Author Archives: Stephen Shapiro

About Stephen Shapiro

Stephen Shapiro is the author of five books including “Best Practices Are Stupid” and “Personality Poker” (both published by Penguin). He is also a popular innovation speaker and business advisor.

Redefining Failure

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

I view life as a series of experiments. When you look at it through this lens, failure means something completely different.

One definition of an experiment is: “A test or investigation, especially one planned to provide evidence for or against a hypothesis.”

The only way an experiment can fail is if you don’t get the evidence.

Even if the evidence proves your hypotheses was wrong, the experiment itself was a huge success.

When you view innovation through the lens of experimentation, it redefines failure.

When developing new ideas, the best approach (especially when there is “market” uncertainty) is to create small experiments that can be scaled over time.

The experiment can give you one of four outcomes:

  1. Our hypothesis was validated by the experiment. Let’s make a larger investment in a larger experiment.
  2. Our original hypothesis was wrong, but we found a different direction that looks promising. Let’s create a new experiment with the new hypothesis.
  3. Our original hypothesis was wrong and we should kill the idea.
  4. Our experiment did not give us enough data to determine whether or not the hypothesis was correct.

Of these four outcomes, only the last one is a failure. With the other three, the experiment was successful. It either confirmed that we are on the right path or it stopped us from making further investments.

The problem with some innovation efforts is that insufficient data is gathered throughout the process. Experimentation is not the mantra.

When you view innovation as a series of experiments, you must make sure that the experiments don’t fail. It is totally fine if your hypotheses are invalid, as long as you determine that early in the experimentation process.

P.S. One book I really like is “The Science of Success” by Charles Koch. The entire book is about how experimentation made Koch Industries one of the most innovative – and successful – companies in history.

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Measures – Will you get what you want?

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

I recently spoke with a new client who shared with me their innovation measures. When I looked at their measurement system, I immediately saw flaws.

But before addressing these imperfections, let me first provide you my perspective on innovation measures.

In general, there are three types of measures associated with “challenge-based” innovation (be sure to read this article if you are unfamiliar with the concept of challenge-based innovation):

  1. Process Measures – These measure the activity associated with your challenges (e.g., 500 registered solvers, 40 submissions per challenge, 80 votes per challenge, etc)
  2. Solve-Rate Measures – These subjectively measure how well you solved your challenges (e.g., 82% of challenges were partially solved, 61% of challenges were completely solved, etc)
  3. Value Measures – These measure the actual value accrued (e.g., increased revenues by $25M, reduced costs by $35M, etc)

The last measure (value) is where the rubber meets the road. This is your ultimate goal. But sometimes, value realization can take years (or in the case of pharmaceutical companies, decades). Therefore, the second measure (solve-rate) is a good way to monitor progress with your program. But what about process measures?

Process measures are leading indicators that can be useful in measuring trends over time for things like community engagement, effectiveness of internal communications, and quality of challenges.

Let’s look at one common process measure: the number of ideas/solutions submitted for a given challenge. This was one of the measures that my new client used.

Imagine that you are using crowdsourcing to find a solution to a challenge. You post the challenge on your website or intranet. A month later you check to see how many responses you get. In this scenario…

Which is better:

  • Getting 100 ideas/solutions?
  • Getting only two ideas/solutions?

Most people intuitively think that 100 solutions is better than two. In fact, most organizations believe that more ideas equates to greater success. The reality is, however, that 100 is not necessarily better than two.

Let me re-frame the question…

Which is better:

  • Getting 100 ideas where only two of them were exactly what you needed and the other 98 were duds?
  • Getting two ideas where both were exactly what you needed?

Now the correct answer is a bit more obvious. In this situation, the latter is probably better. The amount of work needed to sift through the solutions is a lot less when you have only two submissions. Imagine if you received 10,000 ideas of which only two were good. You can see now that the effort to find the best solutions/ideas might be overwhelming.

Although activity is good, too many submissions can indicate that you have a poorly defined challenge. Therefore the ratio of good ideas to duds might be a more interesting measure.

The key is, make sure you understand the unintended consequences of your measurement system, especially when it comes to process measures. If done properly, process measures can help you drive higher solve rates (measure #2). And often, higher solve rates lead to greater value (measure #3) in the long run. But not always.

