Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability

Interview - Rowan Gibson of "Innovation to the Core"

I had the opportunity to interview Rowan Gibson, co-author of "Innovation to the Core" about the book and about creating a systemic innovation capability inside organizations.

Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation. In addition to "Innovation to the Core, Rowan is author of "Rethinking The Future", and a keynote speaker at large international conferences, corporate management events and executive summits.

We have split this in-depth interview into three parts. Here is the third part of the interview:


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

The biggest barriers to innovation tend to be deep and systemic. They are embedded in a company's leadership priorities, political structures, management processes, cultural values and everyday behavior. For example, senior managers might actually be working against innovation, because the company's metrics system doesn't measure them on it, and the compensation system doesn't reward them for it, so why should they be worried about it? Or a company might be biased heavily toward its legacy business and against revolutionary new ideas that might potentially cannibalize that business. Or allocational rigidities in the budgeting process are making it difficult to get resources behind new opportunities. Or the criteria used in the company's product development stage gate process may tend to kill great ideas too early. Or the organization might simply lack people who have had any significant training in the skills and tools of innovation. These are quite familiar problems, but in every organization the barriers to innovation are subtly different, depending on factors like corporate culture, business model, organizational structure, and so forth.

To make the transition from innovation initiative to enterprise capability, an organization needs to identify, objectively, the practices, policies, and processes inside its core managerial DNA that are toxic to innovation - like traditional management processes that systematically favor perpetuation and incrementalism over new thinking and innovation. Senior executives need to realize that building a truly innovative company is not a matter of simply asking people to be more innovative; it's a matter of positively changing those things that today diminish or stunt the organization's innovation potential. As Clayton Christensen puts it, "Systemic problems require systemic solutions".


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

Managers are going to have to develop a "dual focus" - both on short-term operational performance and on long-term growth opportunities and innovation. The problem here is that these two sides of the business require very different skills. It takes a certain style of management to cut costs, restructure, reengineer, and downsize, and quite another style of management to create growth through new ideas and initiatives.

Today's senior executives will have to learn to do both - they will have to be relentlessly focused on meeting the numbers within their legacy businesses, yet equally focused on generating and successfully commercializing new growth opportunities for the future. This is very easy to talk about but very difficult to do, because efficiency and innovation don't usually "cohabit" too well - they're uncomfortable bedfellows because there's just an inherent tension between these two forces. So what this adds up to is an extremely difficult balancing act for today's managers.

I know of only one way to realign the focus and commitment of top management so that it's equally focused toward innovation, and that is to design a new set of metrics for evaluating management performance - one that puts innovation at least on a par with other performance objectives. If you think about the Balanced Scorecard inside most organizations it's actually not very balanced, in the sense that it tends to be weighted heavily toward optimization rather than innovation. So the first step is to make sure innovation is fully represented in a company's metrics. It has to be recognized to be equal in importance to operational excellence.

Companies might preach the need for risk taking and rule breaking, but these are not the metrics they typically use for measuring their managers' performance. Management compensation is typically tied to other measures like cost, efficiency, speed, and customer satisfaction - and executives are paid for making progress against those metrics. Organizations that are serious about making innovation a core competence need a new set of metrics to offset this tendency and encourage managers to put as much energy into innovation as they are currently putting into optimization.

The other thing managers need to learn is that, in an innovation-led organization, strategy-making is no longer going to be a top-down, executive-only exercise. It's something that will involve everyone in the company - and even people on the outside - and it will increasingly emerge from the bottom up. Managers must come to believe, deep down, in "innovation democracy" - the notion that ideas with billion-dollar potential can come from anyone and anywhere.

Instead of fearing that this will put them out of a job, managers should recognize their pivotal role as champions of the new innovation process. Rather than going away in a little group and trying to come up with all the new growth opportunities on their own, executives should be encouraging all of their people to think like entrepreneurs and submit new ideas. Then they need to regularly sift through the wide variety of opportunities bubbling up from below, and look for ways to invest incrementally in these opportunities. This has worked very well for Best Buy, for example, where some of the most valuable ideas in recent years have come not from top management but from line-level employees who interact with customers each and every day.

This is no doubt going to require a degree of humility on the part of top management, because it essentially means that senior executives will have to give up the old, elitist view about who is responsible for the destiny and direction of the organization, and start involving many new and different voices in the process of charting the company's future.


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

Well, if we agree that tomorrow's economy will be an ideas economy, or a creative economy, or - as I like to call it - an innovation economy, then what does this tell us about the kind of skills tomorrow's workers are going to need? Look at the typical school curriculum. What are the kids learning? Most of it has to do with filling their heads with old information - with facts and figures - as opposed to enhancing their imagination, their ability to create or envisage new solutions.

The education system is set up to teach conformity. It punishes people who fail to stand in line, or who question authority. Yet when we look at successful innovators - like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson - we find that they tend to be rebels. They are contrarian in their thinking. They 'zig' where others 'zag'. They have somehow developed an almost reflexive ability to question the status quo, to look at things from a completely different angle of view, to imagine revolutionary new ways of doing things, to spot opportunities that others can't see, to understand the revolutionary portent in trends and discontinuities, to empathize with unmet needs, to take risks and follow dreams. Is that what schools and colleges are teaching their students to do? I don't think so. In fact, I would argue that they are systematically robbing people of their ability to think creatively.

