How is Innovation Like Pornography?

by Jeffrey Phillips

I made what in hindsight is a fairly funny mistake recently. Working with a new client who wanted to become more innovative, we pressed ahead into a project only to realize that their definition of innovation was to have customers interact with their products in a technology showcase. When I think of "innovation" I think of teams using a number of tools and techniques to generate and bring to life new products, services and business models. When this team said "innovation" that's what I thought, and what I assumed. What they were thinking was something else entirely, and that didn't become evident until we developed a workplan. Then, the differences in the expectations and definitions were clearly exposed.

We failed at what should be an upfront discussion - that is, what does innovation mean to your firm? I've been around innovation so long that if I'm not careful I just assume that corporate executives that I'm working with have the same expectations and definitions as I do, and that can be very problematic. Definitions matter because they drive corporate expectations and commitment. If it seems "innovative" to have your clients interact with your products in a showcase environment, and that adds value to your organization, great. But in my mind that's not innovation. And also not my client's fault. It's mine, for not taking the time to understand what the word "innovation" meant when they used it, and what their expectations and best outcomes were.

Innovation is one of those words like "pornography" that, in the immortal words of the Supreme Court can't be defined, but we know it when we see it. Our client thinks it will be considered "innovative" if it allows customers to interact with its products in a high tech, high touch environment. They may be right. However, that's not really "innovation" in my mind, because they are not trying to use the facility to generate new ideas or bring new products and services to market. The center may become a marketing program, meant to create good will and more openness to the market, but not ascertain ideas or seek consumer input. This won't create new products and may divert funds from other efforts that would create new ideas, so it may be doubly risky, while seeming very innocuous.

The morale of this story is simple. As innane and obvious as it may seem, when the words "innovative" come out of your client's mouth, stop and ask for an example or a definition. If they can't provide one, then work with them to create a definition that you, and they, agree is correct, because there's simply too much room for assumption, and error, when the word is taken at face value. Too many firms, and too many people are simply throwing the word around for advantage, which leads to misguided expectations and disappointed consumers.


Enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

---

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.

Five Minute Rule helps get intimidating projects done

by Matt Heinz

We all have big, intimidating projects on our plates that, frankly, are a little scary. They either feel like a lot of work, or you're not exactly sure how to tackle them. So, we hem and haw and avoid them.

I've found that a fairly simple trick can help me get more of those projects done. It takes just five minutes.

When I'm facing a big project or task, I tell myself I'm going to spend five minutes getting it started, and that's it. I'm either going to just do five minutes worth of that task, or just spend five minutes planning how to tackle it.

The secret of the Five Minute Rule is that I almost always keep going, blow past the five minutes, and get the task done in far less time than if I would have kept procrastinating.

It's those five minutes that demonstrate how relatively quickly & easily the task can actually get done. If you get five minutes of momentum, sometimes that's all you need to keep going to the finish. If you use the five minutes to brainstorm, it makes the task far less intimidating and easier to get done right away.

Find something on your list right now and give it five minutes. Let me know what happens next.

---

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

Innovate or Die - Tactics #43-72 of 110

by Tom Peters

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

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


• Click here to view Part Two - Innovation Tactics #17-42

Celebration!

43. Celebrate! Innovative organizations are places where people enjoy their peers' work, good tries, good screw-ups, milestones reached, etc. Celebrating these events, large and small and very small, is a fullscale part of the "innovation culture."


44. Celebrate failures. This peculiar form of celebration deserves particular mention. "Fast failure" is innovation's bedrock. Hence the encouragement thereof, rather than the stigmatization, is of paramount importance. Hence, the hearty celebration of the quick try run amok is of strategic importance.

R&D, Ubiquity of - "Staff Department" R&D Paramount

45. R&D spending/Overall. This is a "boring" staple of innovation, but obviously of great importance. Aggressiveness is called for. In addition to the firm itself, having, say, a set of vendors, most or all of whom are top-quartile in R&D spending in their industry, is also of great importance.


46. R&D/Big Co, Small Co. Aggressive R&D is not just the provenance of the big company. In fact, it is more important to the 2-person Professional Services Firm than the lumbering giant - talk about "Innovate or die"!


47. R&D spending/Small projects. Make sure the R&D portfolio includes many one-off, short-term projects. (Quite often, these little fellas grow to become the biggest of the big.)


48. R&D/100% Staff Departments. Aggressive R&D is as important in Finance and Purchasing as in IT or New Product Development!!!


49. R&D/Systems! Innovative systems are as important as innovative products (witness Dell's 2-decade systems-driven run, which changed the world). Manage the hell out of this!


50. R&D/Practice "Nudgery." Small system nudges can cause grand behavior changes. Become a "nudge aficionado." Teach Nudgery.


51. "R&D" Play Money/Ubiquitous. The ability for virtually anyone to get their hands on a few bucks (and a mentor) to play around (right term) with a new idea is essential.


52. Venture Funds/All levels. This can run to billions of $$ at Intel to much smaller sums, but the idea is casting a wide, speculative net.


53. University support. Research universities are among America's most vital competitive advantages, and are likely to be so for decades. Associations, large and small, with universities are an important part of the innovative enterprise.


54. "Sell-by" date, consideration of. Peddling old stalwart parts of enterprises when they become commoditized may help free the spirit of the enterprise to move toward a new playing field. (On the other hand, oldie goldies can surprisingly often become hotbeds of new innovation under inspired leadership.)


