“Creativity is an input to innovation and change is the output from innovation.”
– Braden Kelley
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I 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.
So 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:
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“Anything is possible, but not always probable. Innovators increase the probability of the impossible.”
– Braden Kelley
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A recent post by Jeffrey Phillips titled Velocity is the Only Innovation Outcome That Matters sparked respectful disagreement inside me.
I believe that when it comes to innovation, veracity is more important than velocity. Let’s look at the definition of the word veracity from our friends over at Merriam-Webster:
Veracity
1: devotion to the truth : truthfulness
2: power of conveying or perceiving truth
In my opinion it is more valuable to spend time on identifying the right customer insight and the right way to communicate with customers about the solution which you create to serve the insight, than it is to spend the same amount of time inventing faster or launching faster.
In fact your innovation velocity can exceed your innovation veracity as shown in this article.
And many a company has fallen foul of going too fast and thinking an invention will become an innovation when they are ready to launch it, including Microsoft with the Windows Tablet and Apple with the Newton, only to find that customers were not ready to adopt it as an innovation until years later.
Velocity is definitely important, but more isn’t necessarily better. Many times the competitor with a lesser innovation velocity but greater innovation veracity has ended up winning. Look at Apple and the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, etc.
It’s also more important to look for the barriers to adoption than it is to look for the barriers to creation. Innovation is all about value and this is why it is so important to pay just as much attention to value access and value translation, as you do to value creation, because it takes doing all three really well with a solution with real innovation veracity to find innovation success.
Fail to identify a solution with real innovation veracity and you are likely to miss potential elements of optimal value creation, you will likely struggle to make its value accessible, and there is a greater likelihood that you will fail to properly translate the value of the solution for your customers.
So, taken another way, the search for innovation success is a search for truth. You must therefore unlock the inner truths of your intended customers (think unmet needs or jobs-to-be-done), you must search in areas that your intended customers will feel are true for your brand, and areas that feel true to employees given the company’s mission and values. When your pursuit of innovation centers around truth and when you commit to a focused effort to increase your innovation capability – and to pursue Innovation Excellence – then and only then do you have your best chance at innovation success.
What innovation truths are you searching for?
How much innovation veracity can you create?
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Innovation is everywhere. Or at least the word is. CEOs talk about innovation, every technology company claims to be innovative (or to want innovative employees) and now we’re even seeing advertisements on television talk about innovation. Even Nissan, which has had innovation in their tagline for two years now, has decided to change their tagline from “Innovation for All” to something new “Innovation that Excites.” Okay, it still has innovation in it. But, the fact that they decided to move from innovation being something that is democratic, to something that is exciting, is an interesting shift. Maybe now that everybody is claiming to be innovative they felt the need to say, “No, our innovations aren’t like everyone else’s, our innovations are exciting!”
Because people talk about innovation so much, and misuse the term so frequently, I think it is important to reiterate my definition of innovation and talk a bit about the differences between invention and innovation and the differences between innovation and improvement. My definition of innovation is:
“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into solutions valued above every existing alternative – and achieves wide adoption.”
Adoption is of course key to something moving from being an invention to innovation, but then so of course is the threshold that something is valued above every existing alternative, and as a result isn’t just merely useful – but valuable. Crossing this threshold means that people willingly replace their existing solution. Crossing this threshold is what solidifies your solution as a true innovation. And that’s the point.
Improvement versus Replacement
All companies must focus on improving their existing solutions. But at the same time they must also constantly be on guard against other ways of potentially solving the same customer problem or fulfilling the same customer need. Six Sigma does a great job at fulfilling the mission of improvement and at helping to achieve operational excellence. But while an organization must be ruthless in their pursuit of perfection, or the amount of perfection that their customers are willing to pay for and that they can make profitably, organizations must also make a commitment to the pursuit of innovation excellence. The reason companies must strike a balance between the pursuit of improvement and replacement is that sooner or later something will become possible that wasn’t possible before – due to changes in technology AND customer psychological readiness for change – creating an opening for replacement. Really good value translation (and education) can help accelerate that customer readiness, but launching before both conditions exist can lead to financial ruin. When replacement does become inevitable, the only question is whether you will continue to focus on improvement and be replaced, or whether you will have the courage to replace your own solution with a new one…
Is there any innovation here to excite?
