Coca Cola Vietnam Thinking Beyond Traditional Product Lifecycle
I came across this great video from Coca Cola Vietnam that is an example of how creative minds and the concept of Value Access can sometimes unlock more value from your existing products and possibly even create new products as a result.
The concept of the video starts with a simple question:
What if a Coca Cola bottle was never thrown away?
From there it goes on to show lots of different potential uses for a Coca Cola bottle, and possibly even new products that Coca Cola could sell.
I love this.
And hopefully it will inspire you to ask, what simple question could we ask that would unlock new sources of value from our existing products or services for customers?
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I’ve written many times about the role of inspiration in innovation, and there are lots of sources of both inspiration and innovation. For me, inspiration is so important to innovation that I put inspiration at the center of my Eight I’s of Innovation framework (traducido al español por Vanessa Lopez-De la O). While inspiration is of course important, there are seven other I’s in the Eight I’s framework that help to transform inspiration into income. I came across a video, on Yahoo! Sports of all places, that inspired me. It shows goats engaging in a very unusual behavior with a metal ribbon.
Here’s the video:
The video of the goats’ behavior made me not just stare, but also made me think about several things, including:
What a fun way to play king of the mountain
This is a great demonstration of the importance of flexibility, balance, and perseverance
All athletes need off-season training, maybe this is off-season training for goats
Just about anything will make me laugh (5 million views can’t be wrong)
How long before someone tries to turn a metal ribbon into the next Zumba like craze?
How long will it be before Cirque du Soleil creates a metal ribbon act?
Some might disagree with me, but I believe animals can be inventive, and we can see in the video the goats collaborating. But are the goats being entrepreneurial here?
Are humans the only animals that innovate?
What can we learn from the behavior, physics, or architecture of other animals that might inspire us to achieve success with our current innovation challenge?
Keep innovating!
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Last week GE and Quirky announced a new partnership where GE will make some of its library of patents available as part of Quirky’s new inspiration platform, allowing inventors to use some of its patents in their potentially novel consumer product invention ideas. This on its surface is a very interesting and logical open innovation partnership. Some people are talking about it as a crowdsourcing partnership, but it isn’t really because the work product is not well-defined and being sourced from multiple competing providers. No, this is an open innovation partnership.
Here is the Quirky and GE partnership announcement video:
It is very interesting to me that GE chose to partner with Quirky and not someone like Innocentive, NineSigma, Idea Connection or someone else. I’m curious what others think this indicates about the future of these firms. Personally, I think that this is something that Quirky is better equipped to make happen than these other firms, and that Innocentive and others still fill an important need using a completely different approach (challenge-driven innovation).
Whether or not GE creates any sizable new businesses from their participation in this partnership, I still think this is a brilliant marketing move by Beth and her team and it will be interesting to see whether any impactful inventions come from people leveraging GE’s patent portfolio.
Here is Quirky’s video announcing their inspiration platform (which they raised $68 million to help build):
There is one thing that bugs me a wee bit about Quirky. My tagline since 2006 has been “Making innovation insights accessible for the greater good” and it feels like they’ve swiped it to create theirs – “Making invention accessible.” Surely as creative people they could have invented their own tagline instead of swiping mine. 😉 (wink)
But, there is another idea of mine trapped in this announcement that I’d like to highlight and set free, and that is the idea that innovation is not just about ideas, but that other factors are equally important – including inspiration, investigation, and iteration. These are captured in my incredibly popular Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation framework.
Be sure and follow this article link to the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation if you missed the link above, or if you’re not clicking away to learn more, here is a quick list of the eight stages:
Inspiration
Investigation
Ideation
Iteration
Identification
Implementation
Illumination
Installation
Personally I don’t think their platform appears to go far enough to deliver inspiration or to empower investigation, and as a software and internet guy I would be happy to help Quirky and GE strengthen the solution if they’re interested in making this platform more successful.
Will any successful innovations come out of this GE and Quirky partnership?
I’d love to hear what you think.
Image credits: GE, Quirky
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A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an innovation speaker at an event, I noticed a large building by the side of the freeway advertising Indoor Sky Diving. The sign peaked my curiosity to investigate what indoor sky diving could possibly mean and so I set up a visit with iFly Seattle co-founder Lysa Adams.
My visit surfaced three key innovation-related concepts I would like to discuss:
Challenging Orthodoxies
Changing Perspectives
Tunnel Vision
1. Challenging Orthodoxies
Rowan and I talk a lot here on Innovation Excellence about how challenging orthodoxies is one way to identify insights to drive innovation efforts, and it made me wonder:
Have they successfully challenged the skydiving orthodoxies that you need the following to experience the thrill of skydiving or ‘flying’?