Today's MBAs are also woefully unprepared for the new era. They may have learned how to read a balance sheet correctly, but when did they learn how to systematically discover new strategic insights, or how to come up with radical new growth opportunities, or how to recognize a really big idea when they see one, or how to rapidly reallocate resources to push ideas forward? And when did they learn how to foster the cultural and constitutional conditions inside an organization that serve as catalysts for breakthrough innovation? Let's face it, what business schools produce en masse are business administrators, not business innovators. They reward people with MBAs, not MBIs. And, again, I believe that part of the answer is to bring more balance into the student's priorities, so that they learn how to embrace the paradox between the relentless pursuit of efficiency and the restless search for radical, value-creating innovations.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that "Innovation to the Core" is increasingly being included on business school curriculums. I wanted it to be kind of a business education for the 21st century and it's gratifying to see it being used that way. The book is also playing quite a role in corporate training programs inside some of the companies that have truly recognized the innovation imperative. So if that means I'm making a meaningful contribution to advancing the field of business innovation, I'll be a happy man.


Related Articles

• Part 1 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• Part 2 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• "Innovation to the Core" Book Review and Innovation Summary

Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

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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.

Part 2 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability

Interview - Rowan Gibson of "Innovation to the Core"

I had the opportunity to interview Rowan Gibson, co-author of "Innovation to the Core" about the book and about creating a systemic innovation capability inside organizations.

Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation. In addition to "Innovation to the Core, Rowan is author of "Rethinking The Future", and a keynote speaker at large international conferences, corporate management events and executive summits.

We have split this in-depth interview into three parts. Here is the second part of the interview:


3. Innovation demand in an organization is equal in importance to innovation supply, but why don't most companies see that?

Again, it's because they are usually too focused on the front end. So they work hard to push up the supply of ideas, launching initiatives like online suggestion boxes, open innovation programs, creative competitions, and perhaps some kind of reward and recognition system. But they fail to create the necessary demand for innovation, meaning the natural, reflexive pull for new ideas within and across the businesses. Failure to drive and manage the demand side of innovation is often where the whole initiative falls flat.

I often ask companies a simple set of questions to gauge the level of innovation demand inside their organizations. For example, Do the executives who run your company's core businesses demonstrate genuine interest in radical, new ideas by redeploying adequate resources behind them? Are they held personally responsible for the performance of their unit's innovation pipeline? Do they spend a significant percentage of their time mentoring innovation projects?

One of the dilemmas today is that, in most organizations, the pressure to innovate is not very real and tangible to senior managers. If you are running one of the company's business units, for example, what is real and tangible to you is the pressure to meet the numbers - to improve operational performance - and you know you are being monitored on a monthly, weekly, daily, or even minute-by-minute basis. But there is usually no similar pressure that is holding you directly accountable for innovation performance. So your natural bias is to worry a lot more about efficiency, and short-term earnings, and monthly variances from budget, than about the innovation performance of your business unit.

The challenge, therefore, is to create a whole set of pressure points on the demand side that will make leaders as sensitive and responsive to the need to innovate as they are to the need to make the numbers. For example, companies can give senior managers unreasonably high growth targets that call for innovative ways to dramatically outperform the average; they can force their senior managers to allocate a portion of their budget to fostering innovation projects; and they can link a sizeable part of executive compensation directly to innovation performance. These are the kinds of measures GE has taken to drive innovation demand across the organization, and it has produced impressive results because GE is a company where managers are fanatic about achieving their goals.


4. Since the book was published, have you come across other organizations that you think are doing systemic innovation really well?

When we were writing the book, we devoted quite a lot of ink to companies like Whirlpool, P&G, IBM, GE, Shell, W.L. Gore, and Cemex. These are all excellent examples. Since then, of course, I've been working with all sorts of other organizations to embed innovation as a systemic capability. They include pharmaceuticals giants like Bayer and Roche: tech champions like Microsoft and Nokia: financial services leaders like Generali Group; massive consulting firms like Accenture; manufacturing companies like Rexam, top automobile brands like Volkswagen; trend-setting retailers like Ahold and Metro; home appliance makers like Philips and Haier; even heavy engineering firms like Debswana diamond mining. For the last half-year, I've also been very busy with Mars - the global manufacturer of chocolate, pet food and other food products - and I've seen a lot of progress there, too.

What really satisfies me is to see companies like these gradually institutionalizing and managing innovation as a discipline. So some of them are setting up innovation directors, innovation boards, business unit innovation officers, and innovation ambassadors. They are introducing comprehensive new metrics to measure their innovation performance. They are building new processes to produce and nurture a continuous stream of innovation opportunities from inside and outside the organization, as well as robust innovation pipelines for taking ideas from mind to market. They are giving their people new tools - including the "Four Lenses" methodology and web-based innovation platforms - that open up the innovation process to everyone. They are training literally thousands of their employees to use these skills and tools, and setting up incentive schemes and reward ceremonies to encourage them to innovate every day. They are hardwiring all their HR systems - pay, spot awards, the long-term incentive plan, the balanced score card objectives - into the company's innovation strategy. They are creating new cultural mechanisms, such as a discretionary time allowance, to foster and support innovators throughout their ranks. They are building dedicated innovation spaces where their people can ideate together. And they are working hard to make innovation a tangible corporate value, rather than just an aspiration.

There are few other companies, too - ones that I have not yet personally worked with - that I would point to as good examples of systemic innovation. They include Best Buy and McDonald's in the USA, and Tata in India. In fact, there's a rapidly growing list of organizations around the world that seem to be gaining traction with the innovation management challenge, and what they demonstrate is that large companies really can tackle innovation successfully in a broad-based and highly systemic way.


