Archive for category innovation
What doesn’t kill you makes you more innovative
Posted by John in innovation on 3 February 2012
Most of you would know the Nietzsche quote “that which doesn’t kill is makes us stronger” (or it could be a Kelly Clarkson quote, depending on your age). My main point for today is that quote also applies to innovation and this has far reaching implications for anyone trying to make a firm or industry more innovative.
Last year I was talking with Narelle Kennedy, CEO of the Australian Business Foundation, who has done a great job in connecting businesses, research academics and politicians to get a sensible and informed debate on innovation and growth in Australia. With colleagues at the University of Queensland Business School we have been running a large longitudinal survey of innovation and performance in Australian firms. One of the consistent patterns in the survey is that firms are far more likely to innovate when they are in a tough competitive environments. When I explained this to Narelle her response was something along the lines of “that makes sense, you need to experience pain to innovate”.
Narelle is exactly right! The list of evidence that innovation comes out of hard times and challenges is very long. For example, this is a central message in Michael Porter’s classic work “The Competititive Advatage of Nations”. To quote Porter:
A nation’s competitiveness depends on the capacity of its industry to innovate and upgrade. Companies gain advantage against the world’s best competitors because of pressure and challenge. They benefit from having strong domestic rivals, aggressive home-based suppliers, and demanding local customers.
And this is also the reason why protecting industries from competitive pain and providing public funds for pain relief rarely makes a business more competitive. With mainly good intentions, millions of dollars have been spent supporting the Australian car industry and yet it continues to die a slow and painful death. Like a billion dollar game of Russian Roulette, each government hopes that they can provide enough support so that the big collapse will occur during the life of the next government.
A good case in point for the ‘benefits of pain’ is a pretty amazing chart from Business Insider of the efficiency gains in the airline industry. I use the airline industry as an example of cut-throat competition in my MBA strategy class and Warren Buffett’s famous quote is particularly good:
If a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.
This is the kind of environment that produces the cummulative innovations that result in chart below (taken from Alan Kohler’s Eureka Report).
While traffic has increased 45%, fuel usage has increased 3%. To stay alive in this industry, firms need to continually find ways to improve pricing power and reduce costs and fuel efficiency is a big part of that.
If you want to be more innovative, embrace pain and challenge yourself.
Please Reinvent the Wheel
Posted by Tim in innovation on 26 January 2012
How often have you heard someone say something like “No need to reinvent the wheel”?
It’s such a common phrase we don’t even think twice when we hear it. The thing is, a lot of the time there is a huge need to reinvent the wheel.
If we didn’t reinvent the wheel on a regular basis, we’d be driving using cars, bicycles, wheelchairs, shopping trolleys, vacuum cleaners, and an almost infinite number of other things using wheels that look like this:
That wouldn’t be so good.
If we never reinvented the wheel, we wouldn’t have things like the Osmos Orbital Wheel:
In addition to looking really cool, the Orbital Wheel has significant advantages over regular wheels in performance, reliability and safety.
Clearly there are good reasons to reinvent the wheel. How do we know when to do so? Here are some guidelines for wheel reinvention:
- Innovate in Your Core: you don’t need to be good at everything. In response to this statement “Leading practice companies need to follow leading practice for water management,” one of our research partners once said:
I disagree with that. Leading practice companies can’t be leading practice in everything. They need to be leading practice in the things that are critical for them, but for everything else they just need to be fit-for-purpose. For example, I don’t want to be leading practice in payroll – there are other people that I can outsource that to – we just need to be fit-for-purpose.
It’s probably smart to avoid reinventing the wheel in the parts of your operation that just need to be fit-for-purpose. However, in the operational activities that are critical, it can be highly profitable to reinvent the wheel. This is where new business models often originate.
- Explore related areas: a lot of fruitful wheel reinvention has come from looking at how the wheel might be applied in related areas. That is how we ended up using wheels in all of their various applications. This is what Steven Johnson talked about as “exploring the adjacent possible” in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.
Saul Kaplan has expanded this idea very well in a number of posts. Here he discusses how to create space for wheel reinvention:
The trick is to explore and test new models while at the same time continuing to live within current ones. This requires establishing adjacent innovation platforms with the freedom to explore new ways to create and deliver value, especially approaches that are disruptive to the current model. Adjacent innovation platforms must have the freedom to experiment with different rules and financial models. Connected adjacencies require senior leadership sponsorship, support, and protection or they will fail. They must be free to recombine and connect capabilities in new ways unconstrained by the existing organization. Those working in the adjacencies must be empowered to borrow and flexibly deploy capabilities and technologies from inside and outside the organization in novel ways.
