Category Archives: Innovation

4 Ways to Create Something Truly Original

4 Ways to Create Something Truly Original

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I study innovators for a living. Every year, I interview dozens of men and women who’ve achieved remarkable things. For my own part, I publish about a hundred articles a year and my second book, Cascades, has sold well since coming out five years ago. While my achievements pale in comparison to many of those I interview, many believe my work to be original.

The most destructive myth about creativity is that there are innate traits that allow some people to be creative, while others, who lack these, cannot. The truth is that in decades of research on creativity, nobody has been able to identify any such traits. In my experience, great innovators come in all shapes and sizes.

Still, despite the diversity of original innovators themselves, there are some common principles in how they approach their work and these are things that anyone can apply. That doesn’t mean everyone can be world famous, but the evidence clearly shows that anyone can be creative and, even if it’s not a major breakthrough, make some contribution to the world.

1. Explore

In 2006, Jennifer Doudna got a call from a colleague at the University of California at Berkeley, Jillian Banfield, who she knew only by reputation. Banfield’s area of research interest, obscure bacteria living in extreme conditions, was only tangentially related to Doudna’s work, studying the biochemistry of RNA and other cell structures.

The purpose of the call was to interest Doudna in studying an emerging phenomenon that was recently discovered in microbiology, a strange sequence of DNA found in bacteria. The function of the sequences were not yet clear, but some early evidence suggested that they might be involved in some kind of immune function, helping bacteria to defend themselves against viruses.

Intrigued, Doudna began to research the sequences, called CRISPR, in her own lab and, in 2012, discovered that they could be used as a powerful new tool for editing genes. Today, CRISPR is creating a revolution in genomics, completely redefining what was considered to be possible in just a few short years.

Many have observed the role of serendipity in innovation, such as in Alexander Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin. Yet in every case, once you look a little deeper, you find that even the most unexpected discoveries were the product of intense exploration. Like Fleming and penicillin, Doudna wasn’t looking for a gene editing technology, but she was investigating a wide number of phenomena that were previously unexplained.

The first step for innovation is exploration. All who wander are not lost.

2. Combine

I’m a relentless fact checker. Over the years, I’ve found that even if you’ve done significant research, reading papers and interviewing experts, it’s amazingly easy to get things wildly wrong. I’ve also found that fact checking can lead you to new information you didn’t know existed. So before I publish anything of significance, I always make sure to reach out to someone who can correct my foolishness before it becomes public.

That’s why when I was finishing up Cascades, I reached out to Duncan Watts to look over two chapters on the science of networks, a field which he helped pioneer. As usual, Duncan was gracious and helpful, and pointed me towards a paper of his that I might want to include. He did so somewhat apologetically, not wanting to push his work on me, but observed that since I had largely based both chapters on his work already, it was probably okay.

This was entirely true. Much of the first half of my book is based on Duncan’s ideas. What’s more, much of the second half of the book is based on insights from my friend Srdja Popović , who trains activists around the world to create revolutionary movements. There are a number of others as well, all of who shared their wisdom with me.

None of this, of course, was at all original, but the combination is. In fact, the key insight of the book is that Duncan’s mathematical models and the on-the-ground tactics of Srdja and others are intensely related. They can inform each other in ways that both men, who are mostly unfamiliar with each other’s work, had not addressed and, I believe, are important.

3. Refine

I first got interested in Duncan’s work in 2006. I was running a large digital business at the time and, with social networks becoming a powerful force online, I thought that learning some basic concepts of network science would be useful. Much to my surprise, I found that the ideas had a powerful resonance in an unexpected area.

Two years earlier, I had found myself in the middle of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. What struck me at the time was how nobody seemed to have the first idea what was happening or why — not the journalists I worked with everyday, or the political and business leaders I would meet with regularly, nobody.

So I was excited to find, in Duncan’s work, a mathematical explanation for many of the seemingly inexplicable things that I had seen and experienced first-hand. Yet still, I had only a faint sense of what I was on to. Sure, there were obvious connections and possibilities, but I had no real framework to make the insights actionable.

That was 12 years ago (and 15 since the Orange Revolution began) and I’ve been working to refine those initial ideas ever since. Over that period, there has been no shortage of blind allies and wrong turns. Nevertheless, I kept at it and continued to learn. It took over a decade before I was able to pull everything together into something worth publishing.

4. Validate

The connection between Duncan and Srdja’s work wasn’t completely out of the blue. In fact, Duncan had made a short reference to Otpor, the movement which Srdja had helped lead, and its overthrow of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević in his book, Six Degrees. Yet there was no guarantee that the significance went any further than that.

So I began to widen my search. I looked at social movements throughout history to see if similar patterns held or whether the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and similar events in Serbia were anomalies. I struck up a working friendship with Srdja, read his book, Blueprint for Revolution and pored through the training materials on his organization’s website.

Yet to be truly useful, I needed to see if the same concepts could be applied more broadly. So I also researched and spoke to a number of leaders in other fields, such as corporate executives and people who led movements to transform heathcare, education and other things. Anywhere I could find anyone that created transformational change, I sought them out to find how they were able to succeed where so many others failed.

What I found was that while there were vast difference among changemakers, they had all eventually arrived at similar principles that made them successful, which I could validate. It took me nearly 15 years, but the journey that began with that initial connection between two vastly different sets of ideas eventually became something that I could consider to be coherent and useful.

In that way, my experience reflects many of the innovators of vastly greater accomplishment that I research and study. Truly original work doesn’t emerge fully formed from a brainstorm or sudden epiphany. It’s long years that follow, combining, refining and validating that makes the difference between an errant idea and something useful.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pixabay

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The Top 10 Irish Innovators Who Shaped the World

The Top 10 Irish Innovators Who Shaped the World

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Ireland, a land of rolling green hills, ancient castles, and lyrical poetry, has also been home to some of the world’s most brilliant minds. From groundbreaking inventions to revolutionary discoveries, Irish innovators have left an indelible mark on history. Let’s raise a pint of Guinness and celebrate the top 10 Irish visionaries who changed the game.

1. Arthur Guinness: The Brewmaster Extraordinaire

Arthur Guinness, the man behind the iconic stout, didn’t just create a beer; he crafted a legacy. In 1759, he signed a 9,000-year lease for the St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin. His confidence in his product paid off—Guinness is now the best-selling alcoholic drink of all time, with sales exceeding $2.6 billion. To Arthur, Sláinte!

2. John Joly: The Color Visionary

John Joly, hailing from Hollywood, County Offaly, changed the way we see the world. His invention of color photography in 1894 transformed art, science, and our everyday lives. From a single plate, he captured the vibrancy of our surroundings, proving that Ireland’s genius extended beyond its green landscapes.

3. Lord Kelvin Thomson: The Trans-Atlantic Connector

In 1865, Lord Kelvin Thomson helped lay the Atlantic Telegraph Cable, connecting Newfoundland to Valentia in County Kerry. His work revolutionized global communication, enabling trans-Atlantic calls and shaping the future of connectivity. And let’s not forget his contribution to thermodynamics—the Kelvin Scale.

