Monthly Archives: April 2013

Latest Radio Interview with The Health Maven

LeAnna J Carey - The Health MavenI’m proud to share with you the link to my latest radio interview. This time I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with LeAnna J. Carey (@LeannaJCarey), host of the popular radio program The Health Maven – Innovation Talk.

We spend the 30 minutes talking about The Nine Innovation Roles and how organizations around the world are increasingly utilizing The Nine Innovation Roles to help them build more effective innovation teams. Curious which ones I think LeAnna fills or that I see myself typically filling?

Tune into the broadcast to find out! 🙂

Click here to listen to a recording of the interview


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Join me at the Front End of Innovation 2013

Join me at the Front End of Innovation 2013From May 5-8, 2013 I will be in Boston, MA for the Front End of Innovation conference at the Seaport World Trade Center which takes place May 6-8, 2013.

Use discount code FEI13BRADEN to save 20% on the event and join me and 600+ innovation managers and thought leaders from around the world who are serious about learning more about the front-end of innovation or improving existing innovation efforts.

I’ll be there leading some thought provoking panel sessions, sharing new insights, and reconnecting with innovation friends (both old and new).

If you’d like to set up a meeting to explore your innovation efforts or needs while I’m there, please contact me.

I’m also willing to hold a FREE train the trainer session to go with all of the other FREE Nine Innovation Roles resources — if enough people are interested. To register your interest please fill out the contact form and make a note in the question field.


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Renting ‘Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire’

I noticed something new on the Amazon page for my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire today when I popped onto their web site.

What was it?

Amazon has introduced a rental option for textbooks.

It makes sense that my book is part of the program because Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire is being used as a text book as part of innovation courses at Creighton and other fine institutions.

Professors can get evaluation copies here from my publisher John Wiley & Sons.

Here is a screenshot:

Rent 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire'

BUT, one thing that doesn’t make sense is that the rental price of $22.22 is only slightly less than the discounted sale price of $22.53 that Amazon charges for a new copy of my book. Which is a pretty good discount off the retail price of $34.95.

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire makes a great bulk book buy for organizations seeking to establish a common language of innovation or to identify and remove one or more barriers to innovation they might be struggling against.

I believe in the content so much that I’ve made a downloadable free sample chapter available for everyone.

If you are in the United States and interested in making a bulk purchase of this five-star book, please contact Hooks Book Events – an independent minority women-owned business in Washington D.C.

If you are outside the United States, you might want to check out 800-CEO-Read or you can get FREE shipping to 90 countries is available from Book Depository.

And what better way to get the most value out of a bulk purchase of my book than to invite me to come deliver an innovation keynote or workshop? 🙂


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Is GE Trying to be Too Quirky?

Is GE Trying to be Too Quirky?

Last week GE and Quirky announced a new partnership where GE will make some of its library of patents available as part of Quirky’s new inspiration platform, allowing inventors to use some of its patents in their potentially novel consumer product invention ideas. This on its surface is a very interesting and logical open innovation partnership. Some people are talking about it as a crowdsourcing partnership, but it isn’t really because the work product is not well-defined and being sourced from multiple competing providers. No, this is an open innovation partnership.

Here is the Quirky and GE partnership announcement video:



It is very interesting to me that GE chose to partner with Quirky and not someone like Innocentive, NineSigma, Idea Connection or someone else. I’m curious what others think this indicates about the future of these firms. Personally, I think that this is something that Quirky is better equipped to make happen than these other firms, and that Innocentive and others still fill an important need using a completely different approach (challenge-driven innovation).

Is GE Trying to be Too Quirky?

Whether or not GE creates any sizable new businesses from their participation in this partnership, I still think this is a brilliant marketing move by Beth and her team and it will be interesting to see whether any impactful inventions come from people leveraging GE’s patent portfolio.

Here is Quirky’s video announcing their inspiration platform (which they raised $68 million to help build):



There is one thing that bugs me a wee bit about Quirky. My tagline since 2006 has been “Making innovation insights accessible for the greater good” and it feels like they’ve swiped it to create theirs – “Making invention accessible.” Surely as creative people they could have invented their own tagline instead of swiping mine. 😉 (wink)

But, there is another idea of mine trapped in this announcement that I’d like to highlight and set free, and that is the idea that innovation is not just about ideas, but that other factors are equally important – including inspiration, investigation, and iteration. These are captured in my incredibly popular Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation framework.

