Killing Innovation by Asking Too Many Questions

by Mark Prus

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are your thoughts?


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

Growing a Garden of Innovation

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


by Mitch Ditkoff

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

From where will the next wave of groundbreaking innovation come?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


1. WHET THE APPETITE

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

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

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

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

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


2. STAKE and PREPARE THE GROUND

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

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

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

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

Secondly, it needs to prepare the ground for planting.

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


3. FIND THE SEEDS

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

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

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

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


4. PLANT THE SEEDS

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

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

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

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


5. FENCE THE GARDEN

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

Organizations of all shapes and sizes experience the same phenomenon.

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

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


6. TEND NEW GROWTH

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

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

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

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


7. THIN and TRANSPLANT

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

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

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

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

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

The result? Scraggly, stunted, and undeveloped ventures.

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


8. CELEBRATE THE HARVEST

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

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

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

Nothing could be further from the truth.

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

Food for thought?


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Mitch Ditkoff is the Co-Founder and President of Idea Champions and the author of "Awake at the Wheel", as well as the very popular Heart of Innovation blog.

Six Sigma and Innovation

The Gotta Have a Process Blues

by Mitch Ditkoff

One of my favorite clients of all time was a key manager in a very prominent Fortune 500 company. She was smart. She was funny. She was creative. And she was kind. Then her company adopted Six Sigma.

I couldn't help but notice that soon after this she started becoming uncharacteristically cranky, not unlike the way an artist gets upon filling out a tax form. When I asked her how the Six Sigma initiative was going, she rolled her eyes and mumbled something about "going through the motions."

In a recent online Business Week posting, Brian Hindo lucidly deconstructs some of the flawed assumptions of the Six Sigma approach...

"The very factors that make Six Sigma effective in one context," explains Hindo, "can make it ineffective in another. Traditionally, it uses rigorous statistical analysis to produce unambiguous data that help produce better quality, lower costs, and more efficiency. That all sounds great when you know what outcomes you'd like to control. But what about when there are few facts to go on - or you don't even know the nature of the problem you're trying to define?

"New things look very bad on this scale," says MIT Sloan School of Management professor Eric von Hippel, who has worked with 3M on innovation projects that he says 'took a backseat' once Six Sigma settled in. "The more you hardwire a company on total quality management, the more it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation," adds Vijay Govindarajan, a management professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "The mindset that is needed, the capabilities that are needed, the metrics that are needed, the whole culture that is needed for discontinuous innovation, are fundamentally different."

And so, dear Blogging Innovation readers... in honor of all people who have ever questioned the long-term value of Six Sigma... in honor of all the people who have understood that increasing - not decreasing - variability is often the key to success, it is my utmost pleasure to make my graceful exit from this latest blog posting with the immortal, finger-snapping, toe-tapping, knee-slapping, put-on-your-blues-hat-and-sunglasses lyrics to....


THE GOTTA HAVE A PROCESS BLUES

I woke up this morning,
put both feet on the floor,
but I didn't have a process
to find the bathroom door,
so all I did was shuffle,
first the left foot, then the right,
forgot to count the tiles,
(hey boss, I ain't too bright.)

We got green belts, black belts,
corporate karate,
and soon we'll need a process
for going to the potty.
Lord, I need a chart and graph to help me choose
just what to name this song about the Six Sigma blues.

Back when we were kids
the only processed thing was cheese,
now we need a process
every single time we sneeze,
I say "achoo," I blow my nose,
I try to get it right,
my Black Belt says my charts don't flow,
not once a gesundheit.

I make no mistakes,
I do everything right -
to make sure nothing breaks,
I stay up all night,
I'm a Six Sigma cowboy
cutting cycle time in half,
I measure every joke
and the way it makes me laugh.

We got green belts, black belts,
corporate karate,
and soon we'll need a process
for going to the potty,
a fishbone diagram would be so cool to help me choose
just what to name this song about the Six Sigma blues.

I barely make a boo boo, I rarely blow a deal,
you might call it voo doo, but that's just how I feel,
I'm one in a million
though my defects number three,
I log on while I'm sleeping
and I've changed my name to "E."

We got green belts, black belts,
corporate karate,
and soon we'll need a process
for going to the potty.

by Blind Willy Nilly AKA Mitch Ditkoff


Editors Note: The first person to post a blog comment here identifying both the musician in the photo AND the city he's in, will win a tweet from @innovate (sorry I don't have any extra books to offer right now).


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Mitch Ditkoff is the Co-Founder and President of Idea Champions and the author of "Awake at the Wheel", as well as the very popular Heart of Innovation blog.

Innovation? - Just Do It

by Jeffrey Phillips

I'm constantly amazed by all the talk about innovation that I hear within many organizations, and how little real action is taken. It's time, my friends, to gird up your loins and take action. Let's borrow the motto from Nike and decide to "Just Do It."

