How to Spark a Snowcrash & What the Web Really Does

by Venessa Miemis

It's been an interesting week, to say the least.

In a lot of ways, we all just pulled each other up to a new frequency, I think. We've been sharing our ideas and perspectives of our personal discoveries for a while now, and all of a sudden all these perspectives assembled into an insight that helped me understand why the human network is so important, and why building a personal 'trust network' is critical for moving forward in society. (For anyone new here, check out An Idea Worth Spreading post and comment thread as an orientation to this site and the thinking going on here.)

So the past few days have been spent thinking about what just happened, and how we can keep doing it.

I have realized what's happening here is that this blog has become a public learning community, where we are all literally learning how to learn. We are learning how to think in this new way. This new way of thinking, this 'network thinking', by default requires a network. We can't learn how to think in the new way alone. We can only figure it out through experimentation and collaboration. This is the "shift" everyone is talking about, the big thing that individuals and organizations "need" to operate in the 21st Century. We're revealing it, unfolding it, right now, together.

My takeaway of what this means and how to do it:


1. Create a personal 'trust network' for yourself first.

In order to understand the implications of the shift and to internalize it, you need to experience it firsthand. You can't tell your organization that you're going to be implementing "social media" and everyone is going to start "collaborating," and assume that waving a magic wand is going to make this happen. My experience has been that I had to learn what trusting and sharing means on my own.

That really sounds bizarre, and I feel a bit sub-human that it took me so long to re-learn how to trust someone and share resources. It's what we're taught as children, but apparently society does a good job beating it out of us.

All of us have a trust network already 'in real life'. It's your family and your close friends and colleagues, all those strong ties, and also your extended family, community, and coworkers, your weak ties. These people are crucial, they are your companions day to day. But what about people beyond your real life connections? Is there a way to extend our connections and build trust with strangers who have a diversity of backgrounds, skills, strengths, resources, and knowledge? People who could help us if we needed help? Could we establish a global trust network?

What I discovered through Twitter was that there are people out there who know what community means. Who really, truly know. These people have already internalized what a society could look like based on a cooperative model, and it seems that this is what's really going on on the web. Beyond all the superficial stuff out there, all the mindless entertainment and porn, at the core (or maybe at the periphery) is a community of...thousands?...millions?...of people who have jobs and careers and passions that they carry out "in the real world," but have already embraced the vision of a much different way of life that is based in trust.


And they are modeling it online.


What is actually happening on the web is an epic experiment in creating a new society.

When you hear people talk about this online "gift economy," and "building value and trust," and "sharing" - this is WAY beyond a new gimmick for your business. Please don't underestimate what's going on. This is actually people laying down the foundation and infrastructure for a new global economy. There is a movement that is slowly gaining steam as people are "waking up," and it has the potential to change the world.

That thing you think about before you go to sleep at night, when you say "sigh, if only the world was a little more like ________" - that thing is actually going on right now. It's terrifying and magical, because it means that there is hope. It means that we don't have to stand by and let the economy and education and government all erode and crumble around us as we watch from the sidelines. There's the opportunity to actually get involved, take charge of our own lives, and join in the experiment and see how to make it a reality. How to make it THE reality.

The beauty of the complexity of it is that in order to really reap the benefits of it, you have to participate in it genuinely, and in order to participate genuinely, you have to do it intentionally, and in order to do it intentionally, you have to understand it, and in order to understand it, you have to understand yourself, and in order to understand yourself, you have to learn how to give, and in order to learn how to give, you have to establish a network to give to.

It's a complex interrelated web, but it seems that establishing the network is a first step.


2. Share yourself.

This is the part where mindfulness comes in, and where you really have to start exploring the depths of personal Identity.

That's a lot to ask, and you may not have even asked yourself that question in a while. That's the point. If you were really going to live in a trust-based society - what would that look like? Who would you be?

There's a big path of self-discovery and self-reflection that goes on, there's a lot of confronting your beliefs and your ego, and it's painful sometimes.

For me, that is kind of the beauty of the web. It can help you to help yourself, if you choose to use it to that end.

And the way that 'it' helps you, is that PEOPLE help you. It's the people. It has always been about the people.

Why has our society become so jaded, so selfish, so afraid, so arrogant, so egotistical, and so greedy?

I think it's because our society doesn't give us many chances to share ourselves with each other. To really let our guards down and just be authentic, good people, who are not out for gain, who are not out to exploit each other in order to get ahead, but who just want to be able to freely exchange gifts and collaborate because it makes us feel good.

Society doesn't want this. You want to know why?


Because these things are free.


What does society reward? Cheating. Stealing. Exploitation. Fame. Big houses. Fancy cars. Executive titles. Material stuff. All these things are attached to something else. Something has to be sacrificed to get these things. And they often don't make you happy in the end. They're not who you really are, or what you really care about, but you do them because that's how it's set up, and we're just operating within the framework that exists.

But, there's this other way.

In this experimental society in which you can participate, if you want - people are a little more 'real'. People will give you advice, pass along a link they think might interest you, offer to collaborate on a real project, or exchange some information with you, for no other reason besides that it's "how THIS system works."

The precondition is trust. You can't buy trust. You can't force trust.

You earn trust.

You earn it by sharing your gifts. I don't know how to tell you what yours is. It took me years of exploration to find mine, but I can say from my firsthand experience on the web, that my trust network pulled me forward into the realm where I made the discovery. The search for self-identity that I've been on my life was actually aided by real people around the planet who I've never actually met.

The process of self-discovery is of course completely personal. I can only tell you that for me, starting my blog was one of my greatest tools. Writing my thoughts was a powerful way for me to practice thinking about what I think, and critically evaluate myself. The even better part is when other people started leaving comments on my posts, challenging the way I think, offering their perspectives, and making me rethink what I thought I knew. These conversations have been evolving for months, but each blog post resulted in people leaving comments that challenged my thinking further and further. Sometimes people disagreed with me, and sometimes I wanted to lash out and defend my thinking.

But instead, I tried to understand that other person's perspective, see where they're coming from, and imagine why they might think what they think. I tried to learn empathy. I think empathy is a critical emotion to develop in a trust society, and also a necessary one to help bring about 'the shift'.

