Just getting my mind back to operating level after three days running in overdrive at Kiwi Foo Camp.Β While there was an abundance of fascinating conversation, one particularly pertinent comment highlighted the role of innovators in corporate environments:
“Innovators are like crisis insurance for corporations.”
Thanks to Courtney Johnston for this insight.
From..ahem…a few months back comes this fascinating article from BusinessWeek about growth in China.Β It looks across a wide range of industries, but comes back to a key point.Β If you are churning out commodity products that do not have a high margin, then growth is hard to sustain.
…delve beneath the muscular statistics and hype about advances in strategic industries, and China doesn’t seem so prepared to catapult into a role of global economic leadership. Experts familiar with highly touted Chinese achievements such as commercial jets and high-speed trains say the technologies that underpin them were largely developed elsewhere. There is no Chinese Sony, Toyota, or Samsung on the horizon. While Beijing’s $586 billion stimulus package and a 150% increase in bank lending have spurred impressive growth, “the question,” says Morgan Stanley Asia Chairman Stephen S. Roach, “is the quality of that growth.”
The question facing many countries – and companies – is how do you develop a culture of innovation to deliver quality growth? Samsung is one example of an organisation that has invested heavily in this regard and is reaping the benefits. The proof is in the pudding – at an annual international product design competition, Samsung won more awards than Apple last year.
The full BusinessWeek article is worth reading…
My work with Jade (a New Zealand software development company) has received further media coverage today.Β Check here for the latest story, or here for the background.
Every so often I read an article that really hits home.Β This is one of them.Β In the post Professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of Insead explain how the “Innovators’ DNA” works.Β The summary of their findings is encapsulated in the post, but the start of the article nailed it for me:
Β Interviewer: You conducted a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews. During this study you found five “discovery skills” that distinguish them. What are these skills?
Dyer:
The first skill is what we call “associating.” It’s a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas.
The second skill is questioning β an ability to ask “what if”, “why”, and “why not” questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture.
The third is the ability to closely observe details, particularly the details of people’s behavior.
Another skill is the ability to experiment β the people we studied are always trying on new experiences and exploring new worlds. And finally, they are really good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn.
If you work with creative people or within good innovation teams, the above traits will ring true like a dart hitting the bulls-eye.
Apparently there is a follow-up article due in the Dec 09 issue of HBR. I’ll be watching for it with interest..
This post could also be called “what’s been keeping me busy lately.”Β The answer to that is a whole myriad of fascinating projects for clients, and one of these today hit the headlines.
I’m working with the senior team at Jade Software in New Zealand, and assisting in both innovation and foresight (the latter for clients of Jade).
I proposed the iPhone App Store idea as a way of stimulating software developers to think differently about what they designed and how they designed it. In a nutshell here’s the concept:
I was impressed at the way in which theΒ CEO and CIO at Jade both picked up the idea and ran with it, and the reaction from the wider team at Jade has been equally impressive (to the extent there’s had to been extra technical sessions added). Watch this space for updates…
From the NY Times comes an interesting and illuminating piece that identifies a change in the way that computer manufacturers are starting to think.Β You can sum it up in a couple of words – start with the end user.
Historically the computer industry has sold itself on technology and the speed increases that inevitably accompany it.Β But – as the article points out – very few buyers really care about whether the hard drive spins at 4500rpm or 7200rpm.
The old tradition of flogging 220 different combinations of A.M.D. chips has been traded in and replaced with three categories of PCs: See, Share and Create systems (the designations roughly line up with βgood,β betterβ and βbestβ). A.M.D.βs 40-page manual that explained its technical wizardry to salespeople has met its demise as well, replaced with a two-page pamphlet.
They’re also looking at adjacent sectors for inspiration:
Intel has dabbled with what it called βuse-model marketing,β where computers were aimed at people who wanted to play games or those who wanted entertainment like movies over the gearhead speak of a fact tag. Intel poured money into its Viiv concept, which centered on using computers for entertainment, only to find that it confused consumers who also wanted to use the machines to do work. Intel has since turned elsewhere for answers.
βWe have been looking at the automotive industry,β said Ms. Conrad. βComputers have become an emotional purchase like cars. Weβre getting very emotional with our marketing and advertising.β
And, like carmakers that spend ages fine-tuning the sound of a slammed door, Dell has focused on the touch and sound of its computers.
The takeaway from this?
1. Understand you customers, and put yourself in their shoes
2. Most problems that you face in your business will have been encountered before by other industries. Look across sectors, rather than within your own, for solutions and inspiration.
As a tool to facilitate and encourage employees to share their ideas about new business opportunities, suggestions boxes have the same effect as a shredder does on paper.
What’s more they don’t scale, they don’t manage expectations and they’re not robust.Β About the best thing you can do to a suggestion box is to ask employees to suggest the most creative way to destroy the box itself.
So what do you once the suggestion box has been burnt/shredded/crushed and microwaved? Start researching prediction markets from companies like BrightIdea, and read posts like this from James Gardner…
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.
In this current climate, companies that double down on innovation and invest in R&D can expect to do well when the cycle changes.Β There’s plenty of literature around that supports this, and I’ve been interested to spot companies that are taking the message to heart.
In Australia, one of the largest financial services companies – AMP – is continuing to run it’s fantastic Innovation and Thought Leadership Festival called AMPLIFY.Β Of course it’s not just fantastic because I was one of the headline speakers last time it ran in ’07Β – if anything it was fantastic despite me being a headline speaker.
