GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

James Gardner, an innovator, blogger and author whom I respect, has a new post out today that talks about the need for a “new kind of hero“. He’s referencing innovation heroes like Steve Jobs. As you may believe, some Apple supporters and investors are in a bit of a tizzy, wondering if Apple can continue it’s great streak of successful product and service innovations if Jobs is absent from the company.

James notes that most firms that rely on innovation heroes are usually successful in the short run, but don’t create the capabilities to innovate sustainably over time. After a few successes, the heroes, battered and bruised from the immense effort required to innovate in an environment that often isn’t very supportive, burn out. Frankly, most heroes, whether they are innovation heroes or imaginary superheroes or even just random people on the street who do heroic things will tell you not to follow in their footsteps. The burdens are too high.

However, many firms hope that a hero will arise in their midst – an innovation hero. That hero, when he or she comes, will overcome years of efficiency and effectiveness training and methods and processes tuned to achieving quarterly goals. The hero will accomplish the development of new products and services by rising above the day to day fray, working with little support and few resources to identify really important new needs and to commercialize products in less time than the firm does today. This thinking, which belongs in a comic book, is more pervasive than you might imagine. Too often external consulting firms, even the one I represent, offer our services as an external super-hero, one you can simply alert with the Bat Sign over Gotham, and we’ll respond. Even well-regarded and capable innovation consultants from the outside can’t work miracles if the material they have to work with is the same material that blocks your internal teams.

James toys with the answer to the heroes problem but doesn’t delve deeply into the answer. We believe heroes arise when people have become complacent and cynical, when there don’t seem to be any easy answers and everyone is locked into a common perspective. It’s not easy to solve these problems, and heroes are one possibility. But there is another possibility, and James points at it – creating an environment and culture that welcomes and encourages innovation, and processes and methods that people understand that simplify the work. Superheroes are only necessary when there’s “no other way” and when only the abilities of a superhero can overcome the existing barriers. What if the executives, whose participation and support are necessary, rework the culture and eliminate the barriers to innovation? What if the common expectation within the organization is: we will be innovative? After all, isn’t that why Schmidt is stepping aside at Google, to allow the wonder boys to rework the culture to encourage even more innovation?

In a culture that encourages innovation and provides the tools, methods and processes, anyone can innovate, so there’s far less need for a hero. Or, perhaps, everyone can be an innovation hero if they choose to be.

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

Last week I wrote about becoming a “fast discoverer“, which was primarily about using experimentation to find new ideas. What struck me as I contemplated the need for more experimentation is how frequently many businesses will ask for new ideas and accept them because “experts” said they were correct. As innovators, you need to experience these needs and participate in the discovery first hand. Here’s why.

One question I like to ask my clients is “what new insight have you learned and how did you learn it”. We can’t create interesting new products and services without learning something new about customers or prospects. If you don’t learn something new, all you have to offer are the same products and services to meet the same needs. Alternatively, you can decide that actually understanding needs is less important than creating and then solving a new need that you create. This is why marketing is far more important that product development. Rather than ask clients what they need and fulfill those needs, many firms prefer inside-out innovation, in which the firm creates new features and attributes and communicates the value of these new features to customers. If you don’t learn something new, you have to stick with what you know, or create your own reality and hope to lead customers to that reality. So you can see why learning something new is important to innovation.

Next, if you did take the time to try to learn something new, how did you acquire the information? In our very busy world, most product development and innovation teams outsource discovery to someone else. These innovation teams work on internal issues while third parties, industry analysts and survey attendants conduct interactions with customers to discover new insights. Then, a meeting is held to discuss what was discovered and why it is important and relevant. Since the innovation team didn’t participate in the discovery, it has to receive at face value the needs and wants that are reported to it. This purely passive role means that the innovation team has no investment in the needs, nor have any of them witnessed the discovery of the needs. Therefore they are at best neutral on the needs and their importance, and can find it easy to:

1. Reject needs that are real but don’t fit their world view or
2. Accept needs that don’t actually reflect what the customers and prospects said

There’s another problem when a team outsources discovery: it has no emotional connection to the information presented. If a team meets a customer in his or her home or business and sees the challenges and struggles with their own eyes, then the problem takes root and has meaning for the innovation team. There’s more to the idea than its existence, the team can assign importance and relevance to the problem or opportunity. When handed the description of the problem in a PowerPoint deck, it is exceptionally difficult to generate any empathy for the customer or the need.

