Category / Innovation PROCESSES

by Roger Dennis

Why have multi-day workshops?

When I suggest a workshop to clients, the usual expectation is for a half day format – or – if they are really serious – a full day event. I always find it interesting to gauge the reaction when I recommend taking three full days to address strategic impertatives.

There are many reasons why you should have multi-day workshops when tackling thorny issues.

Most importantly they give people time to think, and acknowledge the complexity that is inherent in many of the problems and challenges that are common to large organisations.Β  It’s unrealistic to dumb this type of work down, and expect solid, coherent solutions from a half day workshop, let alone one that was conducted as an ‘off-site’ complete withΒ  Jack Daniels and golf (although not necessarily in that order).

One of the more subtle reasons is that by focusing on issues over several days (three days is about right) you provide the opportunity to absorb, sort and frame new information.Β  This is not a hunch, or some half baked concept, but something that has attracted serious scientific attention.Β  For example, read this from The New Scientist :

Ever wondered why sleeping on a problem works? It seems that as well as strengthening our memories, sleep also helps us to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up during the day.

Bob Stickgold from Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that people were better able to recall lists of related words after a night’s sleep than after the same time spent awake during the day. They also found it easier to recollect themes that the words had in common – forgetting around 25 per cent more themes after a waking rest. “We’re not just stabilising memories during sleep,” says Stickgold. “We’re extracting the meaning.”

And, more recently from the BBC:

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers.They tested whether “incubating” a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM.

Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep – when most dreams occur – were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.Β  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published the US work.

“We propose that REM sleep is important for assimilating new information into past experience to create a richer network of associations for future use”

These findings reinforce the need to tackle complex issues – such as those prevalent in strategic innovation – over the course of two or more days.Β  While the body is sleeping, the brain is processing, and that means that people return to the issues better equipped.

The findings also have an unexpected payback for office workers who are bored to tears with mundane roles.Β  Armed with the above research, they can awake from a mid-afternoon desk slumber, ready with the defense: “I was problem solving.”

Hard at work - solving problems

by Roger Dennis

AMP Innovation Festival – followup

As mentioned earlier I headed to Sydney to attend the AMP Innovation Festival a couple of weeks back.Β  In a previous post I interviewed the organiser – Annalie Killian – about the event.Β  I’m not going to revisit that, however I am going to say that the event was simply stunning on a number of levels.

However don’t just take my word for it, but have a read of what one of the speakers – James Gardner – says:

Amplify09 is the most magnificent ideation campaign I’ve ever seen. […] AMP is an institution that’s realised that the real competitive advantage it has is the people who choose to work there. Who cares about technology and products and processes, when you have the ability to invent uniqueness whenever you want?

It’s worth reading his entire post.

by Roger Dennis

Cisco and innovation cycles

From the Dec/Jan 09 issue of Fast Company magazine comes a great article about Cisco.Β  Several paragraphs of note including:

Get ready for the upturn. “What’s our vision for where this industry is going with or without us?” That, [CEO John Cambers] says, is a five-year horizon. “What is our differentiated strategy within that vision?” That’s a two- to four-year plan. “How are we going to execute in the next 12 to 18 months?”

Chambers is convinced that the role of the CEO has to morph. He recalls a lesson he learned working for An Wang of Wang Laboratories, whom he has often called one of the smartest people he’s ever known: “One person cannot anticipate a market transition. At Wang, we transitioned four times, but we missed the fifth, from mini computers to PC and software. If you don’t catch them [all], you leave your company behind.”

It is Ron Ricci’s (Cisco VP) job to translate Chambers’s ideas into action — as he puts it, “I’m John’s scaling machine” — and he was the chief architect with Chambers of the new quasi-socialist Cisco. They were inspired in part, Ricci says, by management guru Gary Hamel’s ideas about the need to democratize strategy and distribute leadership in order to stimulate innovation.

Full article here.

by Roger Dennis

Corning is the new 3M of innovation

More from my very backdated pile of Fast Company magazines:

Seventy percent of Corning’s revenue today comes from products that did not exist five years ago.

Corning must have a very robust innovation process in place for making this happen. What’s the advantage of such a process?

By bringing out new products constantly, and killing off older ones, your margins remain high. By the time a competing product makes it onto the market (usually at a lower price) you’ve got a whole new set of high margin products coming out.

by Roger Dennis

New product design – an example of the investment (Formway)

When an organisation identifies a market opportunity, it still takes time to release the completed offering in the market.Β  Just how long depends on the sector; software for example can be developed extremely quickley, while infrastructure projects in areas like energy take longer.

The lead time for product development was the topic of discussion recently when I met with Ed Burak of Formway Furniture.Β  The company makes some of the finest office chairs in the world – a fact recognised by companies like Herman Miller (who have licenced Formway worksystem designs)

The latest offering from Formway is called ‘Hum‘ – furniture specifically designed to maximise collaboration in corporate environments.Β  It’s been met with rave reviews and awards around the world.Β  Ed was the lead designer on the project.

What’s interesting is that it took a long time to develop – almost five years.Β  That’s a serious investment by the company, and is food for thought for businesses looking at embarking on a similar journey.Β  In this current economic climate it’s tempting to cut back on innovation and design, but the Formway example illustrates that development times can span economic cycles.

I asked Ed some questions about the development journey:

1. What was the spark that started Formway down the path to design the Hum range?

We started with the question – does the world need another desk?

We began to explore this by removing the desk and trying to understand what’s left – the artefacts, the communication, the tasks and the human and how these elements are both supported & suppressed by conventional/current workspace design.
We were also aware that we have witnessed a significant shift in the purpose of coming to a place of work. By this I mean that in the past, we came to work to read and write and do ‘other stuff.’