High solve rates with low value can also indicate problems with your innovation program:

  • Poor implementation – You are unable to convert solutions into finished products/services
  • Poor commercialization – Your solutions do not meet the needs of the market/customers and therefore do not generate revenue
  • Poor relevance – Your challenges, although solved, are not important enough to “move the needle” of the organization’s innovation efforts

Measures are important for helping tracking your innovation efforts. And they can help diagnose potential issues. But it is important to measure the right things.

There is an old expression: “You will get what you measure.”

But the bigger question is, “Will you get what you want?”

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Part 3 – Three Innovation Distinctions

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

This is the third of my “Innovation Distinctions” entries.

In the first part of this series, I wrote why you should focus on “Challenges, not Ideas.” Next, I addressed the distinction of “Process, not Events.”

In this final entry, I discuss why innovation requires “Diversity not Homogeneity.” Be sure to read the previous two articles before reading this one.

As mentioned in the other blog entries, I first shared these distinctions with a group of speakers and authors who were brainstorming ways to improve the learning experience for other speakers and authors who attend their conferences. Here’s the Catch 22: Having only speakers and authors speaking to other speakers and authors does not lead to much creativity. Most of the “ideas” presented are well-worn and don’t address the “real world” outside of the industry.

Therefore, my last suggestion to the group was to increase the level of diversity at these learning experiences. This would provide a wider range of ideas, suggestions, and points-of-view.

How does diversity apply to an organization?

Diversity can mean a wide variety of things:

  • Diversity of race, creed, color, sex, etc.
  • Diversity of innovation styles
  • Diversity of disciplines

I won’t address the first point as that has been a topic of discussion for decades. Let me tackle the next two.

Diversity of Innovation Styles

The second point ties directly to my Innovation Personality Poker system.

In the card-based game, I discuss the four primary innovation styles: analytical, creative, planning/action, engagement. Most organizations favor one over another and therefore do not have a good balance of styles. There’s a reason for this.

Although homogeneous teams are often more efficient (i.e., you get things done faster), having a bunch of “yes men” working for you is not the answer for long-term growth. When people think too much alike, new ideas struggle to surface. In these homogeneous climates, innovation and growth (i.e., effectiveness) suffer.

The essence of successful companies, then, is the ability to be both efficient and effective. They are able to focus on both production and innovation, not just doing things right but also doing the right things.

There’s plenty of evidence that team diversity translates directly into corporate profits. Sigal Barsade and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school studied top management teams at large corporations in the United States. Interestingly, the more diverse the functional roles of the members of those teams were, the greater the average, market-adjusted financial return in those companies. Diversity of the top leaders translated into bottom-line results.

In Personality Poker, there are four key concepts:

  • You need people in your organization “play to their strong suit.” That is, make sure that everyone understands how they contribute to and detract from the innovation process. This includes ensuring that you have the right people with the right leadership styles in your organization.

  • As an organization, “play with a full deck.” You must embrace a wide range of innovation styles. Instead of hiring on competency and chemistry, also hire for a diversity of innovation styles. Every step of the innovation process must be addressed. You need people who are great at conducting research, delivering results, developing plans and reports, building relationships, and creating new ideas, amongst other things.

  • “Deal out the work.” That is, you must divide and conquer. You can’t have everyone in your organization do everything. Instead, get them to divvy up the work based on which style is most effective at a given task. You can’t have everyone generating ideas, or focusing on planning.

  • Recognize that in order to treat everyone the same, you must treat everyone differently. People have different needs in terms of how they like to be managed, how they like to be praised, and how they want to contribute to the organization. In order to attract and retain a well-balanced organization you must be prepared to treat people as they want to be treated. To do this, you must overcome the inertia of your company’s personality and embrace the needs of the individual personalities.

I could write a whole book on the value of diverse teams. Oh, wait, I did! My Personality Poker book will be published by Penguin’s Portfolio imprint Fall 2010. Throughout, I provide examples of, and evidence for the value of having a diversity of “styles” within your organization.

But what about the third type of diversity: The diversity of disciplines.

Diversity of Discipline

A discipline is any area of expertise like biology, chemistry, physics or mathematics. You can have an organization comprised of diverse innovation styles while sharing only one discipline.

