GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

According to Wikipedia, Big Data is the term for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using regular database management tools.  Many organisations are now using advanced methods to analyse large data sets in order to gain insights that can lead to innovations in products and services.

Parking meters in cities are uninteresting, unintelligent and unpopular.  They just collect money from unhappy drivers. The city of Los Angeles has recently completed a 12-month project with Xerox to analyse parking data and offer real-time pricing adjustments based on variables such as the time of day, season or public demand.  Xerox used algorithms to analyse the city’s big data from the project and found that demand for parking spaces varied by up to 50% across the week. It then compared this demand to the actual rates paid for the space and adjusted these accordingly.

This not only led to a 10% reduction in congested spaces during peak hours, it also reduced parking rates for 60% of spaces in the city, saw a 5% reduction in underutilised space and even more impressively a 2.4% increase in parking revenue for the city.  The Daily Telegraph reports that the project has proved so successful that Xerox has been commissioned to do the same for Washington DC and other cities.

“We’re on a mission to get rid of the pain in parking, and already have most of the components in place to do so. Sensors can guide people to empty spaces, dynamic parking rates can help reduce congestion, and mobile phone payments can eliminate fines or overpayment,” said Onno Zoeter, senior scientist at Xerox Research Centre Europe.

It is not just big companies that can benefit from big data. IdealSeat, a Seattle start-up company, collected location data about balls hit into the crowd during baseball matches.  These are called foul balls and are highly prized by spectators who are lucky enough to catch and keep them.  IdealSeat crunches all the data and builds a stadium heat map like the one to the right. The end result is a seating chart that shows fans the best place to sit if they want to increase their chances of catching a foul ball.  “We just want to help people find the best place to sit it in the sun, drink a cold beer and catch a foul ball,” says IdealSeat co-founder and CEO Joel Banslaben. More details in this report on GeekWire.

As we gather more and more data the opportunities increase.  We can use powerful tools to hack through the mountains of information in order to uncover the nuggets and insights which will meet the needs of consumers.  The data is out there just waiting to be analysed.

en.sap.info

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Gamification is the use of game methods and game thinking in order to engage users or solve problems. It is an innovative crowdsourcing technique which is gaining increasingly widespread acceptance in business, education and research.

For example Cancer Research UK has launched GeneGame, a smartphone app that challenges users to form the best combinations of genes – aiding research in the area in the process. It was created by games developer Guerilla Tea, at a Cancer Research UK hackathon.

Researchers have reams of data about genes and their role in diseases such as cancer. In order to produce reliable results from these datasets, it’s necessary to combine at least 25 different variables each time for each human gene – of which there are around 20,000. Rather than leaving this job up to researchers alone, the GeneGame app turns these combinations into winning ‘hands’ that the player has to build using their knowledge or searching the web for answers. The best players get to show off their knowledge through league placings, which researchers can then use to find out the players that are producing the most reliable datasets. More details from Springwise.

Dacadoo and Fitocracy are sites that use gamification to encourage users to improve their general health with exercise contests and games.

Mathletics is a site which encourage students of all abilities to learn and enjoy mathematics by taking part in games and challenges. It is used by over 10,000 schools and 3.5 million students aged from 5 to 18 from around the world. It tailors the games to the individual strengths and weaknesses of the student.

Health Care educators at the University of Minnesota’s School of Nursing have collaborated with the technology company, VitalSims, to launch web-based interactive games that challenge nursing students with real-life scenarios.

The University of Washington developed a game called Foldit, which encourages players to compete in science puzzles such as manipulating proteins into more efficient structures. According to the science journal Nature, Foldit’s players delivered better results than computer generated outcomes.

Restaurant.com is a dining deal website. It has developed a game called Restaurant.com Rewards . According to Chris Kohn, President of Restaurant.com, ‘customers earn points, badges, and rewards for completing specific tasks and missions. For example, our most popular badge is the “Sherlock Holmes,” which customers earn simply by searching for a restaurant. The most popular mission is “Creation Station” that challenges members to create an account, visit our home page, and search for a restaurant to earn rewards for completing all three steps.’

Gamification can increase traffic to your website and improve user engagement. More importantly it can be used to answer important questions and solve problems for your business.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Are our schools preparing pupils to cope with the workplace of tomorrow or are they preparing them to pass exams today? To succeed in a digital world rich in information and innovation, future skilled workers will need the ability to analyse problems, think critically, think creatively, find new solutions and have the courage to take risks and to cope with failure. But these skills are eschewed in our current education system.