- Find areas of poor performance and innovate there: if you look at where the Osmos Orbital Wheel is being used, it is showing up primarily in racing applications. This is where its performance advantages show up the most. A lot of important wheel reinvention happens at the extremes – when we are trying to meet the needs of the most advanced (or the most reluctant) users.
I’m pretty happy that I’m not using crude wooden wheels everywhere these days. Reinventing the wheel is how we move forward. In many cases, the biggest innovations are not completely new ideas, but rather something that already exists being repurposed. That’s what reinventing the wheel is all about.
So by all means, please reinvent the wheel.
How Apple Disrupts Markets and then Goes on to Dominate
Posted by Tim in innovation on 19 January 2012
By Greg Satell (mostly) and Tim Kastelle
The Three Horizons Model
A good lens for understanding how Jobs innovated is the three horizons model. This tool is designed to help you manage a portfolio of innovations that will have an impact over three different time frames.
When you innovate using the three horizons model, the first horizon involves implementing innovations that improve your current operations, horizon two innovations are those that extend your current competencies into new, related markets, and horizon three innovations are the ones that will change the nature of your industry. In general, H1 innovations tend to be incremental, while H3 are more often radical innovations.
You must have innovation efforts aimed at all three time horizons. If you only look at the exciting transformative H3 innovations, you’ll lose business to current competitors who are using incremental innovations to improve their operations. Consequently, you might have the best ideas for the future, but you’re no longer around to execute them.
On the other hand, if you only focus on H1 incremental innovations that make your current business better, you’ll end up being replaced by organisations that are driving disruptive innovations in your field. Using the three horizons framework helps balance innovation efforts between incremental and radical, which is important.
However, maintaining a balanced portfolio does not mean that you put 1/3 of your effort into each horizon. For example, Google uses a 70/20/10 split. About 70% of their innovation time and money goes into making them better at what they currently do, 20% goes to extending into new markets, and 10% aims at developing entirely new markets.
10% Blue Sky Projects
Every new Apple product started the same way. Jobs would see something crappy and want to change it. After he returned to Apple and launched the iMac, he looked at digital music players, concluded that they “truly sucked” and decided to do something about it. He envisioned 1000 songs in your pocket.
There was, however, a rub: the technology did not exist to do it (which is why music players were so sucky in the first place). His engineers cobbled together a suitable screen and battery, but couldn’t find a disc drive small enough. A while later, on a routine trip to Japan, one of his engineers came across a 1.8 inch disc drive that Toshiba had under development.
It was just the thing. Small enough, with a 5GB capacity or just enough to fit 1000 songs. Then came the design, the flywheel and the interface – all things that played to Apple’s strengths. The rest, and the breakaway success of the iPod, is history.
It was a pattern that was to be repeated time and again: Look for something sucky. Figure out what wouldn’t be sucky (i.e. 1000 songs in your pocket) and then work on technical specifications. Of course, he could have launched the iPod sooner with a standard disc drive, but then it wouldn’t have been “1000 songs in your pocket.”
20% Look at the 4 Forces
As his biographer, Walter Isaacson pointed out, Jobs revolutionized 7 industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, tablet computing, digital publishing and retail. Yet, no one considers Apple a conglomerate. In fact, most consider it to be a very focused company. The reason is that its expansions are into adjacent markets.
What’s an adjacent market? Take a look at Porter’s 5 forces framework:
What makes Apple such a dangerous company is that they are fearless in turning the arrows outward.
They didn’t worry about Post PC computing devices like phones and tablets invading their Macintosh environment, they invaded those spaces instead. They didn’t worry about music companies giving them lousy deals, they built their own environment. They didn’t whine about the retail environment their wares were displayed in, they revolutionized the space.
It should be mentioned here that Apple isn’t always successful in this regard. Their heavy handedness in demanding 30% of subscription revenues from magazine publishers appears to have flopped and their iAds program has suffered from high prices and poor service. Nevertheless, their hits have greatly outshone their misses.