4. Vincent Barry: The Accidental Leprosy Cure

Vincent Barry, while researching Ireland’s tuberculosis problem, stumbled upon a cure for leprosy. Talk about a lucky mistake! His accidental discovery changed lives and exemplified the serendipity of scientific progress.

5. Louis Brennan: Guiding Torpedoes to Victory

Louis Brennan invented the guided torpedo in 1877. His creation, a self-propelled torpedo with gyroscopic control, revolutionized naval warfare. Brennan’s legacy lives on in modern missile technology.

6. Francis Rynd: Healing with the Hypodermic Syringe

In 1844, Francis Rynd introduced the hypodermic syringe, a medical marvel that transformed pain management and drug delivery. His invention remains a cornerstone of modern medicine.

7. Rev. Nicholas Callan: Electrifying the World

Rev. Nicholas Callan invented the induction coil in 1836, paving the way for electrical innovation. His work laid the foundation for telegraphy, telephony, and countless other applications.

8. Sir James Martin: Ejector Seats for Safety

In 1946, Sir James Martin designed the first aircraft ejector seat, saving countless lives. His invention ensured that pilots could escape from damaged planes, making aviation safer for all.

9. Arthur Leared: Listening to the Heartbeat

Arthur Leared created the binaural stethoscope in 1851, allowing doctors to hear internal sounds more clearly. His invention became a vital tool for diagnosing heart conditions.

10. Leo Dean Jansen MD: Pioneering Innovations

Leo Dean Jansen MD, though not as well-known, deserves recognition. His contributions span various fields, from medicine to technology. His legacy reminds us that innovation knows no boundaries.

So, next time you raise your glass of Guinness, remember that Ireland’s spirit of invention flows as freely as its famous stout. Sláinte to these remarkable Irish innovators!

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Bing Dall-E

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Agile Innovation Management (Part Two)

How Agility Enables Innovation

Agile Innovation Management (Part Two)

GUEST POST from Diana Porumboiu

In the previous article on agile innovation we covered the main concepts around agile, business agility and its role as a driver for innovation. Now, let’s see how to actually leverage agility to innovate and how other companies have succeeded in this area.

Agility is an enabler for innovation. The pace of innovation, while not easy to achieve, has become the ultimate competitive advantage as we all need to adapt quickly to evolving environments, the digital age and increasing pressing needs.  

The reality is that agile thinking is changing the world whether we decide to adopt it or not.  

Those who succeed at this are ahead of the game. McKinsey research suggests that agility is a critical factor for organizational success. 

The Organizational Health Index (OHI) assesses various aspects of organizational health, including agility, and examines how these factors correlate with business success. An increased organizational health is linked with more resilient, adaptive, and high-performing organizations that can better navigate complexity, drive innovation, and achieve strategic goals. 

What’s more, agile organizations are best at balancing both speed and stability, and these are also the companies that rank highest in the organizational health index.  

McKinsey Ability
Source: McKinsey&Company

The research goes even deeper and identifies a series of management practices that differentiate the most from the least agile companies.  

As you can see, there’s more to business agility than meets the eye and a few sprints just won’t cut it.  

However, if we look at the agile principles, there are several ways in which they can enable innovation:

  • They bring an empirical process control approach, which emphasizes transparency, evaluation, and adaptation.  
  • They enable experimentation and learning as teams are encouraged to test hypotheses, validate assumptions, and learn from both successes and failures. This experimental mindset is essential for innovation.
  • They are about adaptive planning processes that allow teams to adjust their priorities, strategies, and product roadmaps based on emerging opportunities and threats.
  • They emphasize customer-centricity. By focusing on delivering value to customers through continuous delivery and customer feedback loops, you make sure your innovations meet real market demands and solve genuine problems.
  • They encourage cross-functional collaboration and self-organizing teams, bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise.  

To get a better idea of how this looks in practice, we’ll take the example of ING Bank.

ING Bank

ING is a global financial institution originally from the Netherlands and a good example to illustrate how agile can be introduced organization-wide, the right way.

ING wanted to become agile for the right reasons. The shift to agility wasn’t about working faster or growing more—it was about being flexible and adaptable. Even though things were going well financially in 2015, ING noticed that customer behavior was changing due to trends in other industries, not just in banking. So, they knew they had to change too.

ING Bank embraced several key principles of agility, drawing inspiration from the practices of tech companies to align with their objectives and operations: 

  • Cross-Functional Teams: ING structured its IT and commercial departments into agile squads, mirroring the approach seen at Tesla. This integration fosters cross-functionality and collaboration, with teams physically situated together within the same premises.
Agile at ING Bank - McKinsey
source: McKinsey & Company
  • Rapid Decision-Making and Experimentation: Without bottlenecks created by middle management, ING facilitates swift decision-making and continuous experimentation. This agile approach enables the organization to constantly refine and test customer offerings without bureaucratic delays.
  • Enhanced Collaboration and Transparency: Recognizing the importance of collaboration, ING implemented structural changes to break down silos. Clear delineation of roles, responsibilities, and governance structures fosters improved cooperation across teams and departments.
  • Accelerated Delivery: Instead of their usual annual product launches, ING adopted a more agile release cycle, rolling out software updates every two weeks. This agile delivery model allows the organization to respond promptly to market demands and customer feedback, ensuring rapid innovation and adaptation.  

The first step in achieving this agile transformation was to develop a clear strategy and vision. They started small and rolled out the new structures and way of working across the entire headquarters in eight to nine months.  

Last, but not least, they invested significant energy and leadership time in fostering a culture of ownership, empowerment, and customer-centricity, which are foundational elements of an agile culture.

As Bart Schlatmann from ING points out, agility is a means to an end, not the end goal itself; it is the pathway to achieving innovation.

Drawing from these examples and research from other organizations, we can summarize the five tenets of agile organizations:

  1. Purpose-Driven Mindset: Shift from a focus on capturing value to co-creating value with stakeholders, embodying a shared vision across the organization.
  2. Empowered Network of Teams: Transition from top-down direction to self-organizing teams with clear responsibility and authority, fostering engagement, innovative thinking, and collaboration.
  3. Rapid Learning Cycles: Embrace uncertainty and continuous improvement through iterative decision-making and experimentation, prioritizing quick adaptation over rigid planning.
  4. Innovation Culture: Cultivate ownership, empowerment, and customer-centricity, enabling employees to drive organizational success.
  5. Integrated Technology Enablement: View technology as integral to unlocking value and enabling responsiveness to business and stakeholder needs, leveraging advanced tools for seamless integration and rapid innovation.

Actionable Steps to Drive Innovation through  Business Agility

We can’t wrap things up without going through some of the key steps that should not be missed in an agile transformation journey.  

Constancy of purpose  

You might have heard of Edwards Deming and even used his PDCA cycle in your continuous improvement work. He is well known for his legacy in the field of quality management, particularly for his contributions to the improvement of production processes in Japan after World War II. To some degree, his work is also seen as one of the main inspirations for the agile movement.

Among his work, we can also find the “14 Points for Management,” where Deming outlines how essential it is to have a clear and unwavering commitment to a long-term vision or mission. 

He called it constancy of purpose. You can also call it your North Star. Regardless of the words you choose, it’s important to set your goals and align all activities, processes, and resources towards achieving them. How to do this?

