Optimizing Innovation Conference Wrapup

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from all of the speakers at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

The speakers at this intimate conference were the innovation directors from several Fortune 500 companies, who shared their approaches to topics as varied as innovation management, process, innovation metrics, and more.

Click the link of the speaker you are most interested in, or read them all!

• Microsoft - Joe Boggio and Michael Steep


• AT&T - Rajendra Seksaria


• Anheuser Busch-InBev - Patrick O'Riordan


• Panel Discussion


• Alcatel-Lucent - Dr. Guido Petit


• 3M - Mauro Porcini


• CogniStreamer - Wim Soens


• Xerox - Francois Ragnet


• Kraft Foods - Dr. Stephen K. Goers


• SmartOrg - Dr. David Matheson and Don Creswell


• Chevron - Jack Anderson


• Google - Dr. Daniel Sturman


• American Express - Steve Faktor


• Creax - Simon Dewulf


• Pfizer - Roopa Unnikrishnan


• Whirlpool - Moises Norena


• LinkedIn - Dr. Ellen Levy

Overall, it was a great conference. The Connecting Group will be hosting a European version next year called 'Breakthrough Innovation 2010' in Barcelona, Spain from March 17-18, 2010.

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Dr. David Matheson of SmartOrg

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Dr. David Matheson's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Dr. David Matheson of SmartOrg conducted a workshop on optimizing profitable growth in uncertain times. He started by talking about how when it comes to innovation, you should always start with the following three questions:

1. Does anybody care?


2. Can we do it?


3. Should we do it?

And then explore some of the things that make innovation difficult to pursue:

• Time horizon
• Payback
• Uncertainty
• Risk
• Competitive Landscape
• Scale & Reach
• Mission Fit
• Incentive Structure
• Market Adoption Rate
• Regulation
• Past Experience
• Unknown Unknowns

You have to keep in mind that the mental models that people use for project evaluation, don't work for innovation (assumption, hockey sticks, etc.).


"How good are you at articulating your ignorance?"


When it comes to evaluating innovation projects and building an innovation portfolio, you have to make people state percentage ranges (one person's definition of likely is different than another's). But keep in mind that these may change with new information. Focus on the range not the assumptions.


"Nobody knows the future."


As much as you might try and look for it, data does not exist on the future. Gartner reports are often extrapolations made by recent MBA graduates - they are not data.


"If I walked in and asked for $500,000 and said I could make $2,000,000, the COO would laugh at me and I wouldn't get the money. But if I asked for $500,000 and promised $750,000 then I would get it. Why is that?"


A company's culture and our own credibility pose challenges for people pitching innovation ideas using the expected costs and expected returns.


"In the room here you just validated that most of you spend money on validating what you think you already know rather than testing what you are most afraid of."


"In would argue that to follow the fail fast principle and maximize learning, that you should invest in testing proof points, not in validaton."


If it is a good calculate risk made on the best information you are going to get, with appropriate offset for risk, then it is a good investment.


"If you want more certainty, you'll get more mediocrity."


"Project Risk is not equal to Portfolio Risk"


It is EXTREMELY important that you do not transfer corporate risk to individuals if you want to succeed in innovation:

• Measure Value


• Embrace Uncertainty


• Maximize Learning

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Joe Boggio and Michael Steep of Microsoft

by Braden Kelley


We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Joe Boggio and Michael Steep's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Joe Boggio, Director of Innovation Management Solutions and Michael Steep, Chief of Operations at Microsoft spoke about:

• Innovation at Microsoft


• Building Open Innovation Competencies


• Technology Enabled Innovation

Mike Steep sits on a team that looks at cross-Microsoft innovations. Innovation at Microsoft from amongst its 90,000 people, breaks down time horizons as follows:

• Present -> Product Groups (40,000 in product groups)


• 2-4 yrs -> Microsoft Labs (maybe 200 in the lab environment)


• 5-10 yrs -> Microsoft Research (800-1000)

The challenge Microsoft has is leveraging their technical capability to lead the industry in a new way in the future, while working against the challenge of the short-term focus of each product group.

There are three main innovation processes at Microsoft:

1. Think Week - any employee can write a paper about a topic - 300+ papers used to be read by Bill Gates, but Steve Ballmer and execs do now


2. High level architecure process


3. Trying to figure out ways to bring customers into the process

Microsoft is in all of the top 100 companies and unfortunately, talking to our customers sometimes results in more short-term thinking being fed back by customers.

They've built a new Innovation Outreach Program:

• They talked to lots of the leading 100 companies and their innovation leaders


• They themselves as matchmakers in matching people newer to innovation with those farther along


• Strategy & implementation are key challenges for innovation leaders


• They now are engaged with 15 companies and out of that 6 joint ventures have emerged from among the companies


• After bringing together ten non-competing companies and government agencies, the biggest value they said was the ability for them to talk to each other. They didn't tend to call each other before the gathering.


• They've found the business model discussion to be as important as the technical discussion (the Innovation Outreach Program)

The Microsoft approach to innovation management leverages SharePoint:


Engage -> Evolve -> Evaluate -> Execute


Microsoft is leveraging partner network to create business models for product prototypes they are working on, and bringing their offering to market as software via Codeplex and as services via Microsoft Consulting.

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Rajendra Seksaria of AT&T

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Rajendra Seksaria's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Rajendra Seksaria, AVP, Business & Process Integration at AT&T spoke about successfully managing your innovation process. Before AT&T, Rajendra spent time with IBM Consulting during the early days:

• Discovering and developing staff with creative minds in order to capitalize on their knowledge and optimizing the innovation process


• Important to create an environment where you can harness the best people (inside and outside)


• Streamlining process and minimizing risk


• Databases are not the key to innovation - connecting people is

"Many people cannot make the mental switch from protecting an existing business to creating a new business."