70% – Focus on Your Business
When Jobs returned to Apple, he didn’t look first at how he could change the world. That came later. First, he killed most of the products they were producing so that he could focus on improving operations. He innovated not with breakthrough new products, but focused on the core desktop market that had fallen flat.
One thing that often gets overlooked is Apple’s incredible track record in operations since Steve Jobs’ return. They not only dream up the next big thing and come up with breakthrough products in adjacent markets, they are also a low cost producer. That’s an incredible combination.
And it didn’t just happen, but is an indication of how much focus they put on operations. After all, it was operations maestro Tim Cook who replaced Jobs, not design genius Jony Ive. That focus on pays off not only in lower prices and higher margins, but also in their ability to improve their products significantly with each generation.
Those improved products increase scale, which improves their negotiation leverage with suppliers, which leaves room to add more features at lower cost and on it goes.
Innovative Discipline
The three horizons model is pretty simple, which begs an even simpler question: Why doesn’t everybody do it? The answer is discipline.
Jobs wanted to launch a tablet computer years before he actually did, but chose to do the iPhone first. He realized that he couldn’t do both. In other words, he limited the 10% to 10%, even if he wanted to do more. He never attacked more than one adjacent market at a time and kept the company focused on improving existing products, even though it was the new ones that got the headlines.
Further, he resisted calls to use Apple’s enormous cash hoard to make a major acquisition and kept breakthrough new products under wraps until they were ready to launch. His focus wasn’t on useless headlines or accolades, but focused on making products that didn’t “suck.”
And that’s the crux of the three horizons model, that business innovation is a business activity. While we would all like to dream up the next big thing, unless we’re focused on our core market, we won’t be able to support breakthrough innovation. If we don’t look beyond our direct competitors, we we’ll always be beholden to industry ups and downs.
Three Mistakes We Make With Models
Posted by Tim in book riffs, business models, innovation on 18 January 2012
Imagine that you live in Australia and you would like to eat a good, genuine bagel. After fairly extensive research, I have discovered that there are two places that you can go. One is called Bagel Nook, and it’s here in Brisbane. Not many people know about it, and one of the reasons is that it’s really hard to find.
Here it is on a map:
Here’s why it’s hard: it’s address is Creek Street, but you can’t actually reach it from Creek Street. To get to Bagel Nook, you have to go down that tiny little laneway that comes off of Adelaide Street. It’s a classic example of the map not being the territory.
The other place in Australia with good bagels is Glicks in Melbourne. It’s also on a tiny hard-to-find street, so to get there you need an equally detailed map.
Now, imagine making an Australian Bagel Road Trip and travel from Bagel Nook to Glicks. If you start with the map with Bagel Nook, and stick with maps of that scale, you’ll need roughly 8,335 pages to cover the trip that you’ll take.
That’s no good. Instead, for most of the trip, this map is what you need:
Maps are models, and we use models all the time to help us understand the world. We use models of roads to help us get around. We use models in science to help us understand physics, the way that economies work, and many other things. John Kay makes a good point about how we use models:
All science uses unrealistic simplifying assumptions. Physicists describe motion on frictionless plains, gravity in a world without air resistance. Not because anyone believes that the world is frictionless and airless, but because it is too difficult to study everything at once. A simplifying model eliminates confounding factors and focuses on a particular issue of interest. To put such models to practical use, you must be willing to bring back the excluded factors. You will probably find that this modification will be important for some problems, and not others – air resistance makes a big difference to a falling feather but not to a falling cannonball.
Our use of mental models is so ubiquitous that we’re often not aware of using them at all. However, we can use the Australian Bagel Road Trip and the quote from Kay to look at three common mistakes that we make with models:
- Using the wrong scale: just as we need a map at the right scale to get from Bagel Nook to Glicks, our business mental models also need to be at the right scale.
In her excellent book The Plugged-In Manager
Terri Griffith talks about the thought process that a manager goes through in making the decision to start using the cloud for some of their computing functions. She talks about how to make this decision, you have to think about how the technology, your people, and the organisation’s processes interact.
But it’s also important to have a good model of how cloud computing works. And this means having a model at the right scale. For most managers, you don’t need a hugely detailed model that includes servers, packet-switching and communication protocols. That’s the wrong scale – too small. But you do probably need to have a model that includes issues like back-ups, security and mobile access.
