Setting Big Things in Motion

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to attend a Biznik Innovators event featuring John Hagel III (JH) and John Seely Brown (JSB) earlier this week and thought I would bring you some of the highlights and a video interview with John Seely Brown.

Here are some of the key insights:

• Don't focus on employee satisfaction. Often the most passionate people are the most frustrated. In the typical organization about 20% of the employees are passionate and 80% are not. This percentage is inversely correlated with corporation size. - JH


• "Extreme performance only comes from people who are passionate." - JSB


• Compactness Theorem - Kids need to link, then lurk, then join - JSB


• Spikes are places where you have a concentration of people focused on the same thing. When it comes to spikes in today's flat world, you can either go there, or try to pull them to you or pull them together. - JSB


• John Hagel told a story about Chris Anderson, Wired magazine editor and his side-project - Drone aircraft - and how he found a guy to be his CTO who knew more than anyone else about drone aircraft - only to find out he was a 19-year old high school dropout from Tijuana. He never would have found him via a traditional search.


• It would be helpful if we changed education system for the new world, but change can start without it - JH


• John Seely Brown talked about how construction contractors are actually good examples of 'pull' because of the underlying trust networks.


• The process of idea appropriation is very social and the best ideas do not always win. - JSB


• Our identities are shifting from consumption to creation. Who has used what you've created? What have you learned from it? - JH


• It used to be that what was important was 'What I own and control', but now 'I am what I build, share, and what others build on' - JSB


• Firms are focused on scalable efficiencies and need to switch to scalable learning. - JSB


• Handling exceptions is an opportunity for all employees to be creative - JSB


• Passionate people who leave organizations are incredibly important to innovation ecosystems. They often help start the next wave of innovation. - JSB


• 75% of business change initiatives fail. Most that succeed are threat-based. - JH


• Business relationships must create mutual value or they end quickly. - JSB


• You can't control serendipity but you can shape it. - JH

John Seely Brown elaborates on the principles of the book in the embedded video.




Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed or join us on Facebook or LinkedIn!

---

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.

Storytelling in Social Media

TEDx Seattle Interview with Elan Lee, Founder of Fourth Wall Studios

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview Elan Lee, Founder and Chief Designer at Fourth Wall Studios, at TEDx Seattle recently. In this video Elan talks about the future of storytelling and the importance of storytelling to conveying information to others about your new ideas or innovations.





Some of you may be familiar with Elan Lee's work on the alternate reality game "Year Zero" for the promotion of Nine Inch Nail's "Year Zero" album. This project won a Cannes Lion Grand Prix award and a Clio Award (Bronze). Here is an excerpt from the "Promotion" section of the "Year Zero" album's Wikipedia entry:

In an interview with Kerrang! magazine, Reznor hinted that the album was "part of a bigger picture of a number of things I'm working on".[3] In February 2007 fans discovered that a new Nine Inch Nails tour t-shirt contained highlighted letters that spelled out the words "I am trying to believe".[2] This phrase was registered as a website URL, and soon several related websites were also discovered in the IP range, all describing a dystopian vision of the fictional "year 0000".[2] It was later reported that 42 Entertainment had created these websites to promote Year Zero as part of an alternate reality game.[8]

The Year Zero story takes place in the United States in the year 2022; or "Year 0" according to the American government, being the year that America was reborn. The United States has suffered several major terrorist attacks, and in response the government has seized absolute control on the country and reverted to a Christian fundamentalist theocracy. The government maintains control of the populace through institutions such as the Bureau of Morality and the First Evangelical Church of Plano, as well as increased surveillance and the secret drugging of tap water with a mild sedative. In response to the increasing oppression of the government, several corporate, government, and subversive websites were transported back in time to the present by a group of scientists working clandestinely against the authoritarian government. The websites-from-the-future were sent to the year 2007 to warn the American people of the impending dystopian future and to prevent it from ever forming in the first place.[9]

The Year Zero game consisted of series of websites, phone numbers, e-mails, videos, MP3s, murals, and other media that expanded upon the fictional storyline of the album. Each new piece of media contained various hints and clues to discover the next, relying on fan participation to discover each new facet of the expanding game. Rolling Stone described the fan involvement in this promotion as the "marketing team's dream".[10] Reznor, however, argued that "marketing" was an inaccurate description of the game, and that it was "not some kind of gimmick to get you to buy a record - it IS the art form".[11]

This gives you a good idea of the type of storytelling that Elan Lee does. For more of the story about how the "Year Zero" game played out, see the rest of the "Promotion" section of the Wikipedia entry on the album.

