Heads-Up! on Organizational Innovation

Business of Innovation Series

CNBC is running a 5-part series on innovation.  And, while the first episode has already aired, you haven’t missed it; you can see it  here.  Arkadi Kuhlmann, CEO, ING USA Direct, who is also a keynote speaker at the 13th annual Innovation Immersion, is featured in this series and describes himself as the "anti-banker banker."  With branches that sell coffee and mountain bikes, that seems like a fair description.

It promises to be an interesting series although the resident expert is Roger Schank, Ph.D. a learning expert rather than an innovation expert.  He does liven up the program by making outrageous and thought provoking comments such as recommending that companies hire the bottom 10% of Harvard rather than the top, because they’re the ones who were smart enough to get in and then decided not to follow the rules.

Also, after a segment that highlighted Google’s culture of innovation, Schank states that he doesn’t see Google as a particularly innovative company.  Which, of course, brings us back to the definition of innovation.  For a company that has created a value of $150 BILLION in eleven years and added the term “google” to the vocabulary of millions, if not billions, of people, I think most of us would give them the innovation nod.  Schank defines innovation as a “breakthrough, a new idea, something you’ve never seen before” rather than something that creates new value.  He also started losing his expert chits when he stated that Google hasn’t done anything innovative other than Google Earth and that the Google perks have little to do with keeping people happy and keeping the ideas flowing.  A culture is made up of a thousand things and you can look at any one thing (such as the free food or pool tables at Google) and say it doesn’t matter.  But, if you start taking those things away, the culture diminishes and, at some point, it is no longer the same culture.

Business Voices in first Episode:

• Cathleen Black, President, Hearst Publications
• Howard Putnam, Former CEO, Southwest Airlines and Branif Airlines
• Vinod Khosla, Founder, Sun Microsystems, venture capitalist
• Arkadi Kuhlmann, CEO, ING USADirect

You can see the second episode on March 11^th at 9:00 eastern.  Or catch it online.  The website also has a lot of additional innovation resources so it’s a hot place to visit.

Remarkable Company: Whirlpool

Whirlpool is the poster organization for innovation.  This article from
ComputerWorld gives you a sense of their in-depth approach.  Here's an excerpt:

Innovation Infrastructure

Whirlpool's approach was to use IT to facilitate innovation much as it has been used to streamline supply chains. The company would re-engineer management processes that slow down innovation and use IT to improve and accelerate the innovation chain from idea to final product. The key was to encourage many low-cost "stratlets" (or small strategies) rather than a few big-budget projects.

To embed innovation as a core competency, people would need training, access to expertise and small amounts of seed funding, freedom to work on their ideas and a way to share information. "You begin to see the magnitude of infrastructure that has to change to support it," (Nancy) Snyder says. "And remember, we weren't adding on to a core competency. We were creating one that didn't exist."

Snyder put a leadership team in place that included a global director of knowledge management, three regional vice presidents of innovation and regional innovation boards (I-Boards) to set goals, allocate resources and review ideas for funding. Later, each major business unit also established an I-Board. Twenty-five people from each region were trained to serve as in-house innovation consultants, or I-Mentors.

Whirlpool built an IT intranet infrastructure called the Innovation E-Space. It starts with the "fuzzy front end" of innovation where random insights are systematically generated and shared to spark ideas. The home page links prospective innovators to all the tools and resources they need, from insight libraries and innovation templates to I-Mentors. It provides "an informal social system that works below the hierarchy level," Snyder says, "and it uses technology to enable that."

The back end is the I-Pipe, a dashboard view of the innovation pipeline adapted from Strategos. It tracks ideas from concept to scale-up and provides project details as well as the big picture, enabling management to focus on areas in need of attention. For example, a dozen innovations that deal with pricing may indicate that there's a problem in that area. In this way, says (Gary) Hamel, innovators create strategy and top managers "edit" it.

The IT infrastructure didn't require an extensive investment, says CIO Esat Sezer. On the front end, Whirlpool used a Lotus Notes-based intranet and added new capabilities using collaboration tools like QuickPlace and Sametime from Lotus. For the I-Pipe, the company built a platform on its SAP infrastructure using SAP's xApps for project resource management.

Remarkable Company: Whole Foods Market

In a world where most companies have less-than-memorable mission statements filled with words like quality, excellence and customer satisfaction, think about this company motto and statement:

"Whole Foods - Whole People - Whole Planet

We believe in a virtuous circle entwining the food chain, human beings and Mother Earth: each is reliant upon the others through a beautiful and delicate symbiosis."

Here are just a few points to ponder about this remarkable company: Taken from the latest Fast Company article and the Whole Foods website.

How many companies have a Declaration of Interdependence that relates all the stakeholders together into a common vision?

How many CEOs would dismiss a pesky dissenter at the annual stockholders' meeting only to later decide to figure out what she was complaining about and wind up changing his life and policies when he decided she was right?