The learning process that takes place during this self-discovery isn't just a discovery of self, but the discovery of self in relation to others. The thinking process becomes one that can encompass the idea of interdependence. I don't know how to explain this, but I can only say this "new way of thinking" involves a transcendence of ego. It is a mental model that assumes that problems cannot be solved alone, and that collaboration is not just desirable, but is actually a display of higher intelligence.

When you are able to put your ego aside, and realize that problems can only be solved by many, your mentality shifts from "I know the answer" to one of "How can I contribute to the solution?"

For me, when this started, it felt like a video game. I would send people links, or retweet people's stuff that seemed useful, and when I got a "thank you," it caused a little high. People were appreciating my contributions. When people would comment on my blog posts or retweet my posts to their networks, it caused a little high again, because again I was being appreciated.

As you start sharing more of yourself and your ideas, your art, your gifts, your insights, people will start to notice. You don't have to try to 'sell yourself'. You have to try to BE yourself.

There's a difference. And the difference gets noticed.

And the shift starts to creep into your brain, as this behavior becomes reinforced over and over and over again.

Every time someone shows you some appreciation for being you, even something as small as a retweet, a different kind of synapse starts firing in the brain.

We start getting rewarded for giving and for sharing.

We get rewarded for being our authentic self.

It starts to build self-confidence and self-esteem in a strangely gratifying way, because all you're doing is kind of having a good time, and just being yourself.

Just keep doing this.


3. Rewire your brain

In order to function in this new society, what it comes down to is that you need to kickstart your brain.

Beyond all the fun and giving and sharing is an actual restructuring of the way the brain works. We have to teach our brains how to process the type of information that now needs to be processed. Digital information. Information that has a place it needs to go in order to be useful. We are problem solvers, but we are also transmitters. We need to build a new brain.

This new brain is intuition based.

I actually think it's not a new brain at all, but the 'real' brain. I think what happens is that we start to unlearn some things, and then rediscover how the optimal brain actually functions.

I have read quite a bit of research on complexity science, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and really so much more, so this isn't coming from a place of being uninformed, but there's something different about this brain.

Because it's intuition based, it defies description. It doesn't think hierarchically or in a linear way, instead it operates in patterns. It happens seemingly instantaneously. It happens through intention.

Someone gave me the example of reaching out for a glass. Do you think about all the muscles and movements involved in moving your arm, or do you simply have an intention for your hand to grasp the glass?

It's complex beyond reason, and blows away our current models of description.

It happens because we just 'know'.

I think what's happened to us is we have trained our brains to operate like machines for 100 years. We have been working in jobs that have set descriptions, with specific tasks and roles, and they box in our mind. I think our minds have actually struggled to form the linear paths to think in the linear way that typical organizations want us to operate in; following directions, following rules, doing repetitive tasks, regurgitating information.

But the brain doesn't want to work like that. It wants to work like a network. It wants to send ideas and information all over the place, jumping from synapse to synapse on multiple pathways. It wants to be contextual, relational, adaptive, and non-linear. It wants to imagine things, map new models, and revise itself constantly. I think it WANTS to be a learning machine. As we pick up on new ways of thinking about things and assembling information, new synapses form, helping information reach its destination faster and more effectively.

I started to think about the brain this way by watching the way information travels on Twitter. This was a huge help in shifting my thinking. I imagined each person as a node in a network, even imagining the people out there who I wasn't following. I tried to imagine EVERYONE who's on Twitter. All the humans around the world. I imagined we each operated as a switch and a filter.

As a switch, we each can decide where to allow information to spread into our network. (Keep toggling this example between how Twitter works and how the brain's neural nets work)

When we retweet, we expose our entire network of relationships to this particular piece of information. That's like flipping the switch 'on'. It fires the synapse. Or we can take no action, and the tweet just passes through the stream. The switch stayed 'off'.

In addition, we can also be a filter. We can add extra data to a tweet, leaving a short comment about it, or cc'ing specific people on it, or just sending it directly to people.

As we become more familiar with who we're following and who's within our human network, we individually get better at being a switch and a filter.

We become more discriminatory about what to tweet, what to retweet, and where to send information.

Like the brain that forms new pathways for effectiveness, we also learn to more effectively move information.

I think that the act of doing this in itself trains the brain. It teaches the brain to recognize itself. It's like you giving your brain permission to operate the way you're modeling the movement of information in Twitter. Your tweets don't get seen by the same people after every tweet, and you never know who is going to pick up your tweet and send it to their network. If the person is influential, they can cause a huge number of people to see your tweet, sending along all kinds of new and unexpected pathways. But the travel of a tweet is kind of random - you can't predict exactly where it will go or who will combine it with some other novel piece of information, it's just this organic process.

Now the interesting thing is when you stop thinking about tweets, and stop thinking about the screennames that are retweeting tweets.

Instead, think that you are sending an important piece of information. And think that your network isn't Twitter, it's human beings who need certain information in order for them to be able to solve problems. And then assume that you've got a pretty good read on the human beings within your personal network, and you have a pretty good intuition about who you should send that information to in order for it to get to where you think it needs to go and be seen and processed in order for it to have the most impact.

Now you're operating intelligently.

My little snowcrash was understanding this process of information travel. It's non-hierarchical, fluid, organic, and unpredictable. But it's a lot closer to how the brain wants to function than the way we usually use it.

I think that by observing how information moves in Twitter, by literally SEEING it, watching it, observing, we can teach the brain to recognize itself, and jumpstart this shift process.

It's said that "two neurons that fire together, wire together."

This is the snowcrash. It's the moment that a new connection, a new pathway, is forged in the brain. Or maybe many pathways. Maybe a whole new network of pathways. Maybe that 'lightning bolt' feeling is really what it looks like, just a ton of new pathways blazing across your brain.

At any rate, once your brain locks in this new set of pathways, you're in.

Now you're ready to start doing some reeaaalllllly interesting things.

I think this might be the way innovation works. It might be the way idea generation works. It might be the way creativity works. It's allowing the hierarchical thinking to loosen its grip on your brain, and let it do what it wants to do. I think it will start jumping in these non-lateral patterns and joining up ideas that you would have never thought to join before, because you have a whole new set of pathways to connect them.

