Key to Successful Innovation Leadership?

Be an Arsonist and a Firefighter

by Paul Sloane

Innovative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity. They know that there are many ways forward. They are evangelical about the vision but agnostic about how to achieve it. They have a clear strategy but are quite prepared to change tactics. They recognise the need for different leadership styles at different times. When it comes to innovative ideas they are alternately arsonists and firefighters. They go around starting fires under people - challenging them. They ask questions that confront their teams - the kinds of questions that demand answers and actions:

• Can you find a new route to market?


• Can you halve our service response time?


• How can we break into the Chinese market?


• Can we find a better way to provide this service?


• Can you design a lighter, cheaper, faster version?

The leader starts many initiatives and then follows up to ask how things are going. The projects that are not succeeding are cut back. If the new product prototype does not please customers, or is not technically feasible or is very costly then the fire is extinguished. Lessons are learnt and the team moves on.

The leader has a restless curiosity to try new things. Some people may find this frustrating and ask, "Why does she keep asking us to try new things and then stop them just when "they are getting interesting?" The answer is that only by trying lots of different things are we likely to find the radical new initiatives that we need. Not every interesting project can be pursued to completion. Life is too short and resources are limited. It is essential to eliminate the less promising projects so that we can devote resources to those that show the most potential.

Innovative leaders are a little schizophrenic. They strive for success but fear it. They love to win yet they applaud failure. They are coldly analytical some times and hotly passionate at others. They use left brain and right brain techniques. Their management styles are sometimes tight and sometimes loose. They start fires and they put them out.


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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.

Innovation Equality

by Tom Peters

Nobody disagrees with the fact that there are few things and maybe no things these days that are more important than innovation. I just want to add one small twist to that and it's what I call my Innovation Equality Act. And what I mean by that is, when we think of research and development, we almost always think of new product development. Well, here is my iron law, my request, my command, my rule:


Innovation and R&D budgets of significance are equally important in every single piece of the organization.


They are important in the logistics function. They are important in the purchasing function. They are important in the HR function. They are important in the finance function. That is, innovation (and R&D) is about every single nook and cranny within the organization. It's not just a marketing thing. It's not just a new product development thing. Think about it. An R&D budget in every training or HR department; it just doesn't happen very often, and that is genuinely, truly dumb.

You are just as likely or more likely to find that elusive competitive advantage in purchasing or HR as you are in an official engineering or marketing department.





What do you think?


Editor's Note: Tom Peters has just launched a new book "The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence" - click here for more information


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Tom Peters is the author of "In Search of Excellence" and twelve other international bestsellers, and a consultant, columnist, seminar lecturer, and more at the Tom Peters Company

Idea Cancer - The Danger of Good Ideas

(Growing Out of Control)

by Jeff Lindsay

Nussbaum on Design (BusinessWeek) has a thought-provoking column that mentions several innovation principles from designer Diego Rodriquez. One of these is "Killing good ideas is a good idea." That's the kind of counter-intuitive blasphemy that merits reflection. Of course, developing good ideas is essential, but without the killing phase, good ideas can lead to "idea cancer." Ideas from late-stage idea cancer strangle many organizations and many minds - when ideas grow without control, unregulated and unchecked by proper objectives and reality. Ideas can metastasize and choke the arteries of business, cloud the mind, and weaken all life support systems in the end, unless they are regulated and killed at the appropriate time. So many great failures begin with good ideas, and lots of them.

Innovation is often more about execution and planning than idea generation. A weak idea, implemented ITERATIVELY with the right talent, can be adjusted based on feedback from the system (e.g., the market) and become successful. Even mediocre ideas can beat good ideas if there are great skills, good leaders, and good execution. But add an occasional great idea to the mix and the success can be remarkable, if the dream isn't cluttered with lots of distracting good ideas along the way.

Innovation requires discipline. One has to focus and learn iteratively in the process, and not let unrestrained good ideas shut down your innovation engines with "idea cancer."


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Jeff Lindsay is the lead author of "Conquering Innovation Fatigue" (Wiley & Sons, 2009) and Director of Solution Development at Innovationedge. He blogs at InnovationFatigue.com.

