“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into solutions valued above every existing alternative – and of course widely adopted.”
– Braden Kelley
“Innovation is fostered by information gathered from new connections; from insights gained by journeys into other disciplines or places; from active, collegial networks and fluid, open boundaries. Innovation arises from ongoing circles of exchange, where information is not just accumulated or stored, but created. Knowledge is generated anew from connections that weren’t there before.”
– Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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Although there are simple and cost effective ways to jumpstart your efforts – for example, leveraging a company like InnoCentive to host prize-based challenges in order to rapidly find solutions to your most pressing problems – leading organizations that wish to truly embrace open innovation and crowdsourcing do so through careful planning. When seeking to engage external talent, one of the first of many questions you must first ask yourself is: Why are we doing this? What do we hope that external talent can achieve for us that our internal talent cannot (or should not) achieve, and how do we integrate the two together?
The second question leading organizations in open innovation ask themselves is: Why will they care? And one good place to start in answering this difficult question is to ask: What kind of organization do you have? Do you have a product-driven organization like Microsoft that is very much organized around products? Do you have a customer-driven organization like Hallmark that is organized around customer moments instead of around products? Or do you have a purpose-driven organization? While it does not technically matter what kind of organization you have, the key is to find something that not just your employees will engage with, but that your customers and partners will engage with as well. This could be purpose, but it could also be love for a brand or a well-designed, emotionally-connected product.
Other questions to ask:
In our organization, where does open innovation fit in our overall innovation efforts?
How are we looking to connect?
Do we want to build our own proprietary global sensing network that allows us to pull together insights and ideas from lots of different types of sources in different locations?
Or, do we want to utilize external service providers like InnoCentive to get up and running faster or go wider than our own proprietary networks can go?
Are we looking for crowd labor or creativity, or are we looking to engage in open innovation or civic engagement in creating innovative solutions?
Are we looking for possible solutions to problems that we have already identified?
Are we looking with current and potential suppliers at the intersection of what is needed and what is possible?
Or, are we looking more broadly to identify new insights through which we can drive our innovation efforts?
Note that one must be careful not to become too focused on ideas. Great ideas fail all the time – poor value translation, poor value access, poor timing, and so on. Rather, getting to creative solutions to problems and challenges is key to innovation success.
Another important questions is: What tool is best for this problem? We have all heard the saying that if you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail. Well, when it comes to open innovation and crowdsourcing, there are lots of tools that we can use, but only if we first understand the nature of the work we are trying to get done. Is it a creative piece of work that we can put out to a community like 99Designs? Or do we just need someone to help us temporarily through a place like PeoplePerHour? Or, perhaps we are trying to solve problems, both big and small, and want to leverage a company like InnoCentive to create and tap into both internal and external communities of problem solvers to accelerate our innovation efforts.
Smart organizations identify the different work and challenge scenarios they expect to face over time and then identify which resourcing option(s) make the most sense for each scenario. They then work to form the relationships and agreements necessary with firms like InnoCentive to make sure that they will have reliable resources in place for when they seek to utilize a particular type of resource to tackle the matching challenge or work scenario.
Successful organizations have a plan for how they are going to interface with external resources and how they are going to bring ideas and potential solutions in house for further development and launch. What will the cultural obstacles be? You must consider what the potential cultural obstacles might be to engaging external talent in your organization. P&G had to work very hard to change of its culture from ‘Not Invented Here’ to one where people embrace new things being ‘Proudly Found Elsewhere.’
Some of the reasons that you may face resistance in implementing an external talent strategy include beliefs that career advancement comes from increasing the number of headcount managed, a fear of failure, a lack of management support, and people not wanting to go outside their comfort zones (‘I get paid to manage and make things incrementally better’). But when people start to hear stories about some of the successes, see some proof of the benefits, and see other people get recognized for utilizing external talent, acceptance of an external talent strategy starts to spread. And when senior leadership or middle management start talking about what is being done with external talent, and people using external talent start training their peers on what they are doing, you know people are starting to fully embrace your external talent strategy.
If you want to read How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part Two, you can find it here or…
“Common sense is a collection of prejudices acquired by age 18”
– Albert Einstein
– Submitted by Bob Housden
(“Had scientists relied on common sense we’d still believe the Sun orbits Earth – thank goodness for innovative thinking”)
“Innovation is a gift. What are you doing to ensure that employees want to give it?”
– Braden Kelley
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
It used to be that when you formed a rock band to seek fame and fortune, all you had to do was find a lead singer, a guitarist, a bass player, a drummer, and maybe another guitarist or a keyboard player if you wanted a richer sound. But the digital age presents a level of complexity and opportunity that John, Paul, and Ringo never had to deal with.
If video killed the radio star, or tried to, then YouTube will certainly finish the job.
In the old days (come on, rock music is less than 100 years old), bands played at their local high school, then maybe the local club circuit, recorded a demo and sent off demo tapes, and finally if they were lucky they were ‘discovered’ by a record exec and signed to a record deal.
In the digital age, aspiring rock stars need to consider the social media and marketing skills of potential band mates as much as they scrutinize their skill with a particular musical instrument. In the digital age your skills with YouTube are almost more likely to make you a rock star then your skills with a guitar.
Just look at Pomplamoose – nearly 80 million video views and 340,000 subscribers. They have more YouTube subscribers than mega-stars Coldplay.
If we look at a new song as an invention and at my Innovation is All About Value framework through a music lens, you will quickly see why social media and creativity are so important in the music business and why new singers and bands can seemingly come from nowhere on the Internet.
1. Value Creation
A new song (Is the song any good?)
2. Value Access
How easy do you make it for people to find this new song, listen to it and buy it?
3. Value Translation
Do you do a good job of making people want to add the song to their playlists and to share the song with others? Do you engage them and make the song a part of them?
The power of #3 is magnified on the Internet (both if you do it well or poorly). Just look at the fact that Gotye created an AWESOME song ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ and the video for it has received 600,000 page views, but a little known Canadian band Walk Off The Earth released a YouTube video covering the song and their cover has generated 83 million page views and an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Why?
More passion, and a better, more engaging story (ultimately better value translation that was worth sharing).
So all you teenyboppers out there putting together the next great rock band, beware. In this new digital reality we all live in, you can’t think just about guitar, vocals, bass, drums, and keyboards. You must also think about who in the band you are considering putting together (unless you actually have money to pay someone) will make you look awesome on:
1. YouTube
2. MySpace Music
3. Twitter
4. Facebook
5. Band Web Site
6. Other places (Spotify, iTunes, etc.)
Yes, I said MySpace. The site remains incredibly relevant despite being eclipsed by Facebook thanks to its understanding of how to help bands create valuable pages for fans. Facebook still sucks at this. If I were Google and didn’t want Google+ to die a slow death, I would buy MySpace and incorporate the Music capabilities into Google+. It would make a great pairing with YouTube. They might want to buy Spotify while they are at it to bolster their unfortunately pathetic Google Play offering.
One other interesting contrast to draw between the successful bands spawned by YouTube versus the successful bands spawned by the old guard. YouTube successes tend to be very human and engaging in their approach, while old guard bands tend to be very aloof, distant, and well-packaged.
What kind of musical band and social media band will you be?
Here are the two different ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ videos, starting with the original by Gotye:
Followed by the Walk Off the Earth cover:
Image Credit: Foxhound Studio
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“Two of the most important job skills in this new world of work will be the ability of the individual and the organization to deconstruct the work into portable units that can be executed by a mix of internal and external talent, and construct a project plan for distributing, aggregating, integrating, and executing the component parts to achieve the overall project goal.”
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Although there are simple and cost effective ways to jumpstart your efforts – for example, leveraging a company like InnoCentive to host prize-based challenges in order to rapidly find solutions to your most pressing problems – leading organizations that wish to truly embrace open innovation and crowdsourcing do so through careful planning. When seeking to engage external talent, one of the first of many questions you must first ask yourself is: Why are we doing this? What do we hope that external talent can achieve for us that our internal talent cannot (or should not) achieve, and how do we integrate the two together?
It used to be that when you formed a rock band to seek fame and fortune, all you had to do was find a lead singer, a guitarist, a bass player, a drummer, and maybe another guitarist or a keyboard player if you wanted a richer sound. But the digital age presents a level of complexity and opportunity that John, Paul, and Ringo never had to deal with.