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

This is such an important issue. When we asked more than five hundred senior and midlevel managers in large U.S. companies to identify the biggest barriers to innovation in their respective organizations, one of the most common responses was "lack of time." Most of us are struggling simply to get through the day, and it's almost impossible to think creatively, reflect on new strategic insights and innovate in a focused manner when you're running from one meeting to the next, making loads of phone calls, writing a thousand emails and frantically trying to work through all the other tasks on your to-do list. So companies need to think seriously about freeing up more time, energy, and brainpower across the organization to devote to innovation and growth.

The fact is, none of us are going to "find" time for innovation. We are going to have to "make" time for it by driving a wedge into our agendas and turning innovation it one of our strategic priorities. In the book we say that carving out time for employees to imagine and experiment and develop their own ideas is the "first commandment of innovation". For some companies, a discretionary time allowance seems to work quite successfully. Well-known examples would be 3M, Gore and Google, where employees can spend a percentage of their time on pet projects. Other organizations take a number of people out of their day jobs for a certain period - say, a few weeks or months - and let them concentrate on generating new insights and ideas as members of dedicated innovation teams. Here, I'm thinking of companies like Whirlpool and Cemex. In addition, Whirlpool also has a formal training program where people are given time to learn the principles, skills, and tools of innovation in the same way as they learnt Six Sigma. Then there's the example of Shell, where the time allowance actually comes after a person or team has submitted an idea, and these people are given one or two months, rising to perhaps a whole year, to design some small-scale, low-cost experiments to test the validity of their new business concepts.

The other thing to remember, as I have been emphasizing all along, is that creating bandwidth for innovation is not just about the front end. It also has to do with freeing up top management time for the back end of innovation - time to devote to steering innovation activities, reviewing ongoing innovation projects, setting priorities, allocating resources, mentoring innovators and embedding innovation as a core competence. And making innovation stick requires a significant number of people - outside of R&D and new product development - who officially work on a full- or part-time basis on innovation activities. One global company has already appointed 1,200 part-time innovation mentors along with 50 full-time innovation consultants, who coach and support would-be innovators throughout the organization, helping them push their ideas forward.


Related Articles

• Part 1 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• "Innovation to the Core" Book Review and Innovation Summary

Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

---

Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Part 1 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability

Interview - Rowan Gibson of "Innovation to the Core"

I had the opportunity to interview Rowan Gibson, co-author of "Innovation to the Core" about the book and about creating a systemic innovation capability inside organizations.

Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation. In addition to "Innovation to the Core", Rowan is author of "Rethinking The Future", and a keynote speaker at large international conferences, corporate management events and executive summits.

We have split this in-depth interview into three parts. Here is the first part of the interview:


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

The biggest challenge is not generating new ideas and opportunities. It's how to make innovation a deeply embedded capability. What usually happens is that companies focus most of their efforts on the front end of innovation - so they launch some kind of ideation initiative with a lot of hoopla and they get a whole bunch of ideas. But then they hit a wall because there is no back end - there is no organizational system for effectively screening ideas, aligning them with the business strategy, allocating seed funding and management resources, and guiding a mixed portfolio of opportunities through the pipeline toward commercialization. So, invariably, what we find is that the whole innovation effort eventually withers. And all those enthusiastic innovators inside and outside the company become cynical and discouraged as they watch their ideas go nowhere.

The real challenge, therefore, is to turn innovation from a buzzword into a systemic and widely distributed capability. It has to be woven into the everyday fabric of the company just like any other organizational capability, such as quality, or supply chain management, or customer service. In other words, for innovation to really work, and to be sustainable, it has to become a way of life for the organization. Yet how many companies have actually achieved that? The sad truth is this: most organizations today still have absolutely no model, no practical notion, of what the back end of innovation actually looks like. If you asked them to build a corporate innovation system that seamlessly integrates leadership commitment, infrastructure, processes, tools, talent development, cultural mechanisms and values, they wouldn't even know where to start. That's the challenge Innovation to the Core was meant to address.


2. Why is it so important that organizations build a foundation of insights before generating ideas?

OK, let's go back to the front end of innovation. If you're going to do this properly, what you're really looking for is not just a lot of ideas. Senior managers often complain that most of the ideas they get from their employees and customers are not very good ones. So after they open up the innovation process to everyone, everywhere, they find themselves wasting valuable management time sorting through a heap of garbage to find a few interesting submissions. That's because, frankly, they don't really understand how the innovation process actually works.

Try to look at it this way: before you start building a house, you have to gather the right materials and lay a solid foundation, right? Remember the story of the three little pigs? If you build a house from the wrong materials it can easily be blown down, so it's useless. Then there's the Bible story of the house built on sand rather than rock. It makes a similar point: if you don't have the right foundation - regardless of the quality of the building materials - the house is equally useless. So it is with new ideas and opportunities. In a sense, they need to be built from the right "materials" and they need a solid "foundation", otherwise they won't be very good. What I'm getting at here is that there is actually a front end to the front end of innovation. Before you start ideating, you need a set of really novel strategic insights. These are like the raw material out of which exciting innovation breakthroughs are built. If you ask people to innovate in a game-changing way without first building a foundation of novel strategic insights, you find that it's mostly a waste of time. You get a lot of ideas that are either not new at all, or so crazy that they're way out in space.

So how do you develop those all-important insights? I teach companies a methodology for doing that in a systematic way - it's called "The Four Lenses of Innovation". The fact is that in order to discover new ideas and opportunities of any real value, people need to stretch their thinking beyond the conventional. They need to develop fresh perspectives. So the "Four Lenses" represent four specific types of perspectives, or ways of looking at the world, that innovators typically use to come to their breakthrough discoveries. They are (1) Challenging orthodoxies, (2) Harnessing trends, (3) Leveraging resources in new ways, and (4) Understanding unmet needs. By using these lenses, or these particular angles of view, it's possible to systematically look through the familiar and spot the unseen. That's how you discover those deep insights that others have overlooked or ignored.

