Category / Innovation CULTURE

by Roger Dennis

Culture and innovation – alignment is essential

Booz and Co published a study back in October that’s been on my reading list for a while. It’s had an interesting but not surprising conclusion -spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.

To quote the study:

36 percent of all respondents to our survey admitted that their innovation strategy is not well aligned to their company’s overall strategy, and 47 percent said their company’s culture does not support their innovation strategy. Not surprisingly, companies saddled with both poor alignment and poor cultural support perform at a much lower level than well-aligned companies. In fact, companies with both highly aligned cultures and highly aligned innovation strategies have 30 percent higher enterprise value growth and 17 percent higher profit growth than companies with low degrees of alignment.

via The Global Innovation 1000: Why Culture Is Key.

by Roger Dennis

Innovation in Unexpected Places

Heston Blumenthal apparently presented recently at the Marketing Society’s 2011 Global Leadership Conference in London with a presentation about pure creativity.  In case you’re wondering who he is, Blumenthal is one of the world’s top chefs.  Coverage of his presentation at the conference mentioned his insights about serendipity:

Blumenthal believes innovation more often than not comes from the places you least expect. “You need to be aware that innovation can happen on any level and ideas can come from anywhere; from seeing a leaf fall from a tree to the most cutting-edge design,” he says. “I am personally at my most creative when interacting with creative people from completely different disciplines to my own, whether that be a perfumier, a scriptwriter, a magician or an experimental psychologist.

via SAY Media / Blog / Heston Blumenthal: Innovation in Unexpected Places.

by Roger Dennis

Ten Tips for running your first session at a Foo Camp

In New Zealand the invitations have just gone out for Kiwi Foo Camp in February. As always there will be a mix of first timers and old hands attending. I’ve been very privileged to be invited to a few Foo Camps in the States and also in New Zealand, and one of the things that strikes me at every Foo is that for many first-timers the idea of running a session is daunting.

Most recently at Science Foo this year I spent time talking to two people around the bar at the hotel before the  event kicked off. They were first timers, and weren’t even thinking of running sessions.  However they were fascinating to talk to and I encouraged them both to run something.  Both of them ended up doing so, and one person even went so far to kindly email me and thank me:

Thanks for encouraging me to give the seminar.  I felt I was not perfectly prepared for the presentation although adequately prepared for the conversation as led on by excellent questions.

With that in mind I thought it was worth putting a few pointers online to encourage people to run sessions. Here’s my Ten Top Tips for first time Foo attendees:

  1. Above all else, think about what you can run a session on before you arrive.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen people paralysed by inaction as the session board opens and they left wondering what to write.
  2. Once you’ve got a session idea, put it online on the Foo wiki.  Check back and see what comments other people make.  Don’t be afraid to edit your session idea once it’s on the wiki.
  3. Check the attendee list to see if there are any potential collaborators attending.  I’ve found that people are very receptive to the idea of helping to run a session.
  4. Don’t think that you have to have an hour of material to run a session.  The best sessions I’ve seen involve someone talking for about fifteen minutes and then throwing the session open to discussion.
  5. When you actually arrive at Foo spend some time talking to people about your session.  It’s far more interesting (and fun) if you can drum up some attendees by doing little sales pitches.
  6. When you post your session idea on the board, make sure it is catchy enough to attract attention, but not too over the top that it becomes worthy of a tabloid headline.
  7. If you can run a session without using slides, then do so.  If you really feel the need to use PowerPoint then show pictures, not bullet points (the only good use for a bullet point is to shoot the presenter).
  8. The success of your session is not dictated by the quantity of attendees, but by the quality of the conversation.
  9. Don’t be intimidated if people leave your session half way through.  Others may join half way through.  It’s not a sign of something wrong, it’s just that there’s so much on that people may be splitting their time across a number of sessions.

What’s your top tip that could be number ten?

by Roger Dennis

Societal, technological and organisational change

Every so often I read something which stops me in my tracks.  “A Long-Wave Theory on Today’s Digital Revolution”  on the Booz & Co Strategy and Business site falls squarely into this category.

It’s an interview with historian Elin Whitney-Smith and has a range of insights that are worth sharing.   Whitney Smith has spent 30 years researching and refining her theory of economic progress as a series of information technology disruptions, drawing on studies of subjects as varied as digital media design, medieval gender relationships, and the extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene epoch.

Her theory is that:

There have been six information revolutions in human history. Each represents a major change in the organizational paradigm — a change in how people form themselves into groups.

  • The first was among hunter–gatherers just before the invention of agriculture;
  • second, the rise of counting and written language;
  • third, the fall of Rome;
  • fourth, the invention of the printing press;
  • fifth, the electric information revolution that accompanied trains, telegraph, and telephone; and sixth, the digital information revolution that we are now living through.

In the last three, the economics follow the same pattern: a long boom followed by a crash. Then a difficult and turbulent struggle begins. New ways of organizing emerge and the old ways, supported by established elites, fail.

This has close parallels with the theory of technology innovation as proposed to Ray Kurzweil, and has led him to propose his theory of ‘the singularity’ where humans and machines merge.  Kurzweil’s theory is that each technology wave – from the discovery of fire –  has happened successively faster.  Whitney-Smith makes a similar observation:

Throughout history, the time frame has gotten shorter. Among hunter–gatherers, it took thousands of years to make the transition to agriculture. From the fall of Rome to the press was almost 1,000 years. The printing press revolution took 220 years. The electric revolution [trains, telegraph, and telephone] took 110 years, and, as I count it, the digital revolution started about 50 years ago. So, in recent information revolutions, there is a kind of rule of halves.

