Author Archives: Jeffrey Phillips

About Jeffrey Phillips

Jeffrey Phillips thrives at the intersection of strategy, sales, marketing and innovation, and enjoy helping companies grow and find new opportunities or create new products. Jeffrey also teaches part-time at SKEMA US, leading graduate level classes on strategy, new product development and digital marketing and is the author of “Make us more Innovative”, and innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com.

Making New Mistakes

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

Nothing is quite so frustrating as working with a client who claims to want and need innovation, but is paralyzed by indecision or doubt. Unless, of course, it is a client who has decided that regardless of the new ideas they generate, they will all fail, because of the mistakes they made in the past.

I’ve worked with a number of clients where teams can generate interesting, relevant, valuable ideas for needs that exist in their customer base. Rather than proceed to develop these ideas, the team then huddles up to discuss all the reasons the ideas won’t work. And often, the reasons the ideas won’t work are nothing more than a litany of mistakes the organization made ‘the last time’ they tried to innovate.

Those who ignore the past

It’s one thing to be paralyzed by indecision, or to question innovation due to the costs or risks involved. It’s quite another to reject innovation because of failures or mistakes made in a previous attempt, but you’d be amazed and saddened by the amount of discussion that goes on about the previous mistakes. Many companies and teams are haunted by the fact that previous teams made mistakes that slowed or killed innovative ideas. What the past has to tell us about the future is completely another matter.

Santayana is credited with saying that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. What did he say about those who are fixated with history and believe we cannot learn and change? Whatever happened to all the lip service about becoming a “learning organization“. Can we simply acknowledge the past and then move on? What does this learning organization learn? How to avoid failure?

Let’s make new mistakes

Perhaps one of the rallying cries for innovation teams should be “let’s make new mistakes”. At a minimum, innovators should look to history for cues as to decisions or actions to avoid, in order not to make the same mistakes again. But they should not become fixated on the past. Instead, innovators should decide to avoid the mistakes of the past, and realize that they will make a host of new mistakes moving forward. They’ll make mistakes because many firms have never attempted a consistent, sustained innovation program. Any new activity where the history has been less than successful and the teams are working in unfamiliar territory will lead to mistakes. That should be OK – we are a learning organization after all, and new mistakes should equate to new learning, new insights and ever better processes and outcomes.

Error-free innovation

Like perpetual motion, life on the Moon, and the calorie free chocolate bar, error-free innovation is a myth. You will make mistakes when you innovate. As they say in skiing, if you aren’t falling occasionally, you aren’t challenging yourself. The same is true with innovation. But rather than avoid mistakes, your first goal is to change the attitudes and mindsets about making mistakes, as long as those mistakes lead to ever better outcomes.  Of course we should be able to avoid the mistakes of the past, and should not become morose in our beliefs that we’ll simply repeat those mistakes. If you are living in a Groundhog Day of repeating past mistakes, innovation isn’t your key need as a business.

The problem with Six Sigma, Lean, efficiency and so many management philosophies is that they’ve eliminated experimenting, trying new things, making mistakes in order to learn and grow. Corporate cultures recoil at even the hint of a less than perfect outcome, and innovation by its very nature is messy and uncertain. It’s simply not possible to innovate in an error free manner, so you can’t eliminate mistakes. What you can do is eliminate the attitudes and perspectives about mistakes, which are ultimately the factor that is holding your team back.

The Innovator’s Creed

Perhaps a line in the Innovator’s Creed should be:

We promise to understand and attempt to avoid past mistakes, and not be bound by them, and we promise to risk enough to create new mistakes and learn from them, in order to grow and change in ways that improve our company, and deliver products and services that matter to our customers.

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Pay Attention!

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

You want to know what the biggest input gap is where innovation is concerned? Want to know what really matters when you are starting an innovation initiative? Did the bright sparkly pop-up advertisement steal your attention in the last 20 seconds? Did your email notification sound while reading this blog?

Pay Attention

Perhaps the biggest gap between knowing and doing innovation is what I call the attention gap. It is evident throughout all layers of the organization, across all industries and functions. People need to pay attention to innovation.

The problem is our business as usual entity functions fairly well in the background, and we’ve lost the rationale to pay attention to anything for any significant period of time. The biggest compliment you can pay to anyone in business today is to actively, completely pay attention to what they say. That means shutting out the day to day distractions, the “fires” that constantly pop up, the incessant demands from social media, the phone, email, Twitter, instant messaging and a hundred other constant interruptions.  Undivided, consistent, engaged attention – what some people call “being present” is the most valuable commodity for engagement, change and innovation in any organization.  And, unfortunately, that commodity is overly committed to efficiency, easily distracted by short term needs and often in very short supply.

Executive Attention matters

Let’s start at the top.  Executive attention matters. If what gets measured gets managed, then what gets executive attention gets focus from the rest of the organization. While many initiatives can be “signed off” and then delegated to the appropriate leader or team without fear of distraction or delay, innovation needs consistent executive attention to succeed and flourish. There are simply too many uncertainties and unknowns prevalent in innovation work to delegate innovation and lose executive attention. And we know how valuable and rare deep executive attention can be. What do the executives in your business pay attention to? What captures their attention? If it isn’t innovation, then innovation won’t capture the attention of the rest of the organization.