Innovators frequently talk about “passion” for an idea. There are so many barriers that will block or delay the development of an idea that it’s difficult to commercialize an idea that everyone believes in. Opportunities or problems that weren’t viewed or experienced by the team directly are easy to discount. If you haven’t “walked a mile” in the customer’s shoes, you can’t discover their problems and the importance and relevance of that problem or opportunity.

Yes, innovation is messy, time consuming and difficult. It requires skills and competencies that you don’t regularly practice in your working life, but no skills or capabilities that you don’t already possess or can’t acquire quickly. Innovation requires your full attention and deep immersion into the lives of your customers. Discovery and validation of needs and wants is important – perhaps one of the most important acts in the process of creating a new product or service. Yet most teams spend very little time in this step, and outsource a great deal of the discovery. You’ll never have much passion or investment in an idea until you’ve experienced the need that created it up-close and personal. No third party can adequately describe a need, and if you outsource the discovery and insight work you’ll never have the depth of understanding, empathy or passion for an idea, and that just makes innovation all that much more difficult. You must do this work yourself if you hope to succeed at innovation.

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

Become a Fast Discoverer with Experimentation

by Jeffrey Phillips

One data point is interesting, two points define a line and three points are a trend. Today in my Twitter feed were several articles and stories about the interrelationship between innovation and experiments. When you see a trend, especially one that makes sense, it’s important to call it out, discuss it and unpack it.

In MIT’s Management Review, Michael Schrage is interviewed, primarily about his thinking on innovation and information technology, yet he ends up talking a lot about experimentation. Schrage points out that the cost of experimenting has fallen dramatically, yet few firms use rapid, low cost experimentation effectively, and lays the blame for that fact at the feet of our educational system, which cranks out MBAs who demand deep quantitative analysis. Schrage makes some other good points, especially about the cost of discovery. At one time it was expensive for P&G to film how consumers used Tide in their laundry. Now, they can simply ask moms and dads to send in video clips of their laundry practices. The consumers can, and will, do the work for the company. Here’s a low cost experiment. Send 50 consumers a video camera and a new product. Ask them in exchange for the use of the new product to record their use and experiences with the new product. Ethnography for free!

But I digress, since this was intended to be a post about experimentation. In the Financial Times there’s a blog post entitled Why Don’t We Experiment. In the post the article quotes Dan Ariely as noting there are two significant barriers for experimentation: short term costs for long term gains, which for some reason seems a difficult trade-off, and the value we place on the insight and expertise of experts over our own experimentation and testing. Far too frequently we choose to purchase answers from “experts” rather than simply trying and discovering ourselves.

Third, Michael Schrage (him again) interviews the head of Caesar’s casino about the importance of experimentation and how it should be conducted. At Caesar’s they expect any new idea to be incorporated as part of an experiment, but a rigorous experiment including a control group.

Experimentation is very intertwined with innovation. Both require a hypothesis – if we do X, then we will get benefit Y. Both require a lot of work for uncertain outcomes. Both require rigor and careful planning. And both are consistently avoided by turning to “experts” who provide an answer, which takes less time and exposes the executive to less risk. After all, if the idea fails and the expert supported it, it can’t be the executive’s fault!

Good innovators are good experimenters. The converse is also true. Firms that don’t innovate don’t experiment. They wait for others to create a market and exercise a “fast follower” mentality. Which would be a fine strategy, except that the vast majority of firms fashion themselves as fast followers, and few really are.

Why not reposition your firm as a “fast discoverer” using rapid, low cost experimentation. Then, you won’t have to pay experts, you will be the expert.