But at the same time, you also have to be careful not to abandon a dying business too early or you may not have the money to fund the new thing.

Interesting facts:

• IBM gets more patents than the next eight companies combined


• IBM introduced a way for patent holders to get a percentage of any licensing revenues that their patents might get

AT&T's innovative leaders program is run out of the Chairman's office and this program allows selected individuals to have visibility to other parts of the organization and to people in other parts of the organization that they would not otherwise have.

Rajendra gave an example of a situation where AT&T was 12 months slower in cycle time than our competition (42 vs. 30). But, they determined that instead of trying to go from 42 months to 20 months on a 2 year improvement program, they had to try and go from 42 months to 10 months because they needed to try and not just improve, but to vault ahead of the competition.


Are you setting the right goal?


Are you setting the goal in relation to the competition or just in terms of what you think you can do?


AT&T Corporate Innovation Process

• We have built something we think is sustainable. An innovation managemen system called "innovation pipeline"


• When you join the system you are given $10,000 of innovation money that you can invest - values go up and down


• The top 10-15 votes are presented to senior execs


• When the product comes to market, the people who submitted the idea, participated, invested, etc. receive some kind of reward


• First there is sme social innovation, then a pitch, then a project


• But, this is not the only process - this is a corporate-wide process. Divisions also have their own ideas processes for improving things in the division

"Learn from your competitors mistakes"


While focusing on creating new revenue is important, don't ignore cost savings ideas. How much new business would you have to sell to make the same amount of the savings?

Example: a $10 Million annual savings on revenue leakages from billing, cost only $40,000 to get, and that's pure profit. At our margins, it would take something like $200 Million in new business to make that much profit.


Also, think about your strengths and what you need to do versus what you can get others to do.

Example: The group chosen to build the IBM PC, chose to think about it in terms of just assembling computers rather than building everything. As a result it took only 9 months instead of 3 years to get to market.

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Patrick O'Riordan of Anheuser Busch-InBev

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Patrick O'Riordan's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Patrick O'Riordan, Global Director of Insights & Innovation at Anheuser Busch-Inbev spoke about balancing short, mid, and long-term initiative in your innovation pipeline. Patrick sits in the marketing organization and serves the top 10 markets and focuses on filling the innovation pipeline using a decentralized, lean organization. Recently, they've been opening up more to their peers and people outside of their organization.

They've lost global share of thoat over the last 10 years (Diageo too), but they are gaining within alcoholic beverages at the expense of spirits. The Chinese are gaining a taste for beer and China is the biggest market (by consumption).

Anheuser Busch-InBev has a 'World Class Commercial Program' focused on creating a marketing excellence culture - focused on renovating & innovating.

It's not all about new products, but about staying contemporary with our customers:

• Look at innovation through the consumers' eyes


• Renovation could be a bottle or label change (same basic product)


• Renovation offers similar benefits


• Innovation offers similar benefits in a better way or additional benefits

"Never fall in love with the process"


They focus on clear goals and clear targets and their innovation culture is tied into their corporate culture. They have eight modules in their innovation process - four at the front-end and four at the back end, with four stage gates for the four stages at the end - with a fuzzy front end.:

• Define R&I Strategy & Brief


• Develop concept platforms


• Generate ideas


• Write & test concepts


• Prioritize


• Determine feasability


• Develop product


• Execute launch

They created an online innovation management system only about 18 months ago and it has had a huge impact on time to market.

Anheuser Busch-InBev focuses on Share of Throat (SOT) innovations (new skus), Share of Beer (SOB) renovations & innovations (new skus), and securing & improving competitiveness renovations & innovations (part of the core - existing skus). They distinguish between liquid and packaging innovations.

They do measure how much of their revenue comes from innovation (now that we've been going for a few years). They would like to work with their competitors to make sure that their category stays relevant.

In the Anheuser Busch-InBev model, different organizations have different time horizons:

• BU/Country = 0-18 months (competitiveness and SOB renewal)


• Zone + Global = 18-36 months (SOB & SOT renewal)


• Global - long-term = 36-60 months (consumer trends/growth opportunities)

One of the things that the central innovation group organizes, is InnoWeek - an innovation week workshop. They have to go and live it and work it with them including legal, CSR, and other roles. They have an Oceans Eleven type approach with functional experts that bring best practices to different countries.

They focus on satisfying the emotions of the customer, and do a lot of ethnography and observation and co-creation with pro-sumers. You have to keep in mind that the consumer sometimes says one thing but means and does another thing. They are also looking to partner with other companies (like Apple, P&G, Danone, Unilever, BMW, etc.) to share customer insights.

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Panel Discussion

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from a panel discussion at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

The panel topic was "Successfully Innovating in the Current Economy". The panelists were Robert Repetto (Wyeth Biotech), Halina Karachuck (AXA Equitable), Randy Calson (Diageo), and Karen Morris (Chartis Insurance). I will bring you key responses from the panelists by question:


Question 1 - "What challenges are you facing in the current environment?"

"We innovate around whatever the world throws at us, so events won't change our approach and how we build our model/systems/tools/etc., but what we focus on and the money we have available might change." - Robert Repetto (Wyeth Biotech)

"We are seeing resources being cut for innovation and growing risk aversion despite people "wanting" innovation." - Halina Karachuck (AXA Equitable)

"These are the best of times and the worst of times for innovation. The political and personal risk for stepping outside the status quo is now higher and people don't want to step out of their box. And at the same time, senior management time and leadership time is distracted by the economic times." - Karen Morris (Chartis Insurance)

"We have a portfolio that helps us adapt very quickly and the company was aligned to making change from ultra premium innovation focus to mainline focus. We look at an 18-24 month future, and have the benefit of a chairman that has stood up and said that innovation is a key focus - 'We will do new things to win'" - Randy Carlson (Diageo)


Question 2 - "What does innovation mean? Do employees know what it means? How is it actionable?"