If you use a model that is the wrong scale, it will be very hard to make good decisions. That’s the first mistake to avoid.
- The map isn’t the territory: even if you have the map for Bagel Nook, it’s hard to find it. You need to be on the ground to figure out to go into that little laneway.
Mistaking the map for the territory is a huge problem in business. Roger Martin addresses this in his book Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL.
Martin talks about the difference between the real market and the expectations market. In the real market, firms make and sell real goods and services, and their performance depends on how effectively they do this. The expectations market is the stock market – and here, a stock is a model of how the firm is expected to do.
Steve Denning talks about the implications of mistaking the expectations market (map) for the real market (territory):
“Maximizing shareholder value” turned out to be the disease of which it purported to be the cure. Between 1960 and 1980, CEO compensation per dollar of net income earned for the 365 biggest publicly traded American companies fell by 33 percent. CEOs earned more for their shareholders for steadily less and less relative compensation. By contrast, in the decade from 1980 to 1990 , CEO compensation per dollar of net earnings produced doubled. From 1990 to 2000 it quadrupled.
Meanwhile real performance was declining. From 1933 to 1976, real compound annual return on the S&P 500 was 7.5 percent. Since 1976, Martin writes, the total real return on the S&P 500 was 6.5 percent (compound annual). The situation is even starker if we look at the rate of return on assets, or the rate of return on invested capital, which according to a comprehensive study by Deloitte’s Center For The Edge are today only one quarter of what they were in 1965.
In other words, mistaking the model for reality has destroyed shareholder value, the opposite of what was intended. We always have to be aware of the models we’re using, and ensure that we’re managing the reality, not the model.
- Using the wrong map: a lot of people contend that a significant cause of many of the recent stock market crashes has been the use of incorrect models. That’s the fundamental issue that Nassim Nicholas Taleb keeps trying to get people to acknowledge. His contention is that the market models in use have vastly underestimated the probability of large price fluctuations. Consequently, when these fluctuations do occur, things blow up.
The post by John Kay addresses the problems with this, as does this one by Mark Buchanan, and they’re both worth reading. The key point though is simple: if you use a model that isn’t accurate, you can’t make good decisions.
Models are an important part of how we make sense of the world. However, we often make mistakes in our use of models. To avoid these mistakes, try to make sure that the model you use is at the right scale for the decision you’re making, try to manage the real market, not the model built on top of reality, and try to make your models as accurate as possible.
And if you know of any other good bagel places here in Australia, please let me know!
There’s No Such Thing as Information Overload
Posted by Tim in complex systems, connect, filter, innovation, time on 13 January 2012
The size of your inbox or your RSS feed or your twitter stream might all argue otherwise, but there’s no such thing as information overload.
Or, at least, if there is, it’s not new. Check this out:
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
That was Denis Diderot in “Encyclopedie”, back in 1755. 1755!
The problems that we have with information isn’t that there’s too much of it – there has always been too much. Rather, there are two related problems with information: how do we filter out information that doesn’t help us, and how do we find information that we need.
Jorge Luis Borges touches on this in his story The Library of Babel. You should go read it here since everyone should be reading more Borges. The story is short, but packed with ideas. The library has an infinite number of rooms, all filled with books. Each book is the same length, with randomly assembled letters. The Men of the Library spend their lives wandering the shelves, reading the books. Since the library is infinite, it must contain all books ever written (and all that will be written!), but since the library is infinite, the odds of coming across even one sentence that makes sense are exceedingly small.
It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters
dhcmrlchtdj
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons — and its refutation as well. (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)
What do you do when you are faced with all of the information in the world? To make any sense of it, you have to find the information that is useful to you. So we filter.
As Borges suggests, each piece of information means something to someone, even if it’s gibberish to us. We need to knock out the stuff that’s gibberish. So we find ways to ignore information, by saying things like “Twitter is just 100 million people talking about what they ate for lunch, so why would I waste my time with that?” I do this by ignoring TV (unless I can find a hockey game on). Everyone makes choices about what they should be paying attention to.
The key to dealing with information is to be conscious of the choices that you’re making, and to develop a strategy or a set of routines for handling it. Howard Rheingold has created an outstanding set of resources for his classes on Mind Amplifiers and Infotention. Start with those to develop a filtering strategy.