Now things are different – the reading and writing can occur almost anywhere now, at home, on the kitchen bench, in the corridor or even a park. We are gathering together at this place we call work more and more for this ‘other stuff’ – the meeting of minds – to problem solve, socialise, share and collaborate.

Three significant research themes emerged from our early investigation into what goes on at your desk in the workplace – attentiveness, interaction and cognition – in other words focused or individual work, collaborative and making sense of the information and space around us.

2. What was the duration of the project from the start to product launch, and how long did each of the phases take?

The entire project has taken four and a half years.

The process is incredibly fluid so its difficult to tie down discreet phases but we typically spend one third of product development time at the ‘fuzzy front end’ investigating the opportunity, writing the brief and ensuring we are asking the right questions. Following this it’s:

  • about two years researching the opportunities, increasing our knowledge and developing up concepts,
  • hundreds of prototypes and various levels of user testing
  • finally about one year from final design to production (specifying and tooling)

3. What processes did you employ to gather the insights that would guide the design process?

Voice of the Customer interviews in USA, Australasia and Asia, data mining the transcripts to identify latent needs, patterns and behaviours.

We identified and bought into the team experts in fields outside of our core strengths such as psychology, cognitive ergonomics, conflict resolution, change management. We basically went back to university for several months and were lectured on topics such as cognition, attentiveness and perception.

Inviting market influencers early on and throughout the project to ensure we were staying on task and remaining relevant to our target customer groups.

An ongoing ‘Living Lab’ philosophy here at the Formway Design Studio is a critical learning tool, spending less time sketching ideas, more time making ultra fast full scale prototypes that we can interact with, and observe others using.

Independently conducted user trialling of early prototypes to ensure usability, interface design & product semantics are relevant & user focussed.

by Roger Dennis

Excellent summary of discontinous innovation approaches

If you are after a good overview of disruptive/discontinuous approaches to innovation, then look no further than the UK organisation Advanced Institute of Management.Β  It has compiled an Executive Briefing that is comprehensive in its coverage of the field. The blurb reads:

In a fast moving world, one of the biggest challenges facing organisations is dealing with discontinuous innovation (DI).Β  This briefing documentΒ  focuses on at what some leading organisations are doing in this area it suggests 12 different strategies for developing a search capability to detect triggers of discontinuous innovation. These strategies are also useful for more conventional innovation, and all organisations should employ some at least, if they aim to remain both competitive and durable.

The Futures approach we use at Innovaro with clients such as Shell and GM (Europe) is referenced, although not quite in the full context.

Direct download of the PDF is also available.

by Roger Dennis

Gladwell on Insight (The New Yorker)

Over at the New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell has written as essay on insight – more specifically – how to cultivate it artificially. Besides being a damn fine read, there’s some great sections on cross-sector discovery.

Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn’t realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didn’t realize were problems. At one point, Myhrvold asked the surgeons what, in a perfect world, would make their lives easier, and they said that they wanted an X-ray that went only skin deep. They wanted to know, before they made their first incision, what was just below the surface. When the Intellectual Ventures crew heard that, their response was amazement. β€œThat’s your dream? A subcutaneous X-ray? We can do that.”

Insight could be orchestrated: that was the lesson.

For many people the concept that they can look across industries and learn from others is an amazing discovery. I’ve used it to great effect in learning workshops where I’ve had C-level executives looking at a massively diverse set of industries. The results are always incredibly rich in all sense of the word.

by Roger Dennis

Business Process Innovation

Not all innovation has to produce sexy products that create some sort of techno-fetish lust (disclaimer : I’m typing this on an Apple MacBook Pro…). Innovation at the process level has the potential to return significant value, as detailed in an article in the Feb issue of Fast Company about how Abbott – a medical devices manufacturer – sped up the process to develop new ideas for stents:


The researchers didn’t want to lose themselves and their work in the bureaucracy of a big organization like Abbott, so their lab remained in Santa Clara, California, far away from Abbott’s Chicago-area headquarters. To speed up research, they reorganized the assembly-line process and connected the designers’ computers directly to lasers to cut the lag time between design and manufacturing. Abbott ultimately slashed the time it took to make a new design from months to weeks, then to just one day; to date, the company has designed and manufactured some 300 different iterations of Absorb. By reducing the time it took to design, “we didn’t need the first one to be right,” Capek says. “We can have one or two failures and still beat our schedule.” He hopes to roll out this production process to other areas within Abbott.

by Roger Dennis

Adjacent sector insights

The Spring 07 issue of Ambidextrous Magazine was damn interesting. In addition to the snippet mentioned below, it also had a couple of great pieces from Bill Cockayne. The first was called “A Primer for Budding Futurists.” (not available online)

The second was an article about the development of the Aeron chair from Herman Miller (should I do a disclaimer here? Both my cheeks are well supported in one of these wonderful chairs as I type). You can read the full article online (PDF), but I’ve summarised the relevant extracts:

For Herman Miller Inc (HMI), design is a way to solve problems…..a long standing philosophy of the company is to particularly focus on the future. If you could thoroughly understand a problem, in the context of now and the future, it would take the competition years to figure out the design and replicate it.

HMI often employs leading thinkers whose outside expertise can provide insight into the issues relevant for designing for the edge of tomorrow.

One particularly influential foray was a multi-million dollar research project on the future of aging in the 1980s. It combined the fields of gerontology, architecture, public policy and the field of aging. The study then focussed on the issues of long-term sitting for these populations.

This is very similar to the Futures programmes that we run at Innovaro, where we draw upon a diverse group of experts from adjacent sectors to map out future business opportunities.