Monthly Archives: August 2012

Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation

Eight I's of Infinite Innovation

Some authors talk about successful innovation being the sum of idea plus execution, others talk about the importance of insight and its role in driving the creation of ideas that will be meaningful to customers, and even fewer about the role of inspiration in uncovering potential insight. But innovation is all about value and each of the definitions, frameworks, and models out there only tell part of the story of successful innovation.

To achieve sustainable success at innovation, you must work to embed a repeatable process and way of thinking within your organization, and this is why it is important to have a simple common language and guiding framework of infinite innovation that all employees can easily grasp. If innovation becomes too complex, or seems too difficult then people will stop pursuing it, or supporting it.

Some organizations try to achieve this simplicity, or to make the pursuit of innovation seem more attainable, by viewing innovation as a project-driven activity. But, a project approach to innovation will prevent it from ever becoming a way of life in your organization. Instead you must work to position innovation as something infinite, a pillar of the organization, something with its own quest for excellence – a professional practice to be committed to.

So, if we take a lot of the best practices of innovation excellence and mix them together with a few new ingredients, the result is a simple framework organizations can use to guide their sustainable pursuit of innovation – the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation. This new framework anchors what is a very collaborative process. Here is the framework and some of the many points organizations must consider during each stage of the continuous process:

1. Inspiration

  • Employees are constantly navigating an ever changing world both in their home context, and as they travel the world for business or pleasure, or even across various web pages in the browser of their PC, tablet, or smartphone.
  • What do they see as they move through the world that inspires them and possibly the innovation efforts of the company?
  • What do they see technology making possible soon that wasn’t possible before?
  • The first time through we are looking for inspiration around what to do, the second time through we are looking to be inspired around how to do it.
  • What inspiration do we find in the ideas that are selected for their implementation, illumination and/or installation?

2. Investigation

  • What can we learn from the various pieces of inspiration that employees come across?
  • How do the isolated elements of inspiration collect and connect? Or do they?
  • What customer insights are hidden in these pieces of inspiration?
  • What jobs-to-be-done are most underserved and are worth digging deeper on?
  • Which unmet customer needs that we see are worth trying to address?
  • Which are the most promising opportunities, and which might be the most profitable?

3. Ideation

  • We don’t want to just get lots of ideas, we want to get lots of good ideas
  • Insights and inspiration from first two stages increase relevance and depth of the ideas
  • We must give people a way of sharing their ideas in a way that feels safe for them
  • How can we best integrate online and offline ideation methods?
  • How well have we communicated the kinds of innovation we seek?
  • Have we trained our employees in a variety of creativity methods?

4. Iteration

  • No idea emerges fully formed, so we must give people a tool that allows them to contribute ideas in a way that others can build on them and help uncover the potential fatal flaws of ideas so that they can be overcome
  • We must prototype ideas and conduct experiments to validate assumptions and test potential stumbling blocks or unknowns to get learnings that we can use to make the idea and its prototype stronger
  • Are we instrumenting for learning as we conduct each experiment?

Eight I's of Infinite Innovation

5. Identification

  • In what ways do we make it difficult for customers to unlock the potential value from this potentially innovative solution?
  • What are the biggest potential barriers to adoption?
  • What changes do we need to make from a financing, marketing, design, or sales perspective to make it easier for customers to access the value of this new solution?
  • Which ideas are we best positioned to develop and bring to market?
  • What resources do we lack to realize the promise of each idea?
  • Based on all of the experiments, data, and markets, which ideas should we select?

You’ll see in the framework that things loop back through inspiration again before proceeding to implementation. There are two main reasons why. First, if employees aren’t inspired by the ideas that you’ve selected to commercialize and some of the potential implementation issues you’ve identified, then you either have selected the wrong ideas or you’ve got the wrong employees. Second, at this intersection you might want to loop back through the first five stages though an implementation lens before actually starting to implement your ideas OR you may unlock a lot of inspiration and input from a wider internal audience to bring into the implementation stage.

6. Implementation

  • What are the most effective and efficient ways to make, market, and sell this new solution?
  • How long will it take us to develop the solution?
  • Do we have access to the resources we will need to produce the solution?
  • Are we strong in the channels of distribution that are most suitable for delivering this solution?

