potentially create by pursuing innovation, "Conquering Innovation Fatigue" instead chooses to focus on the things that can wear down the inventor, the manager, and the innovator. The authors classify potential innovation fatigue into three main classes of innovation fatigue:

1. People Fatigue


2. Organization-Level Fatigue (Strategy, Culture, Actions)


3. External Fatigue

And then break down those classes of innovation fatigue into Nine Leading Fatigue Factors:

People Fatigue:

1. Theft of the invention and exploitation of inventors


2. Innovator deficiencies (e.g. unreasonable expectations, impatience, unhealthy pride)


3. The NIH syndrome ("Not Invented Here")

Organization Level Fatigue (Strategy, Culture, Actions):

4. Breaking the will to share (loss of cooperation from the innovation community)


5. Fundamental flaws in decision making and vision


6. Open innovation fatigue (corporate barriers to external innovation and collaboration)

External Fatigue:

7. Patent pain: barriers to intellectual property protection


8. Regulatory pain: challenges in policy, regulation, and law


9. University-industry barriers

Risk is discussed briefly in the book. As many of you may know, most companies end up focusing on small, incremental innovation because the more disruptive ideas are likely to been viewed as too risky. Smart companies don't spend all of their energy trying to de-risk every idea, but instead engage in innovation portfolio management that spreads innovation investment across ideas with different risk profiles and time horizons.

The book makes the point several times that innovation is not always fast, including a story about how it took the British Navy two centuries (200 years) to adopt the cure for scurvy. Along these lines, I'll be writing and publishing an article about slow innovation later this week.

One of the points I particularly liked in the book was the section talking about how there can be lots of logical reasons why an innovation project should not be funded or not proceed after funding. So, don't take it personally if someone wants to kill your innovation idea, instead try to anticipate as many of these logical reasons to kill it and strengthen your idea or have your rebuttals ready. Be your own devil's advocate, and deprive others of the opportunity in the process.

Breaking the Will to Share

As more and more organizations try to establish an innovation-led organization or choose to try and differentiate themselves based on innovation outcomes, nothing is more crucial than maintaining the will to share among employees and any other group that you ask to participate in your innovation efforts. The authors break down the will to share in this way:

Maintaining Trust

1. Fair, Helpful Performance Reviews


2. Rules Consistent, Fair


3. Promises Kept

Sense of Inclusion

1. Access to Insights, Results


2. Inclusion in Decision Making


3. Talents Valued, Used

Effective Incentives

1. Financial Incentives


2. Intrinsic Incentives


3. Likelihood of Impact

Innovating Beyond Innovation

There was a great call-out in the Orion Energy Systems case study about innovative reasons to believe when your innovation idea faces doubt. The point can be summarized in this quote from the book:

"Sometimes a great invention is not enough to deal with the social aspects of innovation. Further creativity is often needed to help customers change their behavior and try something new."

Innovating from the Inside Out

Finally, I'd like to agree with the authors on two important points that we all need to be more aware of as we push for increased innovation in the United States or elsewhere:

1. An incredible number of the great inventions and companies credited to discovery or formation in the United States were created by immigrants. The United States and any other country in the world hoping to start their share of innovation-led organizations, must ensure that immigration policies do not place mis-guided caps on immigration from well-educated and populous countries.


2. When comparing the potential benefit of an innovation idea, we must remember that we should not typically compare the potential benefit against some sort of continuing steady state. The absence of action will generally not lead to maintenance of the current state, but instead inaction will lead to a general decline in financial performance as competitors choose their own path of action.

Conclusion

There are a couple of great case studies in the book, an interesting framework or two, and lots of good information about intellectual property that most books on innovation don't have, making it a worthwhile reference for the layperson.

My interview with co-author Jeff Lindsay can be found here.

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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.

The Carrot Principle - Pixar Style

I'll be publishing a book review of "Conquering Innovation Fatigue" soon, and for a bit of fun I thought we could flashback to a book I reviewed in June 2009 - "The Carrot Principle" - Pixar-style:





It just goes to show that not paying attention to the rewards and recognition for your most valuable resource (your employees), can result in breaking the will to share - this point we will discuss in the book review of "Conquering Innovation Fatigue" by Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins, and Mukund Karanjikar.