Are You Killing Innovation in Your Company (Without Even Knowing It)?

by Holly G. Green

In today's world, innovation is a business imperative. You either find new and better ways to add value to your customers, you play follow the leader with those who do, or you go out of business as others change the game and you lose.

Most business leaders intuitively know this. Which is why more and more are making sincere efforts to encourage innovation in their companies. Unfortunately, these efforts rarely produce the desired results.

According to a recent Forbes article, "Why The Pursuit Of Innovation Usually Fails," when it comes to business innovation, failure is the norm rather than the exception. Most "innovations" are little more than thinly disguised reformulations of existing products or services.

What's behind our systemic inability to innovate?

It's not a lack of creative ideas. People and companies come up with these in abundance. Instead, Forbes attributes the dismal results to how we go about trying to innovate.

Today's business leaders are trained to defend and extend the existing core business, not create a new one. This is especially true in successful companies. Instead of looking for the next breakthrough product, leaders seek to lower costs, improve operational excellence, and develop customer intimacy with the biggest clients.

As a result, most innovation efforts focus on making the innovation process efficient and effective rather than actually developing something new. They try to leverage the company's core brand, which may lead to incremental innovation but greatly reduces the odds of coming up with anything that transforms the market or industry.

At the same time, innovation initiatives rarely receive sufficient budgets or resources. In most companies, the lion's share of the resources go into supporting existing products and services.

These are all valid reasons for why companies struggle to innovate. But sometimes I think the reason is even simpler and more insidious. In the corporate world we are trained to kill good ideas. Instead of looking for ways to make new ideas work, we look for reasons why they won't work. And most of the time we're not even aware we're doing it!

How do we kill good ideas? Simply by the way we talk about them. This process is automatic and mostly unconscious, and it happens countless times every day on the shop floors and in cubicles and boardrooms everywhere.

How many times have you heard these phrases (and others like them) in your organization?

• We already tried that.
  
• That's never been done before.
  
• We don't do things that way.
  
• It will cost too much.
  
• Management won't go for it.
  
• That will never pay for itself.
  
• The customer won't buy that.
  
• Nice idea, but too far ahead of its time.
  
• You're such a dreamer.

These are innovation killers! They sound reasonable. They sound practical. In some cases they may even be true. But they stop new and promising ideas dead in their tracks before they have any chance to blossom and grow.

Here's the interesting part - most of us do not intentionally set out to stifle innovation. When we hear a new idea, we don't consciously think, "That's a bad idea, I'm going to kill it." Instead, our response occurs at the unconscious level. A new idea contradicts what we believe is true, so our brain perceives it as a threat. This triggers an automatic response, and the innovation-killing phrases come out of our mouths before we even know it.

Don't believe me? Watch what happens the next time a new employee joins the company. Part of the reason we hire new employees is for their fresh energy and new ideas. Yet, when they start suggesting different ways of doing things, you'll hear things like, "Oh, we've always done it this way." Or, "That'll never fly!" Or, "You might want to learn how we do things around here before you go rocking the boat."

People say these things all the time! And we never take notice because they are so ingrained in our thinking and our culture.

I agree that we need to train our leaders better on how to manage innovation. And we could certainly allocate more money and resources in that direction. But it can start with an even simpler approach of identifying and eliminating all the different ways we unintentionally shut down good ideas with the way we talk. Of course, this does require we become aware of our own thinking process and reasons for our auto responses first.

The language we use to describe the world has a powerful impact on the way we see it. As long as innovation killers remain part of our lexicon and culture, our chances for meaningful innovation are greatly diminished.

Related Article:

• Do you have an Anti-Creativity Checklist? by Braden Kelley

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Holly is the CEO of THE HUMAN FACTOR, Inc. (www.TheHumanFactor.biz) and is a highly sought after and acclaimed speaker, business consultant, and author. Her unique approach to creating strategic agility, helping others go slow to go fast, will change your thinking.