  • Communicate the Purpose: Regularly communicate the organization’s purpose, mission and goals as well as how agility contributes to achieving them.
  • Define Goals: Clearly define objectives and goals that align with the organization’s purpose. These goals should support the overall mission and vision.
  • Empower Teams: Trust by default and enable teams to make decisions, take ownership of their ideas and work. Provide them with the autonomy and resources they need to innovate and deliver value.
  • Measure Progress: Measure progress towards your goals, but also establish metrics that can measure your ability to be responsive. Regularly review and assess how agile practices are contributing to the overall mission.
  • Adapt and Iterate: Embrace continuous improvement processes that align with your internal structures and needs. Encourage teams to experiment, learn, and iterate on their approaches.

Agile leadership

Adopt the ABC of leadership which drives innovation and makes the shift from “vertical ideology of control” to “horizontal ideology of enablement”.

Linda Hill, renowned professor at Harvard Business School, specializing in leadership and innovation makes a great point about the roles a leader should take if they want to drive innovation and agility.  

Over time leadership evolved from a purely strategic role, to providing a vision that guides people in the same direction. More recently, research showed that a visionary leader is not enough. You need leaders that can also shape the culture and capabilities needed for people to co-create the future. This requires a different approach to leadership.

Research has identified that in order to lead an organization that innovates at scale with speed, you need leaders that fill in three different functions:  

  • the Architect – to build the culture and capabilities necessary to collaborate, experiment and work.
  • the Bridger – to create the bridge between the outside and the inside of the organization by bringing together skills and tools to innovate at speed.
  • the Catalyst – to accelerate co-creation through the entire ecosystem.  

Here is Hill’s short summary on the ABC of leadership:

Another top voice is Steve Denning who has been an advocate of agile and agile management for years. He makes some great points about the agile mindset which requires a new way of running organizations.

For an organization to be truly agile, the so called industrial-era management needs to be replaced with digital-age management which is strongly driven by an agile mindset.  

The traditional management style makes it hard for agile to work because the old command-and-control approach goes against the agile principles. The top-down approach is riddled with bureaucracy which obstructs visibility to the customer and the realities at the lower levels of the organization.  

Some of the most successful and innovative organizations, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft understood this early on and shifted their focus to delivering customer value first, one of the agile principles. This required a change in mindset but also in the corporate culture, which is no easy undertaking.

To make this transition, Denning talks about five major shifts that companies need to make:

  • From profit-focused to customer-focused goals.
  • From direct reporting to self-organizing teams where management’s role is not to check on employees, but to enable them to do their work by removing obstacles.
  • From bureaucracy, rules, and reports to work coordinated by Agile methods and customer feedback.
  • Prioritize transparency and continuous improvement over predictability.
  • Encourage horizontal communication rather than top-down directives.  

While they are straightforward and make sense for most of us, these changes are maybe the hardest to make, especially for established organizations that are not used to challenging the status quo.  

These big undertakings are what make agile possible at scale. But even if you’re not there yet, you can still apply the agile principles at a smaller scale to enable innovation.  

Minimize complexity  

Complexity is the enemy of agility. People in companies both large and small try to come up with the perfect solution, that often doesn’t exist in the first place, and only end up having solved the wrong problem.

On the other hand, if you were to simply move ahead quickly with something that creates real value and solves at least some of the problems, you’ll see which of your assumptions and concerns are real, and which aren’t. You’ll also see which problems you can work around, and which ones you simply must address directly.

This obviously eliminates a lot of uncertainty and reduces the complexity associated with solving the problem, which again helps you focus your innovation efforts on what matters – creating real value.

The bigger and more complex the problem, the more important it is to take an agile and modular approach. 

Thus, the bigger and more complex the problem, the more important it is to take this agile and modular approach that focuses on the speed of making tangible progress. 

Conclusion

As we explained in our complete guide to innovation management, there is no single perfect way of managing innovation. Different companies have different approaches for innovation management.  

However, the common thread of successful organizations are structures and processes that mitigate the somehow chaotic nature of innovation management.  

In these two articles we explored agile as a method to enable innovation and improve its management for sustained success. We don’t believe in quick fixes or miracle solutions. That’s why we made the case of agile as a mindset that should permeate every aspect of the organization.


Article originally published in full format on viima.com/blog

Image credit: Unsplash, McKinsey

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The Remarkable Power of Negative Feedback

The Remarkable Power of Negative Feedback

GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

The most effective innovators—entrepreneurs, scientists, new product developers, and advocates of social change—are adept at seeking feedback. But not just any feedback. They look for a particular type of feedback that may surprise you. They actively seek negative feedback, feedback that tells them when they’re wrong.

That probably sounds counterintuitive. Who goes around wanting to fail? The whole field of positive psychology has convinced many of us that to be successful, we need confidence and plenty of positive reinforcement. There’s some truth to that. Entrepreneurs understandably want their businesses to be successful. Scientists don’t win many awards for failed theories.

But deficits matter. One crucial flaw can torpedo the best of ideas. In the real world there are always many things that can go wrong. Figuring out what those shortcomings are can save you a lot of time and wasted effort. Negative feedback tells you when the strategy you’ve chosen isn’t working, so you can adjust, either by overcoming some obstacle, or adopting a different strategy.

Seeking only positive feedback predisposes you to confirmation bias, when you tend to see what you expect, or hope will happen. It feels good, but it may not be telling you what you most need to know, to be at your best. Savvy investors—and my own research—have found that those innovators and entrepreneurs who most actively seek negative feedback, create by far the greatest value.

Almost any feedback is better than none. You need feedback to get a clear take on the realities you face, so you can respond effectively. But only seeking positive feedback ultimately fosters false-confidence and insecurities. It’s always looking for validation and simply wanting to be right.

Negative feedback can be humbling, but you can build confidence in your ability to respond to setbacks and failures, rather than pretending they aren’t there. Accomplished innovators can handle the bad news because they’ve done it many times before. When you’re trying to bring change, it comes with the territory—and it’s always an opportunity to practice being creative and resourceful.

The next time you face some challenge, hoping for success is understandable, but the best way to make sure that success is real is to look for indications that what you’re doing isn’t working. 

That’s the fastest way to make sure it is working.

View this post as a video here:

Image Credit: Pixabay

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5 Innovation Leadership Lessons That Go Beyond “Yes, And”

5 Innovation Leadership Lessons That Go Beyond Yes And

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Yes, and….”

You know it.  You love it.  You may even use it.

The phrase is a core principle of improv that has become the “magic” brainstorming phrase.  On stage, it encourages acceptance and collaboration, and in innovation, it quiets the critics (“No, because”), one-uppers (“No, but”), and passive-aggressive show-offs (“Yes, but”).

And there are other core Improv principles that will help you lead your team to innovation success.

You probably know them.  You may or may not love them.  And you definitely need to use them.

1. Be human

As Alla Weinberg pointed out in our conversation about Psychological Safety, “People are messy.”  YOU are a person (I assume), meaning YOU are messy.  And that’s ok because guess what?  Your boss, team, and even that super annoying person in (fill in the function) are people, meaning they’re messy. 

