GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

GladWare containers have become a common household item. Most kitchens today have that designated drawer filled to the brim with self-stacking plastic wonders and the infamous lids with the center circle. Those center circles are most convenient, providing an interlocking feature for stacking, as GladWare intended.

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Drew Boyd is a 30-year industry veteran who spent 17 years at Johnson & Johnson in marketing, mergers and acquisitions, and international development. Today, he trains, consults, and speaks widely in the fields of innovation, persuasion, and social media. The executive director of the Master of Science in Marketing Program and assistant professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati, his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Industry Week, Psychology Today, and Strategy+Business. Follow @DrewBoyd

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Perhaps the most important role of the innovation leader is creating a competent team. For that reason alone, it’s one of the most challenging. It’s a constant fight for talent. You may have the best products and services in the market, but without a strong, talented marketing team behind them, you’ll start losing ground to the competition.

Building a competent team begins with recruiting and hiring the right people. But it takes much more than just telling your human resources department to go fill open slots. Top innovation leaders get actively involved. When is the best time to recruit marketing people? All the time! What I mean by that is you should think of recruiting as an ongoing activity. You need a pipeline of potential marketers ready to step in when a position opens up.

When I hire innovation team member, I always look for certain characteristics beyond just job experience and track record. I look for people who are competitive by nature, who have a high tolerance for ambiguity, who are great at networking, and who have a good head for numbers. Creating new products and services is a cash generating activity, so you’ve got to have solid financial skills.

Notice I didn’t mention specific commercial skills like branding or marketing research. That’s because innovation can be learned like any skill. You, as the marketing leader, need to establish a strong, well-defined training and development program for your entire organization. Be sure to make it an annual, on-going activity, not just a one-time event. Training is an investment. For some examples, check out my other fundamentals courses on marketing, innovation, and branding. They’ll give you a good head start.

Innovators like to perform at high levels, but they have to be motivated. You, as the innovation leader, play the key role in doing that. Innovators are at their best when they feel a sense of purpose. They have to feel good that the products and services they put into the marketplace are valued by their customers. Innovators need to feel appreciated for the work they do and the risks they take. And they need to be rewarded and recognized for their accomplishments.

Be sure to use a mix of both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, and do it throughout the year, not just at the annual meeting. Now here’s a tip. A great way to recognize innovators is to have one of your key customers present an award in front of their peers. That really ties it all together – a sense of purpose, a sense of appreciation, and a sense of recognition.
Creating competent teams means getting the right talent, but also dealing with under-performers. The mistake you can make is thinking that just hiring a few superstars will make up for the weaker talent. Just the opposite will occur. The superstars will get frustrated, demotivated, and they’ll eventually leave if they don’t think you’re dealing with the poor performers.
Your under-performers either lack the skill to do the job or the will to do it. You have to have clear conversations with them to understand why they’re not performing, then set clear expectations and deadlines when they need to turn things around. If they don’t improve, they’re a liability to you and your team. You’ll lose credibility inside and outside the department if you don’t take action.

So take a look at your talent pool. Understand your team’s strengths and weakness, then put the right hiring, training, and motivational programs in place to keep upgrading your team year after year. That way, you’ll keep winning the fight for talent.

image credit: bigstockphoto.com

Drew Boyd is a 30-year industry veteran who spent 17 years at Johnson & Johnson in marketing, mergers and acquisitions, and international development. Today, he trains, consults, and speaks widely in the fields of innovation, persuasion, and social media. He is the executive director of the Master of Science in Marketing Program and assistant professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Industry Week, Psychology Today, and Strategy+Business. Follow @DrewBoyd

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

You’ve heard that old adage. Don’t judge a book by its cover. The same holds true in creativity. You want to resist the temptation of judging ideas depending on who it came from. Yet, it’s very difficult for us to do this. Here’s why. If we like the person who generated it, we tend to like their idea. And if we don’t like that person, well, let’s just say we might see a few more flaws than we might have otherwise.