"Often times the definition isn't clear. Innovation is different than having an idea. An idea is a wonderful thing and something to be proud of, but it may never come to fruition or make you any money. Innovation is taking an idea and making it real. Do we recognize the individual for the idea or the whole team that makes it happen?" - Robert Repetto (Wyeth Biotech)

"That word innovation can work against us. Everyone has a different idea of what means - from silly/fluffy brainstorming to 'oh my god are we going to have to create the next iPod? I can't do that.' - I would like to get rid of the word." - Halina Karachuck (AXA Equitable)

"One of the first things our group did was to define it - 'Innovation is the creation of new value sustainably for us and our value chain and our customers' - In retrospect 'innovation' is a burdensome definition - Instead we should focus on 'What can we do to build better relationships?' - Focusing on this will help to create value and innovation - especially in our product centric business" - Karen Morris (Chartis Insurance)

"Innovation is a separate business unit and success is measured over three years - 'A new liquid or a new package or a new combination of the two things' - a new product or new technology for existing product. One unusual example of innovation came with our failing french vodka (about to be killed) where someone suggested adding Sean Combs as a profit-sharing spokesperson and it turned around" - Randy Carlson (Diageo)


A couple of random comments:

"Much more difficult to create disruptive innovation, as it requires a whole set of different processes and systems than the incremental innovations." - Karen Morris (Chartis Insurance)

"Some people in our org think that innovation skills can be learned, while others think it is not a discipline and a waste of time." - Halina Karachuck (AXA Equitable)


Question 3 - "What about quick wins?"

"We've done ammendments to make products a little more attractive than they are currently (removing restrictions). It is currently harder to bring new market product innovations to bear, so we have started rapid prototyping and sometimes even creating hypothetical press releases for the business unit leaders with our name or the competitors name on it to spark conversations - 'Wait. We haven't got this.' - 'No, but we could.'" - Karen Morris (Chartis Insurance)

"We switched from bringing a pipeline of ideas to market to trying to focus on the culture and getting people to think more creatively, looking at our product design process. We got the green light to bring in IDEO to help us with our product design process because of the crisis. We are also looking at how we are training middle managers to feel comfortable and confident that they can be innovators even if they are only frontline-informed incremental innovations (people applied for this systematic innovation course)" - Halina Karachuck (AXA Equitable)

"We have had more success putting 3D bottles in front of executives to get them to buy-in, than presenting the fully-developed ideas in presentation form. That's not saying that we won't do all of the other justifications for the stage gate process - but just to give you an idea." - Randy Carlson (Diageo)


Question 4 - "Failure is not an option for me in the banking industry. If current business is a castle (nice, safe place), then why don't we don't innovate outside the castle?"

"Our castle is under siege. I would love to innovate outside the castle, and maybe we have one idea that might be allowed to do so in a more entrepreneurial way because it might go faster, and fast matters." - Halina Karachuck (AXA Equitable)

"There is always the challenge re-integration later, and sometimes they drown in the moat. High potential leaders may not want to participate because it removes them from visibility for a time. Insights are increasingly being described as the only source of competitive advantage." - Karen Morris (Chartis Insurance)

"Fail fast, fail small, learn, and adapt. There will be a chance of failure - limit the size of the exposure." - Randy Carlson (Diageo)

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Dr. Guido Petit of Alcatel-Lucent

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Dr. Guido Petit's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Dr. Guido Petit, Director of the Alcatel-Lucent Technical Academy spoke about Optimizing Innovation through Entrepreneurial Boot Camps. The program had its genesis back in 2002 after massive layoffs at the company. At that point in time, the CEO decided to focus on making innovation the job of everyone. They started in Belgium with an idea generation site that they built. They received maybe ten idea submissions per month in Belgium after launching it.

But, then they decided to put a car on the parking lot and offer it as a prize. Submisions tripled to thirty per month. So, they got 150 ideas in the 5 months of the car contest. Eleven people were selected to pitch their ideas to senior leadership out of the 150 ideas. But this car prize promotion was a mistake. In the end we made one person happy and 149 people unhappy. This is not sustainable.

As a funny side note, the person who won the car, was someone who rode his bike to work every day, and he sold the car after one week. And after contest the volume of idea submissions dropped back to 10 per month, and none of the eleven selected ideas made it into a product (including the winner).

But, the guy with the second place idea proposed starting a program to help people learn how to develop their ideas. This evolved into our entrepreneurial boot camp.


"Let people pursue their passion."


The Entrepreneurial Boot Camp takes place over three weekends (Friday + Saturday) - with the Friday being donated by the company and the Saturday being donated by the employee, and then a dry run, and finally a Super Friday for people to pitch their ideas (all together this takes place over about three months - spaced 2 weeks apart).

For the program, we set expectations that idea subissions must be for a new business that will be worth 50-100 Million Euros in 3-5 years:

• Otherwise we just get a lot of process improvement ideas or suggestions on improving the food in the cafeteria

We partner with the Flanders Business School on the program and typically have five teams of five people with a senior manager as part of the team as a coach (for a total of six people). We generally have five or six teams per boot camp.

Super Friday consists of 15 minutes per team, with 12 slides each to target all 12 points including vision, competition, solution, etc.

