Innovation Perspectives - Assessing and Building Innovation Strengths

This is the fourth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Dan Keldsen

In the absence of explicit top-level innovation support, how can you go from an "innovating army of one" (always useful, but frequently not sufficient), to building out innovation teams? And not just collections of people who want to innovate, but who are the best people for any particular challenge/problem that you are looking to overcome?


Heading: Right or Left? We Need Whole Brains on the Job

The old myth of "right-brain" vs "left-brain" continues to hurt us all in the business world. There has been an immense amount of research into the psychology, skills and strengths of innovators and creative problem solvers in the last 20 years, which is only beginning to get the attention it deserves.

Creativity in a business setting is not simply about having great product designers, marketers, and other so-called "creative people." If you do not also have creative technologists, salespeople, business development, managers, executives, etc., then you will never be able to create the full potential future of your organization, as there simply won't be enough energy, time, money and resources dedicated to the effort, unless you are incredibly lucky. Unfortunately, luck isn't a terribly reliable strategy.

While whatever made you successful in the past may have put you in a good position, perhaps even #1 in your industry, when sudden and massive changes strike, such as new competition, the rise of cloud computing and SaaS when your model is dependent on legacy and on-premise deployment, or economic upheaval - staying in a "left-brain" or operational and "stay the course" rut will (more than likely) result in a crippling of your business.

You may be able to recover, but then again, if innovation only happens in an emergency, will you have let the innovation muscles and skills of your people have atrophied to the point where you can't ramp up quickly enough to react?


Innovator, Know Thyself

Fortunately, there are many ways to head off this problem, and to jump-start innovation skills at the individual level, and then to expand up from there.

Just as you would assess the requirements for a new IT system to support the business, you can assess the individual skills and strengths of your own people to understand how to best take advantage of your personnel.

There are many assessment techniques in use, although many focus on specific business or technical skills. While those skills can be and frequently *are* important, my focus is on the core and broadly applicable creative problem solving and decision making skills and strengths that we all have.

Just as the problem isn't as black and white as left-brain vs. right-brain, it is not just that you are either an innovator or you are not.


We use an assessment called VIEW, which has now been used with over 20,000 people, to assess innovation across three continuums:

1. Orientation to change - Your responses to or ways of dealing with novelty, structure, and authority (Explorer to Developer)


2. Manner of processing - How you manage your energy and the energy of others during problem solving (External to Internal)


3. Ways of deciding - When making decisions, do you turn first to considering people needs, relationships, and harmony, or on the specific task and the quality of the outcomes and results? (People to Task)

By assessing the individual skills and strengths of yourself and at least your immediate and "normal" team members, you can specifically create teams that have the strengths and skills that you NEED to solve a given problem, rather than whomever happens to be around, has tenure, the "expected" technical skills, etc..

Using such an assessment can quickly point out that the teams you've created in the past, while likely to have been made of smart people, had the opposite innovation skills and strengths for the problems you've tried to solve.

Asking an extreme "in the box" thinker to come up with the next new, radical idea, while it can happen, is unlikely.

Target team creation by stacking the deck with the best of the best for that problem and you increase successful outcomes dramatically, and scientifically, repeatably.

I'm not suggesting that having technical skills to execute on ideas is not necessary, but having the skills to build/develop comes after you have first uncovered what you should be building, and those skills do not always exist in the same person.

Have you experienced working in teams that are clearly mis-matched for the problem at hand? Or perfectly aligned? Let's surface the war stories, as this is an area that needs far more attention than it typically receives.



You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Dan Keldsen is Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected in Boston, MA, providing analysis, consulting and training services to organizations worldwide on the application of technology to knowledge workers and managers.

Making Innovation Work in a Downturn

by Dan Keldsen

In this latest podcast, IAM Talking with Carlos Dominguez, Senior Vice President in Cisco's Office of the Chairman of the Board and CEO.

Carlos has worked at Cisco for 17 years in a variety of roles, and advocates for the broad and creative use of technologies that are transforming how companies do business, creating distinct competitive advantages and new business models for those who adopt them.

Dominguez says that video, Web 2.0 applications and the increasing use of social networks, at home and at work, are at the heart of the collaboration revolution that is helping companies use the power of collective intelligence to produce revolutionary ideas for new products, better customer service and greater cost reductions.

It was a sincere pleasure of speaking at length with Carlos, and for my part, I believe we had a stunning array of innovation and collaboration-related tangents that emerged, which I believe are well worth paying attention to. Not your average interview, by any stretch.