A while back, I spoke with Al Bredenberg, Senior Researcher from ILO Institute. He subsequently wrote an excellent blog entry on the topic of diversity where he quotes me. He also mentions a Harvard Business Review article by Lee Fleming that suggests that companies with less diversity of discipline produce better overall financial results than highly diverse ones.

“The financial value of the innovations resulting from such cross-pollination is lower, on average, than the value of those that come out of more conventional, siloed approaches. In other words, as the distance between the team members’ fields or disciplines increases, the overall quality of the innovations falls. But, my research also suggests that the breakthroughs that do arise from such multidisciplinary work, though extremely rare, are frequently of unusually high value – superior to the best innovations achieved by conventional approaches… When members of a team are cut from the same cloth, you don’t see many failures, but you don’t see many extraordinary breakthroughs either.”

However, as the diversity of disciplines increases, “the average value of the team’s innovations falls while the variation in value around that average increases. You see more failures, but you also see occasional breakthroughs of unusually high value.”

Therefore, although there is value to diversity of disciplines, the challenges seem to outweigh the benefits.

What’s the solution to having a diversity of disciplines without having to deal with the inherent complexities?

Open Innovation. By working with companies like InnoCentive, you get the value of discipline diversity while having few of the downsides. You get the take advantage of a wide range of experiences while only paying for successful solutions.

I will write more on Open Innovation in subsequent entries.

The Bottom Line

Diversity can create incredible value for an organization. It can help facilitate the innovation process. It can help increase the quantity and quality of breakthrough ideas. The key is knowing the right way of managing and engaging a diverse set of perspectives.

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Part 2 – Three Innovation Distinctions

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

In the first part of this series, I wrote why you should focus on challenges, not ideas. You should read that article before proceeding.

In this second entry, I will focus on “Process, not Events.”

I first shared these three distinctions with a bunch of speakers and authors. In the speaking industry, conferences/conventions are the primary model for professional development. That is, a bunch of people get together for a few days. The days are comprised of presenters on the stage who share their “wisdom” with attendees. When the event is over, the learning ends. And for most individuals, progress ends.

People who attend these events leave with a laundry list of ideas. Most people never implement any of the ideas. They just sit on the shelf in a binder.

This, in a nutshell, is what happens in the innovation programs of many businesses. They hold ad hoc brainstorming sessions. Or maybe they run a campaign using a crowdsourcing tool. They develop new ideas. If they are lucky, those ideas do get implemented. But quite often, the event ends and progress ends. Regardless, innovation does not happen again until someone has another stroke of inspiration and decides to hold another event.

Innovation in most organizations is episodic. It is unpredictable. And it is certainly not repeatable.

But what if you had a systematic way for ensuring that innovation continued long after the event? What if you didn’t need to wait for divine intervention for your next big idea to sprout? What if you could make innovation repeatable? To do this, you want to move from “innovation as an event” to “innovation as a process.”

Back to the authors and speakers… what if, instead of just events, there was a process that helped people see their ideas through to fruition? What if everyone came to the event with some challenges? The process could involve regular mentoring or an online community. There could be measures in place to help monitor progress. The point is, there is a process to help ensure progress.

In the business world, we have the opportunity to take this process-driven innovation concept a bit further.

For this “event to process” transition to be successful, the first step is to start treating innovation like you would treat any other part of the business. For example, your organization’s finance department has skilled experts, measures, supporting technology (e.g., Oracle or SAP), processes (e.g., processes for closing the books at year end), an owner (the CFO), and a strategy.

The innovation “process” requires all of these elements, and more, including skilled innovation experts (e.g., an innovation center of excellence aka innovation master blackbelts), innovation measures (e.g., return on investment for each idea), innovation management technologies (e.g., InnoCentive’s @Work solution), an innovation process, an innovation “czar” (aka advocate, Chief Innovation Officer, VP Innovation), and a clearly articulated innovation strategy (what you expect to achieve with your innovation program).

I call this level either “innovation as a process” or more accurately, “innovation as a discrete capability.” You can read more about this in my “Innovation Philosophy” page.

With these fundamentals in place, you can begin to make innovation a repeatable and predictable process whereby creativity is encouraged throughout the organization and the best ideas are implemented.

