GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

During WWI there was tremendous demand for bandages and sterile dressings for Allied wounded on the Western Front.  The US company, Kimberly-Clark, developed a new cotton-like material from wood-pulp.  It was highly absorbent.  They manufactured this in large quantities to supply gas-mask filters and field dressings.  When the war ended in 1918 the company was left with large stocks of materials which the military no longer needed.  A salesman at the company, Walter Luecke, did some lateral thinking and read through letters from nurses who had served in the front-line field hospitals to find out if they had put the dressings to any alternate uses.  The nurses had reported that the gas-mask filter fibres were often used as face-wipes and disposable handkerchiefs.  From this insight Kimberly-Clark went on to develop and market Kleenex tissues.

Furthermore, the female clinicians reported that the field dressings were really useful at the time of month when a woman had her period.  Based on this intelligence, the company developed and marketed a new product, Kotex, as the first commercial sanitary towel.  Before that innovation women throughout history had used rags and cloths during menstruation – often with unsatisfactory results.  Many women just did not go out when they had periods.

In October 1919, the Woolworth’s department store in Chicago sold the first box of Kotex pads.  The marketing executives at Kimberly-Clark realised that there was a huge potential market for their new product but they faced a problem.  Because nothing like it had existed before they had to advertise it – but menstruation was a taboo subject.   It might prove highly embarrassing for a woman to ask a store assistant (many of whom were men) for such a product.   They advertised in women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping with the slogan ‘Kotex – Ask for it by Name.’  The adverts explained in generic terms the usefulness of ‘sanitary napkins.’

Even so, prudishness was a major obstacle to the promotion of the product.  Many magazines hesitated to run adverts concerning something so unmentionable.  Edward Bok, publisher of the highly influential Ladies Home Journal, banned the adverts from his range of magazines.  Kimberly-Clark’s advertising agency was Lord and Thomas whose CEO was Albert Lasker, a legendary figure in the history of advertising.   Lasker visited Edward Bok and tried to persuade him to change his mind, but Bok was adamant.  Finally, Lasker took a gamble.  He asked Bok to call in his secretary and ask her if she found anything offensive or embarrassing in the advert.  Bok summoned his secretary – a rather prim and proper woman of about 60.  She carefully read the copy and then turned to her boss and said, ‘This is wonderful.  Women deserve to be told about it.’  Bok’s objections were overcome, and Kotex went on to become extremely successful.  It is sold worldwide by Kimberly-Clark to this day.

Innovators should listen to customers to find new applications for their products.  And they can sometimes overcome resistance by playing a game and taking a gamble.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

A catastrophe produces an unexpected set of circumstances and this can lead to opportunities for innovation.

In January 1992 a container with 29,000 plastic bath toys was washed overboard in the Pacific Ocean.  They were manufactured in China and were on route to the USA.  They were called Floatees, bath toys consisting of red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks. Unlike many bath toys, these had no holes in them so they did not take on water.  At some stage the container broke open and the toys were released.  Another ecological calamity!< An oceanographer based in Seattle, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, learnt of this event and saw it as a singular opportunity to study ocean currents.  He and his partner, James Ingraham, set out to track the toys.  A typical oceanographic study would release 500 to 1000 drift bottles of which only 2% might be returned.  So a sample of 29000 items represented a significantly bigger and more accurate experiment.  Ebbesmeyer alerted beachcombers, marine scientists and coastal workers to be on the lookout for the distinctive toys.  Sure enough ten months after the consignment was lost at sea the first rubber ducks washed up in Alaska.  Over the next 20 years the ducks turned up in all sorts of places. Some washed up in British Columbia and Hawaii, some got stuck in the Arctic ice, many others circumnavigated the globe. Each reported recovery was entered into a computer program which models ocean surface currents.  The study of where and when the ducks made landfall helped increase understanding of gyres, persistent ocean currents. For example the North Atlantic gyre is a huge circular current that passes the US east coast, Western Europe, and Africa.  It takes about 3 years for a piece of flotsam to go once around the gyre.  The work of Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham helps us understand how flotsam moves around the world’s oceans and thus can assist in plans to tackle the pressing problem of marine plastic waste. Every time there is a calamity or when things go wrong then the pieces on the board are disturbed.  That means that there are new possibilities.  Viagra was the result of a clinical trial which failed in its initial objectives.  Post-it notes were made by 3M from a glue that did not stick.  Penicillin was discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming when he noticed a mould resisting bacteria in a dirty petri dish which should have been cleaned.  Disasters can open the door for innovations.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Is your organization a little too comfortable?  Are your people risk averse?  Is there a blame culture?  How can you encourage innovation by getting men and women to be more adventurous and entrepreneurial?  How can you get them to take more risks?  Here is an idea that is borrowed from the game of Monopoly – the Get out of Jail Free (GOJF) card.