We’ve always had too much information to handle, and we’ve always dealt with it by developing routines. The real difference now is not that there’s so much more information, it’s that we don’t have good routines to go with the new channels that the information is taking to get to us.
The danger in thinking that we have too much information is that we’ll start missing out on innovation opportunities. After all, the creative part of innovation is about making novel connections between ideas. So we actually have to seek out information that is a bit out of the ordinary (see the end of this post for some techniques for doing this).
If you think that the problem is information overload, then this will seem completely counterintuitive. That’s why it’s a dangerous idea – if you take it seriously, it makes it much harder to innovate.
That’s why I say that there’s no such thing as information overload. Even if that’s not strictly true, we’re better off acting as though that’s the case.
The Intersection of Human and Organizational Innovation Capabilities
Posted by Tim in innovation on 9 January 2012
Guest post by Ralph Ohr
One of my main interests is looking at the intersection of organizational and human capabilities. Business is accomplished through people, thus individual mindset, behavior and capabilities determine organizational performance. When it comes to innovation, a recently published research paper, titled ‘The Bias Against Creativity’ serves as a good example. The findings indicate a paradox that people desire but reject creativity. The authors explain this paradox by proposing that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt, and which is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty. They further conclude:
If people hold an implicit bias against creativity, then we cannot assume that organizations, institutions or even scientific endeavors will desire and recognize creative ideas even when they explicitly state they want them. This is because when journals extol creative research, universities train scientists to promote creative solutions, R&D companies commend the development of new products, pharmaceutical companies praise creative medical breakthroughs, they may do so in ways that promote uncertainty by requiring gate-keepers to identify the single “best” and most “accurate” idea thereby creating an unacknowledged aversion to creativity.
This suggests two main points:
- People being involved in innovation are required to truly embrace creativity and novelty. They prove it through their ability to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty. Further, they are not inhibited by an unconscious bias against novel ideas, while claiming to drive innovation forward. Biased people, particularly in case of decision makers and executives, may seriously harm innovation activities.
- In order drive innovation, people need to be able to manage tensions. The paradox, that people are often curious about novel ideas and leaving the status quo, while at the same time being pulled back by their fear of uncertainty and risk, reflects .
Innovation occurs along a continuum from maintaining and improving the already existing (incremental innovation) to entering novel regime in terms of technology, meaning or business model (radical innovation). Both ends of the continuum require particular capabilities and human characteristics in order to get accomplished properly. As innovation activities are often embedded in a portfolio approach across this continuum, innovation management depends on integrating and balancing opposite requirements.
As Tim Kastelle points out, we need to learn and use integrative thinking to tackle these kinds of tensions. Integrative thinking is about creating new models that contain elements of individual models, but are superior to each. I think this can also be applied to personal orientations and mindsets on the human level. In the following I’d like to share some psychological concepts, describing opposite orientations and being relevant for innovation. Everyone has a natural tendency between these poles – and is therefore predestined for corresponding innovation tasks. By means of integrative thinking, we can learn to consciously move to our weaker pole. This may help us to become more flexible, particularly if we intend to develop entire innovation portfolios.
Cognitive orientation: Analytical thinking vs. Intuitive thinking
According to Roger Martin, analytical thinking is great for exploitation within the existing stage, i.e. improving core business through incremental innovation. Intuitive thinking is indicated for leaving the existing stage by exploring unknown terrains. Analytical thinkers focus almost exclusively on generating reliability – the ability to produce a consistent, replicable outcome. In contrast, intuitive thinkers tend to focus on validity – the production of a desired outcome, whether or not it is consistent or replicable. This makes analytical thinkers more appropriate for incremental innovation, while intuitive thinkers tend to be more suited for radical innovation. In most cases we can’t analyze the way to growth.
Balancing analytical thinking and intuitive thinking enables to both exploit existing business and create new opportunities. That’s what Roger Martin defines as Design Thinking.
Creative orientation: Searchers vs. Finders
Galenson et al. (2003) found that modern artists can be divided into two groups:
Experimental innovators are driven by imprecise goals, so their procedure is tentative and incremental. The imprecision of their goals means that they rarely feel they have succeeded, so their careers are often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. They paint the same subject many times, gradually changing its treatment by trial and error. They consider procedure as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover in the course of making.