It’s worth noting that after successfully moving through the process level of innovation, the highest level of innovation is embedded innovation (aka embedded capability or environment). With both the event- and process-driven levels, innovation tends to be reactionary and discrete. It is somewhat separate from the business. With embedded innovation, people not only innovate to deal with “problems/challenges” that are presented to them, but in everything they do. They continuously, even radically, improve their products, processes and organization.

Look for the third and final installment of this three part series sometime soon.

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Predicting the Next Innovation

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

Recently I returned from over two weeks on the road. I was in and out of five airports. As you go through security, the routine is always the same…

  • Take off your shoes
  • Take out your liquids
  • Take out your computer

Why are we put through these security gymnastics?

On December 22, 2001, Richard Reid was caught with plastic explosives in the soles of his shoes. That’s why we now have to walk barefoot through airports.

On August 9, 2006, two dozen people were arrested in the UK because they were plotting to bring liquid explosives on planes leaving Heathrow airport. Now we have to travel with miniature shampoos, shave creams and toothpastes.

Computers are scanned because, well, that’s the obvious place to look. I guess.

What do these have in common? For the most part, the security scans we now endure were due to cleverness on the part of terrorists. Rarely are we subjected to scans that are due to the cleverness of government agencies.

Are there ways to easily smuggle weapons on planes in spite of our increased security? Of course. Nearly every time I pass through a metal detector, I have metal collar stays in the dress shirt I am wearing. Although the detector never beeps, these could easily have been turned into razor sharp weapons. Does this mean that next week I will have to travel topless through the airport? Good thing I have been working out.

Give me 15 minutes and I could rattle off dozens of other, more sinister ways to smuggle weapons on board.

Reactionary Innovation

This is a reactionary approach to business.

The current financial situation also demonstrates a reactionary approach to business. Enron has a meltdown. What should we do? Implement ridiculously stringent rules like the Sarbanes-Oxley act. Our financial institutions start to falter. OK, let’s spend $700 billion of the taxpayers’ money to sort out the mess.

I’m not saying that these rules and legislation are good or bad (or ugly). That’s a conversation for another time. But I do find it ironic that the “big ideas” always seem to come in response to some tragedy. They are rarely proactive.

What does this have to do with innovation? Everything.

Most organizations use creativity to help them determine what to do next. They brainstorm ideas, select the best solutions, and then implement the most promising ones. Creativity is used to determine what your company or organization will do next.

Predictive Innovation

But in these rapidly changing times, creativity can be equally (if not more) valuable for determining what the marketplace and your competitors will do next. Or, if you are the government, it may help determine what your banks and terrorists will do next.

When is the last time you had a brainstorming session where you asked the following questions?

  • What are we most afraid our competition will do to us?
  • Who is not a competitor now, but might be in the future?
  • What shift might happen in the buying habits of our customers that may make our product/service less appealing?
  • How can the sagging economy help our business?
  • What emerging products or services may make our business irrelevant?

The list of outside-in questions can be endless – and valuable.

In your next brainstorming session, try the following:

  • Brainstorm your own list of questions, building on mine above.
  • Determine which ones you want to tackle first.
  • Brainstorm, using a variety of creativity techniques, to identify “possible” outcomes.
  • For those which are deemed plausible, brainstorm a list of “triggers” for each. These are market conditions that tell you that the given scenario is moving from “possible” to “plausible.”
  • Set up a corporate “radar” system to help monitor external conditions. Have everything in place such that you can implement critical ideas when market conditions dictate.

This approach blends creativity with scenario-based planning. It helps you move from reactive solutions to proactive solutions. And in today’s volatile world, this might just be the key to your long-term survival.

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Part 1 – Three Innovation Distinctions

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

Last week I was with a group of extremely successful entrepreneurs in Las Vegas. I was a bit of an outlier as my background is mainly with large, multi-billion dollar businesses. Everyone else in the room came from the start-up world. Also, nearly everyone in the room worked exclusively with speakers and authors. Although I too am a speaker and an author, it was clear that my perspectives were a bit different than everyone else in the room. Or as one entrepreneur said, “Steve, you have distinctions in innovation that we don’t.”