Give every member of your team two GOJF cards at the beginning of the year.  The cards should be personalised to each individual and they are strictly non-transferable (unlike in the game where you can buy or sell them).  The idea is this.  If you try an initiative which is aimed at improving things for the customer or the business and the venture fails for any reason whatsoever then you can play your GOJF card and no-one can blame or criticize you.  You can still analyse what happened and how things might have been played differently but the card means that the person responsible cannot be blamed for what went wrong.

Of course the cards are not intended to defend against incompetence or laziness in the normal course of your work.  You cannot play your card to excuse lateness in your regular duties or missing deadlines.  They are reserved for new ideas and initiatives that you champion and carry out.

If you reach the end of year review and one of your people has not played his cards then ask why.  Did everything you try succeed or did you not attempt anything new?  Gradually the message will get across.  People are empowered, encouraged and expected to try out innovative ideas which are beneficial for the business.  And they will not be punished for failing.  The Get out of Jail Free cards are fun and playful but they underscore a serious message.  We need to try more new things more often.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

The Customer Journey Map is a popular management tool.  It is a visual representation of customer interactions with a company and a tool to investigate, analyse and thus improve customer experiences.  Let’s borrow the tool and adapt it for our purposes.

The Innovation Journey Map (IJM) is a similar concept showing the journey that an innovation takes from initial conception through to final implementation.  The purpose of the IJM is to realistically assess what is happening with innovative ideas within your organisation, to identify impediments and delays and to significantly improve the innovation process.  The IJM  would typically  include:

• A flowchart or diagrammatic representation of the journey which the innovation takes
• All interactions and interfaces, decision points (DPs), between the idea and the reviews, approvals or developments carried out by the organisation
• Likely “pain points” in the journey i.e. areas where the idea is likely to experience difficulties or rejection
• Key “moments of truth” i.e. areas where there is the opportunity to “make” or “break” the proposal.

Once a map has been developed, it can be expanded to include:

• Identification of departments and people responsible for the progress of the idea at each DP
• The flow and timing between DPs
• Importance ratings for each DP.
• Performance of the company/organisation/brand at each DP.  This can include looking at the ideal performance compared to reality.

It is recommended that you draw up several maps.  Start with a couple of innovations which you have successfully implemented in the last 12 months.  Talk to the project owners and draw a block diagram showing each step starting with the origination of the idea right the way through to implementation.  Maybe take a major new product or service and also an important internal process or system innovation.  Next examine a project which made some progress and then got canned.

For a new product innovation the IJM might look a little like a stage gate diagram.  But a stage gate diagram is normally idealized and looks at the go/nogo critical points.  The IJM is more messy, more complete and more realistic.  It is an assessment of what actually happens showing all the key steps where the the proposal is either progressed or retarded.

Here is a simplified IJM for a new product.

Typically a map would have many more steps.  The IJM provides a visualisation tool which can be used to assess the effectiveness of the corporate processes.  Drawing up detailed IJMs for several different types of innovation projects will help show cultural and process obstacles to innovation.  It is important that the timeline is shown so that important questions can be asked.  These might include:

• Where do good ideas originate?
• What happens to good ideas?
• How many approvals are needed to test a prototype idea?  Are they all needed?
• What impedes progress for new ideas?
• Why does it take so long to go from initial approval to final approval?
• Where do we need to allocate more resources?  Which ones are needed?
• How can we make it easier, simpler and faster to bring new ideas to market?

