Heads-Up! on Organizational Innovation

Becoming a Trendmaster

Robyn Waters, Target's former executive trendmaster, has now distilled her wisdom into an easy-to-read guide titled "The Trendmaster's Guide, Get a Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next." (Robyn will be a keynote speaker at Convergence 2005.)

Here's a nugget from Robyn's book -- from "C is for Connect the Dots":

An interesting fact catches your attention.  A related tidbit pops up out of nowhere.  A random comment reinforces a budding thought. Hey ... pay attention!  Your trend dots are begging to be connected. Taken individually, each "dot" may not mean a lot.  Connected, a pattern emerges that often points to a developing trend--in time to do something about it.

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about several "dots" – Monster Thickburgers, Enormous Omelet Sandwich and other high calorie offerings from fast food places.  We asked for comments about what this might mean and received several interesting responses which are listed below.

We didn't quite connect the dots, however, in a way that might be useful from an innovator's perspective.  What if you were a designer of automotive interiors and you looked at those dots?  Would you connect them into a trend of heavier people who need more support in car seats?  Or would you see it as an impulse toward small indulgences which would lead you to adding more sensory delight to the auto interior?  Or maybe you'd see these fast food monsters being eaten in the car and design a chin trough that would catch all the drippings.

** Challenge for next week -- here are four "dots" -- how would you connect them into a possible trend?  What businesses might be impacted by that trend and how?

- Netflix is wildly successful delivering movies directly to homes.

- According to ubercool.com, the hottest new community is “thefacebook,” aimed at college students. The site has exploded from zero members 14 months ago to more than 2 million today. That fast ride led venture capital firm Accel Partners to invest a rumored $12 million for an undisclosed share of the company.

- Hot hybrid, Toyota Prius, does not have an ignition key ... it has a "Power" button plus a videogame-like display reward for fuel- efficient driving.

- Apple iPod's latest offering is the "shuffle."  Gone are the display and choosing your tunes. The memory-stick sized iPod puts surprise and randomness back into music.

There are no right or wrong answers ... so, how would you connect the dots?  Send your thoughts to mailto:[email protected], SUBJECT:  Dots.

Have a great and innovative week ... Joyce Wycoff

Here are the responses to "Thick or Thin - What's the Trend?"

Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Blink, the Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell is an outstanding writer and storyteller and his new book offers interesting stories and food for thought.  However, it falls far short of his blockbuster The Tipping Point.

Blink is about the intuitive response, the pattern recognition that happens almost instantaneously, and allows us to recognize faces and complex, non-verbal communication.  Gladwell seldom uses the term intuition, referring to this phenomenon as the adaptive unconscious.  He offers a series of fascinating stories focusing on the process he calls “thin-slicing,” the process of recognizing and making a decision based on incredibly small amounts of data.  One example shows people accurately predicting which married couples will stay together based on only two seconds of videotape.

He offers the premise that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.  However, he acknowledges that this same process can often result in bad decisions and offers little guidance on how to make the process more reliable.

The Medici Effect

The Medici Effect, Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts & Cultures by Frans Johansson, Harvard Business School Press, 2004.  Buy at amazon.com.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the wealthy Medici family attracted artists, scientists, poets, architects and philosophers to Florence where their interactions and work stimulated a burst of creativity that changed the world.  Johansson uses this Medici effect as a metaphor for deliberately bringing together differing disciplines and cultures in order to find new intersectional ideas.

Even if you’re an old hand at creativity and innovation and know the theories and techniques that the author writes about, his compelling stories and clear approach will help you understand them at a deeper level.  And if you’re just getting started in this field, this is a terrific, solid place to begin. 

I particularly appreciate the focus on exploring the intersections of different fields and the great stories that demonstrate how truly unique innovations spring from explorations at the edges of disciplines.  There is still too often a tendency to respond to the call for innovation by gathering a handful of people and decamping to the nearest conference room for a rousing brainstorming session.  Unfortunately the blizzard of sticky notes that come out of these sessions seldom results in anything that makes a significant difference either in value to the customer or to the bottom line.

Deliberately putting together unrelated fields, however, can force thinking onto totally new paths where breakthroughs have a chance to reveal themselves.  Supermarket guru, Phil Lempert, reminded attendees of the recent Brand ManageCamp conference that out of 30,000 new supermarket products, only 100 are successful three years later.  Any normal person who was failing 99.7% of the time would think about changing the way they do things (assuming they were still around to make such a decision).   Exploring intersections may not guarantee success, but it will give you a chance to create something truly new and valuable.

The author calls these “intersectional innovations” and characterizes them as:

• Surprising and fascinating.
• Take leaps in new directions.
• Open up entirely new fields.
• Provide a space for a person, team, or company to call its own.
• Generate followers, which means the creators can become leaders.
• Provide a source of directional innovation for years or decades to come.
• Affect the world in unprecedented ways.