Improv embraces the mess.  When someone says the wrong thing, something unexpected happens, or everything goes wrong, the actors don’t stand around, point fingers, and complain.  They embrace the opportunity to step into the scene, support their fellow actor, and move things forward. Plus, as Coach Beard says, “Perfection sucks.  Perfect is boring.”

2. Connect

Building genuine and authentic relationships is central to building Psychological Safety.  It’s also central to great Improv.  Consider this example:

If two performers come on stage and only talk about the muffins they are baking, it’s going to be a boring scene. The audience doesn’t care about the muffins! What they really want to know is how these characters feel, especially about each other. Is one character sad because her daughter is about to go off to college, and she will miss spending time with her? Or is the other character fearful because she will have to navigate adulthood without her mom nearby? If the scene doesn’t focus on the relationship, it isn’t going very far. In order to connect well in the scene, improvisers must be attuned to one another.

If all you do as a leader is talk about your calendar, your To-do list, and deadlines, people aren’t going to care about the work.  They’ll do the work because that’s what you pay them to do.  But they won’t care enough to problem-solve (they’ll ask you for the solution), suggest improvements (they’ll do what you ask), or develop new ideas (they’ll wait for your orders).  As a leader, you need to connect to create. That applies to creating solutions, new businesses, and the next generation of leaders.

3. Actively Listen

Active listening isn’t just about nodding your head while someone else speaks. Active listening requires giving full attention to the speaker, letting go of judgment, and understanding their point of view.  You don’t have to agree with what they’re saying, but you do have to understand and respond to it.

Actively listening, understanding, and responding are essential to Improv.  When an actor does something completely unexpected, their fellow actors can’t ignore it because that will destroy the show.  They respond to it and build on it.  After all, you shouldn’t say “Yes and” if you don’t know what you’re saying yes to.

4. Pivot

Pivoting is hard.  It’s hard to admit something isn’t working, and often harder to figure out what will work while you’re in the middle of doing the thing that doesn’t work.  And that’s what Improv actors have to do all the time.  You may not notice because it looks easy.  But it only looks easy because they practice all the time.

Flexibility, adaptability, and the ability to change quickly are all skills that can be developed.  But you must practice.  Some people are naturally more comfortable making changes, but everyone can learn skills and tools to recognize when a change in direction is required and quickly sort through the options to find the next best option.

5. Have fun

Improv is hard work, and it’s fun.  Innovation is hard work and (it should be) fun.  We spend too much time at work and with our colleagues to not have fun, laugh, or enjoy ourselves.  Work will never be all rainbows and unicorns, just like not every Improv sketch will be hilarious.  But there must be moments of fun, laughter, and joy because you can’t create or innovate when you’re overwhelmed, downtrodden, or burned out.

As Jeff Ash, Director of Westside Improv, explains:

“Play unlocks the creative spirit that we all have. When people lose a creative spirit and get engulfed in whatever they’re doing in their day-to-day lives, I believe it impacts our ability to connect, build relationships, and be in community.”

What are other lessons we can learn from Improv?

Image credit: Dall-E via Bing

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Innovation is Rubbish!

Why waste recycling and reuse may represent a valuable entrepreneurial opportunity…

Innovation is Rubbish!

GUEST POST from John Bessant

One of our family traditions at this time of year is the big clear-up. There’s a time limit on our tolerance for the accumulated junk, the temporary displacement of furniture to make space for Christmas trees, decorations, cards and mountains of discarded wrapping paper, piles of new toys and other festive fripperies. At a certain point (Twelfth Night, good of them to mark it on the calendar) some kind of alarm switch trips and it’s a case of loading up the car to transport the rubbish to the refuse tip. Where, we quickly discover, we are not alone — everyone else has had the same idea. Cue long wait in queue.

When I teach about searching for innovation opportunities one of the great tools to introduce is ‘find a queue’. It builds on a well-established principle of lean thinking — most times the presence of a queue means that value isn’t being added somewhere. Something or someone is being forced to wait for something to happen and that’s a waste of time, space, energy, etc. . So there’s an opportunity to think about how to change the process — to innovate to smooth out the bottleneck. Find a queue do a process map and begin the improvement journey.

So sitting in a queue for the refuse tip started me thinking on the innovation opportunities so much accumulated waste might have to offer. And whilst it might be possible to improve the ways and speed with which families can be separated from their rubbish the real benefits are buried a little deeper.

Queuing

In fact it’s worth referring back to a well-known piece of Yorkshire wisdom, ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’. Waste needn’t be a problem to be hidden away — buried or burnt to get rid of it. Instead there are real opportunities in waste — as plenty of innovators have already found out. Think for example of Earl Tupper whose efforts to turn the black sludge emerging from 1940s oil refineries paid off when he created the bright shiny plastic kitchenware which bears his name.

Or Charles Goodyear who managed to improve the unpromising raw material of rubber with its tendency to become sticky and brittle into something elastic and flexible through the vulcanization process he literally cooked up in his kitchen sink.

Or Henry Ford who developed a plastic made from soybeans and used it to make car parts, demonstrating an early example of using agricultural waste to create valuable products.

It’s still happening — take the case of Terracycle, founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky as a business specialized in recycling and up-cycling various waste materials. Envar is a UK company which recycles coffee grounds into bio-fuel. An approach which has been deployed elsewhere; Virgin Atlantic picked up some helpful publicity and valuable learning when it flew an airliner from London to New York on November 28th last year on a diet of 100% bio-fuel, essentially derived from waste cooking oil.

In doing so they scored a notable PR bonus, being the first of many airlines seen to be doing something to help reduce their climate impact. Adidas has done something similar for the fashion industry; their partnership with Parley for the Oceans creates shoes and apparel from ocean plastic waste. And Nike, not to be left out, has been running its Grind program since the 1990s turning waste from shoe manufacturing into surfaces for sports facilities, turning manufacturing waste into valuable products.

In fact there’s growing interest in using waste as a feedstock for further use — through recycling or re-using in different forms. Waste tips are increasingly seen not as dumps but as mines, full of valuable resources which can be dug out. It’s a useful analogy.

Think of gold mining and the traditional picture is something like a hot and cramped shaft a mile below Johannesburg’s city streets. The results of long sweated hours are brought to the surface and end up mostly as huge piles of rock which are painstakingly separated to yield a few grams of gold. That’s not so far from what is now becoming commercially interesting — digging deep into waste heaps to extract and concentrate small flecks of gold (or many other valuable minerals) from the piles of discarded electrical goods.

When I took a tour of my local waste processing facility recently (I have so much fun in my holidays) I had a growing sense of déjà vu — where had I seen something like this before? Separating out an unpromising feedstock of unpleasant smelling raw material into different parts which could be further refined to produce something of value? Then it struck me — an oil refinery. The processes might be different — think physical separation instead of fractional distillation — but the underlying story is the same. Identify the value in different streams, find clients who will pay for it and manage the business accordingly.

It’s a profitable business — so much so that councils and local authorities are increasingly selling the licenses to process waste. Recent reports suggest profit margins at between 30 and 60% which suggest that it’s worth taking a close look. The global recycling industry is worth about $410 billion and is forecast to grow at over 5% per year, at least for the next 7–10 years. A 2023 McKinsey report offers an optimistic scenario for plastics recycling, for example, suggesting a future in which 50 percent of plastics worldwide could be reused or recycled by 2030. Following that path, plastics reuse and recycling could generate profit-pool growth of as much as $60 billion for the petrochemicals and plastics sector, representing nearly two-thirds of its possible profit-pool growth over the period.

