Part 1 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability

Interview - Rowan Gibson of "Innovation to the Core"

I had the opportunity to interview Rowan Gibson, co-author of "Innovation to the Core" about the book and about creating a systemic innovation capability inside organizations.

Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation. In addition to "Innovation to the Core", Rowan is author of "Rethinking The Future", and a keynote speaker at large international conferences, corporate management events and executive summits.

We have split this in-depth interview into three parts. Here is the first part of the interview:


1. When it comes to innovation, what is the biggest challenge that you see organizations facing?

The biggest challenge is not generating new ideas and opportunities. It's how to make innovation a deeply embedded capability. What usually happens is that companies focus most of their efforts on the front end of innovation - so they launch some kind of ideation initiative with a lot of hoopla and they get a whole bunch of ideas. But then they hit a wall because there is no back end - there is no organizational system for effectively screening ideas, aligning them with the business strategy, allocating seed funding and management resources, and guiding a mixed portfolio of opportunities through the pipeline toward commercialization. So, invariably, what we find is that the whole innovation effort eventually withers. And all those enthusiastic innovators inside and outside the company become cynical and discouraged as they watch their ideas go nowhere.

The real challenge, therefore, is to turn innovation from a buzzword into a systemic and widely distributed capability. It has to be woven into the everyday fabric of the company just like any other organizational capability, such as quality, or supply chain management, or customer service. In other words, for innovation to really work, and to be sustainable, it has to become a way of life for the organization. Yet how many companies have actually achieved that? The sad truth is this: most organizations today still have absolutely no model, no practical notion, of what the back end of innovation actually looks like. If you asked them to build a corporate innovation system that seamlessly integrates leadership commitment, infrastructure, processes, tools, talent development, cultural mechanisms and values, they wouldn't even know where to start. That's the challenge Innovation to the Core was meant to address.


2. Why is it so important that organizations build a foundation of insights before generating ideas?

OK, let's go back to the front end of innovation. If you're going to do this properly, what you're really looking for is not just a lot of ideas. Senior managers often complain that most of the ideas they get from their employees and customers are not very good ones. So after they open up the innovation process to everyone, everywhere, they find themselves wasting valuable management time sorting through a heap of garbage to find a few interesting submissions. That's because, frankly, they don't really understand how the innovation process actually works.

Try to look at it this way: before you start building a house, you have to gather the right materials and lay a solid foundation, right? Remember the story of the three little pigs? If you build a house from the wrong materials it can easily be blown down, so it's useless. Then there's the Bible story of the house built on sand rather than rock. It makes a similar point: if you don't have the right foundation - regardless of the quality of the building materials - the house is equally useless. So it is with new ideas and opportunities. In a sense, they need to be built from the right "materials" and they need a solid "foundation", otherwise they won't be very good. What I'm getting at here is that there is actually a front end to the front end of innovation. Before you start ideating, you need a set of really novel strategic insights. These are like the raw material out of which exciting innovation breakthroughs are built. If you ask people to innovate in a game-changing way without first building a foundation of novel strategic insights, you find that it's mostly a waste of time. You get a lot of ideas that are either not new at all, or so crazy that they're way out in space.

So how do you develop those all-important insights? I teach companies a methodology for doing that in a systematic way - it's called "The Four Lenses of Innovation". The fact is that in order to discover new ideas and opportunities of any real value, people need to stretch their thinking beyond the conventional. They need to develop fresh perspectives. So the "Four Lenses" represent four specific types of perspectives, or ways of looking at the world, that innovators typically use to come to their breakthrough discoveries. They are (1) Challenging orthodoxies, (2) Harnessing trends, (3) Leveraging resources in new ways, and (4) Understanding unmet needs. By using these lenses, or these particular angles of view, it's possible to systematically look through the familiar and spot the unseen. That's how you discover those deep insights that others have overlooked or ignored.

Once you have gathered a collection of really inspiring insights, you can then do your ideation work. You start thinking about what kinds of ideas and opportunities could be built on these unexamined dogma, unexploited trends, underutilized resources, and unvoiced customer needs. And what that gives you is not just a high quantity of ideas but also a high quality. Rather than just pulling ideas out of the air, you generate opportunities that are grounded. They are based on real industry orthodoxies that deserved to be challenged, real discontinuities that could potentially reshape the business landscape, real competencies and assets that could be leveraged to create opportunities beyond the boundaries of the existing business, and real customer needs that have not yet been addressed. So you inspire ideas that are connected to the real world; they are not in some crazy, unbounded creative space. They are founded on realities - things you can test and validate.

Now imagine that instead of merely inviting everyone, everywhere to "go forth and innovate", you actually gave them access to these powerful strategic insights via a web-based tool, and you taught them how to ideate effectively. Can you see how that would dramatically enhance their innovation performance? That's what I'm currently doing with all kinds of organizations around the world.


Related Articles

• Part 2 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability (coming March 17, 2010)
  
• Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability (coming March 18, 2010)
  
• "Innovation to the Core" Book Review and Innovation Summary

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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.

Free Range Innovation

by Jarie Bolander

Cowboys love the wide open plain. The vastness of the prairie ignites a self-reliance that few others can comprehend or handle. The cowboy is free to drive his cattle the route he feels best, yet his end game is always clear - get them to market. The cowboy struggles to keep his herd moving and might even loose a few along the way. His satisfaction comes when the herd is safely to market and the wage he earns hardly pays for his trouble but that does not matter - he's in it for the journey.


The Cowboys of Innovation

Innovators are like modern day cowboys that peer out onto the vastness of the world and chart a course to get their ideas to market. They do it for the love of the journey and the results of seeing something they invented being used by millions. Companies tend to fence innovators in by overburdening them people with process, procedures, arcane organizations and stifling bureaucracy. These conditions severely limit the creative mind to the point of stalling out any sort of innovation.


Wander Within Limits

The innovation cowboy needs to wander around and seek the best path forward. This means his organizational structure has to be flexible enough to wander yet sets limits to get to market. The best structure for this is the automatous team that has flexibility to get stuff done but has clear objectives and timelines. Guidance from the boss should be the high level goals and objectives not micro-managed tasks and rigidly defined parameters. Doing this allows innovators to chart their own course while still having some guidance.