Middle Management Attention matters

If executive attention matters and is crucial for success, middle management attention is ultimately decisive and vital. That’s because while executives propose, mid-management disposes, to paraphrase another saying. No matter what the executives detail and delegate, the middle managers are the ones who determine what initiatives receive high priority and resources, and which circle slowly in a backwater, never quite dead yet never quite alive. Middle managers can’t afford to be distracted from efficiency and predictability, their attention is completely focused on these criteria, until an executive who is paying attention tells them otherwise. And not a one time suggestion or directive but a consistent interaction to signal that a middle manager must pay attention to innovation activities and prioritize them accordingly.

We pretend to work

There was an old saying in the Soviet Union about work commitments. It went something like this: They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. If executives won’t commitment limited and valuable attention to innovation, in the form of their time, their energy and they vision, and if middle managers can’t find time to pay attention to innovation and don’t want to take their eyes off the efficiency engines, why oh why would anyone else in an organization expect anyone else to pay attention to innovation. There’s a reason many innovators often earn the title “mavericks” – its because they are often a lonely voice in the wilderness trying to draw attention (there’s that word again) to new and different realities.

If executives can’t or won’t pay attention to innovation, and if middle managers can’t be bothered to glance away from short term crises and the efficient engines they’ve created and sustain, no one else is going to pay attention either. In fact perhaps one of the best methods to move up in an organization is to mimic the behavior that your management team demonstrates. If paying attention to innovation isn’t important to them, why should it be important to anyone else?

The Innovation Inbox

In my innovation heart of hearts I imagine the creation of an innovation inbox – a place so compelling, that refreshes so quickly and demands so much attention that it distracts people from other, less pressing mundane work. Now, can we create an innovation activity that is as compelling as your email inbox, that attracts and retains attention like a short term crisis and is important enough to demand a lot of your attention?

Of course not. We could create constant crisis, like “burning platforms” that pop up and are extinguished, but they wouldn’t sustain over time. What is urgent is not a momentary, short term set of innovation emergencies but a long term cultural change to refocus attention to what is important. What does your team pay attention to?

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The Innovation Chicken & Egg Problem

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

Here’s a question that has befuddled even the best innovation thinkers, and has led to countless articles, white papers, surveys and other analysis: which is more important to innovation success, leadership or culture?

Does an engaged leadership engage an organization and direct its energy toward innovation, or does a sustained culture engage the organization regardless of the will of the leadership toward more innovation? It is a classic chicken and egg question, and one that my clients and our consultants at OVO deal with constantly.

The fact is that both are vital, and both are predominant depending on the organization. But the fact is that culture doesn’t ring you up one day and ask you to drop by to provide advice about innovation. Typically its the leaders of an organization that do that. So it’s far easier to place emphasis on leaders and leadership as the key innovation driver, since we can single out a small team of executives and point the finger of blame at them.

That’s what Hayden Shaughnessy and Scott Anthony just did in a recent Forbes article. I was alerted to the article by my good friend Paul Hobcraft, who has also had much to say in this vein. Anthony suggests in his interview with Shaughnessy that the “One Innovation Rule that Matters Most” is that leadership is vital. Anthony goes on to say that:

“Any company that thinks it has an innovation problem in fact has a leadership problem.”

All well and good, and in may ways this is true. In fact I wrote about this very topic recently, making the argument that poor prioritization, poor vision and little funding by executive teams lead to a lack of innovation. My article was based on a recent innovation survey by McKinsey, so the assertions are backed by survey data.

The other side of the coin

However, claiming that an innovation problem is always and everywhere a leadership problem seems a bit too narrow to me. In my work I’ve found many executives who are exceptionally focused on innovation, who are willing and able to fund innovation and set clear priorities, but they face a significant hurdle called corporate culture. You see, no matter how much a small senior team of executives works to influence a culture, that change happens incrementally and slowly if at all. A leader who is not focused on innovation doesn’t necessarily distract a culture that is engaged with innovation (see 3M as an example), and far too often we are caught up making examples of charismatic leaders (see Steve Jobs as an example) that we use to make the case that leadership is what matters alone.

When you see the phrase “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” on a regular basis you begin to grasp the subtle and intangible power of corporate culture.  The unfortunate aspect of corporate culture is that senior executives don’t have nearly as much impact as they’d like to think. Culture is somewhat immune to leadership edicts, since the culture is long established, and recognizes that leaders are temporary. When leaders are in their roles on average less than five years, the culture will patiently wait out the leadership. What changes culture is a burning platform.

Large and established cultures will change, and they will change swiftly when threatened. Too often executives create plans and strategies that keep the culture relatively comfortable and safely ensconced in its existing image of itself. A burning platform – an immediate threat to the business, a sudden shift in consumer demand, a new law or regulation which changes the playing field – is often what will force a culture to change. And note that the culture is something that every employee contributes to. Their expectations, attitudes, behaviors and actions in aggregate make up the culture, so every employee contributes to the shape, size and attitude of the culture.

Don’t leaders establish culture?

You’ll be thinking right about now that my arguments are interesting but ultimately futile. Don’t leaders set culture, or at least influence it? For the most part, most leaders don’t understand the true power of corporate culture and fail to understand how to change it dramatically. Their attempts to change the culture only shift thinking and behavior temporarily, since executives fail to stay engaged with cultural change over their tenure. The real leadership necessary for innovation to take root is both a clear strategy, well articulated and funded, as well as consistently engaged leaders who work to slowly shift the culture to a new way of thinking, incorporating innovation as a consistent part of the everyday activities, rather than an occasional moonshot.