So they asked me to share my point of view. What I shared were three simple distinctions on innovation.

  1. Challenges not Ideas

  2. Process not Events

  3. Diversity not Homogeneity

In today’s blog entry I will focus on the first point. Subsequent blog entries will address the last two points.

CHALLENGES, NOT IDEAS

Signal-to-Noise Ratio

One of the most important, yet under-considered measure in the innovation process is the signal-to-noise ratio. The signal-to-noise ratio is the ratio of a signal power to the noise power corrupting the signal. In layman’s terms, it is the ratio between what you want and what you don’t want. For example, in audio recordings, it is the ratio between the music and the background noise.

Organizations do not have a shortage of ideas. They have a shortage of good ideas that matter.

In innovation, the signal is comprised of the good ideas. The useful ideas. The ideas that can and will ultimately be implemented in such a way that they create value. The noise is made up of all of the other ideas. Useless suggestions. Solutions to problems that don’t matter. Ideas that will never come to fruition.

To increase innovation’s your signal to noise ratio the first thing you want to do is stop asking for ideas.

Drowning in Ideas

Suggestion boxes are cluttered with noise. The amount of time required to sift through the chaff to get to the wheat is huge. And even when you do find a good solution, the amount of effort required to rally to troops to implement the problem is huge.

The innovation team of a large retail bank implemented a major suggestion box program. They received thousands of ideas. Evaluators looked at every idea. In the end, none were implemented. In the aftermath of their efforts, they asked me for my observations. In hindsight, the submitted ideas could have been categorized into 3 groups:

  1. Duds: A large percentage of the ideas were clearly not worth pursuing. These ideas were not new, or were unlikely to show a positive ROI. However, even with these, there might have been a nugget of usefulness that was missed. However the energy to nurture these nuggets was probably not worth it.

  2. False Negatives: There were, from my perspective, many ideas that were indeed good. But for whatever reason, the evaluators dismissed them. Part of it had to do with biases of the evaluators. Sometimes it was due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the evaluators. And often, it was because the ideas were not fleshed out enough making it difficult for them to be properly judged.

  3. Good, But No Home: This was the most disconcerting category. These were ideas that were good ideas that the evaluators liked, but sadly they had no organizational home. As a result, the ideas withered on the vine and were never implemented. They never got the resources or funding necessary to move them to the next level.

The company’s innovation program lasted a total of 18 months. It was shut down and deemed a huge failure.

I have seen similar results in other organizations. One large company I know has a competition each year where employees submit new product ideas. The winner gets a large check and the company implements the best idea. I asked the person responsible for this program if it was viewed as a success. The answer was, “It was a PR success but a commercial failure.” The competition generated buzz in the media, but none of the products have yet to generate a positive ROI. Contrast this with their more focused efforts on creating or improving specific product lines. In nearly every case, these were commercial successes. Their idea-based programs did not generate good bottom-line results, while their challenge-based initiatives did.

The other issue with ideas is that there is no level of accountability. Because people tend to develop ideas on their own time, there are no time tracking methods that can keep tabs on how much energy is invested in idea generation. If you encourage ideas, I suspect that you are spending a lot more money on those initiatives than you could ever imagine. You might be able to measure the ROI of a winning idea. But I doubt you can determine the ROI of your overall ideas-based program. There is no way to know how much time was spent on the thousands of duds that never see the light of day.

The Power of Challenges

Contrast this with challenges. With challenges you assign owners, resources, evaluators, evaluation criteria, and funding up front. We know that the solution to a challenge will be relevant to the needs of the organization, so if a solution is found we know it will be valuable. Also, because of the nature of challenges, we have better tools to evaluate the amount of time spent on finding solutions. We can truly measure the ROI of each challenge and the overall challenge-based program.

Some of you may see a loophole in my logic. You might think, “Ok Steve, why not just post a challenge that asks for new ideas. This would seem to be a challenge-based approach. But of course all you are getting back are ideas.” This is true. And this is why it is important to discuss the construction of challenges.