In contrast, conceptual innovators have intended to communicate specific ideas or emotions. Their goals for a particular work can be stated precisely in advance. They often make detailed preparatory plans for their paint, and execute their final works systematically. Conceptual innovations appear suddenly, as a new idea produces a result quite different not only from other artists’ work, but also from the artist’s own previous work. Conceptual innovations are consequently often embodied in individual breakthrough paintings. The conceptual artist’s certainty about his goals, and confidence that he has achieved them, often leaves him free to pursue new and different goals.
These findings widely hold true for business and innovation, too. Peter Sims emphasizes the need for an experimental and emergent approach in order to manage uncertainty and risk for innovation in his great book Little Bets.
On the other hand, small steps are often in danger to range within existing regimes. In order to aim at the next breakthrough innovation, a vision or scenarios of future conditions need to be defined. It’s essential for breakthroughs ‘to skate where the puck is going to be, rather than where it is.’ This vision is to be approached gradually through experimental steps – as small as possible and as big as necessary – in order to remain adaptable. I think, only by integrating searching and finding, the innovation continuum can be properly covered.
Temporal orientation: Monochronic vs. Polychronic
Individuals conceive of time quite differently. The most common understanding of time in the western world is “clock time”. Ian Mc Carthy et al. (2010) focus in their research on the differentiation between monochronic and polychronic individuals and how they are suited for particular business tasks (you can even find a link to a self-test at the bottom of the post). They describe monochronics as viewing time as a unified and linear phenomenon. Monochronics prefer to work on individual tasks with given deadlines in a serial fashion. In contrast, polychronics tend to view time as a heterogeneous and malleable phenomenon. They like to work on many things simultaneously, and are much less concerned about missing deadlines. Mc Carthy further suggests that a monochronic orientation suits better to linear innovation frameworks, involving relatively discrete, sequential and determnistic stages. Such frameworks are primarily employed for incremental innovation activities. Whereas a polychronic orientation tends to correspond to highly interconnected environments where more nonlinear and iterative frameworks are required. Those frameworks are suited to deal with unknown outocmes and radical innovation.
A balanced temporal orientation enables people to accomplish tasks from both sides of the innovation spectrum. Moreover, most innovation processes require a higher polychronic orientation in the (messy) ideation stage, while being based on more linear and monochronic execution afterwards.
Takeaway:
There is an intersection between individual and organizational innovation capabilities. Human capabilities might not be a sufficient condition for organizational performance, but at least a necessary condition. In order to make innovation activities a success, we have to make sure that novel and creative ideas become truly accepted and acted upon by the people in charge. This requires having the right people in place, being equipped with beneficial capabilities and orientations to tackle the tasks across an innovation portfolio. This suggests hiring and allocating appropriate ‘specialists’ for incremental as well as radical innovation activities, respectively. The overall portfolio, however, needs to get managed by people who are capable of integrating opposing mindsets, orientations and approaches, therefore being able to connect to different individual characters.
Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr has extensive experience in product/innovation management for international technology-based companies. His particular interest is targeted at the intersection of organizational and human innovation capabilities. You can follow him on Twitter @Ralph_Ohr.
Vote for the Top Innovation Bloggers of 2011
Posted by Tim in innovation on 25 December 2011
It’s time to vote for the top innovation bloggers of 2011 over at Innovation Excellence. The list of nominees is fantastic – and a great indicator of the growing community of people that are passionate about innovation.
You can vote by leaving a comment on the voting page, or by sending a tweet to @ixchat with your nominee’s name in it. And there are prizes! So vote now.
It’s depressing, but it looks like the guys that actively campaign to get votes this will probably be at the top again this year. However, there are lots of great people on the list that might get overlooked – here are a few recommendations of people that you might want to consider:
Deb Mills-Scofield: Deb is involved in innovation consulting and VC work, among a range of other things, which gives her blog great practical insight. Her recent post Status Quophiles and Quophobes is an excellent place to start.
Helen Walters: Helen has written about innovation and design for a wide range of publications. Her tumblr blog is great example of how to use that format well. Start by checking out the post on the web and serendipity.
Melba Kurman: Melba’s area of expertise is getting knowledge out of universities and into the world – a critical innovation issue. Her recent post on the best US universities for technology transfer gives an idea of what she regularly talks about.
Kay Plantes: Kay specializes in business model innovation, which is an area of increasing importance. Her great post about how Dow Corning disrupted itself is a good example of what she writes about.