Annalie Killian is the organiser of the bi-annual event, and manages to pull in a mind-expanding array of speakers from around the world.Β When you look at the festival website you have to keep reminding yourself that this is an internal event, aimed at inspiring and provoking employees from across the entire organisation.
If it was a public event it would easily justify having a few zeros tacked onto the end of the ticket price.
The event appears to be quite unique in the corporate world, and sends very clear signals about what AMP is about, and the core values that will underpin it’s growth. I was curious to know more about the event being staged in the middle of The Great Recession, and fired three questions at Annalie:
This is the third innovation festival you have organised – what have you learnt from the first two?
Be bold, trust your instincts but keep your nearest and dearest colleagues as a sounding board. We are a very collaborative and supportive team and I know that my team colleagues will support me when I want to push the envelope- but they will also not let me stray that far that I fall off the edge!
Being a bit of a maverick is a delicate balancing act and having supportive and trusted colleagues is key to surviving and thriving.
Create an event for both the Heart and the Mind! In corporations, there is an over-emphasis on the mind at the expense of the heart and aesthetics. When you touch people emotionally – be that by creating joy, humour, laughter, wonder….it goes a lot further than logic and deductive reasoning in terms of lasting cultural impact. (This is a tip I have learnt from the amazing Andrew Zolli- Curator and producer of Poptech)
The festival is interesting in many ways, not least of which is the fact that anyone in the organisation can attend, not just senior management. How does this benefit the organisation?
This is what sets AMPLIFY and AMP apart – it’s an inversion of the usual organisation development model where the more senior you are, the more exposure you get to the world’s leading thinkers by attending global events or expensive business school courses- and the less the lower you are in rank and seniority.
These learning exchanges are valuable for the personal development of those individuals, but they seldom come back able to transform the organisation they’ve returned to after a few days of a “Damascus experience”.
If you can give a substantial number of your employees exposure to the very same thought leaders and thinkers in a concentrated dosage, you create an organisational tipping point much quicker andΒ can actually accelerate the pace of cultural change, idea adoption and implementation. It also goes a lot further a lot quicker in creating a learning organisation.
As a consequence of past Festivals, I now have employees spontaneously sharing with me (and others) articles they have discovered, introductions to talent and or interesting thought leaders-Β behaviour that I just didn’t experience before.Β It may sound bizarre- but it’s as if the free access to any dimension of the Festival offerings gives people a permission to dare and to dream and to think big.
We also hear stories of the AMP Innovation Festival repeated to us in hiring interviews by candidates who have heard about it and liked what they heard. They cite the company’s investment in an innovation culture as one of the reasons why they want to work for AMP- so it clearly has a talent retention and attraction benefit for the organisation.
The same goes for employee engagement. We have steadily seen an improvement in our employee engagement score over the past 9 years- and whilst the Innovation Festivals are not singularly responsible for that- its the convergence of many leadership initiatives- it plays its part in what people believe is possible to achieve personally and collectively in the organisation.
You’ve made the event open to non-AMP staff also.Β What was behind this gesture, and what sort of response have you had?
Because of the quality of the event we create and top notch speaker line-up, people outside AMP hear about it and request if they too can attend.Β In the past, we have had a small number of guests at management discretion, but this demand has grown so much that we thought it best to manage it by way of offering a small number of Festival tickets at roughly the market rate of the average conference.Β AMP makes no money from this it goes a small way to offsetting the cost of speaker expenses and production costs.
Some of the folks who have requested to buy a Festival pass say its like a TED Downunder. That’s a lovely compliment but its not far from the mark albeit on a much smaller scale. Conferences like TED, POPTECH and Business Innovation Factory are what we benchmark against, but we don’t have the venue overheads because everything is held on site by turning our corporate offices into a learning campus for the Festival.
I recently stumbled across a book by Bob Sutton called Weird Ideas That Work (and subtitled how to build a creative company).
It’s interesting because it does not have the word ‘innovation’ on the cover.
It’s interesting because it’s written by a guy who wrote a book called “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense” (he also wrote the “No Arsehole Rule,” which surely must go down in history as the best title ever given to a business book.)
It’s interesting because it’s based on research and observations by a Stanford professor over ten years.
The book is fascinating because it’s not some breathless magazine article extolling the virtues of a fad, or some factoid one-pager from a consultancy group (in my experience nothing pulls your head ten directions quicker than a whole bunch of shallow articles rabbiting on about business trends).
Here’s the summary (I’m still digesting the book):
The three key principles are to increase variance in available knowledge,see old things in new ways, and break from the past.
The weird ideas that aid in implementing those principles are:
- Hire smart people who will avoid doing things the same way your company has always done things.
- Diversify your talent and knowledge base, especially with people who get under your skin.
- Hire people with skills you don’t need yet, and put them in nontraditional assignments.
- Use job interviews as a source of new ideas more than as a way to hire.
- Give room for people to focus on what interests them, and to develop their ideas in their own way.
- Help people learn how to be tougher in testing ideas, while being considerate of the people involved.
- Focus attention on new and smarter attempts whether they succeed or not.
- Use the power of self-confidence to encourage unconventional trials.
- Use “bad” ideas to help reveal good ones.
- Keep a balance between having too much and too little outside contact in your creative activities.
- Have people with little experience and new perspectives tackle key issues.
- Escape from the mental shackles of your organisation’s past successes.
Highly recommended if you are grappling with how your organisation builds an innovation culture while still having people focused on operational goals (which, by their nature, tend to stifle innovation).