A sampling of the highlights until we have a transcription ready:

Social networking and open innovation:
How did Journey find the next replacement singer after languishing for years with the missing voice of Steve Perry (lead singer) in the late 80s? YouTube and social networking located a replacement singer from... well, you'll have to listen to find out.

Virtual meetings and worlds:

Cisco is not immune from the worldwide dip in the economy, has taken steps to ban all large scale travel for their sales meetings, executive meetings - at a 10x cost reduction (minimally), and with no perceived decrease in the richness or validity of the outcomes. What is the role of telepresence? Gaming as a competitive driver for salespeople? Take a listen.

Culture:
To paraphrase Carlos:

"Most great innovations are killed within organizations... as they are threats to the existing business... and the Cisco culture is specifically built and tested to prevent potential ideas from being killed"

Cisco has a requirement for executives and managers each quarter, or at the least, yearly, to indicate exactly what they are doing within their business unit to Innovate (BIG I in my vernacular or "disruptive innovation" to some) versus innovate (small i or improvememt) within their areas. How does this compare with YOUR organization?

Healthcare:
What is Cisco doing themselves, internally, to innovate in the health and wellness of it's own employees as well as their families? And what has the impact of that investment been?

And much, much more in this slightly more than 30 minute interview...

We had some issues with Skype introducing noise into the system, but keep your ears open for some fantastic points on the state of Innovation within Cisco, Cisco's customers, and what Carlos' experiences in seeing and working with some of the most cutting-edge technologies available, make possible.

Listen now!

Download the MP3 of this podcast

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Dan Keldsen is Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected in Boston, MA, providing analysis, consulting and training services to organizations worldwide on the application of technology to knowledge workers and managers.

Innovation Perspectives - Strategy From Above?

This is the fifth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on The Importance of Innovation Strategy. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Dan Keldsen

Arguably there is no important time than NOW to ensure that your organization has an innovation strategy.

After all, without a strategy, how are you going to making the changes to your business that you need to make, in order to survive the economic storm, and (if you move quickly and intelligently) to be well positioned to blow past your competition as the economy improves?


But strategy isn't enough...

Yes, companies need an innovation strategy - and ideally, that innovation strategy is no different from the business strategy at large.

As very smart, and quite wealthy friend of mine once said in doing the upkeep on his home - "if you aren't fixing it up, it's breaking down." And that most certainly applies to businesses and business models as well as it does to homes.

So, innovation strategy should either be your business strategy, or a sub-set of the overall organizational strategy, but strategy, even very deep, extremely well planned strategy will not do a SINGLE thing to move your company forward.


Execution is what counts - the rest is theory

There is an IBM commercial from the early 2000s that I frequently reference, that goes something like this:

A business managers has a room full of his team, and he's proudly showing off the 3-inch thick paper binder with the "strategy that took us 12 months and 3 million dollars to create. It's the most cutting-edge strategy we've ever had, and we're extremely excited by this. My question to all of you is... can we do it?"

(dead silence for 10 seconds)

No! Absolutely not! No way!

(the manager is stricken, deathly pale as the team lampoons the strategy)


Strategy needs to connect to reality


By connecting to reality, I mean that while the goal may be to "think out of the box" - you need to take into account how your business operates now, what skills, technical capabilities, existing technology investments, partnerships, clients, etc. exist RIGHT NOW.

Connecting the dots between the current-state of the business, with the future-state of the business, means that the hard work to actually walk that path from here to there, needs to happen, and THAT is all about execution.


Is your team ready? Is your business ready? All of it? A certain piece of it?

Humans are adaptable creatures by nature, but some are more adaptable than others - which is why recommend taking a more scientific approach to understanding which people are equipped to create the brilliant, disruptive ideas, who can run them to actually delivery as a new product or service, who SHOULD be paired up to solve problems, who absolutely should NOT be working on similar teams, and so on. Measure their problem-solving and decision-making strengths, and take the best of the best for each type of problem that comes up, and the odds of successfully solving and executing on the solutions are that much more likely.

While it's far easier to identify the weaknesses of teams or business models, leveraging the strengths is for many, quite difficult. And while some companies can "turn on a dime" or instigate rapid change throughout the organization, more often, there is a leading and a trailing edge to certain areas of the organization that are likely to make the jump to the future first.


Lead and Pull

Leverage the adapative leaders and pull-through to the rest of your organization, and you just might be able to make your innovation strategy turn into reality.


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on The Importance of Innovation Strategy by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Dan Keldsen is Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected in Boston, MA, providing analysis, consulting and training services to organizations worldwide on the application of technology to knowledge workers and managers.