• 30 minutes for Q&A


• Participants don't want to lose because this is a great exposure opportunity


• CEO, CTO and CFO of Alcatel-Lucent Belgium and venture capitalists make up the panel


• Now VCs are knocking on our doors to participate


• Only 1 of the 5 ideas will go into the incubation phase where market validation, fast prototyping, and a lead customer must be sourced


• Sometimes ideas are transfered immediately to business units if they are close to core

One thing that we have found is that people don't always want to post their idea on an innovation web site, so we have these 'dating events'. Idea owners can pitch their ideas to anyone in the company at a dating event to attract supporters. This also serves as an opportunity to connect people. We encourage people to merge research, mktg, finance, engineering, and sales into diverse teams.


"Talented people are everywhere but... they are not connected."


We have found that in our organization the smokers are the connectors, and so we have made it more comfortable for people to smoke. This is not to say that we encourage smoking.

• There are no salary levels when people smoke together


• Our smokers tend to be very social


• hey call people to go smoke


• They also like coffee and beer

We do our best to promote success stories from the boot camps. The boot camps are 80% coaching and 20% theory. Boot camps are done on top of daily duties.

We encourage risk-taking and entrepreneurship with our boot camps:

• A way to change the innovation mindset


• They provide an opportunity to scout entrepreneurial talent (finding people that have skills that are not otherwise shown and to possibly redeploy talent)


• HR doesn't know where the entrepreneurs are


• 80% of the ideas coming through the boot camps address new markets - the other 20% are new technologies for existing markets


• We include VC's and business school professors because they often have insights into new markets - either new or existing technology

The results of our boot camps so far?

• 2 internal ventures


• 3 projects in incubation


• 5 proposals were transferred to existing business units

Setting expectations is important to get the good ideas. Managing expectations is important because all of the teams believe they will win even though only one can win. For those teams that lose, they will get feedback from VC's and our executive leadership in the room.

Successful teams don't always move onto the incubation or venture teams. Some have had nobody transfer into the venture team and others have seen 4 of 5 carry forward onto the venture team. GM's for venture teams can be hired from outside.

We started two ventures in 2008. It is still to early to tell if they will be successful. We can tell you though that the business plans of ventures were different at the end of incubation and the at the end of the venture period than they were going in.

We are on Boot Camp 8 and we have now put 200 out of our 1,800 people through our boot camps and the number of ideas and the quality of ideas are inevitably and expectedly trending down. So now we are opening our boot camps to Alcatel-Lucent employees outside of Belgium, and we are sharing the methodology with other companies like Exxon, Agfa, Philips, J&J, Picanol, etc. We are also going to experiment with joint teams from more than one company.

One nice outcome has been that the alumni still supply new ideas and are interested in being coaches the next time around. Surprisingly, only about 10 of the 200 people in the program have left the company.

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Mauro Porcini of 3M

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Mauro Porcini's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Mauro Porcini, Head of Global Product Design - Consumer & Office Business at 3M
spoke about the importance of design and its role in innovation. 3M focuses a lot on taking a technology and adapting it to a lot of different products in different industries. In 1948 William McKnight created the 15% rule (time to use for anything) at 3M, and this stimulated innovation.

And when we look at the world as a whole, it is clear that we're reaching the limits of efficiency, and this is leading companies to focus on innovation to meet the relentless pressure of shareholder expectations. And at the same time, design-thinking is everywhere - including this New York Times article, and at most of the fast growing companies.

Design alert businesses benefit in their turnover, stock price, market share, and in a reduction of price competition. At 3M we talk about how Holistic Innovation connects R&D Innovation to Design.

Luckily the decision of whether to invest in design today is becoming a no-brainer for many companies devoted to innovation. At the same time, many people don't understand what design is or what design is compared to design thinking.

When 3M hired me they didn't know how to use me - they just knew that they wanted to have more of a presence and focus on design. At 3M designers existed, but they were often not involved until the end of solution development.

So what are some of the cultural roadblocks?

• A misunderstanding about the meaning of design


• It helps to start by defining design and its value for people


• Show how each group will benefit


• Not invented here syndrome - "We can do it ourselves"


• Build credibility and respect - Make Yourself necessary


• Reluctance to change (People who answer - it's too much - too complicated - too expensive - too much additional work - too difficult - too stylish - too trendy) - This is the reason it usually requires a crisis to change


• Build smooth integration of the new design variable, and focus on cultural risk management.

And what are some of the other ways to overcome the barriers?

• Bring a new strong design know how


• Strong top management support


• Find a co-conspirator that is more of an insider than you


• I started with Italy first and then tried to go worldwide


• Get external reinforcement and don't be afraid to use customers for reinforcement


• I pitched to Target what I was trying to do at 3M and they thought it was interesting and they then decided to transform their monthly tech fair into a design fair

One of the quick wins of our design journey was a projector, where we did only styling (no product design) - The result? - Sales doubled. But design is not just about the consumer market. Even changing the styling of a molding machine doubled the sales. The fact is that if you have an ugly product, you have to spend more money to sell the technology.

One methodology that is grabbing more attention is Design for Six Sigma (DFSS).

Pragmatic Design Flow:

Idea -> Purchase -> Receive/Unpack -> Use -> Store -> Dismiss

1. Visceral Relation (purchase experience)


• Emotional impulse purchase


2. Interactive Relation (use experience)


• Emotional satisfaction & loyalty


3. Expressive Relation (use experience)


• Communication & spontaneous PR

You should be creating things that you are happy to display insteading of hiding. And while the practical interaction must be good, you must also deliver some magic.

Luckily, design at 3M has moved from beautification to integrating with the other functions. If you don't focus on the rational and emotional and focus only the functional, ultimately your competitor might do it and kill you in the marketplace.

Design can provide intimate pleasure and/or reassurance, but also the communication of mindset, status, etc.


"When you are in love with your customer, you want to surprise them - instead of just satisfy them."