Leaders don’t want to spend a lot of time on culture change, because they realize the work necessary to dramatically change a culture and they feel they don’t have the time or energy. While they may demand innovation activities, they won’t ultimately succeed at “making the firm more innovative” until the culture changes as well.

Which comes first?

Which comes first then? Leadership or culture? Well, since the culture is a monolith made up of the expectations and behaviors of the entire company, few organizations can start there. Leaders engage experts and consultants to help improve innovation performance, and many honest innovation experts will frankly tell the leaders that while leaders can impact innovation activities, they can’t impact innovation engagement and sustainment without a focus on the culture. It’s easy to run innovation projects, which will be successful in the short run, but which ultimately don’t change the culture in the long run, and as soon as the leadership changes and priorities change, the culture reasserts itself and innovation is banished. Unless there is a string of leaders who are committed to innovation, or a significant burning platform forces an organization to change, or a charismatic leader drags his company kicking and screaming into a new paradigm, its the culture that matters.

And before you suggest that Jobs demonstrates that leaders matter, know this: Apple was probably a quarter or two from bankruptcy when he took over. Jobs was a charismatic leader, yes, with a big vision, who rekindled the original culture at Apple, but he also had a significant burning platform.  Apple had to change, and to its credit it has remained an innovator. Time will tell whether that attitude has permeated the entire culture.

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Innovation Ignition

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

I read a lot about innovation, and I’m constantly amused by the articles that talk about “kick starting” innovation. If there is one activity that is resistant to forward motion based on one quick action like a kick start, it’s innovation. What people who advocate “kick starting” innovation don’t understand is the analogy, and the effort involved before the fact.

Kick starting refers to the act of starting a motorcycle, using a “kick starter” to ignite the engine. If you’ve ever had a motorcycle with a kick starter, you’ll understand how much energy it takes to kick start a motorcycle, and how finicky the engines can be. Further, you’ll know how much work it takes to get a motorcycle ready to kick start – the priming, for example. People talk about “kick starting” when I think they really mean electronic ignition. Simply flick the switch and go. But this brings us to a larger point about getting innovation capabilities starting and working effectively.

What’s the right innovation ignition

If we can stipulate that “kick starting” is possibly the wrong metaphor for starting innovation activities, what is the right concept and approach for starting an innovation program or activity? Other “ignition” metaphors immediately spring to mind. Perhaps the most iconic metaphor for ignition is Cape Canaveral, where rockets take off bound for space. We’ve all seen the reverse countdown “3..2..1..ignition…liftoff”. But that kind of ignition is too high profile, too rare and implies too much risk. If our innovation ignition looked like Cape Canaveral, innovation would only take place periodically, after massive investments to reduce uncertainty and risk, and would be an exceptionally high profile event. Whereas “kickstarting’ innovation implies starting quickly from a standstill, anywhere and all the time.  In that regard, kickstarting is a more effective metaphor, but we have to understand the work that proceeds the kick start to enable it to occur.

Another ignition metaphor is in your automobile. We are all familiar with inserting the key in the ignition, turning the key, perhaps giving the car a little gas, and starting the engine. This kind of ignition is regular, repeatable, hopefully trustworthy, without a lot of drama. If you have a reliable car, the ignition is almost an afterthought, because the car is well-tuned, the ignition switch and starter are reliable.

What it takes to ignite an innovation project

Note that much of the discussion about ignition has focused on igniting and starting an engine. Engines are also good metaphors. Physical engines that are well-tuned and maintained run effectively and generate a lot of power or forward motion. To perform innovation effectively, we need well-tuned innovation “engines” in our organizations, engines that are comprised of people, who know what to do, processes that define how to accomplish innovation tasks, and cultures that support and sustain innovation. Those engines also need to eliminate or at least overcome initial inertia – the desire of the business to continue doing what it does best, rather than to pursue innovation, recognizing the effort involved in the change and uncertainty necessary to accomplish innovation goals. A well-tuned innovation engine contains people who are ready and willing to do new, interesting things, a methodology that’s well understood, a carefully designed scope with goals that support strategic outcomes and a culture that has dramatically reduced the power of inertia. Innovators and cultures can prime this engine by focusing on recognition and reward systems, and creating a powerful rationale for innovation, a “burning platform” for change and renewal. If these factors are in place, the metaphor of the electronic ignition makes sense.

Kick starting and Cape Canaveral

If, on the other hand, you have a poorly maintained or inadequate innovation engine, with significant inertia or no recognition and reward priming, or no burning platform, your only ignition choice may be to kick start – that is, apply an overwhelming force to a recalcitrant engine, exerting a lot of physical force and executive will to start the engine, or treat the ignition as as showpiece of man’s accomplishments, Cape Canaveral style. Both of these ignition types ignore to some extent the tuning and priming, and expect the engine to simply obey the will of the executive who attempts to start the engine.  Sheer force or high stakes, show piece ignition won’t start an engine that hasn’t been maintained and tuned, and may cause backfires or worse. What many executives fail to realize about innovation is that the magic is in building the engine, developing the people and processes, maintaining the engine, training and reinforcing capabilities, and in priming the engine by thinking about culture and burning platforms. It’s not the ignition that matters, so much as the work that went before it.