Failure is Always an Option

Innovation is full of failure. So much so that most people can't stomach the constant setbacks and uncertain future. The ideal culture for innovators is one that embraces failure, learns from it and moves on. This culture will always out innovate a punitive structure where everyone is afraid to make one little screw-up. The other vital cultural trait is one where intellectual curiosity is encouraged, especially outside the companies field of endeavor. More innovative ideas have come from cross-over problem solving (i.e. Taking a solution from another industry and applying it to something else), then just staying within your companies comfort zone.


Bonuses Don't Work

The journey is the incentive for innovators to invent. No other incentive is as strong or as effective as working on a challenging problem that you enjoy. In fact, the open source movement has taught us that creative people will work for free and give away their work product for something they find interesting. The organization can apply these incentives by giving innovators a support and recognition network that allows them to invent, be recognized and feel respected. The only monetary bonus that seems to work is one that treats everyone the same (e.g. The janitor to the CEO gets 'the same bonus'). Anything other that than, is ripe for gaming and defeats the purpose of incentives.


Rugged, Yet Refined

Free range innovation is all about respecting the rugged innovator that takes on the world yet still delivers products to market. It's the realization that innovation takes flight when you give creative people the space to move, explore and grow. No fancy organizational structure, no complex cultures and no silly incentives - just smart teams, building innovative products by driving their ideas to market the way the range tell them too.


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Jarie Bolander is an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature. Jarie blogs about innovation, management and entrepreneurship at The Daily MBA and has recently published his first book, "Frustration Free Technical Management". You can also follow him on Twitter @thedailymba.

Ten Reasons Your Corporate Social Network Should be an Innovation Social Network

by Matthew Greeley

1. Adoption - There is no doubt online communities are valuable and powerful, but there is no value if your community is an empty dance floor. Generic communities based on generic tools, often have no stated purpose and employees or customers don't know why they should go there. Idea Portals are a proven way to get very rapid uptake because there is something in it for the end user. Either participating in the product direction or cutting costs instead of headcount...there's an obvious 'What's in it for me?' and that drives rapid adoption out of the gate.


2. ROI - In today's environment the bean counters are holding the purse strings pretty tightly. So a technology looking for a problem is dead on arrival. However with Innovation we are often talking to our customers about Millions, Hundreds of Millions and Billions of dollars. By connecting the benefits of social networking with the innovation process the ROI is obvious, immediate, quantifiable and large.


3. Innovation is a Social Activity - and can not be managed or automated with older transaction-or workflow-based enterprise software. By allowing individuals to interact with Innovation Management and Measurement is the first true killer app of the social software revolution.


4. Important Stuff Falls Through the Cracks with Horizontal Communities and Platforms - Like stock market bubbles, this is a lesson that has be re-learned with every generation. The instinct to build a one-size-fits-all solution to "capture more of the market" almost always leads to failure. Vendors that focus on specific niches, sub-categories, roles, functions, jobs and even specific tasks as customer is trying to get done - deliver more value, and win out in the end. If your social networking platform is generic, beware, you may be fighting with one hand tied behind your back.


5. Your Company May be Trying to Create a "Culture of Innovation" - Right Now! - Sit in on an executive meeting and the topic of innovation is likely to come up many times. By tying the roll-out of an internal social networking platform to the innovation process you ensure you are aligned with the goals of the company and your budget is less likely to be cut.


6. It's Fun! - How would you like to see all the best ideas your group, department or company has to offer? And all the innovative projects people are working on? By working on these systems, you literally get to see the future of the company as it takes shape.


7. Silo Busting is More Important to Innovation than Anything Else the Company Does - Social Networks naturally break down silos, increase communication and enable ad hoc relationships to form... while that can be helpful in areas such as customer support, it is EXACTLY what is needed in corporate innovation, where the current organizational structure often the culprit stifling creativity and collaboration. Innovation is the killer app for this new paradigm.


8. Innovation Data HAS to be Controlled by the Company - As employees proactively reach for consumer Web 2.0 tools to make their job easier with out approval from the IT department, dangerous data-ownership issues arise quickly. A seemingly harmless employee- or customer user- group setup on facebook can spring a leak in your intellectual property regime. Do you really want the intellectual property rights of your company's latest ideas to be subject to facebook's latest terms of service? Saavy CIO's will be ahead of the curve to set standards for where these types of communities can reside.


9. Inter-Company Collaboration - Many innovation initiatives involve customers, partners or suppliers. An online social network is a great way to have 'facetime' and maintain relationships when you don't see those people every day.


10. It's easy to get started - You don't need to establish an enterprise wide roll-out strategy, to run a group or product-focused brainstorm. If you are hearing "Innovate in a Recession" or "Do More with Less" you can launch your first Innovation Community in a few hours.

Thanks for listening, I'd love to hear your perspective on this. Until next time, Keep Innovating...


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Matthew Greeley is Founder and CEO of Brightidea, the global leader in On-Demand Innovation Management software. Prior to founding Brightidea, Matthew consulted for Wrenchead.com, helping them raise over $100 million in venture funding. Follow him on twitter @brightidea.

Pick Your Best People to Lead Innovation

by Paul Sloane

Many businesses make the mistake of giving innovation projects to junior executives. It seems natural to hand innovation opportunities to enthusiastic and promising upstarts. But generally it is the experienced heavyweights who can overcome all the process and political obstacles that will occur.

In September 1999 Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM, read a line buried deep in a report which said that current quarter pressures had forced a business unit to cut costs by stopping efforts in a promising new area. Gerstner was incensed and wanted to find out how often this happened. He asked J. Bruce Harreld, IBM's senior VP in charge of Strategy to find out. Harreld found a similar pattern in at least 22 other cases. IBM had plenty of new ideas but it had a remarkably hard time turning those ideas into businesses. IBM had produced many crucial inventions, such as the relational database and the router, then watched while others, such as Oracle and Cisco built huge companies around them.