The Goldilocks Principle

Good challenges must adhere to the Goldilocks Principle. That is they can’t be too big (broad, novel, abstract – e.g., asking for new ideas) or too small (overly specific). They must be “just right.” As Dwayne Spradlin said in his InnoCentive blog entry on the topic:

For example, the big problem is not the need for a new drug for a neglected disease, it is the elimination and/or minimization of the human suffering caused by the disease. The right questions might include: How do we limit transmission? How can we cost effectively produce treatments that comprehend market based economics to ensure a sustainable model? How do we distribute treatments in the developing world? Even these questions require further decomposition until we get to well formulated challenges (e.g., Can we get 5X more vaccine into the hands of those that need it in the context of real world economic, cultural, and political constraints in Sub-Saharan Africa?).

The key is good challenges. The right challenges.

A lot more could be said on this topic. But I will close with a quote from Albert Einstein, who in 1938 said:

“The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

P.S. The next blog entry in this series will be on process versus events.

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Is Collaboration or Competition Better for Innovation?

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

At the Open Innovation Summit last week, I had a lively conversation with a few individuals. The debate was about which model of open innovation is most effective – competitive or collaborative.

Kevin Boudreau and Karim Lakhani wrote an excellent article earlier this year in the MIT Sloane Management Review on this very topic. They looked at the merits of each form of open innovation. I encourage you to read the article as it addresses factors like intrinsic and extrinsic forms of motivation.

InnoCentive uses both forms of open innovation in different environments.

Their ‘marketplace’ model is competitive. That is, when posting challenges to their network of 185,000 experts, the solvers cannot see any of the other solutions. One reason for using this model is that the intellectual property needs to be protected.

This is in contrast to InnoCentive’s @Work product which is used to broadcast challenges internally to employees. With this product, solutions are provided in a collaborative fashion where solvers can see all responses. Given that only employees are participating, intellectual property issues are not as critical.

The competition/collaboration debate reminds me of the Miller Lite commercials – “Tastes Great…Less Filling.”

It also reminds me of the hand dryer versus paper towel debate (in terms of efficacy – not impact on the environment, which is a different debate).

After much experimentation, I have the long awaited answer: Use paper towels first followed by the hand dryer. The paper towel gets off most of the water so that the hand dryer can quickly evaporate the remaining liquid. The best solution for drying your hands is not one approach, but a combination of the two… in the right order.

I believe that the answer is the same for the competition versus the collaboration debate. It is not an either/or proposition.

From my experience, you start with competition followed by collaboration. Here’s why:

If you start with collaboration, you end up with “group think” very quickly. That is, as soon as the first idea is thrown out, it tends to influence the thinking of the other contributors. This narrows the set of ideas that are typically generated. Therefore, if you start with a competition, you get the broadest set of ideas possible.

Then, after selecting the winners of the competition, you take the best ideas and allow a collaborative community to flesh them out. This gives you get a much richer solution in the end.

This approach models the most effective way of running brainstorming sessions. It works best when you first have each person independently write down their own creative ideas. Only after everyone generates their own list does the group come together. Then they share ideas, select the best ones, and expand upon those best ideas collaboratively. Individual thought followed by group thought. Competition followed by collaboration.

IMHO, the same is holds true for open innovation.

Of course there are a variety of factors that may require the use of one approach over the other (e.g., intellectual property protection), but there are even ways to address that. But more on that in another blog post.

P.S. I’m serious about using paper towels first followed by the hand dryer…
P.P.S. If you are not aware, I am InnoCentive’s Chief Innovation Evangelist.

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Innovation Convergence

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

I never really thought much about toothpaste. But at the last two innovation conferences where I spoke, toothpaste was one of the hot topics.

At the FT Innovate conference in London, Unilever discussed their “Signal White Now” (and other brands) toothpaste. Instead of using harsh bleaches and abrasives, they borrowed an optical-effect technology from their laundry team. This toothpaste uses a blue pigment to make yellow teeth instantly appear whiter. This same ingredient is used to make white clothes look even whiter.

At the Open Innovation Summit in Orlando, GSK discussed how their “Aquafresh iso-active” toothpaste borrowed an idea from Edge shaving cream (now a division of Energizer Holdings, Inc). The toothpaste comes out like a gel, but foams in the mouth, much like the shaving cream. This formulation, according to the can I was given, removes 25% more bacteria than regular toothpaste – or 3x more according to the picture on the right.

