Increasing Innovation Productivity

by Stefan Lindegaard

In a 2006 article, P&G's New Innovation Model, P&G stated that their open innovation program - along with improvements in other aspects of innovation related to product cost, design, and marketing - made their R&D productivity increase by nearly 60 percent since 2001.

When I listen to P&G talks on innovation today, the innovation productivity has nearly doubled and open innovation is a key reason for this.

Every company would like to increase their innovation productivity significantly so I am looking into how companies can do this. I am still researching and it would be great to have a discussion here on my blog. A few conversation starters:


What does innovation productivity mean?

In this video, P&G gives us some insight on innovation productivity including this quote from A.G Lafley: "...the other obvious way we measure innovation productivity is how much innovation do we generate per person and how much innovation do we generate per dollar invested in innovation." You can read a transcript at the link.

Which other metrics can we use to track innovation productivity?


Maximizing Innovation Productivity

In this article, PRTM focuses on four areas of opportunity that offer high potential for productivity and innovation leverage but are often overlooked or underutilized by development organizations: platforms and architectures, resource management, information automation, and cross-functional teams.

To which extent does your company apply this? Does it deliver results? What else do you do?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and input on this.


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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

Human Capital x Social Capital = Productivity and Innovation

by Meri Gruber

As a culture we like to think of our achievements as the triumph of the individual. But last week I used a memorable chicken breeding example to show you that group performance outweighs individual performance in a group environment because a focus on individual performance comes at a cost to the group performance.

The reality is that company performance is a complex group effort. Without positive group productivity, companies under perform. And most companies under perform. We are used to seeing numbers like 90% of companies fail to execute on their goals, that excellence in business execution is the chief concern of CEO's. What's going on here? "Companies assume people are atomistic and economic, versus social creatures", writes Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton in "The Knowing-Doing Gap, How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action."

There are two things going on here that get in the way of group productivity, two deeply held organizational operating assumptions that are completely out of sync with reality. The first is that company performance is atomistic. The atomistic model assumes individual control and that company results are the consequence of individual decisions. The second is that individual performance is motivated largely by extrinsic, (financial) rewards based on individual performance." Companies operate on oversimplified or incorrect models of human behavior relevant to shareholder (short term) interests, irrelevant or counterproductive for ultimate success of the business."

In "Managing the 21st century organization", Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com reminds us that what you know (human capital) multiplied by who you know (social capital) creates productivity and innovation. Traditional company hierarchies have an up-down formal information flow: you report up the chain, you receive information down the chain. But to actually get your work done, you tap into the organization sideways so to speak, leveraging your informal contacts across the company.

Research sited by Krebs found that "the ability to reach a diverse set of others in the network through very few links was the key to success for both individuals and teams." We know this from our own experience. A good networker gets more stuff done because companies are not atomistic, they are complex group environments. So if you think about it, with the exception of the few jobs in the company that don't interact with anyone, you should be interviewing people for their social skills, not their functional skills.

We might be done there, but we're not. Because relying on social skills and ad-hoc networking is terribly inefficient and capricious. And all too often, it is down right discouraged by performance targets that misunderstand human motivation and pit employees against each other in an endless game of internal competition. At a recent TED talk, Dan Pink, author of "A Whole New Mind, Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future", made the case for businesses to rethink their "business operating system":


"There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things. To entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach."


Innovation and productivity doesn't happen by carrot or stick, it happens through connectivity. What Pfeffer and Sutton found was that "firms where measurement helped measured things that were core to their culture and values and intimately tied to their basic business model and strategy, and used these measures to make business processes visible to all employees."

To close the group productivity gap and foster innovation, enable and empower connectivity in your company. This requires you to revisit your assumptions about company performance and individual motivation. So before your write "superstar wanted" in you next job tweet, read the chicken story one more time. Hopefully you will come to realize that "super collaborator" is what you really need. And before you start your quarterly/annual performance goal setting process, listen to Dan Pink's TED talk one more time on what really motivates and stimulates the kinds of creative solutions you need today.

Finally, think about group productivity as part of an overall business execution platform. The mindful implementation of Enterprise 2.0 emergent social software platforms and performance management solutions are components of a connected company, and a connected company outperforms its peers. What does this kind of emergent business execution platform look like? Stay tuned.

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Meri Gruber is a leading expert on business execution. She blogs on the intersection of innovation and business execution at www.competingonexecution.com

Work Can Be Fun

by Kevin Roberts

I don't get a lot of free time, and that's the way I like it. For me it's never been about work-life balance, but always about work-life integration. Finding compelling and compatible work to who I am and who I want to continue being, and devoting everything I have to performing at peak, getting into flow.

In these new straightened economic times, we're all having to work harder, knuckling down to the task at hand, and making sure we're building a future that is sustaining and rewarding. It's not easy. But it's easier if you love what you're doing, and you're doing it all the time. Naysayers will say nay, but its actually easier than ever to devote yourself to what sustains you. All you need is a computer, and the desire to make a difference.

Probably nowhere in the world is this more clear than in my home of New York City, where once again, creativity is biting back and inspiring people to throw everything they have at their situation. I don't know if the people who run the http://www.overthinkingit.com/ blog do anything else with their day, but something tells me everything they do has to be fun. At least they have enough time to bring us the graph above.

Which is fun, and will get you arguing about rock music, Rolling Stone, or crude oil. Their blog is classic pop-culture with a semi-serious spin. It's fun for the readers, but what fun is it for the bloggers themselves? These people have created their world and devoted their time for their own enjoyment. It just so happens we love it too.

Our only way to make the long road ahead through our economic crisis run faster is to enjoy ourselves, to be creative in everything we do, and integrate work and life. Start today with something simple. Eliminate the reasons not to, apply yourself wholeheartedly, make sure you're smiling, and enjoy the (bumpy) ride.

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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.

Stop Procrastinating - 2 Minutes or Less

by Matt Heinz

When I think about procrastination, I think first of bigger projects. I have a column to write, a proposal to finish, a report to publish.

The real time-suckers are the much smaller projects. If you read an email and don't take action right away, you're procrastinating. If you see an interesting article or blog post and don't do something with it right away, you're delaying action - and you're procrastinating.

I fight this type of mini-procrastination all the time. It doesn't mean I have to actually do everything right then and there. It just means I need to decide what to do, and move on.

But if the task takes two minutes or less (respond to an email, set up a meeting, quickly scan an article), I try to do it right away. With such a short time period required for action, delaying that activity (and reviewing the request or task again later) is pure wasted time. Add that time up across a day of emails, blog posts, phone calls, etc. and it's a ton of wasted time.

Simply acting on those two-minutes-or-less tasks right away will work wonders to clear your inbox, get things done, and keep you moving more productively throughout the day.

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

Microsoft's Vision for 2019

I found this video showing how Microsoft imagines we might interact with technology in the world in 2019, and I can't say that I agree with what they find to be compelling real world uses for future technology.

As I watched the video, I saw lots of things that were visually interesting but very little that would deliver increased productivity or true value in terms of time or money savings.



Most of what they are imagining I find to be visual noise, that would actually decrease productivity and overload the brain.

The most compelling thing I saw was the digital white board that they quickly skipped over.

Second most compelling was the plant identification by video input example. If you expand that to showing the computer just about anything and receiving back information about what you are seeing, it could be a very valuable educational tool.

What do you see in this video that is compelling?

@innovate