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Wim Soens of CogniStreamer

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Wim Soem's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Wim Soens, Managing Partner at Cognistreamer spoke about their Innovation Portal 3.0 software and a bit about Enterprise 2.0 Innovation. From Wim's perspective, 2005 marked a switch from the majority of people reading content to the majority creating content. People are now generating, sharing, remixing, and filtering activities are all coming together to create the collaborative effort that represents Web 2.0.

So, what are the flaws of the widely used innovation funnels with stage gates?

• First - Quality of the Ideas


• Survey response - 75% of people are not happy with the quality of their ideas


• Second - Screening Bottleneck


• About 80% of ideas killed after first screening and only about 1% come out of the end of the funnel)


• Three - Assessment Challenge (picking the winners)


• Especially as you expand ideation to open innovation


• During the innovation funnel you attempt to reduce the chance of failure, but at the same time there is an increasing cost of failure as an idea moves through the funnel

You might want to check out the mymachine project in Belgium to connect universities with technical high schools and children.


"The next wave of innovation by enterprises will depend on the ability to connect people together more effectively, especially at the edge of enterprises, and provide them with tools to support collaborative creation." -- John Hagel


As companies evolve, some of the challenges of the Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem that they will face include:

• Community Activation


• Motivation


• Capability and Usability


• Privacy & IP Protection


• Process Integration

Keep in mind that the front end of innovation is not the same as new product development, yet we apply these same sequential processes to this uncertain part of innovation. The fuzzy front-end of innovation ultimately requires more of a Management 2.0 approach.

Finally, as we enter this Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 world, it will be crucial to find the right balance between chaos and structure.

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Francois Ragnet of Xerox

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Francois Ragnet's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Francois Ragnet, Managing Principal, Technology Innovation at Xerox spoke about technology transfer and the paper-free office. Xerox generated 940 patents in 2008 and has 8,000 active patents and invests $884 million in R&D (5.2% of revenue). 5,000 world-class scientists & engineers are generating more than 2 patents a day for Xerox. They recently started an Innovation Hub in India where they will try to leverage open innovation.

From Francois' perspective, part of the difficulties in innovating in the services space is to create something that is repeatable and differentiated. Innovation in services relies on learning from failure.


"We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery." - Samuel Smiles


"We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we're in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There's no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either." - Steve Ballmer


Xerox has an initiative called "customer-led innovation":

• We have technology showcase centers where we show people technology not products (researchers and customers coming together)


• We also do a lot of work practice studies (ethnography)


• Tthe naturalistic study and recording of human behavior


• Naturally occuring behavior, habitats, etc.

In designing our service solutions we also use ethnographic studies to make automated processes more intelligent and human.

While the paperless office has not become a reality, Xerox is still seeking ways to make this happen.

Xerox has an agile innovation pipeline that they use (FUNNEL top to bottom below):

1. Research (called Innovation)


2. Readiness


3. Productization


4. Integration


5. Operation

The traditional innovation funnel is very limiting and the handoffs from one stage to the next involve groups with different timescales and sometimes knowledge is lost in the handoffs between groups. The traditional innovation funnel approach is very much like a waterfall approach to software. But, that approach is very limiting, so we have tried to make this a more agile approach and create a group that goes across all of the innovation pipeline (to provide consistency and negotiate between the different stages and also to drive bi-drectional communication that involves passing potential research ideas back from the operations people to the research people).


"Too much process kills the process."


Key Xerox Innovation Criteria:

• ROI/Reusability


• Differentiation


• Cost


• etc.

Finally, there was a question from the audience about managing the necessary cannibalization of Xerox's existing business, and the response was as follows:

• We see services as a key part of the future of our company (documents and workflow)


• We don't see one replacing the other overnight

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Dr. Stephen K. Goers of Kraft Foods

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Dr. Steven K. Goers' talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Dr. Steven K. Goers, VP, Open Innovation and Investment Strategy at Kraft Foods, oriented his talk towards 'Innovating the How'. Dr. Goers sits in the R&D department and looks after Knowledge Management, Intellectual Property, and Open Innovation.

Kraft Foods has 99% penetration into United States households, but still is trying to grow the company at 5%+ (which translates to $2B a year). To help achive their goals, they are trying to harness the power of internal innovation networks - 2,000 scientists and engineers and 98,000 employees - while also leveraging external innovation networks. They are currently expanding their innovation capacity (ability to do more) and capability (to integrate open innovation).

Kraft Foods needs to innovate because they are in the fast-moving CPG industry, maintain a breadth of categories, and need to continue to maintain an edge over private label products.


"We must ensure that we know what we know"


Knowledge Management Pains:

• Discovery (ability to easily search & access relevant information)


• Documentation and Content Management (capture, organize, transfer & archive info)


• Collaboration & Social Networks (leverage collective power of organization)


• Expertise Management (accessing expertise and know-how)

"How do we make sure that we are leveraging and sharing the information and expertise that are spread around the organization?"