And if your individual brain starts acting like that, and then you tune up your whole organization to that frequency and have a network of minds operating in this non-lateral way... well... the combined intelligence of a network like that seems pretty radical.


Conclusion

I wanted this to be an abridged version of the last post, but it seems like it has gotten pretty lengthy as well. I'm looking forward to your perspectives on the way I'm interpreting what happened, and for those that have had a similar experience, please share your version of how it happened and how you think the process can be accelerated.

I think our capacity to learn and grow is going to skyrocket once we start experimenting with building these new paths in the brain.

So, what I've covered here is three (3) concepts for boosting our intelligence:

1. Build a web of relationships, of alliances, with people who will help us to grow and learn


2. Initiate the process of self-discovery and self-awareness / mindfulness, and learn to share, trust and empathize


3. Intentionally rewire the brain through watching its behavior modeled in the way information travels on Twitter

The other component that I'm going to cover in the next post is dialogue.

I've thought a lot on this, and the thing that's missing from this formula is the spoken word.

I'll get into the concept of orality and generative dialogue, but I think this is the other critical component for us to learn and challenge our minds. We have to engage in spoken 'debate', in a mutually respectful way, to share the way we understand things with others, and then get their perspectives and insights. Some of my greatest growth has happened during conversations that go late into the night, where my mind is stretched to new levels.

I generated what seems like a potentially powerful way to do this publicly online so many can learn at once, which evolved out of my thoughts for starting a Junto.

Sneak preview: Intelligent dialogue -> Chat Roulette format + livestream + Twitter backchannel

I'll explain more about it soon!


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Venessa Miemis is a Media Studies graduate student at the New School in NYC, exploring what happens at the intersection of technology, culture, and communication. Connect with her at www.emergentbydesign.com and on Twitter @venessamiemis.

The Importance of Innovation Skills and Best Practices

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:

1. 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.


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


3. 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.


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


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


6. 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).


7. 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.


8. 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.

Distributed Idea Generation Outperforms Team Brainstorming

by Hutch Carpenter


"This has significant managerial implications: if the interactive build-up [of team brainstorming] is not leading to better ideas, an organization might be better off relying on asynchronous idea generation by individuals using, for example, web-based idea management systems."


That quote is from a report by three researchers from the INSEAD and Wharton business schools. They published a study, "Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea", that analyzes a mainstay of corporate life: the brainstorming session.

Is it effective in generating quality ideas?

To find out, the researchers conducted a field experiment in which they compared two models of generating ideas:

• Team structure: Group works together at the same time together in a room to generate ideas.


• Hybrid structure: Individuals generate their ideas independently, then meet together in a group.

Their objective was to determine which of those two structures generated more ideas, ideas of higher quality and is better able to discern the quality of ideas. They found in all cases that the hybrid structure outperformed the team structure.

Extreme Value Theory

The success of idea generation in innovation usually depends on the quality of the best opportunity identified. For most innovation challenges, an organization would prefer 99 bad ideas and 1 outstanding idea to 100 merely good ideas. In the world of innovation, the extremes are what matter, not the average or the norm.

The researchers - Karan Girotra, Christian Terwiesch, Karl T. Ulrich - were interested in determining what methods generate the best ideas. They distinguish their approach from previous research which analyzed the quantity or average quality of ideas generated.

They use extreme value theory to understand the factors impacting the quality of ideas. Extreme value theory shows that the maximum value of an idea from a set of ideas is based on:

1. The sheer volume of ideas generated
   
2. Average quality of all ideas generated
   
3. The level of variance in the quality of generated ideas

These concepts are put together nicely in this graphic:



Once you understand this framework for innovation, it becomes a matter of maximizing the values for each component. Watching, of course, for correlative impacts between them.

Field Research Experiment

The three researchers conducted an exhaustive experiment to determine which of the two methods - team structure or hybrid structure - generated the highest quality ideas at the top end of the scale. Here is the summary of their experiment.

Subjects: 44 juniors, seniors and grad students at the University of Pennsylvania

Challenges: They generated 443 ideas around two challenges.

• You have been retained by a manufacturer of sports and fitness products to identify new product concepts for the student market. The manufacturer is interested in any product that might be sold to students in a sporting goods retailer.
  
• You have been retained by a manufacturer of dorm and apartment products to identify new product concepts for the student market. The manufacturer is interested in any product that might be sold to students in a home-products retailer.

Idea generation formats: Subjects were split into four clusters. Half the clusters did the team structure first, half did the hybrid structure first. The clusters then switched structures for the different ideation challenges.

Idea quality: The quality of the ideas was assessed in two ways.

1. Business value: Panel of 41 Wharton MBA students each assessed the business value of the ideas on a 1 - 10 scale
   
2. Purchase intent: Panel of 88 college students (the target market for the ideas) each assessed their own likelihood of buying a given product proposal on a 1-10 scale

Experiment format: Subjects conducted idea generation exercises as follows.

• Team structure: 30 minutes together in a room to generate ideas together. Then 5 minutes of assessing and selecting the best 5 ideas.
  
• Hybrid structure: 10 minutes of generating ideas on their own. Then 20 minutes of discussing these and new ideas. Finally, 5 minutes of assessing and selecting the best 5 ideas.

Results: Hybrid Structure Tops Team Brainstorming

The results of the experiment are eye-opening. The researchers analyzed the two approaches on the three components of extreme value theory. They find hybrid is better on the individual components of the theory, and in the ultimate test: quality of the top ideas produced.

Number of ideas generated. Hybrid structure generates three times more ideas than does the team structure. Researchers attribute this result to three dynamics:

1. Free riding: it's easy enough to ride the idea coattails of the group
   
2. Evaluation apprehension: the fear of negative reaction when proposing an idea in front of a group
   
3. Production blocking: participants have to wait while one person is speaking, limiting idea generation throughput

Idea quality: The average quality of the hybrid structure ideas was higher than that of the team structure. Specifically, 0.25 points better in business value, 0.35 points better in purchase intent. To put this in perspective, these differences translate into roughly a 30 point differential in percentile rankings. In other words, the difference between the 1st and 30th idea in a pool of 100 ideas.

Researchers attribute the decrease in idea quality for team structures to the same free riding dynamic that reduces the quantity of ideas.