You can choose any ignition activity I’ve outlined above, or perhaps others. In fact to a great extent the ignition method doesn’t matter. Ignition is easy when the engine is tuned, and difficult when it isn’t. And, to compound the problem, ignition seems to become ever more difficult the more often you try and fail. That’s true for physical engines as well as metaphorical innovation engines.

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Innovation Comfort

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

I think Newton left out a law when he devised his three laws of nature. You know the laws I’m speaking of – objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Every forced is opposed by an equal and opposite force. And so on.

But one important one that he missed is what we’ll call the Phillips corollary – objects (and corporations, and people) tend to seek their specific level of desired comfort and then resist any change that threatens their comfort. This is true in life as it is in business. But it’s impact is probably felt most keenly in innovation settings.

Comfort

Think about it. From your earliest days people have been concerned about your comfort. As a young child your parents did everything they could to make you comfortable. When you visit family and friends they want to make you comfortable with the accomodations. When you encountered problematic or difficult decisions, it is common to ask – Are you comfortable with this? Because discomfort signals a problem, and if people believe a problem exists then they cannot regain their expected level of comfort. And we’ll move heaven and earth to regain comfort if at all possible.

Innovation threatens comfort

Now let’s turn our attention to something sure to create some dissonance in the comfort arena – innovation. By its very nature innovation should create some discomfort. Innovation introduces change, which is likely to move many people from their comfortable positions or perches, and it introduces risk and uncertainty. Innovation changes the natural order, and forces people to consider their strategic goals and options in a manner in which they are unaccustomed to doing. Once an organization has reached its level of comfort, innovation can be a difficult and frankly dangerous force. Increasingly, however, many organizations have no choice. No matter how comfortable they area in their processes, products and markets, they have to innovate to grow and thrive, which means they must sacrifice comfort. The interesting concept is that many firms believe they will simply shift from one level and position of comfort pre-innovation to another position of comfort post-innovation, like electrons moving in orbit around a nucleus. They can’t wait until things are as they used to be. But it doesn’t work that way.

Discomfort

We’ve introduced the idea that for many firms innovation causes change and discomfort. There are really only two options, both of which require change. Either the senior team needs to force discomfort onto a complacent and comfortable organization, to shock it into realizing the need for innovation and to shake off its inertia, or the organization must grow comfortable with the concept of innovation.

The shock and awe strategy works to kick-start a complacent organization and engage it short term and periodically, if the executive team can create enough of a burning platform. But at the end of the exercise, the firm will revert back to its desired level of comfort and complacency, having done just enough innovation to survive, but not sustaining innovation to thrive. This is why many innovation activities aren’t seen as successful – they don’t have a long lasting impact. The organization simply reverts to the way things were, as much as possible, enduring the discomfort of innovation for the short run.

The other option, the one that requires more investment in skills and a sustained focus, is simply to create an organization that is comfortable with innovation. If we can create an organization that is comfortable with change, and risk, and uncertainty, if we can create a culture that thrives on innovation and sustains it, then innovation isn’t uncomfortable, it is expected. And when it is expected, it can be more easily repeated. In this case innovation isn’t viewed as a short term intrusion but a long term commitment to growth and change.

Organizational level of comfort and complacency

What’s your organization’s desired level of comfort and complacency? If you have an organization and culture that strives to maintain its comfort and avoids change, innovation is exceptionally difficult without a significant event or “burning platform” and the organization will revert to that context as quickly as possible after the innovation activity. To sustain innovation over the long term, you must create a culture where risk, uncertainty and change are embraced as part of the expectation and the “comfort” level. This requires changes to attitudes, compensation, skills and processes. In other words, comfort is a cultural phenomenon, and can only be changed through sudden shifts that cause disruptions or through longer term consistent investments. The good news is that you get to choose how you react.

Will you have to force and prod your organization out of its comfort zone each time innovation is deemed necessary? In other words, will innovation remain an uncomfortable activity that requires a burning platform? Or, will you build the attitudes, skills and awareness to build a new level of comfort that includes sustained innovation?

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Why the Front End of Innovation is Different

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

Let’s assert that you’ve become very good at your job. Whether you are in finance, marketing or operations, your proficiency is based on your education and your work history. You know how to anticipate financial needs, or how to manufacture products more efficiently because you love what you do, you do it often and you are rewarded to do it well. You have deep knowledge about your chosen area of specialty and you can demonstrate expertise. Then along comes an innovation need.

If the innovation need is really just continuous improvement or slight improvements to existing products, you are in luck, because that work simply requires that you extend your existing deep body of knowledge. If, on the other hand, you need radical or disruptive innovation, your existing body of knowledge, your scope and frameworks, even your tools and insights may become barriers to innovation rather than accelerators. That’s because true innovation is about discovery, learning and analysis rather than building on past knowledge and success. True innovation is unusual, and requires a different approach. Innovation is the only activity in a business where the people involved are amateurs, because we spend so little time in most businesses working on discovering new needs, learning about customers and markets, and thinking deeply about the implications from discovery and learning.

Let’s consider three factors that make the “Front End” of innovation so different from the rest.

Discovery

Most of us in businesses spend our days perfecting what we already know. The processes that drive a business are evident and well-understood, and may need a few tweaks to perfect them. There’s little to discover about the day to day operations, as most of it has been understood and perfected for years. Deep expertise and constant repetition mean that discovery is rarely needed. Tools and capabilities that aren’t exercised become moribund and stale. We lose a sense of discovery when that sense isn’t effectively or even periodically applied.