To jump out of an airplane
To carry and deploy a parachute
To learn several parachuting skills before progressing to sky diving
What if you could experience experience sky diving without the parachute and the airplane and the training?
Well, after my visit it was clear that iFly and SkyVenture have successfully challenged these orthodoxies with the indoor flying centers they’ve built here in Seattle and 22 other locations around the world including Hollywood, Dubai, and Singapore.
The facility itself seemed to be well-designed, recycling the air through two fan-driven intersecting circles of air that are accelerated from about 30mph through the basement up to 100-160 mph through the chamber up and back around again. Integrated into the space around the necessary apparatus are meeting rooms for corporate team-building events and party rooms for private functions. Organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Boeing, and the military have used the facility. It’s a pretty a cool facility and it was even a fair amount of fun just to watch others fly from the integrated viewing area.
So what is indoor skydiving and how can you experience the thrill of skydiving and ‘flying’ without the plane or the parachute? Well here is a video that shows an amateur learning the basic skills in their first session:
In a vertical wind tunnel people are able to fly in any of the four different skydiving positions – stomach, back, sitting, and head down (after mastering the previous one) – supported by wind speeds typically of 100 miles per hour or higher (an indoor hurricane). The vertical wind tunnel at iFly Seattle is state of the art, allowing wind speeds of up to 160 miles per hour.
I had the opportunity to learn how to fly and try it out for a couple of minutes, and I looked pretty much like the novices in the video above. I was flying successfully by my second minute, floating up beyond the reach of the instructor temporarily, and never felt any of the fear I might have felt if I had done my ‘flying’ by jumping out of an airplane. It was an amazing experience, and I could see how it could be very addictive.
So other than challenging orthodoxies, what does any of this have to do with innovation?
2. Changing Perspectives
Innovation often comes from looking at things from a different perspective, or from observing something potentially valuable to your target customers in another context that you can adapt and bring to them as a new solution offering.
This change in perspective can come from using creativity tools like Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ or other tools like mind mapping, brainstorming, brainwriting, SCAMPER, SIT, or from building and tapping into a Global Sensing Network.
Or it can come from physically changing your orientation. In the case of sky diving, sometimes sky diving teams have to get down on their bellies on wheelie boards on the concrete to show each other the tricks they plan to do in the air or in the vertical wind tunnel. It’s hard for the brain to imagine in a vertical orientation what is going to take place in a horizontal orientation, and this simple physical shift makes all the difference.
If it doesn’t come natural to our brains to imagine the horizontal from the vertical, imagine the trouble our brains have imagining different business contexts without being immersed in them. We often have to go see the other context for ourselves as a result, but a Global Sensing Network can help avoid this need to some extent. But this requirement to see things for ourselves highlights something very important. Because changing perspectives presents a challenge for our human brains, it presents an opportunity for us to work to achieve competitive separation.
Imagine the competitive advantage your organization could build over the other organizations in your context if you could build up your perception shifting muscles to recognize the relevant challenges and opportunities in other geographies and contexts faster than the competition?
3. Tunnel Vision
Do you remember what is like the first time you learned to drive a car? Do you remember how much you had to focus on every little detail from how hard you were pushing the accelerator to how fast you were moving the steering wheel left or right? But how much attention do you pay to these things now?
It came to me as I was staring at the vertical wind tunnel and talking with Lysa Adams about the challenges that beginners have when they learn to jump out of a plane and deploy a parachute, that when it comes to the human brain we have tunnel vision while learning a new skill. This tunnel vision, caused by our lack of experience, causes us to focus on a very small subset of parameters in the environment and makes it impossible for us to notice a lot of the other things going on around us or to focus our attention more broadly.
When it comes to innovation, most organizations suffer from innovation tunnel vision because as they look to involve more employees in their innovation efforts, they don’t give their employees the opportunity to learn and practice new innovation skills. Instead in many organizations we expect employees to just be innovative.
When it comes to creativity skills that tap into our right brain capacity, it is important to remember that as we master right brain skills they move to the left brain. And, when your left brain is occupied, then the right brain can go into a more creative mode. This is why you have many of your most creative ideas in the shower, or while you are driving, etc.
When the left brain is occupied it is less likely to intervene and criticize the ideas your right brain comes up with while they are embryonic and partially formed and kill them before you develop them further. When the left brain is not jumping in and trying to determine whether the ideas are logical or not, the right brain can focus on pure creativity.
