Free Range Innovation

by Jarie Bolander

Cowboys love the wide open plain. The vastness of the prairie ignites a self-reliance that few others can comprehend or handle. The cowboy is free to drive his cattle the route he feels best, yet his end game is always clear - get them to market. The cowboy struggles to keep his herd moving and might even loose a few along the way. His satisfaction comes when the herd is safely to market and the wage he earns hardly pays for his trouble but that does not matter - he's in it for the journey.


The Cowboys of Innovation

Innovators are like modern day cowboys that peer out onto the vastness of the world and chart a course to get their ideas to market. They do it for the love of the journey and the results of seeing something they invented being used by millions. Companies tend to fence innovators in by overburdening them people with process, procedures, arcane organizations and stifling bureaucracy. These conditions severely limit the creative mind to the point of stalling out any sort of innovation.


Wander Within Limits

The innovation cowboy needs to wander around and seek the best path forward. This means his organizational structure has to be flexible enough to wander yet sets limits to get to market. The best structure for this is the automatous team that has flexibility to get stuff done but has clear objectives and timelines. Guidance from the boss should be the high level goals and objectives not micro-managed tasks and rigidly defined parameters. Doing this allows innovators to chart their own course while still having some guidance.


Failure is Always an Option

Innovation is full of failure. So much so that most people can't stomach the constant setbacks and uncertain future. The ideal culture for innovators is one that embraces failure, learns from it and moves on. This culture will always out innovate a punitive structure where everyone is afraid to make one little screw-up. The other vital cultural trait is one where intellectual curiosity is encouraged, especially outside the companies field of endeavor. More innovative ideas have come from cross-over problem solving (i.e. Taking a solution from another industry and applying it to something else), then just staying within your companies comfort zone.


Bonuses Don't Work

The journey is the incentive for innovators to invent. No other incentive is as strong or as effective as working on a challenging problem that you enjoy. In fact, the open source movement has taught us that creative people will work for free and give away their work product for something they find interesting. The organization can apply these incentives by giving innovators a support and recognition network that allows them to invent, be recognized and feel respected. The only monetary bonus that seems to work is one that treats everyone the same (e.g. The janitor to the CEO gets 'the same bonus'). Anything other that than, is ripe for gaming and defeats the purpose of incentives.


Rugged, Yet Refined

Free range innovation is all about respecting the rugged innovator that takes on the world yet still delivers products to market. It's the realization that innovation takes flight when you give creative people the space to move, explore and grow. No fancy organizational structure, no complex cultures and no silly incentives - just smart teams, building innovative products by driving their ideas to market the way the range tell them too.


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

---

Jarie Bolander is an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature. Jarie blogs about innovation, management and entrepreneurship at The Daily MBA and has recently published his first book, "Frustration Free Technical Management". You can also follow him on Twitter @thedailymba.

Call for March 'Innovation Perspectives'

March's opportunity to contribute your Innovation Perspectives is now here.

This monthly feature presents our loyal readers with different perspectives on a single topic all in one place - from several different authors. It gives our innovation community the opportunity to compare, contrast and discuss them in the comments here on Blogging Innovation and with the 2,300+ people in the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn.

Here is this month's topic for publishing the week of March 29-April 4, 2010:


How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?

• Thank you to Drew Boyd for submitting this month's topic


• Thank you to Brightidea for sponsoring Blogging Innovation this month. Find out more about Brightidea here.


• The submission deadline is midnight GMT on March 27, 2010

Several contributing authors will be writing articles on this topic, but you are also welcome to submit an article. The process is simple:

1. Submit your article using our contact form


2. I will e-mail you back with a request for a 1-2 sentence author byline and a photo like those on Blogging Innovation

We look forward to sharing March's Innovation Perspectives with you and hearing your thoughts!


If you missed February's Innovation Perspectives, you can find them here.

---

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.

Innovate or Die - Tactics #17-42 of 110

by Tom Peters

This is the second of four parts of the list of 110 Innovation Tactics.

• Click here to view Part One - Innovation Tactics #1-16

We Are What We Eat. (And Who We Hang Out With.)

17. Hang out/"We are what we eat" We are what we eat/We are who we co-habit with, and variants thereof are of infinite importance to the effective innovator. Managing "the hang-out factor" is of the utmost strategic importance - and usually an under-tended lever.


18. Hang out/Basic axiom. Hang out with weird - get more weird. Hang out with dull - get more dull.


19. Hang out/Customer portfolio. Consider one's customer portfolio. Perhaps a few giant customers account for 85% of one's revenues. One must listen to them, but the odds are that these giants are relatively conservative. Hence one must purposefully and urgently recruit oddball-"on the frontier" customers. Their revenue stream may be limited, but these folks force you to play with novel products and services to meet their peculiar needs. Hence careful construction of the total customer portfolio is an essential practice.


20. Hang out/Customers everywhere. Customers at various staff meetings, on various teams, etc.


21. Hang out/Our folks at customer sites. Imbedded staff at lead customer locations. The success watchword is "intermingle."


22. Hang out/Vendors/Outsourcing Partners Portfolio. Instead of a few "strategic suppliers," as important as they may be, one needs "far out" vendors and outsourcing partners whose innovations force you into an innovation mode. I.e., repeat #19 and #20 and #21 for vendors.


