The Soccket - A Fun Social Innovation

by Kevin Roberts

Tackling climate change is too important to leave to politicians! It's a job for the inventors, the innovators, the radical optimists. Because of them, the clean energy revolution is already underway, in big ways and small. I stumbled across this amazing idea, and I wanted to share it with you.

Meet the Soccket, a "fun, portable energy-harvesting energy source in the form of a soccer ball". That's right - it is a football that captures the energy of each kick, throw or header to be reused later as a tiny power generator. For each 15 minutes of play, it generates enough energy to power an LED light for three hours.

The Soccket has been trialed successfully in Durban, South Africa - home to this year's Soccer World Cup, as well as to millions of young people who love nothing more than to kick a ball around, often in communities with not enough safe, reliable sources of energy. The inventors see it as a community builder and public health tool as well as being, well, a soccer ball. They plan to develop a high-end version for sale in the US and Europe. An inspired and inspiring idea!


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Image source: ecofriend

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Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Olympic Innovation

by Tim Kastelle


"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald


That's the quote with which Richard Lester and Michael Piore open their outstanding book "Innovation: The Missing Dimension." The opposing ideas that they discuss throughout the book are interpretation and analysis. They argue that both are necessary components of innovation, but that they require completely different skills and mindsets to manage. Here is how they describe the issue:


"In new product development, interpretation and analysis exist in perpetual tension. This tension is inevitable and unavoidable, and we believe it is the central management problem that innovative businesses must confront. The tension... springs from many sources. Interpretation proceeds through conversations over time - within and among the various communities that contribute to new product development and between the designers and the customers who use those new products and incorporate them into their lives. Analysis, on the other hand, takes place 'outside of time' - at the point when a product must be optimized according to well-defined and articulated objectives."


This line of thinking is very similar to the argument that Roberto Verganti puts forward in "Design-Driven Innovation" - and I'll talk about those links later this week. Today, however, I want to use this dichotomy to talk about another perpetual question that arises every four years:



Here's an idea: sports where there is an unequivocal winner, like skiing and ice hockey, are primarily analytical, while the judged sports are primarily interpretive. As a consequence, they have different forms of innovation, and it explains in part why they seem so different to us.

In the analytical sports, who wins is reasonably straightforward. If you get down the mountain fastest, or skate the fastest, or score the most goals, you win. In these sports, the problems are well-defined, and most of the innovations are primarily equipment-based. The well-defined problems lead to engineering-style solutions. So you have innovations like this:



The innovation there is the clapskate - a blade where the back detaches at the end of the stride. This allows the full blade to be in contact for a longer period of time, which transfers more power from the skater's legs to the ice. So you go faster.

In the analytical sports, these type of innovations lead to continually faster speeds, or longer jumps, but in the main, the sport still looks the same. Interestingly, most of the innovations don't come from the athletes.

It's a different story in the interpetive events. In these sports, the athletes themselves are coming up with the innovations. As they do this, they remake the sport. Dominic Basulto has a great post about the nature of innovation in snowboarding - where the judges often don't understand the difficulty of new moves.

He includes this quote from a WSJ article called "When Snowboarders Baffle the Judges" - it explains why Shaun White showed off all his new jumps in events leading up to the Olympics:


"The emphasis on innovation this season has snowboarders grappling with whether they can trust the judges to score their new moves fairly at first sight. Many top riders, including Mr. White, are haunted by the prospect of becoming the next Jonny Moseley, the free-spirited American mogul-skiing champion who failed to medal at Salt Lake City in 2002 despite his debut of a revolutionary trick he dubbed the 'Dinner Roll'. Though he executed it perfectly and the move has since elicited higher marks for difficulty, he received lower scores for his jumps at the time than his competitors got for their tried-and-true twists."

"Tricks can be deceiving," Mr. Moseley says. "I worked twice as hard to be able to perform that in the Olympics than anyone else." Mr. White says he could have saved his surprise moves for Vancouver to increase the 'wow' factor and prevent copycats from stealing his thunder, but he decided it was more important "to educate the judges."