Idea quality variance: The researchers found no discernible difference in idea quality variance between the hybrid and team structures.

What this means is that from extreme value theory, the quantity and average quality of ideas are the key drivers of generating the highest-ranked ideas.

Best ideas: Here's where the rubber meets the road. Which approach had the highest ranked ideas? Hybrid structure, by a landslide.

The researchers looked at the top 5 ideas, by quality scores, that emerged from the two approaches. The hybrid structure ideas were of much higher quality than those generated from the team structure. This finding held for looking at the top 3, 4 and 6 ideas as well.

To recap:

The hybrid structure produced:

• More ideas
  
• Ideas of better quality on average
  
• Highest rated ideas

Ability to Select Best Ideas

Perhaps the one down note from the study is the ability of the group to select the best ideas. Remember that in both the team and hybrid structures, the group did a consensus selection of the top ideas. Participants weren't asked to select the top ideas individually.

The researchers found a small advantage in the hybrid structure group's ability to select the top 5 ideas resulting from their ideation exercises. But it wasn't material. Indeed, they note:


"The hybrid process may generate better ideas, but that due to the noisy selection process, its relative advantage is much diminished, to the point of becoming statistically insignificant for one of our quality metrics."


"Noisy selection process", indeed. Ever been in a brainstorming session where you're supposed to rank the ideas at the end? Imagine the dynamics of resolving differences of opinion, time constraints and the extraordinary influence of certain individuals that drowns out other opinions. This is not an optimal way to determine the ideas that define innovation for your organization.

What This Means for Companies Seeking Innovation

As we described previously in "Crowdsourcing Is the New Collaboration", there are many benefits to taking a new approach to idea generation, peer collaboration and integrating innovation more deeply into an organization's culture. Advanced innovation management platforms are ideal for this approach.

As this study confirms, distributing the idea generation process, as well as the idea selection process, results in higher quality ideas for organizations. This study dovetails well with another study by Professor Ron Burt, that found that employees with access to a wider range of viewpoints and feedback generate higher quality ideas.

Brainstorming does have its benefits in terms of face-to-face interactions. Perhaps the nature of what is brainstormed needs to change. Brainstorming can be valuable for project-oriented tasks and problem-solving. But don't consider it your go-to activity for the best ideas.


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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.

Who Killed Our Business?

by Paul Sloane

Most business managers go through the annual ritual of budgeting. We plan the next one or two years based on the actual results of the most recent year. We draw up a spreadsheet and plan line by line - sales revenues up 10% and costs held to a 5% increase means a modest improvement in profits.

We should have learned by now that this is a sterile process. The past is a poor guide to the future and its innovations. In 1972 the Club of Rome published "The Limits to Growth." It was a model that predicted what would happen to energy, food, population, environment, etc. It concluded that essential resources like oil would run out in the 1990s and that economic growth was unsustainable. It extrapolated the future based on the past. And it got it wrong precisely because the future is not like the past.


Blocking out innovative ideas

The planning straitjacket means that we are restricted to small incremental increases in revenues and we are squeezed on expenses. There is no scope for the radical improvements that the business so desperately needs. By thinking in terms of last year plus 10% we are blocking out big ideas. The motor car was not the horse-drawn carriage plus 10%, Amazon was not Barnes and Noble plus 10%, and the Smart Car is not your average sedan with an extra 10%. Each was a leap, an innovation, a different approach.

Nokia started as a wood pulp mill in Finland in 1865. It made paper products, rubber products and became an energy company before moving into consumer electronics and becoming the world leader in mobile phones. Virgin was founded by Richard Branson as a record label. It now offers a range of products in travel, entertainment, finance and communications. These successful companies did not get where they are today by modest incremental steps, but by combining efficiency with bold ventures into new arenas.


Who killed our business?

I use an exercise in my creative leadership workshops to shake people out of incremental thinking and planning. The team imagines that they are sitting in the room six years from now asking the question, "Who killed our business?" The premise is that some powerful force has put their company out of business. Individually and in teams they have to conceive of changes in technology, processes, fashion, competition or demographics that might completely replace their current business model.

There are many examples of how the unexpected has devastated businesses. Typewriter manufacturer Smith Corona was wiped out by word processing software on PCs. Polaroid was sideswiped by digital camera technology. MacDonalds has fallen victim to the rise of anti-corporatism and the power of the book, "No Logo." Downloading music on the Internet is hurting music companies. A loss of reputation demolished Arthur Anderson. Accounting scandals killed Enron and Parmalat. Laser eye surgery is a threat to makers of spectacles and contact lenses.

Starting with a blank piece of paper, people have to imagine a major new trend or approach which would eliminate them and at the same time meet the needs of their customers better. Once they have agreed on some possible scenarios they need to design ideal companies to exploit the new approaches. Instead of starting from today and planning forward, they start from the future and plan for the future.

You can aid the process by first discussing fashion trends, technology developments and demographic movements. The purpose is to startle people out of a complacent and comfortable view of the future and to consider instead a vortex of dangers and opportunities.

Spreadsheets are great tools for recording figures and for trying different assumptions in an existing model. But among all the many menu bars and commands in Excel there is no instruction for "use your imagination" or "conceive entirely new possibility." Try getting your team together and brainstorm some radical ideas. Develop scenarios that are imaginative but possible. Build some prototypes to test new products or business methods. Test them in the marketplace. An experiment will teach you far more than any spreadsheet. It is by systematically testing boundaries and pushing into new areas that companies like Nokia and Virgin succeed.


Conclusion

Of course every business needs a budget as a yardstick to measure against. But the budget is not a strategy for success or even for survival. Leadership means taking the business from where it is today to somewhere new and different. It means using imagination and innovation to design a better tomorrow.


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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.

Brainstorming Breakthroughs Require the Right Question!

by Mitch Ditkoff

There's a simple reason why so many brainstorm sessions are a waste of time. The problem statement being pitched to participants is the wrong one.

This is not surprising - especially when you consider how little time most facilitators put into preparing for a session.

Here's what happens: The person who calls the session is usually scrambling - overwhelmed, over-caffeinated, and running from one meeting to the next. Out of breath, they pitch the topic to the group, but the topic is either vague or secondary to a more essential challenge that remains unspoken.