When innovators talk about the method of innovation, they usually describe it as a “divergent – convergent” process. This means that the first activity is about “diverging” – enlarging the scope, enlarging the number of possible outcomes, discovering new possibilities. Most of us are very good at converging – eliminating even the reasonable alternatives to quickly arrive at one specific solution. Divergence is often one of the most difficult aspects of innovation for many corporate executives to grasp, because it feels like unnecessary effort. Further, divergence is uncomfortable because it requires discovery and exploring areas where the level of expertise is much lower, or non-existent.

Discovery requires people who are comfortable going beyond what they know, who are interesting in discovering something new which has relevance to their organization. It requires those people to look in unexpected places for new and unanticipated things. In other words, a surprise. And you know how managers and executives love surprises.

Learning

If innovation creates something new to your market, or new to the world, then by definition someone has to partake in a learning exercise. We may have to learn about needs, or new capabilities, or new channels, or new customer segments, but there is little innovation that isn’t preceded by learning. Yet learning, especially learning beyond the tools and activities that enable existing products and services is almost unheard of in modern corporations. We spend countless thousands of hours learning about personality differences, tolerance, communication, and other workplace factors that reinforce the existing frameworks, and spend virtually no time learning about emerging needs, emerging technologies and adjacent markets. For most organizations, learning stops at the edge of the corporation or at best the industry, and looks no further than 12 months in advance. External issues and needs are scarcely considered, and adjacent markets, nimble new entrants and emerging customer needs are ignored. Many product managers have never met a customer who actually uses their product, and never meet prospects or segments that actively refuse to use the product.

As noted previously, discovery is given short shrift. If there is no discovery, there’s little need for learning about the wants and needs of the discovered market, segment or opportunity. Even when discovery is possible, little time is left for learning. It is expected that we have all the education and learning we need to make important decisions about markets, needs and trends that we know almost nothing about. It begs to be said again:  there’s no innovation without learning.

You may have heard that experts are often the biggest barriers to innovation. That’s often because they don’t believe that any further discovery is possible, and that they know or have learned all that is important to know or learn in a field. It’s hard enough to spend time learning in your chosen field. Trying to obtain the time and resources to learn in a new area, new market or about a new opportunity is difficult if not impossible. But without learning, you cannot create interesting innovations.

Analysis and Synthesis

If you are lucky enough to have the time to discover and learn, the final activity is perhaps the most important and the most difficult to justify. Because discovery and learning are active tasks, in which you can be seen to be doing something. But the most important task – analysis and synthesis – looks a lot like contemplation and, worse, thinking. And often we don’t value these activities because they aren’t quantifiable and don’t appear to contribute to the bottom line. In a knowledge based economy, we’ve placed a maximum amount of emphasis on activity and a minimal amount of emphasis on what creates knowledge – thinking!

Analysis and synthesis is the capstone to discovery and learning. If you can take what you discovered, add to it what you learned, and then think deeply about what it means and the implications to your market, industry, customers and business, then you are innovating. Understanding a need or opportunity, learning more about its importance and relevance, and deciding how to respond is a virtuous circle of activity for innovation, but one that happens far too infrequently.

Analysis and synthesis are suspect because they require careful consideration by people who were immersed in the discovery and the learning. These activities seem somewhat passive from an outside observer’s perspective and are subject to ridicule because the solutions are not quantifiable. In this activity we are drawing insights and conclusions, interpreting the discovery and what we learned, and using our instincts and insights to define new products, services and solutions. Far too often the scope is defined in advance, and may powerful new insights and opportunities are ignored or shut out of scope before the discovery and learning could take place.

Putting it all into context

If you want to innovate, to create truly new ideas, you need to be willing to discover new needs, new markets or new opportunities. Once you have discovered those opportunities, you need to learn more about the emerging market or need. Why does it exist? Why is it unsatisfied with existing solutions? Once your discovery and learning are complete, you can then begin to interpret, analyze and understand what the true needs and wants are. Only then are you ready to generate ideas, which will really be solutions.

Most organizations don’t appreciate the amount of discovery, learning and thinking that are necessary for true innovation. They don’t allocate the time, don’t assign the right people for these tasks and don’t establish the corporate expectations and culture to define a framework in which people can succeed. Since discovery, learning and thinking aren’t active and don’t seem to produce a quantifiable product, they are discounted and often skipped in the innovation process. This is another reason why so many firms do incremental innovation and continuous improvement so well, and have such a difficult time creating truly new ideas. They don’t take the time to discover new opportunities or needs, they fail to engage in any learning, and resist deep thinking and interpretation if they managed to do any discovery or learning along the way.

What’s interesting is to see “innovation” initiatives that have completely skipped the discovery, learning and thinking activities. They move directly to idea generation. When you hear people say “brainstorming” doesn’t work, they are correct if and when businesses skip the preceding steps. How can you generate interesting ideas or solutions when you haven’t discovered new opportunities or needs, and learned more about their causes and relevance?

Not unknowable just different

The Front End of innovation is not unknowable or undefinable, it is simply different from much of what your organization does regularly, and must be understood in that context. If you’ll place more emphasis on discovery and what it takes to discover new needs and opportunities, learning and the commitments of time and resources to truly understand what you’ve discovered, and analysis to place into context the discovery and the learning, you’ll have a much more capable Front End.

