Monthly Archives: May 2014

Are You Investing in an Innovation Culture?

Are You Investing in an Innovation Culture?

Innovation is everywhere.

You can’t go an entire commercial break during the Super Bowl or a State of the Union address (okay, sorry, both American examples) without hearing the word innovation pop up at least once or twice. Companies have added innovation to their company values and mission statements in accelerating numbers. Some organizations have implemented idea management systems. And others are willing to spend large sums of money on design firms and innovation boutique consultancies to get help designing some new widget or service to flog to new or existing customers. Based on all of that you would think that most companies are committed to innovation, right?

If you asked most CEOs “Is your organization committed to innovation?”, do you think you could find a single CEO that would say no?

So, why do think I’m about to make the following statement?

90+% of organizations have no sustained commitment to innovation.

When it comes to fostering continuous innovation, most organizational cultures stink at it.

Let’s look at some data, because anyone who is committed to innovation (and not just creativity) should love data (especially unstructured data from customers):

  • Over the last 50 years the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has dropped from 61 years to 18 years (and is forecast to grow even shorter in the future)1
  • In a worldwide survey of 175 companies by Hill & Knowlton (a communications consultancy), executives cited “promoting continuous innovation” as the most difficult goal for their company to get right. “Structurally, many companies just aren’t set up to deliver continuous innovation.”2
  • 84% of more than 2,200 executives agree that their organization’s culture is critical to business success3
  • “96% of respondents say some change is needed to their culture, and 51% think their culture requires a major overhaul.”3

So what does this data tell us?

For one thing, it helps to reinforce the notion that the pace of innovation is increasing.

For another thing, it doesn’t exactly scream that organizations are as committed to building an innovation culture internally as their words externally say about being committed to innovation.

Why is this?

Well, as fellow Innovation Excellence contributor Jeffrey Phillips once said:

“When it comes to innovation, ideas are the easy part. The cultural resistance learned over 30 years of efficiency is the hard part.”

And when you get right down to it, most employees in most organizations are slaves to execution, efficiency, and improvement. And while those things are all important (you can’t have innovation without execution), organizations that fail to strike a balance between improvement/efficiency and innovation/entrepreneurship, are well, doomed to fail.

This increasing pace of innovation along with the lower cost of starting/scaling a business and the always difficult challenge of building a productive culture of continuous innovation, is the reason that the lifespan of organizations is shrinking.

So if it isn’t enough to talk about innovation, or to invest in trying to come up with new products and services, shouldn’t more organizations be also investing to making sure their innovation culture doesn’t, well, stink?

The obvious answer is… (insert yours here)

So, if your innovation culture stinks, I encourage you to come join me at Pipeline 2014 and attend my keynote session on exploring five ways to make it smell better:

“Our Innovation Culture Stinks – Five Ways to Make it Smell Better”

It’s a free virtual event on June 6, 2014.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Sources:
1. Innosight/Richard N. Foster/Standard & Poor’s
2. Hill & Knowlton Executive Survey
3. Booz & Company Global Culture and Change Management Survey 2013


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Innovation Best Practices from Microsoft

Innovation Best Practices from Microsoft

“Industries are being commoditized at a faster rate and you have to look for ways to create more value and set yourself apart,” says Braden Kelley of Business Strategy Innovation. “Innovation is one of the few ways to do that because people use the same best practices for operational excellence. The way they innovate and the culture they build are the ways they can differentiate.”

To help companies with their quest to sustain their innovation efforts, Microsoft has reached out to collect a number of innovation best practices into an evolving framework, that I’ve provided a preview of below.

Microsoft’s Innovation Management Framework

Every company serious about innovation should anchor their pursuit in a vision, strategy and goals for innovation. These core innovation components should address not just enabling technology but processes and culture too. Download Microsoft Innovation FrameworkMicrosoft has published this Innovation Management Framework as the culmination of a collaboration with a consortium of visionaries and practitioners to ensure that it includes thought leadership on innovation from Microsoft and its broader ecosystem, including current charter members and contributors to the framework:

  • 3M
  • Avanade
  • Capgemini
  • Ericsson
  • Business Strategy Innovation
  • Microsoft
  • Pcubed
  • PTC
  • Quantum PM
  • Siemens PLM
  • Sopheon
  • Tech-Clarity
  • UMT
  • United Healthcare
  • Wolters Kluwer

“Microsoft’s Innovation Management Framework is designed to help companies develop a comprehensive, integrated approach to implement and support an innovation management strategy. This framework is a repeatable reference architecture for innovation and is intended to allow companies to share and learn about innovation management best practices and enabling technologies as a starting point for strategic discussions for their company’s innovation management strategy.

The framework includes best practice processes and solutions that offer a strategic roadmap. The roadmap offers techniques that are proven through experience to improve innovation and innovation management performance. For example, the framework shares lessons learned from Microsoft’s own innovation strategies and processes that help fuel innovation across the Microsoft enterprise. These processes are used within Microsoft, enabling teams to quickly implement innovation programs that are fit for purpose.”

Microsoft Innovation Management Framework

At its core the framework focuses on five main innovation sub-processes that we’ll give you a very brief preview of here:

1. Envision

Innovation is critical to achieving the goals of the modern business strategy. The Envision process should put in place the strategy and plan to achieve the innovation goals in the business strategy.

2. Engage

At the front end of innovation where ideas are generated, sometimes referred to as “ideation,” is where Engage occurs.