Harreld investigated the causes and found that IBM rewarded short-term results and was reluctant to devote management attention and resources to rolling the dice. IBM's leaders did not spend much time on new businesses and they did not tap their "A-team" of executives to run them. "We were relegating this to the most inexperienced people," said Herrald. "We were not putting the best and brightest talent on this." (Quotes from FastCompany magazine, March 2005 issue)

Gerstner and Harreld reversed this approach. They deliberately put their most experienced and talented executives in charge of Emerging Business Opportunities (EBOs). Their mission was to find areas that are new to IBM that can yield profitable billion-dollar-plus businesses in five to seven years. The program has been a remarkable success. Between 2000 and 2005 IBM launched 25 EBOs. Three failed and were closed down but the remaining 22 produced annual revenues of over $15 billion and growth of over 40% per year.

More importantly than their revenue impact, the EBOs helped change IBM's culture. "We've become more willing to experiment, more willing to accept failure, learn from it and move on. Now being an EBO leader is a really desirable job at IBM," says Harreld.

The lesson from IBM is clear. If you want to change the culture of an organisation so that it values innovation and new business start-ups then get your most senior and best people involved in these activities. Don't delegate it to lower level staff and hope for the best.


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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.

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.

Killing Innovation by Asking Too Many Questions

by Mark Prus

A recent article on the Harvard Business Review blog site discussed how you can kill innovation by asking too many questions. Having spent over 25 years in Corporate America, I can relate. I have seen many novel ideas get 'Murdered by Management' through a steady stream of questions. I have even seen Management use the "question everything about a project I don't like" technique as a means of wearing out the proposer and making the project go away.

I do agree with the article's conclusion that you can often "...substitute early action for never-ending analysis." It is always a good idea to start small, gain experience, tweak and try it again.

But I am not sure I agree with the premise that asking questions is bad. After all, isn't curiosity a foundation of the innovation process?

When I was running the innovation function of my business unit, I was used to getting a lot of questions about the projects I was working on. What I tried to do was separate the questions I could answer right away and the questions that would take a lot of analysis to answer. I'd keep a list of issues that required further analysis, and attempt to gain understanding via research as the project developed. And I would always report back to Management and give them updates on what I had learned.

Asking questions often reveals new opportunities and potential for upside. And yes, sometimes asking a lot of questions reveals a fatal flaw that kills the project. But when would you rather discover that fatal flaw? Early in the project or after you have committed significant time and energy to it? Isn't that one of the jobs of Management?

Does asking a lot of questions kill innovation? I don't think so. I believe a leader who can handle the 'heat' of the "what about?" questions can deftly manage the questioning and in fact use it to his/her advantage.

What are your thoughts?


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Mark Prus is a marketing consultant who offers a name development service called NameFlash^SM.

Growing a Garden of Innovation

"Companies are actually living organisms, not machines. We keep bringing in mechanics, when what we need are gardeners." - Peter Senge


by Mitch Ditkoff

Sustainable innovation, the endless effort to find a better way, cannot be achieved by robotically lining up best practices and imitating them. The real catalyzing agent for renewable innovation is the ground from which these best practices spring - the confluence of purpose, people, and processes better known as culture.

From where will the next wave of groundbreaking innovation come?

Not from organizations mechanically mimicking each other's best practices, but from organizations with the authentic commitment to take their stand on ground that has been cultivated for breakthrough.

If you check the contents of the most popular books on innovation, the same topics show up again and again: strategy, systems, process, leadership, customer focus, risk, speed to market, prototyping, metrics, mass collaboration, market intelligence, technology, and creative thinking.

Clearly, all of these topics are important. But none of them can take root in an organization without one fundamental element being in place - a consciously created culture of innovation.

Is such a culture simple to create? Yes. Is it easy? No. And the reason why it is not easy is because the ground of most organizations is hard, untilled, and in major need of clearing.

The metaphor that most clearly conveys the effort required is creating a garden.

To experienced gardeners, the steps needed to create a garden are simple. To the inexperienced gardener, it is a tangle of complexity.

Yes, gardening demands sustained and methodical effort. And yes, sweating comes with the territory. But getting a yield - something to harvest - is a fundamentally straightforward task.

If your company is clear about the effort required, creating a culture of innovation (lets just call it a garden of innovation) is simply a matter of taking the time to execute each step thoroughly 0- in the time honored way gardeners have always practiced their craft.


1. WHET THE APPETITE

If you are serious about being a gardener of innovation, the first thing you will need is hunger - a real appetite for results.

Growing a garden takes sustained effort. It is hard work - most of it unglamorous and unappreciated. Hunger for a yield is the serious gardener's real motivator. Yes, the serious gardener likes being outdoors and, yes, the serious gardener likes getting exercise, but the ultimate product of his/her labors - the harvest - is what it is all about.

Without this level of commitment, the gardening effort remains only a hobby and does not have the roll up your sleeves and get dirty quality so essential to reaping a result.

If your workforce has no appetite for innovation, you will need to find a way to whet it. If you choose not to, people will sit idly by, waiting for R&D, senior leadership, or the tooth fairy to lead the charge. And while they may talk about growth, shovels, and the need for bulk purchase of mulch, talk will not put food on the table.

Fortunately, somewhere, deep inside everyone in your organization is the impulse to create. This impulse is innate. Your task is to awaken this impulse and help people own the effort to innovate. If they do not own the effort, the only thing you will be eating at harvest time will be your own words. (P.S.: Winter is on the way.)


2. STAKE and PREPARE THE GROUND

Amateur gardeners, fueled by visions of ripe tomatoes, have a tendency to plant before they are really ready. Unclear about how large a garden they can sustain, unsure about what is needed to prepare the ground, unable to resist the impulse for a quick yield, they rush in willy nilly.

The result? Lots of wasted effort and the kind of sweating that signifies almost nothing. The same holds true for organizations who claim they want a culture of innovation.

The antidote is a simple, two step process (though the description of the process is much simpler than the execution).

First, an organization needs to get clear about the scope of the effort they want to make. It needs to stake its territory or, more precisely, define the fields in which it wants to innovate. (If it tries to innovate everywhere, all the time, it will only deplete its resources and exhaust its workforce.)

Secondly, it needs to prepare the ground for planting.

This task includes removing obstacles that will interfere with growth, as well as enriching the fertility of the soil. Weekend gardeners cringe at this kind of preparatory effort. It does not feel like fun and there is nothing immediately to show for it. But without this effort there will be no foundation - no ground - for future success.


3. FIND THE SEEDS

You can have ample space to plant a garden. You can know exactly where that ample space is. And you can have lots of fertile soil in this ample space. But unless you have healthy seeds to plant, space is all you will ever have.