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Why Kirk Beats Spock at Innovation

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

There’s a mistake being played out in your organization when it comes to staffing innovation projects. You are likely staffing them with a bunch of “Spocks”, people who know a lot about the subject and have deep expertise. While this may look like a dream team, I can assure you that staffing a bunch of Spocks is not helpful and can be harmful.  You need at least a few Kirks in the mix to create a balanced team capable of generating interesting innovation.

For those of you born before the TV Show that started it all, James T (for Tiberius) Kirk was the commander of the Enterprise, a spaceship out to “boldly go where no one had gone before”. Spock was the chief science officer, a Vulcan who is (supposedly) devoid of human emotion and who makes all decisions based on logic and reason. Kirk and Spock make a great team because they complement each other. Kirk makes decisions based on his emotions, his instinct and his gut. Spock counters with the reasons why Kirk’s planned actions are “illogical” or don’t fit the data. Kirk experiments, creates problems with impulsive decision making and usually wins the day by doing something Spock (and Kirk’s adversaries) didn’t expect him to do. Kirk demands more than his people and his ship should be able or willing to offer. Kirk rejects the rules and tries to apply his own rules to any situation. And yes I know there were other spin-offs and other Star Trek series and movies, but they pale in comparison to the original.

Why this is pertinent to innovation

I suspect if we look long and hard enough, every science fiction tale has insights for innovation. In this case it is evidently true. Kirk and Spock represent the manifestation of the two sides of our brain – the left side, analytical and rational, scientific, and the right side, creative, impulsive. The problem in many organizations is that we overly emphasize the scientific, rational and logical at the expense of imagining new unexpected or unanticipated products or services. The scientific approach seeks to break down the problem into small morsels and solve for each small incremental solution, always keeping in mind what is “logical” reasonable and possible. Your competitors, at least the competitors you understand and know from your industry, also do this. They seek reasonable, rational, logical solutions and technologies to existing problems. The gap in this thinking is that your unlikely competitors, the new entrants, those with nothing to lose, those who seek to disrupt the market, don’t care about logical or rational. They don’t care about the existing order – in fact they’ll be happy to disrupt it. Their actions on the surface may seem, well, illogical. Why would anyone give away software for free? Who would create a website with a revenue model based on ads? What seemss logical to us is just what seems familiar or reasonable in a given context, not necessarily in all contexts or under all conditions.

The Spocks in your company want to approach innovation as a science. They want to examine all the data, review all the technologies and make the most logical decision possible. Their ideas are likely to be very well defined, very reasonable and often very incremental. The Kirks of your company think differently. They want to understand the problem, want to create unusual solutions that may defy existing logic. They recognize that it may be necessary to suspend disbelief for a while in order to get to the right solution. They work from instinct, from their gut and may not be able to justify their approaches to the Spocks, or worse, to the executives.

Balancing Kirks and Spocks

Given that Kirks find it hard to justify their outlooks and approach, it’s rare you’ll have a team full of Kirks. In fact, it’s often unlikely that you’ll have any Kirks on an innovation team at all, because innovation looks risky and uncertain and dangerous. Who better to staff an innovation activity than a bunch of Spocks, who demand data, expect to be able to predict all of the outcomes and are scientifically based? But the world according to Spock (had to do it) doesn’t exist. The world is far more unpredictable, capricious, fickle than Spock expects. The world shifts in its expectations and demands, and what was impossible only yesterday is currently completely possible. What was unthinkable yesterday is now an accepted reality. Five years ago the US was completely dependent on foreign oil, and the amount we imported each year was growing.  In the next decade we may become an EXPORTER of oil and natural gas. Things change, and change quickly.  Kirks get this, but may get it wrong. Spocks understand it but discount it.

Your innovation teams will have more Spocks than Kirks. That’s understandable, but can become a real limiting factor if the whole team is Spocks. You need some Kirks to make the activity more instinctual, more illogical, more messy. Without Kirks your innovations will be practical, safe, predictable and ultimately very incremental.

However, to create something interesting, with real value, to disrupt the status quo, you need some Kirks. And while you are reading this and thinking, wait, was Jobs a Kirk or a Spock, I’ll offer this: Jobs was probably the rare being who could be both. While he ran Apple like a Spock, he understood the markets like a Kirk. You don’t have to be both to be successful, but you need to understand what value each offers, and right now Kirks are undervalued for innovation.

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Innovators are Unreasonable Networkers

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

It is hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar … Such communication has always been, and is particularly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress,” – John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy

John Stuart Mill lived at a time and in a place where the interaction of the various classes was limited, and when it occurred the conversation or interaction was one of disdain for the lower classes. Mill lived at a time of little change and great social unrest, but his goal was to create more progress. Today we live in a place where anyone can talk with anyone. Twitter, Facebook and other social media provide ever greater opportunities to exchange information and ideas with a wide range of people.

But even with lowered class barriers and increased communication channels, our interactions and discussions are often narrow and limited. Increased specialization in business and less social exchange between classes in casual settings (social clubs, religious institutions, political parties) leads to confirmation bias and less new insight.  When you read that many people who voted in the US presidential elections don’t know anyone who voted for the other candidate, you know that increasingly we are gathering into tribes that don’t provide for communication across the tribes.

Why this matters to innovation

As Mill noted, more progress results when people with different interests, different experiences interact and exchange ideas and insights. Further, extensive research by Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen demonstrate that the best innovators have well-developed and active networks with people outside their industry or geography.

