GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

This is the sixth of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘What is the role of social media in innovation? (Either inside or outside the organization)’. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Paul Hobcraft

I am not alone I am sure but I suffer from Social Media Return Dilemma. There I’ve said it, it is out in the open, “I suffer from SMRD”.

To be honest I am struggling on social media in innovation, struggling to get my head around it for my business, for me. It often seems overwhelming, do you feel the same?

I can see daily the amazing power that social networking can provide, it is certainly eating into my day more and more. Is this a good thing or bad? The time issue has to increasingly managed, and as yet I don’t have a clear enough strategy for it or where to direct my social media energy. I am still learning, experimenting through a combination of writing blogs, contributing to others, updating my connections as well as my twittering away occasionally, the regular freshening up of my web site but to what end I still feel nags away at me?

I focus 100% on innovation- I research, I advise, I coach, I consult. Presently I work as an independent but find this has its marketing difficulties so I need a greater exposure and through social media I feel I can achieve this. It can lead to a clearer awareness of what I stand for and what I can offer, and to date, I can see solid progress. Building does take time and time is a precious commodity so I try to balance this accordingly. The chicken and egg becomes part of this social media return dilemma.

For me I certainly want to contribute to others, to provide back some of my experiences and significant knowledge gained in working across different aspects of innovation as many people struggle with this daily. The one problem is I want to get paid for this and I keep wondering how social media can give me that monetary return At present it seems more a constant outpouring and I have not figured out yet the return for this. The more traditional channels to market still yield more but I think, no I believe this is changing but it is early days. I’ve just got to figure out my SMRD model better to make this happen more.

The question I am told to constantly ask myself is where is my target audience? I definitely think Linkedin holds part of the key to this as the quality of connections that work in the innovation space that are connecting on this social platform holds real promise. Connecting is one thing, engaging is another! Are they really connecting and more importantly listening to all this advice being offered? Are we forming deeper relationships from this or just fleeting ones? Am I still a click away from the recycle bin?

So I’m asking myself many open ended questions on the contribution and impact that social media is having on my business life. I learnt many things, I’m moving towards a better social media strategy.

What I’ve learnt:

1. Social media is not a ‘fad’; it is becoming deeply embedded in my daily life.
2. I’m engaging across multiple groups to contribute and to learn from others
3. I am getting a ‘pulse’ on innovation that shapes my thinking
4. So far I have been dealing with social media on my terms but struggling to extract the value I need to build this fully into my business.
5. Broadcasts don’t work, self promotion is not welcome and there is emerging a clear accepted social behaviour depending on the social media. I’ve avoided these pitfalls and pleased that I have, others seem not to be as socially aware.

Where I’m still learning:

1. I need to select and settle on the social media applications that can fully support my strategic development priorities of building a thriving innovation knowledge practice.
2. I certainly feel I need more professional guidance to this whole area to make more sense of it as they seem to be fragmenting even more and experimenting just for the sake of it is tougher for small organizations to do.
3. Getting recognition of the expertise and knowledge that resides ‘within’ my business is still hard to achieve through the tools and applications. Knowledge platforms that work like Google but align to knowledge depth not breadth need to be developed.
4. The time that this engaging in social exchange is taking out of my day needs to be capped.
5. These “online exchanges” are running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year…even on holidays! You choose when you want to get involved yes, but is this just not leading us into an even bigger tread mill of never ending activity?

What I still question to find the right answers to on four topical points:

1. That links are the Key to Success! It goes beyond that, it is to do with engagement, sustainable engagement and links are just not enough.
2. There are out there amazing building opportunities that wait. You can’t engage in social media half-heartily, it has to be full on!
3. Opening up new markets for your business will happen. Yes but I think over time, a time you have to put in to make this happen and it is often random, fickle and fleeting and must be the real struggle within the corporations at present, seeing a return on investment. Can we afford to just’ go with the flow’ on this?
4. Social media can provide instant market research abilities and feedback. The larger you are, the more demanding this will be. The more opinionated you are the more popular you seem to be but that has its downsides. The fickleness of crowds. The instant reaction may not reflect the long term value.

So, I struggle on social media and its role in innovation. When you suffer from SMRD like I do, they do tell me that part of the cure is to talk about your own troubles. A trouble shared…

You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles from the different contributing authors on ‘How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?’ by clicking the link in this sentence.

Paul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities.

