Monthly Archives: June 2012

What is Your Innovation Equation?

What is Your Innovation Equation?Have you ever wondered why with all of the people trying to innovate, more innovation isn’t created?

I’ll give you a hint…

Often, something gets lost in the translation between what people think their customers want and what their real desires are.

Part of the reason so many people fail to innovate is that they fail to recognize that ideas and innovation are not the same thing. Ideas are easy, innovation is hard. For ideas to translate into innovation they must be based on unique insights that unlock new customer value.

In their book The Other Side of Innovation, Chris Trimble and Vijay Govindarajan assert that:

Innovation = Idea + Execution

Successful innovation is based on how effective firms are at execution, and that ideas aren’t as important as execution. But the equation could be better because many companies are good at generating ideas and at executing their ideas, but are still bad at innovation. The problem is not that companies don’t know how to execute, but that they often fail to identify a unique insight that unlocks sufficient new customer value to displace existing solutions.

So let’s modify the equation to be:

Innovation = Insight x Execution

The equation improves by multiplying the two elements instead of adding them because if the insight is not unique or does not unlock new customer value, then even the best execution doesn’t equal innovation.

But even this modified equation doesn’t go far enough. Instead it should be something more like this:

Continue reading this article on the American Express OPEN Forum

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Time to Find Your Innovation Catapult

Time to Find Your Innovation CatapultNow that 2012 has kicked into gear, it is time to get your innovation efforts right before the recovery. To that end, every organization should be looking to find and aim their innovation catapult.

What does this mean, exactly? Well, we all know that innovation is about challenging the status quo. Because of this, there are many barriers to innovation that exist within organizations that try to prevent innovators from storming the castle gates and disrupting what is safe, comfortable, and successful. So what is an innovator to do?

To successfully catapult your innovation efforts over your organization’s defenses, you must first develop flexibility, focus, and passion in your approach to innovation. You must fight to balance several tensions within your organization including: exploitation versus exploration, and the entrepreneurial mindset versus the executive mindset. To help with these efforts, you must also consciously establish a focus on creating innovation excellence much in the same way that you pursue operational excellence.

To effectively find and aim your innovation catapult, you must first remember six key things about catapults themselves:

1. They Accelerate Things

Innovation acceleration is achieved by accumulating the partial ideas and the energy and passion behind them to create broader support, tackle their obvious weaknesses, and to build a more complete solution to take to the marketplace.

2. Risk is Involved

We must be aware and manage the risks to innovation that come from choosing the wrong insight to drive ideation, from overestimating the new value, from underestimating the development costs, from being too early, or from being overconfident.

3. You Need a System

To create innovation excellence we must first understand what our current level of innovation maturity is, and then we must either build or improve our system for generating insights, and have a system for managing the overall innovation process.

4. It’s About the People

People of course are central to innovation, and this means we need to have people that seek insights, are great at collaboration, that are willing to fight to overcome obstacles, and that understand that they have a role to play in the innovation process.

5. You Can’t Do It All Yourself

But as an organization, you can’t do it yourself. There are many different groups surrounding your organization that can serve not only as great sources of insights and inputs to power innovation, but also groups that you need to work with to manage the complexity of change that your innovations will unleash. At the same time, you must work hard to achieve a level of balance in these partnerships in the same way that successful personal relationships require a certain balance of give and take.

6. Barriers Can Be Overcome

Finally, barriers to innovation can be overcome if you know where to look. By knowing what the unique barriers to innovation that your organization faces are, you can begin to address them, whether they lie in the organizational psychology or somewhere else.

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The New Reinvigoration of American Manufacturing

The New Reinvigoration of American Manufacturing

As wages and shipping costs rise abroad, unemployment stays high at home, and strategic discontent with offshoring grows, U.S. Manufacturing finds itself facing its best chance at staging a comeback.

American companies are considering a reversal of offshoring and outsourcing to reduce risk, improve agility, shorten product development cycle, and improve their ability to simplify increasingly complex supply chain management.

Missing from this list is innovation, but US companies that commit to engaging American workers in their innovation efforts may also increase their ability to justify manufacturing their products at home.

As wages and shipping costs rise abroad, unemployment stays high at home, and strategic discontent with offshoring grows, U.S. Manufacturing finds itself facing its best chance at staging a comeback.

American companies are considering a reversal of offshoring and outsourcing to reduce risk, improve agility, shorten product development cycle, and improve their ability to simplify increasingly complex supply chain management.

Missing from this list is innovation, but US companies that commit to engaging American workers in their innovation efforts may also increase their ability to justify manufacturing their products at home.

Moreover, Chinese workers are now three-to-five times more expensive than some other Asian workers, leading American firms to reconsider their sites of production.

One such firm is Nike, whose innovative Flyknit technology could allow it to make shoes easily anywhere in the world by having a machine make the most labor-intensive parts of the shoe. To bring production back to the United States allows Nike to react faster to competitors or to increase the speed of scheduled product launches. In the fashion industry, speed is crucial, and onshore production could create a competitive advantage.

Other firms are taking a second look at their reliance on contract manufacturers in China and elsewhere. Companies that once saw contract manufacturing as a strategic or economic necessity are questioning the wisdom of the arrangement as they watch original design manufacturers like HTC move up-market and strengthen their brands to compete with Apple, Motorola and others.

Adding fuel to the fire are rumors of workers at plants like Foxconn smuggling out plans and components to sell to pirates to make a little cash on the side.

But more importantly, an almost religious focus on cost and increased use of standard components across whole industries has made it more difficult for one brand to differentiate their products from another in the industry – increasing price competition and squeezing margins for all.

As a result, companies like Apple are now looking to reverse some elements of their standardization and outsourcing strategy and instead become more vertically integrated. Apple has acquired a chip design firm — and even their own chip fabrication plant (fab) — in its quest to differentiate itself and control some of its basic inputs and it may still acquire another fab to continue this strategic direction. Not to be outdone, Google is acquiring Motorola, and Nokia and Microsoft are working together closer than before.

It is possible for companies to manufacture their products in the United States and make a profit. When you invest in your workers, engage their hearts and minds and involve them in the innovation process, you can not only optimize your manufacturing processes but also uncover new growth opportunities that no contract manufacturer will ever bring to you.

Companies like New Balance, Snapper Mowers, American Apparel, Caterpillar, Syntax-Brillian (Olevia TV’s), Case IH, American Bicycle Group and many others have been working hard to keep making their products in the United States.

Now is the time for the Obama administration and state and local governments to step up their encouragement of US manufacturing. In these difficult economic times, Americans would love nothing more than to stroll down the aisles of their local Walmart, Target, or independent retailer and find more products on the shelves that say Made in the USA.

This article originally appeared on The Atlantic

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Latest Apple Innovation You Won’t See

Apple announced a new Macbook Pro with a Retina Display and an all flash architecture, but I think its most important design innovation is one you won’t see. The video below gives a good introduction to what they’ve done with the new Macbook Pro from a design perspective, but more importantly it reinforces some things we should all think about when trying to innovate:

After looking at the new tech that they packed into the design, the two most important inventions I saw that are likely to become innovations were:

  1. The asymetrical fans to reduce perceptible fan noise
  2. Expanding the unibody approach to incorporate the display

Asymetrical fans to spread out the noise signatures and make it seem quieter to the user?

Why didn’t anyone think of that sooner?

Well, I’m sure someone else did, but Apple seems to be the first one to ship it in a notebook in quantity, and if it works well I’m sure the rest of us who don’t want to spend $2,200 for a laptop will benefit as other manufacturers rush to adopt the approach.

A nice subtle pop song choice for the background too – Paradise.

Watch the video, be inpired, and be reminded that reimagining things and paying attention to detail are always key to designing insanely great products. 🙂

Happy innovating!

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Managing Innovation Complexity

Managing Innovation ComplexityIdeas are easy; innovation is hard. Ideas are exciting, but innovation is scary because it is all about change. The changes required by minor innovations are easier for customers and organizations to absorb. But the large changes generated by major innovations often disrupt not only the market, but the internal workings of the organization as well. This requires organizations to become increasingly flexible and adaptable. And companies that successfully innovate in a repeatable fashion have one thing in common: they are good at managing and adapting to change and complexity.

People often fail to imagine just how the change injected into organizations by innovation ebbs and flows across the whole organization’s ecosystem. Innovation creates a complex web of change not just for customers, but also for employees, suppliers, marketing, operations, and many other groups. Let’s explore some of the change categories visualized in this framework using an Apple iPod example from my book, Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire:

Continue reading this article on the American Express OPEN Forum

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Staging an Innovation Party

Staging an Innovation PartyIn 2011, I was a regular contributor to the American Express OPEN Forum on the topic of innovation. Here is the first one of that year:

Have you ever woken up in a cold sweat in the middle night from a nightmare focused on you throwing a big party that nobody comes to? Or, in real life, have you ever thrown a big launch party for a new product or service, made a lot of noise with advertising, marketing and public relations – only to have the sales returns be anemic at best?

According to a Linton, Matysiak & Wilkes study from 1997 titled Marketing, Witchcraft or Science, the success rate for new product introductions in the food industry is only between 20 and 30 percent. But, there is a key insight inside that data not to be ignored. The results highlight the power of market research and strategic marketing:

  • The bottom 20,000 U.S. food companies in the study combined for an 11.6 percent success rate.
  • The top 20 U.S. companies in the study enjoy a 76 percent success rate for new product introductions.

Sure, the 1997 data is coming from a single industry that many of you may not be in, but other data I’ve seen from the Product Development Management Association (PDMA) and other sources are similar and reinforce the importance of market research and strategic marketing. Worded another way, success in the market is often:

Continue reading this article on the American Express OPEN Forum.

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Full House of Innovation

Full House of InnovationMuch is written about the importance of diversity in teams and also about the competitive advantage that high-performance teams can build for an organization. There is a lot to read about boosting creativity and forcefully injecting different perspectives into the ideation process.

People are encouraged to use tools like the six thinking hats or methodologies like SCAMPER to help their teams come up with more innovative ideas. But, we don’t talk enough about the roles that are necessary for innovation success.

People are not interchangeable commodities and they don’t possess the same characteristics and aptitudes. Because it is simpler for us to pretend that people are interchangeable, we often do so, but deep down we know that people have different passions, skills and abilities. Yet we delude ourselves into thinking that every employee in our organization:

Continue reading this article on the American Express OPEN Forum

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Three Social Media and Innovation Quotes


“Social media serves an incredibly important role in innovation. Social media functions as the glue to stick together incomplete knowledge, incomplete ideas, incomplete teams, and incomplete skillsets.”

– Braden Kelley


“Social media can help ideas grow and thrive that would otherwise wither and die under the boot of the perfectionist in all of us.”

– Braden Kelley


“Do you remember the saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’? Well, it takes a village to create an innovation from an idea as well, and social media helps to aggregate and mobilize the people and knowledge necessary to do just that.”

– Braden Kelley


This will be the last of the quotes for a while. Things are getting a bit busier around here as interest in my new B2B Pull Marketing Strategy services takes off.

If you’d like to increase the number of inbound sales leads that your business receives, please contact us and we’ll let you know how we can help.

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Don’t Fail Fast – Learn Fast

Don't Fail Fast - Learn FastThere is a lot of chatter out there about the concept of ‘failing fast’ as a way of fostering innovation and reducing risk. Sometimes the concept of ‘failing fast’ is merged with ‘failing cheap’ to form the following refrain – ‘fail fast, fail cheap, fail often’.

Now don’t get me wrong, one of the most important things an organization can do is learn to accept failure as a real possibility in their innovation efforts, and even to plan for it by taking a portfolio approach that balances different risk profiles, time horizons, etc.