I would love to hear your thoughts about how storytelling will evolve as an art form as the internet and mobile devices gain new capabilities. Sound off in the comments!


Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed or join us on Facebook or LinkedIn!

---

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.

Ten Innovation Imperatives

Interview - Robert F. Brands

I had the opportunity to interview Robert F. Brands, author of "Robert's Rules of Innovation" recently.

Here is the text of the interview:

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

The first and most important challenge is to understand and realize that innovation is not optional, it really is : Innovate or Perish. As a result of the traditional product lifecycle it is a phenomenon that once past the "growth" and "mature" phase, any product or service will ultimately decline. So for any thriving business one has to reinvent itself and add new products or services over and over. Once convinced of the importance, it all starts with the leadership. The CEO supported by the leadership team has to create a vision mission and strategy that is all in support of and in line with the innovation efforts. As a result resources would be budgeted, measurements and reward systems created. It has to be a holistic approach since no individual elements like just having a new product development process or great ideation will ultimately create sustainable innovation. The larger the organization the bigger the challenges and the most important tip is to have a simple and clearly stated innovation objective so that all involved will work towards the same objective, this can be as simple as "one new product per year".


2. For you, where does innovation begin?

Innovation begins with the Chief Executive Officer who has to be the Chief Innovation Officer. His or her vision, mission and strategy supported by the executive leadership team is really where it all begins but the most important first step is for any organization to define innovation so that everybody is on the same page.


3. Are there any of the ten innovation imperatives that are more important than the others?

To create truly sustainable innovation, no imperative is more important than the other. However it is essential to have a solid New Product Development process as well as Ideation process in place since both will create, feed and guide the product concepts through the organization.


4. What are some of the most important parts of an innovation culture that must be maintained for innovation to be sustainable?

Inspiration is one of the most difficult elements of the innovation efforts to maintain according to a recent survey by InnovationCoach.com. This is kind of a surprise as it is the chief executive that should continue to inspire, stay focused and involved. In looking at the parts to make this happen, communication is absolutely key. It is really important to share with the organization as a whole the intend, the goal and the focus and as a result one should communicate on a regular basis to share the initial victories and wins, challenges and focus. The second element that comes to mind is "Openness" of Innovation; start internally, eliminate silos and the anti-bodies and cooperate to win. This will create an environment where by Open Innovation from the outside can be accepted and welcomed which can help you accelerate your efforts.


5. Why are patents and the new product development process so important to innovation?

The book spends a complete chapter on the importance of intellectual property and patents and how to go about it. Patents are important since they create protection and allow a greater return on investment, it helps you carve out a specific proprietary area of protection that can help you build market share and create stakeholder value. It is proven that those companies with a strong patent portfolio creates much more value to their stakeholders than companies without. Airspray, the case study focused on in the book (the company that brought instant foaming dispensers like hand soap to market) was sold at 15 times EBIT which proves the point.

The New Product Development process helps you take a product or service from concept to launch. It enables you to do multiple tasks, simultaneously, by different departments, so that all elements come to completion and fruition at the same end date. This can be done by way of a simple matrix or complex detailed process but it is essential to prioritize and track the concepts through the process and have clear go/no-go stage-gates with teeth.


6. 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?

Making sure that the innovators of tomorrow are skilled in project management, ideation, and teamwork. Leadership will come naturally to those able, but regardless of whether you are a leader or contributor these three skills are essential to cooperate and deliver the new products and services of tomorrow.


You'll find our book review of Robert F. Brands' book "Robert's Rules of Innovation" here.


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.

Interview with Kodak CMO Jeff Hayzlett

by Adam Burns

Here are some excerpts from my video interview with Jeff Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Kodak:

1. Are you a big believer then in this leadership idea of good leaders ask good questions?

Absolutely. I think good leaders, more than anything, listen. I think that's the most attribute to being a leader. Asking questions is one thing and asking the right questions is good, but to listen, to really hear what the real answers are, I think, are real key, because they're usually buried in there somewhere, so you have to listen very carefully. I think that's that best thing a leader can do.


2. Having an outsider's perspective and a very "can do" attitude, I've read and seen quite a few interviews with you previously. You've also very much entrenched yourself in the Kodak Company law. You know the history of the product. How do you balance those two tensions within yourself? How do you make sure that keep your outsider's perspective, plus being the company man?