Innovation Journey Maps can become a useful addition to your management toolkit.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Leaders of innovation have a bias for action. They get on with things. No matter how well the business is doing they are not content to settle for what has been achieved so far; they are restless to try new initiatives. These seven verbs describe some of their key actions.

1. Focus.  They focus on the long term, on the strategic objectives and vision of the business. They are well aware of short term pressures, but they do not get consumed by them. They are committed to the long-term survival and success of the organization. They focus on the needs of customers and employees.

2. Listen.  They are smart and self-confident but modest enough to know that they do not have all the answers. They are always keen to learn. They ask great questions and challenge employees, customers and outsiders. Then they listen.

3. Tell.  Great leaders communicate by asking questions, by listening, by discussing and by telling. They tell people about the vision for the business. They tell people what a great job they are doing. They tell them that it is OK to fail. And they tell stories about people who display the values and behaviors they want to see. They are usually great story tellers.

4. Empower.  They trust their best employees to come up with great ideas and to implement them. They delegate and supervise. They grow new leaders by empowering people to try new things and to develop skills and experience. Talented people are motivated and inspired by leaders who trust and empower them.

5. Experiment.  They do not trust in conventional wisdom, theories or spreadsheets. They trust empirical results. They believe in getting out there and trying new things. They encourage people to experiment and try new concepts by building prototypes and testing ideas in the marketplace.

6. Welcome. Innovative leaders welcome risk – it is part of the game. They welcome and celebrate success. Funnily enough they also welcome failure; they treat it as a learning experience. They welcome technology and new ways of working. They welcome people – whether old friends or strangers. Above all they are open-minded and welcoming to fresh ideas.

7. Decide. These innovators are open to discuss and consider different options. Then they move swiftly to a decision. They might have only half the information that they would like to have but they are prepared to move forward and commit to a course of action. Often the chosen option proves wrong. In this case the leader of innovation is big enough to say, ‘I admit I got that one wrong.’ They quickly move to correct things and set a new course.

Many leaders and managers utter fine words about how important innovation is, how important their people are and how they have great plans for the future.  But ultimately leaders are judged by their deeds and not by their words.  The successful leaders of innovation are those who take deliberate calculated actions to drive the business forward.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

In this two minute video clip we will explore two important questions relating to risk in your life:

1. What is the biggest risk your have taken which has succeeded?

2. What is the biggest risk you have taken which failed?

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

“If the Door is Shut, Open it. If the Door is Open, Shut it.”

Change of State Innovation

In looking for innovations it is sometimes helpful to consider whether your product or service is open or closed.  If it is open what would happen if you enclosed it?  If it is closed what would happen if you opened it?  The opposite approach to the current method can yield powerful new ideas.  Here are some examples.

Computing.

• For years software products were completely closed systems. For companies like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft the door to the code in their products was firmly shut.  Then Linus Torvalds opened the door by making all the code in the Linux operating system transparent and available to anyone who wanted to see it or tinker with it.  Open source software became a major force for innovation.
• Similarly, mainframe, mini and home computers were sealed boxes until the IBM PC was launched with its open architecture. Anyone could see the specifications and create their own add-ins.
• Personal computers, ipads and laptops became complex and closed but the Raspberry Pi computer is inexpensive and open. Children and enthusiasts build it themselves by plugging together the components and then writing code for the machine they constructed.

Food.

• For centuries food was sold and stored in an open way. You might buy apples and keep them in a bowl or potatoes and keep them in a sack.  But food is perishable.  A major innovation in the 19^th century was canned food.  It was originally created for the French and then the British armies and enabled them to store, transport and use fruits, meats and vegetables long after they would otherwise have rotted.
• Tea was sold loose. A major improvement in convenience was the result of enclosing just enough tea for one cup in a teabag.
• The meal you get in a restaurant or a ready meal from a supermarket is a closed product in the sense that you do not see the ingredients being prepared or the meal being made. Hello Fresh opened this process by giving you the specific ingredients and instructions for one gourmet meal (ironically inside a box!).
• Restaurants used to have the kitchen door closed. Customers could not see what was happening there.  Then some restaurants opened the door.  They turned their kitchens into a selling feature by making them open and clearly visible to all comers.