Once you have gathered a collection of really inspiring insights, you can then do your ideation work. You start thinking about what kinds of ideas and opportunities could be built on these unexamined dogma, unexploited trends, underutilized resources, and unvoiced customer needs. And what that gives you is not just a high quantity of ideas but also a high quality. Rather than just pulling ideas out of the air, you generate opportunities that are grounded. They are based on real industry orthodoxies that deserved to be challenged, real discontinuities that could potentially reshape the business landscape, real competencies and assets that could be leveraged to create opportunities beyond the boundaries of the existing business, and real customer needs that have not yet been addressed. So you inspire ideas that are connected to the real world; they are not in some crazy, unbounded creative space. They are founded on realities - things you can test and validate.

Now imagine that instead of merely inviting everyone, everywhere to "go forth and innovate", you actually gave them access to these powerful strategic insights via a web-based tool, and you taught them how to ideate effectively. Can you see how that would dramatically enhance their innovation performance? That's what I'm currently doing with all kinds of organizations around the world.


Related Articles

• Part 2 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability


• "Innovation to the Core" Book Review and Innovation Summary

Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

---

Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

You Were Born to Save the Planet

Adam Werbach, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, recently spoke at the 5th Annual Teens Turning Green Summit in California to an audience of keen, sustainability-minded young people. His message - on the opportunities this generation has to create positive change and the power of DOTs - clearly resonated, and is now spreading like wildfire on the web. It's a welcome shot of inspiration for anyone, whether you're teen or senior, whether you consider yourself Green or Blue. Below is a shortened version of Adam's speech, you can read the full version here. - Kevin Roberts


by Adam Werbach

The Earth needs you right now. Our ecological systems are in decline, one-third of fish species stand at the verge of collapse, the glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide drinking water to over a billion people, are rapidly melting, the chemicals we're putting in us, on us and around us are forming complex endocrine disrupting compounds that are in every one of our bodies. Tonight hundreds of thousands of Haitians are sleeping below flimsy plastic shelters wondering where they'll find their next meal, wondering when their kids will start going to school again.

All of this bad news should make me crawl up into a ball. But instead I'm oddly optimistic, like a kid looking for coins in a payphone. The world may be screwed up, but it's changing faster than ever. Your challenge is to make the type of change we want at the speed we need. And you have it in your neural programming to make it so. Recent brain studies show that your brain moves faster when you're younger, so you're bringing more processing power to the challenge. All of that texting and facebooking is going to pay off in spades. The world is changing and your generation was born to save the planet.

Any movement starts with yourself. I ask you to pick a DOT - DOT stands for Do One Thing. One thing that's good for you, good for the planet, that you do regularly. Maybe it's yoga or riding your bike or saving energy. But it's one thing you do to put your body where your mouth is. We need a billion DOTs. One billion people all making their own commitments. Take a moment now and choose your own DOT. Share it with a friend. Keep it going. Pick another. And it all adds up. If every high schooler turned the thermostat in their house down by one degree Celsius, it would be like reducing 100,000 tanker trucks of gasoline, or taking over a million cars off the road.

Right now there are about 6.7 billion people on the planet. And there's an emerging bulge of teenagers at the bottom of the demographic pyramid that exists because fertility rates are dropping globally. By 2011 there will be 7 billion people and 1 billion teenagers on the planet. Can you imagine 1 billion teenagers? Can you imagine them talking all at once? Now imagine them all walking in the same direction in a line that's as long as 1,000,000 Empire State Buildings. Can you see it? The line would stretch around the earth fifteen times. Can you see it? Now imagine one billion DOTs. All coming together. I'll bet on that.


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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.

Do Ten Things, Do 100 Things

Ikea OGLA chair - made from 100% post-consumer plastic waste

by Kevin Roberts

I wrote a few weeks ago about Do One Thing, the Saatchi & Saatchi S initiative to personalize sustainable actions. Real change requires a ground swell of action, but as companies we can take decisive steps that have impact.

Walmart recently discontinued issuing paper checks to its employees in favor of electronic payments. By that stroke alone it will save some 257,572 pounds of paper a year.

Tesco in the UK has announced that it is now diverting 100% of its waste from landfills. This is no small feat, since it encompasses all of Tesco's 2300 stores and distribution centers in the UK.

Marks & Spencer has pledged to meet 100 separate commitments to reduce impacts within a five-year time-frame, and has already achieved 39 of those within the first two years.

Here are ten things Ikea did to be more sustainable:

1. Replace polyvinylchloride (PVC) in wallpapers, home textiles, shower curtains, lampshades, and furniture - PVC has been eliminated from packaging and is being phased out in electric cables;


2. Minimize the use of formaldehyde in its products, including textiles;


3. Eliminate acid-curing lacquers;


4. Produce a model of chair (OGLA) made from 100% post-consumer plastic waste;


5. Introduce a series of air-inflatable furniture products into the product line. Such products reduce the use of raw materials for framing and stuffing and reduce transportation weight and volume to about 15% of that of conventional furniture;


6. Reduce the use of chromium for metal surface treatment;


7. Limit the use of substances such as cadmium, lead, PCB, PCP, and AZO pigments;


8. Use wood from responsibly-managed forests that replant and maintain biological diversity;


9. Use only recyclable materials for flat packaging and "pure" (non-mixed) materials for packaging to assist in recycling.