This is why it is so important to create things like a common language of innovation, a shared innovation vision/strategy/goals, and to have a structured innovation process. If these things are all very clearly understood across the organization, then your innovation tunnel vision opens up a bit wider to allow you to identify more relevant insights and come up with better ideas. But you can’t stop there. If you want to engage all employees in innovation in your organization (or even a subset), and you want to open up the innovation tunnel vision in your organization even wider, then you must provide innovation training to every employee in the organization (or your chosen subset).
The faster you can get your employees to a level of comfort with your innovation language, vision/strategy/goals, process, and tools, the sooner they will be driving innovation with their knees, eating a Big Mac, and changing your innovation soundtrack – all with the windows down letting in new stimulus and fresh air into your innovation efforts.
Every organization has innovation tunnel vision, the question is how wide or narrow your field of vision is and how much you’re doing to pry the blinders farther apart.
Conclusion
We all are innovative in our own way, which is why I created the Nine Innovation Roles. But at the same time, we all have a certain level of innovation capacity, and if we develop that capacity we can achieve much more. If you want to get better at innovation as an individual or as an organization, you must learn new skills and you must practice them. Otherwise you will be an innovation belly flier forever. Thanks to Darren (my instructor at iFly Seattle – who used to be involved with Cirque du Soleil) and to Lysa Adams I was able to fly for the first time, but if I want to progress to back flying or sit flying on the way to head down flying and doing tricks, I must practice – in the same way that you must practice innovation in your organization. To conclude, I’ll leave you with this video of one of the instructors showing off and some team flying:
If you ever get the chance to try out indoor skydiving or ‘flying’, I highly recommend it as an amazing, fun experience. The cost runs about $60 for some basic instruction and a couple of instructor monitored flights (without the whole parachute or jumping out of the plane part). Happy innovating (or flying)!
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When it comes to education, we should adopt Nike’s famous motto and ‘Just Do It’.
In the United States (and probably many other countries around the world), it has become a popular pastime to complain about the state of the public schools. People complain about school funding, teacher performance, curriculum, class sizes, and more things than I care to remember right now.
And while the Gates Foundation and many other great organizations are trying to come up with new ways to make education delivery and administration better, the fact remains that education funding is likely to get worse (not better) and any reform is likely to take a long time to implement in the face of stiff resistance.
So what are parents to do?
Well, in my interview with Seth Godin at the World Innovation Forum (2010), he suggested that parents are going to have to take increasing responsibility for educating their own children at home AFTER they get home from school. The interview is one of many innovation interviews I’ve done, and is below for your reference:
But, I’ve been thinking lately that while parents may be interested in supplementing the education their children receive at school in order to help them succeed in the innovation economy (a topic for another day), they may NOT possess the knowledge, skills, abilities (or maybe even the desire) to succeed at this admirable task.
I have another idea.
It is time for us as parents and community members to stop praying for education reform, and instead take action. I’ve given you the WHY, now let’s look at the WHO, WHAT, and WHERE.
The WHO
You! Many people have knowledge and skills that they can share with kids. Skills and knowledge that will help prepare the next generation for the realities of a workplace that demands more flexible thinking, creativity, problem solving, and entrepreneurial skills.
The WHAT
Let’s face facts. Today’s schools are designed to mass-produce trivia experts and basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic (and maybe some history, science, and other important subjects).
But, to succeed in the innovation economy, the next generation is going to need to be proficient in at least these ten things:
Creativity
Lateral Thinking
Problem Solving
Innovation (of course!)
Interpersonal Skills
Collaboration
Negotiation
Partnerships
Entrepreneurship
And much, much more…
The WHERE
Our workplaces and our schools may be the most common places for citizens in our societies to congregate, but there is another place where we could come together to supplement our childrens’ educations…
Congregations: (a definition)
1. The act of assembling.
2. A body of assembled people or things; a gathering.
Now, the word is often used in a religious context, but not all people are religious (or even belong to a religious congregation). But, we have buildings all over the world that are designed for people to come together to study or pray together – or that belong to the government and can be used by the general public. We can use these buildings as gathering places to educate our children for the innovation economy.
Conclusion
We need to come together as societies and communities and fill the gaps in our educational systems that are unlikely to go away any time soon. We need to stop waiting for others to fix the problems and instead do what we can as individuals by coming together to solve this key challenge for continued prosperity. We must do this now.
Who’s with me?
