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

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

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

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

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

1. Head over to our new Facebook page and become a fan


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


• Clicking on the discussions tab and responding to the topic there


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


3. Do this by midnight GMT on March 21, 2010


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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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

7 Keys to Innovation - European Style

by Kathy Robison

Two weeks ago, I attended the Front End Innovation Europe Conference (FEI Europe) held in Amsterdam. One of the highlights was seeing the car in the picture above in person. Yes, they drove it into a large conference room inside the Hilton Hotel. It is the 2010 BMW Vision EfficientDynamics Concept car, and it is even more cool in person than in the photo. It's BMW's answer to the green car revolution. Though perhaps a little late to the game, I suspect it will eventually prove to be a huge success as they continue to do engineering with more style than most other car makers. In addition to seeing the car, we got to hear directly from Adrian van Hooydonk, the Director of Design of BMW Group and mastermind behind the group that developed the car. They clearly rose to the challenge of eloquently working Future Sustainability into their brand of the Joy of Mobility in a record amount of time.

We also received a lesson from Josephine Green, a well-known leader in trends and strategy from Philips Design, on Engaging with the Future Differently. It was a real eye opener for many. We also heard fantastic examples of innovation in conjunction with universities from Sigvald Harryson with Copenhagen Business School that left us all realizing the vastness of the untapped resources lurking around our universities. The event concluded with a superb presentation from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and an interactive session that literally no one wanted to leave. All in all... a huge success! If you missed FEI Europe, don't miss FEI USA 2010 in Boston this coming May (see editor's note for 20% off). I suspect it to be equally as tantalizing.

I've written previously about the Pitfalls of Innovation, and I still believe that far more talk about innovation occurs than actual innovation because true innovation comes from doing not talking. Just go to any third world country where people are forced to live with minimal resources and you will see what true innovation is all about. It comes more from unmet needs and a gap in resources than heavily padded budgets purposed toward the never-ending replacement of old gadgets with new gadgets. None-the-less, well done conferences such as FEI, are well worth it.

Below are the 7 Keys to an Innovative Business. Some are my standard favorites, and others I picked up at the FEI Europe Conference.

7 Keys to an Innovative Business

1. Multiple Approaches to Innovation Provide the Best Results


• Hire people with innovative characteristics
  
• Seek partnerships - the more unlikely, the better
  
• Lead users and co-invention can be extremely useful in some sectors
  
• Complex Coalitions (public/private/univ/venture/research) are coming


2. Don't Overlook the Importance of an Innovative Business Model


• Ensure culture and vision include a commitment to innovation
  
• Business as usual is no longer an option for 21st century success
  
• Traditional hierarchical and rigid organizations don't foster creativity
  
• Change should be the fuel of your business model not what creates a crisis


3. Find the Right Balance Between Old, Adjacent, and New Business/Products/Services


• Varies between industries, companies, and brands
  
• Don't chuck out the old, just for the sake of it
  
• How much of the value of your firm is based on its future potential?


4. Innovation Requires Optimism, Curiosity, and a Splash of the Future


• Spend more time studying the fringe - the middle is already known
  
• Analyze what isn't and not what is - finding the gaps
  
• Understand the "big think" trends
  
• Get to know younger generations, they will be running things soon


5. From Linear, to Exponential, to Circular


• From "out of the box thinking" to "thinking without boxes"
  
• Renewable and sustainable are circular concepts and here to stay
  
• Constant feedback loops are critical to staying ahead of the curve


6. Cultivating the Right Mindset is 90% of the Battle


• Learning from failure is a key to success
  
• Blur the lines and anxiety around internal vs external
  
• Collaboration with competitors can be the best option in some situations


7. Leadership Sans Egos


• Cultivating trust requires the courage to be vulnerable
  
• Constructive conflict produces the best answers
  
• Business model intimacy - creating solutions with customers
  
• Money is a low-level motivator... find out what really motivates your employees

Editor's Note: As an added value to our Blogging Innovation subscribers, we have negotiated a 20% discount for you. Just register using the discount code - FEI2010BRADEN.