That sounds a lot like the conversations between stakeholders that Lester & Piore describe, doesn't it? As the athletes in interpretive events innovate, the look and feel of the sport changes dramatically. The last interpretive-style innovation in an analytical-style sport that I can think of is the Fosbury Flop in high jumping. Dick Fosbury actually came up with a completely new way to do the high jump. I can't think of a similar shift in skiing, or the other more 'objective' sports. Verganti and Lester & Piore all conclude that interpretive processes are more likely to create radical innovations. We see the same outcomes in the Olympic sports. The innovation in snowboarding is definitely more radical than the innovations we see in downhill skiing. This is a useful thing to keep in mind when we're managing innovation within our organisations.

I'm not sure if this resolves the question of whether or not ice dancing is a real sport. But I think we should embrace the Lester & Piore argument - both analysis and interpretation are important, and we need to be comfortable with both to be genuinely innovative. We need to have both skills within our firms to innovate successfully. So maybe we need to embrace both forms of sport, and both forms of sporting innovation in the Olympics as well.


NOTE: This article talks about innovation at the Winter Olympics, and it's all analytical!


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(Speed skating from flickr/BWJones, snowboarding from flickr/prosto photos - Creative Commons)

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Tim Kastelle is a Lecturer in Innovation Management in the University of Queensland Business School. He blogs about innovation at the Innovation Leadership Network.

Innovating the Hockey Stick

by Drew Boyd

Ice hockey is big business. But it lags behind other professional sports - soccer, football, baseball, and basketball. As with all industries, the key to growth is innovation. Equipment manufacturers such as Reebok are taking this seriously with the creation of the Hockey Research and Innovation Center. In this month's LAB, we will focus on the equipment side of hockey, specifically on: the hockey stick.

Hockey has been around a long time with evidence of its origins dating to the sixteenth century. The first organized indoor game was played in 1875. Since then, many innovations have been introduced. Let's see how a systematic, corporate innovation method can be applied to drive new sales opportunities.

I used the Attribute Dependency template of Systematic Inventive Thinking. Attribute Dependency differs from the other templates in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components. Start with an attribute list, then construct a 2 x 2 matrix of these, pairing each against the others. Each cell represents a potential dependency (or potential break in an existing dependency) that forms a Virtual Product. Using Function Follows Form, we work backwards and envision a potential benefit or problem that this hypothetical solution solves.

Here is my attribute list:

Internal Attributes:

• length of stick


• curve of stick


• flex of stick


• friction of stick (bottom)


• weight of stick

External Attributes:

• game situation (even strength or penalty situation)


• condition of ice (smooth or rough)


• type of shot (forehand or backhand)


• force of shot (slap shot, wrist shot, snap shot)


• use of stick (blocking, hooking, checking, etc)

Here are five innovations for the hockey stick using combinations of these attributes (underlined for emphasis):

1. "Extenda-Stick:" The hockey stick changes length depending on the game situation. If the player is in a defensive mode, the stick can be extended to its maximum allowable length to allow better blocking of shots. When the player transitions to the offensive puck handling mode, the stick reverts to its optimal length as determined by the height and preference of that player. This would be great for situations when your team has a player in the penalty box where defensive play is called for. The stick length could be changed, perhaps, with a push button and spring-loading within a certain range.

2. "Curve-Switcher:" Hockey sticks are either right-handed or left-handed as determined by the direction of the curve of the stick. The challenge occurs when a player wants to take a backhand shot with the back, convex side. It is difficult to control direction and speed of the puck with the back of stick that is curved the wrong way. With this new innovation, the direction of the curve changes depending on the type of shot the player is about to take. Like the "Extenda-Stick," the curve direction changes with the push of a button or a squeeze of the stick. The would be particularly useful on the "wrap-around" attempt (demonstrated here by my son, Ryan, at age 14). This would increase goals, game interest, attendance, etc.

