Category Archives: Finance

Where is your Innovation Friction?

Innovation Perspectives - Where is your Innovation Friction? How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?

When it comes to creating an innovation culture, often people make it far too complicated. If you’re part of the senior leadership team and you’re serious about innovation then your job is simple – reduce friction.

If you’re serious about innovation and you’re not a senior leader, then your job is to do what you can to convince senior leadership that innovation is important. Then, gently help your execs see the areas of greatest friction in your organization so they can do something about it.

When it comes to creating a culture of innovation, the most frequently cited area of friction in organizations is the acquisition of resources for innovation projects (the infamous time and money). Senior leaders serious about innovation must eliminate the friction that makes it difficult for financial and personnel resources to move across the organization to the innovation projects that need them (amongst other things).

But this particular impediment is just a part of a much larger barrier to innovation – the lack of an innovation strategy. When senior leadership commits to innovation and sets a strong and clear innovation strategy then policies and processes get changed and resources move.

A couple of years ago I ran a poll on LinkedIn asking people to identify their organization’s biggest barrier to entry. 566 people responded and 58% of respondents identified either the absence of an innovation strategy or the psychology of the organization as the biggest barrier. ‘Organizational psychology’ came out on top with 32% of the vote, with ‘Absence of an innovation strategy’ a close second (26%). Other choices in the poll included – ‘Organizational structure’, ‘Information sharing’, and ‘Level of trust and respect’.

(poll results timed out on LinkedIn)

A second major area of innovation friction is the movement of information. Too often there is information in disparate parts of our organizations that remains separated and unknown to the people who need it. Organizations that reduce the friction holding back the free flow of relevant information to where it is needed will experience a quantum leap in not only their product or service development opportunities, but in many other parts of their organization including sales, marketing, and operations.

So, what are the areas of friction that are holding your organization back from reaching its full innovation potential?

What are the barriers to innovation that have risen in your organization as you struggle to maintain a healthy balance between your exploration and exploitation opportunities?

I’ve explored the idea of barriers to innovation further in my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons. It’s been called “accessible and comprehensive” and companies have been acquiring it in bulk to both identify and knock down barriers to innovation, but also to build a common language of innovation.

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Innovation Costs of Reducing the Flow of Immigrants and Travelers to USA

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Innovation Costs of Reducing the Flow of Immigrants and Travelers to USA

September 11th was a traumatic event for the psychology of the nation but also for its innovation capacity. After 9/11 the United States started admitting fewer highly skilled immigrants, invited fewer students to come study here, and companies and consumers cut back on their travel budgets.

These factors, along with many others, combined to reduce the amount of face to face collaboration and created new innovation headwinds for the country.

In 2001, Michael Porter of Harvard Business School published a report ranking the United States as #1 in terms of innovative capacity. By 2009, the Economist Intelligence Unit had dropped the United States in its innovation rankings from #3 between 2002 – 2006 to #4 between 2004 – 2008. The most recent Global Innovation Index has the United States falling from #1 in 2009 to #7 in 2011 — behind Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland, and Denmark.

If you’re the United States, not being #1 anymore is a definite concern. Innovation drives job creation, and any decrease in the pace of domestic innovation will ultimately lead to lower economic growth. As the United States slides down the innovation rankings, restrictive immigration policies suddenly look less smart.

The number of foreign student visas increased by a third during the 90s, peaking in 2001 at 293,357 before dropping post-9/11 by 20 percent nearly overnight. It took five years before foreign student visa numbers recovered to 2001 levels. Last year, 331,208 foreign student visas were issued.

But a drop-off in highly skilled immigration does not account for the entire drop in America’s innovation leadership. Another headwind that hit post-9/11 was the drop-off in travel in America. In August 2001, 65.4 million airline passengers traveled to the country. It took three years for passenger growth to resume.

Travel — both corporate and leisure — is important to innovation for three main reasons:

People see and experience things that spark new ideas

Face-to-face meetings deepen human connection and improve productivity and collaboration.

Innovation partnerships and acquisitions are often made in-person.

The United States is at an innovation crossroads. We must commit to attracting more innovators to this country, and to traveling abroad more. Not doing so is guaranteed to exacerbate America’s slide from innovation leader to laggard.

This article first appeared on The Atlantic before drifting into the archive

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Business Model Innovation?

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Business Model Innovation?

Nearly five years ago I wrote this article, but I think it is worth dredging it up out of the archives because there is such misunderstanding out there about what business model innovation is. This article highlights some of the misconceptions people have about what business model innovation truly is and looks quickly at a couple of more appropriate examples of business model innovation. But of course I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, including your favorite business model innovation examples.

Here’s the article from 2007:

I came across an article on BusinessWeek.com that I just have to write about because it asserts that GM has achieved a business model innovation by shunting its retiree medical obligations onto the Union (and getting away with only contributing 70% of the outstanding obligations to the fund).

This is not a business model innovation, but purely a negotiation outcome and nothing that will give GM any sustainable competitive advantage. Ford and Chrysler will end up doing the same thing and the parity of competition amongst US manufacturers will be restored. A business model innovation is Southwest Airlines establishing a new airline focused on providing low fare point to point air travel instead of creating another airline based on a hub and spoke model, or Saturn selling their cars for a fixed price, not GM pushing obligations off their balance sheet.

GM is not losing in the automobile industry because of health care costs for retirees. They are losing because their operations result in cars that less and less people want to buy. GM needs to stop complaining about peripheral issues and trying to be like Toyota and instead focus on how they can be better than Toyota.

When workers come back on the job, nothing will have changed in their business, the business of designing, manufacturing and selling cars. If anything the workers are going to come back to work feeling like they have just given even more away to the corporation, just so that the CEO’s balance sheet look better. This is not a business model innovation. The Big Three will not avoid the inevitable by simply squeezing their union workforce, they need to design and manufacture better cars. This deal with the unions may slow the inevitable, but not avoid it. Toyota is passing GM, the Korean manufacturers are quickly improving their quality, and the Chinese will begin entering the US market in the next few years. One of the Big Three will go out of business in the next ten years. The real question is which one?

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4 Days to Innovate

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The clock is ticking on the congressional “supercommittee” – a panel comprised of six Republicans and six Democrats charged with issuing a plan to balance the nation’s budget. The bipartisan gathering has only four days until their deadline to submit such a plan. But how well can they, or anyone, innovate while the clock is ticking?