Enabling Networks & Collaboration Tools to begin to address the pain:

• Innovation Web Site & Toolbox


• R&D Knowledge Suite


• Innovation Supplier Portal (probably have dealt with hundreds)


• Ask an Expert (blog type tool to route questions to senior tech community)


• Technical Subject-Matter Experts (expert management system)


• Category Linkage Meetings


• Innovation Days (get people to work in cross-functional days to ideate and innovate once a year - about 25 products have come out of these including Oreo Cakesters)

Deli-Fresh Case Study

• The technology that was developed a dozen years ago was found and leveraged, and this saved about four months of development time


• "New challenges can have old solutions"


• "Going slow to go fast"

"Innovation Capability = Know How + Know Who"


Knowledge Management - "Know what we know"

Open Innovation - "Knowing what others know and leveraging external solutions and capabilities"


Kraft Foods is moving to open innovation because innovation landscape is changing, pace is acclerating, cost is increasing, internal resources are constrained, and speed-to-market needs to improve:

• There are a lot of smart people outside of Kraft


• Kraft owns only about 2% of the food-related IP - #1 us patent holder and #3 globally, but that still only gets us to 2%


• We've done partnerships and open sourcing before (example of partnership with Starbucks in grocery stores)

Open Innovation (OI) Strategic Imperatives (currently focused on building capabilities):

1. Focus (things our businesses really want - not OI for OI sake)


2. Building capabilities, and becoming a partner of choice


3. Addressing the culture

Accelerating our approach to open innovation is not without headwinds within the company:

• "I was hired to create"


• What you create is equally important as what you FIND and who you know


• "We didn't find an internal solution - let's now look external"


• Build OI strategies into business plans (consider open innovation at the beginning of the project


• What is the best path to the solution of this problem?


• Is it internal, is it external)


• "We need to own the IP"


• "You need rights to use IP"


• "OI is what they (that central group) do"


• People think my group handles this and so they opt out instead of proactively seeking themselves


• OI needs to be embedded into how everyone innovates

Kraft Foods like many of the other organizations here, operate a Hub & Spoke construct to drive open innovation:

1. Hub - Tools, Process, Culture


• Build org capabilities and networks


• Scout for new biz partnerships


• Governance and metrics


2. Spoke


• Scout, content, collaborate


• Identifies key business unit priorities


• Scouts for BU opportunities


• OI advocate/champion

Kraft Foods intends to embed open innovation into strategy and business process:

• Considered at onset of project


• Shared ownership and alignment


• One set of goals, Business Unit owns, OI group enables

The Innovation Hub tries to serve as a catalyst for these efforts, not as the driver:

• Supplier Innovation & Co-creation (most effective method so far)


• Innovation Challenges (Internal Innovation Days and external challenges as well)


• Expanded external networks


• External Investments - univ research and venture capital


• OI web site & cool tools (to help enable and connect people)


• http://www.innovatewithkraft.com (unsolicited idea submission portal)

Supplier-based innovation example (Oreos/Chips Ahoy):

• Resealable packaging for oreos and chips ahoy (no more sliding tray out of plastic and back in)


• Solution is the "Snack 'n' Seal"


• 51% to 70% boost in customer preference "definitely would buy"

Triscuit/Wheat Thins/Planters example:

• Here we put the strategy and customer needs statement with selected strategic suppliers


• This was very difficult to make happen


• We use these case studies to raise awareness and open doors to other groups changing their behaviors

Kraft Foods is currently doing mostly supplier-based open innovation.

Another case study (All Out Squeeze Kraft Mayo):

• Customer complaint of too much product left in the container


• We bought a technology that allowed us to coat the inside of the containers and allow complete evacuation of product


• This allowed us to turn consumer dissatisfier into a growth enabler


• But, not only that, as we started working with this company, we developed additional IP to make things work on our high speed lines, etc.

Kraft Foods High-Level Innovation Framework:

1. Business Strategy


2. Technical Needs


3. Intelligence Gathering


4. IP & Technology Sourcing Strategy


5. Development/Commercialization

One of Kraft Foods' key challenges is that often because of time constraints, people try to skip Intelligence Gathering and IP & Technology Sourcing Strategy:

• Knowledge Management - What do we already know internally?


• Open Innovation - How can we leverage external knowledge & innovation?


• Intellectual Property - How can we create or access an invention & operate freely?

Embedding innovation into the organization:

• Focus on the fact that the benefit is for them - the scientist/developer


• Communication


• Executive sponsorship and support

Finally, in response to a question from the audience, Dr. Goer did delve into the topic of corpoarte/university partnerships for a brief moment and his key points were the following:

• It's gotten a lot harder over the last few years


• Contract negotiations are taking a lot longer


• Questions about whether we really need to own all of the IP or whether having the rights to use it or the rights of first refusal are okay

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Jack Anderson of Chevron

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Jack Anderson's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Jack Anderson, Innovation Specialist at Chevron, spoke first about innovation and IT's overall posture (High Level IT Posture Within the Organization):

• Systematic innovation


• Managed innovation


• Defined innovation


• Sporadic innovation


• Initial/Ad hoc innovation

Versus the view of IT as:

• Cost Center


• Service Center


• Investment Center


• Value Center

Jack Anderson works in the technology group at Chevron:

• Chevron leadership sees innovation as a connector


• One of Chevron's core values is based around ingenuity


• Chevron employees are expected to be collaborative and to be ingenious, but you still have to know the right person to ask for the data

"How do we get the great ideas articulated so that people can do something with those ideas?"


Chevron has three modes of innovation:

1. Radical


2. Incremental


3. Reapplied


• Reapplied is the one that people have the most difficulty with (an innovation designed for a different industry or a different problem)

Jack recommended that everyone check out some of Edward De Bono's books. I'll be checking out "Teach Your Child to Think".

There are three people on the central Chevron innovation team, and they are expected to galvanize and network. Chevron also has a network of people they are training to be experts in innovation practices.

Jack also spoke about commitment statements:

• What are we doing here?


• What is your role in it?

Chevron's innovation benefits from the central innovation team are mostly top-line ($3.6 million), but also $143,000 in savings from efficiencies.