For fun you might want to check out one of the latest Nissan advertisements from the United Kingdom for the Nissan Juke that I’ve embedded below. Is the car itself innovative? No. Is the advertisement innovative? No. But it is creative. Is there any innovation in the product at all? Well, that depends. It depends on whether there are any new components that don’t just merely improve their performance but instead completely replace the traditional approaches to solving the targeted problem or performing the job-to-be-done. What do you think, true or false?
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I came across the infographic that I thought was interesting and thought I would share about the cost of an MBA and whether it is worth it.
As a career switcher, getting an MBA helped me change the direction of my career, but what do you think about whether getting an MBA is worth it or not?
And if you had a $100,000 would you rather use it to start a business or to get an MBA?
Sound off in the comments.
Created by: MBAOnline.com
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Following on the heels of a recent thought leadership webinar (link to recording) on the same topic, this white paper explores the intersection of talent management and open innovation strategies. The paper dives into why having an external talent strategy is becoming increasingly important and how it can help your company accelerate innovation, shows how leading organizations manage their open innovation and crowdsourcing efforts (including case study examples of companies like P&G), and provides proven strategies and steps to take for attracting talent to your organization’s innovation efforts.
Download this Complimentary White Paper
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Click on Part 1 or Part 2 or Part 3 if you missed them
Innovation Is Social
These quotes from John Hagel’s article are important because they reinforce the notion that innovation is a social activity. While many people give Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the modern – day equivalent, Dean Kamen, credit for being lone inventors, the fact is that the lone inventor myth is just that — a myth. All these gentlemen had labs full of people who shared their passion for creative pursuits. Innovation requires collaboration, either publicly or privately, and is realized as an outcome of three social activities.
1. Social Inputs
2. Social Evolution
3. Social Execution
When it comes to insights, these three activities are not completely discrete. Insights do not expose themselves only in the social inputs phase, but can also expose themselves in other phases — if you’re paying attention. Flickr famously started out as a company producing a video game in the social inputs phase, but was astute enough during the social execution phase to recognize that the most used feature was one that allowed people to share photos. Recognizing that there was an unmet market need amongst customers for easy sharing of photos, Flickr reoriented its market solution from video game to photo sharing site and reaped millions of dollars in the process when they ultimately sold their site to Yahoo!. Ultimately, action is more important than intent, and so as an innovator you must always be listening and watching to see what people do and not just what they say. Build your solution on the wrong insight and nobody will be beating a path to your door.
Bringing It All Together
If your organization is struggling to sustain its innovation efforts, then I hope you will do the following things.
If your organization has lost the courage to move innovation to its center and has gotten stuck in a project-focused, reactive innovation approach, then now is your chance to regain the higher ground and to refocus, not on having an innovation success but on building an innovation capability. Are you up to the challenge?
You can read ahead by getting the book or downloading the sample chapter, or by checking out the other parts here:
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Click on Part 1 or Part 2 if you missed them
Purpose and Passion
Ultimately, successful and sustainable innovation is all about purpose and passion. The people in your organization have to be clear on what the purpose of the organization is. Ideally, that purpose has to be something bigger than the individuals and something that people can get passionate about, because first and foremost, as Jeffrey Phillips has said, “You can’t force a disinterested person to innovate.”
Passion is a prerequisite not just for getting started with innovation; people leading innovation projects must have enough passion to fight through, over, around, or under any obstacles they may encounter in their effort to make a new idea a reality.
