Davison Creators has just published an interview I did with them.Β There were some interesting questions, and you can catch the full blurb here.
The company itself has a fascinating 20 year track record of commercialising ideas, and if you have the time, you can dig around the Davison web site where there are some relevant case studies.
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.
More from my very backdated pile of Fast Company magazines:
Seventy percent of Corningβs 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.
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:
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.
There’s been a lot of coverage over the last couple of years around the word “design.”Β Some people now regularly interchange the terms “design” and “innovation” as if they mean the same thing.
They don’t.
Innovation should be an inherent part of your strategy.Β A strategy without explicit acknowledgment of the need for an innovation component is a strategy that will not bring any benefit to the organisation.
If a business is not looking to develop new offerings that can bring high margins, then the business will not grow. Innovation is the key to this.
Design is different.
Design is a vital part of the process in developing new offerings – but does not need to be part of the strategy.Β You can only bring design into the process once you have identified product opportunities – or better still entirely new markets – and analysed the proposition.
It’s absolutely vital to have the design process inherent in the development of new offerings.Β Design brings customer insights, ergonomics and a whole raft of necessary thinking to the development of new offerings.Β There is also a strong element of innovation in the design process.
It would be pointless investing in the identification of new opportunity spaces, only to go to market with a product that is badly designed and does not meet the customer need.
The summary:
Now can someone please tell BusinessWeek to stop interchanging the words design and innovation?
Over at BankerVision, James Gardner weighs in on the importance of strategic innovation for financial institutions.Β Having worked for egg (a London based online bank), and seen some of the thinking first hand, I agree entirely with his point:
Try this experiment. Dream up some bank-important scenario. Create two stories, one in which the bank makes a decision, and the other in which it doesn’t. Present both. Watch the mind set of leadership change as they begin to rehearse the implications through for themselves. I have to tell you, having now spoken to a very large number of innovation teams for Innovation and the Future-proof Bank, that few organisations do this kind of work in a very structured way.
James is right. Very few organisations – let alone just in banking – carry out this process in any structured manner.
Bear with me while I dive into some detail and pick up on his ideas around “what if” future scenarios.
I’d suggest that the way in which you present the scenarios is critical to this process.Β Don’t rely on black and white A4 documents.Β Don’t rely on documents at all.Β Develop your picture of the future by using images, sounds, actors – whatever you need to bring the scenario to life.
If the scenarios challenge a critical strategy, then the way in which you present the information is critical too.Β Take your CEO on a journey – and make sure it’s not one that involves narcolepsy –Β by not just telling a story, but involving him in it.
But let’s not stop there.Β If we’re looking at the role of the ideal innovation team, let’s keep pushing the boundaries to see what else they could be doing.
The role of an innovation team should notΒ be limited to future thinking and proposing ways to add value (although finding a team that does these things alone is a rarity in any organisation).
The ideal innovation team should also perform the role of the Court Jester.Β Consider the following extract from Wikipedia:
In societies where the Freedom of Speech was not recognized as a right, the court jester – precisely because anything he said was by definition “a jest” and “the uttering of a fool” – could speak frankly on controversial issues in a way in which anyone else would have been severely punished for, and monarchs understood the usefulness of having such a person at their side.Β Still, even the jester was not entirely immune from punishment, and he needed to walk a thin line and exercise careful judgment in how far he might go – which required him to be far from a “fool” in the modern sense.
When you consider some of the group think that pervades senior management structures, the role of the Court Jester becomes an important one.Β Who better to perform the role than the team that regularly examines the futures, deals in complexity and thrives on creativity?
This point is reinforced in a Harvard Business School publication called “Seven Ways to Fail Big.”Β For a summary, view the video summary, and take note of the last point.Β The authors talk about empowering internal devils advocates to ask the tough questions.
Sounds like a Court Jester to me.
To summarise here’s what your corporate innovation team should be doing:
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.
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 didnβt realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didnβt 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. βThatβs your dream? A subcutaneous X-ray? We can do that.β
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.
The latest edition of the Innovaro publication “Innovation Leaders” is now available. As the name suggests, it looks across a number of sectors to identify the companies that are leveraging innovation to the maximum benefit. You can download the summary or buy the book from the Innovation Leaders website.
If you are in The States this week, and want to hear more about the book Innovaro, then the founder of Innovaro – Tim Jones – will be doing a live interview discussing the research innovation in Ireland on CNBC for the “Business of Innovation” 2008 series which goes to air in the next couple of weeks.Β USA this Thursday at 8pm/ET (1am GMT).
(edited update reflects the changed focus of the interview)
Via a very circuitous route, I stumbled across a year old blog posting about innovation at EMC (a disk drive manufacturer). It is by Bob Buderi (of MIT Technology Review) about the EMC Innovation Conference he attended in 2007. This quote caught my attention :
Mark Lewis, president of EMCβs Content Management and Archiving Division, said in his conference keynote, the innovation landscape had changed dramatically for companies like EMC in recent years. It used to be, he said, that big corporations had the advantage over smaller companies and entrepreneurs because they were organized for R&D. Now, Lewis said, given the Internet, the global nature of competition, social networking, mashups, and more, itβs not unusual to find βthe edge out-innovating the core.β As a result, he said, βwe not only have to compete with companies, now we have to compete with non-companies.β
Exploring beyond the core is the central tenant of the Futures programmes that we run at Innovaro. If you are in a business that is already digitalised – such as EMC – the innovation timeframes are much shorter, and you have a much higher susceptibility to disruption from the fringes.
(Mark Lewis – who is quoted above – blogs here.)