10. Introduce rental bicycles with trailers for customers in Denmark.
    At Saatchi & Saatchi, we're setting goals relating to optimal management of our buildings, and doing less traveling. And individually our employees each declare what their DOT is.

There's an interesting exchange on the post I published a few weeks ago on DOT - a reader claiming that the "incremental steps" model does not achieve transformative change. Adam Werbach responds to this and other views on this, and how he believes the "bottom-of-the-pyramid" actions on the part of the general population have a major effect on decisions made by companies and governments. More on this to come.

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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.

Mumbai's Innovation Hub

by Vyoma Kapur

Innovation in the developing world, as many people may tend to think, comes from either large conglomerates or small entrepreneurial communities which have had the good fortune of venture backing. Especially in a free market economy, such as India's, innovation is often thought of as the mandate of thriving businesses equipped with the know-how.

In Mumbai, India's economic powerhouse, the real social innovation is coming from the grassroots. These are people, who despite having little, are the answer to Mumbai's mounting waste management problem.

The dwellers of the Dharavi slum, the largest in Asia, have created a massive recycling industry. Invaluable for the social impact it has created, the slum's existence is supported by high-strung officials and ordinary civilians alike. Using simple machines in their home factories, these dwellers are recycling anything from plastic bottles and metal cans to paper and cotton, saving the city from the wrath of its own garbage. Over 80% of the plastic waste of Mumbai is recycled in the Dharavi slum.

As the consumerism of Mumbai's upper and middle classes disposes of thousands of tons of waste material everyday, energetic young men of Dharavi sift through piles of trash to gather anything with the potential of being recycled. Different types of junk is given a new life and then sold for a bargain. With support from non-profit organizations such as ACORN International, rag-pickers are taught how to manage solid dry waste.

With an increasing number of micro-entrepreneurs entering the recycling business, this industry has seen an astonishing level of organic growth. The slum produces a jaw-dropping $1.3 billion worth of recycled output every year. There are approximately 400 recycling units, and the number is increasing every month.

Spreading across approximately 174 hectares, this slum is like any other. It lacks food and proper sanitation and is rife with squalor. For a few hours everyday, some areas of the slum are supplied water and electricity. Despite making only a fraction of the salaries earned by their counterparts in more developed areas of Mumbai, many of these dwellers are finally finding their way out of poverty through the huge demand for their services. Needless to say, environmentalists are in full praise of this green industry, a rarity in the hustling cites of India.

Having spent a few years in India, I find this commendable. I have not seen the Dharavi slum, however; I've seen many other slums, just like those depicted in Slumdog Millionaire. That slum dwellers could become social entrepreneurs within their own capacity to fight for survival never crossed my mind.

The Dharavi example made me wonder; do we always need a team of experts and comprehensive research data to innovate? Is it not about solving the problems in front of us and seeking ways to improve what is defined and traditional? To the Dharavi dwellers, the waste piled up around their homes was not a problem, it was an opportunity. They became rag-pickers and set up mini factories with whatever little they had. In time, they turned Dharavi from being Mumbai's biggest headache to one of its greatest assets, setting an example for similar communities around the world.

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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.

Video Interview - Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi at the World Business Forum this week at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. You can see the video interview here:





Saatchi & Saatchi is a well-regarded advertising agency and Kevin Roberts has a lot of great insight on the customer. In this short video we chat about the evolving relationship between customers and their mobile devices, the state of integrated campaigns with social media as a component, and about Saatchi & Saatchi's "Do One Thing" (aka DOT) campaign.

For those of you don't know, Kevin Roberts is a contributor here on Blogging Innovation.

What do you think?

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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.

Do One Thing

Kevin Roberts will be speaking at the World Business Forum in New York City, October 6-7, 2009. Here is our latest hand-picked article:

by Kevin Roberts



For change to take real effect, it needs to be personalized. Saatchi & Saatchi S, our sustainability agency, is working with companies to implement nano-practices in the workplace to reduce carbon use.

We call this DIY contagion DOT, Do One Thing. Each person is encouraged to choose one thing to pursue regularity. It can be anything from cycling to work or doing laundry with cold water. It's just one thing, a start not a complete change of life. One person's DOT may stand alone, but connect a billion DOTs together and you'll see a movement of change happening.

Employees throughout our own network have shared their DOTs. Here are ten, from Sao Paolo to Singapore:

1. My DOT is to take public transportation to and from airports whenever possible.


2. I use the same bottle for water each day every day.


3. I am going to stop smoking.


4. I no longer use plastic shopping bags.


5. My family will no longer buy water in plastic bottles.


6. I turn off the tap while brushing my teeth.


7. I buy ecologic food and supplies, when possible.


8. I will not eat meat at least once a week.


9. I will drink coffee from a reusable mug whenever possible.


10. To find my bike in the cellar – yes, and to use it!

What's my DOT? Make one less flight per month. What's yours? It doesn't matter what it is, so long as you Do One Thing.




It's not too late to catch Kevin Roberts at the World Business Forum in New York City, October 6-7, 2009.

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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.

Rewarding People for Helping the Planet

by Kevin Roberts

If guilt is the gift that keeps on giving, here's an easy way to break its grip. We're all aware of the things that we can be doing to improve society, the community, the environment - but frequently we don't get around to activating this desire, usually because it involves sacrifice or getting around some inconvenience.

Recycling is one thing that's easiest enough to do, yet we don't recycle as much or as often as we could. Eighty percent of all garbage is recyclable, yet the average residential recycling rate is less than 20 percent. Recycling saves cities millions of dollars in landfill and disposal fees, saves trees from the paper mill, and even millions of gallons of oil from use.