The great innovation which transformed global trade was one that took an open process and enclosed it.  For centuries dockers or longshoremen stowed separate cargoes into ships’ holds.  Containers transformed this system.  Goods were put into the container at the factory and then trucked and shipped much more easily.

Open innovation and crowdsourcing take closed doors and open them.  Big companies used to try to solve their research problems in house and develop new products in secret.  Now they throw out challenges on sites like Innocentive.  They ask all comers to suggest ideas for specific challenges and they collaborate with many outside companies and inventors to bring new products to market.  This necessitates a dramatic change in the corporate culture from secrecy to openness.

Take a look at your products, systems and services.  Wherever something is hidden or closed what would happen if you made it transparent? Where things are open would there be a benefit by packing them into a box?  Innovate by changing the state of your offerings.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Sometimes the idea is simple and obvious but getting it adopted is very tricky.  Containerization was a massively important innovation which powered the expansion of global trade but it was a difficult idea to implement.

Before containerization,  goods were physically manhandled as break bulk cargo. At the factory or warehouse goods were loaded onto a truck, driven to a port and then offloaded to await the next suitable ship.  The dockers (aka longshoremen) piled boxes, barrels and sacks onto wooden pallets secured with ropes.  The pallets were then hoisted onto the ship where more dockers would carry each item and fit it snugly into the ship’s hold.  This was difficult, time-consuming and dangerous work – many dockers were injured or killed at work.

When the vessel was eventually fully loaded it would set off.  It might easily have over 1000 different loads on board – each with its own paperwork.  If the ship had to visit more than one port to deliver goods then dockers had to find and pick the items to be offloaded and then reposition the remaining cargo.  Once delivered the goods were loaded onto trucks and sent to their destinations.  Multiple handling and delays made transport costly, time consuming and unreliable.  Each day in port is expensive for ship owners and fractious dockers would use strikes and go-slows in order to secure better terms.

The idea for a better way of doing things had been around for some time.  It was simple – put things in big boxes and move the boxes.  In 1766 in England James Brindley designed a box boat with wooden containers to transport coal by canal to Manchester.  As early as the 1830s, railroads such as the Liverpool and Manchester Railway were using containers.

But there was opposition.  Trucking companies, shipping companies and ports could not agree on a standard.  Some wanted large containers and others small.  The dockers unions were strongly opposed to the idea as they correctly saw it as a direct threat to their levels of control and employment.   The freight sector was highly regulated and regulators were happy with the status quo.

The man who changed all this was Malcom McLean.  He was born in 1913 in North Carolina.  His family was poor.  They could not afford to send him to college but they could afford a second-hand truck.  Together with his brother and sister he founded the McLean Trucking Company.

In the 1950s McLean foresaw the great potential of containers and he used his commercial expertise and political shrewdness to make things happen.  He was an expert in trucking but could not persuade shipping companies to adapt their ships for containers.  He borrowed $22 million from the bank and bought two World War II tankers which he converted to carry containers on and under deck.  On April 26, 1956, with 100 invited dignitaries present, one of the converted tankers was loaded and sailed from New Jersey to Houston Texas, carrying fifty-eight 35-foot containers, along with a regular load of liquid tank cargo. As the ship left the port, Freddy Fields, an officer of the International Longshoremen’s Union, was asked what he thought of the new container ship. Fields replied, “I’d like to sink that son of a bitch.”

It is estimated that in 1956 hand-loading a ship cost $5.86 a ton. Using containers, it cost only 16 cents a ton, a 36-fold saving. Containerization also greatly reduced the time to load and unload ships.  McLean designed and patented the standard container; 8 feet tall by 8 ft wide by 10 ft and made from thick corrugated steel. The design incorporated a twistlock mechanism at the corners, allowing the container to be easily secured and lifted using cranes.  He then gave the patented designs to industry; thus enabling international standardization of shipping containers.

McLean achieved a huge breakthrough in the 1960s when he persuaded the US military to use his containers to ship equipment to Vietnam.  They became a key part of one of the first integrated logistical systems – now common across the world.   McLean shipped the empty containers from Vietnam to Japan where they were filled with consumer goods and then transported back to the USA.

Nowadays people across the globe enjoy the benefits of cheap products made far away – cars, toys, electronic goods, clothes and appliances.  They are all shipped in containers and using the systems that Malcom McLean developed.