If you want a garden of innovation, you need seeds. Not just one kind of seed, but many. Indeed, the more varied seeds you have, the greater your chances for an interesting yield.

In the realm of innovation, ideas are the seeds. All innovation begins with an idea. Ideas are the fuzzy front end of the innovation process - the alpha and omega of new growth. No ideas, no innovation. Its that simple.

The big question, then, is this: Where will your company get its new ideas? Is there an existing process? And if so, is this process working? Can you count on your workforce to deliver high quality, game changing ideas? Or is there something else you need to be doing in order to tap their brilliance?


4. PLANT THE SEEDS

While it is true that some seeds, spontaneously carried by the wind and landing on fertile soil, find a way to plant themselves, most gardens require that seeds be planted in a more dependable way.

If your company is sincere about its intention to create a culture of innovation, it will need to refine its seed planting process. More specifically, it will need to establish a more effective way for the carriers of seeds to increase the odds of those seeds taking root.

Yes, aspiring innovators will need to become more adept at pitching/planting their ideas. But at the same time, the people to whom new ideas are being pitched will need to become more receptive to the possibility that something new is worthy of taking root.

Having a silo of healthy seeds is a good start, but ultimately those seeds need to be planted - and they need to be planted in a way that will radically increase the odds of them growing into seedlings.


5. FENCE THE GARDEN

If you have ever planted a garden, you have experienced the phenomenon of uninvited predators showing up at all hours to devour your tender, young seedlings. Deer, raccoons, moles, rabbits, and a host of other unidentifiable varmints seem to have no other mission in life but to downsize your dreams of winning the state fair or, at the very least, eliminate all possibility of you having fresh lettuce for dinner. It comes with the territory. And it will continue to come with the territory unless you fence your garden.

Organizations of all shapes and sizes experience the same phenomenon.

Promising new business growth ideas - the tasty indicators of breakthrough innovation - are routinely devoured by ravenous corporate naysayers. That is, unless the organization finds a way to protect their aspiring innovators.

Your role, as a gardener of innovation, is to fence your garden and protect your people from the overly acidic scrutiny, doubt, and premature evaluation of predominantly left brained, metric driven, analytical inhibitors of innovation. It can be done. It must be done. And you are the one to champion the process.


6. TEND NEW GROWTH

Conceiving a garden is relatively easy. It requires no special skills, discipline, or education. Anyone can do it. Indeed, anyone does do it every single Spring and Summer. Getting a harvest, however, is an entirely different matter. It is not so easy - and unlike conception, requires skill, discipline, resources, and the ability to learn on the job.

In the same way, conceiving new ideas is relatively easy. It happens every day of the year to millions of people. Bringing them to fruition is not so easy. Along the way, they get neglected, mishandled, and trampled on. What starts out as a brilliant new possibility, often shrivels on the vine. Most organizations have no conscious process for nurturing the growth of new ideas.

As a result, many powerful, new ideas never mature.

They may break new ground, but they do not necessarily flower and bear fruit. The good news? It does not have to be this way. With the right kind of sustained effort, gardeners of innovation can dramatically increase the odds of exciting new ideas becoming part of the harvest and making it to market.


7. THIN and TRANSPLANT

Inexperienced gardeners, intoxicated by their need for a big harvest and overcompensating for their fear of having nothing to show for their efforts, tend to plant too many seeds too close together. Their fear usually dissipates in a few weeks when the first sprouts emerge, but then another challenge surfaces - what to do with the apparent bounty of new growth?

While the profusion of greenery certainly looks good to the untrained eye, the reality is different. New seedlings start competing with each other for water and nutrients. Roots entangle. Left unaddressed, the results are disappointing - row after row of stunted, scraggly plants.

Savvy gardeners respond quickly, thinning out new growth to make room for a select number of the healthiest plants to flourish.

Really savvy gardeners go one step further - transplanting the healthiest of the thinned out plants to new, roomier locations.

Organizations trying to raise the bar for innovation face the same challenge. Intoxicated by their need for impressive growth (and wanting to involve as many employees as possible in the process), they get overwhelmed by a profusion of ideas and initiate too many projects - ideas and projects that end up competing for the same, finite resources.

The result? Scraggly, stunted, and undeveloped ventures.

The antidote? A clear strategy for how their organization will evaluate, select, and fund new initiatives - along with a process for identifying promising new growth to be transplanted for future development.


8. CELEBRATE THE HARVEST

All cultures around the world have a holiday, ritual, or ceremony dedicated to expressing gratitude for the bounty of the harvest. In their bones, they understand the purpose, power, and privilege of giving thanks. Their recent harvest may have fed the body, but the collective acknowledgment of the harvest feeds the soul, strengthening everyones resolve to begin the growing process again the next season.

Corporate cultures could learn a lesson or two from this age old practice.

Historically, organizations have been severely lacking when the time comes to acknowledge the harvest and the people whose efforts were essential to manifesting that harvest. The endless demand for output drives most business leaders to conclude that acknowledging successes is a waste of time - a luxury no bottom line watching organization could afford. Somehow, deep within the collective psyche of senior leaders, lurks the fear that celebrating successes will invariably lead to a fat and lazy workforce.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

People flourish when their efforts are acknowledged - not only individually, but as an entire workforce. If you are serious about establishing a sustainable culture of innovation, remember to take the time to acknowledge your gardeners. For their effort. For their resilience. For their collaboration. And for whatever harvest they are able to manifest.

Food for thought?


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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.

The Mad World of Innovation

by Boris Pluskowski

I believe it was Albert Einstein who once said that the definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." So I feel I'm in good company as I observe the sheer insanity of companies and the way they embrace innovation.

I've been watching several people I know Twittering and Blogging their observations from several innovation conferences recently and it finally dawned on me what's been missing: anything at all new.

All the big takeaways, noteworthy points, and otherwise shareable insights have quite simply all been seen and done before. They're all rehashed observations and reinvented wheels - some of which have been out for over 10 years - Which brings up the question - Is there a lack of innovation or originality in the innovation practice itself?

Maybe - maybe not - but I refuse to believe that there aren't areas of innovation thought and practice that are still ripe for exploration and innovation of the core processes themselves. Instead, let me point the finger at a different potential culprit - organizational ignorance in picking their leaders.