If you are waiting for the sign from above (by that I mean your executive management) that you may now go and be innovative, stop waiting. Even if the sign comes, it will be so watered down and so filled with misdirection and uncertainty that you wouldn't act on it anyway. Act now, even in small ways to develop innovation activities and skills, so that you can then build on those activities and flesh them into new ideas, and new products and services.

When I say this to many mid and senior level folks I talk to, they want to know: what can I do to make a difference? There are a host of small actions you can take to start innovating, and as you do you'll build credibility and will attract others who are interested and want to work with you. If you never start, you'll never build the community or team you need to succeed.

Here are just a few things that are very easy to do, and very inexpensive to do, that just about anyone in any firm can do to add value and start innovating. Once you do these things you'll build your credibility and get to do even more.

1. Document trends and provide your sense of what they'll mean for your business in the near future. Yes, I know this isn't your job, but as it turns out it's not anyone's job in most businesses but everyone needs this synthesis. A well organized consolidation of trends, transitioned into a document that provides shape and clarity to a potential future outcome, is helpful to any organization. And, since no one else is doing it, you are now the expert. If someone disagrees, then you've attracted a compatriot who can work with you to provide a counterpoint. All innovation starts from recognizing an opportunity, issue or threat before others do. Trend spotting and synthesis can get your team there first.


2. Observe your customers. Go read the complaint letters. Read what people are writing about you online on Facebook or Twitter, or other blogs. Go watch your customers use your products. Become a customer of your products or services. Write down what you like, and don't like, about your products. This is free Voice of the Customer and Ethnography. As you do this you'll gain insights into unmet unarticulated needs, which are also a great opportunity for innovation.


3. Use brainstorming and other idea generation tools as frequently as possible, and use them in the right situations and contexts. Rather than pull a rarely used tool out of the toolbox ocassionally, use the tools regularly and effectively. In that way, idea generation doesn't seem so artificial, but a natural part of doing business. And since you're doing it regularly, you learn more about how to do it well.


4. Read the best books about innovation, to learn more about the best practices and tools, so when there are opportunities for innovation, you can recommend the appropriate tools and techniques. Learn to be a good facilitator, and understand the rules and techniques for idea generation. As your skills grow, you'll be asked to lead idea sessions for other teams.

There's always something you can do, and starting now is much better than starting when you finally get the OK. In many firms, the OK may never happen. Create a small innovation capability and generate ideas about the future, new product and service ideas, and help other teams generate ideas. You'll attract others who have similar needs and interests and gain incredible credibility. Eventually you'll be the go-to person for innovation. Don't laugh, I've been in at least two organizations where the head of innovation was simply the person who started doing innovation and was eventually recognized as the expert.


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Jeffrey Phillips is a senior leader at OVO Innovation. OVO works with large distributed organizations to build innovation teams, processes and capabilities. Jeffrey is the author of "Make us more Innovative", and innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com.

Part 2 - Three Innovation Distinctions

by Stephen Shapiro

In the first part of this series, I wrote why you should focus on challenges, not ideas. You should read that article before proceeding.

In this second entry, I will focus on "Process, not Events."

I first shared these three distinctions with a bunch of speakers and authors. In the speaking industry, conferences/conventions are the primary model for professional development. That is, a bunch of people get together for a few days. The days are comprised of presenters on the stage who share their "wisdom" with attendees. When the event is over, the learning ends. And for most individuals, progress ends.

People who attend these events leave with a laundry list of ideas. Most people never implement any of the ideas. They just sit on the shelf in a binder.

This, in a nutshell, is what happens in the innovation programs of many businesses. They hold ad hoc brainstorming sessions. Or maybe they run a campaign using a crowdsourcing tool. They develop new ideas. If they are lucky, those ideas do get implemented. But quite often, the event ends and progress ends. Regardless, innovation does not happen again until someone has another stroke of inspiration and decides to hold another event.

Innovation in most organizations is episodic. It is unpredictable. And it is certainly not repeatable.

But what if you had a systematic way for ensuring that innovation continued long after the event? What if you didn't need to wait for divine intervention for your next big idea to sprout? What if you could make innovation repeatable? To do this, you want to move from "innovation as an event" to "innovation as a process."

Back to the authors and speakers... what if, instead of just events, there was a process that helped people see their ideas through to fruition? What if everyone came to the event with some challenges? The process could involve regular mentoring or an online community. There could be measures in place to help monitor progress. The point is, there is a process to help ensure progress.

In the business world, we have the opportunity to take this process-driven innovation concept a bit further.

For this "event to process" transition to be successful, the first step is to start treating innovation like you would treat any other part of the business. For example, your organization's finance department has skilled experts, measures, supporting technology (e.g., Oracle or SAP), processes (e.g., processes for closing the books at year end), an owner (the CFO), and a strategy.