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In support of my crowdfunding project over on IndieGoGo I am offering an incredible deal to the first TEN (10) individuals to grab this perk:
In exchange for each $500 investment, the first TEN (10) people anywhere in the world will get:
One of only TEN (10) spots in an online seminar where I will personally train you on how to facilitate a Nine Innovation Roles workshop or public seminar
A share of any Nine Innovation Roles Workshop leads that I can’t fulfill myself
A Nine Innovation Roles Seminar Pack – which includes TEN (10) Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tools to use with your first set of workshop participants (a $199.99 value)
This is a great opportunity to add the Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop to your roster of innovation services that you offer to clients. You should be able to charge between $2,000-$5,000 + expenses for each of the sessions you facilitate depending on the length and amount of custom content, so you should recoup your $500 investment after running your first workshop or public seminar.
The Nine Innovation Roles diagnostic workshop will create a fun, interactive experience for innovation teams or organizations to use to help people better understand what roles they fill on innovation projects, why the team’s or organization’s innovation efforts are failing, and how they can together improve the innovation performance of their teams or organization.
So, grab this Amazing Innovation Keynote and Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Deal and help your innovation teams be more successful in the future. Don’t wait. Be one of only TEN (10) people worldwide to get this perk, or pre-order the seminar kit and run run workshops or seminars on your own.
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It’s a wedding proposal from an actor in my hometown to his now bride to be, and is a great example of re-imagining a traditional activity in our society – the marriage proposal.
The things I love about it are not the actual creative execution but the principles exemplified by the experience:
If you have a great product or service, people will be willing to help you sell it
If it’s really good, they may go out of their way to help you sell it – or even do so without asking your permission
Oregon fosters creativity 😉
Focus on more than the transaction – Make magic!
Skills can from other contexts can be valuable to the current challenge
Have fun with everything you do and you’ll have better results 🙂
Don’t just ask people to help, make it fun to help
Give people something to talk about and feel the love spread 🙂
Even if your customers or community do the sales pitch – YOU’VE GOT TO CLOSE
What magic are you making?
Are there boring transactional parts of your business that could use a little love and magic?
Don’t be afraid to invest in reducing the friction in your adoption process. You’ll improve the value access performance in your innovation equation:
Innovation Success (or even business success)
= Value Creation
+ Value Access
+ Value Translation
I came across Yougme Moon’s “Anti-Creativity Checklist” over at the Harvard Business Review after a tweet from @lindegaard and it got me thinking…
In order to build a culture capable of encouraging innovation or creativity (or both), you must first do an inventory of the psychology and mental models in play in your organization.
One great way to do this would be to build an ‘anti-innovation checklist’ or an ‘anti-creativity checklist’. If you start watching the vocabulary that people use in meetings where ideas are being discussed, the behavior of senior leadership as it relates to these areas, and most importantly – how people respond – you’ll get a better sense of where your organizational challenges lie with respect to innovation and creativity. Wouldn’t that make such an exercise of great value to an organization?
Anyways, as an example, I’ve pulled out the fourteen items on Yougme Moon’s checklist from the video above, which you may just want to watch:
Play it safe. Listen to that inner voice.
Know your limitations. Don’t be afraid to pigeonhole yourself.
Remind yourself: It’s just a job.
Show you’re the smartest guy in the room. Make skepticism your middle name.
Be the tough guy. Demand to see the data.
Respect history. Always give the past the benefit of the doubt.
Stop the madness before it can get started. Crush early-stage ideas with your business savvy.
Been there, done that. Use experience as weapon.
Keep your eyes closed. Your mind too.
Assume there is no problem.
Underestimate your customers.
Be a mentor. Give sound advice to the people who work for you.
Be suspicious of the “creatives” in your organization.
When all else fails, act like a grown-up.
What is on your “anti-innovation checklist” or your “anti-creativity checklist”?
Please feel free to share yours in the comments below.
Not much has changed since 2010 when on Blogging Innovation (which has now become Innovation Excellence) we asked the following question as part of a series of Innovation Perspectives:
What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?‘.
Here was my response:
When I first saw this topic I wanted to write about education innovation, but I resisted when a couple of the contributing authors chose this topic. I wrote about the publishing industry instead, but then in 2009 I came across a Phil McKinney article and had the opportunity to meet Sir Ken Robinson then too, and my passions for an education revolution were stirred.
We sit at the nexus of amazing new education technology capabilities, the globalization of work, and an incredible transformation in the needs of employers. The path forward is not the same as the road behind, but our education system is proceeding as if it were.
“We need our children to be Masters of Mystery and Einsteins of Insight.”
– Braden Kelley
Instead of pursuing the current education mantra of more, better, faster, we need to instead rethink how we educate our children because we need to prepare them for a different world. A world in which flexibility, adaptibility, creativity, and problem solving will be prized ahead of the deep technical knowledge that is fast becoming a commodity and easily available.