Good ideas exist at the intersection, or collision, of industries, technologies or needs. If your teams constantly interact with their internal compatriots, or at best with industry competitors, then they are constantly reinforcing a small body of knowledge rather than expanding their knowledge and introducing new insights. If you wonder why your ideas seem cramped, teams seem stymied when generating ideas or the ideas you hear about are simply uninteresting, that’s because your people and their interactions are very limited.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw understood that people either adapt to existing conditions or resist conditions. Today we have the concept of the Kirton Adaption-Innovation index, which is a personality assessment that indicates preferences for innovation (resistance to existing conditions) or adaption (adapting to conditions rather than seeking to change them).

Why this matters to innovation

Going along to get along is a well-respected (and expected) approach to business. Don’t ruffle feathers, get in line, do what you are told. As Shaw noted, no progress comes from this type of response, but it results in acceptance. Most innovators are told to simply adapt to the way things are, but they refuse. This makes innovators seem like cultural misfits; they reject the way things are. Innovators are the people with unreasonable expectations, unreasonable goals who want to find new and better ways to create new and better products and services.

Conclusion

If these two concepts are true, then most innovators are more likely to be viewed as having unreasonable personalities. They don’t accept the status quo and disrupt comfortable acceptance of the status quo. They may seem a bit brash. Steve Jobs comes to mind. Further, they are people who constantly seek to expand their knowledge and networks, because they realize that innovation happens at the intersections of people, technologies, industries and information. An innovator will never wall themselves off from other people or technologies or industries, but will seek to immerse themselves in these networks and experiences. And, for that reason, may people within a comfortable organization will be happy to see the brash, unreasonable innovator take trips to conferences, trade shows and partner firms.

But prevailing culture is to go along to get along, and to put the nose to the grindstone. There’s no time for challenging the existing orthodoxy or finding new insights or technologies. Time is the enemy, distraction and deviation are its allies. Get in line, hurry up, focus, focus, focus. Which is a recipe for more of the same. Yet that’s what current cultures and corporate pressures reinforce.

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Why Your Business Needs More Innovation

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

I was working with a client recently where there’s a real, palpable disconnect between the product managers and the executive team. The product managers believe more innovation is necessary – not simply more new products, but more expansive innovation. They want to pursue new categories, offer dramatically new features and create new to the world products. In addition, they are interested in expanding the definition of innovation to encompass services, experiences and business models.

The executive team, on the other hand, is concerned about profitability, efficiency and effectiveness. They want innovation, but they want to know why more innovation is in order. And if more innovation is in order, why does that new innovation have to include new to the world products and/or new services or business models. Why do we need more innovation than we did previously, and what forces are requiring us to expand our definition of innovation? This is a perfectly acceptable question, and one we innovators need to have good answers for.

Porter’s Five Forces
As a newly minted MBA in the early 90s, I was entranced by Porter’s Five Forces model. Basically, it’s a model that examines forces on an industry. The model should help executives in any industry parse the changes and threats and determine responses. The model is as good a place as any to start thinking about the need for more, and different, innovation.

Three of these forces that we think drive the need for more innovation, and more broadly defined innovation:

New Entrants
Every market has new entrants, and newer entrants and competitors are less invested in the way things used to work within the industry or market, and more interested in disrupting how things work in an industry. Barriers to entry are falling in many industries, leading to new entrants from other industries or geographies and new entrepreneurs. These new entrants offer new products, services and business models that weren’t considered before.

Buyer Power
Thanks to the internet and a wealth of information on the web, buyers have far more power, and far more options, than they had previously, and this will only increase over time. As buyer power grows, firms must counter by offering products and services tailored to the buyers’ needs, and providing experience and information that matters.

Alternatives and Substitutes
Increasing, thanks to advances in technology and more efficient trade, there are often many more alternatives or substitutes for products or services than there were previously, and this fact too will continue to increase. Find French red wine too expensive? Look no further than Australian Shiraz or Argentine Malbecs. Customer have choices and alternatives, so our products and services must be more differentiated or more compelling. Old, tired offerings are no longer good enough.

Pace of Change
One factor that Porter leaves out is the pace of change. The pace of change is accelerating at an ever-increasing rate, and leading to discontinuities in the market. In the past, we designed products and services in the expectation of long product life cycles, hoping for a return over years or even decades. The increasing demands and the pace of change are dramatically shortening product life cycles, to the extent that manufacturing is returning to the US, in order to be far more responsive to changes in consumer tastes and the ability to fulfill orders quickly.

It’s a race
In auto racing, the pack starts out together and the leaders are just slightly ahead of the laggards. Over time, however, the leaders pull away and begin to lap the laggards, moving further ahead in the race based on speed and agility. This metaphor describes what’s happening in your markets. Often we hear clients say that they believe they are innovating at the same speed as their traditional competitors. That’s only one important measurement. There are at least two others:

Speed of change in the market
Are you introducing new products and services at the speed and expectation of the market? Merely matching your traditional competitors may mean that you are drafting on one of the laggards, not a leader. What is the pace of change that consumers expect?

Shifts in expectations
Are you introducing the range of products and services that align to customer needs and expectations, and are you aware of the products and services offered by new entrants or substitutes to your existing products? Subtle shifts quickly become landslides. As products become commoditized, consumers expect innovation as new products, but also as enhanced experiences, services, channels and business models. If you don’t believe that, put down the $5 bottle of Fiji water and drink tap water for a while.