As someone who's been in the job market for senior innovation roles for a little while now - it's been interesting to note that most job opportunities that have crossed my desk seem to end in one of two ways:

1. The company decides to hire someone internal despite a lack of any internal innovation skills or experience, believing that the right person will simply learn the necessary process expertise quickly enough to make it all work.


2. or otherwise the company decides not hire anyone at all due to budgetary cuts/changes in corporate priorities.

The second option implies a serious lack of understanding as to the power and importance of innovation - especially with regards to making sure the company has a future - or even a present for that matter. Even in a downturn as bad as the one we're experiencing now - one would expect for companies to shorten the time horizon for innovation processes to deliver results - but not to eliminate them altogether - that's just crazy. To be fair, most of the ones that have ended like this have ended with an intention to revisit this "innovation concept" again in the future - but that's still pretty dumb, as the situation won't get any better until you make core changes, until you change the rules of the game to better suit your strengths, until, in short, you innovate your way out of it.

However, I put to you that the first option is just as bad if not worse - as it implies that there is little or no value in innovation process expertise - despite all evidence to the contrary as to how tricky it can be to balance the rapid achievement of organizational goals with the engagement of social and human capital needed to fuel the innovation process. They would rather take someone who "understands the company" and attempt to teach them how innovation works than the other way around. I don't know about you, but outside of certain government entities who don't understand themselves how they get anything done - I don't know of any company that is that complex that you can't pick it up in a few weeks - are they trying to say that learning how to put together a comprehensive innovation program that engages the value chain and social networks as a whole to driving new sources of value that will generate results for the organization is easier than that?? Doesn't make sense to me - but then again, I'm not the one making those kind of calls. For now at least...

The result then, is a continuous stream of new innovation "leaders", making the same mistakes over and over again - and coming up with the same results (or lack of them) and 'insights' repeated over and over again. There are plenty of good innovation people out there - plenty with the knowledge, expertise, and ability to not only make an innovation program work - but to make it excel and deliver massive results. It's no wonder that the companies that invest heavily in innovation are the ones who thrive and survive - they're the ones who value the process expertise over industry expertise.

So here's my wakeup call Corporate World - industry expertise counts for little or nothing in the innovation game! In fact - it can even frequently be a hindrance. It puts walls up where they might not need to be; tells you what you "can and can't do"; what "will and won't work" - it can be, and frequently is, in short, a barrier to innovation - the very thing you're trying to achieve.

As a result, we get what we've been seeing on the conference circuit - a steady stream of people relatively new to the subject who are trying to assimilate the complexities of innovation and social networks from scratch - and as a result -progress in the innovation industry has been handcuffed - and corporate results with innovation have been mediocre at best as these people make the same mistakes all over again that the previous generation made - reinventing the wheel over and over again...

As Gary Jules sang: "I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take, When people run in circles it's a very very... Mad World, Mad World"




Please stop running in circles everyone. Comments, as always, are very welcome.


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Boris Pluskowski is the Founder of The Complete Innovator where he regularly shares new ideas and best practices on how big companies can harness Innovation, Collaboration and Social Media to drive new sources of value throughout the enterprise.

Is Innovation a Fad?

by Jeffrey Phillips

I had a rather disconcerting part in a recent discussion with some senior leaders and executives who were discussing innovation. It was interesting to hear from some of them that they believe "innovation" is a fad, and will run its course shortly. They believe that innovation is simply another "quick fix" elixir cooked up by management consultants to find new things to sell to senior executives. Some others in the discussion believed that innovation is more systemic, and will have a longer shelf life, and add value for many years to come. I found myself disagreeing with both schools of thought.

The cynics suggest that innovation is simply a buzz word for creating new products or services, something that many firms already do. In that regard they view innovation as the current flash in the pan, meant to distract everyone from the real problems and place a nice bow on a box that already exists. To these cynics I say - you couldn't be more wrong. In a market that is moving and changing as quickly as the one we are experiencing now, and an environment where consumers are demanding more, and better, products and services, and in a production environment where any new idea can be copied fairly quickly, the only real winners are those who create substantially new concepts on a consistent basis. The old, static product lives and days of lower competition are over. Innovation isn't a "nice to have" or a "flash in the pan", it is rapidly becoming the most important skill set your organization can acquire.

For those who believe innovation does add value and can be more systemic, I say they are right, but only partly so. They see innovation as a tool that can be used, until the next tool comes along. This follows the theory of "waves". There was the "wave" of quality improvement, followed by the "wave" of rightsizing and outsourcing. Now, these folks believe, is the time for the "wave" of innovation, which will run its course and introduce a new wave of something else yet unseen. The problem with considering innovation as a wave with a specific time horizon is that new products and services will continue to be important long after the expected time frame of the "wave" is complete. If your investment is to simply adopt innovation as the next tool down the pike, and expect to jettison it once the wave is over, your team won't commit the necessary resources to innovate effectively. It will be a sideline to the "real work" of the organization, eagerly awaiting the next wave or fad.

No, here's where I diverge from the discussion. We are in a fundamental environmental shift. The pace of change and the increase in global competition means that the way we work has to change. Innovation isn't an interesting sideshow or fad, unless your management team allows it to be. Innovation isn't a wave or trend for the next "x" years to be replaced by something else. Innovation is THE differentiator between firms that are thriving and healthy today, and those that will be thriving and healthy a decade from now, because innovation isn't a fad, and isn't a wave, but is going to become a permanent way of life, a sustaining capability for the firms that understand the shift underway and adopt innovation as a cultural imperative.

If you think this doesn't matter then simply consider the culture and environment of the organization where you'd most like to work. Do you want to work in a firm that places emphasis on the future and staying abreast of trends and new ideas, or do you want to work in a firm where the constant activity is reacting to what other firms do in the market? The most innovative firms will attract the best people and accelerate their capabilities, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The firms with less innovation skill will atrophy because they can't compete on new ideas, and they can't generate new products and services fast enough to retain customers.

What's it going to take for us to wake up and realize that innovation is the most important skill we can gain within most organizations? I recognize that this kind of change threatens the status quo, but if we ignore the shifts underway in the market and economy we risk a future with far fewer jobs and far fewer opportunities.


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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.