The innovation "process" requires all of these elements, and more, including skilled innovation experts (e.g., an innovation center of excellence aka innovation master blackbelts), innovation measures (e.g., return on investment for each idea), innovation management technologies (e.g., InnoCentive's @Work solution), an innovation process, an innovation "czar" (aka advocate, Chief Innovation Officer, VP Innovation), and a clearly articulated innovation strategy (what you expect to achieve with your innovation program).

I call this level either "innovation as a process" or more accurately, "innovation as a discrete capability." You can read more about this in my "Innovation Philosophy" page.

With these fundamentals in place, you can begin to make innovation a repeatable and predictable process whereby creativity is encouraged throughout the organization and the best ideas are implemented.

It's worth noting that after successfully moving through the process level of innovation, the highest level of innovation is embedded innovation (aka embedded capability or environment). With both the event- and process-driven levels, innovation tends to be reactionary and discrete. It is somewhat separate from the business. With embedded innovation, people not only innovate to deal with "problems/challenges" that are presented to them, but in everything they do. They continuously, even radically, improve their products, processes and organization.

Look for the third and final installment of this three part series sometime soon.


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Stephen Shapiro is the author of three books, a popular innovation speaker, and is the Chief Innovation Evangelist for Innocentive, the leader in Open Innovation.

Innovating Healthcare

by Rowan Gibson

The first modern hospitals were founded in Europe and America in the 18th century. About a hundred years later, both the pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry began to emerge. So it's safe to say that, in much of the developed world, the healthcare business has been around for about two or three centuries. And, over time, like most other businesses, it has become bigger, better and faster. But has it actually become different in any essential ways? Not really. Yet that's about to change. In a world of hyper-accelerating change, global competition, rapidly commoditized products and services, and unprecedented patient primacy, the industry is waking up to the need to reinvent itself from top to bottom for a whole new era.

Over the last few years, I've been spending a disproportionate amount of time with healthcare people. Not because I'm sick (thankfully!). But because there's a growing recognition right across the industry that the strategies and business models of the last couple of centuries may no longer be fit for purpose. The world is simply changing so much, and so quickly, that the old ways of doing things (and they are very old) are looking increasingly archaic, perhaps even obsolete.

As regular readers of this column will know, my approach to radical rethinking and renewal is centered on a set of strategy tools called the "Four Lenses of Innovation". Briefly, they are: challenging orthodoxies, harnessing trends, leveraging resources in new ways, and addressing unmet customer needs. And if we look at what is happening in the healthcare industry around the globe, we can see numerous and very exciting examples of these four "lenses" in action. Here are just a few.

One of the stubbornly enduring orthodoxies in hospital management is the age-old notion that we all make mistakes - "to err is human". Everyone has heard horror stories of people having the wrong leg amputated, or getting an operation that was meant for the patient next door. Every year in the U.S., for example, millions of hospital patients suffer injuries - about 100,000 of them fatal! - from things like false medication, incorrect dosage, inefficient diagnostics, duplicated procedures, and so forth. Yet in healthcare, people have long accepted these medical errors as "part of the system". This is clearly an orthodoxy that must be challenged. When IBM took a good look at what was going wrong - and all too often it was stupid things like illegible handwriting, misplaced decimal points, missed drug interactions and allergies - they realized they could alleviate the problem. They offered to use IT to help hospitals manage their patient data a lot more effectively, in much the same way that companies manage their supply chains. This was the birth of IBM Life Sciences, which has grown from a 2-person unit in 2000 to a multi-billion dollar, 1500-employee business today.

Consider another orthodoxy - this time in the pharmaceutical industry. The traditional pharma model is based on drug discovery - testing thousands of compounds to see if any of them makes a measurable difference. It's a model that has essentially remained unchanged since the industry got started in the 19th century - the only difference being the scale and efficiency with which today's pharma companies can manage the compound-testing process. Today, however, a new set of players has emerged - companies like Amgen, Genentech, and Genzyme - where the business model is focused on understanding disease mechanisms (i.e., genetic diseases, immune system disorders, heart disease, cancer) and creating targeted products that address those mechanisms. Their promise is 'personalized medicine', in which the therapy can be matched to an individual's own unique genetic makeup, as opposed to big pharma's "mass medicine" model. By innovating around gene-based therapy, which is based on completely different skills and assets from conventional drug-making, this new breed of pharma companies is fundamentally changing the game. Which explains why Swiss pharma giant Roche was recently so focused on swallowing up biotech pioneer Genentech.

Now think about trends. Look at what's happening in the technology field alone - from e-health to handheld scanners, mobile information devices, telemedicine, surgical robots, remote diagnostics, "integrated digital hospitals", 24/7 access to full medical records, and the list goes on. Or consider the parallel trend "from high tech to high-touch", where design elements such as nature, color, lighting, noise reduction, and so forth, are being used by a few cutting-edge hospitals to promote what is known as a "healing environment" that treats both body and soul.

Then there are healthcare providers that leverage their resources in novel ways to create new value for customers. India's Apollo Hospital Group, for example, which is the largest healthcare provider in Asia, and the third largest in the world, uses its expertise to offer medical business process outsourcing - i.e. writing of diagnosis reports, medical coding, billing etc. - to hospitals right across America. And for many of these hospitals, Apollo take cares of radiology, X-rays, ultrasound, CTs and MRIs when it's nighttime in the U.S., taking advantage of the time difference. The company's IT-enabled services already generate tens of billions of dollars.

And what about unmet customer needs? Again, there are great examples. Like Florida Hospital, where staff did "day in the life" profiling of patients so they could better understand and address their problems and frustrations. Or California's Fresno Surgical Hospital, which has modeled itself on the Ritz Carlton hotel to offer a '5-star patient experience' - including luxury rooms, mini-bars, art on the walls, and food prepared by a Ritz-Carlton chef.

True, many of these examples are still about improving what has always been done. But as all this exciting innovation activity continues, I believe we'll soon see the healthcare industry doing things it has never done before.

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Rowan Gibson is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on enterprise innovation. He is co-author of the bestseller "Innovation to the Core" and a much in-demand public speaker around the globe. On Twitter he is @RowanGibson.

Innovation Perspectives - Ideas are Not Enough

This is the sixth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?'. Now, here is Rowan Gibson's perspective:

by Rowan Gibson

One of the most prevalent and dangerous misconceptions in innovation is that it's all about coming up with ideas. So when companies catch the innovation bug, their tendency is to run off and immediately launch fun initiatives like online suggestion boxes, creative competitions, open innovation programs and offsite brainstorming sessions. Of course, in themselves, these initiatives are not wrong. In fact, they can be an essential part of the process. But ideas are just the front end of innovation. Without the back end of innovation - the capacity to effectively screen ideas, align them with strategy, allocate resources to them and manage them successfully toward commercialization - all of those light bulbs and eureka moments will never add up to much.

When you ask most people to describe their company's "corporate innovation system", all you usually get is a blank stare. Sure, they may tell you they have recently been involved in some sort of idea submission scheme, but if you ask them what their company actually does with all the ideas - how many of them have so far been turned into experiments, how many are receiving more serious funding and attention, how many ventures are heading for commercialization, and how much money those ventures are expected to generate - people's answers tend to become a lot more vague. The sad truth is that most organizations have not yet developed a clear model - reflected in management practice - of what the back end of innovation actually looks like.

In my speeches, I often compare the front end of innovation to the sparkplugs in an engine - the exciting ideation part where new ideas are born from inspiration and breakthrough thinking. But I argue that literal sparkplugs would be completely useless if there were no engine around them - no mechanical system for taking those sparks of fuel and using them to propel the vehicle forward. And that's the rub. What most companies are missing today is an "innovation engine": a high performance organizational system that can continually pick up promising ideas and transform them into powerful new ways to create value and wealth.

Imagine you typed a few words into Google, pressed the search button, and nothing happened. Have you ever thought about how Google manages to deliver all those results in the blink of an eye? The reason we call it a search 'engine' is that behind Google's simple and playful user interface is an incredibly complex system comprising half a million servers, racked up in clusters at data centers all over the world, all working together to scan billions of websites at breakneck speed. Without the back end of Google - without that engine - all we would have is a lovable logo on a clean white web page. Similarly, organizations are finding out that without the back end of innovation, all they get is a lot of ideas at the front end which end up going nowhere.

How many big opportunities have been missed over the decades by companies that were presented with some radical new idea but that lacked the right system for nurturing it and turning it into a market success story? Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, originally pitched his personal computer idea to Hewlett-Packard, his employer at the time. But HP had no organizational mechanism for connecting a freaky engineer and his "crazy invention" with the political and financial infrastructures of the company. There was simply nowhere for his idea to go; no way to get a small amount of experimental capital and some time to test its potential; no coaches or mentors in the organization who could help him push his idea forward; no management processes that had been set up to support his work as an innovator. So instead Wozniak decided to throw in his lot with Steve Jobs, and the two friends went off to commercialize his idea from a Palo Alto garage. The rest is history.

Could you put your hand on your heart and say that a similar scenario has never played out - or would never play out - inside your own company? If you can't, it's high time your firm started building a corporate innovation system - an organizational 'engine' that will enable your company to manage the back end of innovation as a disciplined and highly integrated business activity rather than something that is left to chance.