7. Illumination

  • Is the need for the solution obvious to potential customers?
  • Are we launching a new solution into an existing product or service category or are we creating a new category?
  • Does this new solution fit under our existing brand umbrella and represent something that potential customers will trust us to sell to them?
  • How much value translation do we need to do for potential customers to help them understand how this new solution fits into their lives and is a must-have?
  • Do we need to merely explain this potential innovation to customers because it anchors to something that they already understand, or do we need to educate them on the value that it will add to their lives?

8. Installation

  • How do we best make this new solution an accepted part of everyday life for a large number of people?
  • How do we remove access barriers to make it easy as possible for people to adopt this new solution, and even tell their friends about it?
  • How do we instrument for learning during the installation process to feedback new customer learnings back into the process for potential updates to the solution?

Conclusion

The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation framework is designed to be a continuous learning process, one without end as the outputs of one round become inputs for the next round. It’s also a relatively new guiding framework for organizations to use, so if you have thoughts on how to make it even better, please let me know in the comments. The framework is also ideally suited to power a wave of new organizational transformations that are coming as an increasing number of organizations (including Hallmark) begin to move from a product-centered organizational structure to a customer needs-centered organizational structure. The power of this new approach is that it focuses the organization on delivering the solutions that customers need as their needs continue to change, instead of focusing only on how to make a particular product (or set of products) better.

So, as you move from the project approach that is preventing innovation from ever becoming a way of life in your organization, consider using the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation to influence your organization’s mindset and to anchor your common language of innovation. The framework is great for guiding conversations, making your innovation outputs that much stronger, and will contribute to your quest for innovation excellence – so give it a try.

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Webinar – Winning the War for Innovation

Webinar - Winning the War for InnovationOn September 12, 2012 I will be presenting a webinar in cooperation with Imaginatik, a leader in the idea management software category.

The webinar is titled ‘Winning the War for Innovation‘ and we’ll be helping you take a look at whether or not you’re ready to accept that innovation has become a top priority.

Innovation has become a key source of competitive advantage, and the companies that thrive are those that innovate on a consistent basis – like Amazon and General Electric. Failing to innovate will put you on a straight, but treacherous path to extinction.

I will explain why innovation is so crucial today, and investigate the importance of building a continuous innovation capacity.

  1. How product cycles have fundamentally changed
  2. How global competition affects innovation
  3. How to build an innovation vision
  4. How to ‘make time’ for innovation

The world’s leading companies commit to embedding innovation deeply into their organizations. It becomes part of their DNA. Developing a consistent ability to innovate distinguishes today’s winners from losers.

Which group do you want your company to be a part of?

So, join me for this exclusive webinar Wednesday, September 12, 2012.

Click to Register for FREE

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Apple Touches on a Potential Innovation Integration

Apple Touches on a Potential Innovation Integration

Recently Apple announced its intention to acquire Authentec, a biometric authentication company. Apple was in a real hurry to complete the acquisition and it makes you wonder whether Authentec’s fingerprint authentication technology will make it into the home button of the iPhone 5 and possibly the iPad Mini in the coming months.

If Apple were to integrate the Authentec technology into the home button on the iPhone 5, the iPad Mini, and eventually the iPad 4, then it would not only create a handy way to make the devices easily personalized for multiple users of the same device (or just a simple password-free login for a single user), but purportedly the technology also has the ability to recognize multiple fingers (allowing for the home button to potentially achieve multiple functions), and to serve as authentication for mobile payments (most likely via NFC – Near Field Communications).

That would mean that Apple would add a lot of new functionality with the integration of this tiny piece of hardware, several software updates, and another tiny piece of hardware for NFC. But more importantly, these tiny pieces of hardware and software could make the computing experience more personal, and more naturally personalized as you move around the environment into different applications.

I know it is only a replacement for what could or can be done with a password, but I would love to be able to have apps like Netflix personalized based on whose finger was used.

This could become a great example of flexible design and innovating for the future present if they launch the iPhone 5 with these technologies. That would show that they started the design process with this as only a possibility but decided AFTER the technology looked ready to actually integrate it into the shipping product, and remained flexible enough to integrate the component near the end of the design process – something that is very hard to do, but very powerful.

Are all of these potential innovations ranging from the minor (login) to the transformative (speeding up mobile payment adoption) likely to make the cut for the iPhone 5?

I guess we will wait and see what happens on September 12th.

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A Refreshing Approach to Product Innovation

A Refreshing Approach to Product InnovationSometimes it is better to be late than never. Starbucks recently announced a new line of energy drinks – Starbucks Refreshers. There are two flavors Cool Lime and Very Berry Hibiscus and instead of copying other energy drinks, and use the same active ingredients as the usual suspects, they instead decided to use something uniquely Starbucks – green coffee extract.