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

When I was coming along in school, back in the dark ages when we still used the wide tablets and the short, fat pencils, we were taught a fair bit about writing. Unfortunately, little of that learning gets reflected here. One of the items we were taught was how to write a great introductory newspaper article. As I recall, the first article had to include all the major “Ws” – Who, What, Why, Where, When, and of course How. I can’t tell you how frequently we use this same thinking when working with a client to define an innovation effort. Or how often those same clients gloss over or forget what they learned in elementary school.

The Five W One H way of thinking is old school, but it is an exceptionally useful device. You may have seen it used as an idea generation technique, which it can be, but that’s not what I’m presenting it for today. Rather, I’d like to use it as a way to frame an innovation effort. Far too often teams make assumptions or think that someone else has thought through these items. The innovation teams are so eager to start with what seems to be the “real work” of innovation – generating ideas – that they neglect all of the strategic framing. And as any good Confucian scholar can tell you, everything important happens at the beginning.

So let’s take these in order and understand what we should know before we start.

What: What are we trying to accomplish with the innovation effort? What are the goals and measures we’ll use? What risks are we willing to face? What sacred cows should we avoid?

Why: Why are are innovating? Why not keep doing what we are doing? Why does an innovation effort make sense? Why innovate around this particular issue or opportunity?

When: When do you want results? When can we have the people and budgets we need? When can we get started?

Where: Where should we focus our efforts? Where in the future is our target? Where are the prospects and customers we should consider?

Who: Who is the financial sponsor? Who will adopt or commercialize the ideas? Who is the ultimate customer of our ideas? Who is the final arbiter in case of disagreements? Who will staff this project?

How: How should we work? How will the existing tools and techniques be helpful? How can we use new techniques? How do we deploy innovation in our business?

What Really Happens

If we were good at remembering elementary school English class and applying the techniques, we’d ask these questions and wait to get good answers before we start an innovation effort. In my experience, having witnessed good projects and not so great projects, many projects that struggle fail to ask and understand some of these questions. Either they assume someone else has the answer, or the team is in too much of a rush to get started, or they doubt that anyone has the answer, so why waste time.

What will happen if your team hasn’t asked these questions and gotten answers, or failing that made up your own answers, is that someone in authority will question why the work is being done, or who authorized it, or how you are using tools or techniques. Without a good answer, your entire project is delayed or placed at risk. Innovation is a very easy project to derail, because it’s different and risky, so entering a project with unknowns is simply asking to be derailed.

Document Everything

Ask, often and repeatedly, for good answers to the Five Ws and one H at the beginning of the project, and confirm them occasionally during the project. This ensures you have a firm grasp of the scope and commitments necessary for the project to be successful and can defend your team from the inevitable attack by someone or something that is threatened by the innovation effort. You will be questioned, and your ability to respond quickly and precisely, with evidence, is important. Even if you can’t get good answers, answer the questions yourself as best as you can and seek validation. Some definition, even if your team develops the answers, is better than none.

While this may seem like a lot of work up front, it will dramatically simplify your efforts downstream by framing the problem effectively and providing the means to answer those individuals, or systems, or policies that will seek to derail or distract down the road. Further, having these answers will help the team when it comes time to decide which ideas are valuable and how to evaluate them.

The Tools You Need

As the famous saying goes – All I needed to know I learned in kindergarten. For innovation, that may not be quite right. You may need some tools from fifth or sixth grade English class. Don’t be bamboozled by all the tools and techniques available for innovation, and don’t be shy about asking these important questions before you start. The tools are simpler than you’ve been led to believe, and the questions you ask up front will save you significantly down the road.

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

Frankly, I’d rather write about success than failure, especially in an innovation setting. But since it’s true that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, someone needs to tell its story.

We’ve all heard the mantra (and I’ve used it many times) that innovation will require some failure. In this regard what we are talking about primarily is fast experimentation, prototyping and piloting, which leads to new insights. What we don’t mean is consistent failure in the marketplace, which is simply a recipe for disaster. But what is also interesting is to begin to decipher why “innovations” failed, and what innovators can learn from those mistakes.

We believe that innovations fail in the marketplace based on one or more of four key issues:

1. Ideas don’t solve an important problem for a customer
2. Ideas take too long to get to market/Shifts in needs
3. Ideas underfunded or poorly launched
4. Ideas require too much work to adopt

Let’s address the first three briefly, and look at the fourth one in more depth.