Part 3 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 third part of the interview:


6. What are some of the biggest barriers to innovation that you've seen in organizations?

The biggest barriers to innovation tend to be deep and systemic. They are embedded in a company's leadership priorities, political structures, management processes, cultural values and everyday behavior. For example, senior managers might actually be working against innovation, because the company's metrics system doesn't measure them on it, and the compensation system doesn't reward them for it, so why should they be worried about it? Or a company might be biased heavily toward its legacy business and against revolutionary new ideas that might potentially cannibalize that business. Or allocational rigidities in the budgeting process are making it difficult to get resources behind new opportunities. Or the criteria used in the company's product development stage gate process may tend to kill great ideas too early. Or the organization might simply lack people who have had any significant training in the skills and tools of innovation. These are quite familiar problems, but in every organization the barriers to innovation are subtly different, depending on factors like corporate culture, business model, organizational structure, and so forth.

To make the transition from innovation initiative to enterprise capability, an organization needs to identify, objectively, the practices, policies, and processes inside its core managerial DNA that are toxic to innovation - like traditional management processes that systematically favor perpetuation and incrementalism over new thinking and innovation. Senior executives need to realize that building a truly innovative company is not a matter of simply asking people to be more innovative; it's a matter of positively changing those things that today diminish or stunt the organization's innovation potential. As Clayton Christensen puts it, "Systemic problems require systemic solutions".


7. What skills do you believe that managers need to acquire to succeed in an innovation-led organization?

Managers are going to have to develop a "dual focus" - both on short-term operational performance and on long-term growth opportunities and innovation. The problem here is that these two sides of the business require very different skills. It takes a certain style of management to cut costs, restructure, reengineer, and downsize, and quite another style of management to create growth through new ideas and initiatives.

Today's senior executives will have to learn to do both - they will have to be relentlessly focused on meeting the numbers within their legacy businesses, yet equally focused on generating and successfully commercializing new growth opportunities for the future. This is very easy to talk about but very difficult to do, because efficiency and innovation don't usually "cohabit" too well - they're uncomfortable bedfellows because there's just an inherent tension between these two forces. So what this adds up to is an extremely difficult balancing act for today's managers.

I know of only one way to realign the focus and commitment of top management so that it's equally focused toward innovation, and that is to design a new set of metrics for evaluating management performance - one that puts innovation at least on a par with other performance objectives. If you think about the Balanced Scorecard inside most organizations it's actually not very balanced, in the sense that it tends to be weighted heavily toward optimization rather than innovation. So the first step is to make sure innovation is fully represented in a company's metrics. It has to be recognized to be equal in importance to operational excellence.

Companies might preach the need for risk taking and rule breaking, but these are not the metrics they typically use for measuring their managers' performance. Management compensation is typically tied to other measures like cost, efficiency, speed, and customer satisfaction - and executives are paid for making progress against those metrics. Organizations that are serious about making innovation a core competence need a new set of metrics to offset this tendency and encourage managers to put as much energy into innovation as they are currently putting into optimization.

The other thing managers need to learn is that, in an innovation-led organization, strategy-making is no longer going to be a top-down, executive-only exercise. It's something that will involve everyone in the company - and even people on the outside - and it will increasingly emerge from the bottom up. Managers must come to believe, deep down, in "innovation democracy" - the notion that ideas with billion-dollar potential can come from anyone and anywhere.

Instead of fearing that this will put them out of a job, managers should recognize their pivotal role as champions of the new innovation process. Rather than going away in a little group and trying to come up with all the new growth opportunities on their own, executives should be encouraging all of their people to think like entrepreneurs and submit new ideas. Then they need to regularly sift through the wide variety of opportunities bubbling up from below, and look for ways to invest incrementally in these opportunities. This has worked very well for Best Buy, for example, where some of the most valuable ideas in recent years have come not from top management but from line-level employees who interact with customers each and every day.

This is no doubt going to require a degree of humility on the part of top management, because it essentially means that senior executives will have to give up the old, elitist view about who is responsible for the destiny and direction of the organization, and start involving many new and different voices in the process of charting the company's future.


8. If you were to change one thing about our educational system to better prepare students to contribute in the innovation workforce of tomorrow, what would it be?

Well, if we agree that tomorrow's economy will be an ideas economy, or a creative economy, or - as I like to call it - an innovation economy, then what does this tell us about the kind of skills tomorrow's workers are going to need? Look at the typical school curriculum. What are the kids learning? Most of it has to do with filling their heads with old information - with facts and figures - as opposed to enhancing their imagination, their ability to create or envisage new solutions.