Innovation Perspectives - Trendspotting Trifecta

This is the third of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Braden Kelley

I believe this question should really be broken up because there are three VERY different (and incredibly important) pursuits intermingled here:

1. Trend spotting
   
2. Putting emerging behaviors into context for a business
   
3. Putting emerging needs into context for a business

Only at the very beginning of a business, when it is all or nothing for a small team of founders, should responsibility for these three tasks be combined. The reason responsibility for these three different pursuits should be split up is because each requires a different way of thinking, that often requires different types of people to generate the most relevant and actionable insights.

As I've written before, insights and execution are the real keys to business success, and in building any successful innovation - the insights come first. So, combining these three pursuits properly and getting the insights correct is incredibly important - otherwise you'll design, build, and distribute a solution that misses the mark with customers.

Trend spotting requires big picture thinking, a talent for separating the notable from the unimportant, the ability to see how potential trends connect together, and the vision to see the impact of this trend intersection (what megatrends might they point to, etc.).

Putting emerging behaviors into context for a business requires an incredible capacity for insightful observation, the ability to spot influential thinkers who are good at identifying and describing changing behaviors, and the skills to synthesize a collection of perspectives into a cohesive view of the future. This view of the future must of course have a strong chance of being correct.

Putting emerging needs into context for a business is incredibly difficult and requires understanding how emerging trends and behaviors will intersect with new technologies and other business capabilities to expose new customer needs. Those new needs then represent potential growth areas for businesses to enter with new solutions. The goal of course is to identify and act upon these emerging needs before the competition has the opportunity to observe these needs as expressed behaviors and actions and react.

The one skill that all three share in common however, is the ability to disconnect one's own perspective from the changing perspectives of others. Whether you as an organization choose to hire people into these roles, hire in consultants to provide this insight, or to spread the responsibilities around the organization, you must have a strategy.

Personally, I believe organizations may soon begin creating insight networks within their organizations in the same way that they currently do with innovation. This means having a central insights team at Corporate HQ with strong executive support that is responsible for managing the process, the distributed global network, its training/certification, and its outputs. This does not have to mean starting a new team - companies could incorporate these responsibilities within an existing dedicated-innovation infrastructure. So, can an insight management software industry be far behind?

And last but not least you will need to assign people to monitor trends and emerging behaviors and needs from Six Ways to Sunday:

1. Demographic and Psychographic Changes
   
2. Legal and Political Changes
   
3. Different Geographies
   
4. Different Industries
   
5. New Supplier and Technology Capabilities
   
6. New Business Capabilities and Business Models

Do you have a strategy and responsibilities in place for spotting trends and emerging needs/behaviors in your organization?

What are you waiting for?


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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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.

Finding Experts In Your Pursuit of Innovation

by Gil Yehuda

I attended a KM conference recently where a speaker remarked on how difficult it was to find experts in his company. He suggested that HR create a database and every employee should declare that they are an expert in something. Then when a manager needs to find an expert for an innovation project, he or she could query the database.

There's more to this story, and I'll share the details in two blog posts that I plan to publish about this conference. But I wanted to take an excursion and talk about expertise locators.

The expert database idea is doomed to fail. It will never be accurate or updated. But the problem of finding experts in your company is real. One would think that there should be a way to organize a list of experts. Databases are the wrong solution (I'll explain why). But what solution would work?

I'm excited about the approach that Aardvark is taking to solve this problem in the consumer space. I think it would translate well to the corporate space too. First let's talk about the mechanics of the solution, then why it is so interesting. When you sign on and set up your profile, you declare the topics that you consider yourself to be an expert in. They list many, and you can add any you want. So far, this seems like a database. But wait. Then you connect your network and set up how large of a network you want to engage with. You can invite people directly, via Facebook, gMail contacts or other means in order to set up your network. Then you specify how far you want your awareness to traverse - e.g. to limit interactions to your friends only, or include their friends in your trust circle. OK - you set it up like you would many other social networking sites. If this was an enterprise vendor - then you'd set it up via active directory so it would know which division you are in, who you report to, etc.

As a participant you can ask questions and answer questions. When you ask a question, you specify the topic, and Aardvark sends the question to those people in your network who said they are experts in that topic. Similarly, you can expect to get asked questions once in a while (you determine how often) about the topics that you said you are an expert in. This participation continues - every so often you get a question, and if you have the time and the answer, you help out. If not, that's OK too. After all, you are helping out your friends or their friends - something that we do all the time.

But many times you'll find that you are not so much of an expert that you think you were. You start getting questions you can't answer. Aardvark will ask you if you want to modify your topics. It does this in a very subtle way. If you decline to answer a question, it just asks - are you busy now (if so it will not bother you for a while) or is this a topic that you don't want to be asked about? Sometimes you get a question about a topic that is similar to one that you said you were an expert in, and Aardvark asks you if you want to include that topic on your list. You can set that up automatically so that it adds topics to your expertise list if you answer questions about them. Your answers get rated "helpful" if they are indeed helpful. There are other features too, it's pretty clever and easy - and I dare say, fun to use.

Most importantly - Aardvark refines your list of topics based on your ability to answer questions. It is better than a static database could ever be.

But the big "aha" about this for me is thinking about a corporate version of Aardvark. Over time your expertise would be recognized based on what you actually know and share - not based on what you once answered in an HR survey. This solves a very challenging business problem with a simple, fun solution.

At this conference I introduced myself as someone who helps companies solve problems by leveraging social software tools and behaviors. Finding experts is a problem. Creating a closed stagnant database is a poor solution to that problem. But creating a dynamic system is a much smarter approach. First of all you get people answering questions - which saves time and money. And secondly, by leveraging social computing tools (and staying away from emails that hide conversations) it becomes clear who the experts really are. Employees might want to answer questions to demonstrate what they are capable of. And administrators can manage the system so that no one person gets too many questions. Let's say you get no more than two questions a week - that's not such a burden. Let's say the answer is "go to the corporate librarian" - OK, that's a good answer too sometimes. But having this kind of system solves a set of business problems that the old database would never solve.

It also solves one other problem - improving knowledge. Let's say I give an answer to a question that is not complete or correct. Then another friend/coworker (who is in the network and is also an expert in the topic) steps in and contributes more to the answer. The person who asked has the benefit of a better answer, and I get the benefit of learning something I didn't know. Next time someone asks I'll know more, or I'll refer the question to my friend who knows this topic better than I do. That's a win all around.