Nilofer Merchant: Nilofer is awesome. She writes about a wide range of topics, and every post is incisive and insightful. Start with Are You Standing Out Today to see what I mean.
There are plenty of great choices – go vote now!
Innovation Lessons from Hedy Lamarr
Posted by Tim in connect, innovation, time on 23 December 2011
Every time you use wi-fi, bluetooth, a cordless phone (including mobiles), GPS or anything with an RFID tag, you’re using a technology called spread spectrum radio. The first version of spread spectrum was invented during World War II as a method for controlling torpedos using rapidly changing radio frequency to control their direction in a way that couldn’t be jammed. It was invented by the composer George Antheil and the actor Hedy Lamarr.
That’s Hedy Lamarr:
not Hedley Lamarr:
The story of the invention is told by Richard Rhodes in Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, which is well worth the read.
The story includes several important innovation lessons, including:
- Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act of innovation: Rhodes interviewed Neno Amarena an engineer that discussed Lamarr’s inventive work with her in later years:
“More often than not,” he told me, “the inventive process follows a cascade of ideas and thoughts interconnected from previous concepts that for the most part lie separate, unconnected and unrelated. It takes a clear state of mind, which is usually someone thinking ‘outside the box,’ to suddenly or serendipitously see the connected between the unrelated concepts and put it all together to create something new.” In that regard, the process of invention is no different from the creative process in other fields. Scientific discovery proceeds the same way. So do painting and sculpture. So does creative writing. The results are different, because each process operates on different realities and by different rules.
That’s just a beautiful passage, which captures things perfectly.
- Innovation is a process: coming up with a great idea isn’t enough to innovate. You also have to select which ideas to pursue, you have to make them work, and you have to get them to spread. Lamarr and Antheil did all of the first three things brilliantly, but they fell over on the last bit. They figured out how to make spread spectrum work through frequency hopping, and were granted a patent for that. However, they couldn’t get the US Navy to adopt their idea. The donated the patent to the Navy, where it sat for about 20 years. It wasn’t until the 1980s that people started to realise what Lamarr and Antheil had accomplished. Which leads to the third point -
- Ideas spread slowly: and they can be ahead of their time. We like to think that the value of an idea is self-evident. This often isn’t true, and even when it is, that doesn’t mean that people will adopt it. In addition, you can be ahead of your time technologically. According to Rhodes, that seemed to be the case here:
“Lamarr and Antheil,” Price writes, “seem… to have been more than a score of years ahead of their time, considering that [frequency hopping] evidently was not used operationally against intentional jamming until [1963].”
You have to fight to get your ideas to spread, and this is a crucial part of the innovation process.
There’s also one last point that is easy to overlook: Lamarr and Antheil invented this breakthrough technology in their spare time. She was busy becoming a movie star, and he was writing symphonies while they worked out how to turn frequency hopping into a functional idea. A frequent excuse for not innovating is “I don’t have enough time.” But you do. Find the time, and use it.
Thirty Great Free eBooks for Innovators
Posted by Tim in book riffs, innovation on 15 December 2011
Two years ago, I wanted to give everyone that reads my blog a present. Here is how I put it:
Whenever I make a new friend, one of the first things I usually do is buy them a book. I’m not exactly sure why – probably because I really value ideas & books, and I want to share them with people that I like. So for all my digital friends here, I thought that since it’s the holidays, I would give you links to a great set of books that are all downloadable for free.
The result was the post Ten Great Free e-Books for Innovators. Then last year I wrote a follow-up called Ten More Great Free e-Books for Innovators.
Since it’s the holiday season again, and since I still give books as gifts to everyone, I figure that it’s time for more free e-books. The 20 on the first two lists are still mostly available. I’m adding another 12 now – 10 plus 2 bonus books just in case some of the old links don’t work. This list is the best one yet!
Have fun and enjoy the holidays! Thanks for all the time and support that you’ve given to me, John and the blog over the past 12 months.
Please note: while these are free copies of the books, they are nearly all also buy-able if you want a physical copy and/or you wish to support the authors.
One must-read book:
The Flinch by Julien Smith: in order to innovate, we have to execute our ideas. The excuses for not doing this are legion, and they are just that – excuses. Julien’s book with Chris Brogan, Trust Agents, was outstanding. This one is better. It’s easy to dismiss as self-help, but it includes a bunch of practical ideas for executing your own ideas. Essential. Get the kindle version for free here (and if you don’t have a kindle reader, download kindle for PC, Mac, iPhone, Android or iPad).