1. Ideas Don’t Solve an Important and Relevant Problem

Many innovators assume that they understand what customers and prospects want and need, rather than doing the research to understand what customers want and need. We call this “inside-out” innovation and most firms are guilty of it. Their innovators and product managers think they understand customer needs based on some market research and company history and don’t engage customers to truly understand unmet or unarticulated needs. When the products or services are launched, there are few buyers and the ideas seem uninteresting. That’s because the needs were formed based on misunderstanding or a lack of interaction to discover what customers want.

Solution: Use scenario planning and qualitative research like Voice of the Customer or Ethnography to gain more insights!

2. Ideas Take Too Long to Get to Market or Needs Shift

Since many organizations don’t have a well-tuned innovation process, even when firms identify the right needs it may take years for a new product to get to market, completely missing a market window. Or a firm may have decision cycles (annual planning, anyone?) that slows the development and restricts funding of new ideas. So a great ideas languishes in product development limbo and when it is finally released it has missed the market window or needs have shifted.

Solution: Define a funding mechanism to sponsor ideas that occur out of sequence with annual planning cycles, and develop a well-tuned innovation process to convert ideas to new products and services.

3. Ideas are Poorly Launched

No matter how well you conceive the idea and how well it’s developed, if the new product or service isn’t launched effectively, considering its place in the ecosystem and the PR and marketing necessary to get the word out, it won’t be successful. Built it and they will come is a fool’s errand. Even the best ideas must be effectively marketed and promoted, yet far too often good ideas are barely marketed at all. Contrast this with Apple’s approach to revealing new products – the CEO presents the new product as if it were the second coming. If your company has a great new innovative product or service, understand how to launch it, or be prepared for disappointment.

Solution: Perhaps we can’t all do the “reveal” like Steve Jobs, but we can place more emphasis on building excitement for the launch of a new product or service.

4. Understand the Adoption Cycle or Barriers

Innovators see the value of their ideas innately, and can’t imagine why anyone would not immediately switch allegiances to their product or service. Customers, on the other hand, are the ones who make determinations about how difficult the transition from one product or service will be. Far too frequently, consumers remain wedded to products and services that offer them less convenience and less value than other offerings in the market, because the effort to change appears too high. Frankly, this issue is probably the biggest challenge to new innovative products and services. Understanding the adoption issues and addressing them in the product and in the launch can make all the difference.

Inertia suggests that bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, and customers with existing relationships and patterns tend to retain those patterns. If your innovation seeks to disrupt existing patterns and actions, it had better offer tremendous benefits and a bridge to port information between the existing platform and your new platform. Otherwise, few customer may make the leap, even for a significant change in value. The adoption effort is not a barrier to be taken lightly. It is, in fact, one of the biggest barriers for new innovative ideas to overcome. And, because innovators fall in love with their ideas and fail to see the barriers, adoption barriers often receive the least consideration.

Solution: Understand the entire value proposition of the products or offerings you are trying to displace or disrupt. Help the prospect bridge between their existing platforms and standards and your new innovative product, or you may find that inertia overcomes innovation. Define a clear, simple path for people to follow as they leave behind their existing patterns and platforms so adoption is simple.

Conclusion

So here we finish, with another Covey principle: start with the end in mind. If your solution solves a problem that real customers have, great, your chances of an innovation success are increased. If your solution is easily adopted by your target customers, based on their needs and understanding of the adoption issues and not yours, then you have a winner.

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

Recently, Norm Augustine wrote an article for Forbes entitled Danger: America is losing its edge in innovation.

In the article Augustine cites a number of factors, such as the often Tweeted fact that US consumers spend more on potato chips than the government does in Energy Research and Development. He also points to the fact that science and engineering are underrepresented in the US student body and that more and more patents are being awarded to entities outside the US. This is all true, and should be warning signs for our economy. While he’s right, we are losing the innovation edge, the factors he states are lagging indicators at best, or misleading at worst, from an innovation perspective. There are several reasons why.