It may not be so easy as waving a magic wand, though. There is widespread concern that plastics recycling is much more difficult to achieve because of the challenge of separation — most plastic waste is mixed and contaminated. But whilst manual separation may be cheap it is rapidly being supplanted by a new generation of smart sensors and actuators. CES 2024 might have some glamorous consumer products and plenty of AI on the front stage but behind the scenes there’s huge improvements in the sensor and actuator field which could drive the cost of separation down whilst improving its efficiency.

Robot Recycling

And it’s not just economic pressure in the marketplace. Increasingly regulation is pushing for higher rates of recycling and for manufacturers to take responsibility for their products over the whole life cycle. Which is promoting some ambitious innovation in recycling. Henry Ford’s ghost might enjoy a trip to the southwest of England where the Charles Trent scrapyard in the town of Poole has quietly reinvented itself as one of Europe’s most advanced ‘de-production’ facilities.

It has cost over £10m and looks at first sight like a car assembly plant — except that this one is focused on disassembly. Whole cars go in at one end and their skeletal remnants emerge at the other. Around 96.3% is reused or recycled by weight — above the 95% legal target and the UK average of 93% or less. Part of what makes the model work is the emphasis on separating out the valuable but harder to get at elements rather than simply recycling the steel for scrap.

On a typical day 120 cars arrive on trucks from all around the area and engineers crawl over them attaching bar codes which identify key valuable items. It’s a high-tech operation. Robot arms lift items clear so that humans can get in with cutting torches, bar codes label and track everything.The wheels, batteries and tyres are the first to be removed — many can be refurbished and resold, others can go to a specialist recycling facility. Fluids are drained off- fuel, oil even water — and are used in the company’s own vehicles. And then the carcass is hoisted on to a disassembly line where it visits four stations; at each one the bar codes are scanned to identify what has to be done and instructions for how to deal with different parts. It’s got a lot in common with Ford’s old lines — the same race to complete tasks against the clock, for example, 15 minutes being allocated for each set of instructions. The stations are specialized; number 1 deals with doors, panels and interiors, 2 handles lights and dashboards, 3 is moving parts like engines, gearboxes, axles and cat converters ad the last stage is electricals. Engine blocks are washed, labelled and assessed for re-usability — or stripped down for parts. What’s left after all this is to crush the rest into a metal bale and send to scrap recycler. The whole process takes about 60 minutes and handles 75 cars/day

A key element in the process is the downstream platform where parts can be sold online; eBay has become the UK’s largest retailer of car parts and preferred not least because it offers guarantees of provenance and quality. It has grown as a marketplace partly because since the Brexit split from the EU spare parts are scarce. Prices have risen and consumers and repairers are prepared to pay and use recycled ones, especially with a guarantee. The approach is not only greener but also up to 70% cheaper!

Innovation is continuing to help develop the process further; as the CEO comments ‘within the next couple of years our target will be to close that recycling loop to nearly 100%…this is the future of car recycling’.

So innovation in processes is a key — but so too is innovation in the underlying ways in which we frame business opportunity. Business model innovation. Current concerns around the availability and complex geopolitics of key raw materials is promoting a rethink and a re-evaluation of opportunities. Key minerals like lithium and cobalt are going to be critical and the search for alternative sources of supply comes into the equation. How about re-mining as one route forward?

In another recent article in New Scientist Graham Lawton reports on thinking — and the technology development behind it — around revisiting coal waste as a source of key valuable materials. A recent webinar hosted by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine explored some fascinating options which revalue the thousands of sites of old coal mines which are littered with unsightly waste heaps. There’s a lot of collateral waste associated with coal mines — slag heaps, ash ponds and so on do not make for green and pleasant landscapes. These are mostly the consequence of burning coal — but they may represent a rich source of opportunity. Burning coal concentrates residual chemicals in the rock and those residuals include some of the most sought after minerals in today’s world. Lithium is close to the top of the list, essential for our current electromobility revolution and the batteries which will drive it. But there are other members of the so-called ‘dynamic dozen’ of key strategic materials present on slag heaps. Estimates suggest US coal waste alone contains around 288,000 tonnes of the stuff, enough to supply the US market for 130 years. Plus it also contains other high value minerals like cobalt (think mobile phones), platinum, iridium, gallium and germanium (semiconductors anyone?)

Rethinking waste in this way takes not only money but the classic entrepreneurial skill of reframing — of seeing what others don’t see. At its core, the Trash-to-Cash business model is all about re-imagining waste as a valuable resource. It requires an open mindset but also a long-term vision; the changes which might make such a business model viable may take time to materialize. But somewhere in that future of uncertainty about resource availability, concern for pollution and an increasingly strong regulatory framework lie the seeds of significant opportunity.

There’s also a need to think big and recognize that this kind of change may require a rethink at systems level. Much of the circular economy argument hinges around this theme of bringing together different players to create something viable which has emergent properties — the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Sustainability led innovation is easy and obvious — up to a point. Only a very short-sighted organization would fail to try to do what it does better — saving energy, reducing carbon footprint, etc. — it’s a no brainer. And there’s scope for the visionaries who see that this might be a route to new products and services, a way of creating a company or of renewing and transforming an existing one. The role model of Ray Anderson who took Interface Flooring from a small carpets company to being a major player in the industry through committing wholeheartedly to the sustainability vision is a powerful one.

The big challenge in sustainability-led innovation is working at the system level, assembling and aligning multiple players into a coherent ecosystem. And that takes a lot of entrepreneurial vision, re-framing and dogged perseverance! But the prize may be worth it; in earlier centuries alchemists were seen as the somewhat lunatic fringe with their attempts to transmute base material into gold. With today’s technological, political and economic environment we may be closer to reaching that goal. To paraphrase a classic one-liner from the Hollywood depictions of the Gold Rush — ‘there’s gold in them thar hills….!’ could become ‘there’s gold in them thar landfills….!’

Golden Rubbish

You can find my podcast here and my videos here

And if you’d like to learn with me take a look at my online course here

Image credits: Dall-E via Bing, John Bessant

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Celebrating the Trailblazing Women Pioneers of Innovation

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

On this International Women’s Day, we honor the remarkable women who have shaped our world through their groundbreaking inventions, discoveries, and unwavering determination. These female innovators defied societal norms, shattered glass ceilings, and left an indelible mark on history. Let’s delve into the stories of some of the greatest female minds:

1. Caroline Herschel – The Comet Hunter

Caroline Lucretia Herschel, born in 1750 in Hanover, Germany, was a trailblazer in astronomy. Despite her parents’ discouragement, she pursued education and mathematics. Caroline’s brother, William Herschel, took her to England, where she became his housekeeper. In 1782, she discovered her first comet, earning her place in history as the first woman to achieve this feat. Her meticulous observations and dedication to science paved the way for future astronomers.