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Kathy Robison is the CEO of YURU, (The Guru Is You), dedicated to assisting businesses to realize the full potential of their success through innovative business strategies, executive coaching and leadership development.

Sex and Creativity

Is there a connection? Study shows number of sexual partners corresponds to creative output.

by Idris Mootee

Creative people are fun. Creative people are likeable. But many creative minds are unorganized and sometimes deficient in handling complex logic. Some creative minds are highly analytical too, although the processing was sort of in the back and you don't see it.

Creative people are more social than others. Here's a case in point. Psychologists at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Open University found that professional artists and poets have about twice as many sexual partners as other people. The study also shows that the average number of sexual partners increased as creative output went up. So the more creative you are, the more sexual partners you should have. You tell me if this true. Now I understand why so many people want to be a creative director.

More on creativity and sex drive. The desire to be creative or feel creative, whether expressed in music, industrial design, art, fashion or photography or film, coexists with the primal urge to commit the sex act, and other layers in between. It is like onions that we have many layers. What if your desire for sex is weak, does it mean you are less creative than others? If you buy the above argument, then this should the case. When sex is suppressed in some cultures, does this in effect force the libido up into "higher" forms, and thereby further enhance creativity? I don't know.

I believe our creative motivations are often based on some of our most primal passions, such as joy, fear, anger, love and lust. In an article "Creative Juice - A Dozen Key Lessons for Creative Dreamers", Suzanne Falter-Barns quotes Deepak Chopra:


"Creativity is ultimately sexual - I'm sorry - but it is!"


I am not a Chopra fan, but he may be right this time. Love and lust make us think differently in that they trigger global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking. Love and lust are good for creativity.

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

Are you crimping your innovation funnel?

New Product Development Requires Fresh Perspective on 'Creative' and 'Structure'

by Robert F. Brands

New product development can be a misunderstood concept.

Is the "product" actually a product? Or can it be a process? Is it a mandate from the C Suite? Or can it be a suggestion from the factory floor, the retail showroom, the Idea Box or a customer tip?

How wide is your idea funnel? And how do you treat ideas once they land in the organization's "idea hopper"? (see the blog post on "Innovation and Idea Management" to discover how to handle in-bound ideas).

Answer these questions, and you've placed your finger on the pulse of how your organization embraces new product development (NPD).

NPD best blossoms in that place where creativity commingles with structure - where fresh thinking is fostered in a nursery of structured liberation. Think of ideas as if they were offspring: They should be free to roam and explore, but they need fences - structure - in their lives to ensure safe maturation in a controlled environment.

The same is true for NPD - regardless of whether products are widgets for sale or processes envisioned to improve the organization. For the concepts of "creative" and "structured" are not mutually exclusive. Creativity is the thinking that goes behind the ideation of a new product. Structure helps define and determine the vetting process that NPD must go through.

Keep in mind that each step of this entire process has distinct "sub-steps," if you will, that must be accomplished even before a Go/No-Go decision can be made. These often are done together - and simultaneously. This vetting and completed steps will than determine which products pass the Go/No-Go decision - regardless of the source or even the potential "profitability" of any new product.

These are important distinctions. When creating a foundational NPD process, all ideas should be welcomed from all sources - from the customer service rep to the C-level exec. No short-shrift or free pass here. If the structured vetting process, one established by the Chief Idea Officer and his/her team, gives a Thumbs-Down to a new idea, the source should not spin that determination.

Regardless of whether a product is seen as a revenue source, or just an internal concept or process, that, too, should have little impact on a product's viability or survivability in the organization. Good "products" don't have to result in revenues; they can enhance processes, that in turn, can boost profitability.

As you're pondering your NPD capabilities, consider whether your pipeline accommodate simultaneous multiple product development streams? A new, physical product for sale should not force a process-focused product to be shelved. This level of scalability ensures a wide "innovation highway" - one that is lean, adaptive and flexible, and can handle various products at the same time.