First, let’s consider the throw-away line that consumers spend more on potato chips than the government does on Energy research and development. What should a relevant measure be? How much the average consumer spends on oranges or bananas? This is a non-sequitur of the first order. What people choose to spend their money on in a free economy has no relevance or meaning to what our government spends on research. Also, let’s consider the energy sector in this country. Other than perhaps the nuclear industry, none of the major energy sources were the result of government R&D. The government didn’t sponsor the early Texas oilmen, or the coal industry. Perhaps the government did assist with the development of hydroelectric in the form of the TVA, but many would argue that the regulations the government imposed slowed the growth of the industry. While our government did spend a tremendous amount of money in research during the cold war, there are two distinct problems with that approach today. First, the government is more involved in more areas of our economy than it was then, and has extended itself too far and can’t afford significant research and development. What’s more, the government is creating both a crowding-out problem and a regulatory burden contributing to less and less R&D. When the government suggests that it must enter the pharmaceutical R&D space since the major pharma companies don’t provide enough new medications at appropriate prices, that should send warning signals.

What the government should do is make the risk taking of entrepreneurs more rewarding and lower taxes and provide incentives for new firms to grow, and larger firms to innovate. We need the government to do its bit where R&D is concerned, but given the budgetary pressures and the growth of the government in a range of other areas, and the lethargy in converting R&D into new products within the government, it is risky at best to assume that more government R&D is the answer.

Second, Augustine assumes that more science and technology education and training in the US will mean more innovation. In the past, innovation was driven by technology, and to some extent that will be true in the future. However, innovation is a much more robust solution than merely new patents or technologies. Look no further than Apple to see that one doesn’t have to be a technology leader to be an innovator – innovation is created by new technologies, but also new processes, new services, new business models and new customer experiences. The sooner we expand our definition of innovation and move beyond the simplistic equation that science and technology = innovation, the better. That’s not to say that science and technology innovation is not valuable, just that we need a much bigger perspective.

Third, regardless of where the technology and engineering happens, we need to continue to keep our creativity energy flowing. We in the US have a very special petri dish for innovation, based on free markets, no rank or caste system, liquid venture capital and other funding, good education and a risk taking culture. There are few, if any countries in the world that have our collection of attributes or that can even hope to attain them in the short run. We need to reinforce these attributes and benefits, not detract from them. Where products are made becomes less important than how they are imagined and designed, and who owns the intellectual property.

Fourth, we’ve allowed ourselves to be made comfortable by the fact that Steve Jobs and other creative people are “out there” doing the interesting innovation work so we don’t have to. Most of us would far rather rely on a few insightful others to create interesting products rather than take on the role ourselves. We’ve become consumers of ideas rather than creators of ideas, outsourcing even the creative act itself. Most of us live in a gray area defined by Teddy Roosevelt as a place with cold and timid souls who never tasted victory or defeat. Rather, to continue, we should “spend ourselves in a worthy cause…best knowing in the end the triumph of high achievement and at worst, if we fail, at least we failed daring greatly.” That’s a paraphrase, of course, but rather than living lives of quiet desperation, we need more people to live dangerously, with big ideas and big dreams. We need to stop waiting for the government, a large enterprise, some nameless bureaucracy or some other agency to innovate, to create new things and do it ourselves. Few great innovations spring from established bureaucracies – they have too much to lose. Innovation is by its nature disruptive to established hierarchies, and thus is more likely to take root and succeed in smaller organizations and in individuals.

Finally, we’ve become accustomed to being told we are now behind. Every day the news tells us that China will soon be the largest economy in the world. India graduates more engineers each year than we graduate university students in total. And so on. We’ve already lost, so like the English of the early 20th century we should lie back and think of England. Well, sure, China will be the largest economy in the world in a few years, but over half its population lives in poverty. The Chinese have no choice but to create 20 million new jobs a year, each year, just to sustain unemployment levels. We’re falling behind only to the extent that the BRIC countries and others are “catching up”, which is a good thing for us (opens new markets for our products and ideas) and them (improves standards of living worldwide). Rather than resign ourselves to being the “second class” citizens, how about we define ourselves on what we do better than anyone?