I’ve said here before that the keys to business success are insight and execution. We are ending an era of incredible business focus on execution excellence and are entering an era of an increasing business focus on insight. Excellent execution will always be valued and required, but more and more components of this execution are shifting from the developed world to the lower-wage developing world.
We are currently in a race to the middle when it comes to standard of living as the developing countries like China, India, Brazil and others climb up the pyramid and developed countries like the United States, Italy, Greece and others slide down. Those developing countries wanting to stay near the top of the flattening standard of living pyramid will have to re-tool their education systems to to prepare their populations to grab as big a share as possible of the higher-wage insight-driven jobs.
Here is an interesting chart from a Newsweek-Intel Study reformatted by Phil McKinney:
Looking at the differences in perspectives between the American and Chinese respondents in the research, I came to two possible conclusions:
I am Chinese
The United States (and many other developed countries) are headed in the wrong direction and better change course on education fast
You may think that my views on education are too business-focused, but look, even the arts are being globalized (look at Cirque du Soleil).
I believe that we underestimate children’s ability to understand the real world and I think that the education system and the business world need each other more than they realize. We need to re-imagine our public-private partnerships and expectations when it comes to education, and we need to start educating today’s young kids for tomorrow’s world.
The fact is that we are pushing the limits of taking today’s understanding of science to improve productivity an standard of living. Going forward we will need to break through currently held physical and natural limits and an expanded understanding of our physical and natural worlds. This will require a new generation of scientists and workers who can synthesize approaches from different cultures and disciplines, that are masters of creative approaches to problem solving, and that have the entrepreneurial spirit to breakthrough perceived barriers. Are these the kind of students we’re educating?
What kind of students is your country educating?
As an added bonus, if you haven’t seen it, I encourage to check out Sir Ken Robinson’s video on “Creativity versus Literacy” here:
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One of the best Twitter names that I’ve come across in the past few years is @ShowerThinker – almost as cool as mine – @innovate. It’s an account for an inventor that makes post-it notes for the shower called Aqua Notes.
This Twitter name captures a well-understood fact – that a lot of great ideas (and ultimately innovations) come to us not from brainstorming, but from the connection to our subconscious that occurs in the shower (or pretty much anywhere else in the bathroom). If so many great ideas come to us when our active mind is elsewhere, then why is such little attention paid to this source of innovation.
A lot has been written about creativity and the brain, left brain vs. right brain thinking, and how often the brain just needs to get out of its own way for creativity to occur as there is no single creative area of the brain.
In my own cuarto de bano moment, I came up with this contrasting phrase to help us frame the conversation – Instinctual Innovation versus Intellectual Innovation.
Intellectual Innovation begins with active efforts to capture and develop ideas using techniques such as brainstorming, greenhousing, etc.
Instinctual Innovation springs forth from a collection of sometimes un-connected information that collects in an individuals brain. Often ideas that form the basis for instinctual innovation rattle around as part of a collection of problems in search of solutions for a long time before emerging.
I’ve created this table to lay out some of the differences:
Innovation has garnered a lot of attention in the press over the past couple of years, and many executives have the word rolling off their tongues quite easily now. In some organizations this has translated into employees being trained to be better intellectual innovators, or into creativity consultants helping stimulate the organization’s intellectual innovation for a particular project.
But much less attention is being paid to instinctual innovation. To build sustainable instinctual innovation you have to train members of your organization to be business innovators. You also need to provide members with a set of clear and actionable innovation goals along with a simple visual framework to decipher them. And, most importantly you have to invest in the organizational change necessary to create a culture of continuous innovation.
Then, and only then, will instinctual innovation be best able to emerge from any part of the organization on its own timeline and integrate with the intellectual innovation that is also going on at the same time.
Intellectual innovation can help drive the short-term growth of an organization. But, when combined with instinctual innovation, the two together can create an innovation engine to power the organization now and into the future.
What do you think?
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What makes you stop and stare?
A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an 
It came to me as I was staring at the vertical wind tunnel and talking with Lysa Adams about the challenges that beginners have when they learn to jump out of a plane and deploy a parachute, that when it comes to the human brain we have tunnel vision while learning a new skill. This tunnel vision, caused by our lack of experience, causes us to focus on a very small subset of parameters in the environment and makes it impossible for us to notice a lot of the other things going on around us or to focus our attention more broadly.
When it comes to education, we should adopt Nike’s famous motto and ‘Just Do It’.
Here was my response:
