Enter to Win a Free Ticket to The Economist's March Event

Want a chance to win a free ticket ($1,500 value) to The Economist's event - "Innovation Fresh Thinking For the Ideas Economy" at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley on March 23-24, 2010?

It's easy, here is all you need to do is fill in the blank on our LinkedIn or Facebook discussion:

1. When it comes to innovation, I wish somebody would write about ______________.


• Fill in the blank in our Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn.
  
• Fill in the blank in our brand new Facebook page (and become a fan)

Enter by midnight GMT on March 2, 2010. Winner will be announced March 3, 2010.

If you don't want to enter the contest but would like to save $150 off event registration, see the discount code at the bottom of this article.


There will be a lot of great, top-flight speakers at this event, including:

• Clayton Christensen and Michael Porter (by Video Link)
  
• Arianna Huffington - Editor in Chief, Huffington Post
  
• Tim Brown - CEO, IDEO
  
• David Kelley - Head, Stanford Design School
  
• Judy Estrin - Author, "Closing the Innovation Gap"
  
• Scott Berkun - Author, "Myths of Innovation"
  
• Roger Martin - Dean, Rotman School of Business
  
• Paul Saffo - Visiting Scholar, Stanford Media X Network
  
• Matt Mullenweg - Founder, Wordpress
  
• John Kao - Author, "Innovation Nation"

As an added value for our loyal Blogging Innovation readers, we have negotiated a $150 discount when you register using our discount code - "BLINN" - register now.

We hope to see you there!


EDITOR'S NOTE: Winner is still responsible for all travel costs and the ticket is granted at The Economist's discretion not ours. There is only ONE (1) ticket up for grabs in this contest and it will be awarded to ONE (1) winner.


Don't miss an article - signup for our rss feed or our Continous Innovation group today!

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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.

Economist - "Fresh Thinking For The Ideas Economy"

Blogging Innovation will be covering The Economist's event - "Innovation Fresh Thinking For the Ideas Economy" (see discount code below) at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley on March 23-24, 2010.

There will be a lot of great, top-flight speakers at this event, including:

• Clayton Christensen and Michael Porter (by Video Link)
  
• Arianna Huffington - Editor in Chief, Huffington Post
  
• Tim Brown - CEO, IDEO
  
• David Kelley - Head, Stanford Design School
  
• Judy Estrin - Author, "Closing the Innovation Gap"
  
• Scott Berkun - Author, "Myths of Innovation"
  
• Roger Martin - Dean, Rotman School of Business
  
• Paul Saffo - Visiting Scholar, Stanford Media X Network
  
• Matt Mullenweg - Founder, Wordpress
  
• John Kao - Author, "Innovation Nation"

As an added value for our loyal Blogging Innovation readers, we have negotiated a $150 discount when you register using our discount code - "BLINN" - register now.

We hope to see you there!

Don't miss an article - signup for our rss feed or our Continous Innovation group today!

---

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 a Prisoner of Inductive and Deductive Logic

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted by the Seattle office of design firm NBBJ yesterday. The event featured Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of "The Design of Business" and "The Opposable Mind." I'd like to share a video interview I did with Roger before the event:

Interview - Roger Martin - Author "The Design of Business" from Braden Kelley on Vimeo.

I'd also like to share some of the key insights from Roger's talk at the event:

• People think in ways that form rules in their brains, and they are not always aware of the ways that those rules constrain them


• That which tends to get you more reliability often gets you less validity


• IQ tests have test/re-test reliability, but only 30% of life outcomes are related to IQ, 70% is attributable to other factors
  
• Emotional intelligence measures may be more valid, but not reliable


• If you insist on reliability, you can't prove in advance that your heuristic of a mystery is correct


• Innovation is a prisoner of deductive and inductive logic


• We learn to analyze quantities, but what matters more often are the qualities


• Abductive logicians welcome variance because they want to try and understand the outliers. Our modern education system beats abductive logic out of you. Are you focusing on quantities or qualities?


• We depend too much on quantities - Having more Science Technology & Math (STeM) graduates is not the way to invent the future


• Our businesses run on abstractions to help us understand the world, so new ones can be created and existing ones can be questioned


• Outliers in data can be significant sources for growth and innovation. Take the example of Intuit's QuickBooks - it was created because of the persistent existence of Quicken outliers trying to use the program to run their business instead of their personal finances.


• From the book - "It's not necessarily that some young whippersnapper's going to come up with some better idea than you. They're going to start from a different premise and they're going to come to a different conclusion that makes you irrelevant.""


• Sometimes you have to marinate on wicked problems. Instead of trying to simplify them, wade in a ways and then take a break and ruminate.


• If you live in a way that sets up your mind to determine whether things are true or false, then you can't invent the future.


• Innovation is more about combining and synthesizing existing conceptualizations and models. There are three main ways to do this:


1. Disaggregation - Target is a good example - In packaged goods, they focus on price, but in soft goods the focus on design.


2. Doubling-Down - To get the buzz of exclusivity that Cannes gets, the Toronto Film Festival pushed so hard on inclusivity that they created the buzz through the People's Choice Awards


3. Mixing - Hidden gems


• "It's not the job of the customer to invent the future."


• Quantitative and qualitative surveys force customers to make something up when they don't know how to answer


• Customers only know themselves and are happy to talk about themselves


• Interesting question - Should we be teaching intuitive thinking to science, technology and math majors? - Yes! - We should focus more energy in science on the intuitive leaps of the mind necessary to come up with interesting hypotheses.


• CEOs should see themselves as the Chief Validity Officer because of the overwhelming reliability-focus of our organizations


• Heuristics are a drug for strategy & design consultants - Often they are so busy with the heuristics that they don't take the time to push heuristics down into algorithms or to explore new mysteries

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

My previous interview with "The Design of Business" author Roger Martin 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.

Making a Case for Innovation in the Absence of Proof

by Matt Heinz

How do you prove something that hasn't happened yet?

That's the challenge facing innovative ideas inside many companies. Innovation, by definition, is a leap into the unknown. But for organizations that increasingly look to past history/results and data to determine future steps, quantifying the likely success and/or risk with an innovative idea can be tricky.

Or, as Roger Martin and Jennifer Riel put it in their recent Business Week column:


"Innovation is killed with the two deadlies words in business: Prove it."


They continue:


"We use existing information to understand the issue at play. But for breakthroughs, there is no rule or pool of past data to provide certainty. So when a CEO demands evidence that an idea will succeed, he is driving innovation away."


Martin and Reil ultimately recommend innovators use pieces of past history, results, research and logic to stitch together a case for innovation based not on direct past evidence, but clues to a likely outcome. They call it abductive logic, the logic of what could be. It's still a leap, but for organizations dedicated to innovation, it's necessary. The full Business Week column is worth a read, but their parting shot is particularly good:


"Asking what could be true - and jumping into the unknown - is critical to innovation. Nurturing the ideas that result, rather than killing them, can be the tricky part. But once a company clears this hurdle, it can leverage its efforts to produce the proof that leaders depend on to make commitments - and turn the future into fact."


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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Balancing Intuition with Analysis

Interview - Roger Martin of "The Design of Business"


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

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

Here is the text from the interview:


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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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.

Book Review and Innovation Summary - "The Design of Business"

A few weeks ago I received "The Design of Business" by Roger Martin in the mail. "The Design of Business" is a relatively short, easy, and pleasant read.

The main premise of the book is that our organizations, and the business schools that fill out their top leadership ranks, are too focused on analytical thinking at the expense of intuitive thinking. This focus creates too much emphasis on reliability at the expense of validity.


"The most successful businesses in the years to come will balance analytical mastery and intuitive originality in a dynamic interplay that I call design thinking." - Roger Martin


One of the key concepts of the book is the introduction of the Knowledge Funnel - a visual element that shows how knowledge progresses from mysteries to heuristics to algorithms. It all begins with a question at the top of the funnel, and at each stage transition, knowledge and execution can typically be transferred to lower cost labor (and possibly handled by a computer when they reach the algorithm level).



At the same time, there are other tensions in our organizations that managers in the era of the creative economy will have to become attuned to, and these include managing an appropriate balance between exploitation and exploration and not falling victim to the false certainty of the past when making business development decisions.

Ultimately, the exploration of the mysteries at the top of the knowledge funnel and exploitation of the algrithms at the bottom of the funnel are equally important. Companies that focus too much on one, at the expense of the other, risk their very future.

Creating a design thinking organization is not easy, and several pages are devoted to describing the struggles of A.G. Lafley and Claudia Kotchka in transforming P&G's organizational culture to be more design-centric.

In addition to other examples of organizations pushing themselves more towards design thinking, there is also a great deal of focus in the book on the transformation of mysteries into heuristics and heuristics into algorithms.

Overall, the book is another way of looking at the challenge facing innovators everywhere who are looking to embed design or innovation (or both) into their organization.

So, are you ready to tackle the challenge of achieving a balance of analytical thinking with intuitive thinking in your organization?


My interview with "The Design of Business" author Roger Martin 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.