• But, these are numbers that the facility participants actually told Jack and his group is only claiming 1/10 of what they told him

Finally, Jack encouraged everyone to check out a 22 minute IDEO video on building a new shopping cart design in a week. Here is part of it, at least until ABC finds this Spanish language meta information version and tries to charge you $39 for this previously "free" television:

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Dr. Daniel Sturman of Google

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Dr. Daniel Sturman's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Dr. Daniel Sturman, Engineering Director at Google, spoke from an engineer's perspective, not from an innovation director's perspective, about the culture at Google. The main key in his mind?

Make sure you have good people, that they know what direction you're going in, and then as a manager, try to get out of the way:

• Rich and broad mission scope


• Tolerance of failure and encouragement of risk-taking


• Decentralized action towards a commin mission and platform


• Technical leverage (cloud computing)

The Google approach to managing people and launching and iterating, may very well not be applicable to other areas, but it's what they do. Dr. Sturman talked about how he wouldn't necessarily want his surgeon launching and iterating.

From his experience, there was no master plan to Google from 2001 to 2009:

• Many ideas large and small were tried and abandoned


• What worked was defined by user excitement


• We focus on launch and iterate, and fail early and often, because often our first conception of what the user wants were wrong

"Usage is the currency that speaks - not what customers say they will use"


To help them figure out which ideas will succeed and which will not, Google does a lot of live experiments on the Google site - re-routing a small portion of their traffic to experimental parts of the site (as little as .1% of the traffic).

Dr. Sturman feels that having a strong and flexible technical foundation is key to Google's success. This means easy access to hardware resources - rather than machines belonging to a certain group or having to requisition things through a restrictive process.

Google has the advantage of low experimentation costs - because they're in the online services business and have lots of servers. Dr. Sturman referred to the Google portfolio as "shared warehouse computing".

Also key is that all the pieces of code (with very few exceptions), are available to everyone in the organization.


"When in doubt, always move towards empowerment"


Management sets the tone:

• How important is control?


• I have 25 direct reports, some with the same spans of control


• This makes it almost impossible for me to be a control freak


• I can't possibly know exactly what everyone is doing


• A rational organization can often rationize away innovation
  
  • Accountability must be balanced
  
  
  • Some chaos can be a good thing!
  
  
  • Technnology in lieu of hierarchy
  
  
  • Communication can enable flatness
  
  
• Small teams (say 8 people) and a flat heirarchy are good


• Peer driven evaluation and promotion


• If peers don't think your work is important, but boss does, you're not going to be promoted


• peer opinions are almost more important

"Always look for reasons as a manager at Google to say yes."


Google Labs is their outlet for 'radical ideas' to allow for ideas to be tested out:

• Google Squared and its table format for search results is one example of solutions being tested


• Okay that user interface is not consistent


• Primarily advanced users will find these ideas

One of the great things Dr. Sturman has found at Google is that it is much easier to build solutions for very complex problems.


Question from Jack Anderson of Chevron:

"How does Google attract the right people to work in such an environment?":

• We look for people who are comfortable with ambiguity and who have the ability to accept failure


• We hire smart generalists and hope they can acquire the necessary specialized knowledge to solve the problems at hand


• There is no formal process for hiring or training innovators

But, one of my favorite quotes from the event came from Dr. David Matheson in the audience:


"The accumulation of policy and procedure is the greatest burden that a company faces."

---

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.

Optimizing Innovation - Steve Faktor of American Express

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Steve Faktor's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Steven Faktor, VP, Head of the Chairman's Innovation Fund at American Express, talked about how when it comes to innovation and your desire to innovate, you have to ask yourself two questions:

• What can you do from your role in the organization?


• What is your credibility within the organization to do it?

He also talked about how when they were getting started, American Express did an innovation readiness survey to identify the areas where they might be able to go fast and those areas where they might face stronger challenges.

And, when it comes to innovation, American Express focuses on the 4 C's of InnovationTM - Context, Capabilitity, Creativity, Culture.

Steve also spoke about how the regulatory environment influences investment choices, and how the financial services industry has slow innovation because it is highly networked (ACH, POS, branch networks, etc.), rooted (rewards, contracts, convenient locations, etc.), and focused on safety (brand, reputation, conservative, etc.).

There are lots of opportunities for innovation:

• Business Models


• Systems and Processes


• Offerings


• Marketing


• Experience & Design

Here are ten scary reasons to innovate that Steve gave:

• Deep economic shift


• Saturation


• Mass substition - competition for scarce time


• Young customers ahead technologically


• Decline of tech barriers


• Newness no longer a disadvantage


• Business models - local vs global


• Transparency and empowermnent


• Security


• Regulation

American Express focuses its innovation efforts on the core, adjacencies (1-3 years), and future growth (3-5 years).

Ultimately collaborative innovation is going to be required - going it alone is not a great option. Over time they hope to move from working with employees and customers to working more with venture capitalists, academia, and other companies.

They have a stage gate process for managing the employee idea pipeline that involves:

• Ideation


• Concepting


• Feasability


• Build & Pilot


• Scale & Launch

American Express looks at a lot of different innovation metrics, including:

• # of ideas submitted


• # contributors


• Revenue potential


• Projected revenue


• Revenue generated


• Attrition


• Payback period

They have chosen to create several roles in the Innovation Network:

• Ideators (people who submit lots of ideas)


• Implementors (involved in selection)


• Promoters (no functional role, but help with communication)

And, at the corporate center, they focus on idea management, portfolio management, knowledge sharing, metrics analysis, rewards & recognition, etc.

It was interesting to see that a great majority of their submissions are focused on the core, but the biggest number of selected projects are adjacent projects. To date they have had 1,000+ ideas submitted, resulting in five pilots, four concepts in development, and three launches.

In the future, Steve would like to eliminate the term innovation and instead focus on growth, doing more experiments, and working with partners more.

---

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.