When you say "being the company man or company person," it's more about I know the core tenants of the brand and the core tenants of what George Eastman started to do. So when I first came to the company, and I was already a big fan before, but when I came to the company, I read everything I could get my hands on. I read his biography. It was one of the most important documents and I got a sense if who he was and how he really made things very simple.

I thought, "If we can carry that forward, wouldn't it be a great thing? How can we bring those things that were so tantamount to what he thought the company should be, like push one button and we do the rest?" That translated itself into the EasyShare sub-brand, in terms of making an easy share. So we wanted to do the same thing with our printers, our cameras and our commercial print products. We make them so easy that anyone can really operate them or make them so easy that we make ourselves so easy to do business with.

So that's a big part of what we have to do, at the same time, challenge that. So ask the product teams, "How are we making this simple? How are we getting this easier for the customer? How are we eliminating the filters when we start talking to our customers? Why can't we get on Twitter? Why can't we get online? Why can't we design products more directly with our customers?" Those are the kind of questions, but, yet, keeping the core things that are important to our value, as a brand, at the forefront? I think that's important to do.


3. Absolutely. That "push one button," is almost perfect for today, isn't it?

It's brilliant. This guy, George Eastman is brilliant. He had some personal issues, if you get to know who he was as a man, but he was truly almost a savant, in terms of the way he did it. He wrote his own ad copy. He designed the business. He had major problems when he first launched where he put out photographic plates and they went bad. You know what he did? He replaced them all. That's what somebody who is a good business leader does. So how can you bring that same sense of core of your beliefs all the way through the organization? That's really what we try to do.

We put together a program very early on when I joined the company, called "FAST," which stood for focus, accountability, simplicity and trust, which really means fast or speed. So even if we screwed up, if that's all we got out of it, was we went faster, and even if we screwed up, we did it faster. That was kind of our joke, internally, because we pushed all these people together and all these companies together when we first started doing the turnaround and the transformation, and things weren't working the way they should have been. So what we said was, "Let's do it fast. What is it I do inside the company, my accountability? What are the promises that I must keep for the company?" My five promises I delivered to my boss, the five that my staff delivers to me, the five that their staff - and so on and so on.

Then simplicity is just not a get out of jail card free, because we don't believe in that, but a permission slip to change things, because you have a big, big company and things are gonna be procedures and rules and policies, which you need, but really more as guidelines, not necessarily that they're law. So if you see a simpler way of doing it, and you're not breaking the law, then go ahead. Why not do those things?

Then "T" stood for trust, which, for us, is healthy debate, to be able to question the status quo and to say, "I think there's a different way of doing that," and then to be comfortable in the organization to challenge a senior executive and challenge the CEO at a town hall meeting. That's what we instilled in the company and I will tell you, five years prior to us joining the company, 10 years, 20 years, there is no way people would have done that. It was a very hierarchal organization that had different lunchrooms for different people on staff. It had conference rooms had that only executives of the company could reserve. Who has that? Things like that that we had to just say, "Does that make sense?" And just give permission to people to change those things.


Here is a teaser for the video interview:




Register for free to see the complete video interview.


Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed or join us on Facebook or LinkedIn!

---

Adam Burns is the Senior Editor of MeetTheBoss TV.

Video Interview - Mary McDowell - Nokia's Chief Development Officer

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview Mary McDowell, Chief Development Officer at Nokia at The Economist's conference "Innovation: Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy". I'd like to share a video interview I did with Mary during the event:




In this video Mary talks about the future of mobile devices, use of the built-in sensors, information access in the developing world, Nokia Life Tools.



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.

Video Interview - John Hagel III - "The Power of Pull"

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview John Hagel III, Co-Chairman of Deloitte's Center for the Edge and co-author of the book "The Power of Pull" at The Economist's conference "Innovation: Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy". I'd like to share a video interview I did with John during the event:




In this video John talks about the difference between passion and obsession, the fringe and the edge, and a sneak preview of "The Power of Pull".



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.

Video Interview - Judy Estrin - "Closing the Innovation Gap"

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview Judy Estrin, a serial entrepreneur and author of the book "Closing the Innovation Gap" at The Economist's conference "Innovation: Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy". I'd like to share a video interview I did with Judy during the event:




In this video Judy and I discuss innovation ecosystems, disruptive innovation, education, and closing the innovation gap.



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.