McLean died in New York in 2001.  Forbes Magazine called him, “one of the few men who changed the world.”  On the morning of McLean’s funeral, container ships around the world blew their whistles in his honor.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

The Ideas Exchange is a brainstorm method which works well for larger groups.   It is easy to run, quick and effective.  This is the procedure:

1. The problem is clearly stated.
2. Everyone is given two colored cards (or post-it notes). Say one white and one pink.
3. Working silently and individually they write down a sensible idea to solve the problem on the white card and a bizarre, crazy idea on the pink card.
4. People then mill around and swap cards (without reading them) so that they end up with a white card and a pink card from two different people.
5. Each person now has to combine the two ideas they have received. They ‘force fit’ them together or adapt them in some way so that they now have a creative idea.
6. People now work together in teams of 4 or 5. They share their new ideas and everyone is encouraged to support and build upon the ideas they hear.
7. Each team selects its one best idea. At this stage they can adapt or improve the idea in any way they see fit. They then present this idea back to the whole group.
8. The whole group votes for the best ideas using agreed criteria – e.g. we want a solution which is effective, novel and appealing to customers.

A key consideration is that the bizarre ideas have to be really bizarre in order to provoke and stimulate the people who receive them.  Tame ideas will lead to bland suggestions so ensure that participants understand that their bizarre ideas must be outrageous.  Say we are a charity looking for new ways to reach donors.  You receive a white card with the idea of running a Facebook campaign to promote the work of the charity.  Your pink card says, ‘Shoot anyone who refuses to donate.’  You have to come up with a combination.  You might suggest that you shoot videos of the stories of people you have helped and post the videos on Facebook and Youtube.  Or you might suggest that you target known wealthy philanthropists and shoot them a message via social media, email or direct mail.  In either case it is the outlandish concept of shooting which stimulates the fresh ideas.

There is a variant of this technique where everyone gets three cards.  On each card they write just one different word.   The cards are then shuffled and dealt out so that everyone receives three cards.  Each individual has to construct a proposition based on the three words they have received.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

So get your patent filed!

Sometimes the idea is tremendous but it fails because of the current state of technology or infrastructure.  Consider the common remote control for your TV set.  The Zenith Radio Corporation launched the first wireless remote control for TVs in 1955.  The ‘Flashmatic’ shone a beam of light onto a photoelectric cell in the TV.  Unfortunately, sunlight or other strong light could also activate the cell and cause the TV channel to change.  Zenith then introduced a remote device using ultrasound which worked better but the very high frequencies drove pet dogs crazy – something the company would not have anticipated when testing the idea in their research centre.   It was not until a quarter century later that TV remote controls became popular.  The advent of text services on TVs in the 1970s increased the need for remote devices and in 1980 the Canadian company View Star introduced an infra-red remote control which worked well and sold in millions.  Today the average home in the USA or Europe has at least four remote controls for consumer devices and annual sales are worth $25B.

The English mathematician, Charles Babbage, invented the idea of the digital computer with his design for a ‘Difference Engine’ which he started to build in 1823.  It required 25000 machines parts and would have weighed 15 tons.  This brilliant idea was never completed because the technology of the time was just not up to the job.  It was some 130 years later that electronic valves and then transistors allowed Babbage’s ideas to be realised.

In 1973 Martin Cooper, working at Motorola, invented the first cellular mobile phone.  Motorola brought it to market in 1983 but it was a heavy, clumsy device with a short battery life and very limited coverage.  It was years later that mobile phones became ubiquitous when technology advanced with touch screens and lightweight long-life batteries.  Motorola’s early success was surpassed by companies like Nokia and RIM in the 1990s who were then overtaken by Apple and Samsung.

The sad fact is that the real pioneers rarely benefit from their daring innovations.  The prize often falls to smart followers who learn from early failures and build a better solution on better technology.  Google was not the first search engine and Facebook was not the first social media site.

Innovation is a cruel and unpredictable game.  If you have a truly radical invention then patent it.   If the first few attempts to make it a commercial success flop then do not get downhearted.  In twenty or thirty years’ time the technology may arrive to deliver the promise.  You might just see a healthy reward to fund you in your old age!

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