So how exactly do you build a corporate innovation system? It starts with building leadership commitment to innovation across the organization - not just in word but in deed. Ask yourself: do the executives who run our company's core business demonstrate genuine interest in radical, new ideas by redeploying adequate resources behind them? Are they held personally responsible and accountable for the performance of their unit's innovation pipeline? Do they spend a significant percentage of their time mentoring innovation projects? Failure to drive and manage leadership commitment to innovation is often where the whole initiative falls flat.

Second, it requires a tangible organizational infrastructure that is set up to nurture and support innovation in every nook and cranny of the company, and from the outside, too. People need to know where they can go with their ideas to find help and encouragement in developing a business plan, or in designing an experiment or prototype, or in putting the necessary financial and human resources behind their idea to move it to the next stage.

Third, the back end of innovation requires effective processes, mechanisms and tools for screening ideas, aligning them with strategy, allocating resources, managing a portfolio of experiments, turning the most promising opportunities into projects, guiding these projects through the innovation pipeline, and successfully taking them to market. It's not enough to merely adapt existing management processes and tools developed for R&D or new product development. For one reason, there are many types of innovation - such as process innovation, cost innovation, service innovation, strategy innovation, business model innovation, or management innovation - that won't fit very neatly into a typical product development process which tracks an idea from stage gate to stage gate.

If you talk to successful innovators in large companies, you usually hear a familiar story: "I succeeded despite the system." If would-be innovators can only succeed in an organization despite the system - if they have to fight their way heroically through a minefield to push their ideas forward - then by definition, innovation is not a systemic capability in that organization. Why not? Perhaps because the company has put too much focus on the front end of innovation and too little effort into building the back end - the "innovation engine" that is needed for taking ideas from mind to market.


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Rowan Gibson is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on enterprise innovation. He is co-author of the bestseller "Innovation to the Core" and a much in-demand public speaker around the globe. On Twitter he is @RowanGibson.

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 - 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 - 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 - 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.

Creating Innovation with Synthesis

by Jeffrey Phillips

I've read several books about innovation, and am reading another which I'll review shortly here on the blog, which talk about the importance of combining disparate skills or capabilities when innovating, or holding two diametrically opposing ideas and finding the happy medium. What should be obvious is that one of the most important skills from an innovation perspective is the act and insight of synthesis.

This is a real challenge, because most people are taught to break down problems into smaller, finite pieces and solve the smaller problems. We also work as specialists, with deep understanding of our core capabilities and knowledge, but often with little insights or knowledge beyond our education or jobs. So most people don't use synthesis skills on a regular basis, and are probably prone to avoiding synthesis since synthesis requires introducing a number of new and possibly unknown factors which may simply make the problem larger and more difficult.

Well, to a certain extent that true. However, innovation often happens when we take a step back, look at the bigger picture and combine two concepts or technologies or ideas that are seemingly unrelated and create something completely new. And when you boil it all down, that is what synthesis is all about.

Synthesis happens in all phases of innovation, starting from the very beginning. We usually like to start a project by collecting trends and synthesizing or combining them to create new, alternative futures (or scenarios). Rather than simply focus on one trend, it is more interesting (and a bit more difficult) to combine three or four active trends and project them into a 7 to 10 year future. The synthesis, or combination of these trends helps create a view of the future which we can use to identify new opportunities or emerging threats.

Synthesis happens in customer research. We often will engage ethnography or voice of the customer work to discover customer needs and wants. Talking with a number of customers or observing behavior can lead to a range of insights. Synthesizing or combining these insights and seeking the common themes or threads is what is really valuable. Insights or needs from one customer is interesting, aggregating insights and understanding them from a range of customers is valuable.

It's not at all unusual to use synthesis as a method to generate ideas. We can ask ourselves what would happen if we combined several capabilities or technologies, and what that combination would create. Clearly synthesis is a powerful tool in almost any phase of the innovation effort.

The way we generally use synthesis is almost always the same, however. Using synthesis requires a team to slow down, step back and look at a bigger picture - to gather more data and more disparate information or insights than may seem necessary. In many ways this may cloud the picture, but if your team is willing to do the extra work synthesizing the materials, or insights, then the results will be even better. Good innovators are synthesizers, and use synthesis techniques in all phases and stages of innovation. This fact is also one reason that many firms struggle to identify innovators - there are simply too few people who are good at synthesis and who use the tool regularly. As with any capability, misuse or lack of use causes the skill to atrophy. Perhaps one of the most important things you can do as an innovation leader is to find people who are comfortable with the approach or skill, or introduce it as a technique and train your teams on the approach.

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Jeffrey Phillips is a senior leader at OVO Innovation. OVO works with large distributed organizations to build innovation teams, processes and capabilities. Jeffrey is the author of "Make us more Innovative", and innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com.

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.

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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 - 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.

