March 2010 Sponsor - Brightidea

Thank you to Brightidea for sponsoring Blogging Innovation for March 2010.

Brightidea is the market leader in On-Demand Innovation Management. Over 300 businesses around the world use its Software-as-a-Service suite to transform their employee, partner and customer ideas into a reality. The Brightidea platform is a flexible, scalable, and standards-based system that provides end-to-end tracking of the innovation process from concept through to realization. The company's software has been successfully deployed at: Adobe, Bosch, Cisco, Harley-Davidson, Experian, Emerson, British Telecom, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Honeywell, among others. Founded in 1999, Brightidea is closely held and headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, please visit www.brightidea.com.

If you are implementing innovation management software to better manage your innovation process and deliver on your innovation strategy, I encourage you to add Brightidea to your consideration set. You really can't manage innovation successfully with e-mail or paper submissions.

And, never fear... Blogging Innovation remains committed to being a leading independent source for innovation and marketing insight articles from:

1. 20+ regular contributing authors
   
2. Quality ad hoc contributions from you - the Continuous Innovation community
   
3. The best innovation events and conferences (and exclusive discounts)
   
4. Interviews with interesting innovation personalities
   
5. Reviews of innovation books
   
6. Video interiews with innovation leaders

The funding we will now receive from our sponsors will enable the site to continue, and will allow us to invest in improving the site design.

If you would like to submit an article or are interested in being Blogging Innovation's April 2010 sponsor to help the innovation and marketing conversations continue, please contact us.


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

BOF 3.0 - Ruffle Your Innovation Feathers

I had the opportunity to attend Brightidea's Birds of a Feather (BOF 3.0) event at Chevron's headquarters the other day. For those of you not familiar with Bright Idea Birds of a Feather events, they are periodic events for innovation practioners from Brightidea customers (e.g. HP) and non-customers (e.g. Chevron) to get together to discuss innovation challenges and share practical experiences peer-to-peer. The third incarnation of BOF was hosted in Chevron's 'Innovation Zone' - a flexible space used to inspire creativity where:

• everything is on wheels


• the space can be used for multiple purposes (including prototyping, recruiting, training, sharing)


• people can experiment with co-location of groups


• informal meetings and mentoring can take place when the space is not scheduled

The day was a mix of presentations from Chevron and HP and unconference open-sharing sessions, interspersed with breaks for people to just talk one-to-one with colleagues from other companies.

The Chevron Kickoff

Peter Breunig and Jack Anderson of Chevron shared their thoughts on innovation and ingenuity (a Chevron value). These included:

• Innovation must be focused on business strategy - For Chevron this means (finding oil, getting it out of the ground, and boiling it)


• Team-based innovation often requires convincing people that all want to be Michael Jordan, that being Scottie Pippen or Dennis Rodman is cool too and will help the team succeed (everyone has a role).


• You must maintain a crystal clear business focus or derivative projects can distract you


• When it comes to innovation - "Don't be afraid to let your horses run"

HP and The Garage

Art Beckman of HP spoke about HP's innovation management system that they have named "The Garage." In the words of HP, innovation management ultimately strives to systematically gather, organize, and collaborate on ideas. The innovation management push at HP is not just a way to improve management of innovation ideas but is also a push to bring together software and solutions people together to be a stronger team. The effort is helping to break down silos and encourage collaboration across geographies and functions.

HP is focusing on creating an innovation federation instead of a top-down model. The Garage team has been championing the model in advance of its rollout to build awareness and is putting the best model in front of the federated states that they can so that people want to use it (because they don't have to use it).

HP has innovation program leads in place in each business unit as the first step of their strategy. HP has created a process for funding ideas into action and is building out an incentive system for employees and executives too. Recognition may be the most important thing, but incentives don't hurt in HP's opinion. Innovation report cards and celebrating innovation successes also factor into their strategy.

HP has three people in The Garage dedicated to implementing the innovation management solution, and 15 Innovation Program Leads (some part-time - some allocated full-time), and some of those with big business units might have their own sub-level of Innovation Program Leads.

HP is looking to eventually take their internal innovation management solution externally to customers.

Open submissions are the trickiest part (ideas not submitted to specific innovation challenges) because they often end up generating answers to questions that nobody is asking. It is also a lot more work to get the business involved on these kind of open submissions, where innovation challenges generate ideas focused on a guiding question/problem.

HP has begun involving the business earlier in the process so that the Garage doesn't waste time evaluating or collating it. HP puts a lot more emphasis on campaigns and are putting together a repeatable process for getting a campaign up and going as fast as possible. HP is primarily focusing on generating ideas that are connected to the business (or a business unit).

The key is to get the problem for a challenge properly framed and make it visible to the organization through as many channels as possible. To that end, HP hosts webinars on the challenge, and are also experimenting with running in-person or virtual brainstorms on the challenge topic.

To maximize the success of any innovation management system, you should seek to involve the people who feel they may not have ideas to share, but may have comments or opinions to contribute on submitted ideas. Everyone has different innovation strengths. HP is utilizing a belt system (black belt, etc.) metaphor for showing and recognizing the people who are contributing.

Questions

How do you keep revolutionary ideas that might not have a business owner from being killed?

• The Garage team works on these, but the Garage team can't carry the idea the whole way

Two pushbacks an audience member:

• Why do ideation sessions if we don't necessarily have the money to develop the idea right now?


• I already have enough good ideas that I can't develop, why should I generate more?

How many focused campaigns do you think you can really run in a year?

• Probably in the 3-5 range (about one per quarter)
  
• Try not to ask the same people all the time to submit to multiple challenges in multiple locations


• They try to spread around the live challenges across several business groups

How do you integrate the work of HP Labs with the work of Garage and the business units?

• HP Labs is invited to the challenge and the Innovation Program Leads and other people in the business unit also work with people in HP Labs

Braden Kelley Insights

Different groups have different participation rates. Could this be a leading indicator on the level of trust or performance in a group? Groups with low participation rates could have low employee engagement, and may have a need for some extra attention to revitalizing the culture and trust in that particular group. This would be worth exploring - potentially matching up participation data with employee survey data.


More from the Brightidea Birds of a Feather (BOF 3.0):

• BOF 3.0 - Culture of Innovation Session


• BOF 3.0 - Innovation Fatigue Session

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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.

BOF 3.0 - Culture of Innovation Session

The first of the Brightidea Birds of a Feather (BOF 3.0) unconference discussion sessions I attended posed the question - What are the key elements of building a culture of innovation and what is the leader's role?

Here are some of the key insights and comments from the session:

• There was a great deal of discussion around the role of the leader in creating a culture of innovation by being a direction setter, venture-capitalist, talent scout, mentor, and silo-buster.


• It was also felt that is was important that respect for people be demonstrated or the culture will not change.


• Accountability vs. Authority - Often times people are made accountable for achieving innovation gains, but are not provided the authority to actually work to make it happen.


• "You are going to inspect what you expect."


• It is important to strike the balance between operational excellence and ideating/initiating growth


• It is worth considering the use of open book management so that people can better understand how to contribute to the organization's success


• Innovating within an ecosystem versus innovating within a company


• How do you enable more nodes in the network to collaborate?


• Defensive IP management is restrictive to innovation


• I need to move from IP defense to IP offense


• IP and IT and Finance are often anti-business teams (they work against innovating fast)


• We explored the concept that the leader should only have the role of driving change (versus maintenance or command & control)


• Leaders must understand that tomorrow will be different than today and that when you start trying to protect today - you are dead


• What signals are your corporate policies sending to employees about innovation?


• Leaders are responsible for strategic clarity - this applies to innovation too


• Do leaders need to change their focus from shareholders to employees if they want to drive innovation?


• Does a leader enable people to take risk? ("If you don't fall down skiing, you won't get better")


• Adobe has a program to allow executives to bet their bonus on ideas they believe in


• SAP is trying to implement a mulligan policy to encourage people to take innovation risks

Overall the session was very lively, with good discussion. People definitely want to create cultures of innovation in their organization, and are finding their way there little by little. Ultimately, you don't make an innovative culture, you make changes to strategy, policies, processes, systems, and training that cause slight changes in people's behavior that over time can effect how innovative a culture becomes.


What things in your mind help to make a culture more innovative or restrict it from being so?


More from the Brightidea Birds of a Feather (BOF 3.0):

• BOF 3.0 - Ruffle Your Innovation Feathers


• BOF 3.0 - Innovation Fatigue Session

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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.