Creating Innovation in the PARC

Interview - Mark Bernstein of PARC

I had the opportunity recently to interview Mark Bernstein, Chief Executive Officer of PARC.

Mark Bernstein has been the head of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) since 2001, when he led the firm in its transition from a research division of Xerox to an independent business. PARC is among the world's best-respected centers of research and innovation, and its relationships include client services for industry leaders in consumer electronics, information and decision systems, networking and communications, and renewable energy. Among the firm's current projects is Content-Centric Networking, a new approach to networking that addresses massive amounts of internet content to achieve better security, scalability and performance.

Here is the text of the interview:

1. Please briefly tell people about what PARC is today (versus its history)

Today, PARC is a center for commercial innovation - for other clients besides Xerox. (Historically, Xerox PARC was a captive/internal R&D center). PARC is driven by the desire to see its research results impact the world in important ways and across multiple industries. The vision for transformational impact is still alive, but now the understanding of what that takes also comes from our commercial partners, embedded business development, and/or market experts like EIRs.


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

They are limited by the problems they see directly in front of them and the capacity of the resources they have in hand to address them. These constraints are stifling when unfamiliar complexities become visible and breakthroughs are required.


3. What are the keys to successfully partnering with PARC or other organizations like yours?

From our experience, an open and genuine interest in alternative perspectives is an enormous asset for any organization facing challenges to their entrenched expertise or assumptions. And then an essential trait for adaptability is being capable of internalizing the consequence of discovery or responding to radical shifts. Look at the media and automobile industries! Organizations must anticipate the need for change, not be in denial of it or pursue ad hoc solutions...


4. What are the secrets to successfully completing a research project?

Deep understanding of the scientific principles that constrain what's possible, clear thinking and teamwork about the experiments that will lead to a new state of knowledge, robust engineering to demonstrate that development through an industrial-strength technology prototype. (This last feature is where PARC scientists really differ from university researchers, because they have to think about the manufacturing and other constraints to make the technologies scalable). But another important "secret" to successfully completing a research project at PARC is involving our social scientists/ethnographers early and throughout the development pipeline. Some would argue that's an ingredient of our secret sauce.


5. From your experience, what are some of the keys to increasing variability to help get the best ideas?

Increasing variability is NOT necessarily the primary ingredient for producing the best ideas! Integrating a diversity of perspectives from multiple disciplines has been successful at PARC for addressing a number of big, complex problems.


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

Rigid internalized realities, incremental thinking, disabled innovation investment models.


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

Exercising flexible perspective, projecting a positive attitude for change, encouraging "what if" thinking to define possibilities - and constraints.


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?

Focused, distributed, and collaborative projects in the math, science, and humanities - using various media to fuse information and capture knowledge. Collective learning is a fundamental experience for what's possible and problematic for global understanding.


Editor's Note: Mark Bernstein will be speaking at The Economist's "Innovation - Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy" conference and Blogging Innovation will be covering this SOLD OUT event for our readers on March 23-24, 2010 here on our blog and as @innovate on Twitter.


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.

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

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.

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!

---

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.

Having Fun with Innovation

Interview - Scott Christopher of "The Levity Effect"

I had the opportunity to interview Scott Christopher, co-author of "The Levity Effect" about the importance of fun in the workplace, and about how beneficial it can be. But how important is fun to innovation?

A contributing author of the bestseller "A Carrot A Day", a regular columnist for Workplace HR and Safety magazines and a distinguished consultant on recognition, Scott travels the world speaking to leadership groups at conferences, conventions, and on-site customer meetings.

Here is the text from the interview:

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

Boss-employee relationships. Look, all the truly useful, great ideas come from the workforce because they're the ones that have identified a need and can actually see themselves implementing them. An engaged employee is ten times more likely to contribute his or her time, effort and energies into innovation, but too many managers are missing the engagement boat. They simply assume that, particularly in a rough economy, a paycheck is all the incentive people need to work harder and better while still devising ways to improve the company.


2. Why is it so important that organizations teach their leaders to embrace fun more?

Thanks for asking that because it beautifully wraps up the incomplete response above. Easing the tension and pressure with levity is fundamental to getting the most from your people. Studies show that there is a direct correlation between being physically relaxed and motor skill acuity, task completion, team interaction, idea generation, creativity, and the list goes on and on. You don't have to look much further than a high school basketball coach who reminds his players to "have fun out there guys!" If they're tense and nervous, they simply won't be at their best. It's usually the team who "has nothing to lose" that ends up shooting lights out from all over the floor, while the top-ranked Bulldogs, for example, feel the pressure of all the expectations and suddenly forget how to make a simple layup or pass the ball out of bounds.

