Category / Innovation PROCESSES

by Roger Dennis

Scott Berkum on innovation

In Wellington last week I dropped past Webstock, and caught Scott Berkum presenting on innovation. He talked about the myth of innovation – or how the eureka moment actually takes years of prior effort. What I found most interesting was his linkages between innovation and the early explorers. How are they similar? Here’s a quick list :

  • they head off into the unknown
  • the time scales for their discoveries are largely unpredictable
  • there’s long periods of boredom before the discovery takes place
  • people think they’re a little mad to challenge paradigms (“Of course the world is flat”)
  • when they report their discoveries, eventually people think it was common sense that the discovery should eventually happen (“Of course the world isn’t flat” and “Of course iTunes was the reason the iPod was so successful”)

The other interesting part of Scotts talk was his link to the innovation culture that used to exist at 3M, and how it was driven from the top (my emphasis):

“As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.

“Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.

“Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.”

This is company that produced masking tape and Post-It notes – neither of which was on any corporate strategic roadmap, but which was devised by coal-face employees.

by Roger Dennis

Early crowd-sourcing (surfing of a different kind)

Over at BusinessWeek there’s a great pointer to a blog posting by John Hagel about innovation and surfing. It seems to me that this is one of the most well documented examples of crowdsourcing, and how lead users can develop new directions for a product. The posting does not stop there, and has lessons to be gleaned about forming user networks and tapping into users on the edges/fringes.

It’s quite a long read, and well worth more than a cursory glance. The one thing that grabbed me was this excerpt:


find ways to appropriate insights from adjacent disciplines and even more remote areas of activity

And now – off to the beach..

by Roger Dennis

Economist special report on innovation

Fresh off the virtual presses is a special report on innovation from The Economist.Β  My colleague – and founder of Innovaro – Tim Jones was interviewed for the section and shares an insight on innovation in the mobile industry in Africa.

At the moment the whole report is available as a free download here.Β  First glance looks damn interesting, with a plethora of bloggable insights… (stay tuned)

by Roger Dennis

Leapfrog Innovation – Zune vs iPod

Apple is a great example – probably the best – of a company that keeps one step ahead of everyone. While other companies rush to copy the current product line, Apple is already about to release the next “big thing.” It not only releases a new product, but it kills off the older lines -the ones the others are copying.

For example while companies were trying to copy the iPod Mini, Apple brings out the Nano. The Mini was the most successful MP3 player of all time. And Apple killed it off.

Now, while others are trying to emulate the iPod Classic, it brings out the iPod Touch. One of the companies desperately trying to play catchup is Microsoft, with it’s Zune player. It has just released a new version of the player – a scant few weeks after Apple leapfrogs once more.

The BBC has an article which contains a quote which captures this nicely :

“This device with the all-too-familiar dial wheel compares reasonably favourably with last generation iPod players,” said Mark Mulligan, analyst with Jupiter Research.

“Microsoft needs to come at Apple from an unexpected angle but at the moment it is Apple with its new iPod touch and nanos that is shaking up the market,” he said.

So how does Microsoft do this? By ignoring what the others are doing, and starting to explore outside the normal design boundaries. At Innovaro we do this with our ‘Futures’ programmes which bring in perspectives from sectors seemingly unrelated to that at hand. For example, with the current Technology Futures programme we ran for Shell Gamechanger this year, we had insights from world experts in areas as diverse as genetic engineering, architecture and superconductivity.

As with the last programme we ran in 2004, this has produced a series of invaluable inputs to Shells strategic planning, so much so that we will now be running the programme with a much shorter gap between the iterations.

But back to Apple – my bet is that within the next 18 months Apple will kill off one it’s current iPod lines and release something that is again revolutionary – and which will catch competitors off guard.

Microsoft trys to copy Apple, but produces a lemon.

by Roger Dennis

Why have multi-day workshops?

Β Most of the work I perform with clients usually involves some form of workshop.Β  My preferred – and proven – format usually is for a multiday event.Β  Inevitably there is some degree of pushback when I recommend that we go for two, or even three days.

In most organisations people are used to half day sessions where they can quickly get back to the “important stuff, ” such as checking email and answering phone calls. If they do have an “off-site” event that goes for more than one day, it’s common for this to have a significant ‘team-building’ component that usually translates to mean ‘we’ll get some time playing golf’.

