Monthly Archives: March 2012

Following the Line to Innovation

Following the Line to InnovationOK, it may not really be an innovation, but I appreciated the following operational efficiency anyway:

Going to check out of the Hilton New York City, there was a queue in spite of the several available kiosks and multiple employees staffing the counter to help customers with various requests. Hilton had obviously invested in some business process consulting (or possibly listened to an employee suggestion) because in addition to the kiosks and the employees staffing the counter, they had an employee staffing the line to identify the needs of guests while they waited in line.

In my case, she asked how my stay was and I told her the story about how I had difficulty with the WiFi not allowing me back into my work e-mail after the connection went down and came back up again. I told her that the first night it worked fine and that I expected not to pay for the second night because it didn’t work properly (leaving important time-critical messages stuck in my outbox). She was sympathetic, but I halfway expected to have to tell the story all over again when I got up to the counter (as this is the typical bad customer experience on the phone or in person). I was surprised and impressed when she told the counter person to take off the second night’s WiFi and that I was ready to check out. Thankfully, I didn’t have to tell the story again.

This is good operational practice for a couple of reasons:

  1. It gave them a way of increasing throughput during busy times when they would otherwise be limited by the number of computer workstations.
  2. It provided a good customer experience. I only had to tell the story once.
  3. I was on my way much more quickly as a result, and the counter person was on to their next customer more quickly as well
  4. The poor person behind me didn’t have to wait while I told my story again, and potentially argued with the counter person because this had already been taken care of while we were both waiting in line (except no arguing was necessary).
  5. If the customer has no special needs, the employee can direct the customer to an available kiosk.

This example, while more about good operational practice and customer service than innovation, does provide the opportunity to identify process innovation opportunities if we look at our own business through a lens of separating the customer experience into the following parts:

  1. Information Gathering
  2. Information Evaluation
  3. Information Processing

Are there times in your business when your customers are waiting? Why are they waiting?

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Do you have certain resources that reach capacity quickly or for sustained periods during busy times that you can’t expand easily?

Is there a way to utilize that waiting time to separate out the information gathering or information evaluation components of a customer interaction, to allow for a division of labor that can be more easily flexed to accommodate demand spikes?

In a phone scenario, could you not implement an interactive voice response phone system that notifies the customer how long they can expect to wait and then transitions to a “While you are waiting…” message and then asks the customer for their name, account number, and phone number to either be played for the agent before transferring the call, or maybe even trying to do some kind of speech to text and facilitate a record-lookup using that information?

Maybe you need to allow your skilled people to focus on information evaluation and processing, while lower skilled people focus on information gathering. Or, maybe in your industry the skilled people are at the front end, focusing on information gathering and evaluation and need to be separated from the information processing tasks.

In a manufacturing environment, while we don’t talk about information gathering, evaluation, or processing, we still use the same logic to evaluate the overall system throughput. Then, break it down into components so that we can identify and manage critical constraints and manage them in a way that maximizes throughput.

So whether you are in a manufacturing or a service environment, are you constantly looking for ways to optimize throughput and maximize profits or customer service (or maybe even both)?

What are your favorite stories of process innovations that have led to improved customer service or manufacturing efficiencies?

P.S. Continue reading on this topic by reading – Followup – Following the Line to Innovation at Costco

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Retained Innovation

Retained InnovationAs a provider of innovation coaching services along with training and innovation speaking, I try to talk to as many other fellow practitioners as my schedule allows to keep abreast of what others are experiencing and doing. What I have found in the area of billing clients is that there are a myriad of ways of receiving compensation for the work that we do. Everything from traditional hourly/daily/weekly to at-risk payment types like graduated rates, milestone payments, equity stakes, contingencies based on achieved savings, royalties, and even retainers.

Of all the different methods that I’ve seen, I think that royalties and savings contingencies make the most sense in revenue augmentation and cost reduction scenarios. Companies should be willing to reward those practitioners that deliver real revenue increases and cost savings, and practitioners should be willing to accept lower compensation if they don’t.

But when it comes to looking at innovation projects and innovation process then I think that the retainer model is the best way to go. Innovation is about competitive advantage and in today’s competitive environment, companies can’t afford to wait around until their favorite practitioner is available to fully engage, and at the same time they can’t afford to go with whoever is available regardless of quality and fit.

I believe the retainer model works best for innovation projects and innovation process because the guidance is there when you need it. It can be as proactive or reactive as the needs of the client dictate, and it provides the continuity necessary to keep program improvements on track. The retainer model also allows the company to access their practitioner a few hours at a time, something that would be unworkable for both sides if a new contract was needed each time.

The retainer model also can be quite useful to companies who would like to have a Chief Innovation Officer (a steward of the innovation process and culture for a company), but can’t justify the overhead of a full-time resource.

But regardless of how a company chooses to resource their innovation capability, every company should have an innovation strategy, and that should include continuous re-evaluation and improvement using both inside and outside resources to preserve freshness and to introduce new thinking.

So what is your innovation strategy?

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Innovation Perspectives – Insights and Execution

Innovation Perspectives - Insights and ExecutionThis is the seventh of several ‘Innovation Perspectives’ articles we published in 2009 from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?’. Now, here is my perspective:

For my money, the most dangerous misconception that leaders have is that coming up with a great idea is the key to innovation.

This is not the case. Insights and execution are the most important ingredients for creating innovation. As more industries become commodity battlegrounds, success will now be the driven by two key things:

  1. The quality of the insights a company has identified to build ideas upon
  2. The organization’s ability to turn their insight-driven ideas into reality

As innovation moves front and center in an increasing number of companies and industries, the quality of insights and execution will separate the winners from the losers.

Apple moving into the phone business should not have surprised a single handset manufacturer out there. What competitive response did handset manufacturers expect as they introduced increasingly music-capable phones?

The idea of a phone that is also a music player is not, in and of itself, a differentiated idea capable of capturing the imagination of the consumer, and so the iPhone was not created with the goal in mind of creating a digital music player that is also a phone (though that was the strategic purpose for its creation). Apple needed a strategic response to protect their digital music player market from being disrupted by the mobile phone handset manufacturers.

But, Apple also knew that to be successful in an industry that they had no experience in, mobile phones, that they needed to introduce a truly differentiated and valuable offering. To achieve that goal, they needed a unique insight to build their ideas on of what a mobile phone should aspire to be.

The insight they chose to build their mobile phone business on, was the insight that people were now ready to make their computing experience more portable, while also at the same time making it more personal. The key idea built on this insight was that of the App Store. In building their phone around this insight, they were able to create a device that not only could play music (and help to protect their digital music player market from being disrupted), but could also perform just about any other function that a user might desire (or even imagine to build).

A lesser company would have endeavored to build the world’s best music phone, but instead Apple realized that it was more important to build the world’s most personal and customizable mobile phone (that happens to play music). This is the power of building around an insight instead of an idea.

Apple realized that the contracts with AT&T and the permission to do something like the App Store, along with building an application development platform that developers could rally around, were possibly even more important than the device itself.

One of the lesser known innovation truths is that a true innovation is often more than just a single idea, but is often several ideas coming together to serve a new key insight. Apple’s insight was that computing was about to become more personal and move to the hand as part of this increasingly personal transition.

What insight will you build your business around?

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Innovation Requires Diagonal Thinking

Innovation Requires Diagonal ThinkingThe outcome of a back and forth of a dialog on Twitter with Scramray E. Pinkus generated a lovely quote worth sharing:

“Innovating is like thinking diagonally. A perfect combination of both linear and lateral.”

– Scramray E. Pinkus (@Easelton)

The conversation sprung out of a tweet I posted that postulated that when people use technology (iPads, smartphones, laptops, etc.) and television as child minders, that they are actually promoting linear thinking in their children at the expense of the lateral thinking that our society so desperately needs. We need strong lateral thinking to compliment the dominant linear thinking out there, so that together they can drive the social innovation the world needs to fix this mess we’ve made.

What do you think?

Technology as child minder, positive or negative effects on the innovative capacity of our children?

One of my proof points is this article from The Washington Post.

Any other proof points out there?

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Food Innovation Sighting – Doritos Tacos

Food Innovation Sighting - Doritos TacosI don’t typically frequent fast food restaurant chains, but today I did, and I had a food innovation sighting for my trouble. I stopped by the local Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Taco Bell combination store and as I was picking up my crispy strips order I heard a guy order two Doritos Tacos.

“Doritos Tacos?” I thought to myself. Then I looked up and sure enough Yum Brands has teamed up with PepsiCo’s Frito Lay to bring you the Doritos Taco. It’s just like it sounds. Frito Lay has created giant round Nacho Cheese Doritos and folded them into the shape of a taco shell, and then Yum Brands employees combine them with the usual Taco Bell taco fillings.

Now I didn’t actually try one, but how could they not be good and absolutely stuffed with calories?

So hats off to Frito Lay and Yum Brands on the creation of this simple food innovation.

For those of you keeping score with your SCAMPER framework scorecard, file this one under Combine.

What other food innovation combinations would make sense for two companies to create?

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Innovating Through Downturns

Innovating Through DownturnsWhile most individuals and organizations natural reaction to an economic downturn is fear and retrenchment, they also present a time of great opportunity.

Where would Microsoft be if they hadn’t continued investing through the downturn of the early 90’s?

  • Microsoft may never have finished the hugely successful Windows 95.

Where would Apple be if they hadn’t continued investing through the technology crash of 2001-2003?

  • Apple may never have fully realized the promise of the iPod and subsequent iPhone.

  • The unemployment rate increases (more available workers)
  • Interest rates drop (lower cost of capital)
  • People become fearful of losing their jobs making it easier to recruit from companies reducing or eliminating their innovation investments (increased labor mobility)
  • People are more open to moving if a spouse’s job is eliminated or at risk (increased labor mobility)
  • When a recession arrives, it is easier to acquire tax breaks or other incentives for expansion, new sites, etc. (lower investment costs)

So, if companies have positive cash flows or significant amounts of cash on their balance sheet, or promising ideas to invest in, then there is no better time to invest. Companies with the courage and financial capability to invest in innovation through a downturn, absolutely should.

In addition to all of the other benefits, there is no better opportunity to achieve competitive separation through continued investment in innovation.

It does, however, take a strong CEO and steady board to have the courage and conviction to make such an investment. Innovation is not a perfect science and requires a tolerance for failure and a long-term commitment.

In today’s short-term Wall Street quarterly profit-driven corporate reality, investors’ short-term outlook may be the biggest impediment of all. But, smart organizations will find strategic solutions to overcome this impediment.

Organizations should take the following strategic actions to maintain or expand their innovation initiatives, despite the current global economic downturn:

  1. Secure the leadership flexibility capable of continuing to invest in innovation despite financial pressures
  2. Identify resources that you would like to have had access to during good times, that you might now have access to such as:
    • Labor in scarce specialties
    • Affordable capital
    • Scarce real estate

  3. Increase competitive monitoring to identify opportunities that may be created in areas where the competition reduces previous innovation investment
  4. Increase customer research to identify opportunities to refine your ability to deliver products and services that deliver increased customer value, ideally at lower cost
  5. Improve your innovation processes to improve your ability to innovate more quickly and effectively than your competition
  6. Improve your organizational agility to increase its flexibility to adapt to changes in market conditions caused by the downturn and to shift resources efficiently and with increased speed

Organizations that take these necessary strategic actions, will come out the other side stronger than the competition, stronger than ever before, and create opportunities to preserve or attain market leadership.