G.K. Chesterton, one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century, distilled the phenomenon down to 13 words. "It's not that they can't see the solution," he said. "They can't see the problem."

Then, of course, there's also the phenomenon of perception bias.

Pitch a challenge to an IT person, and it will be seen as a technology problem. Pitch it to a CFO, and it will be seen as a financial problem. Pitch it to a marketing person and it will be seen as a branding problem.

Or as a wise man once said, "When a pickpocket meets a saint all he sees are pockets."

If you plan on running an ideation session any time soon, don't just stumble into the room and pitch a vague topic to the group. Do your homework. Make the effort to identify the REAL issue before asking for ideas. If it's the WRONG QUESTION you present, no amount of idea generation is going to make a difference.


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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.

Don't Demolish Your Own Innovation

by Paul Williams

Innovative ideas - the kind that can transform your company - are inadvertently being demolished. When first presented, many ideas meet wrecking-ball comments such as:

• "How's that going to work?"
  
• "Good luck getting that done!"
  
• "We don't have time for something like that." And the classic,
  
• "Doesn't work... Trust me... We tried that years ago."

We've all heard (or perhaps said) killer phrase comments like these. These are offered as a "public service" to the team to prevent us from going off track and wasting time.

But, what have we really accomplished?

• Yes... we've kept the meeting on schedule.

But we also,

• have made the suggester feel stupid,
  
• are causing people to hold back their creativity, and
  
• may have destroyed the next big idea.

Instead of immediately leveling them, what if we built on new ideas?

Ninety-nine percent of innovative ideas aren't simply blurted out in their final form. They need development to reveal their full potential.

Instead of destruction, try construction. Use the idea as a foundation and see how tall we can build the framework. If we want to be as innovative as possible, instead of saying "Yeah, but..." try "And, if..."

What's the worst that could happen?

We've wasted 120 seconds on a thought that, in the end, won't work?

But what's the best that could happen?

Perhaps we construct something that does solve the challenge. Even better, maybe it morphs into something completely different - something incredible!

As a bonus, we've made the suggester feel valued and perpetuate creative, open thinking - the stuff that leads to future innovative breakthroughs!

In these competitive times, when innovation is considered one of the single most important factors to the continued success of a company... Spare the "Yeah but..." wrecking ball, use "And if..." to construct your own innovation.


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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.

Brainstorming is More Than Ideation

by Mitch Ditkoff

Most people think brainstorming sessions are all about ideas - much in the same way that Wall Street bankers think life is all about money.

While ideas are certainly a big part of brainstorming, they are only a part. People who rush into a brainstorming session starving for new ideas will miss the boat (and the train, car, and unicycle) completely unless they tune into the some other mighty important dynamics:

1. INVESTIGATION: If you want your brainstorming sessions to be effective, you'll need to do some investigating before hand. Get curious. Ask questions. Dig deeper. The more you find out what the real issues are, the greater your chances of framing powerful questions to brainstorm and choosing the best techniques to use.

2. IMMERSION: While good ideas can surface at any time, their chances radically increase the more that brainstorm participants are immersed (i.e. focused). Translation? No coming and going during a session. No distractions. No interruptions. And don't forget to put a "do not disturb" sign on the door.

3. INTERACTION: Ideas come to people at all times of day and under all kinds of circumstances. But in a brainstorming session, it's the quality of interaction that makes the difference - how people connect with each other, how they listen, and build on ideas. Your job, as facilitator, is to increase the quality of interaction.

4. INSPIRATION: Creative output is often a function of mindset. Bored, disengaged people rarely originate good ideas. Inspired people do. This is one of your main tasks, as a brainstorm facilitator - to do everything in your power to keep participants inspired. The more you do, the less techniques you will need.

5. IDEATION: Look around. Everything you see began as an idea in someone's mind. Simply put, ideas are the seeds of innovation - the first shape a new possibility takes. As a facilitator of the creative process, your job is to foster the conditions that amplify the odds of new ideas being conceived, developed, and articulated.

6. ILLUMINATION: Ideas are great. Ideas are cool. But they are also a dime a dozen unless they lead to an insight or aha. Until then, ideas are only two dimensional. But when the light goes on inside the minds of the people in your session, the ideas are activated and the odds radically increase of them manifesting.

7. INTEGRATION: Well-run brainstorming sessions have a way of intoxicating people. Doors open. Energy soars. Possibilities emerge. But unless participants have a chance to make sense of what they've conceived, the ideas are less likely to manifest. Opening the doors of the imagination is a good thing, but so is closure.

8. IMPLEMENTATION: Perhaps the biggest reason why most brainstorming sessions fail is what happens after - or, shall I say, what doesn't happen after. Implementation is the name of the game. Before you let people go, clarify next steps, who's doing what (and by when), and what outside support is needed.


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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.

Pretending to be a Customer

by Mike Brown

It's a challenge to objectively examine your own website as if a prospect or customer seeking information would. There's an approach you can follow to get ideas flowing though: Look at a direct competitor's online presence, trying to shoot holes in it based on how a customer might view it.

You should really be able to get into it by answering a few questions:

• What misleading or out-of-date information is presented?


• What's not compelling about the website?


• What's confusing about the navigation?


• How much unnecessary detail do I have to supply to get a copy of the "free" download?


• What questions do I have that the website doesn't answer?


• Do I know where to get my other questions answered?


• In what ways did I get smarter by browsing this website?


• In what ways were my information needs left wanting?

After doing this, go back and see how your own online presence compares. Looking at yourself from a customer perspective should now be much easier!


Editor's Note: When you're in a pinch (or without a research budget), you could also use this technique with employees (preferably new ones) for more than just web sites.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Simplifying the Complex

by Paul Williams

Some call it a matrix, others a two-by-two diagram. I call them awesome.

Two-by-twos allow you to plot complex information in a matter that allows you not only to see the relationship between two things, but also to make better judgments and decisions. I often use these during brainstorming sessions with clients as a way to filter our stacks of great ideas to the fewer, bigger, and better solutions.

How to Use Them

1. Determine the two important qualities you want to use to measure or filter your ideas.

For example: We want to better understand the relationship between employee sales and their customer service scores. This two-by-two would begin something like this:



2. Next, I'll plot where each team member according to both their sales and their service score.



We can see Julia ranks where we hope all of our employees would be - she is making high sales and earning a high customer service score.

We can also use two-by-twos as a diagnostic tool to understand where adjustments are needed. Looking at the diagram, we can see that Winston needs help with customer service. O'Brien needs both sales and service help.



You can plot anything. Other measures you may find helpful include:

Product Measurement
Which products are profitable to which customers?
PLOT: Product Profitability -and- Customer Type

Customer Service
Which aspects of our service needs to be worked on?
PLOT: Degree of Importance to Customer -and- Satisfaction Levels

Television Ads Ranking
Which commercials are connecting with customers?
PLOT: How Memorable -and- Relevance

Marketing Promotion Logistics
Which marketing promotion is easiest to implement?
PLOT: Ease of Implementation -and- Investment

Innovation Gauge
Let's prioritize our innovative ideas.
PLOT: Remarkability of Idea -and- Difficulty to Implement

Two-by-twos are simple, effective, and versatile - they make it possible to plot nearly anything. Give them a try!

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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.

Four Perfect Situations for Brainstorming

by Paul Williams

While there are innumerable reasons for hosting a brainstorming session, the purpose for meeting can be summarized with four situations. They are the need to meet to:

1. Fix Something Broken / Problem Solving
   
2. Grow Something
   
3. Get Ideas / Fill Idea Pipeline
   
4. Innovate / Make Something New

(1) Fix Something Broken / Problem Solving

This is what is traditionally thought of as Creative Problem Solving (CPS). You've identified that you have some sort of problem (or 'opportunity' as some prefer to call it), and need to brainstorm some solutions. Perhaps you need to drive sales by x% in Q1? Determine ways to raise money to put a new roof on the church? Find ways to stand apart from your competition? You'd identified something that needs to be addressed (the problem) and need solutions.

Think About: Are you sure you're solving the right problem, and not simply addressing the symptoms? What are the assumptions? Constraints?


(2) Grow Something

Your franchise has reached a certain size and you want to grow bigger. Your new company has a steady flow of clients - now you want a "brand" - a logo, website, long-term goals, etc. You've got something already established and want to make it bigger.

Think About: Where are you now? Where do you want to go? Is this an ultimate goal, or a next step? Are you ready to manage the responsibility associated with the growth? What do you feel you "must keep", or can growing mean starting over from scratch?


(3) Get Ideas / Fill Idea Pipeline

You're tapped for ideas. You need to come up with a series of new product flavors for the next year. You want to determine your FY'10-11 promotional calendar. Your idea bank is near zero and you need to replenish the account.

Think About: How refined do you need the new ideas to be: sketch ideas or near-final proven concepts?


(4) Innovate / Make Something New

Combine ideas in a way that hasn't been done before. You want to do something innovative in your business category. Something above and beyond (a) your competition and/or (b) what you have done in the past.

Think About: Do these ideas need to be truly "new" or just new to your category? (You may find a practice in another industry can become your best practice.


Conclusion

As I've looked across the clients I have served, and meetings I've attended with employers; the reasons for brainstorming always boil down to these basic four situations. Even if - at times - the reason may be a combination of one or more of these... these are still the root situations.

Understanding these four situations will help you define clear objectives and the desired outcome of the meeting.

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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.

Predicting the Next Innovation

by Stephen Shapiro

Recently I returned from over two weeks on the road. I was in and out of five airports. As you go through security, the routine is always the same...

• Take off your shoes
  
• Take out your liquids
  
• Take out your computer

Why are we put through these security gymnastics?

On December 22, 2001, Richard Reid was caught with plastic explosives in the soles of his shoes. That's why we now have to walk barefoot through airports.

On August 9, 2006, two dozen people were arrested in the UK because they were plotting to bring liquid explosives on planes leaving Heathrow airport. Now we have to travel with miniature shampoos, shave creams and toothpastes.

Computers are scanned because, well, that's the obvious place to look. I guess.

What do these have in common? For the most part, the security scans we now endure were due to cleverness on the part of terrorists. Rarely are we subjected to scans that are due to the cleverness of government agencies.

Are there ways to easily smuggle weapons on planes in spite of our increased security? Of course. Nearly every time I pass through a metal detector, I have metal collar stays in the dress shirt I am wearing. Although the detector never beeps, these could easily have been turned into razor sharp weapons. Does this mean that next week I will have to travel topless through the airport? Good thing I have been working out.

Give me 15 minutes and I could rattle off dozens of other, more sinister ways to smuggle weapons on board.


Reactionary Innovation

This is a reactionary approach to business.

The current financial situation also demonstrates a reactionary approach to business. Enron has a meltdown. What should we do? Implement ridiculously stringent rules like the Sarbanes-Oxley act. Our financial institutions start to falter. OK, let's spend $700 billion of the taxpayers' money to sort out the mess.

I'm not saying that these rules and legislation are good or bad (or ugly). That's a conversation for another time. But I do find it ironic that the "big ideas" always seem to come in response to some tragedy. They are rarely proactive.

What does this have to do with innovation? Everything.

Most organizations use creativity to help them determine what to do next. They brainstorm ideas, select the best solutions, and then implement the most promising ones. Creativity is used to determine what your company or organization will do next.


Predictive Innovation

But in these rapidly changing times, creativity can be equally (if not more) valuable for determining what the marketplace and your competitors will do next. Or, if you are the government, it may help determine what your banks and terrorists will do next.

When is the last time you had a brainstorming session where you asked the following questions?

• What are we most afraid our competition will do to us?
  
• Who is not a competitor now, but might be in the future?
  
• What shift might happen in the buying habits of our customers that may make our product/service less appealing?
  
• How can the sagging economy help our business?
  
• What emerging products or services may make our business irrelevant?

The list of outside-in questions can be endless - and valuable.

In your next brainstorming session, try the following:

• Brainstorm your own list of questions, building on mine above.
  
• Determine which ones you want to tackle first.
  
• Brainstorm, using a variety of creativity techniques, to identify "possible" outcomes.
  
• For those which are deemed plausible, brainstorm a list of "triggers" for each. These are market conditions that tell you that the given scenario is moving from "possible" to "plausible."
  