3. "Feel-the-Ice:" The friction on the bottom of the stick adjusts to the smoothness of the ice. Hockey players want to "feel the ice" with their stick as they handle the puck. Early in the game, the ice is freshly prepared and very slippery. That is when the stick bottom needs to have more friction. Later, as the ice surface gets rough and snowy, the stick bottom needs to be slippery. Perhaps the stick has a pad that is added to the bottom at the beginning of a period and it changes over a 20 minute time frame, going from sticky to slippery, adjusting passively to the change in ice surface.

4. "Flex-Flex:" The flexibility of the stick changes with the type of shot the player is taking. If the player "winds up" for a hard slap shot, the shaft of the stick stiffens to maximize the power applied to the puck. If the player takes a shot with the stick at a low angle to the ice (in other words, a wrist shot), the shaft becomes more flexible allowing the player to transfer power with the spring action of the stick.

5. "Whistle-Blower:" Hockey players use their sticks for lots of things, but some of them are illegal. Hooking, tripping, and spearing are examples. With this innovation, the stick alerts the referee when it is being used improperly, causing a penalty. For example, if a player holds the stick parallel to the ice with the blade turned sideways and hooks the body of another player (placing pressure on the top of the blade), the stick would send a signal to the referee indicating a foul.

Perhaps the stick could detect when it draws blood!

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

My Own Tiger's Tale

by Matthew E May

"Tiger-gate" is the media focus of the week. Looks like another one bites the moral dust. Another checkmark in the "how the mighty fall" column. A whole new meaning to Nike's tag line. Skootch over, Kobe. All that.

Be that as it may, I have my own Tiger's tale, and it's one that has stayed with me for the entire eight years since it happened. In fact, I use the story in many of my speeches. (You can view my presentation on YouTube HERE.)

The year was 2001, eight years ago to the week...

I walked into the small workout room of the country club I belong to in southern California, to find none other than Tiger Woods. Each year in December he hosts the last PGA event of the year: a small invitation-only challenge tourney at the course. Proceeds benefit Tiger's educational foundation for disadvantaged youths. (The big news this week, of course, is that he will not be in attendance at his own event). On this particular Monday, the Monday of the tournament week, it was just him and me in the gym. The fact that he was the only golfer in there pumping iron told me something. I guess I was watching him more intently than I realized, because he said "You obviously know who I am. Who are you?" I told him I was just a member, but that I had read an interesting Time magazine cover story on him the previous year, the gist of which was about how he took the biggest risk of his career immediately upon turning pro.

In 1997, with barely seven months under his belt as a professional golfer, 20-year old Tiger stunned the golf world. It wasn't that he had won five PGA Tour tournaments. Or pocketed a $60 million Nike endorsement deal. It wasn't that he had won the 1997 Masters by twelve strokes. It was his decision to reinvent his swing after achieving all that.

Pundits and peers thought he was crazy. Commentators speculated on his early demise. But Tiger knew his swing wasn't as consistent, controlled, or efficient as it could be. It took eighteen months of rewiring, practice, and frustration, during which time he was virtually winless. He knew he was getting better, and was quoted as saying, "Winning is not always the barometer of getting better." Slowly but surely, Tiger's new swing became a deadly controlled substance. With no loss of power, he could hit any type of shot on demand, better and more accurately than ever. The payoff was a record six straight wins starting in late 1999.

He's reengineered his swing now three or four times. Every time he does, he remains winless for a time - but then comes roaring back, usually with a string of wins like the one in 1999.

So I asked him: "What really drives you you to keep breaking what isn't broken?" He said, "The number 18." I immediately thought: "Aha, that's the number of majors Jack Nicklaus won. So that's the goal." I said as much. Tiger said, "That's what people think, and I let them. But 18? That's a perfect golf score."

That says it all right there. The point is this: The pursuit of perfection is not focused on achieving perfection, it's focused on chasing it. Approached as a process, it can drive breakthroughs. Approached as goal, it can actually block innovation. Perfection is unachievable...it'll never happen. Unless you're Buddha I guess. That's what throws people, at least in our Western culture. We've become impatient with mastery. If you can't achieve perfection, why bother pursuing it?

Answer: because you have to. Otherwise you'll always be a follower.