2. Marie Curie – Radiant Genius

Marie Curie, a Polish-born physicist and chemist, revolutionized science. She discovered radium and polonium, coined the term “radioactivity,” and became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (and later, two more!). Her tireless work in radiation research laid the foundation for modern medicine and cancer treatment. Marie Curie’s legacy continues to inspire generations of scientists.

3. Ada Lovelace – The First Computer Programmer

Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer, collaborated with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. She envisioned its potential beyond mere calculations and wrote the first algorithm, making her the world’s first computer programmer. Her foresight laid the groundwork for modern computing, and we celebrate her every time we write code.

4. Katherine Johnson – Hidden Figures, Revealed Genius

Katherine Johnson, an African American mathematician, played a pivotal role at NASA during the Space Race. Her calculations were crucial for John Glenn’s successful orbit around Earth. Despite facing racial and gender discrimination, Katherine’s brilliance helped humanity reach the stars. Her story was immortalized in the film “Hidden Figures” and serves as a beacon of resilience and excellence.

5. Shirley Jackson – Breaking Barriers in Physics

Shirley Ann Jackson, the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. from MIT, made significant contributions to theoretical physics. Her work in condensed matter physics and particle theory advanced our understanding of materials and fundamental particles. Dr. Jackson also served as the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, advocating for safety and innovation.

These women, among many others, have shaped the course of human progress. Their brilliance, resilience, and unwavering pursuit of knowledge inspire us to celebrate their achievements not just today but every day. Let us continue to uplift and recognize the remarkable contributions of women in science, technology, and innovation.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Bing Dall-E

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How to Re-engineer the Incubation Zone

How to Re-engineer the Incubation Zone

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Having spent the last several years working with public companies in the tech sector who want to apply zone management principles to catching their next wave, I finally had an epiphany.

Every one of my clients had an Incubation Zone of one sort or another, and all of them had put concerted efforts into running it in an efficient and orderly way. This included crowd-sourcing a large funnel of potential ideas from the workforce, taking those ideas through a well-structured qualification process with clear benchmarks for progressing to the next stage, and funding a handful of the best ideas to get through to an MVP and market validation.

My epiphany was, this is a Production Zone operating model, not an Incubation Zone model. That is, these enterprises are treating the Incubation Zone as if it were another cost center. No venture capitalist operates in this manner. They are not process oriented—they are coin operated. But they do have a method, one that has proven itself countless times, and that’s what I want to describe here.

Anchor Tenets

In my view, there are five key principles that successful VCs keep close to their hearts. They are:

  1. Trapped value. If you are going to be coin operated, the first thing to do is find the coins. In B2B markets, this typically equates to identifying where there is trapped value in the current way of doing business. The value may be trapped in the infrastructure model (think cloud computing over data centers), the operating model (think self-organizing ride dispatching from Uber over the standard call center dispatcher), or the business model (think software subscription over license and maintenance). The point is, if you can release the trapped value, customers will enjoy dramatic returns, enough to warrant taking on the challenge of a Technology Adoption Life Cycle.
  2. 10X technology. VCs are fully aware that there are very good reasons why trapped value stays trapped. Normally, it is because the current paradigm has substantial inertial momentum, meaning it delivers value reliably, even though not optimally. To break through this barrier requires what Andy Grove used to call a 10X effect. Something has to be an order of magnitude better than the status quo to kick off a new Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Incremental improvements are great for reinforcing the status quo, as well as for defending it against the threat of disruption, but they do not have the horsepower to change the game.
  3. Technology genius. 10X innovations do not fall out of trees. Nor are they normally achieved through sheer persistence. Brilliance is what we are looking for here, and here public enterprises face a recruiting challenge. They simply cannot offer the clean slate, venture funding, and equity reward possibilities that private capital can. What they can do, however, is pick up talent on the rebound and integrate them into their own playbook (see more on this below). The point is, top technology talent is a must have. This puts pressure both on the general manager of any Incubation Zone operating unit and on the Incubation Zone board to do whatever it takes to put an A Team together.
  4. New design rules. The path for breakthrough technology to release trapped value involves capitalizing on next-generation design rules. The key principle here is that something that used to be expensive, complex, and scarce, has by virtue of the ever-shifting technology landscape, now become cheap, simple, and plentiful. Think of DRAM in the 1990s, Wi-Fi in the first decade of this century, compute cycles in the current decade, with data storage perhaps the next in line. Prior to these inflection points, solution designers had to work around these factors as constraints, be that in constricting code to run in 64KB, limiting streaming to run over dial-up modems, or operating their own data center when all they wanted to do was to run a program. Inertia holds these constraints in place because they are embedded in so many interoperating systems, they are hard to change. Technology Adoption Life Cycles blow them apart—but only when led by entrepreneurs who have the insight to reconceive these assets as essentially free.
  5. Entrepreneurial general manager. And that brings us to the fifth and final key ingredient in the VC formula: entrepreneurial GMs. They are the ones with a nose for trapped value, able to sell the next new thing on its potential to create massive returns. They are the ones who can evangelize the new technology, celebrate its game-changing possibilities, and close their first visionary customers. They must recruit and stay close to their top technology genius. They must intuit the new design rules and use them as a competitive wedge to break into a market that is stacked against them. Finally, they must stay focused on their mission, vision, and values while course-correcting repeatedly, and occasionally pivoting, along the way. It is not a job description for the faint of heart.

Now, these are what I claim to be the anchor tenets of the VC playbook. For the purposes of the rest of this blog, let’s take them as a given. Now the question becomes, how could a public enterprise, which does not have the freedom or flexibility of a venture capital firm, construct an Incubation Zone operating model that incorporates these principles in a way that plays to its strengths and protects itself against its weaknesses?

An Enterprise Playbook for the Incubation Zone

We should acknowledge at the outset that every enterprise has its own culture, its own crown jewels, its own claim to fame. So, any generic playbook has to adapt to local circumstances. That said, it is always good to start with a framework, and here in outline form is the action plan I propose:

  • Create an Incubation Board first, and charter it appropriately. Its number one responsibility is not to become the next disrupter—the enterprise already has a franchise, it doesn’t need to create one. Instead, it needs to protect the existing franchise against the next technology disruption by getting in position to ride the next wave as opposed to getting swamped by it.
  • In this role, the board’s mission is to identify any intersections between trapped value and disruptive technologies that would impact, positively or negatively, the enterprise’s current book of business. We are in the realm of SWOT threats and opportunities, where the threats take precedence because addressing them is not optional.
  • The first piece of business is to identify potential use cases that could emerge at the intersection of trapped value and breakthrough technology, to prioritize the list in terms of import and impact, and to recruit a small team to build a BEFORE/AFTER demo that highlights the game-changing possibilities of the highest priority case. This team is built around a technology leader and an entrepreneur. The technology leader ideally would come from the outside, thereby being less prone to fall back on obsolete design rules. The entrepreneur should come from the inside, perhaps an executive from a prior acquisition who has been down this path before, thereby better able to negotiate the dynamics of the culture.
  • The next step is to socialize the demo, first with technology experts to pressure test the assumptions and make improvements to the design, and then with domain experts in the target use case, whether from the customer base or the enterprise’s own go-to-market team, who have a clear view of the trapped value and a good sense of what it would take to release it.
  • The next step is to pitch the Incubation Zone board for funding.