Since de Tocqueville recognized America in the 1800s as exceptional, this country has been a leader in new ideas and innovation. We can continue that far into the future, by focusing on our strengths, keeping our markets free, encouraging ideas and tolerating risks, encouraging free capital movement and strong intellectual property protection. We need to encourage smaller entrepreneurs, and can expect to see many new businesses as the economy improves. We need leaders of larger businesses to take more risks and focus on long term opportunities rather than short term market objectives. What’s interesting is that while larger enterprises become more risk averse and less innovative, the economic recovery will drive more innovation, if for no other reason than millions of unemployed people who seek new jobs will create their own, freed from the constraints of large corporations they’ll unleash a lot of innovation completely outside any government program. History demonstrates that in the aftermath of every significant downturn a flowering of innovation is created. So in some regards Schumpeter’s creative destruction is at work, destroying jobs and industries and laying the foundation for new ones.

Editor’s Note: You may also enjoy Braden Kelley’s An Open Letter on Innovation to President Obama

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

It’s reached the point where I’ve lost track of all the innovation tools available. It seems that every week I stumble across another innovation tool, method or technique. Much to my chagrin, since an innovation consultant should know most, if not all, of the possible permutations and combinations of tools and techniques in his chosen field.

I mean, after all, there’s TRIZ and SIT and ‘jobs to be done’ and “open” innovation and ethnography and scenario planning and.. well the list keeps going and going. Recently I found a website that lists over 40 different methods for idea generation. At some point we’ve gone well past the bandwagon stage, that stage where everyone jumps on the program with momentum, and we’ve entered the baffle them with tools stage, where everyone has a new tool, technique or approach.

What happens when any initiative or movement reaches the tools, tools, tools stage is that people who need answers begin to invest too much in any tool or technique. If it becomes apparent that Apple, for example, has been using “open” innovation, then every CEO will demand that his or her firm copy Apple and use open innovation. If it becomes apparent that your competition has leveraged ethnography and has innovated successfully, then your team will inevitably have to deploy some ethnography. The fixation with methods and tools is understandable, but it begins to cloud the issue. The real issue is that tools are merely implements to help you accelerate your strategies and tasks. What we need is a decision process to decide which tools and methods will help achieve the task, and to ensure we are choosing the “right” tool for the job.

I’ve seen clients demand to use tools simply because a competitor has successfully used the tools. What the clients fail to realize is that a lot of strategy definition, planning and consideration went into the use of the tool, and it was chosen because it was the right tool for the job for that client and their needs. All of the tools I’ve mentioned are valid and appropriate in the right context, and by speaking of context, we are getting to the heart of the problem.

Too often, individuals, teams and firms become enamored with a specific tool or method. That may be because they read about it in a new innovation book, saw a leading consultant discuss its use or know that the tool was used successfully somewhere else. What needs to happen before any firm becomes enamored of tools and methods is a careful consideration of the opportunity or problem to solve, the strategic context in which innovation is important, and an evaluation of tools and techniques that can provide value.

What’s also important is to understand the implications of the choice of an innovation tool. Ethnography, for example, is often difficult for firms to use effectively because it produces qualitative insight based on a small sample size. That means that the results must be interpreted and extrapolated, and aren’t statistically significant. Does your team understand the use of the tool they’ve fallen in love with, and what the constraints, limitations and implications are?

Tools and techniques are important to innovation, just as they are to Six Sigma or other business methods or processes. But many of these tools have specific needs and value propositions that your team must understand in order to use them effectively. What’s more important, in fact, is to frame the problem or opportunity effectively, and then select the tools in context of the problem, fully aware of both the strengths and limitations of any tools that you choose to use.

In an innovation setting, strategy and context are far more important than tools, and well-led people working within the strategy and context are more important than tools or strategy.

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

I know I’m late responding to this ad by Accenture, but I saw it today in the airport and it made me smile. Why? Because it is so “Field of Dreams”. There are so many assertions that are wrong with the statement that one hardly knows where to begin.

First, innovation should be pursued in context of user needs. Inside-out innovation driven by products or technologies is rarely successful. Any one of us can point at many products that were built with the hopes that they met customer needs, and market plans that projected hockey stick adoption curves. But innovation doesn’t happen well in a vacuum.