Rethinking Innovation

by Vyoma Kapur

Riveting innovation stories were told during the Business Innovation Factory conference held in Providence, Rhode Island. In its fifth year now, the conference attracted brilliant people from all over the country hungry to learn and discover. Over twenty speakers from different industries, professions and backgrounds were gathered to share how they have 'innovated' in their own unique way and created an impact. I made my way to Providence full of curiosity.

Here is where I ask you to broaden your definition of innovation. I think we've become too accustomed to think of innovation as an effort that either reduces the bottom line or enhances the top line. Innovation is not only about processes; it also encompasses radical diversions of existing products, ideas built from scratch as well as bottom-up social change.

Neri Oxman's story was unique, astounding and opened my mind. Oxman, a designer and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looks to nature to for practical design answers. Through understanding nature's relationship with things around her, she is able to visualize new and better structures. Her work has been described as "establishing a new approach to design at the interface of computer science, material engineering and ecology."

Simply, Oxman's mission is to change the world by proving how technology can live in harmony with nature. Oxman studies the form, substance and behaviour of a leaf and how these attributes change with the environment. Then, moving from the scale of natural world to the scale of human design, Oxman envisions a building which will endure various environmental conditions in ways such as bending like trees in strong wind to avoid collapsing.

One of Oxman's ingenious innovations is a chair that shapes itself into a human body. This, to me, gives a whole new dimension to ergonomics. Her work is displayed in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.

Oxman is a thinker who challenges our definition of innovation. Is innovation only about increasing efficiency, lowering costs and making improved versions of existing products? Or is it about changing the way we think and ask questions - from "what can we do to make something better", to "why has something always been done in a certain way."

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A marketing professional turned entrepreneur, Vyoma avidly supports and practices open innovation. Earlier this year, she founded Colspark LLC (www.colspark.com), a crowdsourcing platform to help companies tap into student talent for ideas and solutions.

Innovation Velocity

Developing Agile Innovation Leadership through Gaming

by Simon Evans and Victor Newman


The Problem with Innovation

It is a truism that armies tend to continue to fight their last war and need to go through bitter learning experiences before they can understand and adapt to the new, emergent rules of conflict. Present innovation thinking is constrained by legacy successes achieved within a context of unsustainable economic market growth patterns and obsolete models.

This recession is heightening a natural fear of risk and failure, which combined with a perception of increasing innovation difficulty (as highlighted by the Boston Consulting Group reviews in the past couple of years), is encouraging management caution toward innovation. This is reducing leaders' ability to recognise, understand and manage the full range of options available, and this is slowing the pace of innovation (innovation velocity).

We need some new tools to help us deliver approaches to innovation that better suit the emerging realities of the 21st century environment.


Introducing Gaming as a Tool

We propose to use gaming as a tool in this context.

Winning sports teams work on individual players' kinesiology (ability to manoeuvre) and on 'plays' that integrate team movement to gain advantage, at pace. Just as the great team players have to develop peripheral vision, the ability to spot the gap in the opposition defence, and change the way they play within the game, great innovative organisations need to become better than their last approach to innovation, with the ability and agility to customise and integrate options as they emerge, in real-time.

Can we develop leaders' innovation agility by widening their options and building their ability to exploit a greater range of freedoms to innovate through a similar form of 'gaming'?

Considering innovation as a game could help us move forward again by allowing us to test and broaden our leadership skills in a competitive and fun environment without the risks associated in trying things out for real! Such a game would have to act in two ways:

• As a diagnostic tool to help us visualise and review our legacy positions and highlight any areas of inadequacy


• As a means of developing a competitive leadership ability to rapidly construct and test a radical new Innovation Architecture that fits within an emerging market

By introducing a competitive game into our analysis of innovation capability, players can be gently pushed into novel thinking, broaden their options and find new freedoms to innovate. Accelerated learning from game playing is widely accepted now as an effective tool, and the serious games market is now worth some billions of dollars. There is an opportunity to help innovation leaders develop their agility using this paradigm.


Agile Innovation Leadership

So what characteristics are we looking for in an Agile Innovation Leader which will make them successful in the game? The primary role of the leader is:


"To enable an environment which can create great ideas, rapidly develop them to the highest possible potential value, and then to maximise the realisation of their value in the market."


Effectively, they need to manage the whole idea lifecycle which we can picture as follows:



By considering the processes and people needed to support the four main activity types in this model - creativity, development, value realisation and leadership, the great leader is able to construct chains of capability which will create ideas and carry them from left to right in the model in the most efficient way. If we can model these within a game, we have a tool that can help explore new ways of innovating.

The key elements which the leader needs to consider in order to do this are:

• Having few restrictions on freedoms to innovate (F2i) - basically having no constraints on the tools and approaches they can use, for example looking externally for inspiration


• Maximising the return on investment in innovation (ROI2) - obviously balancing the investment costs against the returns


• Developing innovation velocity to optimise time to market - being nimble and agile enough to go to market at the right time


• Proactively constructing opportunities to innovate - there is no free lunch here! A sticky corporate culture can be a problem. Without proactive intervention your ideas will not come flying in through the window (unless you are Alexander Fleming with a Petri dish!)