The problem that I have with all of this chatter about failing fast is that does not take into account the power of language. The language focuses people on failing instead of on the goal – learning. My friend Stefan Lindegaard has recognized this and has incorporated learning into his ‘smartfailing’ approach. But even this approach misses the mark by remaining focused on failure.

When it comes to innovation, it is not as important whether you fail fast or fail slow or whether you fail at all, but how fast you learn.

“The startups that learn the fastest win.” — Eric Ries

And make no mistake, you don’t have to fail to innovate (although there are always some obstacles along the way). With the right approach to innovation you can learn quickly from failures AND successes.

The key is to pursue your innovation efforts as a discrete set of experiments designed to learn certain things, and instrumenting each project phase in such a way that the desired learning is achieved.

The central question should always be:

“What do we hope to learn from this effort?”

When you start from this question, every project becomes a series of questions you hope to answer, and each answer moves you closer to identifying the key market insight and achieving your expected innovation. The questions you hope to answer can include technical questions, manufacturing questions, process questions, customer preference questions, questions about how to communicate the value to customers, and more. AND, the answers that push you forward can come from positive discrete outcomes OR negative discrete outcomes of the different project phases.

The ultimate goal of a ‘learning fast’ approach to innovation is to embed in your culture the ability to extract the key insights from your pursuits and the ability to quickly recognize how to modify your project plan to take advantage of unexpected learnings, and the flexibility and empowerment to make the necessary course corrections.

The faster you get at learning from unforeseen circumstances and outcomes, the faster you can turn an invention into an innovation by landing smack on what the customer finds truly valuable (and communicating the value in a compelling way). Fail to identify the key value AND a compelling way to communicate it, and you will fail to drive mass adoption.

Let’s look at a quick example of learning faster what the keys to market success are (using Apple):

Apple launched the iPod 2-3 years before they launched the Windows version of iTunes. Apple launched the Motorola ROKR two years before they launched the iPhone. The iPhone came out one year before the AppStore was launched. And finally, it took Apple only about three months to move from talking about the iPad using the tagline “Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.” to showing people with their feet up, leaning back using the iPad. All of the solution components lists unlocked mass adoption of an Apple solution, but took Apple time to discover and learn. Do you see a trend? Even if you don’t see a trend of Apple learning faster, I’m sure you recognize the up and to the right trend in Apple’s stock price.

In contrast, Microsoft recognizing the Kin mobile phones were a flop and pulling them from the market was a great example of failing fast. The Kin however is not an example of learning fast.

So, please, please, please, don’t talk to your teams about a need to ‘fail fast, fail cheap, fail often’. Focus their energies instead on uncovering how they can instrument for learning and accelerate their ability to learn and adapt whether project phases succeed or fail.

Happy innovating!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – June 9, 2012


“The real challenge, therefore, is to turn innovation from a buzzword into a systemic and widely distributed capability. It has to be woven into the everyday fabric of the company just like any other organizational capability, such as quality, or supply chain management, or customer service.”

– Rowan Gibson


“I believe that we underestimate children’s ability to understand the real world and I think that the education system and the business world need each other more than they realize. We need to re-imagine our public-private partnerships and expectations when it comes to education, and we need to start educating today’s young kids for tomorrow’s world.”

– Braden Kelley


“Before you start ideating, you need a set of really novel strategic insights. These are like the raw material out of which exciting innovation breakthroughs are built. If you ask people to innovate in a game-changing way without first building a foundation of novel strategic insights, you find that it’s mostly a waste of time. You get a lot of ideas that are either not new at all, or so crazy that they’re way out in space.”

– Rowan Gibson


“Instead of pursuing the current education mantra of more, better, faster, we need to instead rethink how we educate our children because we need to prepare them for a different world. A world in which flexibility, adaptibility, creativity, and problem solving will be prized ahead of the deep technical knowledge that is fast becoming a commodity and easily available.”

– 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!

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