The education system is set up to teach conformity. It punishes people who fail to stand in line, or who question authority. Yet when we look at successful innovators - like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson - we find that they tend to be rebels. They are contrarian in their thinking. They 'zig' where others 'zag'. They have somehow developed an almost reflexive ability to question the status quo, to look at things from a completely different angle of view, to imagine revolutionary new ways of doing things, to spot opportunities that others can't see, to understand the revolutionary portent in trends and discontinuities, to empathize with unmet needs, to take risks and follow dreams. Is that what schools and colleges are teaching their students to do? I don't think so. In fact, I would argue that they are systematically robbing people of their ability to think creatively.

Today's MBAs are also woefully unprepared for the new era. They may have learned how to read a balance sheet correctly, but when did they learn how to systematically discover new strategic insights, or how to come up with radical new growth opportunities, or how to recognize a really big idea when they see one, or how to rapidly reallocate resources to push ideas forward? And when did they learn how to foster the cultural and constitutional conditions inside an organization that serve as catalysts for breakthrough innovation? Let's face it, what business schools produce en masse are business administrators, not business innovators. They reward people with MBAs, not MBIs. And, again, I believe that part of the answer is to bring more balance into the student's priorities, so that they learn how to embrace the paradox between the relentless pursuit of efficiency and the restless search for radical, value-creating innovations.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that "Innovation to the Core" is increasingly being included on business school curriculums. I wanted it to be kind of a business education for the 21st century and it's gratifying to see it being used that way. The book is also playing quite a role in corporate training programs inside some of the companies that have truly recognized the innovation imperative. So if that means I'm making a meaningful contribution to advancing the field of business innovation, I'll be a happy man.


Related Articles

• Part 1 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• Part 2 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• "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.

Part 2 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 second part of the interview:


3. Innovation demand in an organization is equal in importance to innovation supply, but why don't most companies see that?

Again, it's because they are usually too focused on the front end. So they work hard to push up the supply of ideas, launching initiatives like online suggestion boxes, open innovation programs, creative competitions, and perhaps some kind of reward and recognition system. But they fail to create the necessary demand for innovation, meaning the natural, reflexive pull for new ideas within and across the businesses. Failure to drive and manage the demand side of innovation is often where the whole initiative falls flat.

I often ask companies a simple set of questions to gauge the level of innovation demand inside their organizations. For example, Do the executives who run your company's core businesses demonstrate genuine interest in radical, new ideas by redeploying adequate resources behind them? Are they held personally responsible for the performance of their unit's innovation pipeline? Do they spend a significant percentage of their time mentoring innovation projects?

One of the dilemmas today is that, in most organizations, the pressure to innovate is not very real and tangible to senior managers. If you are running one of the company's business units, for example, what is real and tangible to you is the pressure to meet the numbers - to improve operational performance - and you know you are being monitored on a monthly, weekly, daily, or even minute-by-minute basis. But there is usually no similar pressure that is holding you directly accountable for innovation performance. So your natural bias is to worry a lot more about efficiency, and short-term earnings, and monthly variances from budget, than about the innovation performance of your business unit.

The challenge, therefore, is to create a whole set of pressure points on the demand side that will make leaders as sensitive and responsive to the need to innovate as they are to the need to make the numbers. For example, companies can give senior managers unreasonably high growth targets that call for innovative ways to dramatically outperform the average; they can force their senior managers to allocate a portion of their budget to fostering innovation projects; and they can link a sizeable part of executive compensation directly to innovation performance. These are the kinds of measures GE has taken to drive innovation demand across the organization, and it has produced impressive results because GE is a company where managers are fanatic about achieving their goals.


4. Since the book was published, have you come across other organizations that you think are doing systemic innovation really well?