Some point this as a result of problems in the infrastructure of cities or simply that it's not convenient enough to do. Some of our cities are better placed with bins and programs, while other cities leave it entirely up to your own persistence.

Maybe we need more incentive to do so? That's the approach from the people at RecycleBank. They have introduced the element of rewards into how and when you recycle for both curbside pickup and electronic waste recycling.

RecycleBank's slogan is "Rewards for people and planet". So what do people get? Similar to an airline rewards system, you earn points that are redeemable for goods or discounts from retailers. Some pretty big names have signed on - Target, Kraft, Sears, Evian, and Bed Bath & Beyond.

Headquartered in New York City - about three blocks from the Saatchi & Saatchi office - and co-founded in 2005 by Ron Gonen, RecycleBank now serves over 20 million people in America. Last week, Mayor Daley in Chicago instigated the RecycleBank program in 10,000 households. This summer they launch in Europe. They're also expanding the program to include additional Blue actions, e.g. using solar and wind power, efficient use of water, riding public transportation, or buying products that are manufactured from recycled content.

I think the idea is a very good one, as do some of the savviest venture capitalists in America - Kleiner Perkins are among the investors. For what it's worth, the United Nations and World Economic Forum agree. Incentives can be a smart strategy for any product or service, especially when those coincide with rewards for the planet. Now that's Blue Thinking.


Image Source: RecycleBank.com

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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.

Part 2 - Nature's 10 Simple Rules

Here's the second half of my thoughts on Nature's 10 Simple Rules for Business Survival (read Part 1 here). Send me your views on this list. Also, make sure you pin it up on your wall, your company's survival may depend on it.

Nature's # 6. Integrate metrics. Nature brings the right information to the right place at the right time. When a tree needs water, the leaves curl; when there is rain, the curled leaves move more water to the root system. OK, I'm not a big metrics guy. Experience has shown me that a quick decision grounded in intuition often beats the 100 page report and meeting from hell. But I also find inspiration in understanding how the world works, and for that big picture we need numbers - just numbers from a lot of different sources. Smart, revealing, insightful numbers. For example, James Dyson worked through around 5,000 prototypes before coming up with the wildly successful Dyson vacuum cleaner. Let the truth of that number hit you around the head. When did any of us make 5,000 attempts at anything? If all you read are balance sheets, that's how you'll see the world and you will fail. Too many factors impact on us for any one perspective to show the way forward. If you think otherwise, ask a banker about subprime.

Nature's # 7. Improve with each cycle. Evolution is a strategy for long-term survival. The long-term is the only term if you want to survive. Short-term thinking - like the ridiculous obsession with quarterly earnings - has taken more eyes off the ball than a couple of streakers at a football match. The magic mix? Big, long-term ideas combined with the spirit of "Fail fast, learn fast, fix fast". We can all learn from the frenzied world of fashion. In my first job at Mary Quant, we had nine months to conceive, produce, launch, sell, and then discontinue, a complete line. We got better at it - I promise you.

Nature's # 8. Right size regularly, rather than downsize occasionally. If an organism grows too big to support itself, it collapses. If it withers, it is eaten. When businesses start there are usually just a few people doing everything. Then there comes a time when more people are on the job than can comfortably fit around the lunch table. Thus middle management kicks in and, as Kurt Vonnegut put it in Slaughterhouse-Five, "So it goes". Right size is such a great term. The right size of a business depends on the business. This is where business gets specific and where clarity counts. If you want to manufacture cars for the world to drive, your right size is nothing like that of a boutique fragrance. The key though is to know what's right - right size, right people, right choices - and to take action.

Nature's # 9. Foster longevity, not immediate gratification. Nature does not buy on credit and uses resources only to the level that they can be renewed. Since joining Saatchi & Saatchi, one of my great pleasures has been the opportunity to speak to the P&G Alumni. These are people who have worked for P&G and believe in P&G principles. Best of all, they keep the P&G flag flying long after they have left the company. They are in it for the long-term and the long-term extends beyond a job at P&G and even their working life. They are an amazing renewable source for P&G that promotes the company, attracts more great people to work there, and connects P&G in rich and complex ways to the communities and countries it works in. Longevity is about making a worthwhile contribution. Gratification is about an immediate sensation.

Nature's # 10. Waste nothing, recycle everything. Some of the greatest opportunities in the 21st century will be turning waste - including inefficiency and underutilization - into profit. This rule can transform businesses, regions, nations, and people. One area of waste that I take very personally is the waste of human potential. That's why TYLA - Turn Your Life Around - is very close to my heart. This remarkable program based in New Zealand helps kids at risk start to make positive choices about their lives. We use mentors, fresh opportunities, experiences, support - whatever it takes to transform these young people into hard-working, energetic and joyful citizens. In today's tough climate, we want every hand to the pump. Waste not, want not.

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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.

Part 1 - Nature's 10 Simple Rules

I've done the helicopter view of Adam Werbach's book "Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto" but now's the time to dig deeper. Right at the front of Adam's book (and picked up by Fast Company) is a list of Nature's 10 Simple Rules for Business Survival. In this list Adam draws from nature a tough bottom line for sustainable business. "Nature is far harsher than the market: If you are not sustainable, you die. No second chances and no bailouts." I'm not usually a fan of rules but these ten make sense to me. They are big-scale - forest-scale. Ocean-scale. Planet-scale. I've jotted down my own thoughts on each one. I'll share them with you here - five this week and five next.