Eight I's of Infinite Innovation

Be sure and follow this article link to the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation if you missed the link above, or if you’re not clicking away to learn more, here is a quick list of the eight stages:

  1. Inspiration
  2. Investigation
  3. Ideation
  4. Iteration
  5. Identification
  6. Implementation
  7. Illumination
  8. Installation

Personally I don’t think their platform appears to go far enough to deliver inspiration or to empower investigation, and as a software and internet guy I would be happy to help Quirky and GE strengthen the solution if they’re interested in making this platform more successful.

Will any successful innovations come out of this GE and Quirky partnership?

I’d love to hear what you think.

Image credits: GE, Quirky


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Philadelphia – Food Fail

Kraft Philadelphia - Food FailIn a continuing series of articles exposing the gradual degradation of our food supply, I’d like to highlight what used to be called Philadelphia Cream Cheese, but now you will notice that the logo has dropped the cream cheese phrase from the logo.

Why is that you might ask?

Kraft Philadelphia - Food FailWell, Kraft might say because they are trying to extend the brand into new areas, but I would also say that, hopefully, legally now (or soon) they can no longer call it cream cheese because really it is no longer cream cheese, but is now instead is a cream cheese spread.

Cream cheese is technically cultured milk (you can use yogurt) that has been strained of its whey and you can even make it at home using whole milk yogurt.

If you look at the ingredients of most cream cheeses, or sour creams, or chocolate milk and possibly even some yogurts, you will notice that one of the ingredients will be carageenan or some kind of tree gum like xantham gum or locust bean gum. Some of these products even though they are no longer the food you might think they are, you will find might even be labeled “All Natural.”

You will notice that if you get a bagel and cream cheese at Starbucks that the packet they give you is labeled “cream cheese spread”.

At least Starbucks is honest about it that they are not really giving you real cream cheese, but you will notice again the presence of a qualifier word – “spread” – just like honey sauce from KFC.

And if you have any doubts in your mind whether cream cheese can or sour cream be made without these tree gums, check out the products from the Springfield Creamery sold under the Nancy’s brand on the west coast:

Nancy’s All Natural Sour Cream
Nancy’s All Natural Cream Cheese

So, Kraft and Starbucks and others are unfortunately responsible for providing another terrible example of cost cutting gone mad, degrading our food supply again as a result.

What is your favorite food fail story?

Stay tuned for more high profile food fails…


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New Way to Integrate Real and Virtual World

First came augmented reality, using the GPS and camera on your smartphone to layer information from the virtual world onto the real world as displayed via the camera.

Now, Fujitsu has introduced a device that I came across on Mashable that allows you turn any document into a touchscreen that can recognize the actions of your fingers.



Is this an interesting invention or a potentially valuable innovation?

Personally, one potential application I see would be robotic surgery. What do you see?


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Kentucky ‘Fraud’ Chicken – Food Fail

Kentucky Fraud Chicken - Food FailCost Cutting Gone Mad

Every time I turn around, food continues to get less and less real.

Imagine my surprise when in a fit of weakness I turned up at my local KFC (yes, the word chicken is no longer in the name) and they simultaneously handed me honey sauce that is only 7% honey and told me that they were going to soon be offering chickens without bones as an option.

How can a chicken walk around without bones? 😉

Needless to say, that was my last visit to KFC unless I get stranded in an airport somewhere with no other option.

Is the unending quest for corporate profits in the food industry and our own quest for convenience killing us?

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but there is no doubt that chain restaurant food is getting less and less real and this is just the latest example of a company crossing the line of decency (in my opinion) in pursuit of profits.

What is your favorite food fail story?

NOTE: While not technically fraud, I bet that if you surveyed 100 people after they consumed honey sauce, that probably 80% of the people would tell you that they just ate honey, not corn syrup with a taste of honey. For what it’s worth.

Stay tuned for more high profile food fails…

P.S. Thanks to Glenn for turning me on to some Far Side humor to the boneless chicken issue.

Boneless Chicken Ranch

Image credit: Gary Larson, Just-Ask-Jill.com


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Optimizing Innovation Resonance

Optimizing Innovation ResonanceWhat does resonance mean to you?

The word has many different dictionary definitions depending on the context, but most of them focus on vibrations reaching an ideal state.

Here are two of the most relevant dictionary definitions for our innovation resonance context today:

  • “a quality of evoking response” (Merriam-Webster)
  • “the effect of an event or work of art beyond its immediate or surface meaning” (Bing)

Here also are a couple of my favorite resonance quotes:

  • “I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way.” – Robert B. Parker
  • “I think if the movie has resonance and stimulates the viewer to talk about it, you can have as large an audience as you want.” – Andy Garcia

I’ve written in the past about how innovation is all about value and about how innovation veracity is more important than innovation velocity. Now it is time to take the innovation conversations about value and veracity to the next level – to innovation resonance – and how difficult it is to achieve and maintain.