23. Hang out/Locale (Hotbed). Company or unit HQ location is important beyond measure. Working in a "hotbed" (e.g., Cambridge MA and biotech) is an immeasurable spur to innovation. (Beware: Hotbeds eventually become lookalike and-or complacent - think Detroit, 1920 vs 1980-2008.)


24. Hang out/Team placement. An offsite team in an innovation hotbed often takes on the attributes of a gang of on-the-make pirates. A team near a plant takes plant-derived considerations particularly seriously. Etc. Want weird? Start with consideration of locale.


25. Hang out/Space management. Space management is arguably the singlemost important strategic lever. Designer moved next to the CEO? Design vaults up the importance scale. Etc.


26. Hang out/Consultants Portfolio. Types of consultants brought in influences who we talk to-live with, how we approach problems. There are "hot" consultants, and "not-so-hot" consultants. Again, purposefully and strategically manage the portfolio.


27. Hang out/Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing stands a good chance of radically changing the world of innovation! You simply must experiment vigorously. The tool is powerful, but the process is not automatic - it needs lots of thought and oversight. (And it applies to every nook and every cranny of the enterprise - and to small enterprises.)


28. Hang out/Clubs, learning networks, etc. Electronic, physical, any and all formats. Turning the enterprise into a de facto university, with learning and growing honored and ubiquitous and fast and furious and fun, is the point here.


29. Hang out/Staff. Where staffers live relative to their line customers is critical. A finance person imbedded in the logistics department, for example, changes both perspectives.


30. Hang out/Lunchmates. Never waste a lunch!!!! Lunch is 5 opportunities per week, 220 opportunities per year, to get to know interesting outsiders, folks from other functions, customers, vendors, frontline staffers. This is remarkably important. "Lunch management," a "lunch culture" is not an amusing aside.


31. Hang out/Meeting Attendees. We spend enormous amounts of time in meetings. Never waste a meeting. Invite interesting outsiders, folks from other functions, etc. (See #30 immediately above.)

Diversity Per Se. Sine Qua Non.

32. Diversity/Every flavor/Management & Measurement. Diversity with a lower-case "d." Black, white, brown, purple ... tall, short ... North American, Asian ... public school, private school, no school ... etc. ... etc. (Etc.) Decision-making of every sort is far, far better with diverse views of any flavor. Period. I have come to view this as a gamechanger - for a 6-person project team, a 20-person company, a huge enterprise.


33. Diversity/Hiring. Search every oddball corner of the world for interesting people. Hire dull, get dull results. (Duh.) (This holds across the board - and irrespective of the size of the enterprise.)


34. Diversity/Freak Acquisitions. I'm an enemy of 99% of mega-mergers, and a vigorous ally of small acquisitions that allow skipping steps in obtaining interesting new pieces of the puzzle for an enterprise. This can be the purchase of an intriguing 2-person accountancy by a 15-person accountancy, as well as a small-acquisition overall strategy by the likes of Cisco Systems.


35. Diversity/Promoting. Diversity of every stripe at every level, achieved by design. Remember, diversity-qua-diversity works.

100% Enthusiasts. 100% Innovators. HR = Supercool.

36. "What do you think?" Innovation - an innovation culture engages one and all. (All = All.) Getting everyone to think about improvements small and large comes from, de facto, constantly asking "What do you think?" - perhaps the 4 most important words in the innovator's vocabulary. Treating every voice as valued yields more value from every voice.


37. Hire enthusiasts. Innovation is about active engagement. The more enthusiasts, the more people want to "opt in" and fully engage. Enthusiasts are innovators almost by definition. (Or, at the least, non-enthusiasts are guaranteed non-innovators.)


38. Promote enthusiasts. Enthusiasts are important in all roles. Enthusiasts as bosses is a "no option" imperative - if you want to create an "innovation machine" in organizations of any size.


39. Innovative behavior is the best predictor of innovative behavior. Want to discover an innovator? Best test: a history as an innovator, apparent at the latest by, perhaps, age 10 or 12 or 14.


40. Re-invent HR to be a Center of Innovative People. It's not that HR has to "support" a culture of innovation. HR must be a chief carrier of the culture of innovation, must model innovative behavior 100% of the time. An "innovation culture" in HR is arguably more important than an innovation culture in marketing and new product development. (Think about it.) (Alas, this is ever so rare.)


41. Get the incentives right! Profitability, quarter by quarter, is essential - in organizations of all sizes. But a commitment to innovation as evidenced by the likes of share of revenue from products introduced in the last 24 months should be a major component of discretionary compensation. Equivalent measures must be developed for logistics, purchasing, HR, IT, etc. Incentive schemes must "speak" innovation.


42. Get the evaluations right! Per #41 immediately above, the evaluation process must focus on risk-taking, innovations launched, "excellent failures" as one exec puts it. Department bosses might be evaluated by comparative innovativeness at similar departments in peer-competitor firms. Etc. Innovation-in-evaluation is a 100% affair.

If you missed Part One - Innovation Tactics #1-16 - Click here.

---

Tom Peters is the author of "In Search of Excellence" and twelve other international bestsellers, and a consultant, columnist, seminar lecturer, and more at the Tom Peters Company

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

---

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.

The real crisis? We stopped being wise.

Here is an interesting video of Barry Schwartz making a passionate call for "practical wisdom" because rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world. It's well worth the time investment.



What do you think?

@innovate