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

This is the fifth of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?‘. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Paul Hobcraft

When you look at the question posed it is clear to me the key word here is ‘desperate’. What or whom is desperate for innovation? After such a seismic shift that has taken place in the recent period causing the global recession there is a really good case for many products, sectors or industries as all in need of fresh innovation but are they desperate? Most of us would immediately think of the automotive industry, the insurance sector, the banking and the home ownership sectors as ‘primed’ for desperate measures or more radical innovation thinking but after all the considerable bail-outs by public finance this seems not to have happened? So are they ‘desperate’ or just apathetic to making the changes felt necessary for returning to sustaining futures? Clearly time will tell on how the final consumer judges the ‘revised’ offerings from these sectors, in new products or services. Also time will tell if we see emerging different models to challenge existing players. It is then they become desperate because they don’t seem to feel they are in that situation today, although many, including me, might disagree.

As Clayton Christensen outlines in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, Harvard Business School Press, it is failure of companies to confront certain types of market and technological change, even what we thought were well run companies that surprise us when they do fail. When do they begin to fail, I think it is when they are not applicable to the future? Are we ready to ditch these sectors or the products, many bailed out, as we know them today? I’m not sure we are…yet.

We have lived through some exciting times for growth in the “Noughties”, the first ten years of this century, and as we enter the “Teenies” we do not seem to be that well equipped as we would have liked to be, to tackle the wholesale changes society is expecting. Our past models are not sustaining us to take us forward. We have made this ‘rod for our own backs’ by producing thousands of competent managers, risk-adverse not risk-taking, with our business leaders continually look over their shoulders or in the rear view mirror who have become short term in most of their actions. Governments still take ‘adversarial’ positions. The end result of much of the activities of the past decade have led us to building a failure framework, one more sustaining old models and not ones that shift us truly up a gear or two into a new age of prosperity.

So I would argue we are in a desperate situation, but on a broader front than products and sectors alone. What I believe that need tackling through innovation is at a higher level, at the society level and this is where there is a truly ‘desperate’ need for fresh innovative thinking to sow the seeds of real, lasting change? Products and sector change comes as a result of this shift of focus to the higher level as it forms the ‘call to action’ framework.

I believe it is through social innovation we see the greatest desperation for change. We are faced with enormous challenges like aging populations, climate change, migration, social divides, chronic diseases, growing behavioral problems, diversity challenges in cities and countries, transitions into adulthood, addition, crime and punishment, learning disabilities, education inequality, conflicts and mutual resentment, rising long-term health related conditions, the effects of affluence and a greater search for happiness and community belonging. These are the truly ‘desperate’ areas of innovation need that should hold our attention.

It is in these fields that many of our existing models simply do not work well enough. We try to apply business models whereas we need to become more flexible, more imaginative and we need to think more deeply upon the factors that would allow innovation to be successful here.

These challenges have very different patterns of innovation; they are likely to have different motives, different mixes of commitment (voluntary, political and philanthropic) that call for even more complex relationships, different patterns of growth, often more resilient. Judging success will not be based on market share or scale but on a more contained need to overcome with imaginative solutions. We need to plan out different National Social Innovation solutions to tackle these immensely complex problems that only get worse without us turning our creative, innovative thinking upon. These are our pressing, more desperate, frontiers to tackle.

This social innovation space is the new frontier between civil society, government and business to find ways to solve common problems that require real innovation solutions. The positive news is that we are learning fast about the power of networks, different communication mediums and different processes to see some emerging solutions that must now shift from personal experimentation to community engagement ones . It is the power of combining the different players around these social issues and to find a new set of tools, new skills and new kinds of organizations that will occupy us in the years ahead.

Innovation is no more the ‘nice to have’ experiment it needs deeper understanding, a forward thinking for concept forming and then working them back to the issues on hand and applying novel solutions in many cases. By exploring the power of new combinations, using technology and having better social market understanding will give us a greater appreciation of the different aspects of innovation and how they can contribute so each player understands and does play their part, so we can begin to address these more pressing social innovation challenges that are certainly ‘desperate’ to resolve in the years ahead.

Perhaps as we enter the “Teenies” it is the right time; the time we start to grow up and understand what innovation can provide to us all so as to tackle those pressing social ills that need new thought and solutions.

You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles from the different contributing authors on ‘What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?‘ by clicking the link in this sentence.

Paul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities.