However there’s many reasons why you should hold multiday events.Β  Not least of which is that after a good sleep you are better equuipped to resolve problems.Β  Evidence of this is cited in a few places, such as New Scientist and the BBC.

Firstly, here’s the New Scientist take:

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, 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.

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”

While this is useful information to reinforce the need for multiday events – especially around innovation and strategy – it’s also got some unexpected benefits for office workers stuck in the tedium of a corporate job that bores them to tears.

Armed with the above findings, they can safely snooze at their desks, armed with the retort: “I was problem solving.”

Hard at work - solving problems

by Roger Dennis

Processes vs innovation at 3M (BusinessWeek)

BusinessWeek has a fascinating insight into the old, new and then the new-old (stay with me here) cultures around innovation at 3M. If you are familiar with the story of the company that bought you Art Fry and the Post-It, this is still worth a read and looks at Six Sigma vs free thinking.

Or, to put it another way – “How Six Sigma Black Belts Beat up all the free thinking and peace loving innovators.” And before you comment – I know – it would make such a catchy film title.

Thanks Bruce.

by Roger Dennis

Large scale workshops

Just finished a large scale workshop at the end of last week and starting to feel like my life is returning to some sort of pattern once more after weeks of preparation.

It was a three day event for an organisation which employees 8000 people and has an annual spend of NZ$1 billion. We had a mix of people ranging from the CEO right through to front line staff.

This week is time to make some post-event reflections and observations :
– graphical facilitation still blows people away when they see it for the first time
– I still enjoy seeing people making connections across seemingly unconnected sectors.
– physical space is critical – you either have to strike it lucky (as we did) and find a great space, or you have to add a lot to the budget to make a lousy space work
– if you have the right team of people on board you can make an event soar for the participants.
– running on adrenaline is a great substitute for coffee

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

by Roger Dennis

How to hold a virtual workshop

Over at Open the Future, Jamais Cascio has a fascinating post about holding virtual online workshops. It’s well worth a read as he details the tools he used, how they worked and ideas for future implementations.

Next week I’m on a plane again, this time to Bangalore where we will be flying in about forty people as part of the Innovaro Technology Futures series for 2007. While we have bought credits to make it carbon neutral, the possibility of holding mini-tech futures events online is appealing.

by Roger Dennis

Interview with Tony Ulwick – author of β€œWhat Customers Want” (final part)

(continued from Part Three…)

8. I think there is a lot written about innovation, but very little about actually how to do it successfully, and in a repeatable fashion. What are your thoughts on this?

I agree, a lot has been written – most of it about over arching innovation theory, not much on the practical science of innovation. That is what makes us different. Uncovering these β€œtruths” about innovation – and writing about them in books such as What Customers Want – has been a difficult and time-consuming process. Not many people have had the laboratory environment we have enjoyed to make these discoveries, nor have they had the desire to reveal what is in the black box.

We have made public our 8-step innovation process and we explain (in a great level of detail) how innovation works and how to execute the process. Our goal is to make outcome-driven innovation the new design for six-sigma standard for innovation. Our programs for innovation provide serious practitioners with the detailed knowledge and tools they need to achieve success within their company.

9. Do you think that as the area of innovation matures, there is a trend for companies to move away from blue-sky type work and into a process led innovation style?

Absolutely – it must become process orientated to ensure predictable results. In fact all types of innovation initiatives – growing core markets, capitalizing on adjacent opportunities, disrupting existing markets and discovering new markets – are becoming process led. Once companies integrate this thinking wholly into their structure, they will experience a dramatic return on their innovation investments.

The transformation has already begun. With the acceptance of the StageGate process to guide product development efforts, companies are placing greater importance on ensuring only winning products enter the development pipeline. Applying outcome-driven thinking to the β€œdiscovery phase” (phase 0 in the StageGate process) enables companies to achieve this goal. I believe our thinking will proliferate once this connection point is well understood.

10. What’s the online resource you use the most in your work?

Other than our own Tool Library portal and IMSnet – our web-based data analysis and reporting tool, I use Google to conduct research and CEO Express to help with productivity.