Professor Robert Carpenter of Cambridge University wrote recently in the Guardian, “The tick-box mentality underpinning GCSE and A-level rewards reactive rather than proactive responses. Here at university it takes two years to get even our best students to approach problems analytically and imaginatively, rather than expecting us to supply the correct answer to memorise.”

Today’s teaching methods encourage the belief that all that is needed for success is the ability to regurgitate the one correct answer to any given question. If you do that consistently in your course work and exams you will get top marks – and the school will look better in the league tables. But if the history of innovation teaches us anything it is that there is not just one correct answer to life’s real problems. There is always a different way. There is a better way to board an airplane, there is a better way to treat cancer, there is a better way to manage public finances – we just have not found them yet. And when we do implement better ways they will be subject to improvement and replacement too.

Finding an innovative solution for a problem often involves generating a large number of ideas ranging from the obvious to the initially absurd. These are then whittled down using suitable criteria and a selection of promising approaches is identified. Where possible it is often best to pilot these ideas to quickly see which will work and which will not. In order to solve some of the bigger problems in our society we should not put our faith in finding one perfect solution. We should run hundreds of small experiments and learn from the success or failure of each. But one perfect answer is the way our schools teach us to think.

Oxford High School for Girls is treading a different path with a maths test where it is impossible to get 100%. It is designed to show pupils it is ‘fine not to get everything right’. The exam questions get harder and harder until the pupil reaches the top of their ability. She will then be given questions she cannot answer. Chief executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust Helen Fraser told The Sunday Times the idea would help girls understand that ‘being perfect is the enemy of learning’.

Professor Alan Smithers, of the University of Buckingham, said in the Daily Telegraph: “Tough tests for both boys and girls to really challenge them are a good idea, and it is good to have questions that only very few – or perhaps none – can answer. The tougher the questions, the more children are likely to develop to meet them, and a by–product of that may be that children learn that you can’t succeed in everything and if you fail, the rational thing to do is ask why.”

Teaching knowledge is a good thing but it is not enough. We need to equip young people to handle the possibility of failure and to realise that there are no pat answers for most tough questions. We should encourage problem analysis and lateral thinking. We have enough Mastermind champions; we need more James Dysons.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Here is a short management meeting icebreaker that leads to an instant assessment of some of the good points and improvement areas for your organization.

Assemble a mixed team from different departments and then ask everyone to write down their answers to three questions. At this stage people need to work silently and on their own. We do not want discussion or consensus – we want individual ideas.

1. What three words would customers use to describe us?

2. What three words would competitors use to describe us?

3. What three words would our employees use to describe us?

The words can be positive or negative. They are usually adjectives but verbs or nouns are allowed too.  It helps if the words are written on post-it notes.

Now collect the words and group them into positive and negative sets. Form small teams of say four or five people and ask them to choose and prioritize what they consider to be the most important words from each set.  The resulting lists typically show both real and perceived strengths and weaknesses and they naturally lead to further discussions with questions like:

• How can we build on this strength?
• How can we communicate this advantage?
• How can we combat this problem area?
• Who could we collaborate with to compensate for this weakness?

If you want to try a shorter (and more entertaining) version of this exercise, then ask these two questions of the group:

• If this organization were an animal, what animal would it be?
• If this organization were a vehicle, what vehicle would it be?

The answers are often amusing and revealing. People who might hesitate to admit that their company was slow to react, complacent and risk averse are happy to describe it as being like an elephant, a hedgehog, a double-decker bus or a tractor. But don’t assume that you understand what each metaphor means – ask the person to briefly explain why they said the company was like a parrot or a submarine. I have also heard businesses described as being like a jellyfish, a platypus, a stealth bomber and a fold-up bicycle. Each of those of was a personal insight that could potentially lead to a fruitful discussion.

keys showing image from bigstock

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

We are living in an increasingly litigious age. The number of lawsuits brought against the British National Health Service has doubled in the last four years. The fear of litigation and the real possibility of been found guilty of medical malpractice are inhibiting hospitals and doctors from trying promising new ideas in the treatment of deadly illnesses.

Lord Saatchi has introduced into Parliament a Medical Innovation Bill which aims to encourage responsible scientific experimentation in medicine. As he points out, currently the law prevents the process of scientific discovery. Thousands of people die each year from cancers but each sufferer must be given the standard treatment even when it is well known that the standard treatment is largely ineffective. Any doctor who deviates from the standard code of practice is likely to suffer a verdict of medical negligence because the present law defines medical negligence as deviation from the standard procedure. But innovation always involves deviation from the norm. By prohibiting deviation, the law is prohibiting innovation with the long term result that cures for cancers are delayed. Doctors know that the current methods lead to little benefit yet they cannot try new approaches for fear of litigation.

