Innovation 2004

Steve Denning, Storytelling

"Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories." -- Mary Cathering Bateson

"Through a story, life invites us to come inside as a participant." -- Stephen Denning

We are delighted to have Steve at the 10th annual Convergence because we've been trying to entice him to join us for several years but our schedules kept missing. Steve has been enormously influential in bringing storytelling into organizations. His eureka! moment came during his time with the World Bank when a 28-word story changed his life.

Steve in a nutshell:
This sharp, crisp left-brained analyst discovered -- just a few years ago -- the warm, fuzzy, right-brained storyteller within.

Now inspires other left-brained types to find the storyteller lurking within them and to tell their story.

Writes novels and Elizabethan sonnets for fun.

Steve shares a bit of his background below.

MY LIFE IN STORYTELLING: CHAPTER ONE

The first chapter of my life in storytelling is very short, although it lasted a long while. More than five decades. You see, I was born in Sydney Australia. I grew up there. Unlike most people, my father did not sit me on his knee and tell me a story. My mother did not put me to sleep telling me fairy tales. I had S.D.S. – Story Deprivation Syndrome.

But I did well at school. I studied psychology and law. I worked as a lawyer in Sydney. I got a post-graduate degree in England.

And then I joined the World Bank in Washington D.C. I was the quintessential analytic manager. Crisp. Clear. Sharp decisions. Stories were the last thing on my mind. These were the things you stayed away from. You needed bottom-line. You needed analysis. Those were the things that got you on. And I got on. I climbed right up the managerial ladder of the World Bank. Stories played no part in chapter one. Stories were not part of my life.

Don't miss Chapter 2 where he tells you how, rather than being fired, he took on a project that had a zero probablility of succeeding. This is where he met his 28-word hero story. And Chapter 3 tells you how he began to connect the dots into a powerful change agent that can be used by anyone in any organization.

Here's a recent article by Steve from HBR.

Steve is the author of two great books:

The Springboard

Squirrel, Inc. -- which will be released later this year ... we hope by Convergence.

and co-author with John Seely Brown, Katalina Groh and Larry Prusak of Storytelling in Organizations, available June, 2004

You can read some of Steve's thoughts on knowledge management on his website.

Amidon's Book Chosen as BoM

Debra Amidon's new book The Innovation SuperHighway: Harnessing Intellectual Capital for Collaborative Advantage has been chosen by the KnowledgeBoard as their book-of-the-month selection. Debra is one of our Panel of Advisers ... so congrats to her and we should check out the book -- it gets a 5-star rating on amazon.com!

You're invited to attend a one-hour conversation focused on the book. 13 July, 14:00 BST, 15:00 CET, 09:00 USA East Time. For an official invitation, email Debra Amidon.

There is a study guide available to help you get a scope of the work and the Table of Contents:

Part I The Innovation Frontier
Part II Architecting a Future
Part III The Globe as a Network
Part IV Innovation Leadership in Practice
Part V The Millennium Vision

Review comment -- full review below: What I liked most about this book was the simple fact that it encouraged me to think.

Intentions & Tools

This discussion was initiated by John Wolpert (one of our panel of advisors) who is working with BRIDGE Services, Australian Industry InnovationXchange to bring a group of biotech companies together to create new products and services. We'd love to have your comments below.

From John Wolpert:
Apologies for not putting this into a blog. Things are great here, but today is a swirl of activity and it only allows enough time to drop this thought in a note - as I have not committed to memory or habit the activity of entering the blog or wiki.

Was working some TRIZ methodology into our information systems today and noted something. I have bought and read a prodigious amount of TRIZ material in the past months, and I find strong methods for problem-solving in the examples. But it did not occur to me until today - as I was trying to fit an object model to our BRIDGE ontology - that what I don't see is problem-creation.

As you know, our primary method in BRIDGE is to triage out of interviews with researchers and other "innovators" two kinds of objects - Inventions and Intentions, and then combine these objects, often across company lines, to generate new opportunities for action. Now, the thing we have discovered is that Intentions always show up after triage as verbs, and Inventions always show up as nouns. This was probably obvious a priori, but I didn't really think about it until I saw it happen naturally in the database. (We are using theBRAIN (www.thebrain.com) and other data tools as our backbone, which makes it easy to see relationships between objects grow organically.)

Innovation Stories

Catherine Bateson says our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

It might well be that the most important thing we could do together is capture stories of innovation. If you need some guidance on how to use stories as part of a change process, see Steve Denning's HBR article:
"Telling Tales."

Post your stories on the Wiki.

The Role of Trust

Almost everyone talks about trust being a critical part of innovation. Are there research findings that support this assumption? Why do you believe (or not believe) trust is an important part of the culture that supports and encourages innovation?