> This is not an exercise in TAM or SAM or anything else of the sort. Those are tools for determining ROI in established sectors, where category boundaries are more or less in place. Disruptive innovation creates whole new boundaries, or fails altogether in the process, neither of which outcomes are properly modeled in the normal market opportunity analysis frameworks.

> Instead, focus on beachhead market potential. Could this use case gain sufficient market adoption within a single target segment to become a viable franchise? If so, it will give the enterprise a real option on a possible future. That is the primary goal of the Incubation Zone.

Whether the effort succeeds or fails, the enterprise can gain something of real value. That is, success gives it a viable path forward, and failure suggests that it need not spend a lot of resources protecting against this flank. The job of the board is to determine if the proposal being pitched is worth prioritizing on this basis.

  • Once funded, the focus should be on building a Minimum Viable Product and using it as the basis for selling a bespoke project to a visionary executive working at a marquee brand. The intent is to build a whole product for this customer on a project basis, doing whatever it takes to release the trapped value, thereby showing the world what good could look like. This project will require a ton of custom engineering, so it is key to price this on a time and materials basis, giving away the license while protecting the IP rights. Success consists of creating a marquee reference that garners the attention of the tech sector analysts and media.
  • The next funding milestone focuses on productizing the MVP for initial distribution. Ideally, this would be done internally with the enterprise IT department serving as Customer Zero. That allows for deeper dives into what’s working and what’s not as well as data collection to verify that trapped value is not only being released but recovered. It also positions the CIO as a highly credible reference to support New Product Introduction.
  • With productized offering in hand, the final step is to introduce the new product into restricted distribution, not general availability. Your goal is to target a beachhead market with a single use case—just the opposite of what general distribution is designed to accomplish. Thus, the entire go-to-market effort, from product launch, to pipeline generation, to sales, post-sales implementation, and customer success needs to be under the direct management of the GM of the Incubation Zone operating unit. Success here is measured by classic chasm-crossing metrics, focused on winning a dominant share of the top 30 accounts in the target market segment.

Crossing the chasm represents the fulfillment of the Incubation Zone’s real option mandate. This sets up a second set of funding milestones depending on what exit path is to be targeted. We can dig into those dynamics at another time.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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It’s Not Clear What Innovation Success Is

It's Not Clear What Innovation Success Is

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“I would argue that it was an innovation success!”

At that moment, I started to deeply empathize with Alice because I felt like I was tumbling down the rabbit hole.

For the previous several minutes, I had been on one of my usual soapboxes – Innovation needs to generate quantifiable, and specifically financial, results; otherwise, it’s theater at best and performative lie at worst. As Alexander Osterwalder says, “ROI is the only thing that matters in innovation.”

That’s when my conversation partner brought up Kickbox. 

Way back in 2012, Adobe’s Chief Strategist and VP of Creativity, Mark Randall, packed “everything an employee needs to generate, prototype, and test a new idea” into a little red box to encourage employees to unleash their inner innovator. One thousand Kickboxes were distributed to interested employees in that first year. 

In the decade since, Kickbox has been used at thousands of organizations from multi-nationals (3M, Cisco, Caterpillar, MasterCard, Swisscom, P&G, Roche, Implenia, Zurich Insurance) to educational institutions (ETH, UNSW, USC), government agencies (DARPA, United Nations) and non-profits (Peace Corp, Gates Foundation, Kickstart-Innovation, Careum).  It is widely regarded as the world’s most “successful” Intrapreneurship program.

But what does “successful” mean?

Widely adopted?

Highly regarded?

The source of:

  • New projects (using Kickbox, Swisscom validated 400+ innovation projects in just two years)?
  • New revenue?
  • Cost savings?
  • Higher profit?

Effective at:

  • Increasing employee morale?
  • Reducing employee turnover?
  • Building a culture of innovation?

Something else?

For Kickbox, “success” means increasing employee engagement, creativity, and collaboration.

Let me be clear: this is an AWESOME outcome.  Very few programs have even a temporary impact on employee engagement and the organization’s culture of innovation.  So, to have a program that makes a measurable and lasting impact is incredible.  To have a program that is so effective that other organizations around the world adopt it AND experience similar benefits is almost unbelievable,

But is that enough?

If Kickbox was the ONLY thing Adobe did to encourage innovation, would Kickbox be considered a success? 

I don’t think so.

Kickbox was successful because it was part of a holistic approach to innovation.  It was part of a portfolio of efforts to encourage employees to be more creative and collaborative and to build and acquire new sources of revenue. 

If Kickbox was the only innovation effort Adobe invested in, it would not have lasted even the two years between its 2012 test and 2014 Adobe-wide launch.  It would have been like all other hackathons, shark tanks, events, and gimmicks companies use to encourage innovation without thinking about how to carry on after the event.

Speaking of the two years from test to internal launch…

For Kickbox, “success” also means surviving internal scrutiny.

Each Kickbox contained instructions, a pen, two Post-It notepads, two notebooks, a Starbucks gift card, a bar of chocolate, and a $1,000 prepaid gift card that could be spent on anything the employee needed with NO need for approval, justification, or even an expense report.

Think about that for a moment.

The 1,000-box test cost $1M in gift cards PLUS the costs of all the other materials, and that’s before you factor in the costs of design, assembly, and distribution.

If Kickbox was a grassroots effort instead of one championed by the company’s Chief Strategist and VP of Creativity, a highly respected executive who joined Adobe when it acquired the company he led as CEO, would the company have spent $1M+ on the test and an additional two years refining the concept before launching to the rest of the organization?

I don’t think so.

Kickbox was successful because it survived financial scrutiny and organizational skepticism, protected by a senior executive motivated to deliver on a request to teach his skills and approach to innovation to the rest of a giant organization.

“Success” ultimately means money.

After a week of tumbling, I think that I may have reached the bottom of the rabbit hole and a way to reconcile my money-grubbing capitalist view of innovation with my colleague’s extremely true and data-based assertion that success can be something much softer and more intangible.

Yes, and.

Yes, a successful innovation can be something with qualitative benefits, AND those benefits need to translate into quantifiable (financial) benefits, AND it needs a senior executive to shepherd it through the years of scrutiny and skepticism that kill most efforts.

After all, employee engagement, lower turnover, and more ideas have quantifiable and meaningful financial benefits. So, ultimately, it is all about the money.

Or maybe I’m still in Wonderland.

What do you think?

Image credit: Unsplash

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Agile Innovation Management

Agile Beyond Software Development

Agile Innovation Management

GUEST POST from Diana Porumboiu

Research reveals that 90% of executives recognize the critical importance of agility for their company’s future success, with 96% emphasizing the need to increase agility in the future. What’s more, agile companies grow revenue 37% faster and generate 30% higher profits than their non-agile counterparts.  

Incumbents are shaken by the highly dynamic environment they operate in, and they are too slow to respond to disruptive changes. 52% of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, were acquired, or ceased to exist.

An AEIU survey, 27% of respondents cited their organization’s lack of agility as a competitive disadvantage in anticipating marketplace shifts. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to be better and stronger, you also need to be faster to swiftly adapt to the market race.