Second, who is this “they” the article asserts will come? The market at large? Your existing customers? New prospects? People you didn’t want as customers? Innovation should solve specific problems felt by people or prospects that are important to your firm. Innovating for “everyone” is rarely successful. Identify some market or segment needs, validate them with real customers from those segments, and you may have a winner.

Third, the idea that innovation is simple or easy. Beyond asserting that you’ll innovate for unknown customers is the fact that it is exceptionally difficult in most firms to merely get approval to innovate. Where’s the discourse on the work involved before one gets to innovate? Innovation is exciting work but threatens the status quo in a business, and pulls funds and resources from existing products and services. You don’t get to innovate until you’ve proven a market need exists, and even then there are many hurdles.

This kind of advertising leads many to accuse the innovation community (and sometimes rightly so) of being less than honest about the work involved and what’s required to innovate successfully. The Field of Dreams approach may work for Hollywood movies, but will never work in the real world. We need to return to the notion that innovation is real work, with real value, not a Hollywood movie set that produces miracles with very little work.

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

I love blogging, and I love blog comments even more. I get a chance to interact, at least from a short text perspective, with people who agree, and who disagree with my writing and points of view. There’s nothing better than a dispute or debate over ideas.

One of the comments on my recent post “Why Innovation makes Executives Uncomfortable” asserted that I have a bias that innovation is an unqualified good. That statement, and the issues that arise with it, are worth more than a blog post, but that’s all I’ll have time for today.

The key question is: Is innovation an unqualified good, and do we innovation consultants have a bias that leads us to think all innovation is “good”? Let’s unpack, shall we?

First, I believe in Schumpeter, who defined capitalism as creative destruction. But even more, I think innovation itself is creative destruction, which means that for every really interesting, disruptive idea, there are winners and losers. Instead of ignoring Apple, as the commenter suggested, let’s use iTunes as an example. iTunes is clearly and innovation, good for many people who wanted to share and manage music effectively. It was also good for Apple and Apple shareholders. The other side of that equation, since matter can be neither created nor destroyed, is that someone probably lost. Those “someones” were Tower Records and other music distributors. Those firms that were in the business of distributing music on physical media have been hurt by the creative destruction of iTunes. So, while a rising tide may raise all boats, innovation isn’t always an unqualified good. Someone’s ox will be gored.

The real question is why Tower and others refused to see a growing demand for managing music as digital content. It’s entirely possible that the music publishers or distributors could have developed a music sharing platform that would have solidified their position, and made the iPod an interesting MP-3 player rather than the center of music distribution. However, nothing is more inevitable than a good idea whose time has come. Tower chose to double down on traditional music distribution while their consumer base was shifting its desires and preferences. Whether iTunes, Napster, Pandora or some other music management system was the winner, music distribution was going to change.

So, innovation is typically an unqualified good when you are creating the disruption, but it may not look so inviting when the comfortable market you’ve developed is disrupted from underneath you. There are winners and losers in innovation, just as there are in life.

So, innovation isn’t necessarily an unqualified good, although there are other examples where innovation brings social benefits that didn’t exist. For example, new ways to clean water for drinking or new mosquito nets to reduce malaria. But even in these situations the innovation replaces some previous method for cleaning water or reducing malaria. Creative destruction again.

So, let’s turn to the second assertion – innovation consultants always promote innovation to their clients. That’s probably true, for several reasons. First, as an innovation consultant, it’s how I make my living. I’d like to think that I try my best to work with firms that need innovation, and I have turned down work that was merely window dressing or poorly defined. Second, what’s the alternative? Remaining stuck in the status quo is a recipe for slow death. If your firm doesn’t innovate – create new products, services, business models or processes – it will slowly wither away, and other firms will innovate. The Luddites in the 17th century tried to stop the mechanization of the weaving industry. Perhaps our lives would have been better without mass production, but many mill owners had a choice, and chose to bring more and more technology into the mills. We can’t stop progress, and we can’t govern the rate of change. We can either choose to participate – intelligently – or we can wait for others to do so.