It's how the best get better.

In 2007, Tiger pocketed a cool $11,260,000.00 for taking first in the inaugural FEDEX Cup. He did it again this year. You don't mess with that kind of success, right? WRONG. As he accepted his millions for winning the Tour Championship and the FEDEX Cup, and after dazzling the gallery with one immaculate shot after another, he was asked if we can expect him to ever play any better than he is right now. Instant response: "Yes. I think my game is moving in the right direction."

If only his personal life was following alongside...

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Matthew E. May is the author of "IN PURSUIT OF ELEGANCE: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing." He is constantly searching for creative ideas and innovative solutions that are 'elegant' - a unique and elusive combination of unusual simplicity and surprising power.

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.

Unrealistic Expectations for Innovation

by Jeffrey Phillips

I grew up as one of those kids who was sort of good at a lot of sports but not really a master of any one sport. As I've gotten older, I've put considerably more time into biking, tennis and running, which leaves little time for the sport of business titans: golf. Now, I "play" golf at least four times a year, in a fund raising game or with friends and neighbors. I never practice and it shows. I cannot break 100 to save my life. I'm not familiar with any of the local courses and not familiar with my clubs (tools). I don't expect to be successful when I play and I don't take it too seriously. I uncork a nice drive every once in a while, or a good putt, but I don't expect it to happen regularly. Mostly I am a very poor golfer who occasionally gets in a good shot, and that's all I expect.

If you are still with me, then you must be thinking this is leading somewhere. If you've drawn that assumption, you are right. The comparison I want to make to my very part-time golf game is to the part-time efforts most firms put into innovation. If you want to be good at golf, you'll get instruction, play frequently and learn the nuances. Similarly, if you want to be good at innovation, you'll get instruction, work with a pro, learn the tools and use them repeatedly and constantly. Innovating occasionally is like golfing periodically. You may get in a few good shots, but you won't be consistently successful.

As an innovation consultant we get calls several times a week from firms that want to conduct a brainstorming session or a scenario plan. These firms are interested in quick generation of ideas or insights and have no longer term plan, or want to "stick a toe in the water" and see how the initial engagement pans out. I understand that - no one wants to commit to a big investment if the initial effort won't pan out.

However, almost all of these engagements are likely to be less than fully successful, since there is:

1. No longer term commitment to the effort


2. No real momentum for change


3. no consistency of intent or knowledge of tools

I always ask our clients - "OK, assuming we do the (brainstorm, scenario plan, training) - what's next?" Usually there are vague assurances of more focus on innovation, but in many cases I have the sense that the effort is merely a "ticket punching" exercise, with no longer term commitment. It's as if I showed up at St. Andrews, shanked the opening tee shot and decided, well, that's it for me and golf.

If I want to be a good golfer, I need to take lessons and play regularly to gain insights and improve as a player. If I want to be innovative as a firm, I have to do things on a regular basis that grow my skills and demonstrate my intent. An occasional innovative project or task does not change the baseline capability, and often detracts from a larger intent or goal, since "everyone" knows that nothing will be done with the ideas anyway.

It is completely unrealistic for me to think I can play three or four times a year and then compete at the Masters. Likewise, it is completely unrealistic to expect that I will innovate only occasionally and then create the "next iPod" or whatever your baseline construct for disruptive innovation is. Interestingly, most CEOs or executives who tell their teams to be innovative have an outcome more like the Masters and less like putt-putt in mind. Do you think your CEO or executive sponsor has asked you to innovate to create tiny incremental solutions? No! They want the really exciting, interesting, captivating innovation that gains market awareness and attention, but they certainly aren't likely to get it.

So, we have these crazy, mismatched expectations and capabilities. People who should be playing a par three course and getting instruction have been turned loose on Pinehurst #2 with no instruction and are expected to bring home the cup. No wonder CEOs are constantly disappointed in their companyies' innovation efforts, and no wonder many innovation teams live in fear of meeting their executives' expectations. Periodic, half-hearted attempts at innovation are almost worse than no efforts at all.

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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.