The legal judgment in Crawford vs Board of Governors of Charing Cross Hospital (1953) states ‘the practitioner who treads the well-worn path will usually be safer, as far as legal liability, than the one who adopts a newly discovered method of treatment.’ As Saatchi puts it, ‘Doctors deciding how to treat a particular case start with the knowledge that as soon as they move away from existing standards within the profession, there is an automatic and serious risk that they will be found guilty of negligence if the treatment is less successful than hoped.’

Lord Saatchi’s proposed Bill will differentiate in law between reckless experimentation and responsible scientific innovation. Any proposed innovative approach has to gain prior approval from the hospital’s multi-disciplinary team. It will free doctors to make informed decisions that deviate from standard practice and therefore it should significantly increase the chances of finding a cure for cancer.

In medicine, as in business, applying standard practice means applying yesterday’s solutions. Innovation means trying to find tomorrow’s solutions. It involves risk and failure but if we stick rigidly to the current methods we will never reach the innovations we need.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

A recent study by Andy Cosh and Joanne Jin Zhang of the UK Innovation Research centre set out to examine how companies were using open innovation. The report makes a thought-provoking comparison of the innovation styles of companies. It indicates that those companies that are active in open innovation in both giving and receiving ideas achieve higher rates of innovation and of revenue growth.

A survey was sent to 12,000 UK companies and 1202 responded. The authors categorised the respondents as falling into one of three categories which had similar behaviours and practices:

1. Traditional companies made no external knowledge transfers and had few formal collaborations with other organizations in search of innovation.

2. Hunting-cultivating firms engaged in external sourcing of knowledge and had formal collaborations but made no external transfers.

3. Ambidextrous companies were defined as those that had engaged in hunting and cultivating but also transferred knowledge and technology externally. They are typically very engaged in partnering and collaboration.

Companies that serve local markets tend to traditional in their approach whereas national and international companies (whatever their size) show greater openness and ambidexterity.  Traditional companies tended to have lower growth ambitions than hunter-cultivators or ambidextrous companies.

The ambidextrous firms had a higher percentage of employees with first or higher science or engineering degrees and a higher % of staff engaged in R&D. However, the hunting-cultivating firms spent the highest % of revenue on R&D. Despite this, it was the ambidextrous firms who introduced the most innovations. Furthermore although the hunting-cultivating firms grew significantly faster than the traditional firms, the ambidextrous types showed even faster growth. The researchers found no association between the choice of open innovation style and the size or age of the companies (although there were clear differences between sectors).

There is a detailed review of outbound open innovation activities. Firms engaged in external transfers for both financial and non-financial reasons – enhancing reputation was a frequently cited motive. Different kinds of revenue sources were favoured by different size firms – larger firms preferred out-licensing, smaller firms preferred R&D contracts while micro-firms gained most external revenue from spinouts.

There are many detailed results and conclusions in this report. The clearest is that companies that choose an open style to internal and external exchange of information, ideas and technologies achieve the highest rates of product innovation and growth.

team supporting image from bigstock

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Sustainability is now accepted as good corporate practice. It has taken a while but we have all come to understand that the planet is a valuable resource that should be treated with care. It is now recognised that we need to design sustainability into our products from the start, not just add it on as an afterthought.

So how can we do this? Here are some fine recent examples of product and service innovations that incorporate sustainability.

• Replenish. Most household cleaners consist of a disposable plastic bottle, a detergent and a lot of water. Shipping a product which is 90% water through retail stores does not make a lot of sense. Replenish is an innovative reusable cleaning product. You simply buy a detergent refill and add water.

• Shwopping. Marks and Spencer launched a project which aims to reduce the volume of clothes that are thrown away to landfill, whilst supporting the charity Oxfam. Customers can bring unwanted pieces of clothing and place them in bins known as ‘Shwop Drops’. The clothes are then given to Oxfam to re-use, recycle or re-sell. In the last year some 4 million items have been Shwopped in over 400 M&S and Oxfam stores. This has helped Oxfam raise £2.3 million for its many good causes.

• Newlife Paints. What do you do with your unfinished tins of paint? The average household in the UK has 17 tins of partly used paint. These tins typically reside in the garage until they are eventually taken to the tip and then into landfill. Chemist, Keith Harrison, decided to do something about this environmental nightmare by creating Newlife Paints which collects and recycles tins of paint – repackaging them and selling them in a range of 32 colours.

Sustainability is more than just recycling. It is about creative design in products and processes that encourage and reward good behaviour by consumers. And the consumers seem to like it.