Finally, is your organization prepared to measure the results - not of the new product, but of the process itself? Do you have a system in place to gather, measure and share both the success and the stumbling blocks? Are you prepared to ask yourself, how did the process work?

The truth is, future success can be closely tied into past accomplishments - if you're willing to ask the right questions, create the right environment, and learn along the way.

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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.

Innovation - Elite Unit or Crowdsource?

by Hutch Carpenter

A classic dilemma for companies is determining the best way to foster innovation. There are many good books with different approaches. Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" has influenced a generation's thinking about innovation. He focuses management and entrepreneurs' attention on the Big I: 'disruptive innovation'.

One outcome of the popularity of Christensen's book is the awareness people have that entrenched business practices can inhibit companies' ability to recognize and address discontinuous innovations from new market entrants. Motorola, for example, is often held up as an example of this. The company continued to develop only analog cell phones even as the digital phones were getting traction. In clinging to analog, which it dominated, it fell far behind in the mobile phone market.

A key practice espoused by Christensen is for companies to tackle discontinuous innovations by creating separate divisions. These divisions have an R&D profile, meaning they are funded without requiring a financial return. They do not have to prove themselves to sales or other parts of the organization. This gives them the room they need to figure out how to approach the impending market shift.

The issue with the popularization of this framework is that it sets up a binary approach to innovation. You're either addressing disruptive or discontinuous innovations, or you're executing on yesterday's business. It's this dichotomy that obscures the value of innovations that move organizations forward, competing to increase market share and profits.

To that end, let's examine two ways companies create work structures for innovation.

Integrated or Separate Innovation

The graphic below highlight two very different ways to approach innovation. And that's a good thing.


Separate Division

• As advised by Clayton Christensen, this approach is best for companies that need to address disruptive innovations. And all companies need to address disruptive innovations.These days, it's not a matter of if, but when. For fundamental market shifts, too much is invested in the current operations for companies to address changes. Freeing a group of people from these constraints is critical, if the corporate culture is not open to big-bet innovations.

A couple examples of interest here. First, let's go back to Motorola. Yes, the company muffed it badly on the transition from analog to digital. But there was something that it did right years before. Motorola researcher Jim Mikulski could see in the 1960s that existing cellular technology was insufficient for the emerging uses of the mobile technology. He had a new technology to replace it, and asked the head of Motorola's communications division, John Mitchell to fund its development. Mitchell said "no,"


Arguing that 400MHz technology offered sufficient capacity and met consumer needs. The Communications Division current product line was the market leader, and a new product, which would likely cannibalize the current system, was deemed to be both unnecessary and potentially harmful to this business line.


So Mikulski found refuge in Motorola's Corporate Research Laboratory. He worked on the new technology there, receiving funding for its development. When his view of the coming changes proved to be true, Motorola was ready with its new technology.

In other words, he addressed innovation that affected the communications division in a completely separate division.

Microsoft, on the other had, has programmatically set up a separate division for innovation. The Microsoft Research group works on ideas that may never have commercial appeal. But some of their work has resulted in product features and direction for its new Natal gaming system, its Bing search engine, and an upcoming release of Outlook email.

They have a separate division, but the innovations arguably are of the sustaining variety, not disruptive.


Integrated into Daily Work

• In this work structure, everyone is involved in innovation. The company sets expectations, and encourages employees' to share ideas. Done right, this is in-the-flow stuff. Employees are encountering issues to be addressed daily, and they're hearing new customer feedback all the time. They are well-positioned to come up with innovative solutions and products, if senior management makes that a priority.

Whirlpool is a good example of this. In 1999, then-CEO David R. Whitwam made the determination that Whirlpool needed to stop competing on price, and make innovation its central strategy. Fast forward to today, and the results have been stellar. Whirlpool has escaped competing as a commodity vendor, with $4 billion in revenue (21% of total sales) generated from its innovation efforts. Are they satisfied? No. CEO Jeff Fettig stated that while participation in innovation from 5,000 employees is good, he's looking to increase it to 15,000.