The next question is how to get experts to share their expertise? I'll post the response I gave at the conference - look for it next week on this blog.

Disclosure: I have no relationship with Aardvark and do not know if they plan a corporate edition. I'm just mentioning them because I'm impressed with what I see in their approach.

Editor's Note: Google recently acquired Aardark for $50 million. What will they do with it? I guess we will have to wait and see.


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Gil Yehuda is web strategy consultant at GilYehuda.com who helps organizations leverage Enterprise 2.0 tools and behaviors to meet their business goals. He is a former Forrester analyst and Enterprise Architect.

Ideas Are Core to Enterprise 2.0

by Hutch Carpenter

Brian Solis spoke recently on what the future of social networks will be. Ideas, it turns out. As I wrote on another blog post:


"Solis, leading thinker in the integration of social media and PR, recently spoke on an intriguing concept: ideas connect us more than relationships. The premise of his argument is that ideas are what elicit passion in people. They animate us, and if we find someone with a similar interest in a given idea, we connect."


Then there was this observation by Intel's Enterprise 2.0 lead Laurie Buczek on the only quantifiable value they found in their Enterprise 2.0 efforts:


"Where we did quickly find quantifiable business value during an ideation proof of concept. Ideas that are discovered and turned into action have produced dollarized return of business value."


Both Brian and Laurie are pointing to the unique nature of ideas. Brian talks of ideas as connectors. Laurie talks of ideas being 'discovered'. If Enterprise 2.0 rests on delivering value through collaborative, emergent and social means, ideas are the top basis for leveraging these qualities.

Of course, from a pragmatic, what-do-businesses-care-about perspective, innovation is a top priority.

The top-down, Board-level importance of innovation is not a surprise. As I've seen repeatedly with our enterprise innovation work at Spigit, ideas are an excellent bottom-up basis for Enterprise 2.0.


Ideas Are Me

Perhaps the most important aspect of social is the ability to express what you're thinking. Ideas fit this dynamic quite well. Ideas are...

• Expressions of my creativity, ingenuity and problem-solving

Inside companies, we see things that we know can be improved. We see opportunities that need to be explored. We know a good answer for a particular challenge put forth by managers.

Every time you have an idea, a bit of you bonds to it. Your way of thinking, your understanding of context, the experiences you've had, the expertise you bring to bear, the work aspirations you have.

Ideas can be small, giving you satisfaction in fixing something obvious to you. They can be big, offering the possibility of work that elicits your passions.

This is powerful stuff. It is a unique intersection of something that helps the company with something that personally satisfies you.


Ideas Are the Basis for Finding Like-Minded Colleagues

When I post an idea, I create the basis for finding others. That because when I post an idea, I'm making...

• A call for your interest

Think about that. The act of publishing an idea is a broadcast across the organization. It's a tentative query to see who else feels the same way. Or if not the same way, who has an interest that overlaps mine.

This is unique to ideas. Ideas are potential. They are a change from the status quo. There are others who share at least some aspect of your idea. In large, distributed organizations, where are these people?!!

My idea is my call to form my own virtual team, to see who can help me accomplish something of value to me and the organization. I contrast this with other types of activities one might do under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella: status updates, project tasks, writing a common document, adding content to knowledge wiki. Those aren't calls to form virtual teams.

Ideas have a unique quality in team and community forming, consistent with the emergent nature of Enterprise 2.0.


Ideas Are Social Objects

A key consideration of any framework for interaction is, "what are we going to talk about?" Within the enterprise environment, an idea is...

• A social object for our interaction

The concept of social objects is powerful. It illuminates the core basis for why two or more people interact. They share an interest in some thing. We are complex beings, with multiple different interests. We won't ever match up with someone else exactly in terms of what animates. But social objects allow a sort of miniature Venn Diagram of our common interests to flourish.

Hugh MacLeod pragmatically notes, "The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else."

Leading designer Joshua Porter, also known as Bokardo. In his post, Finding Innovation in Design, he describes the AOF method of social experience design:

• A = activity you want to support
  
• O = social objects that define the activity
  
• F = features are actions people take upon social objects

You build social-oriented sites around a core set of objects and activities which attract people.

Ideas, because they represent something new, something that can affect your daily work, are terrific social objects. An idea is a proposal, and a natural basis for interacting. Contrast this with posting a document, or a page of knowledge, or a status update. Those are lower wattage, more ephemeral social objects.


Ideas Become Projects

Ideas get attention. They propose to change things, and they will need work. An idea is...

• The basis of a future project for us

What makes ideas so powerful is they are changes to the status quo. This means:

• They're going to affect people's daily work
  
• They require some work to make happen

This imbue ideas with a certain vitality. It gives them a power not seen with with other types of social computing activities, save projects themselves.

Another important aspect is that ideas will elicit passion in certain users, those we talked about earlier. If there is a chance to become part of a project team working on the idea, that is exciting. Consider times in your life you got to be part of a team, working on something that excited you.

Ideas have these qualities: possibilities, change to work routines, chance to be part of an exciting initiative. Projects have a certain aspirational quality for us employees, and ideas tap this aspect well.

There are many types of content and activities - social objects - that are part of a social computing initiative. I'd argue ideas, for a host of reasons, should be considered top amongst those social objects.


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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.

Accelerating Innovation

by Andrea Meyer

Point: Accelerate innovation by finding an analogous solution from a different industry.

Story: Henry Ford's assembly line is often touted as a breakthrough innovation. What's less known is that Ford got the idea by seeing the "disassembly line" process of butchering hogs at the Philip Armour meatpacking company in Chicago. Similar techniques were also already being used by Campbell's to automate canned food production.

Adopting ideas from other industries and applying them to your own industry is a powerful and proven source of innovation. But what if you don't know which industry to examine, or where to look for that potentially breakthrough idea? Solutions may arrive serendipitously as you visit companies and read widely, but how do you accelerate the process and make it systematic?

One exciting solution I came across was described by Jim Todhunter, CTO of Invention Machine at the Open Innovation Summit last month. Invention Machine's Goldfire software uses semantic technology to access a vast collection of scientific principles, patents, articles and Deep Web technical websites (meaning you can't find them via standard search engines like Google). Simply put, Goldfire automates searching for analogous solutions in different industries. I talked with Todhunter to learn more about how Goldfire, an innovation platform, can help a company innovate systematically.