Of course In addition to this, innovation does not happen for free, you need to invest resources appropriate to the process. So what skills do you need?

We suggest that a combination of the following are needed to drive innovation:

• Finance - obviously money is needed in many cases to fund an innovation process. Does you innovation strategy generate sufficient management faith that it gets the funds it needs?


• People - many hands can make light work, do you have the manpower to make things happen?


• Knowledge - be it tacit, explicit or emergent, knowledge underpins so much of our innovation capability - are you ready to act on key knowledge or is it lost or inaccessible to you internally or externally?


• Relationships - becoming increasingly vital in these days of collaboration and open innovation - how good are your internal and external relationships? How much relationship capital do you have in the bank?


• Innovation - the trickiest resource to define, but we probably all recognise those people or events that just spark new ideas all the time. You need to find these people and recognise their contribution.

Summary - Where do we go next?

At InnovoFlow, we believe that by assisting Innovation Leaders to visualise their innovation architectures using a game as a diagnostic tool, and then giving them an opportunity to exercise new approaches in a competitive environment, we can broaden their thinking, help them see innovation in a holistic way and grow their agility and freedoms to innovate.

An effective gaming model will provide leaders with a framework for articulating, discussing, exploring and testing alternative Innovation Architectures and practising the integration of key elements for successful innovation agility. A game gives people a shared vocabulary that they can use to clarify their discussions. In our experience, many valuable, insightful and often amusing stories are generated as players relate the game outcomes to real experiences - generating powerful learning.

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Victor Newman is an internationally renowned innovation and knowledge management consultant, lecturer and author of "The Knowledge Activist's Handbook". Simon Evans is an experienced consultant with many years service in the global Pharmaceutical market and a track record of developing innovative business solutions. Together they founded InnovoFlow Ltd in late 2008.

Book Review - "Innovation Tournaments"

A few weeks ago I received "Innovation Tournaments" by Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich in the mail. "Innovation Tournaments" is a relatively short, easy, and pleasant read. This book is definitely one of my favorite innovation books to date as it covers concepts clearly and in an accessible way. Wharton professors Terwiesch and Ulrich have chosen to focus their innovation book on creating and selecting exceptional opportunities.

Because all companies can create lots of ideas when they engage their employees, suppliers, partners, and even customers in the idea generation process, the real differentiation comes from creating processes for sourcing and selecting those ideas that are truly exceptional and having the courage not to back those that are only merely good.

Professors Terwiesch and Ulrich start off by defining innovation as a new match between a need and a solution.

One of the key concepts that they cover in this book is the 'innovation return curve', which graphically represents the expected profits from a set of innovation investments. Creating an innovation return curve helps you to identify exceptional opportunities, and after all - exceptional opportunities drive exceptional value. The overall concept of the book is that by evaluating ideas in a series of 'rounds' or 'filters', that you increase your chances at having only the exceptional ideas make it through to the other end.

The book discusses tools and techniques for generating opportunities, opportunity selection, strategy alignment, and opportunity analysis. In addition the book covers innovation portfolio management, interdependencies and risk management, governance, and administration.

One of the major tenants of the authors when it comes to innovation is that uncovering exceptional opportunities is more likely when your process exhibits greater variability (it actually displays less consistent output quality).

Techniques for stimulating opportunity generation include:

• Alternative approaches to existing innovations


• Follow a personal passion


• Annoyance-driven innovation


• De-commoditize a commodity


• Drive an innovation down-market


• Trend-driven innovation


• Attribute-based innovation


• Functional decomposition

The book also introduces a nice and simple visual tool for sorting opportunities into strategic buckets based on their level of technological uncertainty and market uncertainty:


A large part of the book is dedicated to financial management and risk management as it applies to innovation, and while interesting to read, is hard to summarize here.

And finally the book closes with an interesting innovation maturity model, which is summarized in a simple way by the chart I have created here:


Overall, I found the work of professors Terwiesch and Ulrich to be well worth the investment of time and money.

My interview with "Innovation Tournaments" co-author Christian Terwiesch can be found here.

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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.

Innovation Perspectives - Who's Your Innovation Czar?

This is the third of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on "Where should innovation reside?" Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Rowan Gibson

It never ceases to amaze me. I'm meeting with the executive committee of a major global company. I've just asked if innovation is one of their top strategic priorities. Their unanimous answer is "yes". I then ask about their individual responsibilities. "Which one of you is the CFO?" "Who is head of HR?" "Where's the CIO?" One by one their hands go up. Yet when I ask to see their global director of innovation, nobody raises a hand. Everyone just looks at me with a blank expression. So, sure, this company understands the innovation imperative. But nobody in its leadership team is directly responsible - or accountable - for making innovation happen across the organization. And they don't even seem to be aware of the paradox.

Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton made an astute observation after interviewing thousands of senior executives about corporate innovation. Their conclusion was this: 'Of all the core functions of most companies, innovation may be managed with the least consistency and discipline.' Some of course would argue that this makes sense. That innovation is, by definition, a creative process - a mysterious mix of happenstance, individual brilliance, and the occasional bolt of lightning. How could it possibly be managed? Business guru Tom Peters appears to share this view. Tom announced not so long ago that "'Innovation process' is an oxymoronic phrase, believed only by morons with ox-like brains."

I'd rather side with Peter Drucker, who wrote - already back in the 1980s - about "the systematic practice of innovation", and argued masterfully that innovation is a discipline that can and should be managed just like any other corporate function. What worries me is that, today, over two decades later, organizations still assign responsible people to every other core function of a company except innovation. And then they wonder why they just can't seem to make innovation happen in a profitable and sustainable way.

Ask yourself: how many innovation managers do we currently have in our own organization? Perhaps your immediate reaction is to point to a department like R&D or New Product Development. The executives running those departments are innovation managers, aren't they? And what about the people in charge of other innovation units like incubators, new venture divisions, or Skunk Works? Surely these are innovation managers, you might reason. And, at some level, you would be right. But confining innovation to these traditional structures is usually counter-productive.

Putting innovation out on the periphery reinforces several erroneous and persistent views. One is that innovation is something that happens at the margins, not in the core business. Another is that innovation is the responsibility of a small cadre of experts, not something that should involve everyone else at the company - and even people on the outside. Still another is that innovation is mostly about new products and technologies, not about breakthroughs in cost structures, processes, services, customer experiences, management systems, competitive strategies, and business models.

Instead of trying to manage innovation by forcing it to reside in a disconnected silo or enclave, where it neither involves nor infects the rest of the organization, companies should be trying to embed innovation as an 'all-the-time, everywhere' capability that permeates the entire firm.

To make innovation a pervasive and corporate-wide capability, the responsibility for innovation needs to be broadened beyond conventional structures and spread throughout a company's businesses and functions. This is exactly what happened to quality in the 1970s and 1980s when it ceased to be the exclusive responsibility of a specific department, and instead, became distributed to every corner of the company. What is required today is a similarly systemic infrastructure for innovation that starts at the corporate level and infiltrates every part of the organization chart. An infrastructure that makes managers accountable at all levels for driving, facilitating, and embedding the innovation process into every nook and cranny of the culture.

Let's go back to the executive committee meeting. When I ask which of the leaders is globally responsible for innovation - in all its forms - I expect the CEO to say, "That's me." Building a deep, self-sustaining enterprise capability for innovation is something so vital to the destiny of the firm that it absolutely has to be spearheaded by the CEO. We see this happening right now in several of the world's biggest and best-known companies, where innovation is being driven directly from the top. Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Immelt at GE, Sam Palmisano at IBM, and Alan Lafley at P&G are just a few examples. These leaders have clearly taken on the role of Chief Innovation Officer at their respective firms.

What I'd next like to see is another hand being raised - this time the COO. I'd like that executive to tell me that he or she has been appointed as the chief architect of innovation embedment at the firm - responsible for making innovation happen from an operational perspective, just as the company succeeded in making quality happen. And I'd like him or her to proudly hold up an organization chart that shows me the company's innovation infrastructure. I want to see a global vice president of innovation - an 'Innovation Czar'- someone who reports directly to the CEO as the firm's leading innovation practitioner. I want to see an innovation council, made up of the company's top business unit leaders, that manages innovation embedment and new growth activities across the organization.

Beyond that, I want to see regional vice presidents of innovation, who work with the respective regional heads in a visible and senior position. In addition, there should be 'Innovation Boards' - in the regions as well as in the business units - comprised of senior leaders who manage and advance the innovation process at the local level. And the firm should also have hundreds of part-time 'Innovation Mentors', along with dozens of full-time 'Innovation Consultants', who have been intensely trained to coach and support would-be innovators, helping them push their ideas forward, and who work closely with the company's divisions to stoke the fires of innovation by actively monitoring and managing the pipeline process.

Sound like a daydream? Not to me. I've actually seen innovation infrastructures similar to this one in more companies than you might think. So when I ask you how many innovation managers you have in your own organization, this is the kind of innovation management I'm talking about. Take a good look around your firm. Who exactly is in charge of managing innovation as a core corporate function? Does your firm have an 'Innovation Czar'? If not, isn't it time your top leadership team appointed one?


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles published so far from the different contributing authors on "Where should innovation reside?" by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation.