Monthly Archives: July 2012

Veracity Required for Innovation Success

Veracity Required for Innovation SuccessA recent post by Jeffrey Phillips titled Velocity is the Only Innovation Outcome That Matters sparked respectful disagreement inside me.

I believe that when it comes to innovation, veracity is more important than velocity. Let’s look at the definition of the word veracity from our friends over at Merriam-Webster:

Veracity

1: devotion to the truth : truthfulness
2: power of conveying or perceiving truth

In my opinion it is more valuable to spend time on identifying the right customer insight and the right way to communicate with customers about the solution which you create to serve the insight, than it is to spend the same amount of time inventing faster or launching faster.

In fact your innovation velocity can exceed your innovation veracity as shown in this article.

And many a company has fallen foul of going too fast and thinking an invention will become an innovation when they are ready to launch it, including Microsoft with the Windows Tablet and Apple with the Newton, only to find that customers were not ready to adopt it as an innovation until years later.

Velocity is definitely important, but more isn’t necessarily better. Many times the competitor with a lesser innovation velocity but greater innovation veracity has ended up winning. Look at Apple and the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, etc.

It’s also more important to look for the barriers to adoption than it is to look for the barriers to creation. Innovation is all about value and this is why it is so important to pay just as much attention to value access and value translation, as you do to value creation, because it takes doing all three really well with a solution with real innovation veracity to find innovation success.

Fail to identify a solution with real innovation veracity and you are likely to miss potential elements of optimal value creation, you will likely struggle to make its value accessible, and there is a greater likelihood that you will fail to properly translate the value of the solution for your customers.

So, taken another way, the search for innovation success is a search for truth. You must therefore unlock the inner truths of your intended customers (think unmet needs or jobs-to-be-done), you must search in areas that your intended customers will feel are true for your brand, and areas that feel true to employees given the company’s mission and values. When your pursuit of innovation centers around truth and when you commit to a focused effort to increase your innovation capability – and to pursue Innovation Excellence – then and only then do you have your best chance at innovation success.

What innovation truths are you searching for?

How much innovation veracity can you create?


Build a Common Language of Innovation

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The Adopted Child of Innovation

The Adopted Child of InnovationInnovation is everywhere. Or at least the word is. CEOs talk about innovation, every technology company claims to be innovative (or to want innovative employees) and now we’re even seeing advertisements on television talk about innovation. Even Nissan, which has had innovation in their tagline for two years now, has decided to change their tagline from “Innovation for All” to something new “Innovation that Excites.” Okay, it still has innovation in it. But, the fact that they decided to move from innovation being something that is democratic, to something that is exciting, is an interesting shift. Maybe now that everybody is claiming to be innovative they felt the need to say, “No, our innovations aren’t like everyone else’s, our innovations are exciting!”

Because people talk about innovation so much, and misuse the term so frequently, I think it is important to reiterate my definition of innovation and talk a bit about the differences between invention and innovation and the differences between innovation and improvement. My definition of innovation is:

Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into solutions valued above every existing alternative – and achieves wide adoption.”

Adoption is of course key to something moving from being an invention to innovation, but then so of course is the threshold that something is valued above every existing alternative, and as a result isn’t just merely useful – but valuable. Crossing this threshold means that people willingly replace their existing solution. Crossing this threshold is what solidifies your solution as a true innovation. And that’s the point.

Improvement versus Replacement

All companies must focus on improving their existing solutions. But at the same time they must also constantly be on guard against other ways of potentially solving the same customer problem or fulfilling the same customer need. Six Sigma does a great job at fulfilling the mission of improvement and at helping to achieve operational excellence. But while an organization must be ruthless in their pursuit of perfection, or the amount of perfection that their customers are willing to pay for and that they can make profitably, organizations must also make a commitment to the pursuit of innovation excellence. The reason companies must strike a balance between the pursuit of improvement and replacement is that sooner or later something will become possible that wasn’t possible before – due to changes in technology AND customer psychological readiness for change – creating an opening for replacement. Really good value translation (and education) can help accelerate that customer readiness, but launching before both conditions exist can lead to financial ruin. When replacement does become inevitable, the only question is whether you will continue to focus on improvement and be replaced, or whether you will have the courage to replace your own solution with a new one…

Is there any innovation here to excite?

For fun you might want to check out one of the latest Nissan advertisements from the United Kingdom for the Nissan Juke that I’ve embedded below. Is the car itself innovative? No. Is the advertisement innovative? No. But it is creative. Is there any innovation in the product at all? Well, that depends. It depends on whether there are any new components that don’t just merely improve their performance but instead completely replace the traditional approaches to solving the targeted problem or performing the job-to-be-done. What do you think, true or false?

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Velocity is the Only Innovation Outcome that Matters

Velocity is the Only Innovation Outcome that Matters

Recently I wrote an introductory blog post about the importance of VELOCITY as an innovation outcome. Today I want to drill a little deeper, to examine why velocity is so important to many businesses, and why innovation should be the technique that many turn to to accelerate velocity.

Few people would quibble with the argument that the pace of change is accelerating, and continues to accelerate. If, for example, you could teleport yourself to the Roman empire and examine the living conditions of the average family, you’d find that conditions weren’t overly improved for hundreds of years. New technologies were infrequent and scientific discovery was slow. Fast forward to the early Middle ages, as learning and communication improved, and we see an increasing pace of change. Comparing, say, the 1200s to the 1400s would demonstrate significant gains for the upper class in terms of products, services and technologies. But the pace of change for significant portions of the population was still slow. Consider even the 1950s and 1960s. Much of the world lacked basic infrastructure, communication systems, adequate food, while the “developed” world had all of these factors and more. Today, it’s not unusual to find people in depressed circumstances with access to cell phones, the internet, bank accounts and many of the trappings of a fully modern society. The pace of change has delivered more goods, services and technologies, and distributed them more quickly in the last few decades, than many believed possible.

Factors Driving Pace of Change

What factors drive the increasing pace of change? I’m sure better minds than mine have pondered this question, but a few factors seem relatively obvious. First, better information systems and communication systems. When communication is difficult, it is hard to transfer knowledge and information. As communications systems have advanced, the ability to spread information more broadly has improved the pace of change in many areas. Second, the distribution of education. Today, many of the world’s best universities are resident in the US, the UK, Germany and other “western” countries, but increasingly excellent universities are identified in India, China and other countries. Further, access to education, over the web, over the improved communication channels means that far more people can gain education and build skills. Third, the increasing demand for better living conditions, better lives for our children, more access to more things. Fatalism and the acceptance of a terrible life is a thing of the past. Everyone, everywhere demands a better standard of living, more access to more and better goods and services. These demands create the opportunity for a market, these demands are filled with new and better supply.

These are factors that I think are driving the increasing pace of change. But you don’t have to accept my assertions, you can see the increasing pace of change for yourself in adoption curves of technology. The “S” curves of technology adoption over the last 100 years demonstrate that it took years for a radio or television to penetrate many households, while newer products like VCRs, cell phone and PCs penetrated very quickly. One reason this is true is that the infrastructure (electricity, communication standards, interactivity) was built, deployed and stabilized. As the infrastructure got better, it became easier and easier to deploy and to use new technologies. See the increasing acceleration of adoption in the “S” curve image below.

Technology Adoption S Curves

Implications of Accelerating Change

The implications of this acceleration should be obvious – the pace of change and rate of acceleration is ever increasing. Individuals who were once satisfied with only one model of product are now more likely to be clamoring for more variety, more choice. This is something that even Henry Ford missed. Simply solving a basic transportation need led to ever increasing demands to satisfy comfort, status and ego needs. For many products and services, life expectancy is decreasing at the same rate as the accelerating pace of change. Few firms can count on long product cycle times.

Why this matters to Innovation

If these assumptions are true, then VELOCITY, as defined as speed in a specific direction, becomes very important for a firm’s ability to grow and compete. Relying on long product life cycles is not an option. Customers will demand new products, new features at an ever increasing rate. Firms can’t simply “dump” older technologies and products into “developing” markets because those market too understand the product/feature acceleration and reject older products. This acceleration means that firms must address the most significant barriers to velocity within their businesses. There are three barriers they must address:

  1. The ability to bring products to market very quickly. Most organizations have well-defined, stage-gate models that use waterfall approaches with many signoffs to reduce risk. These existing processes are long, drawn out affairs designed to prevent mistakes and perfect products rather than systems attuned to customer needs and expectations. One of the first activities many firms should undertake is to innovate their product development cycles.
  2. Few firms have invested in true innovation capabilities. Yes they have some “innovation” teams and perhaps even some systems or processes meant to sustain innovation, but they don’t consider innovation core to their business. Innovation – purposefully creating new, meaningful products and services that clients will want – will increase the organization’s speed, and potentially its velocity. It can increase velocity if…
  3. Executives create clear strategies based on the understanding of the importance of velocity. Innovation can result in more speed, based on improvements in the product development cycle time and in generating new ideas more effectively. But the difference between velocity and speed is intent. Velocity is speed in a specific direction. Executives must provide the demand for speed, combined with the insights that detail specific directions. Innovation needs far more attention from executives, in terms of greater importance and more clarity and focus.

Conclusion

So, hopefully you can see that perhaps the most important outcome innovation can deliver is velocity, that is, corporate speed with purpose. I’ve identified at least two areas where more internal speed is important, if a firm hopes to keep pace with its competitors and its market demands. Executives play an important role here as well. Our corporations become comfortable with our operating models and the internal pace of business. While our internal pace may be valuable, comfortable and well understood, our internal pace is irrelevant if the external pace of change is different. Far too many firms have too many structures that impede speed and velocity, and are too comfortable with a slow pace of change. Why they may believe they need innovation to create new products and services, these firms fail to realize how important it is to accelerate their operations and keep pace, at a minimum, with the market. And, not only is speed important, but velocity. Meaning that while we increase internal speed we do so in important, strategic directions.

In subsequent posts I’ll address the concept of innovation as a catalyst for corporate velocity.

Image credits: Pixabay, Forbes

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Would you rather get an MBA or start a business?

I came across the infographic that I thought was interesting and thought I would share about the cost of an MBA and whether it is worth it.

As a career switcher, getting an MBA helped me change the direction of my career, but what do you think about whether getting an MBA is worth it or not?

And if you had a $100,000 would you rather use it to start a business or to get an MBA?

Sound off in the comments.

Would you rather get an MBA or start a business?

Created by: MBAOnline.com

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Velocity, Speed and Innovation

Velocity, Speed and Innovation

Flying for 12 hours at a stretch can give you a lot of time to think, in between in-flight meals, movies and other on-board entertainment.

The more I thought about the current state of innovation, the more I realized that many of us have it all wrong. We at OVO often talk about innovation as an enabler to strategy, not a strategy itself. But I think there’s something much deeper going on than that. First, we know that many executives WANT more innovation. But they don’t want innovation for its own sake. They want innovation that drives more revenue growth, more differentiation and more creation of compelling products and services than what would otherwise happen. This means that innovation must create solutions with more return than existing methods, with only incrementally greater risk.

Executives want to be Innovative, they don’t want Innovation

In the final analysis, CEOs and senior executives don’t want INNOVATION, they want the benefits and outcomes of well-pursued innovation activities, namely, growth, differentiation, market penetration, disruption of adjacent markets and so forth. If there are easier ways to achieve these outcomes, CEOs and organizations will gladly pursue the alternatives, and forgo the risks that surround innovation. What risks? Because of the investments in management tools, techniques and training to improve efficiency and effectiveness, many businesses have very efficient but very brittle and fragile operating models. Innovation introduces risk, uncertainty and change into organizations and business models honed to avoid these issue. Further, most work teams have been right-sized and down-sized to the point where incremental work is almost impossible to engage. No, what executives want is not innovation per se, but they would like to be viewed as INNOVATIVE and enjoy the benefits of meaningful, valuable new products and services.

Why Velocity is more important than Speed

Perhaps what I’ve come to realize is that what most organizations need more than anything is VELOCITY. Let me explain what I mean by Velocity. My daughter’s physics class was working on the definition of motion and speed. Speed measures how fast an object is moving, so many feet or miles divided by the amount of time it takes to complete the distance. Physics and calculus distinguish SPEED from VELOCITY, by taking the stance that VELOCITY is Speed in a specific direction. Physicists and scientists would say that VELOCITY is a Scalar concept.

When we think about most businesses, VELOCITY is exactly what they need. They need speed to compete with a host of changes occurring in their markets, from increased competition to lowered trade barriers to a rapid increase in the abilities of individuals and firms in developing countries and markets. However, speed isn’t all that valuable if it’s in the wrong direction. VELOCITY is speed in a specific direction, and that’s what many organizations need. They need to be faster, more effective, more innovative, and end up in a place that was intentional.

VELOCITY connotes the idea that the firm is going somewhere that matters. How a firm knows where to go is dependent to some extent on corporate strategy and how well that strategy is communicated. Further, how it knows where to go is dependent on the firm’s ability to assess market trends, develop scenarios and understand customer needs. These final factors are innovation tools, which help describe a range of possible futures and help decipher which ones are relevant and important.

Speed kills, Velocity Wins

Over the next few posts I will write about speed, velocity and their relationship to innovation. Because increasingly innovation is just a method to help a firm increase its speed in a particular direction. Speed will become the new competitive weapon in a highly competitive market, but speed in and of itself is useless without intentional direction and guidance. We’ll look at why speed is ever more important, and how good innovation contributes to speed and velocity.

Another way to think of this is that innovation is a feature, and speed or velocity are the potential benefits. I’m increasingly convinced that velocity in a business sense – getting to the right markets and opportunities faster than others, and doing so intentionally – is the capability that will distinguish winners from losers in the coming years.

Image credit: Pixabay

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New White Paper on External Talent Strategies

Innocentive - New White Paper on External Talent StrategiesFollowing on the heels of a recent thought leadership webinar (link to recording) on the same topic, this white paper explores the intersection of talent management and open innovation strategies. The paper dives into why having an external talent strategy is becoming increasingly important and how it can help your company accelerate innovation, shows how leading organizations manage their open innovation and crowdsourcing efforts (including case study examples of companies like P&G), and provides proven strategies and steps to take for attracting talent to your organization’s innovation efforts.

Download this Complimentary White Paper

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Making Innovation Sustainable – Part 4 of 4

Click on Part 1 or Part 2 or Part 3 if you missed them

Innovation Is Social

These quotes from John Hagel’s article are important because they reinforce the notion that innovation is a social activity. While many people give Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the modern – day equivalent, Dean Kamen, credit for being lone inventors, the fact is that the lone inventor myth is just that — a myth. All these gentlemen had labs full of people who shared their passion for creative pursuits. Innovation requires collaboration, either publicly or privately, and is realized as an outcome of three social activities.

1. Social Inputs

  • From the very beginning when an organization is seeking to identify key insights to base an innovation strategy or project on, organizations often use ethnographic research, focus groups, or other very social methods to get at the insights. Great innovators also make connections to other industries and other disciplines to help create the great in sights that inspire great solutions.

2. Social Evolution

  • We usually have innovation teams in organizations, not sole inventors, and so the activity of transforming the seeds of useful invention into a solution valued above every existing alternative is very social. It takes a village of passionate villagers to transform an idea into an innovation in the marketplace. Great innovators make connections inside the organization to the people who can ask the right questions, uncover the most important weaknesses, help solve the most difficult challenges, and help break down internal barriers within the organization — all in support of creating a better solution.

3. Social Execution

  • The same customer group that you may have spent time with, seeking to understand, now requires education to show them that they really need the solution that all of their actions and behaviors indicated they needed at the beginning of the process. This social execution includes social outputs like trials, beta programs, trade show booths, and more. Great innovators have the patience to allow a new market space to mature, and they know how to grow the demand while also identifying the key shortcomings with customers who are holding the solution back from mass acceptance.

When it comes to insights, these three activities are not completely discrete. Insights do not expose themselves only in the social inputs phase, but can also expose themselves in other phases — if you’re paying attention. Flickr famously started out as a company producing a video game in the social inputs phase, but was astute enough during the social execution phase to recognize that the most used feature was one that allowed people to share photos. Recognizing that there was an unmet market need amongst customers for easy sharing of photos, Flickr reoriented its market solution from video game to photo sharing site and reaped millions of dollars in the process when they ultimately sold their site to Yahoo!. Ultimately, action is more important than intent, and so as an innovator you must always be listening and watching to see what people do and not just what they say. Build your solution on the wrong insight and nobody will be beating a path to your door.

Bringing It All Together

If your organization is struggling to sustain its innovation efforts, then I hope you will do the following things.

  • Find the purpose and passion that everyone can rally around.
  • Create the flexibility necessary to deal with the constant change that a focus on innovation requires for both customers and the organization.
  • Make innovation the social activity it truly must be for you to become successful.

If your organization has lost the courage to move innovation to its center and has gotten stuck in a project-focused, reactive innovation approach, then now is your chance to regain the higher ground and to refocus, not on having an innovation success but on building an innovation capability. Are you up to the challenge?

You can read ahead by getting the book or downloading the sample chapter, or by checking out the other parts here:

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Making Innovation Sustainable – Part 3 of 4

Making Innovation Sustainable - Part 3 of 4Click on Part 1 or Part 2 if you missed them

Purpose and Passion

Ultimately, successful and sustainable innovation is all about purpose and passion. The people in your organization have to be clear on what the purpose of the organization is. Ideally, that purpose has to be something bigger than the individuals and something that people can get passionate about, because first and foremost, as Jeffrey Phillips has said, “You can’t force a disinterested person to innovate.”

Passion is a prerequisite not just for getting started with innovation; people leading innovation projects must have enough passion to fight through, over, around, or under any obstacles they may encounter in their effort to make a new idea a reality.

“Passion-based organizations stop at nothing to accomplish their goals and are able to attract people and resources to their causes. That got me thinking. Over all of my years as an innovation junkie, the common denominator, among the innovators I have connected with and the most successful enterprises I have observed and worked with, is passion. They started with a passion or cause and then organized around it to make it happen. Not the other way around.” — Saul Kaplan

Blogging Innovation as a Case Study in Passion

I started innovating long ago, but I didn’t start Blogging Innovation until 2006. I realized I needed an outlet to express my passion for innovation, and blogging offered the perfect opportunity. I kept reading and writing about innovation despite getting only a couple of hundred people to read my articles each day. Then at the start of 2009 I completed a marketing strategy project for Wunderman and Microsoft Windows Live, and, using some great tools including Website Grader, I discovered that the blog had some technical challenges. After fixing those, traffic to Blogging Innovation finally started to take off. Now instead of averaging more than 200 daily visits, the blog averages nearly 10,000 and the numbers are still growing. Do I spend less time on the blog now than I used to? No!

Most people would consider an increase in traffic of 2,500 percent in one year as being a huge success and a chance to relax, but I don’t see it that way. Back in August 2009 I decided to commit the blog to a mission of making innovation and marketing insights accessible for the greater good. As a consequence of that mission, I decided to open up the blog to the very best contributing authors on the topic of innovation and other marketing – related subjects that I could find.

Instead of using the blog as an extension of my company, Blogging Innovation exists to help raise the baseline understanding of innovation and marketing so that organizations can become better at satisfying the needs of their customers, the first time they try. After all, the more efficient our organizations are at meeting their customers’ needs, the less waste of human capital and natural resources. That’s what drives me to get up at 5:00 a.m. seven days a week to start letting people know about all the great content our contributing authors have published that day.

We have recently decided to take on a monthly sponsor who wants to be associated with innovation in a tasteful way, but that is not for commercial reasons but because the blog needs additional people power to run it and a new site design to make the content even more accessible. As I go out to look for the assistance I need to take Blogging Innovation to the next level, I’ll be looking for one thing in the people I choose to help make the community stronger — passion.

Note: For the newer readers, Blogging Innovation formed the foundation of Innovation Excellence before I sold it and re-booted Blogging Innovation as Human-Centered Change & Innovation.

Passion versus Obsession

There is a great article “Passion versus Obsession” by John Hagel that explores the differences between passion and obsession. This is an important distinction to understand in order to make sure you are hiring people to power your innovation efforts who are passionate and not obsessive. Here are a few key quotes from the article:

“The first significant difference between passion and obsession is the role free will plays in each disposition: passionate people fight their way willingly to the edge to find places where they can pursue their passions more freely, while obsessive people (at best) passively drift there or (at worst) are exiled there.

It’s not an accident that we speak of an “object of obsession,” but the “subject of passion.” That’s because obsession tends towards highly specific focal points or goals, whereas passion is oriented toward networked, diversified spaces.

The subjects of passion invite and even demand connections with others who share the passion.

Because passionate people are driven to create as a way to grow and achieve their potential, they are constantly seeking out others who share their passion in a quest for collaboration, friction and inspiration . . . . The key difference between passion and obsession is fundamentally social: passion helps build relationships and obsession inhibits them.

It has been a long journey and it is far from over, but it has taught me that obsession confines while passion liberates.”