Members of the Innovation2004 project should post their thoughts on the Wiki. Guests can use the comment fields below.

Innovation a Day

An Innovation A Day ....

If the old saying, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," is true, what does an innovation a day do?

Building on the "What if..." item -- What if we started or ended each day capturing in a quick list the most innovative things that happened to us or that we witnessed that day....and posted it somewhere accessible -- What have you seen or done today (or recently) that best expresses the concept of "innovation"? What has been the most innovative thing to happen to you today?

Maybe this is the starting place to expand our personal definitions of "innovation" if we see how others describe it.

This also seems like a great way to open our perception ... if we are actively looking for what's innovative every day, we will probably see a lot of new things.

Post what you seen on the Wiki category "Innovation a Day" -- Under the category Information.

Group Name

Here's a first cut at drafting some possibilities that came out of the survey ... To add, tweak or vote on your preference, go to the WIKI.

1. Global Innovation Group
2. Worldwide Innovation Commons
3. Global Innovation Study Team (GIST)
4.
5.

Member Pages

One of the top “Wouldn’t it be great if…” responses was:
WIBGI … this group became an innovation community of practice that continued to collaborate on additional innovation-related projects, even after this report is completed.

In order to become a community, we need to know who we are … therefore a WIKI page has been set up for each of you with your name, email and Key Learning (If you haven't sent in a Key Learning yet, please email 1-2 sentences about what you've learned about innovation.)

Please go to your member page and add whatever other information you’d like for people to know about you. This will give you some practice with the Wiki … which you only need to use once or twice to get the hang of it. You can cut and paste from your website and all the links will come with it.

Picture -- it's more fun when we can see faces, so try to put a picture of you on your page. Photos that are 1.5" wide and 150 pixels work well. If you can't change the size of your photo, email it to Joyce Wycoff and she'll adjust it and load it for you.

Phase I - Definition

Synthesizing a Definition of Innovation -- Target date: 7/23/2004

There is a great deal of definition fodder on the Wiki now ... those of you who have signed up for editing and synthesizing, now is the time to read through the material and boil it down into a definition that captures the essence of innovation.

This will be our first experience of producing something as a collaborative group.

Action Groups

Here's the current list of action groups gleaned from the Member Survey:

Edna Pasher, Edna Pasher PhD & Associates

Dr. Edna Pasher, CEO, Edna Pasher PhD & Associates, - Management Consultants, Israel
Key Learning: Innovation is about creating new knowledge based on existing knowledge and exploited to create value. It seems that each of these elements is critical for successful innovation.

International Innovation Day?

Naina Redhu suggests as one of her "Wouldn't it be great if's ... ":

--the day the Innovation 2004 report is released is declared as "International Innovation Day"!
(I know there is a creativity and innovation day....but no "International Innovation Day")

It turns out that October 1 is a Friday and could easily be set up as an "innovation day" if we started to let people know now. This could be the first activity of the group ... to publicize this day.

What do you think? Please comment below.

Wouldn't it be great if ...

It only seems fitting that we should use some of our own tools ... so to get us started, let's each post 15 answers to the great question, "Wouldn't it be great if..." Here are some starters ... please post yours in the comments section below. Try to come up with 15 even if they start to sound wild and crazy!

So far ... 101 answers have been posted ... we took a shot at grouping them into themes to help you think about what's important for you.

Debra Amidon, Entovation Intl

Debra M. Amidon, Founder and CEO, ENTOVATION International Ltd., and prolific author in the areas of knowledge management and innovation. See below for list of books.
Key Learning: The world is now our manageable landscape. Connections are made East-to-West, North-to-South with many nodes in between. But The Innovation SuperHighway is not only a physical infrastructure, albeit technical and electronic. It is human – a function of insight, interaction and imagination resident in the minds, hearts and hands of people around the globe.

Books:
Managing the Knowledge Assets into the 21st Century (1987)
Innovation Strategy for the Knowledge Economy: The Ken Awakening (1997)
Creating the Knowledge-Based Business (1997)
Collaborative Innovation and the Knowledge Economy (1998)
The Architectural Primer for Knowledge Innovation (2001)
The Global Knowledge Primer (2001)
The Innovation SuperHighway (2003);
Knowledge Economics: Principles, Practices and Policies (2004)

George Land, FarSight Group

George Land, Chairman, Leadership 2000, the FarSight Group, author of Grow or Die, and co-author of Breakpoint and Beyond
Key Learning: Innovation is most successful if it is:

-driven from the top
-has a robust process or system with professional innovation process leaders
-gets in-depth customer emergent needs at the beginning of the process
-has clear criteria for measurement as a project proceeds from step to step
-uses these criteria rather than stage gates to speed the process
-covers all aspects of the business, not just R&D
-lies outside the normal budgeting process

Robert Newhart, Innovation Center

Robert L. Newhart II, Chief Executive Officer, Innovation Center
Key Learning: In the final analysis, innovation is all about changing the yield from resources. It is about boundary spanning, ambiguity, embracing error, the asymptote principal, and living with uncertainty. And -- very importantly -- it is fun. If you commit to the innovation revolution you will discover that laughter is the sound innovation makes when it is born.