When we were writing the book, we devoted quite a lot of ink to companies like Whirlpool, P&G, IBM, GE, Shell, W.L. Gore, and Cemex. These are all excellent examples. Since then, of course, I've been working with all sorts of other organizations to embed innovation as a systemic capability. They include pharmaceuticals giants like Bayer and Roche: tech champions like Microsoft and Nokia: financial services leaders like Generali Group; massive consulting firms like Accenture; manufacturing companies like Rexam, top automobile brands like Volkswagen; trend-setting retailers like Ahold and Metro; home appliance makers like Philips and Haier; even heavy engineering firms like Debswana diamond mining. For the last half-year, I've also been very busy with Mars - the global manufacturer of chocolate, pet food and other food products - and I've seen a lot of progress there, too.

What really satisfies me is to see companies like these gradually institutionalizing and managing innovation as a discipline. So some of them are setting up innovation directors, innovation boards, business unit innovation officers, and innovation ambassadors. They are introducing comprehensive new metrics to measure their innovation performance. They are building new processes to produce and nurture a continuous stream of innovation opportunities from inside and outside the organization, as well as robust innovation pipelines for taking ideas from mind to market. They are giving their people new tools - including the "Four Lenses" methodology and web-based innovation platforms - that open up the innovation process to everyone. They are training literally thousands of their employees to use these skills and tools, and setting up incentive schemes and reward ceremonies to encourage them to innovate every day. They are hardwiring all their HR systems - pay, spot awards, the long-term incentive plan, the balanced score card objectives - into the company's innovation strategy. They are creating new cultural mechanisms, such as a discretionary time allowance, to foster and support innovators throughout their ranks. They are building dedicated innovation spaces where their people can ideate together. And they are working hard to make innovation a tangible corporate value, rather than just an aspiration.

There are few other companies, too - ones that I have not yet personally worked with - that I would point to as good examples of systemic innovation. They include Best Buy and McDonald's in the USA, and Tata in India. In fact, there's a rapidly growing list of organizations around the world that seem to be gaining traction with the innovation management challenge, and what they demonstrate is that large companies really can tackle innovation successfully in a broad-based and highly systemic way.


5. People often talk about not having time to innovate. How can people find the time for themselves or their employees?

This is such an important issue. When we asked more than five hundred senior and midlevel managers in large U.S. companies to identify the biggest barriers to innovation in their respective organizations, one of the most common responses was "lack of time." Most of us are struggling simply to get through the day, and it's almost impossible to think creatively, reflect on new strategic insights and innovate in a focused manner when you're running from one meeting to the next, making loads of phone calls, writing a thousand emails and frantically trying to work through all the other tasks on your to-do list. So companies need to think seriously about freeing up more time, energy, and brainpower across the organization to devote to innovation and growth.

The fact is, none of us are going to "find" time for innovation. We are going to have to "make" time for it by driving a wedge into our agendas and turning innovation it one of our strategic priorities. In the book we say that carving out time for employees to imagine and experiment and develop their own ideas is the "first commandment of innovation". For some companies, a discretionary time allowance seems to work quite successfully. Well-known examples would be 3M, Gore and Google, where employees can spend a percentage of their time on pet projects. Other organizations take a number of people out of their day jobs for a certain period - say, a few weeks or months - and let them concentrate on generating new insights and ideas as members of dedicated innovation teams. Here, I'm thinking of companies like Whirlpool and Cemex. In addition, Whirlpool also has a formal training program where people are given time to learn the principles, skills, and tools of innovation in the same way as they learnt Six Sigma. Then there's the example of Shell, where the time allowance actually comes after a person or team has submitted an idea, and these people are given one or two months, rising to perhaps a whole year, to design some small-scale, low-cost experiments to test the validity of their new business concepts.

The other thing to remember, as I have been emphasizing all along, is that creating bandwidth for innovation is not just about the front end. It also has to do with freeing up top management time for the back end of innovation - time to devote to steering innovation activities, reviewing ongoing innovation projects, setting priorities, allocating resources, mentoring innovators and embedding innovation as a core competence. And making innovation stick requires a significant number of people - outside of R&D and new product development - who officially work on a full- or part-time basis on innovation activities. One global company has already appointed 1,200 part-time innovation mentors along with 50 full-time innovation consultants, who coach and support would-be innovators throughout the organization, helping them push their ideas forward.


Related Articles

• Part 1 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• "Innovation to the Core" Book Review and Innovation Summary

Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

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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.

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


• Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• "Innovation to the Core" Book Review and Innovation Summary

Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

---

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.