According to Whitney-Smith this has wide ranging implications, including changes for organizations:

We’re just starting to see the organizational innovation of the second phase emerge. These new companies take the Internet for granted. They are designed by a generation that had access to computers from childhood. Businesses that are less bound by old forms of hierarchical authority, such as Facebook (where any engineer can modify any part of Facebook’s code base), are thriving. So are companies with massive line worker input such as the “open management”

…companies that use these new ways of organizing will out-compete the old. If the rule of halves still applies, we would expect this new information order to manifest itself by sometime around 2012.

This is supported by evidence that companies are already embracing a ‘co-creation’ framework rather than a top down approach.  For example I’m working with a number of forward-thinking clients on the deployment of Spigit  – an online idea management tool which empowers everyone in an organization (especially front-line workers).

Whitney-Smith’s theory also has implications on a global scale:

In the short run, it’s better to be a member of the elite in China than a college student elsewhere with free information access. But bottom-up innovation will always be more successful in the long run. Therefore, if China continues its closed information policy, its success won’t last because regular people won’t be able to innovate.

Last but not least, the theory weighs in on the importance of moving away from the core to look for changes at the periphery and the edges:

“Lasting innovation in an information revolution doesn’t come from the elite, or from people who already have access to wealth and authority. It comes from the edges…”

by Roger Dennis

(off topic) Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork (HBR)

Richard Hackman is apparently the guru of team dynamics, and the article link below was from another guru, Bob Sutton at Stanford. This combination means that although this post is not directly related to my usual topics, it’s worth reading for anyone in business.

Misperception #2: It’s good to mix it up. New members bring energy and fresh ideas to a team. Without them, members risk becoming complacent, inattentive to changes in the environment, and too forgiving of fellow members’ misbehavior.

Actually: The longer members stay together as an intact group, the better they do. As unreasonable as this may seem, the research evidence is unambiguous. Whether it is a basketball team or a string quartet, teams that stay together longer play together better.

Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork – J. Richard Hackman – Harvard Business Review.

by Roger Dennis

Five Discovery Skills that Distinguish Innovators — HBS Working Knowledge

The Harvard Business School Working Knowledge site has published an extract from “The Innovator’s DNA”, the latest book from Clayton M. Christensen (with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gergersen). They outline the five discovery skills that distinguish the Steve Jobses and Jeff Bezoses of the world from the run-of-the-mill corporate managers.

The key concept is that research supports the idea that innovative tendencies are not genetic. Rather, they can be developed. The authors identify five discovery skills that distinguish successful innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.

Reading the extract it felt like someone had just described my day job.  Read more here : Five Discovery Skills that Distinguish Great Innovators — HBS Working Knowledge.

by Roger Dennis

When ideas have sex…

I love this quote from Kirby Ferguson, a New York-based filmmaker, in his series “Everything is a Remix”:

the most dramatic results can happen when ideas are combined. By connecting ideas together creative leaps can be made, producing some of history’s biggest breakthroughs.

His video series has the foundation of some serious reading, and harks to the work of Steven Johnson. Watch the video for some more context to this quote..

via Everything is a Remix.

by Roger Dennis

Smashing paradigms (Wired Article)

When someone challenges existing paradigms, it’s all to easy to scoff. My favourite paradigm smasher was Columbus.  Prior to his epic adventure, everyone knew the world was flat – what else could it be?  Now the world is round – what else could it be?

A more recent example of paradigm smashing was profiled in this wonderful article in Wired.  It’s the story of the invention of a craft that was presumed to be impossible:

Since Cavallaro first proposed Blackbird’s design on the Internet, his concept has been ridiculed and lampooned in blogs and forums, and the idea has even been refuted in a national magazine. The debate recently reached a fever pitch among a certain type of geek, especially in Silicon Valley, so much so that some notable entrepreneurs, including Google’s Larry Page, forked over the cash to let Cavallaro finally build the vehicle. After four years of online arguments, explanations, and insults, Cavallaro has brought his vision here—to the Dirt Cup—to prove he can beat the wind.

via One Man’s Quest to Outrace Wind | Magazine.

by Roger Dennis

Co-creation (and an example)

Yesterday I spent the day in conversation with Prof Venkat Ramaswamy (in 2004 he wrote “The Future of Competition” with C. K. Prahalad).  The subject of the conversation was co-creation, and the power of tools such as Spigit. In essence, co-creation is working alongside stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers etc) to create a win-win situation.  It’s a powerful concept, and something that I’ve been working on with a couple of clients for a while now.

This morning I read a great example that broadly fits the concept: designer works with the masses to get funding for his idea, he takes pre-orders to ensure that there’s enough demand, brings it to market and then Apple comes to the party:

It’s the ultimate Kickstarter success story. Unable to secure a manufacturer, the Chicago-based designer Scott Wilson placed his TikTok and LunaTik wristbands — which convert the Nano into a watch — on the funding site. Within a month, he raised nearly $1 million from 13,500 backers — a Kickstarter record. All of a sudden, retailers came calling, including the most prestigious of all: Apple, which is rolling out the wristbands in North American stores this week.

via Kickstarter’s Biggest Success Ever: Nano Wristbands Raise $1M, Jump To Apple Store | Co.Design.

The story above broadly fits the concept – however I’d recommend a closer look at the concept in Prof Ramaswamy’s book called “The Power of Co-Creation.” It’s attracted some very powerful reviews, including a Twitter recommendation from Tom Peters (which conveyed so much excitement I thought his next Tweet was going to be requesting paramedics).