In this process, companies engage employees, customers, and partners in an innovation community to capture and share new ideas. Formalizing engagement transforms it from a passive, unfocused, ineffective “suggestion box” to a proactive approach that effectively produces targeted ideas. The goal is to generate ideas that will drive new business value. As Braden Kelley of Business Strategy Innovation explains, “The key in the engage processes is to get closer to the customer, what they desire, how they will make their lives better, and how your product will displace something.”

3. Evolve

The third process, “Evolve,” takes the output of the Engage process to the next level. In this process, companies evolve ideas – as individuals or as teams – to increase their quality and value. Soliciting and capturing ideas is not enough. Early feedback allows great ideas to be improved upon and issues to be raised so they can be resolved (if possible).

4. Evaluate

Simply discussing ideas is not enough. “It’s important to be able to organize, de-duplicate, and merge ideas and take them to the next step in order to turn ideas into money,” offers Newsgator’s Markus von Aschoff. At some point companies must identify the innovations they believe are candidates for further investment. Unfortunately, many companies are drowning in too many ideas.

5. Execute

Of course all of the best ideas, proposals and business plans in the world are of no value unless they can be turned into a reality. The “Execute” sub-process takes the input from the previous processes and executes a formal project to further develop the idea or commercialize it.

Microsoft DIRA Framework

The Microsoft DIRA Framework

This Innovation Management Framework is tightly aligned with Microsoft’s Discrete Industry Reference Architecture for the discrete manufacturing industry. The DIRA framework covers three primary business imperatives that are critical to the growth and profitability of a manufacturing enterprise. These imperatives are:

  1. Innovate – Manage cross-boundary innovation and accelerate time-to-market
  2. Perform – Deliver operational excellence with reliable business continuity
  3. Grow – “Observe & serve” customers globally to drive growth with profitable proximity

This framework represents the “Innovation Management” portion of the “Innovate” imperative (see diagram). This framework will also align with the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Framework, which also falls under the Innovate imperative of DIRA.

Download Microsoft Innovation FrameworkI’m sure you can tell by now, or at least I hope you can tell, that this has just been a teaser of some of the great content that exists in the full document.

For more detail on Microsoft’s DIRA Framework and to see the complete Microsoft Innovation Framework, be sure and download it as a PDF.


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Is Jack White’s Lazaretto Ultra LP a Vinyl Innovation?

Is Jack White's Lazaretto Ultra LP a Vinyl Innovation?Video may have killed the radio star, but the mp3 and even the CD have failed to kill the lovable vinyl LP record. In fact, they are making a resurgence and if anything have probably grown in popularity over the last decade.

So, you might be thinking what kind of innovation could someone possibly pull off on a vinyl album?

Well, here is a list of the new things they’ve done on the album:

  1. Hidden track under the label of Side A
  2. Hidden track under the label of Side B
  3. One of the hidden tracks plays at 45rpm and the other plays at 78rpm, while the rest of the album plays at the normal 33rpm
  4. Side A plays from the inside out
  5. Side A plays into a locked track on the outside edge that loops continuously
  6. Side B plays the normal way – outside in, but depending on where you place the needle, you’ll either get and electric or an acoustic intro to the first song on the side
  7. Last, but not least, on a 1-inch band near the label of Side A, if you look at just the right angle while playing the record you’ll see holograms of two spinning angels (one right side up, one upside down)

Jack White walks you through the new things they’ve tried to include on this piece of vinyl in this video:



And if you’re not familiar with Jack White’s music (he started the White Stripes by the way), then check out the video below of one of the songs from the album



Who says an old dog can’t learn new tricks?

So, pull your turntable or record player out from under your bed and check out this groundbreaking new album.

Ultimately whether this album is an innovation or not is up to you…


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Free Virtual Keynote on Innovation Culture – June 6, 2014

Pipeline 2014 Conference

If your innovation culture leaves something to be desired and its your job to make it better, then come join me online at Pipeline 2014 for my FREE keynote on June 6, 2014 and find out five actions you can take to change your innovation culture for the better.
Here is a description of the session:

When it comes to innovation, far too much emphasis is placed on creativity, ideas and products. Innovation requires more than ‘aha’ moments. Innovation is a team sport, not an individual one, and while it may be easier for our reptilian brain to understand a single innovation hero, the truth is that every innovation figurehead from Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison had a whole lab or team of people behind them making the real innovation happen. In this session we will investigate what it takes to build a successful team of capable innovation practitioners and contributors that will effectively form a strong and sustainable innovation culture to power success for the organization, not just for the moment, but for the lifetime of the organization.

And here is some information on this FREE virtual conference:

If you’re not familiar with the Pipeline Conference, it is a virtual conference with more than 4,000 participants from 95 countries over the past four years. PIPELINE offers product development practitioners access to experts as well as practical information they can use right away – all from the comfort of their desks. From idea to launch to end-of-life, the content will appeal to any professional involved in the end-to-end product development process. In addition, the newly designed PIPELINE virtual platform serves as a resource center for 12 months following the live event with new content each quarter.

People who register for the conference get a free access to the resource center. PIPELINE 2013 was named Event of the Year category in Best in Biz Awards for virtual conference on innovative product development. For more information and to register, visit:

http://www.pipelineconference.com

I hope to see you online on June 6th for my presentation and the Q&A session!


Build a common language of innovation on your team

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