With thanks to Chris Sherwin of Seymourpowell for pointing out these examples.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

If you want to innovate with a process or a service then try focusing on this word: rearrange.

Describe your current process as a series of steps. Draw them out as a block diagram. Now try moving the blocks around and see where this leads.

Ray Kroc delivered a major innovation with the concept of fast food at McDonald’s.

The process steps for a conventional restaurant are something like this:

1. Customer selects choice from menu
2. Waiter takes order from customer to kitchen
3. Kitchen prepares food.
4. Waiter delivers food to customer
5. Customer consumes food
6. Waiter presents bill
7. Customer pays

Kroc rearranged this process. The fast food model at McDonald’s is:

1. Kitchen prepares food in advance
2. Waiter takes order and presents bill
3. Customer pays
4. Waiter delivers food to customer
5. Customer consumes food

On-line check-in for flights is another example. Previously we went to the airport and stood in line to check in for our flight. Now the order is rearranged; we check in on-line at home and then go to the airport. By getting the customer to check himself in, time is saved and the process is improved.

Every process in your business should be examined and the question asked, ‘How could we rearrange this?’ Make a list of who does what tasks when. Then play around with possibilities. What if we did this stage earlier or later or not at all? What if we got the customer to do this part and a supplier to do that part?

For hundreds of years shops had the same process. The customer told the assistant what he or she wanted. The assistant fetched the goods. The customer paid for the goods and took them. Then in the 1920s Michael Cullen decided to rearrange the process. He asked, ‘Why not let the customer fetch the goods instead of the assistant.’ He created the world’s first supermarket, the King Cullen store in New Jersey.

The UK retail giant Tesco faced a challenge when it entered the Korean market. All the best retail locations were taken by the incumbent market leaders. Tesco took an innovative approach and rearranged the process. They rented space on subway walls and created virtual stores showing pictures of popular items with QR codes. Commuters waiting for their train home can select and order the goods they want using the camera on their mobile phones. When they arrive home the goods are delivered.

There is scope for innovation in every process; even such a well-established process as shopping. Take a good look at your processes. Apply the verb rearrange in an imaginative fashion. It might lead you to create an innovation as dramatic as fast food or the supermarket.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

The Economist recently ran a feature entitled, ‘Has the Ideas Machine broken down?’ The front cover showed a Rodinesque figure sitting on a toilet and pondering the question, ‘Will we ever invent anything as useful again?’

There are many pundits who think that the innovation engine which has powered the growth of the world economy is running out of steam.  Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal says that innovation in the USA is ‘somewhere between dire straits and dead.’

Consider as a marker the speed of travel.  It improved dramatically through the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries with major innovations such as trains, automobiles, airplanes, jet engines and rockets.  But the big advances came to an end in the 1970s.  Movement by car now is no faster than it was then – indeed it is often slower.  We can fly from London to New York no faster now than in 1970 – indeed with the abandonment of supersonic passenger it takes significantly longer.  Only 12 people have walked on the moon and the last of those was over 40 years ago.

At a more prosaic level consider the kitchen.  Technology made massive improvements in the domestic kitchen in the first 70 years of the last century with refrigerators, gas hobs, microwave ovens and dishwashers all making life much better for the housewife (or househusband) but what has changed since then?  What major innovations can you name that have significantly impacted the kitchen in the last forty years?

Productivity in terms of output per person increased in the major economies between 1950 and 2000 but since then it has stalled.  Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University believes that the past two centuries of economic growth may represent a one-off spurt rather than a sign of uninterrupted progress.  He contends that there were only a few truly fundamental innovations and they have already been made.  They include the use of electricity, the ability to travel anywhere, vaccination, mass production methods, and the ability to communicate with anyone at will.  Surely there will be many more innovations but they will not have the impact of electricity grids or the telephone.

More evidence comes from the world of research and development.   Studies by Pierre Azoulay of MIT and Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University indicate that an average R&D worker in the USA in 1950 was seven times as productive as one today measured in terms of contribution to innovation and growth.  Many of the easy wins have been made.  Also it takes much longer for any researcher to catch up with the frontier of their science or technology because there is so much more knowledge out there.

Countering this pessimism about innovation, the optimists would point out that although progress in speed of travel has slowed it has continued in safety and fuel economy.  And if mature industries such as air travel have slowed, innovations in computing and mobile technology have powered ahead.  Computers today continue to offer huge increases in computing power and storage capacity and these are being put to use by more people in more ways than ever before.  And then of course there is the Internet – possibly the greatest technological innovation of all time.