You can read ahead by getting the book or downloading the sample chapter, or by checking out the other parts here:

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Rise of the Social Business Architect

Rise of the Social Business Architect

Download the Rise of the Social Business Architect PDF

The world is changing and needs Social Business Architects. Gone is the epoch of the passive consumer, now customers want a say. At the same time, the quest for survival and growth is causing companies to stop looking at suppliers as someone to squeeze on price and instead as partners in innovation. And, employers are realizing that to maximize their success they need to attract and engage the best talent not just into internal talent pools, but external ones as well.

Social Business IntersectionsIt feels like you can’t go a day without hearing someone or some publication mention Facebook, Twitter or some other component of the social media universe. The fact is that social media has invaded the public consciousness and people are now more suspicious of someone who doesn’t have a social media presence than someone who does. People are starting to judge others based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profile they ever meet them, and expecting companies to answer the tweet they’ve sent them or the question they’ve posted on their Facebook wall within the day, the hour, the minute (believe me the expected pace of response is accelerating).

Social media has become so important and pervasive that it is beginning to co-opt the term ‘social business’ into its lexicon to describe an organization’s engagement with people outside of its borders across a variety of channels and for a variety of purposes. Social media is stealing the term ‘social business’ away from the social enterprise folks, and that’s okay – they can’t possibly use ‘social business’ and ‘social enterprise’ at the same time anyways.

The importance of ‘social business’ and social business design has grown as our technologies have matured from contact management to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, from bulletin boards to discussion forums, from static to dynamic html, from social networks to social media, and from media consumer to media producer. Ultimately ‘social business’ is the science of optimizing the intersection of people, process, and technology. If we look at ‘social business’ as the discipline managing that intersection and helping an organization focusing on how it engages with others and maximizes the value of its relationships, I’ve been working in social business for more than 15 years as what I like to call a Social Business Architect.

Social Business ConnectionsIn addition to facilitating and optimizing the group dynamics and interactions inside the organization, a Social Business Architect specializes in identifying the different parts of an organization that need to interact with groups of people outside the organization, how those parts of the organization should work together to communicate with people outside the organization, and helps to identify and implement communications solutions that connect the organization with the target groups so that a meaningful connection and conversation can be built, and then helps to manage the conversations and the information and learnings from their outcomes for the benefit of the organization.

A Social Business Architect keeps the organizations focused on the goals of its relationships with the outside, works with the organization’s technologists and other specialists in other departments to enable the necessary conversations to take place for the benefit of the organization.

From building Symantec’s first web-based multi-lingual technical support and customer service capabilities to working with the Windows Live team at Microsoft to building the world’s most popular innovation community centered around https://www.disruptorleague.com, I’ve seen the importance of finding the right intersection between primary connection points and sources of value for the community to establish itself, grow and thrive.

To build a successful community and attract talent to your organization you must try to identify as an organization what resources you already have (or could create) that will have some value to the community that you are trying to build. These sources of value to the community could be:

  1. Financial
  2. Informational
  3. Educational
  4. Social
  5. Or come from another store of value

You must give people a reason to want to connect with you and to stay close – and yes, hopefully contribute over time.

In addition to identifying the value that you can bring to the community you must also identify which connection points will multiply the attractive power of the sources of value you choose to focus on. There are three primary connection points to consider:

1. Passion – One of the ways that you can attract people to your community is to leverage the power of passion. Seek to identify what people are passionate about when it comes to your company or your products. Passion can be extremely contagious. Is there a way that you can inject the passion that people may have for your company or products into your community?

2. Purpose – Another connection point to consider is to tap into the power of purpose. Not all organizations are committed to serving a larger social purpose, but all can consider introducing elements of public outreach or philanthropy that the community can engage with and feel good about contributing to. Are you building walls to keep people out? Or are you creating something that people can feel a part of?

Social Business Attraction3. Fun – And don’t forget the power of fun. One of the ways of connecting people to your community is to have something fun for people to do. Recognize people for their participation in your community in fun and different ways to keep them interested and engaged, and have some fun reinforcing the ethos of the community.

And when you bring the right sources of value together with the right connection points that is when the magic of attraction and engagement happens and a community starts to grow its membership and participation. But we are not just seeking to build a community; we are looking to activate it as well (to get people engaged, contributing, discussing, connecting, etc.).