That's integrating innovation into employees' daily work for sustaining innovation. In this case, sustaining innovation has been the source of growth and profits.

Another company where innovation is part of everyday work is 3M. The company is legendary for its innovation. And clearly, the encouragement of all employees to be part of innovation has taken hold. For instance, there was this story recently in Fast Company:


3M told a great innovation story at the ARF annual conference about a new product that started with a complaint call into customer care. The representative did his own research online, came up with a solution, filmed a video that he put on YouTube and re-contacted the customer to see if that is what he was looking for.


The sheer volume of ideas that employees have to improve companies' existing businesses puts a premium on crowdsourcing ideas. And inevitably, some of that culture and the ideas emerging from sustaining innovation will relate to discontinuous or disruptive innovations.

Why Not Do Both?

Google is a good example of a company that does both. Its 20% time for employees to devote to innovation is the stuff of business legend. And according to the company, half of its new products result from this employee time.

But then look at Google Wave. This project was done beyond 20% time. It was actually a completely separate project developed by a 5-person 'startup' team in Australia, far from the company's Mountain View, CA headquarters. Google Wave is transformative, and will likely usher new design principles into a host of software applications.

Google is a good example of an innovation-led company. They mix the elite unit approach to innovation with the everyday encouragement for employees to innovate.

There's not this dichotomy of "all disruptive/discontinuous innovation, or you're just falling behind." Rather, it's a smart blend of the strategies.

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

The Front End Of Innovation Challenge

by Stefan Lindegaard

In a recent meeting in one of my network groups, we focused on the front end of innovation as a couple of the members have current challenges on how to identify and develop ideas in the very early stages.

I remember attending my first Front End Of Innovation conference in Boston five years ago. Hundreds of people participated and there was a great energy. At that time, front end of innovation was the talk of the town in the innovation community just as open innovation is today. Interestingly enough, the front end of innovation is still one of the key challenges for innovation leaders and the Front End of Innovation conferences continue to attract hundreds of participants.

I wonder why this is the case. Has the innovation community failed on developing models that provide answers to this? Are innovation leaders not good enough at learning from other's experiences on this?

In my talks with innovation leaders on this, the issues evolve around the funnel system and stage-gate like models; how to identify the ideas and get them from one stage to the next. Another key issue is how you organize for this. It is my experience that companies often make a couple of mistakes on this. They are:

1. Too much focus on internal sources

• Many innovation leaders mostly talk about internal and employee-driven ideas. There is not enough focus on how to involve external sources in the front end of innovation. This will change as open innovation moves ahead, but why not try to get a head start on this.

2. Too much focus on ideas and too little on processes and people

• I have always said that getting ideas is not an issue. There are plenty of them. If you do not find them internally, it is because you do not look in the right places or because you need to include external sources to a higher degree. The real issue on ideas is how you filter and later on mature them.

So a lot of ideas do not necessarily equal success. This only occurs when you have the proper processes in place and more importantly when you have the right people at the right time.

See this post: People First, Processes Next, Then Ideas


3. No filtering process in place

• The "everything goes" process does not work. You need to set up filters to make sure the early ideas fit the strategic intent you are working towards. You can get an idea of what it looks like when this is not the case in this blog post: How Not to Implement Open Innovation

4. Processes are too complex

• I have seen several cases where companies created processes that attended every issue related to getting ideas through the funnel and their stage gate processes. It looked very good on paper, but it did not work in the real world. Sometimes you need to keep things simple and leave room for "learn-as-you-go" development.

These are just some quick thoughts on this. It would be great to hear your perspectives on why the front end of innovation continues to be such a big challenge.

You can also check out this group at LinkedIn if you want to get an idea of the issues people discuss on this topic: Front End Of Innovation

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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

People First, Processes Next, Then Ideas

by Stefan Lindegaard

The chief thing you as an innovation leader must realize is that when it comes to making innovation happen, people matter more than ideas.