“Passion-based organizations stop at nothing to accomplish their goals and are able to attract people and resources to their causes. That got me thinking. Over all of my years as an innovation junkie, the common denominator, among the innovators I have connected with and the most successful enterprises I have observed and worked with, is passion. They started with a passion or cause and then organized around it to make it happen. Not the other way around.” — Saul Kaplan
Blogging Innovation as a Case Study in Passion
I started innovating long ago, but I didn’t start Blogging Innovation until 2006. I realized I needed an outlet to express my passion for innovation, and blogging offered the perfect opportunity. I kept reading and writing about innovation despite getting only a couple of hundred people to read my articles each day. Then at the start of 2009 I completed a marketing strategy project for Wunderman and Microsoft Windows Live, and, using some great tools including Website Grader, I discovered that the blog had some technical challenges. After fixing those, traffic to Blogging Innovation finally started to take off. Now instead of averaging more than 200 daily visits, the blog averages nearly 10,000 and the numbers are still growing. Do I spend less time on the blog now than I used to? No!
Most people would consider an increase in traffic of 2,500 percent in one year as being a huge success and a chance to relax, but I don’t see it that way. Back in August 2009 I decided to commit the blog to a mission of making innovation and marketing insights accessible for the greater good. As a consequence of that mission, I decided to open up the blog to the very best contributing authors on the topic of innovation and other marketing – related subjects that I could find.
Instead of using the blog as an extension of my company, Blogging Innovation exists to help raise the baseline understanding of innovation and marketing so that organizations can become better at satisfying the needs of their customers, the first time they try. After all, the more efficient our organizations are at meeting their customers’ needs, the less waste of human capital and natural resources. That’s what drives me to get up at 5:00 a.m. seven days a week to start letting people know about all the great content our contributing authors have published that day.
We have recently decided to take on a monthly sponsor who wants to be associated with innovation in a tasteful way, but that is not for commercial reasons but because the blog needs additional people power to run it and a new site design to make the content even more accessible. As I go out to look for the assistance I need to take Blogging Innovation to the next level, I’ll be looking for one thing in the people I choose to help make the community stronger — passion.
Note: For the newer readers, Blogging Innovation formed the foundation of Innovation Excellence before I sold it and re-booted Blogging Innovation as Human-Centered Change & Innovation.
Passion versus Obsession
There is a great article “Passion versus Obsession” by John Hagel that explores the differences between passion and obsession. This is an important distinction to understand in order to make sure you are hiring people to power your innovation efforts who are passionate and not obsessive. Here are a few key quotes from the article:
“The first significant difference between passion and obsession is the role free will plays in each disposition: passionate people fight their way willingly to the edge to find places where they can pursue their passions more freely, while obsessive people (at best) passively drift there or (at worst) are exiled there.
It’s not an accident that we speak of an “object of obsession,” but the “subject of passion.” That’s because obsession tends towards highly specific focal points or goals, whereas passion is oriented toward networked, diversified spaces.
The subjects of passion invite and even demand connections with others who share the passion.
Because passionate people are driven to create as a way to grow and achieve their potential, they are constantly seeking out others who share their passion in a quest for collaboration, friction and inspiration . . . . The key difference between passion and obsession is fundamentally social: passion helps build relationships and obsession inhibits them.
It has been a long journey and it is far from over, but it has taught me that obsession confines while passion liberates.”
You can read ahead by getting the book or downloading the sample chapter, or by checking out the other parts here:
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Download the Rise of the Social Business Architect PDF
The world is changing and needs Social Business Architects. Gone is the epoch of the passive consumer, now customers want a say. At the same time, the quest for survival and growth is causing companies to stop looking at suppliers as someone to squeeze on price and instead as partners in innovation. And, employers are realizing that to maximize their success they need to attract and engage the best talent not just into internal talent pools, but external ones as well.
It feels like you can’t go a day without hearing someone or some publication mention Facebook, Twitter or some other component of the social media universe. The fact is that social media has invaded the public consciousness and people are now more suspicious of someone who doesn’t have a social media presence than someone who does. People are starting to judge others based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profile they ever meet them, and expecting companies to answer the tweet they’ve sent them or the question they’ve posted on their Facebook wall within the day, the hour, the minute (believe me the expected pace of response is accelerating).