Happy innovating!

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Interview with Retired President X

Interview with Retired President XI had lunch in 2009 with the recently-retired president of a multi-billion dollar company and had a great conversation about innovation, leadership, and culture. The insights are still relevant and he enjoys his private life so I won’t be naming any names, but I will share some of the key insights and advice for innovators that came out of the conversation.

  1. Don’t be afraid to pay people well. When people aren’t busy worrying about money, they can focus on how to get more money into the business instead of trying to figure out how to get more money out of the business for themselves. Removing money from the equation also increases the chances that employees will bring their best ideas to the business instead of leaving to create a startup based on them.
  2. If you are an innovator and want to develop your idea within the company you are working for (whether it is an incremental innovation or a radical innovation), try to take it to someone who can say yes. There are far too many people in organizations that are trained to say no, and far too few who are equipped to say yes. Unfortunately, most organizations reinforce the importance of saying no, without empowering enough managers to say yes.
  3. Run as flat an organization as possible is crucial to innovation. Flatter organizations have fewer people in the middle to say no, and flatter organizations require managers to push more decisions to the edges of the organization. Pushing decisions to the edge of an organization tends to result in better decisions. The farther removed you are from all of the factors in decisions, the less successful you will be in making them correctly.
  4. Echoing former Halliburton CEO John Gibson’s thoughts – people brought in to help re-make the organization will ultimately be defeated by the processes and culture of the organization. Organizational change must occur from within and will generally occur quite slowly.
  5. Big ideas should be separated from the main organization into a new organization funded by the board of directors and reporting directly to them. They should also be staffed with employees from outside the main organization as well (except maybe Finance to enable consistent reporting). When you try and keep these potential radical innovations within the main organization, inevitably conflicts of interest will emerge between funding the idea and funding other transitory short-term leadership priorities.
  6. Upper management doesn’t generally know the best ways to effectively improve individual components of the organization. One approach to maximizing incremental innovation and improvement possibilities is to give the employees (not management) of a factory, a business unit, etc. a pile of money to use to improve the organization. You will be surprised how quickly employees can self-organize to determine the best uses for the money, how good they will be in selecting the best improvements to fund, and how fast stories about such an effort will spread to other parts of the organization.
  7. When people have an idea, they often just jump in and start developing the idea (even those ideas that others have had before), often reinventing the wheel and repeating many of the mistakes of those who have gone before them. To reduce waste and to accelerate success, consider having people submit a short research paper on the area of innovation they plan to pursue (to show that they have researched those that have gone before them). At the same time, somehow we have to find a better way of capturing the learnings from failed efforts for those undertaking new projects to learn from.

Finally, President X expressed that he would encourage anyone about to rise to the top job to take a break before assuming the top job to refresh, reflect, and to bring renewed energy and insights into the job. Whether or not you are in the top job or several levels down, I think there are some interesting insights to ponder here.

What do you think?

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Did you like Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire?

Did you like Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire?My book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire has gotten a lot of great reviews on Amazon already, and several likes, and an increasing number of companies are buying it in bulk to help set a common language of innovation in their organization.

I am constantly humbled by the support that people show for my writing, most recently in a post on the Harvard Business Review Blog by Scott D Anthony titled The Making of an Innovation Master.

If you would like to show support for my writing endeavors, please click the ‘like’ button on Amazon (the international flavors have like buttons too).

If you have already read the book, please let others know what you found useful or valuable about it by writing a short review on your favorite book site. Don’t forget to grab your free stuff here.

And if you would like to build a common language of innovation in your organization, I can help organize a bulk order at up to 35% off the list price for USA deliveries (usually with no shipping and no tax) through a bookseller I’ve had great success with – just contact me. 800-CEO-READ also does a great job with bulk orders and can do some customizations.

Thank you very much for showing your support for Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.

Happy Innovating!