Todhunter described how a manufacturer of plumbing fixtures used adjacencies to remove lead from their plumbing fixtures. Companies have long known the dangers of lead and have substituted copper pipes for lead ones and stopped using lead-based solders for plumbing. But most of us don't realize that fixtures like brass faucets also contain lead in the brass alloys. The reason faucets contain lead is because lead makes the brass machinable. A couple percent of lead mixed into the copper and zinc of the brass makes it easier to mill attractive surfaces, drill clean holes, and create smooth pipe threads on the brass. In short, the lead helps a faucet manufacturer create attractive, high-quality faucets. But over time, some of the lead in the brass leaches out into the water that flows through the faucet, which poses some health risks.

The faucet maker realized they needed help to solve the problem and turned to Invention Machine's Goldfire software to find feasible external innovations. "Goldfire helped them in two ways, Todhunter said, "in terms of what are called adjacencies and proof points."

Adjacencies involve finding potentially analogous innovations found in other industries. For example, faucet makers aren't the only companies worried about producing quality products from hard-to-machine materials. "On the adjacency side, when the company started to examine the problem with Goldfire, they were able to discover that there were technologies and methods used in other industries that could obviate the need for lead in brass," Todhunter said. In particular, the manufacturer discovered that woodworkers have clever techniques for milling wood. These techniques could be adapted to machining lead-free brass.

The second help to accelerate the innovative solution is called proof points - tangible examples that prove a solution is commercially feasible. In terms of proof points (i.e., "are there ways to do this?"), the manufacturer was able to discover a very clear proof point through Goldfire: someone had already discovered a way to make millable lead-free brass. "The client didn't even have to go invent this material - they were able to find a supplier," Todhunter said. "As a result, the faucet maker accelerated their time to market for delivery on this kind of concept tremendously because this discovery created a partnering opportunity."

Action:

• Clearly define the problem at hand (e.g., lead-free brass AND attractive, high-quality machined features)


• Survey adjacent industries or applications for ideas that overcome the problem (e.g., tricks for milling a hard-to-mill material)


• Survey external innovations and suppliers for proof points (e.g., a commercially available, lead-free brass alloy that is machinable)


• Combine externally-found adjacencies and proof points (i.e., use the best adjacent methods on the best proof point solutions)

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Author of more than 450 company case studies and contributor to 28 books, Andrea Meyer writes & ghostwrites about innovation, IT and strategy for clients like MIT, Harvard Business School, McKinsey & Co., and Forrester Research. Follow her at www.workingknowledge.com/blog and twitter.com/AndreaMeyer.

Innovation That is Measured is Treasured

Why Results Require Rewards: Encouraging Action With Incentive

by Robert F. Brands with Jeff Zbar

Imagine a company that has taken the time to consider the role of Innovation in the corporate mission. Employees were encouraged to be part of the innovation process but their reward was compensation linked strictly to output.

Does that encourage value-added thought process? In my mind, it encourages work, which should need no encouragement at all.

Now, what if that same company put a reward system in place whose reward system was based on innovation and results, not hours or labor? It aligned reward to patents granted, products launched, or sales achieved? And its reward process was integrated along side its Vision, Mission, Strategy, and Resources/Budget?

I would argue that that organization has asked itself a key question: What motivates your team to excel in innovation? The answer is Net Rewards for Net Results.

Many companies see cash as the ideal motivational perk. This might not be the case. A recent survey from McKinsey found that three non-cash motivators rise above all other forms of incentive:

1. Praise from managers
   
2. Attention of leadership that takes place in one-on-one conversations
   
3. The chance to lead projects, teams or task forces.

Such nods and recognition topped even cash bonuses, increased base pay, and stock or stock options - the three top-ranked financial incentives, McKinsey found.

"The survey's top three nonfinancial motivators play critical roles in making employees feel that their companies value them, take their well-being seriously, and strive to create opportunities for career growth," the McKinsey report noted. "These themes recur constantly in most studies on ways to motivate and engage employees."

Though being discussed last in the list of the 10 Imperatives to Innovation, "Net Rewards and Net Results" arguably holds equally high a position as any other imperative. There's a fundamental connection between the two. Rewards must be in alignment with the expectations of the organization and its people. Some organizations seek to innovate, but try rewarding people based on R&D spend. It is a worthy financial metric, but is no guarantee for success.

Incentives should not be about output or spend. It's about "thought-put," and the creativity, ideation and esprit de corps brought to the effort.

Done right, rewards the organization in search of inspiration, motivation, ideation - all the imperatives that drive innovation. It rewards the individual for performing at a high level, and the team for working effectively as a Unit of One.

For the organization that seeks results, incentive is a kind of Reward ROI. By investing in employee rewards as a carrot, think of innovation as ROI derived from the alchemy of ideas-to-money. As we've written before, innovation leads to improved performance, heightened sales, more black on the bottom line. This profit - whether in actual product on the street or improved organizational performance - brings benefit to all stakeholders: shareholders, executive leadership, employees, customers and consumers.

Various perks can drive incentive. Incentives must be earmarked for all participants at the table. This may include the development team itself, to the marketing, finance, R&D, sales, customer service or people from other departments who helped with ideation, market research, justification or any other process that went into creating the new initiative.

For example, in the NPD process, the team or division should be rewarded with a compensation package that includes a percentage of sales derived from new products delivered. The neat thing about NP sales is that success is rewarded and people stay engaged and involved they care post development or launch.

Simply put, the fruits of your team's labor benefit all - and rewards must reflect that. Moreover, this type of validation acknowledges individuals' ability to envision new concepts, help shepherd them through the R&D process (even if the individual is not part of R&D, per se), and play a key role in bringing product to market.

Rewards can enhance valued employees' commitment to the organization, boost morale, motivate future efforts, reinforce positive outcomes, encourage repeat performances and help keep employees' "eye on the ball" vis a vis innovation and ideation. It also strengthens the connection between strategy and results.

In sum, when Net Rewards are based on Net Returns in the innovation process, everybody - the organization, the innovators, the stakeholders and the consumers - wins.


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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.