Now you and your colleagues might not even be aware that you’re doing this. And what this means for you in practice is that you have to find a way to strip ideas of their identity.

You can boost the creative output of your team just by making sure these ideas don’t get thrown out prematurely. Here’s how you do it. When you’re facilitating a session to generate ideas, announce to the group that there’s a new ground rule and the ground rule is simply this, people cannot put a name to any idea. That means that people are, are going to have to stop saying things like, hey that was my idea or hey, let’s go back to that great idea that Michael had earlier.

People will find this hard to do. So, you’re going to have to be firm about the rule. Another good technique is to tell people that whenever they have an idea, they have to write it down on a piece of paper, again, without putting anybody’s name on it. Every so often, go around and collect those pieces of paper, and then pass them out randomly to people in the group, and have people take an idea and read it aloud to the rest of the group. That keeps the ideas anonymous.

And finally, another good technique is to have people work in pairs or groups of three. And whenever they share their idea, they do it as coming from the entire group, not just from one team member. And what this does is it makes it more difficult for other people in the group to figure out where that idea came from. It helps them eliminate that natural tendency to have a bias to that idea. Now these techniques might take a little bit more time and may feel a bit awkward, but trust me it’s well worth it.
You’ll boost your creative output at work by making sure good ideas don’t get thrown out too quickly.
image credit: the dailyquotes.com

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

When you try on a new piece of clothing, like a shirt or a new jacket, what do you see when you look in the mirror? If you’re like most consumers, you’re not looking at the clothing. Rather, you’re looking at yourself and thinking about how that new clothing fits the image of the person you are or want to become.

As a innovator, you need to understand this very important aspect of consumer behavior called personality. Your customers are complex, and their mental make-up affects everything they do in terms of shopping, buying, and using your products.

Personality is the collection of individual traits and characteristics that make each of us unique. Now the study of personality is highly complicated with many different theories and approaches. But for innovators, one personality factor you must understand is known as the self-concept. Self concept is a person’s ideas and feelings about himself or herself. We live our lives shaping and influencing it.

Each of has more than one concept of ourselves. The real image is how people actually see you. Your self image is how you see yourself regardless of how others view you. And your possible self is what you aspire to become one day. It’s like an ideal self image. Possible self also goes the other direction. Sometimes we hold an image in our head of what we want to avoid becoming. For example, we want to avoid becoming a bad parent or friend.

These self images can change depending on where we are and who we’re with. Your self image might be a lot different at home with your family than it is at work, for example.

As a innovator, you can use these self images in several ways. First, you can build products and services that help people enhance one of these images. Research shows people try to influence most how others see them, so people buy products that are impressive to others. An innovation method like SIT, for example, can be used to point you in this direction. The Task Unification Technique in particular can be deployed in a way that forces you to seek benefits related to the consumer’s self image.

Or, you can appeal to how customers see themselves in their own eyes. If they consider themselves very handy around the house, you can offer tools and other products that help them be great at it. If you want to appeal to customers striving to get ahead in life, you can offer self improvement products and services that let people pursue their dreams.

The self concept is also a very useful way to perform market segmentation. Segmentation is grouping people around at least one common characteristic. A particular type of self image could serve as a way to segment and target customers in your marketing plan.

Finally, innovators need to understand their customer’s self image so they can appeal to it in communications such as advertising or product packaging. Let’s go back to our handyman example. If you wanted to reach this target audience, you would show a commercial featuring a handyman at work using your inventions and doing a great job with it. All the handymen out there will identify with the commercial because it’s telling us that your products will reinforce my self concept as a handy person.

People consume products and services to make themselves happy, and a big part of that is feeling happy about who you are. Innovators don’t just create products. They help consumers shape the person inside. And that’s a very special role.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Here’s a nice example of the Attribute Dependency Technique, one of five in the innovation method called Systematic Inventive Thinking(SIT). It’s a great tool to make products and services that are “smart.” They adjust and learn, then adapt their performance to suit the needs of the user. Attribute Dependency accounts for the majority of innovative products and services, according to research conducted by my co-author, Dr. Jacob Goldenberg.