Nature's # 1. Diversify across generations. This idea has certainly inspired me to write a number of posts here that I've called Stella's World. Of course they are about my and Ro's first grandchild but they are also about what change across generations can really mean. How few companies have that aspiration! In principle we all want our businesses to thrive across generations, but how few succeed. Adam tells me that fully one-third of the companies profiled in Jim Collins' "Built to Last" as out-performers, are now under-performers. Think Ford and Citibank. They lost the juice of excitement, wonder and delight and got lost in expectations and self-obsession.

Nature's # 2. Adapt to the changing environment - and specialize. To get to the future first you have to take on what I call the three A's - Adapt, Adopt and Act. It's worked for children, for animals - for all living things and never forget that businesses are living things too. People are often held back by the feeling that the challenges we face are so great that they can't effect any meaningful change. My response? If you can’t change the situation, change yourself. At Saatchi & Saatchi we have a True Blue sustainability program called DOT. Do One Thing. In other words, don't take on the world; specialize. Sure, some of the things people chose to change are small, but put them together and we're talking serious action. Action that can build as we get more confident about Adapting, Adopting and Acting.

Nature's # 3. Celebrate transparency. Every species knows which species will eat it and which will not. I like to see transparency as opportunity rather than threat. Take the emotional transparency of Lovemarks. You can't hide love - and few of us want to. Check out Lovemarks.com and see how that community responds to the brands it loves; openly, without hesitation, with pride. When consumers can push a brand like Tropicana to revert to its traditional packaging in just a few months, something's up. And what's up is that consumers are in control. They want confidentiality for themselves and transparency from their Lovemarks. No one said it would be easy.

Nature's # 4. Plan and execute systematically, not compartmentally. Every part of a plant contributes to its growth. Anyone who has been in business understands the damage caused by silo thinking. Community is key. All of us are better than some of us. In Peak Performance we demonstrated the power of inspirational leadership and teams. Groups of like-minded people working together to overcome all odds and achieve impossible goals. At Saatchi & Saatchi we sum this up in our spirit 'One team, one dream'. And our dream? "To be revered as the hot-house for world-changing ideas that create sustainable growth for our clients."

Nature's # 5. Form groups and protect the young. Most animals travel in flocks, gaggles, and prides. Packs offer strength and efficacy. This is a fantastic rule and the best argument ever for playing in teams. Most young people aren't educated into creativity; they are educated out of it. At Saatchi & Saatchi we give people an elastic-sided sand box, a problem, a deadline, and we get out of their way. To make sure they reach their full potential we have some older folk around to guide, mentor and run protection when it's needed. Usually it's not needed because what they want is responsibility, learning, recognition and joy. All that they get.

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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.

Even Sheep Avoid the Commodity Trap

One of the unwritten rules of Lovemarks is don't get stuck in the commodity quadrant, the realm of raw products and raw actions. For service industries like travel, this is unforgivable, which is why I will only fly on an American airline out of desperation or duress.

For land based industries which originate in the commodity zone, global integration has laid down hotly contested conditions that demand re-positioning. How to climb the value chain onto a premium rung as value gets redefined around rising standards of quality and sustainability? The answer lies in an end-to-end story of value that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Being from New Zealand, where the sheep outnumber the people (see the comedy horror movie Black Sheep for the dark and ridiculous side of this), I'm excited to see the unveiling of Laneve, a new wool brand from Wool Partners International, a joint venture headed by top business leader, Theresa Gattung, and an old mate of mine, Iain Abercrombie. This luxe evolution of the Wools of New Zealand brands brings the attributes of the wool itself right to the fore.

Here's how the story stacks up. New Zealand produces 30% of the world's strong wool (used mainly for carpets), it's the highest quality but we're not leveraging this scale and quality advantage. Prices paid to farmers for wool have steadily fallen for two decades and incredibly are now well less than half what they were 20 years ago. This has led to New Zealand sheep numbers halving over that period (from 60 million to 30 million). New Zealand needs agricultural diversity - and sheep are low impact on the environment. In the US only 3% of carpets sold are wool, the rest synthetic (i.e. made from petroleum based products). The synthetics guys have comprehensively outmarketed wool, which used to be the dominant fibre for flooring. Wool ought to be a marketers dream - it's a sustainable raw product which makes beautiful end products, in a world crying out for authenticity. Bringing that story to the fore and directly connecting producers and consumers is what Laneve (from Laneus, which is Latin for wool and weave) is about.

Laneve's fibre integrity is woven in its farming practices, animal welfare, sustainability, traceability, and environmental standards; issues that are right up the brand street of high-end American consumers. By setting a critical supply standard and tracking the wool only from accredited growers through scouring and spinning right to the finished product at point of sale, the commodity trap gets sprung.

Wool Partners already has direct deals with U.S. carpet makers for launch at trade fairs in the northern winter, and there's more in the works. It's a sustainable story you can follow that delivers through the line. Laneve is pumping in the premium, and that's the new game that really matters to New Zealand.

Image Credit: Rangoli Rug by Nani Marquina, made from New Zealand Wool.

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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.

Designing a Sustainable Paris

In the race to create a sustainable world, designers will be key players. I've always been a big design fan and I salute the new sense of purpose now apparent in every aspect of this industry. It's becoming more experimental, more challenging, more ethical, and more exciting without losing its core functions - to stimulate ideas, change behavior, and offer help and hope.

Sustainability brings a whole new set of issues to the design table and a grandiose challenge was recently issued by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. In a blaze of publicity, Sarkozy invited 10 architects to project 20 years into the future and come up with some ideas for the world's most sustainable metropolis.