• Set up a corporate "radar" system to help monitor external conditions. Have everything in place such that you can implement critical ideas when market conditions dictate.

This approach blends creativity with scenario-based planning. It helps you move from reactive solutions to proactive solutions. And in today's volatile world, this might just be the key to your long-term survival.

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Stephen Shapiro is the author of three books, a popular innovation speaker, and is the Chief Innovation Evangelist for Innocentive, the leader in Open Innovation.

It's Not Rocket Science

by Stephen Shapiro

For those of you who asked, here is the video of my six minute speech at the TEDx NASA conference. Enjoy.

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Stephen Shapiro is the author of three books, a popular innovation speaker, and is the Chief Innovation Evangelist for Innocentive, the leader in Open Innovation.

Help Others Recognize Their Talents

by Mike Brown

Chuck Dymer is a strategic mentor, having done more than any single person to help me understand lateral thinking processes and how integral they are to business success. You could say I've borrowed everything I know on innovation tools from watching Chuck do what he does so masterfully.

After working with Chuck on various projects, he said to me, "You make other people more creative just by cheering them on." While always enjoying participating in brainstorming sessions with others, its potential impact had never occurred to me.

Chuck's comment, though, caused more deliberate reflection on this "talent" I'd never considered and how it could be used more widely. This led to incorporating lateral thinking approaches into additional business activities, speaking topics, and ultimately, Brainzooming.

Are you working with others who display talents you see that they don't realize? Give them a gift by pointing out these talents so they can start considering how to use them even more beneficially.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Innovating Your Wallet

by Drew Boyd

Innovation puts cash in your wallet. But what about the wallet itself? For this month's LAB, we will apply the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to create new and useful concepts for the wallet.

Wallets are the most personal items we own. They carry our money, credit cards, identification, licenses, photographs, and other memorabilia. Your wallet says a lot about you. As with food, we try to stuff more inside while staying thin. Wallets have been around a long time. Today, the wallet industry is a multi-billion dollar market fueled by new designs and innovation.

Here are six unique wallet concepts invented using the five templates in the S.I.T. method. They were created by graduate students at the University of Cincinnati as part of their course requirements in "Applied Marketing Innovation."

1. FINANCIAL WALLET: "A complete personal financial guide to assure financial success." This concept features an online portfolio manager, a stock ticker, account summary, Forex calculator, and Quicken integration.

• Benefits: stay alert to changes in your financial situation so you can make better, real-time decisions to manage your personal finances.

2. ARMOR WALLET: "The most secure wallet on the planet! Helps protect and manage your critical information." This concept features titanium casing, fingerprint scanner, auto-lockdown, missing card alert, and a data manager.

• Benefits: keep your financial instruments secure, get easy access to your important information, and be alerted when something is not right.

3. TRENDSETTER WALLET: "Always keeps you high on fashion. The ultimate style statement." This concept features color changes according to your mood, attire, and occasion. It stores and displays pictures on an LCD screen to capture memories, plays the most hip music, gets real time fashion updates, gives you full body views with an advanced zoom in and zoom out mirror.

• Benefits: helps you match your fashion to your state of mind.

4. SHOPPERS PARADISE WALLET: "The most convenient shopping companion that always gets you the best deal." This concept features credit card select (the appropriate credit/debit card pops out while shopping), then alerts you until the credit/debit card is back in the wallet. It manages your to-do list and shopping lists, and it gets graphical information on your expenditure with tips on money management. The wallet searches for the best discounts, and it controls cash flow with an online budget tracker. It has an aisle navigator to help you shop more efficiently.

• Benefits: gives you an enjoyable shopping experience while saving you money.

5. GLOBETROTTER WALLET: "The ultimate travel guide that makes you feel right at home anywhere in the world." This concept features built in GPS, trip management, food/tip management, weather watch, language translator, and current Forex rates.

• Benefits: helps you get the most out of your travel experience by staying informed about what is going on around you.

6. FITNESS WALLET: "The perfect personal trainer to suit all your work out needs." This concept features a heart rate monitor to check workout intensity, digitized locker key, first aid kit, stopwatch, distance and time, calorie watcher, MP3 player, sports updates, and a fitness scheduler.

• Benefits: helps you maximize the time spent staying in shape.

Check out this and the other Dream Catalogs at the Innovation Wiki.

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

The Dream Catalog

by Drew Boyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream on.

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

Five Ways to Prepare for 2010

by Matt Heinz

I can't believe it's already December, and 2009 is almost gone. That means it won't be long before the holidays are over, and we're staring at a brand new month, quarter and year. Before January hits you unprepared, spend time in December both catching up and getting ready. Here are five specific things to get you started:

1. Read

• That backlog of blog posts sitting in your RSS Reader? The stack of magazines on your desk? Dig into them. You don't need to read every single article, but take time this month to catch up a bit on the reading you've wanted to do. I guarantee you'll find inspiration many times over.

2. Learn

• What skill have you wanted to learn? What new sales or marketing strategy have you wanted to get smarter about before testing for your organization? There's something youve been putting off, because you simply don't have time. What if you devoted the next 30 days to reading, practicing and testing that skill? How could that make you smarter and more successful in 2010?

3. Brainstorm

• Pick a handful of important problems or challenges. They can be things facing you personally or professionally, individually or with a group. Feel free to brainstorm on your own, but also pull friends, family or colleagues (whichever group is most appropriate) into a room with a white board to help. Even if you just take 30 minutes (our team takes as little as 10 minutes depending on the topic), with a bit of mental isolation and focus, you'll come up with something highly useful.

4. Secret Shop

• Which competitors - big or small - are creeping up on you? Which ahead of you might be within reach? How can you dig deeper, directly, into how they do business to learn what they're doing well, where they're weak, and what you can do differently to accelerate past (or further away from) them in the coming months?

5. Plan

• You've probably done some of this already for 2010, at least for your organization overall and/or for your department. But have you done it for yourself? For your career, or other professional and personal goals? What focus areas and milestones will be important to you in 2010, and what do you need to do starting in January to achieve them? Then, what do you need to do in December to hit the ground running?

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Innovation and Idea Management

From Ideation to Collaboration to Execution

by Robert F. Brands

Innovation: What a great idea!