From Fox News:

“The airline legroom wars may finally be coming to an end.

Engineering firm B/E Aerospace has filed a patent for a ‘legroom adjustable’ seat design that allows flight attendants to move a seat forward or back depending on the size of a passenger, reports the Telegraph.

The seats, which all have moveable wheels, sit on rail tracks lining the aircraft floor. If a taller man or woman is seated in front of a child, for example, the cabin crew will have the ability to move an occupant’s seat several inches back via smartphone or tablet, allowing for extra legroom.

‘While passengers come in many sizes, children, adolescents, adults, men, women and with large height differentials within these categories, seat spacing in the main cabin of passenger aircraft is generally uniform except at exit rows,’ the designers stated in their patent application, submitted in November.

‘The one size fits all seating arrangement can cause discomfort for tall passengers, while a child or relatively small adult may be seated in an identical seat at the seat pitch, with more than ample leg room and in relative comfort.’

The legroom adjustable seat, however, leaves the final spatial arrangement to the discretion of crewmembers, not individual passengers.

‘Even a relatively small incremental increase in seat spacing for the tall passengers can provide additional comfort with no loss of comfort to the much smaller passengers seated in front of the tall passengers,’ B/E Aerospace said.”

To get the most out of the Attribute Dependency Technique, follow these steps:

1. List internal/external variables.

2. Pair variables (using a 2 x 2 matrix)

• Internal/internal
• Internal/external

3. Create (or break) a dependency between the variables.

4. Visualize the resulting virtual product.

5. Identify potential user needs.

6. Modify the product to improve it.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Do you remember a time when you were just about to buy something, but at the last minute, you stopped and said, “No, I don’t think I’ll buy this.” So what stopped you? It was most likely because you were worried about something. There was too much risk around the purchase, so you walked away. Guess what? You’re just like every other consumer out there. Being a consumer is risky business.

As an innovator, you have to understand the risks and uncertainties faced by your customers, and figure out innovative ways to lower that risk. The lower the risk to consumers, the more likely they are to buy the product and less likely they are to complain about it afterwards.

Consumers face different types of risk. Financial risk is the risk of losing or wasting money on the deal. Physical risk is the risk of injury from using the wrong product or using a product incorrectly. Functional risk is the risk of buying a product that doesn’t work as expected or fill the need the way you wanted it to. And finally is psychological risk. This is the risk you face from feeling badly about the purchase, perhaps feeling guilty or even foolish.

When people face these risks, there’s two ways they think about it. First, they wonder about their downside risk, or what they stand to lose in buying the product. They also wonder about their upside risk, or what they stand to gain from buying the product. Research shows that potential losses loom larger than an equivalent gain. In other words, people do more to avoid losses than they do increasing their gains, and that is especially true as we get older. After all, people are betting the product will meet their needs, and they don’t want to lose out.

Now, consumers will do all they can to reduce these uncertainties, but things get in their way, sometimes making the shopping risk even worse. For example, you might be shopping online and find many competing products to the one you were interested in. Now you have choices to make, and that gets scary. Or perhaps you find information about the product that’s inconsistent with what you originally thought. Perhaps prices are changing so often that you don’t know the right time to buy.

So here are things you can do to help consumers deal with uncertainty. First, provide as much information about the product as you can. Make sure it’s where people can find it, in your stores, online, or with your salespeople.

Show comparisons between your product and the competition. Provide independent test data on how your product works. Give consumers access to knowledgeable and trustworthy experts. Share testimonials from other customers about their experience with the product.

Make it easy and convenient to shop for your products. Let them inspect and test your products before they buy it. If they’re worried about the product working or the price changing, give them a warranty or guarantee so they can return the product if it doesn’t work or if they find a lower price.

Now here’s a tip. Try to give your customers three choices of the product: a high priced/high functioning product, a low priced/low functioning option, and a middle option. Research shows people often select the middle option when they’re not sure what to buy. Without that option, they may walk away.

Trust me – customers want to buy from you. Good innovators make it as easy and risk-free as they possibly can.

Want to learn more about your customers? Visit Understanding Consumer Behavior.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Nielson released its 2015 BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATION REPORT tthat features best practices from winning brands – with seven specific case studies from Pepsico, Kraft, MillerCoors, Kellogg’s, Nestle Purina, Atkins and L’Oreal Paris.

The report is based on a two year study examining over 3000 products launched in the US. It debunks conventional wisdom that new product success is random. Instead, it shows that success in new product innovation is repeatable and scalable when the science of innovation is applied.

Key findings:

• American consumer sentiment toward new product innovation is relatively low in an environment that shows CPG innovation investment currently at an eight year high. With projections that show a real acceleration in the number of products that are being introduced into the marketplace in the next 12 – 24 months – (yet failure rate for new products stands at 85%)businesses need to primed for an uphill battle for consumer attention.

• The efforts mapped out in this year’s case studies showcase proven methods to flip the odds from high failure to regular, repeatable and scalable success.

• The application of a “Jobs Theory” yielded success for brands: from ultra-light kitty litter to hand held, healthy breakfast sandwiches…the innovative products named in this year’s Breakthrough Innovation Report highlights examples of innovation that not only help to re-define their category by also served a specific purpose or performed a “job” for consumers

The Nielsen Breakthrough Innovation Project has examined over 20,000 new product launches over the past four years. To date, only 74 products have been named a “Breakthrough Innovation Award Winner.” Twelve brands were awarded this year, with seven highlighted in this year’s report. Winners had to meet the following strict criteria:

• RELEVANT: Achieved a minimum Sales of $50 million in Year 1
• ENDURING: Sustained enduring success for 2 years (achieving in year two at least 90% of year one sales)
• DISTINCT: Delivered a new value proposition to the market

This year’s winners are:

• Advanced Haircare, L’Oreal Paris
• Atkins Frozen Meals, Atkins Nutritionals
• Duracell Quantum, Procter & Gamble
• Lunchables Uploaded, Kraft Foods
• Monster Energy Ultra, Monster Energy Company
• Mountain Dew Kickstart, PepsiCo
• Müller Yogurt, Muller Quaker Dairy
• Redd’s Apple Ale, MillerCoors
• Special K Flatbread Breakfast Sandwich, Kellogg’s
• The Red Bull Editions, Red Bull
• Tidy Cats LightWeight, Nestlé Purina
• TOSTITOS Cantina Tortilla Chips and Salsa, Frito-Lay (PepsiCo)

Download the report at https://www.nielsen.com/breakthrough.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Think about how often you push buttons during the normal course of a day, at home, in our car, and elsewhere – elevators, crosswalks, and so on.

Did you ever stop to wonder how many of those buttons you push don’t actually work? It’s called a placebo button – it seems to have functionality, but actually has no effect when pressed.

It’s a perfect example of the Subtraction Technique, one of five in the innovation method, Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). Subtraction works by removing an element of the system that seemed essentially to identity some new value or benefit.

So what’s the benefit of a button that doesn’t work? Psychologists say that it gives people the illusion of control, defined as the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events; for example, it occurs when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence. We push a button, something happens, so we think, post hoc, that we caused it. Many people argue that we actually benefit from the illusion that we are in control of something – even when, from the observer’s point of view, we’re not.

The beauty of the Subtraction Technique is that you can also replace the missing element with something from the Closed World, an invisible boundary around the problem. As reported by BBC, here are some interesting examples of Subtraction with Replacement:
“The truth is that technology has long been deceiving us. Sometimes this is ethically questionable, but in other cases the user benefits from a sense of control and reassurance that the system is working as it should. Computer scientist Eytan Adar at the University of Michigan has described a series of fascinating “benevolent deceptions” in a paper co-written with two Microsoft researchers. Take the 1960s 1ESS telephone system for instance. After dialling, a caller’s connection would sometimes fail to go through properly. Instead of a dead tone or error noise, the system would instead simply route the call to a completely different person. “The caller, thinking that she had simply misdialled, would hang up and try again: disruption decreased and the illusion of an infallible phone system preserved,” notes the paper.”

To get the most out of the Subtraction Technique, you follow five steps:

1. List the product’s or service’s internal components.

2. Select an essential component and imagine removing it. There are two ways: a. Full Subtraction. The entire component is removed. b. Partial Subtraction. Take one of the features or functions of the component away or diminish it in some way.

3. Visualize the resulting concept (no matter how strange it seems).

4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this new product or service, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge? After you’ve considered the concept “as is” (without that essential component), try replacing the function with something from the Closed World (but not with the original component). You can replace the component with either an internal or external component. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values of the revised concept?

5. If you decide that this new product or service is valuable, then ask: Is it feasible? Can you actually create these new products? Perform these new services? Why or why not? Is there any way to refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

Learn how all five techniques can help you innovate – on demand.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

You can frequently make groundbreaking innovations simply by dividing a product into “chunks” to create many smaller versions of it. These smaller versions still function like the original product, but their reduced size delivers benefits that users wouldn’t get with the larger, “parent” product. This is “Preserving Division.”

Les Paul used Preserving Division to produce his multitrack recording by taking a single piece of media—a tape—and dividing it into multiple smaller tracks that perform the same function as the original large piece of tape.

We see this all the time in the technology industry. For years, computer makers kept increasing the capacity of hard drives (the devices within PCs on which programs and data are stored). Then an engineer had a brilliant idea to use Preserving Division to create mini personal storage devices. Today many people won’t leave their desks without placing their “thumb” drives in their briefcase or pocket. These mini storage units are designed specifically for people who must carry electronic versions of documents with them but don’t want to be burdened with laptops or other computing devices. They simply transfer documents from their PCs to their thumb drives, and walk away from the computer.

Many food manufacturers use the Preserving Division technique to create more convenient versions of popular products. By taking a regular serving or portion of a product and dividing it into multiple smaller portions, manufacturers allow consumers to purchase food products in more convenient and cost-effective ways. Consumers buy only what they need instead of a larger amount. Recently, manufacturers have even used Preserving Division to help people curb their calorie intake by providing popular snacks in smaller, more diet-friendly packages. Kraft Foods’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese brand does this by offering individually wrapped single-serving-size portions of its flagship product for people to put in their brown-bag lunches or take to the office with a breakfast bagel.

The time-sharing arrangements that many hotels and condominiums offer provide more examples of Preserving Division. Under timesharing, a year of “ownership” of a property is divided into fifty-two smaller units of a week each. Each unit is then sold to a different owner, who has the right to live in the property for that week. Each smaller unit preserves the characteristics of the whole. Ownership has been divided over time.

Likewise, when you make payments on a loan, you are sending small amounts of money created by dividing the larger, principal amount of the loan. Like the time-sharing condos, the division is based on time.

When doctors treat cancer tumors with radiation therapy, they have to be sure to kill the cancer tissue without doing too much damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. How? They divide the total dose of radiation into smaller, less lethal doses and aim them at the tumor from many different angles. The smaller beams of high-energy X‑rays, divided in space, converge to hit the cancer cells. But the lighter dose of any one beam does not do enough damage to other tissue that it hits along the way.

To get the most out of the Division technique, you follow five basic steps:

1.  List the product’s or service’s internal components.

2.  Divide the product or service in one of three ways:

• Functional (take a component and rearrange its location or when it appears).
• Physical (cut the product or one of its components along any physical line and rearrange it).
• Preserving (divide the product or service into smaller pieces, where each piece still possesses all the characteristics of the whole).

3.  Visualize the new (or changed) product or service.

4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge?