World Innovation Forum Posts (updated)

I recently updated some of my World Innovation Forum (May 5-6, 2009) posts to add slides for some of the presentations.

You can also download the World Innovation Forum Executive Summary from our site - lovingly assembled by business analysts from ExecuNet.

The conference lineup included - Paul Saffo, CK Prahalad, Vijay Govindarajan, Clayton Christensen, Fred Krupp, and Dan Ariely

Here is a list of all of the posts from my World Innovation Forum trip with the posts that have been updated with slides at the top:

• Paul Saffo (updated)


• Vijay Govindarajan (updated)


• Clayton Christensen (1st Session) (updated)


• Dan Ariely (updated)


• ?WhatIf! Innovation Field Trip (Apple Store and OZOlab)


• Interview with CEO Alexander Tsiaras of TheVisualMD


• Brightidea visit with Co-founder Vincent Carbone


• CK Prahalad


• Clayton Christensen (2nd Session)


• Fredd Krupp

A thank you goes out to HSM Americas and the presenters for the slides.


Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

Interview - Brightidea Co-Founder - Vincent Carbone

I had the opportunity to meet with BrightIdea co-founder and COO Vincent Carbone on May 7, 2009. We had a fascinating conversation about the last ten years of innovation, and the history and future vision of Brightidea.

Brightidea was founded by Matthew Greeley and Vincent Carbone in 1999. Matt was interested in evolution and the shift from physical to mental evolution and he was very interested in exploring how mental evolution could be accelerated. There was a belief that by getting people to more openly share ideas, groups of people could create better ideas.

Brightidea started as an openidea exchange at brightidea.com with a broad set of topics that people could contribute ideas to - the structure being modeled loosely on the DMOZ project. The original model was advertising-supported. Individuals from all around the world submitted ideas on any topic of their choice, and then other members of the brightidea.com community voted on the ideas.

To entice people to participate in the community by submitting ideas, there was a certain amount of revenue-sharing with the people who submitted the ideas (based on the amount of ad revenue an idea generated). The more page visits an idea got, the more revenue there was to go around. The brightidea community had everything from teachers sharing lesson plans to housewives sharing cleaning tips. The concept was doing really well and growing....

But, then the internet bubble burst, additional venture capital became scarce (especially for ad-supported ventures), and advertising revenue decreased substantially. This left Brightidea re-evaluating what to do next.

Looking around, one thing Matt and Vincent saw that there was a trend of decreasing manufacturing costs and increasing digitization. This was causing the 'what' to make, to become more important than the 'how' to make it. As a result, Brightidea changed its name to General Idea and decided to build systems for organizations to help them decide what to make. They went out and asked companies if they could use a system to manage ideas internally. The US Army had one of the oldest suggestion systems in the country at the time and they were very receptive to the idea. So, General Idea helped the US Army to automate their paper system and it really took off.

In 2001, Gartner coined the term 'Idea Management' and named General Idea as one of the key companies in this 'new' sector. After overhauling their product offering, General Idea began to grow again, and things really took off after 2006. As you can see it took a long time for companies to start feeling comfortable soliciting ideas from their employees, and only recently are companies beginning to feel comfortable extending their idea solicitation outside the organization.

Companies like P&G, Starbucks, and Adobe have made this leap outside their organizations and more are starting to follow suit. Before long the opportunity might even present itself for Brightidea to re-launch the brightidea community. Organizations and individuals might finally be ready to engage in open innovation on a large scale.

Companies don't just see innovation as being about coming up with new products and services. Harley Davidson is using software for things like improving factory safety and American Express has a "Recessionomics" initiative. During the downturn, organizations are adapting idea management systems to focus on cost saving ideas as well. Even President Obama is soliciting government employees for cost saving ideas - there must be a plan for managing and evaluating these if the call to action is to succeed.

Currently, according to Vincent, the #2 reason for employees leaving organizations is that they feel their ideas are not heard - #1 is inadequate compensation.

This is leading to idea generation and management finally becoming widely understood as a necessary part of the organizational infrastructure. As a result, Brightidea is positioning themselves for rapid growth over the next two years. At the same time, you see other organizations like Innography adding things like idea evaluation tools to the portfolio of available innovation tools, and Vince sees no reason why the tools won't expand to idea development as more data comes online.