Speed of change based on new entrants and substitutes
The real accelerator of any market isn’t the entrenched players but the new entrants and the products or services that offer substitutes. What is the pace of change of new players in your market? What new concepts or solutions do they offer, and what changes do those offerings inflict in the market?

Why does your business need more innovation? Because the older model of long product cycles, limited competition and complacent consumers with little information is dying, and a newer, faster competitive model that relies on more information, more readily available, with lower costs of entry and more competitors and substitutes is growing.

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Why a Common Language Matters for Innovation

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

As noted in previous posts (here, and here) I’m returning to the idea that executives have a number of important roles to play when sponsoring innovation. Perhaps one of the most important roles is the work of creating a common innovation definition and language, and communicating the importance of innovation consistently and broadly.

The modern tower of Babel

For those of you who don’t know your old testament, complete with the angry, vengeful God, let’s return to the story of Babel. In their hubris, people decide to build a tower that will reach for the heavens. God, in a fit of pique, commands that they all speak a different language. Chaos ensues. Innovation is a lot like the tower of Babel, only in reverse. A god-like leader, typically the CEO, requests, no demands, more innovation. And everyone in the organization runs off to “innovate” interpreting what innovation means and applying to their situation. This means that in any company several “innovative” things happen simultaneously:

  • Old, tired ideas long in limbo are reframed as “innovative”
  • Any small change to an existing product or service is labelled “innovation”
  • A completely irrational, disruptive idea is justified on the basis that it is “innovative”
  • Soon every thing is “innovative” and nothing is

In these scenarios, when executives don’t create a consistent definition of innovation, and don’t bother to construct a common language about innovation, everyone interprets the needs and goals in their own context. I’ve watched management teams talk about innovation in situations where there are at least three or four operative definitions occurring at the same time. The dissonance is maddening, and completely unnecessary.

Everything is based on language and communication

Scientists believe that humans evolved much more rapidly once they began to use complex communication, and that learning accelerated as language became codified. Why do we constantly need to relearn in business what is obvious in the rest of our lives? As young children we are taught the definition of words, and as middle schoolers and high schoolers we are taught to understand and parse great literature, to understand how to communicate. Yet business communication is terrible (if you doubt this, read Why Business people speak like idiots) and the culmination of terrible language and communication is when we mix regular business communication with the new and unusual practice of innovation, which has its own language and definitions. It doesn’t help that innovation is really a catch-all for a number of methods, activities and tools, and that innovation has a potential range of outcomes, from incremental products to disruptive business models. But we blithely toss around the word “innovation” as if there is a common definition, and as if everyone will interpret the word in the same way. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If innovation is new, unusual and uncertain, fraught with change and risk, shouldn’t an organization do all in its power to reduce the uncertainty, remove the risk through clear definition, consistent language and constant communication? You’d think that would be a likely approach, but most organizations attempting innovation view these actions as unnecessary overhead, rather than understanding how much good communication will impact innovation barriers, like risk, uncertainty, the existing way of doing business and the powerful but intangible corporate culture.

How can you define the indefinable?

Can you create a definition of innovation that provides insight, gives guidance and instructs the organization? We’ve noticed that a number of firms have attempted to create a common definition for innovation. 3M uses the following definition: The use or application of creativity to generate a new or novel output having value for customers. Note that this definition identifies creativity as a central input to creating new or novel products and services. Note also that innovation is focused on creating value for customers, so in this definition 3M doesn’t emphasize internal process improvement as innovation. But simply creating a definition creates scope – what to leave in, and what to leave out.

But go further, because innovation has as many contextual meanings and uses as plastic. Should innovation engage external parties or should it be constricted to internal teams (Open/Closed)? Should we focus on small changes to existing products and services, or aim for entering new markets with new to the world products (Incremental/Disruptive)? What is the intended outcome (Product/Service/Channel/Business Model/Customer experience)? Until these concepts are clarified, every innovator defines and scopes innovation for him or herself.

Communicating

Even when a definition, goal or language is specified, most organizations do a terrible job of communicating their innovation requirements, definitions and rationale. Communication experiences what I call the “waterfall” effect. That is, a senior leader communicates to the next management level in the hierarchy, and so forth in a series of waterfalls where the message is watered down, tempered and redirected. By the time the messaging reaches the main body of the organization, they have no idea what they are supposed to do, or how they should react. Rather than actively embracing innovation through powerful and consistent communication, most senior leaders demand it on a quarterly basis and never return to the messaging. These half-hearted messages bounce off the impervious cultural hide of the middle management like a bullet off of Superman. Until executives engage in active communication and assess their reporting structures to understand if the messages are received, heard and acted on at all levels, communication about innovation doesn’t matter, because the overwhelming power of business as usual remains.

Definition, Language and Communication in the Workmat

Paul Hobcraft and I wrote and developed the Innovation Workmat, a guide to what executives need to know, and do, when building a framework for innovation. In the workmat, there are seven domains that must be enriched for innovation to take root in an organization. Definition, language and communication is the central tenet and the “glue” that binds the workmat together. In an effort to get started quickly, most innovation teams never think about defining what innovation is, what the acceptable outcomes are, and how to communicate the purpose, goal and rationale throughout the organization. Without the common frameworks, pretty soon any and every initiative is “innovative” and frustration reigns. This is yet another case where a careful and thoughtful approach to innovation, taking time to think about the definition, language and rationale, without simply plunging in, can make all the difference.

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