Starbucks Refreshers are coffee drinks that don’t look like or taste like coffee, but provide the caffeine jolt that many of their customers are looking for nonetheless. And as an added bonus, they are coffee drinks that are much lower in calories and fat than many of their traditional hot or iced lattes. Coffee for the lactose intolerant too!

Starbucks has done something else smart, and that is that they have created a self-reinforcing product loop that allows for three different preparations and use cases for the same basic product, all in a single summer product launch:

  1. A customizable cafe preparation with multiple sizes and fresh fruit
  2. A canned, chillable pre-mixed portable preparation
  3. An extremely portable VIA DIY preparation without the water

In addition to being sold in their stores and licensed locations, the can and VIA preparation can be distributed via Starbucks’ existing grocery distribution channels.

Starbucks Refreshers are a great example of taking components of your brand and other organizational assets and leveraging them to create new products that people might not have thought about you creating, but that feel like natural extensions to them instead of a stretch.

Starbucks Refreshers are also a great example of looking at your raw materials in a new way and as a result a new product solution in born.

What might happen if you looked at your raw material inputs in a new way?

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The Innovation Locker

The Innovation LockerI came across a Wall Street Journal article recently that caught my eye, an article about Amazon Lockers. The concept is pretty simple. Amazon offers customers in select locations the option of having their package delivered to an Amazon Locker instead of to their street address. When the package arrives they receive an email letting them know where to pick it up along with the code to unlock it, and because most of the lockers are being placed in locations like convenience stores, often the customer can pick up their package 24 hours a day.

This is a great potential innovation for the segment of their customer base that has trouble receiving their packages – either because they live in an apartment or condo that is difficult to deliver to, aren’t home to sign, or because they are worried that their package might be stolen.

But the motive for the experiment is not purely an altruistic customer service one, companies like Amazon pay up to 20% more to have packages delivered to a residence. So, delivering a package to a locker helps Amazon save money too – helping to offset the costs of installing and maintaining the lockers. And as a bonus they serve as OOH (Out Of Home) advertisements in a context where people’s minds are already open to buying things.

So, what did the Wall Street Journal miss?

The Wall Street Journal missed the most important part of this whole idea, and one of the potentially most innovative parts of it. If you’re still missing the hidden golden nugget, one more hint before the reveal – think Amazon Web Services (AWS) including services like EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage Solution). Now you should see that the real innovation nugget here is that what may look at the outset as a service innovation, is actually a platform innovation.

The same problem that has led Amazon to create the potential innovation that is Amazon Lockers, is a problem for all other online retailers. So, Amazon and their customers definitely benefit from the lockers, but they likely can also be leveraged by any retailer that sells their goods on Amazon. AND, in the future there is no reason that in much the same way that Amazon productized S3 and EC2, Amazon could also productize Amazon Lockers and sell it as a service that any other company can purchase and use.

Multiple MailboxesSo who should have come up with this potential innovation?

FedEx, DHL, UPS, and the US Postal Service all missed this as a potential innovation that any of them should have actually developed. The inspiration for this potential innovation was sitting in full view all along. The US Postal Service installed multiple mailbox solutions in many subdivisions long ago to increase efficiency, and make it so that anyone receiving a package receives a key in their mailbox that opens a larger box in the same unit for package retrieval.

Final Thought

Are Amazon Lockers a good idea? A potential innovation? Yes, I think so. Whether they make the transition from interesting experiment or invention to innovation (through adoption) we will wait and see. But the fact that Amazon is expanding their test is a good sign that the transition from invention to innovation will be made. To close, I would just like to say that Amazon has some other possibilities they could (and likely will) explore, including:

  1. Pursuit of space rent reduction through use of the touch screen to suggest certain products for purchase that the host store might sell.
  2. Show suggested products from Amazon with a ‘send me more info’ button to email the customer more information about a product shown on the screen (to their email or possibly to their phone)
  3. Allow the customer to announce via social media that they’ve just picked up their product
  4. Pick select customers to win a prize based on some kind of points scheme related to their number (or value) of pickups – or just by pure chance – (check door 32 and you might be a winner) – adding an element of fun, mystery, and anticipation to the customer’s package retrieval experience
  5. Allow people to order popular products from what is effectively a kiosk, either for immediate delivery or via Amazon Prime delivery back to the locker in a couple of days

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