Optimizing Innovation ResonanceAchieving innovation resonance is about going from 1+1=2 to a state where 1+1+1+1=7, where the sum of the valuable parts in some new potential innovation suddenly becomes greater than the individual components and value may be created that you might not have even anticipated. When you reach this state of innovation nirvana, the power of resonance pushes your invention over the line from invention to innovation, and adoption becomes widespread. People start talking about, spreading it like a virus, and ultimately supplementing your marketing efforts in much more effective ways.

To achieve innovation resonance you must create value with innovation veracity and deliver it in a product or service with the right velocity and course corrections as you bring your potential innovation into the marketplace. Innovation veracity is about identifying the truths that are important to the customer in the problem space you are investigating, the inspirations and the insights that will hopefully lead to better ideas, more value creation, and hopefully, eventually – innovation resonance.

You’ll notice that I used the words hopefully and eventually in the last sentence in relation to achieving innovation resonance, and this is because our best attempts to anticipate the wants and needs of the marketplace will not always be immediately correct, and may require course corrections in the product or service to better match the expected or desired value.

And the ultimate value encompassed in a potential innovation attempting to achieve resonance, comes from three main sources:

1. Value Creation
2. Value Access
3. Value Translation

Innovation = Value Creation * Value Access * Value Translation

You’ll notice in this equation that the parts multiply, and as a result if you do any of the three badly, your potential innovation will fail. But do ALL three well and you will have the opportunity to achieve innovation resonance.

Innovation Resonance Venn Diagram

Optimizing Innovation Resonance

To optimize the value creation component of innovation, you must seek innovation veracity early on, identifying the fundamental truths upon which your potentially innovative solution will be built. During the value creation process you must prototype early and often to test and learn whether your insights are correct and resonating in their expression within the product or service as you expect. From the reactions to your prototypes you must evolve the solution to create more value.

To optimize the value access piece of innovation, you must seek to identify where friction is created in the delivery of your solution and seek to remove it. Carefully observe both where things are awkward or difficult for you to produce and scale the solution, and for your customer to consider and consume it. These friction points represent an opportunity to remove barriers to adoption and to increase potential innovation resonance through better production, purchase and consumption experiences.

To optimize the value translation piece of innovation, you must first identify the gaps in understanding and readiness among your target customers, your plan for working to close these gaps and prepare the market for your launch, and then you’ll want to find your picture or image that communicates a thousand words. Most importantly, you must be aware that the more disruptive your potential innovation the more you may have to educate your potential customers before you even try to sell to them, and so you must build the appropriate amount of market preparation time into the launch plan for your potential innovation plan. Thought leadership marketing and innovation marketing strategies can be very powerful here to help customers understand how the new solution will fit into their lives and why they will want to abandon their existing solution – even if it is the ‘do nothing’ solution.

Resonance Example #1 – The BMW Mini – Barbie in Motion

Barbie Mini CooperOne of those most fun, visually appealing vehicles on the road has to be BMW’s re-release of the Mini. I don’t have one, have only ridden in one once, but whenever I see one driving around, it makes me smile. And if you have any question about whether or not the Mini has achieved a level of resonance (at least in the USA and probably elsewhere), then how would you explain the photo of the Mini on the left that shows you can buy a Mini to drive Ken and Barbie around in? Can you buy a convertible Chrysler LeBaron for Barbie to drive around in? No, but you can buy a Fiat 500, another car achieving resonance here in the USA.

Resonance Example #2 – iPod Nano – Falling from the Pinnacle

iPod Nano 6th GenerationThe iPod Nano is a great example of the rise and fall of innovation resonance. The iPod took three years to take off (right about the time the iPod Nano was released). The trigger for innovation resonance was the Windows version of iTunes (Value Creation), combined with the launch of Apple Retail Stores (Value Access), combined with the iconic advertising campaigns (Value Translation). The iPod became a phenomenon with sales peaking in 2008 right after the iPhone release. Sales have been falling since then, but during this decline came the September 2010 release of the 6th Generation iPod Nano – which resonates to this day – so much so that Apple replaced the design six months ago to protect the market for their upcoming iWatch.

Maintaining Innovation Resonance

As we know from music, to maintain resonance, you must continue to inject energy and focus into the system – a bell won’t ring forever. And as we know from human psychology, just because you continue to ring the bell doesn’t mean that people will continue to want to listen to it in the same way forever. Tastes change, preferences change, the definition of value for each component creating value for customers can potentially change. And so to remain the market leader, to maintain innovation resonance, you must continue to observe, to learn, and to modify your solution to optimize the innovation value equation as needed over time.