Optimizing Innovation - Simon Dewulf of Creax

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Simon Dewulf's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Simon Dewulf, Managing Director of Creax, spoke about how there are 67 million patents in the patent database and that a majority of them are 20+ years old and so they are free to use. And, how the other half are patents that could be applied for free to another purpose.

Simon spoke about an intersection example involving a Kraft need and a Goodyear expertise - cutting of viscous elastic material (cheese versus tires). There is no reason these two companies couldn't collaborate because they don't compete.

Amongst other things, Creax has software that helps people visualize connections and search terms from the information in the patent database. Apparently, less than 3% of patents make more money than they cost to file.


"Research is often re-search - the solution is often already existing."


In addition to companies with problems that are looking for solutions, there are also a lot of materials companies that have developed lots of solutions that are in search of a problem. This can be solved somewhat using the patent database.

Four ways of looking at your search for innovation:

1. Value and function

• What values do we want?

2. Out of the box in time and space

• What resources do we have?


• Utilizes the 9 windows method from TRIZ (surrounding, before/box/after, components)

3. Analogy across domains

• Where do we look for inspiration?

4. Variation of properties for new or improved functions

• What do we change, what do we gain?

All customer value requirements can be attributed to four main values:

• More performance


• Less harm


• More convenience (aka interface)


• Less price (aka cost)

They have simplified the TRIZ methodology down to properties and functions and brought in the patent database.


"Can you connect something that is different to something that is better?"


Finally, here are five questions you should be asking yourselves:

1. What can you achieve by changing properties?


2. What other industries should we be following?


3. Who should we be partnering with?


4. Who should be licensing to or from?


5. Why does it take so long to apply in a different domain?


• If you apply a surface similar to a golf ball to trains, you get 30% less friction.

---

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.

Optimizing Innovation - Roopa Unnikrishnan of Pfizer

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Roopa Unnikrishnan's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Roopa Unnikrishnan, Senior Director of Worldwide Strategy & Innovation at Pfizer, focused on the the messy-ness of innovation in her talk and that while the idea of four grey-haired people beavering away on innovation is true, it is also true that innovation has become more democratized (at least in Pfizer). The pharmaceutical industry has gone from trying to beat diseases, towards having to focus more on price and cost - but this has helped us think more creatively about innovation and focus more on the customer.

Instead of just having centralized innovation funding, Pfizer has put little pockets of funds in every business unit that they can access to test and fail fast with ideas they think need to be explored. They've looked at what the areas are that customers care the most about and think about their innovation efforts as a string of pearls, so that everything hangs together.

Similar to Whirlpool and others, they have 2 1/2 people at the center and a broad network of senior managers with an innovation mandate distributed around the organization as 'innovation champions'. They also have a Senior Innovation Advisory Board of outsiders that includes Saul Griffith and Esther Dyson. Roopa also talked about the importance of networking to innovation. To encourage networking:

• They have held a two day, in-person, 150 person event that 600 people would have liked to attend


• They use Spigit to help people organize around interests and profiles, and also to serve up targeted challenges


• They are also creating a manager network - because that is the level that is the most important to innovation success

Pfizer looks three different types of innovation:

1. Transformative (creates new markets)


2. Pushing the envelope (expands into new markets or better serves existing markets)


3. Sustaining

And finally, when it comes to implementing innovation, Pfizer speaks about how there is a Mindset Change Cycle, an Intellectual Change Cycle, and an Emotional Change Cycle.

---

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.

Optimizing Innovation - Moises Norena of Whirlpool

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Moises Norena's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Moises Norena, Director of Global Innovation at Whirlpool, spoke about how his job is to lead a three person team that works on the infrastructure that enables innovation in the company. He commented about how the theme of the conference - optimizing innovation - creates a bit of a paradox because optimizing innovation is about taking out risk, but innovation is all about risk.

Moises spoke about how their innovation focus from the beginning has been to build a culture, not a group of innovators. They are trying to follow an embedded innovation approach. "Growing a bean plant instead of a can of beans."

Their initial goal was to create one definition of innovation:

• Unique and compelling consumer solutions


• Creating sustainable competitive advantage


• Creating superior shareholder value

Whirlpool's innovation process is organized by regions and brands and built around an s-curve with the following stages:

• Launch


• Proof of Concept


• Scaling


• Sustaining


• Creating Results


• Continuous Improvement

They go thru a process focused on discovery, synthesis, and realization. Challenging orthodoxy is one of the key components. In challenging the orthodoxy of appliances being purchased by women to go into the kitchen, we came up with the Gladiator brand for men to go in the garage (organization).

Whirlpool started with a centralized approach, but has since moved to a more decentralized model focused on training people to become i-Mentors and then embedding them in the business. i-Mentors are to innovation what black belts are to Six Sigma. They have about 1,000 iMentors out of 70,000 employees.

Whirlpool flags certain products as innovative in their systems, and tracks whether they drive greater earnings or greater customer satisfaction (consumer perceptions). They have four very traditional innovation focus areas:

• Innovating in the core


• Leveraging the core


• Expanding the core


• Exploring the whitespace

Whirlpool has been on their innovation for nearly ten years now and some of their key learnings have been:

• In their employee survey, the #1 employee engagement pillar continues to be that people like working for an innovative company


• It is crucial to identify the right customers and suppliers of innovation to create the bridges for success in innovation


• You must have people that focus on introducing the innovation in the marketplace - not just on its development

Unlike some companies, Whirlpool chooses to keep those that created the idea involved, even though others may be leading development and launch. They also choose to bring in industrial design early in the process, and fund new businesses from a seed fund at corporate.

And finally, when it comes to rewards and recognition, product groups have up to 1/3 of their bonus metrics focused on innovation (pipeline value and product value) and they also focus on other very visible rewards and recognition.

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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.