Front-End of Innovation - 1

Here we are at the Front-End of Innovation conference in sunny Boston and the buzz is about the ubiquity of innovation. The word is that there are 750 attendees and 24 exhibitor/sponsors. Some of us old-timers are marveling at the transition between the luke-warm enthusiasm for innovation just three or four short years ago to today’s innovation obsession.

Is there an ad campaign or corporate mission statement anywhere that hasn’t been branded with innovation? But how much is talk and how many organizations are actually walking the talk? Hard to tell. I still hear from a lot of folks who have been given the responsibility for innovation – as an add-on responsibility -- with no staff or resources. And what do organizations really mean when they say "innovation?"

The opening speaker was Tom Kelley, managing director of IDEO, the darling of the innovation world. Tom focused on his new book, The Ten Faces of Innovation (which was the InnovationNetwork’s first book selection for the Innovation Book Club). He spent most of his time on the learning faces of The Anthropologist, The Experimenter and the Cross-Pollinator. Tom stated, “If I could only pick one role to focus on it would be The Anthropologist. I didn’t get this at first but now I realize that, far from being a soft, fluffy thing, this is the source of innovation in our firm.” He explained that actually observing customers in action helps them find the right problem to be solved.

Tom encouraged people to practice what Robert Sutton calls vuja de … seeing things that are hidden in plain sight (the opposite of déjà vu, the feeling that you’ve been somewhere before) and reminded us of how hard it is to see things with new eyes when we’ve been with an organization or industry for a long time. We have to force ourselves into a beginner’s mindset. It’s almost impossible for customers to articulate their beliefs and preferences related to new possibilities. Customers can tell us about changes or improvements they would like to see, but, the example Tom used, was the VCR. If we had polled a focus group about their interest in throwing away their VCR collections so they could buy silver disks, few would have said “yes,” and yet we now live in a DVD world.

Tom also recommended lowering the bar for rough prototypes and put the responsibility on the shoulders of management who can easily stifle the prototyping mindset with their demands for perfection. “We need to learn to squint,” Tom stated. We need to learn to see the essence of the idea rather than looking at a prototype as a polished end result. He also emphasized the importance of multiple prototypes so that people can see differences and make choices.