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The Nine Innovation Roles

I’m seeing an increasing number of articles about innovation personalities and the like, and I’m a firm believer that it’s not personalities that matter so much when it comes to innovation, it’s the roles that we play in making innovation happen (or not). So, I would like to add my Nine Innovation Roles to the conversation.

The Nine Innovation RolesThe following is an excerpt from my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire:

Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.

Here are The Nine Innovation Roles:

1. Revolutionary

  • The Revolutionary is the person who is always eager to change things, to shake them up, and to share his or her opinion. These people tend to have a lot of great ideas and are not shy about sharing them. They are likely to contribute 80 to 90 percent of your ideas in open scenarios.

2. Conscript

  • The Conscript has a lot of great ideas but doesn’t willingly share them, either because such people don’t know anyone is looking for ideas, don’t know how to express their ideas, prefer to keep their head down and execute, or all three.

3. Connector

  • The Connector does just that. These people hear a Conscript say something interesting and put him together with a Revolutionary; The Connector listens to the Artist and knows exactly where to find the Troubleshooter that his idea needs.

4. Artist

  • The Artist doesn’t always come up with great ideas, but artists are really good at making them better.

5. Customer Champion

  • The Customer Champion may live on the edge of the organization. Not only does he have constant contact with the customer, but he also understands their needs, is familiar with their actions and behaviors, and is as close as you can get to interviewing a real customer about a nascent idea.

6. Troubleshooter

  • Every great idea has at least one or two major roadblocks to overcome before the idea is ready to be judged or before its magic can be made. This is where the Troubleshooter comes in. Troubleshooters love tough problems and often have the deep knowledge or expertise to help solve them.

7. Judge

  • The Judge is really good at determining what can be made profitably and what will be successful in the marketplace.

8. Magic Maker

  • The Magic Maker takes an idea and makes it real. These are the people who can picture how something is going to be made and line up the right resources to make it happen.

9. Evangelist

  • The Evangelist knows how to educate people on what the idea is and help them understand it. Evangelists are great people to help build support for an idea internally, and also to help educate customers on its value.

As you can see, creating and maintaining a healthy innovation portfolio requires that you develop the organizational capability of identifying what role each individual is best at playing in your organization. It should be obvious that a failure to involve and leverage all nine roles along the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea commercialization path will lead to suboptimal results. To be truly successful, you must be able to bring in the right roles at the right times to make your promising ideas stronger on your way to making them successful. Most organizations focus too much energy on generating the ideas and not enough on developing their ideas or their people.

If you would prefer, here is a slide deck that I posted to slideshare.net:

Action Items

  1. Download the simple Nine Innovation Roles Worksheet from my FREE STUFF page and use it in your groups to help understand what innovation roles people tend towards and which ones are underrepresented.
  2. Do you believe these are the roles that drive successful innovation? If not, why not.
  3. Book a Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop
  4. This is just an excerpt. Please check out the whole book.

Sound off in the comments below.

Book a Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop

Download the PDF version of the Nine Innovation Roles:

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Innovation Can Come From Anyone

Innovation Can Come From Anyone“Innovation can come from anyone, but it is required from everyone for an organization to remain successful.”

Or taken another way:

“Innovation can come from anywhere, but you must be looking everywhere to find it.”

Innovation comes from good listening, observing, watching, waiting, connecting, and synthesizing.

Innovation comes from the creation of a unique, differentiated customer insight that you can build your ideation, your experimentation, your collaboration, and your commercialization efforts around. The goal of course is to turn that unique, differentiated insight into solutions valued above every existing alternative. Solutions that not only create value, but that you also stand ready and able to help people access and understand the need for and relevance in their life.

It is because innovation can come from anywhere and can involve everyone in the organization in making innovation happen that I created The Nine Innovation Roles and my innovation value framework, to help people make sense of what is necessary to make innovation successful as they form their innovation project teams and process, and to give people a simple framework to hold close as they think about creating innovation success.

I hope you’ll check out both of these and let me know what you think!

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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