There is also just too much evidence to ignore that humor and fun at work are no longer optional, but critical to building a satisfying, engaging workplace which drives performance.


3. Why do some people fight against fun in the workplace?

Because there is a stigma associated with levity - it's inappropriate in a professional work environment. Plus, the fear that somehow everyone with a lifelong yearning to be the next Jim Carrey or worse, Don Wrickles, will suddenly rear their ugly, obnoxious heads and you'll have an office filled with offensive, discriminating jokes courtesy of a new army of Michael Scott clones. A lack of credibility is often associated with levity, which is patently erroneous. Many of the world's greatest leaders had and have wonderful senses of humor. Even Mahatma Gandhi once said, "If I didn't have a sense of humor I would have committed suicide long ago." You remember when Bob Dole lost the 1996 presidential election? His whole image was serious. His monotone delivery, his grave responses, his reputation as a wounded war veteran all shaped his image to voters. After he lost, he was on Leno and Letterman laughing at himself and displaying an uncanny and often hilarious sense of humor. Where was that during the campaign? Fear of not being taken seriously, evidently, was his reason for choosing to only display one side of his whole persona. Too bad, he might have won if people had seen the real Bob - credible, courageous, appropriately serious, experienced, AND able to laugh and joke a little.


4. What most impedes organizations from having fun?

Probably the misconception that it's going to take a lot of time and planning and that no one's going to like it anyway, so what's the point? Lightening up at work begins and ends with the individual. It's just a simple shift in your personal paradigm. Smile more, laugh more, unfurrow your brown, unclench your jaws, keep perspective and be the same person at work that you are at home or golfing or at church. Having said that, it can only help to "program" some levity into your department or team. Plan a couple of parties or an offsite outing. Celebrate birthdays. Go see a Friday movie premiere. Go bowling during lunch. There are of course a million ways to have some fun at work, but ultimately just allowing people to be themselves and laugh more and enjoy a good Youtube video now and then is the least complicated or time-consuming way to getting there.


5. Since the book was published, have you come across other organizations that have transformed their organizations to be more fun?

Absolutely. There are levity champions tucked away in cubicles and offices all across the globe and when they read the book it arms them with the validation they've been seeking to take it up the chain. And then they usually have me come in and speak to their leadership group or even the entire company to underscore the company's determination to "lighten things up around here." It's not an overnight cure, by the way. As with any organizational change, it requires time and effort. Many companies have adopted 'fun' or 'sense of humor' as one of their core values or guiding principles, which instantly legitimizes it and can speed up the transition. Levity's effect is not easily quantifiable, but the results are usually evident in things like engagement scores, employee retention, and customer satisfaction.


6. What advice to you have for managers who work in an organization that doesn't have fun?

Buy the book!... and make a personal, confidential goal to commit to the levity concepts for one year. Keep a journal or log of your efforts and what you perceive to be the results, either immediate or long term. Describe in as much detail the current state of your team to compare against later. You will likely not get through the first few months before your work is noticed and possible opportunities to broaden your goal to others become evident. By the end of the year compare and contrast your relationship with your employees, morale, productivity, and financial goals with your starting point. It may take the whole year, but you should have observed tangible, meaningful changes to keep you committed to levity's path.


7. What advice to you have for employees who work in an organization that doesn't have fun?

First, make an issue of it, but don't overdo it. At least let it be known that "gee, we don't have much fun around here." Or "we should laugh more." This may even include a comment about it to your boss in a review or even just shooting the breeze (if that's allowed.) Second, create your own fun. You can still develop and exercise your unique sense of humor and have fun on your own. You don't need permission, or at least you shouldn't, to have a smile on your face, a look of mirth in your eyes and an itchy laughter trigger finger. Re-record your voicemail greetings - put a smile on your face or make yourself laugh right before you record... people will hear levity in your voice. Make your email "voice" a little less formal, maybe subtly change a font, color, or signature. Humanize the copy some; write like you talk. Listen to your favorite comic on satellite radio or your Ipod on the way into work. Get laughing in the car and share one of the jokes with the first person you greet at work.


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?

A comfy place to nap.


Be sure and check out our review of "The Levity Effect" and summary of the main innovation points here.


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.

Video Interview - Eric Liu - "Imagination First"

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview Eric Liu, author of the new book "Imagination First" at a book event last night. I'd like to share a video interview I did with Eric before the event:



Interview - Eric Liu - Author "Imagination First" from Braden Kelley on Vimeo.


If you prefer YouTube, I've split the interview into Part 1 and Part 2 there.

Eric Liu was interviewed on stage during the event by Warren Etheredge and I'd also like to share some of the key insights from Eric's talk at the event:

• We all have the capacity for imagination, but as we grow up we are disincentivized to share it


• We need to teach kids to have respect for limits and to stretch their imaginations by giving them activities with limits and inviting them to create within those limits


• We need to be careful not to strip out the play from education


• "Play matters" - leaning forward versus leaning back


• We should practice imagination in the same way that we practice music, sports, etc.


• There are two main enemies of imagination


1. Expert Knowledge (we know it already)
   
2. Fear (of succcess, of being exposed, etc.)


• How do we sustain imagination in our little pocket of the organization and then how do we infect others with it?


• Next time something bad happens, try saying out loud "How fascinating!", then allow yourself to detach and observe as you work toward a solution instead of getting stuck in a fear loop.


• We want innovation right now, but you don't get the fruit without first planting the seed


• We need to make education speak to students' and teachers' motivations - More "what if?" and less "what is" - More project-based learning


• Out of all of the practices in the book, the most important one is "Failing Well"


• We must learn to fail better each time
  
• True with entrepreneurs
  
• True with politics


• There is an art to failing


• Failure is the real "f" word in our society

Enjoy this post? 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.

Balancing Intuition with Analysis

Interview - Roger Martin of "The Design of Business"


I had the opportunity to interview Roger Martin, the author of "The Design of Business" about the challenges companies face when they fail to balance analytical thinking with intuitive thinking. We also discuss a variety of other innovation topics including: barriers to innovation, education, and risk taking.

Roger Martin has served as Dean of the Rotman School of Management since 1998. He is an advisor on strategy to the CEO's of several major global corporations. He writes extensively on design and is a regular columnist for BusinessWeek.com's Innovation and Design Channel. He is also a regular contributor to Washington Post's On Leadership blog and to Financial Times' Judgment Call column. He has published several books, including: "The Design of Business" and "The Opposable Mind".

Here is the text from the interview:


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

It is the dominance of analytical thinking which holds that unless something can be proven by way of deductive or inductive logic, it is not worthy of consideration or investment. No new idea in the world has been proven before being tried. So as long as analytical thinking is allowed to dominate, innovation is deeply and profoundly challenged.


2. Why is it so important that organizations teach their leaders to be design thinkers?

Design thinkers are capable of balancing the inductive and deductive logic of analytical thinking with the abductive logic of intuitive thinking. So they are capable of both honing and refining the past and inventing the future. Thus they can overcome the innovation challenge. Without design thinking leaders, an organization is likely to slowly but surely stultify - like most large corporations over time.


3. Why is it so hard for hard for managers to take valid risks?

Two main reasons. First, they live in cultures that value only analytical thinking. And second, they get Stockholm syndrome and begin to believe that is right. First they get dissuaded from innovating by others, then they dissuade themselves.


4. What most impedes the risk-taking necessary for innovation?

The problem is processes that imbed requirements for proof through inductive or deductive logic. And then the culture that this breeds.


5. Since the book was published, have you come across other leaders that have transformed their organizations to take more of a design approach?

Leaders from two of the world's largest companies read the book and both have asked me to help them transform their organizations to take a design thinking approach. So far, so good. They are very committed.


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

That is a lame argument. People have time to do anything for which they are passionate. People blame lack of time for every single thing that they think they would like to do but lack the sufficient passion for. Innovators innovate regardless of their environment. Some get fired for it and go somewhere else and start over again. A leader can make it harder or easier for employees to innovate. But the innovators innovate regardless and the non-innovators complain about the difficulty finding the time to innovate - regardless.


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

They need to nurture their originality. Very few people in life are good at anything without practice. If you practice mastery all your life, you will be masterful. If you practice originality, you will get good at innovation. Most managers spend their time deepening their mastery and not nurturing their originality. Over time, they become fearful of innovation.


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?

Make art a required subject for as long as we make math a required subject. We send a powerful signal to students that analytics are important and artistry is not. Artistry is the foundation of innovation. Most technologists will never innovate a single thing because their training drove out any artistry from them.


My book review of "The Design of Business" can be found here.

---

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.