Let’s not assume that innovation consultants or innovators are Pollyanna’ish, if that’s a word. We recognize that innovation is difficult work, but we hope it achieves a real benefit for our customers. We also recognize that if there are “winners” in an innovation game, there are also “losers” – the products, services and markets that are being replaced. However, innovation is agnostic – anyone who chooses to can innovate. It’s not a tool for the rich, or the well-connected, and many of the people we hold up as innovators started with little – H-P for example, or Apple, or tried and failed several times before becoming successful.

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

One of the most pervasive myths about innovation is that it happens to isolated individuals who have a spark of creativity. The story unfolds that through trial and tribulation, the lonely innovator overcomes obstacles and eventually creates a compelling new product. While that story is entertaining, it is for the most part a fairy tale. Most experienced innovators can tell you that that kind of innovation is the exception rather than the rule.

Good innovation requires the engagement and participation of a fair number of people, who fill a wide range of tasks. From spotting trends and investigating customer needs to generating and evaluating ideas to prototyping and piloting ideas, there are many different roles and perspectives that are necessary. More importantly, good ideas often originate at the intersection of a variety of industries, markets or perspectives, so a thriving innovation community strengthens and reinforces all facets of innovation.

The word “community” is unfortunately often misused, but in this context – an innovation community – the word is exceptionally accurate. An innovation community is simply a group of people who are interconnected and who can freely collaborate, to share ideas, perspectives and concepts. Just as tools like Facebook and LinkedIn enable social communities, innovators need physical and virtual communities to share ideas and information, exchange perspectives, identify trends and reinforce the goals of innovation. This is especially true in large, distributed organizations where innovators may be isolated from one another due to business lines, geographies or business function. Too often good ideas languish because people who have them can’t connect with people who need them – even in the same firm.

In far too many organizations, innovation teams work in small, isolated pockets, rarely interacting with their peers, much less other teams within the organization. We believe this is a terrible mistake. The exchange of ideas drives new engagement and reminds each individual in the community that they are part of an important, greater “whole”. We humans weren’t made to live as hermits in isolation, and our innovation teams can only gain insights and skills as they network with other individuals and teams.

To that end I’m happy to write about one example of a firm using communities to further innovation goals. Our client, U.S. Bank, has worked diligently over the last two years to improve their innovation skills by training many innovation “advocates” throughout the business and developing innovation teams across many business functions. But more importantly, they are beginning to link these individuals into an innovation community that allows them to meet virtually, share ideas and needs, and extend their networks. This innovation community is based on an IBM product called Connections. The idea behind this community is to collapse the “social distance” between individual innovators across the organization and encourage interactions and collaboration.

The application is called US Book, and it looks and feels much like Facebook. US Book has been rolled out to all 60,000+ employees of U.S. Bank. Within US Book is an innovation community open to any innovation advocates or anyone interested in innovation. Think of it as U.S. Bank’s Facebook for innovators. The application allows an individual to “tweet” about his or her actions and ideas, and for others to search for people with specific skills or knowledge. Within the community the users can define interest groups – for example, people who are interested or active in trend spotting, scenario planning or other innovation techniques or capabilities. Additionally, people can tag themselves and associate with others in a specific business offering (checking or savings for example), or market segment or geography. These functions allow people within the community to find people who share a common interest or who have specific skills, and exchange ideas and collaborate far more effectively.

Within U.S. Bank a group called the Enterprise Revenue Office is actively seeding innovation programs, including innovation training for the innovation advocates, and developing innovation platforms like US Book and the innovation community. The interaction within the community is already vibrant, and the community promises to spark many more ideas and simplify engagement across the bank. I’ll plan another update on the progress of the innovation community in a few months to give you a sense of the outcomes and results from the community and how it is growing and changing over time.

What’s your firm doing to sponsor innovation communities – not just innovators, or innovation teams?

Innovation is a difficult, risky proposition. Demonstrating that there are other people who are engaged and interested in innovation, and who are willing to be part of an innovation community, reduces the risk, reduces the uncertainty and encourages better idea generation and more importantly, collaboration.

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