Three Innovation Books:
Exploiting Chaos by Jeremy Gutsche: Gutsche created the TrendHunter website, which is a useful resource for finding out what’s out on the edge these days. The book consists of a ton of short, snappy pieces, organised around several important innovation themes: why we must experiment to innovate, the benefits of an obsession with customers, and why we need to break our current business models to succeed over the long-term. It’s a bit short on how-to, but it contains a lot of great provocation.
Little Innovation Book by James Gardner: Gardner writes a great blog on innovation, and this book is an excellent step-by-step guide to managing innovation as a process.
Making Open Innovation Work by Stefan Lindegaard: Stefan writes one of my favourite innovation blogs, and this book is full of great, practical advice. He’s one of the leading experts on open innovation, and I’m not sure that anyone knows more about how to actually make it work. If you want a physical version, you can order it from amazon here.
From Open Innovation to Open Source, and Back:
Content by Cory Doctorow: Doctorow is mainly known for writing great fiction, but he also co-founded Boing Boing, and this collection of essays on the nature of content is outstanding. He is a great example of how to use “free” as a method for actually turning a profit. He’s tried numerous experiments in this regard, which is the essence of innovation. Question: why is it mainly authors that are doing these experiments, when it is publishers that are under threat? I wish I knew the answer…
Peers, Pirates and Persuasion by John Logie: an interesting discussion of the some of the legal and IP issues raised by sharing. This is a bit different from Doctorow’s work, which discusses free more as a strategy. It’s an interesting frame through which to view these issues.
The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin by Peter Salus: Salus provides an interesting history of how “free” has worked in open source software. Open source and open innovation are often confused – they are related but different. This book explains how people have harnessed massive amounts of volunteers to create some great software.
Innovation Happens Elsewhere by Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel: this book takes us full circle – it discusses why to use open source as a method of development, how to do it, and how to build an open business model.
How-tos and Bonus Books:
Raising Angel and Venture Capital Finance by Tom McCaskill: McCaskill has written a bunch of books designed to help entrepreneurs and start-ups. If you need to finance your great idea, this book provides a very practical guide, and it’s a great place to start.
Why Projects Fail by Uladzislau Schauchenka: if you’re in a big organisation rather than a start-up, innovation often has a significant project-management component. This book outlines how projects go wrong, including case studies, and it also has a number of suggestions for managing projects more effectively.
Engagement from Scratch! by Danny Iny: because I needed at least one book with an exclamation point in the title. Written with a number of contributors (including Alex Osterwalder of Business Model Canvas fame), this book provides useful guidance for building a successful community. This is becoming increasingly important in getting your innovative ideas to spread.
Insubordinate by Seth Godin: like Doctorow, Godin has a long history of giving away some of his ideas, and like The Flinch, this book is concerned with how to actually get motivated to execute your great ideas. It is the companion piece to his excellent book Linchpin – and it contains a bunch of case studies of people that have successfully managed to innovate in situations where innovation is difficult.
So there you go. Books are great, and they can give you a lot of ideas. But remember, ideas themselves aren’t worth anything. You have to execute them to create value. That’s innovation.
Happy holidays!
A Thanksgiving Innovation Reflection
Posted by Tim in innovation on 24 November 2011
As people in the US get ready for Thanksgiving weekend, I was reminded of the story about Joseph Heller told by Kurt Vonnegut in the New Yorker. Bob Sutton has a terrific post on this, which I encourage you to read. Here is the poem:
Joe Heller
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22′
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
–Kurt Vonnegut
The New Yorker, May 16th, 2005
The knowledge that I have enough is something I struggle to gain myself, but it is well worth striving for. I’m incredibly lucky with what I have in life, and it is enough – more than enough.
It’s another reason that when we think about innovation, it’s important to focus on delivering things that create genuine value, not just novelty. I’d be thankful if we can do that.
(I don’t have permission to reproduce the poem like Prof Sutton does, so I hope it’s ok, because it’s something that everyone should read. The photo is from flickr/Edsel L, under a Creative Commons License)
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Tim was named #5 in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2011 at Innovation Excellence.
Tim and John were both named in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2010 at Innovation Excellence.
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