The goal of Brightidea's software is not replace any decision making processes, but instead to enhance them. Their ten years of experience has taught them that the wisdom of the crowd bubbles up from simple +/- voting followed by secondary evaluation of top ideas using specialized custom scorecards.

Ultimately, organizations want to know earlier and with greater certainty whether or not something will succeed so they can allocate funding to the ideas that are most likely to succeed and have a large impact on the organization. To achieve this, Brightidea is trying to create a flexible platform that allows organizations to distribute idea generation and management to smaller and smaller organizational units while allowing for increased sharing of information and ideas. This is partially achieved through new features like ad-hoc challenges, twitter-like functionality, facebook-like functionality, and improved reporting.

So what is the future?

People understand the need for continuous improvement, disruptive innovation, blue ocean strategy, and more open innovation. Now there is room for new thought leaders to emerge and drive organizations forward from understanding the need for innovation, towards building continuously-improving innovation processes and systems.

Companies don't have an inherent right to be immortal. As innovation cycles compress, the companies that will win in the future are not the companies that come up with one great idea and diffuse it into the marketplace, but the companies that can create an innovation wave with peaks that continue to get closer together.

Let the mental evolution continue.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Vincent and it has triggered a couple of insights in my mind that I plan to combine into a white paper to post on the site soon.

Please sign up for my monthly newsletter if you'd like to receive a link to this when it becomes available.

What do you think?

Braden Kelley - @innovate on Twitter

Enhancing the Enhancement Request Process - Mentor Graphics

I had the opportunity to attend the Brightidea Innovation Leaders "Birds of a Feather" Conference. The event was a peer-to-peer discussion on innovation management among innovation executives and managers at top global corporations. The conference provided a forum to exchange ideas and best practices on implementing innovation in large organizations, and there were presentations by WMS and Mentor Graphics. This is the second in a series of two articles highlighting the key takeaways from the two presentations, based on the notes I took at the event.

The Mentor Graphics presentation was given by Kim Kelley, Service Delivery Program Manager.

Mentor Graphics is a leading player in the electronic design automation (EDA) market. They are engaged in developing, manufacturing, marketing and supporting of EDA products. The company's software and hardware solutions enable integrated device manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers and semiconductor foundries to develop electronic products.

Situation

The old process of managing enhancement requests wasn't working and was impeding Mentor's support process. All the enhancement ideas were going through the same rigorous ticketing scenario as a customer support issue.

Solution

To resolve this issue, Mentor decided to use BrightIdea to manage the process and out of their 600 products, Mentor zoomed down to 1 or 2 product lines to get their feet wet, and pursued the effort in primarily a top-down approach.

Similar to WMS, Mentor pursued a structured launch process including some of these key components:

• Identify a face to the customer


• Seeded the site with 26 initial ideas from existing ideas (top ones they were considering)


• Set up a badge for Mentor Graphics submitted ideas


• They pre-launched with selective key customers (people involved in betas, valuable customers)


• We worked with legal and got a terms of use put in place that gives us ownership of any idea submitted


• We also implemented a privacy policy


• We use Google Analytics and the reporting capability in BrightIdea to track our site usage

Learnings

Some of the learnings they had from their launch process and usage of the tool include:

• The software worked, but our pre-launch customers were stronger contributors (so next time we increased pre-launch size)


• The tool is definitely solving the problem we had between support requests and enhancement requests


• Financial incentives were not necessary, people feel ownership of their ideas


• The power of the community or the wisdom of the crowd is starting to have an effect on product development


• People are having candid debate around other customer's ideas and even offering alternative solutions


• Interestingly the seed ideas that we put in initially are not the ideas that customers really want (highest ranking is #5 now)


• We are not only looking at the top ideas, but also looking at ideas that go with them (and combining them at the back end)


• We also have learned that employees should also be able to put in ideas (but not vote) and otherwise contribute


• Seeding the site was important as a way of setting the tone - but of course it is important for people to see changes that have come as a result of their contribution

All in all, a great success for both the customers and for Mentor Graphics.

What do you think?

@innovate

Building an Innovation Culture in Gaming

Introduction

I had the opportunity to attend the Brightidea Innovation Leaders "Birds of a Feather" Conference. The event was a peer-to-peer discussion on innovation management among innovation executives and managers at top global corporations. The conference provided a forum to exchange ideas and best practices on implementing innovation in large organizations, and there were presentations by WMS and Mentor Graphics. This is the first of a series of two articles highlighting the key takeaways from the two presentations, based on the notes I took at the event.