Are you moving your employees' carrot?

Are you willing to pay the consequences?

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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 and Innovation Summary - "The Carrot Principle"

A couple of weeks ago I received "The Carrot Principle" by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton in the mail. Now you might be thinking - What does a book for managers about recognition have to do with innovation?

Well, as I like to say:

"Innovation is a gift. What are you doing to encourage employees to give it?"

Innovation comes from employees that value belonging to the organization, and that are satisfied and engaged in their roles with the organization. One of the main ways that you can create a workforce willing to gift both sustaining innovations and breakthrough innovations to the organization is by adequately recognizing employees for what they contribute to the organization. Innovation is so difficult for most organizations because most managers neglect to provide sufficient recognition to their employees.

"The Carrot Principle" is a well-written book about how the best managers use recognition to engage employees, boost retention, and accelerate performance. The thinking in the book is backed by two extensive research projects that serve not only to substantiate the authors' points, but also to illustrate them.

The book focuses on showing how a manager that improves their recognition skills can actually increase their perceived performance on the basic four areas of leadership:

• Goal Setting


• Communication


• Trust


• Accountability

When managers focus on improving their recognition skills and focus on improving their skills in these four areas, they can move employees higher up in this Maslow-esque pyramid towards creating a self-actualized workforce. The top of the pyramid is where the gift of innovation occurs.


Managers move employees there by focusing on mastery of the building blocks of recognition:

• Day-to-day recognition


• Frequent, specific, timely


• Above-and-beyond recognition


• Value, impact, personal


• Career recognition


• Celebration events

Recognition done well helps to build employee satisfaction and engagement. The top three predictors of employee engagement are:

1. Opportunity and well-being


2. Trust


3. Pride in the organizational symbol

Recognition done well helps to increase your performance with employees on these three predictors and thus your chances for employee engagement.

To help managers prime their recognition pump, the book provides a chapter with 125 recognition ideas.

But of course, managers have to sustain their recognition efforts for their effects to hold. The reward?

Managers will be seen as:

• Better goal setters


• Better communicators


• More trustworthy


• Able to hold people accountable

... and of course if managers can increase employee engagement, then the organization will better be able to innovate.

And after all, isn't creating a more innovative organization what it is really all about anyways?


My interview with "The Carrot Principle" co-author Adrian Gostick can be found here.


Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

Interview and Book Review - Ric Merrifield, Author of "Rethink"

I had the opportunity to interview Ric Merrifield on camera about his new book "Rethink" and here are the questions I asked him:

1. What inspired you to write Rethink?


2. What is the key insight you want to share with this book?


3. What is the most common mistakes people are making in cost cutting mode right now in this recession?


4. What is the most common barrier to innovation that you encounter in your work?


5. In your opinion, what recent innovation (or area of innovation) has the most intriguing potential?

"Rethink" arrived in my mailbox a couple weeks ago and after completing it, overall, I would give it a thumbs up.

For me, the second half of the book was the most interesting part. The case studies were good, and I felt they brought the book's thesis to life. While I found myself thinking about core competencies and value curves when I was reading the book, I could also see how creating 'what' heat maps would integrate quite nicely with other business frameworks like these. They all fit together.

Looking back at my experience of reading the book, my favorite chapter was the 'Key Concepts' chapter. Personally I feel that all too often, the authors of business books spend too much effort expanding a single insight to the requisite thickness, only to omit a proper summary or useful cheat sheet that the reader can go back to for easy reference. The 'Key Concepts' chapter also gives you a glimpse into the level of detail and complexity that these 'what' heat maps actually deliver in practice. I had the opportunity to see one in all of its glory in Ric's office, but there are supposed to be some examples in color at http://www.rethinkbook.com.

So, if your organization is seeking to escape the 'how trap' and refocus its energies on identifying the 'what' changes that will have the greatest impact, I encourage you to check out "Rethink" by Ric Merrifield.

I would be interested to hear what you think of the interview and of the book. Please post a comment with your thoughts.

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)