Social Business EngagementThis is where Social Business Architects prove their worth to the organization. They can use social media, digital communications, value analysis, and other collaborative tools to help organizations attract and engage customers, partners and employees to help the organization achieve its commercial goals. Whether the future direction of your social business architecture includes beginning collaborative innovation, increasing employee retention, building stronger partnerships, growing customer lifetime value, or another effort, be sure that you are involving the Social Business Architects in your organization to help set the right goals and find the right tools to ensure the effort’s success. Only then will you put your organization on the path it needs to be to transform itself from an internally focused product and service factory to a truly internally and externally focused and integrated social business capable of sustainable innovation, retention of the growing millennial work force, long-term customer relationships and loyalty, and true partnerships with its vendors and suppliers for mutual benefit.

Are you ready to architect a social business foundation under your organization?

Stay tuned for more on this topic in a white paper I am publishing with Innocentive very soon.

UPDATE: You can find all of my commissioned white papers here (including the Innocentive White Paper – “Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation”) or contact me to commission one for your company’s inbound or content marketing efforts here.

Download a PDF version of this article

Image credit: Ringling Bros.

Free Experiment Canvas

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Making Innovation Sustainable – Part 2 of 4

Making Innovation Sustainable – Part 2 of 4If you missed Part 1, you can find it here

If You Want Systemic Innovation, You Need Systems to Manage It

If you are really serious about creating sustainable innovation in your organization and engaging more than just a handful of people in the generation of ideas, you not only need to have a group of people to manage the process (either part – time or full – time), but you also need systems to manage the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea development processes. This class of software is commonly referred to as innovation management software and it is often sold in a Software as a Service (SaaS) manner. Organizations with above average privacy or security concerns may choose to run this software locally in their own organization (see Figure 10.1 ).

There are tons of companies selling innovation management software, but the four heavyweights in this area are Brightidea, Hype, Imaginatik, and Spigit, but you also have software like Invention Machine and others that serve similar or adjacent needs (patent searches, etc.). But there is no reason you couldn’t build your own innovation management solution into your enterprise portal or collaboration software platform such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint, and others (see Figure 10.2).

It’s not completely accurate to call it innovation management software because it only manages ideas, but having a software platform for managing ideas is crucial to ensure that you are able to do the following five key tasks.

  1. Capture all of the ideas.
  2. Allow employees to collaborate on evolving ideas.
  3. Allow program managers to evaluate them.
  4. Allow program managers to track idea development progress.
  5. Allow program managers to monitor commercial success of ideas.

No matter how you choose to solve the need for an innovation management software solution, make sure that you have a plan for how you are going to address these five tasks, both in the software and in your organization’s policies and processes.

Innovation versus Flexibility

Does your organization focus on identifying only new innovation projects and not on making the organization itself more agile? For innovation to be sustainable, the organization has to become flexible enough to remake itself as its environment changes and succeed at completely new ways of doing business. Think about Nokia going from tires to mobile phones. Could your organization do that?

Or, think about the Apple iPod, and how Apple went from being a computer company to a consumer electronics company. Figure 10.3 shows one way to think about the changes that both the organization and the customer had to think about (see the case study at the end of this section for more detail).

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – Figure 10-3

Innovation is all about change. It’s about finding a new set of solutions that customers value above every existing alternative – including your current products and services. While investing in innovation projects is important, you have to also make sure that your organization is capable of adapting to the changes in the marketplace. What good is coming up with a breakthrough customer insight that drives great innovation ideas and projects if your organization isn’t capable of making the internal changes that are necessary to execute upon the insight and bring the product or service solution successfully to market?

If you live in the United States, you may be familiar with a couple of failed airlines — Ted and Song. United started the ill-fated Ted, and Delta started the equally unsuccessful Song in response to the growing success of low-cost competitors like Southwest and Jet Blue. Given that Ted and Song came along and copied a successful, proven business model, how did they manage to fail so miserably?

The answer is not a simple one, but in addition to the brand confusion they caused among customers, the harsh reality is that neither organization could change fast enough to operate as efficiently or effectively as Southwest Airlines and then create any innovation capable of proving their solution to be valued above every existing alternative.

Quite often it is not the technical aspects of invention that keep established companies from delivering disruptive innovations, but the change that is required either on the part of the customer in order to adopt an innovation, or on the company’s part in order to deliver the innovation to the marketplace (or both). Investing in innovation without also investing in organizational agility is often a fool’s bet.

You can read ahead by getting the book or downloading the sample chapter, or by checking out the other parts here:

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