Here’s an example of one of the stories in the book.

Mick Pearce was challenged to build an attractive, functioning office building that uses no air conditioning in the steamy climate of Zimbabwe.  He succeeded … by studying termites who build mounds that keep a stead internal temperature of 87 degrees.  The complex saved an immediate $3.5 million by not having to install air conditioning.

Read excerpt from HBS Working Knowledge:  -- JW

Oxymoronic Paradox

This comes from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools:

An oxymoron has been wisely described as "a compressed paradox." Looking at it the other way around, I think of a paradox as "an extended oxymoron." To me, they're close cousins because they both link up contradictory or incongruous elements. And they both play around in the most fascinating way with the difference between literal truth and figurative truth. For this reason, I include both oxymoronic and paradoxical observations (and a few others, as you shall soon see) under the rubric of oxymoronica.

Oxymoronica: Paradoxical Wit & Wisdom From History's Greatest Wordsmiths by Marty Grothe $10
Amazon

Sample excerpts:

The superfluous is the most necessary.
Voltaire

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone
else.
Margaret Mead

I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Georg Hegel

We are never prepared for what we expect.
James Michener

To be believed, make the truth unbelievable.
Napoleon Bonaparte

The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.
Maurice Chapelain

What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
Sydney J. Harris

Seeing What’s Next

Somewhere in a dark cubicle in the bowels of the Harvard Business School, there is an Artificial Intelligence network gathering research both primary and secondary, grinding it through the known intelligence systems and spitting out page after page of useful guidance for the waiting minds of business people trying to make sense of a chaotic world.  Buy at amazon.com.

This is how it must be because surely one person (even with the help of willing graduate students and aligned consultants) couldn’t produce the ever-quickening flow of books that are being released under the name of Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and perhaps the world’s only real challenge to the legendary business-guru status of Peter Drucker.

The Christensen pronouncements began with the Innovator’s Dilemma in mid-1997, picked up steam with the Innovator’s Solution in the fall of 2003 and then amazingly enough tossed us another full meal to digest less than a year later in Seeing What’s Next, Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change. I loved the first book, was amazed that the second was even better than the first (a rare occurrence) and had no hopes for the third … until I sat down to read it.

While Dilemma and Solution tell us how to succeed by overcoming the barriers to innovation, Next shows us how to recognize the signals of change that could easily rock our world. Imagine confidently recognizing the potential of Google or Ebay (before the rest of the pack). Or what if you could read the signals being transmitted by the health care or telecommunications industies and understood how they might affect your industry or company? Just as importantly, what if you could use these signals to more successfully weave your way through the constantly changing landscape in order to develop products and services that create new value for your customers and for you?

It’s a tall order but as usual Christensen and crew deliver. This isn’t a simple, fun read but it is worth putting some time and thought into the theories and how they relate to you and your world. Next does boil down very complex thinking into three primary elements of a predictive model:

1. Look for signals of change
2. Evaluate competitive battles
3. Watch important strategic choices.

We will provide some additional thinking on each of these elements in future messages … but, for now, we suggest that you click on over to amazon and buy the book if you don’t already have it. It’s another must read for every manager’s bookshelf … and for all of you investment-types, this might help you spot the next Google. (The authors offer no guarantees along this line, of course!)

Book Club: Open Innovation

Henry Chesbrough

The first pick for the new Innovation Book Club is Henry Chesbrough's book which is part of the movement of "innovating innovation." It's also the source of one of my favorite quotes. John Seely Brown's lead sentence in the Foreward to this book, states: As a student of innovation for more than twenty years, I still find it amazing just how difficult innovation continues to be. My whole body relaxed when I read that ... If John Seely Brown still finds this difficult, it makes sense that the rest of us keep wrestling with the complexities of innovation.

Henry starts us off with an equally jolting comment: "Most innovations fail." Following that, the equally dire: "And companies that don't innovate die." But he doesn't leave us in this hopeless state for long. Using some excellent case studies, he spells out the new world of innovation, a world that rewards some of the same practices that were strictly forbidden not too many years ago.

Great Groups

Here is a bit of wisdom from Warren Bennis ... it is so powerful, it deserves the entire focus for this week. I've broken the paragraph into bite-sized chunks because there is so much food for thought here. Enjoy

"As they say, 'None of us is as smart as all of us.'

That's good, because the problems we face are too complex to be solved by any one person or any one discipline.

Our only chance is to bring people together from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines who can refract a problem through the prisim of complementary minds allied in common purpose.

I call such collections of talent Great Groups. The genius of Great Groups is that they get remarkable people -- strong individual achievers -- to work together to get results.