One great example of an innovative organization losing resonance over time was Dell. They (and a handful others) came into the PC marketplace with a disruptive business model, captured market share, rose to #1, and then gradually started to lose their position because they didn’t recognize a shift in the relative value of cost vs. design in the marketplace, causing them to lose market share to HP, Apple and others.

One way to look at the difference in strategies between HP and Dell might be to use the Strategy Canvas from the Blue Ocean Strategy methodology. You can see an example of a Strategy Canvas for the wine industry here:

Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas

But traditional Blue Ocean Strategy (or Value Innovation) is very static. As you can see, building a Strategy Canvas using Blue Ocean Strategy methods is a snapshot in time looking at the relative performance of a company on a selected set of value dimensions against its competition. To sail into a Blue Ocean the theory goes, you must select certain value dimensions to either:

  1. Raise
  2. Eliminate
  3. Reduce
  4. Create

But as we know, value dimension performance, value dimension importance, and the competitive dynamics within the industry are not static, but change over time.

It is because of this weakness in the Blue Ocean Strategy methodology that I layer on the investigation of value dimension performance and importance onto any Value Innovation work that I might do. You can see in the two example images below related to the Dell vs. HP example about how changes in performance over time on certain value dimensions relative to what is “good enough” in the minds of customers can lead to changes in the relative importance of various value dimensions in the mind of the customers.

Value Dimension Performance Value Dimension Importance

Because we cannot perfectly predict how customers will consume our product or service when we bring it to market, and because of the shifting sands of value force you to continuously re-evaluate the current situation with value dimensions and value importance, we must re-evaluate where we see the innovation process beginning and ending. Smart companies are recognizing that is not just about coming up with a great idea, or having a great launch, but about creating a commitment to launching, learning, and dialing in success by working to create and then maintain innovation resonance. Whirlpool Corporation, one of the early pioneers of a systematic pursuit of innovation excellence, has seen this and has created a commitment to launching and learning and has added a third diamond to their double diamond innovation methodology called ‘Deliver and Grow’.

Whirlpool Triple Diamond Process

Moises Norena, the Global Director of Innovation at the Whirlpool Corporation, was kind enough to share these thoughts:

“While we put a significant emphasis in the front end of innovation and in the commercialization phase, we recognize that you can not launch a product and sit and wait for its success. With the third diamond we assure that innovation teams stay engaged in the product management while it is in the market, contrasting the results with the predictions, not only on business performance but against the consumer and trade promise they were designed to deliver. We also ask these teams to use the innovation tools and process to identify opportunities to experiment and to maximize value extraction from the market.”

Conclusion

To achieve and maintain innovation resonance, you must nurture a commitment to learning fast, both during the innovation development process and after the launch of a potential innovation. You must maintain a laser focus on how you are creating value, helping people access that value, and translating that value for people so they can understand how your potential innovation may fit into their lives. So, do you have processes in place as part of your innovation methodology for measuring and evolving solutions in place to help you get to innovation resonance?

If not, keep a focus on value creation, value access, and value translation, use my evolutions of the Blue Ocean Strategy framework, and have a look at The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation framework that I created or at the Whirlpool Corporation’s Triple Diamond methodology to help you deliver and grow more successful innovation into your organization, and hopefully reach some level of innovation resonance.


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Announcing FREE Nine Innovation Roles Resources

Nine Innovation Roles Cards

I have big news that I’m extremely excited to share with you today.

I’m proud to announce today that I’m setting The Nine Innovation Roles free.

What does that mean exactly?

It means that for the greater good, I am now providing all of the tools that you need to conduct a Nine Innovation Roles workshop or team meeting inside your organization to enhance the success of your innovation teams – for FREE.

Some people think I’m crazy to help people not hire me, but because of my collaborative and people-centric approach to innovation I would like to give everyone five free gifts:

  1. The Nine Innovation Roles themselves
  2. Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles presentation for team meetings or workshops
  3. Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles Worksheet for gathering data on team makeup
  4. Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles card deck design that I use with Fortune 500 clients
  5. Nine Innovation Roles video for use in team meetings or workshops

The Nine Innovation Roles is one of the most requested workshop topics in the keynotes and masterclasses that I conduct for companies all around the world, and comes directly from my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, that is being used by universities like Creighton and companies like Microsoft and AB Inbev to help establish a common language of innovation.

Here is an excerpt from my book that talks about The Nine Innovation Roles:

“Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.”

I hope you take the time to download and learn and utilize these FREE Nine Innovation Roles resources to improve the success of your innovation efforts and of the innovation teams in your organizations.

Keep innovating!

Get the Free Nine Innovation Roles Resources Now


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