“America’s growth historically has been fueled mostly by investment, education, productivity, innovation and immigration. The one thing that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with America’s growth rate is a brutal work schedule.”
– Fareed Zakaria
“The relative skill and speed with which you extract insights from the voice of the customer, and adapt your organization to deliver the required insightful products and services, will determine whether you win or lose in tomorrow’s marketplace.”
– Braden Kelley
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
– Albert Einstein
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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“The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you, and you don’t know how or why.”
– Albert Einstein
“To build a brand, you must start a conversation with your customers. Your customers have to know that you stand for something and that they can count on you to deliver upon your brand promise.”
– Braden Kelley
“Today you can buy knowledge by the pound – from consultants hawking best practice, from the staff you’ve just hired from your competitor, and from all those companies that hope you will outsource everything. Yet in the age of revolution it is not knowledge that produces new wealth, but insight – insight into opportunities for discontinuous innovation. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination. You must become your own seer.”
– Gary Hamel
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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While I found the Lit C-1 to be an interesting gadget but unlikely to be widely adopted given the other solutions already available at much better price to performance ratios to the problem it is trying to solve, I am a bit more optimistic about this intriguing design from Honda through a slightly different lens than they might examining its possibilities through.
Regular readers will know that I feel that innovation is all about:
Value Creation
Value Access
Value Translation
There is no doubt that Honda has created a lot of potential value here. The problem is that they’ve done a really poor job to date with Value Translation. Notice that in both video examples the users are small females. This introduces doubt unconsciously into the viewers. Will this work for a person who is large and/or tall?
Another point that I often highlight is that disruptive innovations require more than explanation, they require education. This is definitely a device that will require a fair amount of education to get people comfortable with the idea and start to see the need. Honda needs to do more education to help with that. They also need to better visualize where the greatest need for this device will be.
For me this is an amazing device because at 10kg (22 lbs) it is a truly portable personal mobility device (if you integrate a strap or two so that people can carry it on their back).
One hour of battery life seems like a big challenge though. But, not if people are using the device in place of crutches or for when they need a break from standing or walking, and don’t need to go far at any one time before plugging in.
I think this device has real potential, but I have no idea what it costs (and that could change my opinion). But for now it is clear it is a solution in search of a problem. So Honda needs to better identify what the problem is that the U3-X is solving before it will gain any traction, and then educate people so that they feel comfortable with it.
Too many companies invent things and feel the need to announce them too early before they find an application where their solution will be more valuable than all existing alternatives. Don’t make this mistake yourself.
But, what do you think? Invention or innovation?
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I came across the C-1 from Lit Motors in an article by Donna Sturgess over on Innovation Excellence that made me wonder, will this be an invention or an innovation?
As you may know my definition of innovation stresses that a new offering must transform the useful seeds on invention into solutions valued above every existing alternative. An there are lots of existing alternatives in this space including:
Is the gyroscopic stabilization and electric drive enough to distinguish it from some of these other options?
What about at a price of $24,000 – up from earlier estimates of $16,000?
For me there are a couple of key questions. Are they going to try to keep it categorized as a motorcycle or try and get it categorized as a car? And if so, will it survive the car crash safety tests. Although getting it re-classified as a car might make it more accessible (no motorcycle license needed), I have a hard time thinking the greater access would offset the publishing of head on and rear crash test results (and pictures). So, I would place this one in the invention camp – unlikely to reach wide adoption.
What do you think? Invention or innovation?
Is this something that will catch on with commuters around the world?
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“Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn.”
– From the movie ‘The International’
“Incremental innovations can often be explained to customers, but disruptive innovations often require you to educate them on how they will fit into their life.”
– Braden Kelley
“Acquire with the intention to retain, and retain with the intention to grow.”
– Lester Wunderman
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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If you missed How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part One, you can find it here.
So what do leading organizations do to encourage the successful use of external talent?
They build a solid foundation:
Seek to understand where the challenges will lie in the transformation
Have passionate business owners
Secure top level support
Make a long term commitment to the use of external talent
Negotiate master agreements with external talent providers at the center
Create a common language of innovation and external talent
Implement the processes and systems to manage and measure innovation efforts
They get strategic:
Create an external talent strategy
Make a plan for achieving the strategy
Attach goals to the strategy (e.g., P&G’s 50% goal)
Communicate the goals of the strategy and measure goal achievement
They focus on communications and ownership:
Do not underestimate the importance of communications, education, and dialogue
Create guidelines for when and how to use different external talent sources
Have someone own and manage the external innovation efforts
Have owners and champions in place in different business units or product groups
Educate employees on how to engage owners and champions
They continuously reinforce their efforts:
Recognize and reward those who go outside
Weave external focus into internal systems (e.g., innovation system prompts)
Get cross-functional input into problem definition and challenge formation
Make resources available for integration
Work to make the organization more flexible and adaptable
In addition, successful organizations understand that it is about making and maintaining connections and community – you build it for when you need it, instead of building it when you need it. Successful organizations understand that attracting and managing external talent is as important as finding and hiring the best internal talent, and are changing their budget allocations to fit this new paradigm. The role of HR in the near future will not be just to recruit, develop, and manage staff, but also to build and curate talent pools. The HR profession will have to build new core competences in network orchestration and managing talent – no matter where the talent lives (inside or outside the organization). It is time to start preparing.
Before moving on to the final section, let us look at a few brief examples of different companies engaging external talent for business success and one case study of a leader pushing farther:
Threadless decided to base their whole business on external talent and build a community of designers and customers that they could leverage to come up with the t-shirt designs that they sell.
Quirky has taken the Threadless model of utilizing external talent to simultaneously make invention accessible and build a consumer products company. You submit your idea, the community curates it, the company evaluates it, and actually produces and sells the chosen inventions online, and even at a handful of retailers.
P&G went outside with a plastic technology and created a joint venture with competitor Clorox that focuses on trash bags, food storage, and related areas.
Intuit uses its Collaboratory web site to connect with entrepreneurs and to publicize their open innovation challenges, and their Labs web site to engage with the developer and customer communities to get immediate feedback on some of their experiments in order to engage in some level of co-creation.
Psion Teklogix has built one of the more robust corporate open innovation communities – Ingenuity Working – complete with a video from their CEO front and center.
SAP has started The Global SAP Co-Innovation Lab Network (aka COIL) with HP, Intel, NetApp, Cisco, VMware, and F5 Networks to facilitate project-based co-innovation with its members and to enhance the capabilities of SAP’s partner and customer ecosystem through an integrated network of world-wide expertise and best-in-class technologies and platforms.
MyStarbucksIdea.com is an example of engaging the creative energy outside your organization that most companies will not want to follow. They throw things wide open for all idea submissions, not focused on any particular challenges, for all to see. As a result, Starbucks exposes the company to the risk of brand equity destruction from not following through on suggestions. At the same time, this approach provides free market research for competitors and creates a lot of sifting and communications work for internal resources.
If you missed How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part One, you can find it here.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
– Albert Einstein
“In addition to identifying the value that you can bring to the external talent community, you must also identify which connection points will multiply the attractive power of the sources of value you choose to focus on.”
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In writing my article yesterday – 
I came across the C-1 from Lit Motors in an article by Donna Sturgess over on 
If you missed How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part One, you can