This got me thinking. If toothpaste manufacturers can get ideas from shaving cream and laundry detergent, where else could they get ideas? Within 5 minutes, I thought up a few ideas of how to gain inspiration from other products:

  1. Pop Rocks: As a kid, I loved how Pop Rocks, the carbonated candy, exploded in your mouth. What if you added Pop Rock-like crystals to toothpaste? Not only would the toothpaste foam, it would fizz and explode. Maybe this would blast the plaque off your teeth. Of course, it might blast off your teeth like Pop Rocks reputedly did a few times.

  2. Shampoo: Shampoos are infused with vitamins and minerals to give your hair bounce and shine. What if you infused toothpaste with these ingredients? Or maybe you could add some homeopathic remedies – for those who believe in these alternative “medicines.” Sublingual administration (under the tongue) is a common and effective way of delivering drugs directly into the bloodstream.

  3. Conditioner: We use shampoo to clean and conditioner to protect. Maybe they can create a tooth conditioner; a special toothpaste that you use after your regular toothpaste. It could coat your teeth to prevent staining, bad breath, or split ends. Even better, they could borrow the “technology” used by shampoos like “Pearl” that combine shampoo and conditioner into one formulation.

  4. Moisturizers: Several moisturizers have an AM and a PM formulation. One is used in the morning and the other at night before you go to sleep. The AM formula of toothpaste could be infused with caffeine that would be absorbed into the bloodstream sublingually (see idea #2 above). And the PM formulation could be infused with melatonin to help you sleep better at night.

  5. Weight Loss Products: I’m not sure how this would work, but what if you could create a toothpaste that somehow made certain foods taste bad? This might cause you to reduce the amount of food you eat. Or maybe there is another way to make toothpaste a weight loss product. OK, this one is a stretch, but there might be a kernel of an idea there!

In a breakout at the Open Innovation Summit, an innovation leader from Johnson & Johnson, when asked to name the most important word for their business right now, answered “Convergence.” By this, he meant the sharing of ideas across business units and brands.

Ideas can indeed come from anywhere. And quite often, the best ideas will come from inside your own organization – just from a different product, function, division, or brand. Where will your next big idea come from?

If you have other toothpaste innovation ideas, I would love for you to post them as comments!

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What Will Shooting for Mars Get Us?

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

At the TEDx NASA conference, I had some amazing conversations with people in the “green room” while preparing to take the stage.

One individual had spent his entire career with NASA focused on travel to Mars. This was his life’s passion. But now that he has moved out of the space program into the private sector, he wonders if the money spent on space travel should be re-focused. He wonders if we should spend the money fixing problems here on earth.

We had a lively debate. One thing I suggested was that shooting for Mars MIGHT be the way to fix some of our issues here on earth.

From my experience, when trying to solve problems, we attempt to move from point A (where we are today) to point B (where we want to go). But often we fall short and end up at A’ (as depicted in the graphic on the left).

However, if we shoot for point C, even if we fall short, we might just hit point B.

You can debate the value of flying to the moon or looking for life on Mars. But it is hard to debate the incredible technologies that have been developed as part of the space program and how they are integrated into every day life.

There is a great webpage that lists a number of these spin-offs. One example spin-off from the Hubble telescope is the use of its Charge Coupled Device (CCD) chips for digital imaging breast biopsies. According to the website – “The resulting device images breast tissue more clearly and efficiently than other existing technologies. The CCD chips are so advanced that they can detect the minute differences between a malignant or benign tumor without the need for a surgical biopsy. This saves the patient weeks of recovery time and the cost for this procedure is hundreds of dollars vs. thousands for a surgical biopsy. With over 500,000 women needing biopsies a year the economic benefit, per year, is tremendous and it greatly reduces the pain, scarring, radiation exposure, time, and money associated with surgical biopsies.”

The site continues to make a compelling case for why space program investments are good investments.

Here’s the question for you and your innovation efforts…

How often do you shoot for “B” and miss the mark? What if you shot for “C,” fell short and hit “B” instead?

Instead of just going for what seems possible, shoot for the seemingly impossible. Try wild and crazy ideas.

I discussed the general concept of making the impossible possible in an entry called “The Magic of Innovation.” Be sure to check it out.

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