John Wolpert, Australian Industry InnovationXchange

John Wolpert, Executive, BRIDGE Services, Australian Industry InnovationXchange
Key Learning:

Key Learnings

Ahmed A. Al-Ghamdi: The best way to gain knowledge and experience on innovation is to listen to or set with leading practitioners who have developed and deployed successful innovation management program in leading companies. You want just know the new system that they invented to manage properly, hence you will gain more from the lessons learned out of the major issue they have faced and how they managed to overcome them.

Learning through books and articles will just give you a momentary knowledge that will disappear within few days of reading them if they are not used or they are not supported with real case studies especially for those like us who work part time on innovation.

Debra Amidon: The world is now our manageable landscape. Connections are made East-to-West, North-to-South with many nodes in between. But The Innovation SuperHighway is not only a physical infrastructure, albeit technical and electronic. It is human – a function of insight, interaction and imagination resident in the minds, hearts and hands of people around the globe.

Jeneanne Rae, Georgetown Univ.

Panel of Advisors:

Jeneanne Rae, Adjunct Professor of Marketing, Georgetown University McDonough School of Business and
Co-Founder, Peer Insight, LLC
Key Learning: The basis for most consumer-related innovations is problem solving to address latent needs; and being an innovative company requires more discipline than creativity.

Mike Menke, HP

Panel of Advisors:

Mike Menke, Business Strategy Consultant, HP, Business Innovation & Technology Services
Key Learnings:

Dana Wolcott, Kodak

Panel of Advisors:

Dana Wolcott, New Business Explorer, Kodak
Key Learning: Innovation is a mindset bred from intense curiosity, unshakeable problem solving confidence, dissatisfaction with the status quo and the burning desire to fill the glass that's half full.

Joyce Wycoff, InnovationNetwork

Panel of Advisors:

Joyce Wycoff, Co-Founder of the InnovationNetwork, author and speaker on innovation processes and culture.
Key Learning: Passion for the challenge is critical. Innovation is an exciting but risky adventure that requires a great deal of energy which only comes from working on something meaningful and important.

Robert Tucker, The Innovation Resource

Panel of Advisors:

Robert Tucker, President of The Innovation Resource and author of Driving Growth through Innovation and popular speaker on innovation best practices
Key Learning:

Stan Gryskiewicz, Ph.D., CCL

Panel of Advisors:

Stan Gryskiewicz, Vice President, Global Resources, and Senior Fellow, Creativity and Innovation at the Center for Creative Leadership and author of Positive Turbulence.
Key Learning:

InnovationNetwork

InnovationNetwork is an organization that helps organizations develop and sustain the competencies and culture needed to support innovation. We offer the following services and products:

InnovationAudit -- an online cultural assessment that helps organizations know where to start and what aspects of culture to focus on. Directly linked to the InnovationDNA.

InnovationWizard -- a 24/7 innovation resource that links to your organization's intranet and provides tools, idea stimulators, great practices and information to everyone in the organization.

InnovationConvergence -- the annual gathering of corporate practitioners and consultants who share their experiences and ideas on how to create more innovative organizations. Convergence 2004 will be held September 26-29, in Minneapolis, MN. IN Members receive a 20% discount on registration.

IN Membership -- if you want to develop greater competency in the field of innovation, IN membership offers you a wealth of information, tools and techniques.

Mission Statement

Innovation 2004: Fundamentals of Innovation

Our mission is to: Revised from Member Survey input

Create an innovation commons that gathers the collective experience, thinking and wisdom of a wide cross-section of innovation practitioners, consultants and academicians in the evolving discipline of innovation.

Objectives:
Identify new synergies that emerge from the initial collaborative learning, and articulate opportunities for their application.

Create action plans for individual and/or group follow-up on these opportunities.

Synthesize the collective wisdom into an easy to use and understand report.

Distribute the report as widely as possible through various associations and publications, including trade journals and professional organizations which focus on organizational innovation.

Seize all opportunities to demonstrate how innovation can be used to achieve a better future.

Follow up on the earlier action plans, measuring performance against envisioned goals for this mission.

Survey Access

To access the surveys, please click on the appropriate survey below (links will be added when the surveys are ready for response):

Schedule:

Survey #1 -- July 12
Survey #2 -- August 2
Survey #3 -- August 23

Teleconference Info

Teleconference Schedule:

Thursday, July 22, 10:30 a.m. Eastern
Tuesday, August 17, 10:30 a.m. Eastern
Wednesday, September 8, 10:30 a.m. Eastern

The teleconferences are only open to registered participants in the Innovation2004 project. The call-in number will be emailed to participants prior to each call.