The pessimists remain unconvinced.  They point out that all capabilities of the World Wide Web, mobile technology and computing power have had little impact in improving productivity or driving economic growth.  Indeed office productivity has stalled.  It is likely that Google and Facebook are slowing down office work rather than improving it.

There are other reasons to worry about the pace of innovation.   Governments speak much about the need for innovation but their actions often inhibit rather than promote it.  Regulation is much heavier now than it was a generation ago, raising costs and making approvals of new products much more difficult.  Furthermore governments are now unable or reluctant to fund the major new long-term infrastructure or exploratory programs such as the Apollo space project.  Some of the largest sectors of western economies – such as education, health care and government have long proved difficult areas for innovation, productivity improvement or cost cutting.  It is hard to argue for, let alone implement, radical solutions in these sectors because of vested interests and public attachment to familiar methods.

Perhaps the doubters overstate their case but the worry persists that we have become complacent in assuming that innovation is thriving and can continue to drive growth and productivity in the West.  Our levels of regulation and institutional rigidity are making innovation much more difficult.  The emerging economies in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere are seizing the opportunity to change, innovate and grow rapidly.  This is the challenge that we must contend with if our innovation engine is really running down.

teaching children philosophy.org

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

For most organizations innovation is a struggle. The natural thing to do is to stay in the current state. The CEO preaches the need for innovation but people further down know that it involves risk, time, effort, cost, disruption and potential failure. In this contest innovation has some powerful friends and some dangerous enemies.

Let’s start with three of its most important friends, the VCC.

1. Vision. The most powerful friend of innovation is a shared vision of a better future. The leader and his or her team have to effectively communicate a common goal that people buy into. The vision has to be believable, aspirational, worthwhile and demanding. People in the organization must have faith in the vision and see that it involves a change that is worth making. Furthermore the staff must see that they have an important role to play in achieving the vision. They have to agree that the journey is worth undertaking, despite the uncertainties and hardships, and that the destination can be reached. Jack Welch of GE was a great believer in the power of vision and the need for the leadership team to constantly expound its benefits and importance.

2. Curiosity. The second friend is a culture of curiosity and challenge.  Everyone should be encouraged to look for better ways to do things.  We need an endless curiosity about why people buy or do not buy our products, about why we do things the way we do, about how we can make every system and service and method better. We need a culture where anyone anywhere can challenge the existing way of doing things in a constructive manner knowing that their ideas will be listened to. We should be inquisitive about how they solve our kinds of problems in different organizations, cultures and countries. There is always a better way to do everything we do and curiosity can help lead us there.

3. Courage. It is fine to have a great vision and a fruitful supply of creative ideas but nothing happens without the courage to act. There is always a long list of reasons why action should not be taken. We need to assess the options, consider the risks and then reach for our third friend, courage, to take the key decisions to move forward. Courageous leaders take calculated risks as they move the business forward. Not every bet succeeds so they must be brave enough to admit they made the wrong decisions on occasions.

So much for the friends, now for the enemies. These can be harder to spot because they are quiet and unassuming. But do not be fooled. They can stop any innovation initiative in its tracks.

1. Busyness. People are often so busy working on the day job that they do not have time for innovation. People are working hard. They are meeting their short-term objectives and do not want distractions. They do not assign space in their schedule for exploration, brainstorms, looking outside the organization or experimentation. The most innovative companies meet this challenge head on by allocating time for innovation. 3M have a famous provision allowing any engineer or scientist to spend 15% of his or her time on any investigation they fancy. Google and Genentech go further – every employee can spend one day a week researching any business issue that they consider of interest.

2. Bureaucracy. Many organizations have convoluted approval processes requiring multiple sign-offs for any significant change. Initiatives get mired with regulations and compliance requirements that slow things down to a crawl. Of course some checks and balances are needed but they need to be appropriate for the level of change and risk involved. Many procedures are too heavy duty. Shell overcame this problem in its Gamechanger program by allowing engineers to get sign-off on innovations from a panel of their peers rather than having to go to several higher levels.

3. Complacency. In his seminal book, Leading Change, John Kotter identifies complacency as the number one reason why change projects fail. Complacency is a particularly dangerous foe if the organization is successful. It undermines the need for change. We are doing well right now so why do we need to rock the boat? What is the best way to fight contentment with the status quo? By communicating the urgent necessity for change and the importance of the vision. Fighting complacency is one of the leader’s key tasks.

Busyness, Bureaucracy and Complacency (BBC) are the silent but deadly enemies of innovation. They must be confronted and vanquished if the organization wants to become more agile and competitive. If we want more innovation we need to support its friends and fight its enemies.

fly fight image from bigstock

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.