55. R&D/good times and bad times. R&D may have to take its lumps in tough times like the present. But beware of cutting too much muscle. Moreover, bad times can be the perfect time to get the jump on competitors with innovations if at all possible. Tough times are also ideal for little R&D projects that might just grow legs.

The Essential Role of Lead Customers - Loving Angry Customers

56. Lead customer portfolio. Innovation is not natural in the best of circumstances. Stasis is comfortable. Hence, we must force ourselves into uncomfortable circumstances. (I accept speeches to groups where I have no expertise.) Customers who are far from our norm are frontline change agents. We must formally create a portfolio of lead customers - and then commit to joint product development and connection in general. Again, this must be managed and not left to chance.


57. Customers on all teams. Customers must pervade our electronic and physical halls. They must especially be part of all innovation teams.


58. New network forms. Constantly experiment with new forms of networking with customers of all sizes and shapes.


59. Pissed-off Customers Association. No group is more valuable than pissed off customers!! (Even, or especially, irrationally pissed off customers.) Make them part of the family. Shower them with love. Reward them for their contributions. Bring then into electronic and physical networks.

XFX/Cross-Functional Excellence - No Option

60. XF Obsession. Implemented innovations generally (100% of the time?) include and are significantly shaped by contributions from all departments. Lousy cross-functional (XF) communication-cooperation-synergy-esprit is often Problem #1 in enterprises of all sizes. Thus a culture of innovation is dependent on constant-strategic-executive attention to XF effectiveness.


61. XF Innovators. The heart of an innovation that goes in a wonderfully unpredicted direction is very likely to have come from a contribution by a "secondary"-to-the-project functional expert.


62. XF Programs. Formalize numerous programs and nudges, small more important than large, to specifically and measurably attack-enhance-vivify XF effectiveness.


63. XF Friendships (measurement thereof). It is this simple: Friendships across boundaries are the best lubricant there is. Foster them! Formally!


64. XF-centrism in evaluations. Repeated XF obfuscation is a firing offense. XFX (cross-functional excellence) is cause for early promotion, hefty bonuses, etc. This part of the evaluation must have sharp teeth.


65. XF/All teams. Foster cooperative XF involvement in activities of all sizes and shapes by all sorts of folks, even, or especially, when the need is not obvious.


66. XF assignment as requisite career step. Promotion to relatively senior positions or above is dependent on at least one full XF assignment - e.g., a year or so tour of duty.


67. XF/Finance. Get as many managers as possible to spend non-trivial time in finance, to develop a "business" perspective on their work - this is especially important regarding innovation activities.

Project Team Primacy - Project Managers Rule

68. Project team as basic organizational unit. The largely independent project team, the coherent entity of 2, 21, or 212, is the basic building block of the innovating enterprise. This comes as no surprise, but must be underscored anyway. Innovation work is rarely accomplished via a routine grouping that follows the conventional org chart and involves members from various functions who remain under the jurisdiction of their traditional bosses. Obvious or not, innovating organizations are collections of energized project teams - with functional affiliations secondary.


69. The excellent project manager is the Superstar of the innovation-centric enterprise. These are the small numbers of superstars who must be retained at almost any cost. And they do stand out as superstars.


70. The development and care and feeding of your cadre of project managers is human resources Job #1. Effective project management is a peculiar discipline requiring a raft of skills, from the very hard to the very soft. Understanding the discipline and carefully developing project management skills is paramount to creating and maintaining a culture of innovation.


71. Project manager cadre diversity is imperative. Period.


72. Entire talent pool available to project managers. Creating a process, preferably Web-driven, for project managers to cobble teams together for the long haul or for a 48-hour project is essential. But remember to take into account the "soft stuff," and not over-mechanize the process.

---

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

Book Review - "Inside Project Red Stripe"

"Inside Project Red Stripe - Incubating Innovation and Teamwork at the Economist"
by Andrew Carey
Published by Triarchy Press

I've been reading the innovation tome "Inside Project Red Stripe" off and on for some time now and I must say that it is unlike any other book on innovation that I have read to date. Instead of espousing a single innovation theory and taking 300 pages to do so, the book attempts to provide a neutral, anthropological look behind-the-scenes into the journey of Project Red Stripe.

Project Red Stripe was the code name for a discreet innovation effort at The Economist that brought together six team members for six months to research, select, and develop an internet-related innovation project for The Economist on a budget of £100,000. The project's aspiration was to deliver the organization's next big thing.

I found the book to be very well-written, interesting, and definitely worth the read if you are an innovation practioner or are fascinated by important project deconstructions. There are a couple of things you should be aware of before you begin:

• The book is written in an engaging research observation style, not your typical narrative or essay styles.


• The book is organized unlike most books and often feels more like a web site as you select a topic to follow and then jump around to read the installments relevant to that topic.

It was fascinating for me to see the human behavior challenges the group went through in gathering, selecting, and developing their ideas, and the downsides of conducting their project in such a public way.

If you are currently planning an innovation project or culture change at your organization, this book is an essential read to help remind you of the potential pitfalls that await you in such an undertaking. It also serves as a reminder of the potential disconnects between innovation theory and practice.

I won't spoil the ending and tell you whether Project Red Stripe was a success or a failure. You'll have to buy the book and read it in order to draw your own conclusion.

If you've already read it, what did you think?

@innovate