The Italians, Bernardo Secchi and Paola Vigano, came up with an extraordinary idea that upturns urban conventions. Instead of starting with hard infrastructure (roads, subways, walkways), they started with the existing waterways of Paris. The Seine is an icon of Paris but there is a less well-known network of canals, rivers, and waterways. There are already efforts underway to renovate this 81 mile network, but Secchi and Vigano had even grander designs on it shaped by a fantastic metaphor: the sponge.

Sponges are living creatures that shift and change with conditions and survive on a constant flow of water through their bodies. What a beautiful idea. A city that flows, grows, and responds. A city that is more inclusive. A city that attracts ideas found in the natural world. So often designs founded on compelling metaphors are the ones to capture the public imagination.

"Renovate the canal system" or transform Paris into a sponge. No contest. Projects to improve sustainability, or based on sustainable principles, often fail the inspiration test. That's one reason why at Saatchi & Saatchi we have bonded with Blue as a motivating spirit. As Japanese designer, Fumi Masuda has pointed out, the job ahead is not to "sustain society as it is, but change society for sustainability".

That means inspiring people. The concepts of the 10 architects will be publicly displayed, debated, tested, and challenged in true French style. Paris to the Channel as a single city, Paris as archipelego, Paris as an eight-petal flower, a Paris of urban fields, Paris as sponge.


Photo credit: St. Martin Canal, Paris, by Jeff Polaski. Sourced from Photo.net

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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.

Our Modular Electronics Future

THE POINT: Leading electronics companies can lead a movement to future-proof their businesses by innovating updatable products that encourage customer loyalty, sustainability and pragmatic fun.

Creating Consumer Electronics 2.0

It's easy to blame tighter purse strings for falling electronics sales figures. But it's not just lack of money that's keeping customers away; it's fear of instant obsolescence.

Today's consumer consideration set has fundamentally shifted. We now want long-term value, not just the latest and greatest.

Yesterday we used an electronic device until it broke or a better one superseded it. We disposed of the old with great dispatch. Brands using a Parallel Model of product development kept us enthralled with a constant churn of new shiny objects and updated versions. Durables were recast as disposable. Sales and stocks soared. Best Buy created a whole new business, Geek Squad, to help us keep up. We wanted new toys, but needed Geeks to show us how to use them. We delighted at every new feature. We also started feeling pangs of "buyer's hesitation" as Moore's Law kept shortening product life cycles. Particularly as we started replacing devices that still worked just fine.

Oh, how we loved our first iPod - 5GB of musical magic for $399. But oh, how quickly we tossed our still-working sweetie into a drawer, lured by ever-smaller, higher-capacity, ever-cheaper iPods. As prices fell and capacity increased, however, internal conflict also rose. We could never be sure of our decision to buy or when. Wouldn't something far superior be just around the corner?

Today's economic realities compound these past experiences. The consumer technology industry has inadvertently trained us to delay purchases. Though it drove 15 years of unprecedented growth, this Parallel Model won't hold for the next 15. Lowered components costs will not be enough to spark demand.

What might tempt us to spend? An assurance that we're investing in technology rather than playing silicon hopscotch.

Manufacturers and brands need to move from a focus on this year's model to a focus on a whole new model.

Consumers now demand enduring goods we can easily update ourselves. We welcome a new Series Model age of product development.

Imagine how transformative it would be to have an industrial/retail structure where product parts are swapped out [and recycled], where the upgrade is built in, where the form can completely change to answer new needs or aesthetic desires.


It's not such a new concept, but a return to the long-term pragmatism that skipped a generation. Grandma insisted on products that were built to last; tech-savvy Millennials expect the same. Favored Serial Model brands would reflect their values: respecting resources and sustainability; nurturing networked relationships; promoting self-reliance and utility as the height of style.

Consumers embrace smart series strategies in other sectors. We don't throw away our cars when a new set of tires or a paint job is needed. We put energy-efficient bulbs and new shades on perfectly functional lamps. We buy the latest razor blades for our enduring shaver. Why not make consumer electronics as easy to update?

Switching to series production requires moving from a focus on design to a focus on the well designed. It's a long-term view with manifold benefits.

Series Model: Answers both producer and consumer desires for Value and Profit:

• Creates a deeper bond between consumers and a brand, provided that the producer commits to improve and evolve the technology.


• Eliminates the waste of a churn-n-burn model, freeing up investment capital for developing huge, category-creating innovations that radically improve consumers' lives.


• Generates a can-do dynamic between manufacturer and consumer. Since service people cost more than manufacturing labor, it behooves the manufacturer to make swapping out updating / fixing so easy that the consumer will happily take on the task.

Series Model innovations might include:

• Swapping out a circuit board like we do memory cards


• Placing more functionality in parts that can be easily replaced like controllers & remotes


• Designing for aesthetic/functional switching thru more attachment inputs


• Creating energy-improving refrigerator cooling unit upgrades that utilize existing casing


• Making upgrading a 3 mega-pixel camera to an 8 mega-pixel as easy as switching lenses

Activating this Series Model will likely require both producers and consumers to pay more upfront. But these costs should be framed as an economic offset for all stakeholders.

The extra dollar spent on a modular manufacturing schema saves countless dollars on retooling for new gadgets, shipping, warehousing and more. Value-conscious consumers are now ready to see the long-term savings of buying modular products from trusted brands.

The first mover in this space has an opportunity to bond with customers. To cement an enduring relationship with Millennials. And to innovate for this recession in a way that future-proofs its business for decades to come.

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Marcus Oliver is an Innovation Director at innovation consultancy Fahrenheit 212 in New York. Fahrenheit 212 delivers bigger ideas, faster to market.