Take a moment to think about that. Many innovation initiatives fail miserably because their leaders don't understand this simple fact. In fact, it is actually more important to have A-grade people than it is to have a slew of A-grade ideas because A-grade people can take a B-grade idea - or perhaps even a C-grade idea - and turn it into a successful reality. B-grade people, on the other hand, will struggle with even truly great ideas.

So before you get all fired up about generating a ton of ideas, first figure out how you're going to match those ideas to people who can make things happen.

As you start this work, here's another key point to remember: the skills needed to lead and manage a project within the existing core business - where innovation is likely to be incremental and resources plentiful - are significantly different from the skills needed to overcome the challenges and obstacles that greet almost any new business project - where resources may be hard to come by and the innovation involved may be significant or even radical. You need to staff new business projects with people having a mindset and toolbox that match this different challenge.

I recently coached teams working to create new business ideas with a big potential. The managers more or less thought this was business development as usual - as they usually do with core projects - and they did not understand the dynamics of such new business development or innovation projects. Their biggest mistake was that they attached people without passion for the specific challenge to the idea - you need people who have their heart and skin in the game when it comes to developing innovation projects, especially if it has some kind of radical or breakthrough potential.

You also need different people for the different phases of the innovation process. Just as some entrepreneurs are better at running a company at its very early stage and others are better at helping the business scale once the product is launched, so too are there intrapreneurs who are better suited both in terms of mindset and skills to various phases of the innovation process.

Where to Look

Once you accept the importance of finding not only the right ideas but also the right people - your company's potential intrapreneurs - how do you identify these folks? A few possibilities - from the simple to the more complex - include:

1. Look around you

• One simple way to find the people you need is to look for people who persistently follow up on ideas they have previously put forth. You have scores of employees who submit ideas and expect others to deliver on this. Nothing happens in such cases. But if you can find one person who keeps showing passion and persistence about their one idea, you'll be farther ahead than if you have 600 people who each submitted an idea but who don't really have an interest in doing the hard work required to make their idea real. With one persistent and qualified contributor - and a good idea - things can happen fast.


• Look for people who are persistent about their ideas, people who work on their ideas on their own and who perhaps even gather other people to help work on it. If the idea is good and you have this kind of person to drive it, you have something to build on.

2. Internal business plan competition

• A much more formalized way to identify potential intrapreneurs is through internal business plan competitions similar to those held by leading universities. A well-designed competition accomplishes many things. It helps you identify intrapreneurs, moves ideas with real potential forward, helps participants upgrade their intrapreneurial skills and provides a method for matching these A-grade people with good ideas in the future.

3. Intrapreneur-in-residence program

• Why not adopt the entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) practice that venture capital firms use and create your own intrapreneur-in-residence program? The role of an EIR varies, but typically it involves an individual who wants to start a company. Sometimes the entrepreneur has already spent a great deal of time on an idea that the venture company might invest in upon further development or the EIR acts as a 'partner' and helps the venture capitalist evaluate potential deals where the entrepreneur has a particular expertise.


• An EIR might also spend some time with an existing portfolio company to provide his or her functional expertise. In this scenario, the EIR will sometimes enter the company as a full time executive (typically CEO or some 'C' level role) if the company and the executive feel there is a good fit.

Why not use this model to establish an intrapreneur-in-residence program within your company? This could be an adjunct to a business plan competition. Having identified people with intrapreneurial potential in the competition, you can assign them to the role of intrapreneur-in-residence for a set period of time. The key here is to define what role this individual would have; this should be based on what outcomes you'd like to achieve with such a program.

The approach is especially useful when companies work to develop a new platform of business activities that in the early beginning still consists of many small, early stage projects. You wait to see how this specifically talented intrapreneur should be brought into action and until you decide on a full-time executive role in one of the projects the intrapreneur consults on the many projects.

I hope you share my belief that people matter more than ideas. As a follow-up post to this, I will soon look into idea harvesting and filtering strategies and other techniques to make sure the ideas you generate are on target.

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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.