Gaining Customer Insights – the Creative Way

Finding out what customers want is a fundamental aspect of innovation. However, it’s one of those things that is easier said than done. Customer surveys and focus groups have proven ineffective in most cases and bad data can be worse than no data.

Gerald Zaltman in his book, How Customers Think states, “The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and often negative.” He tells a chilling tale of a household appliance manufacturer whose market research showed that 60% of customers were likely to purchase the new appliance. A year later the actual results were that 12% had actually purchased and the customers were unable to explain their reasons for not buying. Imagine gearing up sales, marketing, manufacturing, distribution and service for a new product and being off by a factor of 5!

Click here to buy the book.

So how do you gain true customer insights? We thought this would be an interesting question to explore to see what you’ve done and seen done. One example we’ve seen recently is Staples’ InnovationQuest. The nationwide quest for simple new office products was launched in 2003 and prospective inventors had until November to submit their ideas. To enhance participation, Staples offered a $25,000 prize to the top winner and $5,000 for the other eleven finalists. Additionally, the winner would receive royalties if the product was produced and sold by Staples.

The very process of launching the InnovationQuest created positives… in addition to engaging people (and most likely, customers) with Staples, the inventions submitted would highlight perceived problems. This week Staples announced the twelve finalists out of 8,000 entries and invited the world to judge them. The voting process invites other customers into the mix and their votes are another way to get feedback. I’m not sure that the inventions include any blockbusters such as the Post-It Note, but the value is in the customer feedback rather than the actual new products ideas submitted.

So, tell us what you’ve seen in the way of gaining customer insights. Please add your experiences and insights to the comments section.

Creative Destruction

"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."
-- George Bernard Shaw

Recently, Dana Wolcott suggested that I read Peter Schwartz's book Inevitable Surprises. It took awhile to get to it, but I've just finished it and think it's an important read for our time and for anyone thinking about innovation and change. Peter Schwartz is the cofounder and chairman of Global Business Network who frequently consults with governments and large corporations. Schwartz and GBN are best known for their scenario planning process.

Schwartz argues that many of the big surprises ahead can be foreseen if we use scenario thinking to closely examining existing signs. He states that in a turbulent environment such as ours, there are three critical things to keep in mind:

First: There will be more surprises.
Second: We will be able to deal with them.
Third: We can anticipate many of them. In fact, we can make some pretty good assumptions about how most of them will play out.

There are many things Schwartz talks about in this book that are depressingly chilling (the inevitability of a global plague and the breakdown of law and order in Russia and large parts of Africa) but there are also positive notes (the long boom, the shift toward protecting the environement, advances in science and technology).

Perhaps most useful, however are his prescriptions for anticipating future changes, whether they are the global changes surrounding us or the changs in our own organizations and communities. Here are just a few of his recommendations ... you will want to buy the book to read the rest:

Strategic conversations -- "Build and mainain your sensory and intelligence systems. That doesn't just mean technological sysems. It means the continued kinds of 'strategic conversations' in which you and your cohorts and colleagues keep looking around to observe and interpret the interaction of forces that might affect you, your enterprises, and your communities."

Early warning indicators -- "Identify in advance the kinds of'early-warning indicators' that would signal that a change is rapidly upon you."

Creative destruction -- "Put in place mechanisms to enger creative destruction. The institutions, companies, agencies, political parties, and the values of the past may turn out to be moribund and couterproductive in a new historical environment. Are you prepated to discard them? What processes, practices, and organizations have you actually dismantled in the last year or two? If the answer is none, perhaps it's time to get some practice in *before* urgency strikes."

Let's take this question of creative destruction and see if we're practicing it in our own lives. What have you creatively destroyed in the past two years? What should you be looking at seriously and thinking about how to creatively destroy it? Please use the comment option below to reply.

Innovation Spectrum: The Trouble with Tribbles

If you remember this Star Trek episode, you’ll recall those cute, little furry creatures that everyone loved ... at least until fur- balls began spilling out of every nook and cranny, threatening the survival of the Enterprise. (It turns out that tribbles are born pregnant and hungry. The more they eat the more tribbles there are to have little tribbles who love to eat and have more little tribbles, who ... you get the picture).

The words we use are somewhat like tribbles ... they might seem bright-eyed and innocent on the surface, but they can often start multiplying and nibbling away at our understanding, creating misunderstanding and chaos before we recognize what’s gone wrong.

Clayton Christensen’s ground-breaking and award-winning series ("The Innovator's Dilemma" and "The Innovator's Solution") is a powerful guide to innovation; however, the basic terminology is somewhat like tribbles ... it’s a little fuzzy and can be distracting. However, we *highly* recommend both books.