Schedule

June -- Background Information Gathering
July 1 - 25 -- Phase I

Focus:
Defining Innovation
Common Terms
Responsibility
Shared Values for Innovation

Survey
Draft results posted to blog
Comments from study participants
Teleconference

July 26 - August 17 -- Phase II

Focus:
Innovation Process Phases
Innovation Fundamental Practices
Innovation Models
Innovation Types

Survey
Draft results posted to blog
Comments from study participants
Teleconference

August 17 - September 15 -- Phase III

Focus:
Organizational Structure
Leading Indicators of Innovation
Innovation Metrics

Survey
Draft results posted to blog
Comments from study participants
Teleconference

September 20 -- Final Draft Report
September 25 -- Publish

Co-Author Roster

Ahmed Ali Al-Ghamdi ,Supervisor of Instrumentation Unit of Process & Control System, Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia)

Bob Barbour, Director & Chief Executive, Centre for Competitiveness (Ireland)

Deanna Berg, President, Innovation Strategies International

Peter Cooke, Manager, Pollution Prevention Program, Maine DEP - Office of the Commissioner

Tara Grey Coste, Ph.D. , President & CEO of American Creativity Association, also Leadership & Organizational Studies, Lewiston-Auburn College, University of Southern Maine

Jeff De Cagna, Chief Strategist and Founder, Principled Innovation LLC

Mitch Ditkoff, Principal, Idea Champions

Chuck Frey, Founder, InnovationTools

Charlie Garland, President, Business Brainstorm, LLC

Tammy Gould, Environmental Specialist III, Maine DEP - Air Quality

Adrian Gundy, Senior Executive, Centre for Competitiveness (Ireland)

Lyle Hall, Environmental Specialist III, Maine DEP - Remediation and Waste Management

Ruth Ann Hattori, Principal, Customer Contact Corporation

Ann Herrmann-Nedhi, CEO, Herrmann International

Renee Hopkins, Director, Innovation Services, Decision Analyst; Blog Writer/Editor, IdeaFlow: Creativity and Innovation (www.corante.com/ideaflow)

Kevin Jenssen, Environmental Specialist III Maine Department of Environmental Protection Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management Division of Oil and Hazardous Waste

Bob King, CEO, Goal/QPC

Mehmood Khan, Global Leader of Innovation PD, Unilever (U.K.)

Bob King, CEO, Goal/QPC

Steffen Konrath, Editor-in-Chief, IM-BOOT, Creative People & Methods Worldwide

Marie Lancup, Principal and Founder, James Lambert Consulting (UK) Ltd

Janice Maffei, Vision First

Marsha McArthur, Director, InnovationNetwork

Janice Molloy, Content Director and Managing Editor of The Systems Thinker, Pegasus Communications, Inc.

Robert Newhart, CEO, Innovation Center

Denise Nixon-Benn, Claims Innovation, Scottsdale Insurance

Anne Orban, Director, Discovery & Innovation, Innovation Focus Inc.

Mary Pierce, Environmental Specialist II, Maine DEP - Land and Water Quality

Boris Pluskowski, Director, Imaginatik Research

Donna Prestwood, Market Research Manager, Harcourt Achieve

Naina Redhu, Principal, ASIDE Consulting (India)

Rob Reeve, EDS Defence Ltd. (U.K.)

Paul Schumann, President, Glocal Vantage, Inc.

Joanne Spigner, Vision First

Scott Steen, Chief Operating Officer, The Center for Association Leadership

Vagn Strandgaard, Strandgaard Consulting A/S (Denmark)

Jennifer Thatcher, Innovations Coordinator, U.S. EPA Region 2 (New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands)

Erik Valvring, Realize AB (Sweden)

Amber Wayne, Claims Innovation, Scottsdale Insurance

Joyce Wilson-Sanford, Delhaize Group

Survey #1: Questions

Here are the beginnings thoughts on questions for the first survey which will be sent out to a broad community of people working in innovation in order to gather some initial information. Please add your thoughts and suggestions for other questions or wording of the questions in the comments section.

-- How does your organization define innovation?

-- What terms do you use and how do you define them?
Possibility
Opportunity
Idea
Concept
Types of innovation -- radical, sustaining, incremental
Phases -- fuzzy front end,

-- What do you consider absolutely fundamental to your innovation process?

-- What words related to the process of innovation do you use?
How do you define them?

-- What are the phases of your innovation process?

-- What are the leading indicators that signal effective innovation?

-- What process does your innovation project teams use?