Social media has become so important and pervasive that it is beginning to co-opt the term ‘social business’ into its lexicon to describe an organization’s engagement with people outside of its borders across a variety of channels and for a variety of purposes. Social media is stealing the term ‘social business’ away from the social enterprise folks, and that’s okay – they can’t possibly use ‘social business’ and ‘social enterprise’ at the same time anyways.
The importance of ‘social business’ and social business design has grown as our technologies have matured from contact management to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, from bulletin boards to discussion forums, from static to dynamic html, from social networks to social media, and from media consumer to media producer. Ultimately ‘social business’ is the science of optimizing the intersection of people, process, and technology. If we look at ‘social business’ as the discipline managing that intersection and helping an organization focusing on how it engages with others and maximizes the value of its relationships, I’ve been working in social business for more than 15 years as what I like to call a Social Business Architect.
In addition to facilitating and optimizing the group dynamics and interactions inside the organization, a Social Business Architect specializes in identifying the different parts of an organization that need to interact with groups of people outside the organization, how those parts of the organization should work together to communicate with people outside the organization, and helps to identify and implement communications solutions that connect the organization with the target groups so that a meaningful connection and conversation can be built, and then helps to manage the conversations and the information and learnings from their outcomes for the benefit of the organization.
A Social Business Architect keeps the organizations focused on the goals of its relationships with the outside, works with the organization’s technologists and other specialists in other departments to enable the necessary conversations to take place for the benefit of the organization.
From building Symantec’s first web-based multi-lingual technical support and customer service capabilities to working with the Windows Live team at Microsoft to building the world’s most popular innovation community centered around https://www.disruptorleague.com, I’ve seen the importance of finding the right intersection between primary connection points and sources of value for the community to establish itself, grow and thrive.
To build a successful community and attract talent to your organization you must try to identify as an organization what resources you already have (or could create) that will have some value to the community that you are trying to build. These sources of value to the community could be:
You must give people a reason to want to connect with you and to stay close – and yes, hopefully contribute over time.
In addition to identifying the value that you can bring to the community you must also identify which connection points will multiply the attractive power of the sources of value you choose to focus on. There are three primary connection points to consider:
1. Passion – One of the ways that you can attract people to your community is to leverage the power of passion. Seek to identify what people are passionate about when it comes to your company or your products. Passion can be extremely contagious. Is there a way that you can inject the passion that people may have for your company or products into your community?
2. Purpose – Another connection point to consider is to tap into the power of purpose. Not all organizations are committed to serving a larger social purpose, but all can consider introducing elements of public outreach or philanthropy that the community can engage with and feel good about contributing to. Are you building walls to keep people out? Or are you creating something that people can feel a part of?
3. Fun – And don’t forget the power of fun. One of the ways of connecting people to your community is to have something fun for people to do. Recognize people for their participation in your community in fun and different ways to keep them interested and engaged, and have some fun reinforcing the ethos of the community.
And when you bring the right sources of value together with the right connection points that is when the magic of attraction and engagement happens and a community starts to grow its membership and participation. But we are not just seeking to build a community; we are looking to activate it as well (to get people engaged, contributing, discussing, connecting, etc.).
This is where Social Business Architects prove their worth to the organization. They can use social media, digital communications, value analysis, and other collaborative tools to help organizations attract and engage customers, partners and employees to help the organization achieve its commercial goals. Whether the future direction of your social business architecture includes beginning collaborative innovation, increasing employee retention, building stronger partnerships, growing customer lifetime value, or another effort, be sure that you are involving the Social Business Architects in your organization to help set the right goals and find the right tools to ensure the effort’s success. Only then will you put your organization on the path it needs to be to transform itself from an internally focused product and service factory to a truly internally and externally focused and integrated social business capable of sustainable innovation, retention of the growing millennial work force, long-term customer relationships and loyalty, and true partnerships with its vendors and suppliers for mutual benefit.
Are you ready to architect a social business foundation under your organization?
Stay tuned for more on this topic in a white paper I am publishing with Innocentive very soon.
UPDATE: You can find all of my commissioned white papers here (including the Innocentive White Paper – “Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation”) or contact me to commission one for your company’s inbound or content marketing efforts here.
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Image credit: Ringling Bros.
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