Innovation thrives on a diet of news ideas. It needs fresh thinking and a different perspective from across the organization.

We've noted that Innovation = Creative x Risk Taking. Setting aside risk for the moment, creativity is a central element to the innovation process. But it must continually be nourished with new ideas from a variety of sources.

Ideation is not a single event. It doesn't originate from a single silo or one person or one department, although it can come from a single source. Ideation thrives in an open environment; think Wikipedia, the open-source, online repository of the world's specialized knowledge. It is the result of a collaborative process that welcomes minds and teams from across any organization of any size.

How can you foster a fertile ideation environment?

Start by creating an "idea hopper." This idea bank is the repository of any idea to be pursued, saved and reconsidered - or at least explored.

In the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Ark of the Covenant is crated and stashed in endless warehouse of similar, non-descript crates. This is the polar opposite. Don't think of the Hopper as a bottomless pit. Think actionable. While this idea database can be managed online or in Access Dbase, Word or Excel, the key word is "managed". Ideas come in and are vetted by the Innovation Team and the Chief Innovation Officer. The CIO will organize ideas in order of importance or relevance based on the organization's current path or needs. Then the ideas then are presented at the next meeting of the Ideation or Brainstorming Session.

About that session... Brainstorm sessions should be held at a regular interval and include a variety of participants from across the organization. This isn't just a place for R&D or the New Product team. Sales should be there. So should Marketing. Include Customer Service. Those who interact with customers and have a feel for the shifting tidings of the consumer should have input in ideation - whether in feeding the hopper or digesting its contents.

The meetings also should be structured. They should be scheduled, with an agenda in place so participants know what to expect, the topics of discussion, and the anticipated outcomes. In this instance, the CIO should defer to a facilitator or Innovation Coach who can lead the session with complete neutrality. He or she (or someone designated for that task) will write, chart, graph or otherwise gather every idea presented. There are no bad ideas. All concepts should be filed, prioritized, validated, for future reference and / or use in combination with other ideation session results. The outcome of each meeting besides feeding the hopper is a prioritized list to be worked in Product Development

Next, feed that hopper. This database needs that constant diet of fresh ideas - especially between brainstorming sessions. Welcome ideas from all corners of the organization - from the C-Suite to the receptionist's desk. You never know where the next Great Idea will come from.

To be clear, new ideas aren't simply about products. Ideas can include process changes, technological enhancements - anything that represents change in the organization.

In ideation, think green. In those brainstorming sessions, some ideas will rise, some will fall. Throw none away. Those that don't pass muster at that moment should be placed back in the hopper and recycled. Some ideas fail based on momentary circumstances: bad timing, market conditions, budget constraints, technological disconnect, conflict with the organization's current needs or vision - any of which can change very quickly. In fact, two ideas discarded today may morph into a better concept tomorrow. Keeping them in the hopper ensures they can be revisited in the future.

The process of ideation isn't inherently a risk-taking endeavor. But it is part of the experimentation equation. As we've noted previously, Risk + Experimentation (+ Failure) = An Improved Environment for Innovation.

The risk here is to break the mold. Open the silos. Welcome input from across the organization. You might come away thinking, "What a great idea!"

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Robert F. Brands is President and founder of Brands & Company, LLC. Innovation Coach Robert Brands has launched a new site - www.RobertsRulesOfInnovation.com - to complement his upcoming book.

Cooking Up Some Innovation

by Jeffrey Phillips

I've been thinking for a while about the perfect physical space for innovation. When we work with our clients we often are asked to help design a physical space for the team to work in. This should be a space that is open, colorful, inviting and really different from the regular work environment. The space needs to remind the people working there that when the teams are innovating, they need to be thinking differently than they do when in their day jobs. In a perfect world, there would not be such a separation of thinking, but until everyone is a perfect innovator, we'll have to settle for great thinking spaces.

The spaces we've worked on and in are usually spare space the firm can afford to reconfigure, and are usually the typical Class A space, with bare gray walls and industrial strength carpet. Sometimes the walls have been painted interesting colors or someone has put posters or other graphics up on the wall. Typically the space is fairly open, to allow a lot of movement, with smaller breakout areas for team work. Most of these physical spaces are a good first step, but don't really break out of the usual workspace - gray walls, cubicles, boring industrial feel.

After giving this some thought, I'm going to propose the best arrangement for an innovation space - a kitchen. Think about a kitchen and its properties. A kitchen is a place where you create delicious (hopefully) food from a wide range of ingredients following a methodology (recipes) and experimenting with new additives or flavors. Cooking is a good metaphor for innovation, because many of us follow a recipe to some extent, but we also experiment with different spices, flavorings or cooking styles. Experimentation is important, and having a number of different ingredients at hand is very valuable.

Also, at any party, where do people end up? In the kitchen, standing around, talking about the events of the day. A kitchen, because there's food and drink available, is inviting. People tend to remain there, talking about the issues of the day. From an innovation perspective, that's valuable. A wide range of people mixing together, exchanging ideas is a good building block for innovation. Additionally, kitchens are much less formal than a living room or sitting room, and invite people to interact. The fact that there are few comfy chairs in a kitchen encourages people to mill around. This ensures an exchange of ideas.

A kitchen also has all sorts of appliances, tools and utensils. These are the things that help prepare, mix and bake/broil/fry the food. Likewise, innovators need tools and techniques at hand in order to do their work effectively.

Another reason a kitchen, or some semblance of a kitchen would be an excellent jumping off point for an innovation space is because it would be so different, so unique from the rest of the working environment. A kitchen would be totally unexpected and offer people a very different environment in which to innovate, yet one that is potentially familiar and comfortable.

I can't wait to test this out - I think a kitchen, surrounded by some work areas or breakout areas and white boards, would offer a team a chance to "cook up" (sorry, couldn't resist) a whole range of new ideas. Clearly there needs to be some more traditional working space as well, but a kitchen, stocked not just with cooking utensils but tools for ideation, idea development and prototyping would form a unique site, ready for people to innovate. You could even staff the innovation site with personnel who are innovation coaches would could offer lessons on the methodologies, the tools and the practice of innovation, who could act as "executive chefs".

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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.