The WMS presentation was given by Shridhar Joshi, VP, Global Product Strategy, and Al Thomas, Executive Director, Advanced Game R&D.

WMS has sprung forth from the loins of Williams Bally Midway combination and its heritage of pinball machines to become the dominant player in the video slot machine business.

WMS leadership set innovation as a core principal in an attempt to establish a culture of innovation. They set out with two key questions:

• How do we make every employee feel that innovation is part of their job?


• How do we maximize our innovation potential?

To achieve their innovation culture goals, WMS had to establish certain focus areas, had to establish certain structures that allowed somewhat for spontaneous formation of cross-fuctional teams, and had to form an advisory panel of experts to lead, guide, and evaluate innovations. In addition to creating on-boarding training on innovation for all employees, WMS also had to put training in place to replace panel experts over time.

Other foundational pieces include:

• A process for what to do with ideas that people submit (internal and external ideas)


• Training on the idea submission system along with training on how to innovate


• A reward and recognition program


• Quarterly innovation awards luncheon


• An annual innovation awards dinner


• Marketing team publishes a quarterly innovation newsletter

Seven keys to success:

1. Building a program formally before launching it


2. Launching it with the full support of top management and a communications plan to support the launch


3. Participation - People want to participate (75% so far) - we're tapping the brain of the entire company


4. Consistency - We have been able to maintain involvement over time


5. Fearless Leaders at the top


6. Light-hearted approach makes innovation accessible


7. Having a tool at the backbone has been key (shows that we have a process to manage the ideas that come in)

As a result of the foundational pieces and keys to success coming together, WMS has been able to create a "Culture of Systemic Innovation" because of the following:

• They didn't create artificial financial metrics


• Employees are free to do (submit) what they feel is important


• Panel of experts are responsible for evaluating the financials


• We find the organic innovators in the company and make them the spokespeople

WMS has built an innovation portal, of which Bright Idea's idea management system is but just one part:

• "I have an idea" (submission)


• "I'm in need of a solution" (search and innovation challenge creation)


• "I'm new to this site" (tool training)


• "Be a better innovator" (innovation training)

And a few final takeaways:

• The promise of financial rewards are not key, in fact they might hamper participation


• It is important to also provide the ability to start a specific innovation challenge for problems people are seeking a solution to


• The BrightIdea solution does not replace any existing departmental solution (i.e. new game idea submission from game designers)


• The BrightIdea system helps to make the IP group more efficient in some ways by helping to shape ideas before they get to the IP group (curtails hallway conversations, etc.)


• A lot of the ideas are about things like improving manufacturing, hr benefits, etc.


• Rather than setting aside a certain amount of time every day for innovation, it is more important for managers to be flexible and help promising projects succeed


• It is important to allow ideas to gather strength on their merits, to allow people to comment and vote on ideas, and to provide mentors to help shape promising ideas


• Breaking the surface tension is one of the keys to sparking innovation


• Getting participation is a function of how committed you are to giving people proof points that you are listening (moving the cafeteria soda machine example) vs. The suggestion box is a paper shredder


• Inviting the third person to the idea session often creates a third idea that the first two would have never imagined

Conclusion

All of this comes together to reinforce the difference between innovation theory and practice. Innovation and working with clients are, of course, my passions. After listening to WMS I came away with the feeling that they "get it" and that they are making a lot of the right moves to set themselves up for success, but I also noted that there are numerous other parallel "innovation" tools and processes that may be an area of great opportunity for increasing their chances of achieving continuous innovation.

I would entreat all of you out there in formal or informal innovation management roles, to not only give yourself a broad base of knowledge in innovation theory, but to also seek out other companies ahead of you on the path and learn from their successes and mistakes. Innovation is a dirty business, an emerging discipline, and the reality is actually far more interesting than the theory. For another inside peek into practical attempts to create innovation, I encourage you to check out a book with an unusual (or possibly innovative) organization scheme I am currently reviewing - "Inside Project Red Stripe: Incubating Innovation and Teamwork at the Economist".

So, if the people at WMS keep it up, chances are that every time you go to a casino and play the video slot machines, you (or the casino) will have a better experience than the time before.

What do you think?

@innovate