Based on our experience in working with top innovators, and on market insights and trends, we can see that the future of innovation management is agile. What does this mean, and how does it concern you, the ambitious innovator?

The following two articles dedicated to agile innovation aim to answer these big questions and act as a guide to agile innovation management. Let’s start by framing the major concepts and explain the thinking behind them and later continue with practical and actionable tips.

Let’s start by untangling the intricate connection between business agility and innovation management by shedding some light on all these terms: innovation, innovation management, agile and business agility. 

Innovation is a highly debated topic. You might be sick of hearing this buzzword everywhere, but whether you choose to use it or not, the concept behind it is here to stay.

The short definition of innovation comes from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: innovation is “the introduction of something new.”  

This is an oversimplification, so we have to take it one step further to explain the nuances.  

Innovation is not just about generating and implementing new ideas. While these ideas can refer to products, services or processes, adding innovation to the mix means that you bring about positive change and create value.

Through innovation you should identify new opportunities that can be transformed into tangible outcomes that address unmet needs, solve problems, or improve existing conditions. 

To achieve these results, you need to manage a series of activities that are involved in the process of introducing those new ideas. These activities can range from ideation, development prioritization, evaluation, to implementation and launching of new products or introducing new processes. This is what we call “innovation management”.   

The challenge is not only in managing all these activities to pursue innovation, but also in doing it fast.  

Here, we refer to the pace of innovation, which plays a crucial role in sustained business growth.

In a nutshell, the pace of innovation is the speed at which an organization can improve their existing products and services and their ability to develop them while capturing the needs of the constantly evolving markets. 

Your rate of improvement (so the pace of innovation), has compounding, exponential returns and thus gives a clear competitive advantage.  

Why are we talking about the pace of innovation? Because it goes hand in hand with the agile mindset, which in the past decade has developed into the more holistic approach, business agility.  

A short introduction to “agile”

Agile as a business concept emerged in 2001 with the “Agile Manifesto”.  

At its core, agile refers to a set of twelve principles and four values intended for teams that work on software development. It started as a manifesto, but the brains behind it never imagined that their vision on how to better develop software would play such a pivotal role in management at an organizational level. 

This is, in a nutshell, the 2001 version of agile:

  • The four values of the Agile Manifesto. The idea is that what is on the left should be valued more than what is on the right.  
  1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
  3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  4. Responding to change over following a plan 
  • The twelve principles behind the Agile Manifest that the signatories followed.

Today, “agile” left the dark chambers of software development to capture the attention of leaders across many industries.  

These days there are countless frameworks and practices that ride the agile wave, but to be truly agile it’s more important to understand the thinking behind the agile concept, before deciding what methodologies are fit for purpose.

Agile 2.0

Agile 2.0 is the next iteration which comes from different authors who want “agile to pivot”. Given today’s use of agile and how it has been growing outside of its initial purpose, the initiative is understandable and laudable.   

Agile 2.0 is more anchored in today’s digital world and puts greater emphasis on some areas that were missing or misunderstood in the first version.

It’s also more balanced and encourages a more holistic approach. For example, even though the first manifesto does not incite chaos by making the case of self-organizing teams, it fails to address the importance of leadership, which agile 2.0 wants to rectify. To get a better understanding of agile 2.0, you can read the principles on the dedicated page.  

To summarize, “the agile way” refers to the ability to respond to change, adapt, build things in smaller cycles, get feedback, and unveil new opportunities. 

Why Business Agility is More Relevant than Isolated Agile Practices 

Agility promotes flexibility, collaboration and continuous improvement. It’s about adapting and responding quickly to changes. This is why it also helps increase the pace of innovation. Of course, easier said than done.

We have seen in the past twenty years how agile has outgrown its software development box. The problem is that most organizations that want to be agile are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. This leads to frustrations especially on the receiving end, when employees are forced into these “agile ways” even though leadership did not set the stage for agile in the first place.

Instead of fixating on agile methods, the focus should be on how to scale the approach at a higher level through business, organizational and enterprise agility. They might seem one and the same thing, but there are nuances that differentiate the three.   

While business agility focuses on operational responsiveness, organizational agility emphasizes cultural and structural adaptability, and enterprise agility encompasses a broader perspective, incorporating external relationships and ecosystem dynamics in addition to internal capabilities.  

In all three scenarios, achieving an extensive agile transformation is a highly complex journey and requires a top-down approach. However, it doesn’t mean that agility can’t also be achieved bottom-up, outside the IT department. In our work with customers, we see many innovation champions who put the wheels in motion through their determination and commitment to embrace agility.  

Even though the agile concept is used as a badge of honor by many organizations, it’s still highly misunderstood.  

That’s why it’s also important to understand not just what agile is, but also what is not.  

What is NOT Agile  

Scaling agile thinking organisation-wide it’s very difficult and hard to achieve. One reason is the lack of direction. Leaders and managers rush into methodologies and frameworks that sound good because others seem to be successful in implementing those. But more often than not, they forget to ask themselves why they want to be agile in the first place. Is it for the right reasons? Is there a good understanding of agile before bringing on board an agile coach?

Using Kanban, organizing Sprints, and hiring Scrum Masters will not automatically make you more agile. It’s important to understand agile holistically and put it into context before getting to the actual tactics and tools.

Start by asking yourself, what do you want to achieve, and what problems you want to solve with agile?

If your goal is to increase efficiency, deliver more or faster, increase productivity, or quality, there are plenty of other methods that can help you achieve this. Agile can contribute to these, but it’s not a prerequisite.  

Agility is primarily about adaptability and changing conditions. So, the main reason for considering the agile approach should be market responsiveness: your organization’s ability to adapt rapidly to changes that are happening in the market. 

Without clearly understanding the above, it’s easy to see how, for many organizations, agile became synonymous with processes like scrum.

Just to give a bit of context, Scrum is the most popular method (even though it precedes the Agile manifesto) used now by agile practitioners. It’s an iterative framework that brings small teams together to find adaptive solutions for complex problems.  

source: unsplash.com

A scrum process is built around product innovation and works best when there is a lot of uncertainty, and you don’t know which way your product should go.

In Scrum, work is organized into short iterations called sprints, usually lasting 2-4 weeks, during which a cross-functional team works to complete a set of tasks or goals. Sprints have been adopted by other departments too, not just those working on product development.  

But whether these can be successfully implemented outside of software development and scaled to other departments, is still a matter of debate. We’ll explore the reasons behind this in the next section where we dissect the challenges and pitfalls of agile.    

Bottom line, scrum is most suited for exploration and validation of assumptions. Scrum is not about speed, efficiency, and predictability. If you’re in a highly exploratory environment Scrum is a valuable practice.

Then there are those teams that proclaim their agility through Kanban. We explained the tool in greater detail here, where we show how it’s used to improve flow efficiency and optimize operations.

While it can be a highly valuable tool within the agile transformation, Kanban on its own is not enough to increase agility.  

So, while these are very popular agile practices, useful in their own right, they don’t have the power of embedding agility at the core of the business.

What does this all have to do with innovation management and how can you actually drive agility to innovate?  Something to explore in the next article.


Article originally published on viima.com/blog

Image credit: Unsplash.com, viima.com

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