5. If you decide you have a new product or service that is indeed valuable, then ask: Is it feasible? Can you actually create this new product or perform this new service? Why or why not? Can you refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

Keep in mind that you don’t have to use all three forms of Division, but you boost your chance of scoring a breakthrough idea if you do.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Dr. Steven Palter’s patient began to cry. Not because of the sharp pain that suddenly shot through her abdomen—after years of suffering she was used to that—but from sheer and utter relief. The Yale University fertility specialist had precisely isolated the physical source of his patient’s chronic pelvic pain (CPP). “We got it!” Dr. Palter said elatedly, and immediately released the pressure he’d put on the spot inside her abdomen. “And we couldn’t have found it without you,” he told the woman. For years, she’d been in constant agony that prevented her from sleeping, holding a job, or maintaining even the semblance of a normal family life.

After the patient and Dr. Palter together had identified the location and source of her pain, the doctor made a “conscious pain map.” Immediately thereafter, Dr. Palter used this map to guide his surgery on his patient, using a laser to precisely remove the diseased tissue he could not see with his naked eye alone, finally relieving the woman from the endless rounds of physician referrals, diagnostic tests, and failed treatments.

Dr. Palter and his patient had embarked on a new kind of surgery called conscious pain mapping. As a member of the surgical team, it was the patient who identified the area of pathology.

This particular patient was extraordinarily lucky to have found Dr. Palter. Although 20 percent of women suffer from CPP at some point in their lives—with one of every ten outpatient referrals to gynecological specialists due to this condition—only 60 percent of cases are diagnosed accurately. Even fewer are treated successfully. Most CPP sufferers find their lives altered irrevocably because of the severity of the pain, and many struggle to cope with depression on top of the physical anguish.

CPP has also long frustrated physicians. Although some doctors have suspected that factors such as endometriosis and irritable bowel syndrome can cause CPP, it has always been difficult to make a definitive diagnosis. Seemingly diseased tissue would prove benign and vice versa. And without such a diagnosis, CPP is nearly impossible to treat.

Or was. Until Dr. Palter had his idea.

Before Dr. Palter’s innovation, the gold standard diagnostic tool had been laparoscopy. This involves inserting a small video camera through a small incision in a patient’s abdominal wall to get an internal view of her ligaments, fallopian tubes, small and large bowels, pelvic sidewalls, and the uppermost portion of the uterus, or fundus. But since CPP pain occurs often in seemingly normal tissue, it frequently can’t be detected using visual clues alone (the wrong color, unusual spots or texture, and so on). Therefore, laparoscopy results are at best ambiguous, can be a waste of time, and, at worst, lead to the removal of normal tissue that isn’t even responsible for the pain.

Dr. Palter decided to systematically map the inside of a patient’s abdomen by physically touching one spot after another until the patient felt pain. Once he isolated the spot, he could surgically remove the problematic tissue—and end the patient’s suffering once and for all.

What makes Dr. Palter’s process remarkable is that he performs it while the patient is awake and alert on the operating table. Laparoscopy is usually performed under general anesthesia, which knocks the patient out, and so the doctor must interpret the findings without her input. Given that CPP is a condition that is felt rather than seen, this has always significantly handicapped physicians. By using the patient’s own feedback to help with the diagnosis, Dr. Palter solved a medical challenge that has baffled doctors for generations.

Why did it take so long for someone to come up with this idea? In hindsight, Dr. Palter’s solution seems almost ludicrously obvious. He didn’t develop any new technologies. Nor did he take advantage of innovative drugs, or apply the findings of recent research studies. Dr. Palter made this creative leap using only existing tools and ideas.

As it turns out, Dr. Palter’s achievement is a perfect example of the creativity tool we call Task Unification. As with the other techniques, Task Unification allows you to routinely and systematically be creative by narrowing—or constraining—your options for solving a problem. You simply force an existing feature (or component) in a process or product to work harder by making it take on additional responsibilities. You unify tasks that previously worked independently of one another. In Dr. Palter’s new CPP treatment, for example, the patient is both patient and diagnostic tool. By unifying two tasks—requiring the patient to undergo the procedure and help detect the source of her abdominal pain—he achieved a creative breakthrough while staying well inside the proverbial box.

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