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

This is the ninth of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?’. Now, here is Paul Hobcraft’s perspective:

by Paul Hobcraft

Why do so many of us get fixated on new technologies, discoveries, inventions, the process, the structures, even the art of creativity within innovation? Certainly each of these have their important contributing part to play in building a coherency for innovation, but the ingredient that tops them all and often forgotten or assigned as the afterthought is people. People making innovation work, all the rest are the enablers to help them.

The Australian Business Foundation published a report earlier this year- the Hidden Human Dimensions of Innovation (https://www.abfoundation.com.au/research_knowledge) and in part of a speech given by its Chief Executive, Narelle Kennedy at an Innovation 2009 conference where she spoke of this people factor. Let me quote as her comments are really powerful and help encourage people to conceive that innovation is more of a social process first, and not a technical one so often a misconception of many.

• “People are innovation’s active ingredient, the catalyst that turns novelty into real benefits for economies and communities. Benefits like jobs, wealth, productivity and life-changing progress”
• “The role of people in innovation is a fact that remains hidden in plain sight. It is axiomatic – everyone says it and believes it, but few understand anything at all about the human factors in innovation”
• “It is the pivotal role of people as innovation carriers – their networks, collaborations, knowledge flows, interactions and tacit knowledge – and how innovation itself is a potent competitive force that drives productivity”
• “People who innovate together capitalise on their tacit knowledge and informal know-how and on past strategic investments to “navigate the white-water risks” of innovation more successfully than their competitors.”
• “It is tacit knowledge, accumulated experience and learning by doing result in a highly valuable intangible asset that boosts the innovation odds”
• “(It is people who) form a community of practice with a clear intangible asset value in the form of intellectual capital and human capital”
• “(People rely) on long term and sustained investments in strategic capacity-building and continuity of interpersonal innovation networks and gains in value by sharing and usage”.

Where I do feel Narelle Kennedy nicely sums up is a much needed re-think for innovation for it to really work and be valued for what it can truly offer comes from this statement:

“drawing on knowledge and creativity to add value in products and processes is an expansive view of innovation – new things or ways of working; knowledge and creativity; add value; products and processes – it is a dynamic view“

Everything else today that does not place people in the centre of the innovation equation offers a dangerous misconception about innovation and why it should work. It is our people that make it happen and we need to make innovation the social process it needs to be.

You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles from the different contributing authors on ‘What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?’ by clicking the link in this sentence.

Paul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Steve Todd

This is the first of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?’. To kick it off, here is Steve Todd’s perspective:

by Steve Todd

Who Needs Permission?

The most dangerous misconception that I often see in potential innovators is their belief that they need permission to innovate. Or approval. Or funding. Or a specific job title, for that matter.

Some innovators may be living in a culture where personal innovation is discouraged. Not to worry. Start a skunkworks and apologize later.

Most innovators, I fear, are waiting for someone to tell them to “go innovate”. When this type of mentality is held by the majority of the corporate masses, the treadmill of incrementalism will take its toll on creativity.

It’s a worthwhile exercise to compare the need for permission against my favorite equation:

Innovation = Productivity + Initiative + Collaboration.

Productivity

Do I need permission to be productive? Absolutely not! Productive people earn the right to innovate. When an employee not only meets but exceeds their corporate goals, they’ve given themselves the right to explore new opportunities. So go ahead and get started. The worst thing that can happen is that management might be surprised to see your extra effort (hopefully they’ll be pleasantly surprised). Managers are also likely to be forgiving if they know that you’re someone who delivers.

Of course, lack of productivity works against you. If you can’t do your day job effectively, who’s going to believe you when you propose something innovative?

Initiative

If productivity is the foundation of building an innovative career, initiative is the stairway out of the trenches and into creativity. When you find a problem that you’d like to sink your teeth into, and you can’t think of a ready solution, take the initiative to learn more. Search for adjacent technologies that you feel may be relevant.

Do you need permission to take the initiative to learn? Of course not. Yet many employees fret that their managers might catch them learning about something that’s not directly related to their day job. Remember: you’ve earned it because you’re productive.

Collaboration

Your ability to innovate multiplies exponentially when you pull experts in to help solve your problem. Experts frequently appear as part of your learning process. You may read a paper, or join a forum, or post a question. Discussions occur and your learning accelerates as you connect directly. Do you need permission to connect with experts in adjacent spheres? Of course not. But your involvement and engagement is about to grow to a whole new level.

The collaboration stage is where the rubber meets the road. You’ve been productive in your day job. You’ve found a problem that you’d like to solve. You’ve taken initiative on your own, and you’ve made connections on your own. Your manager has either looked the other way or supported you because of your productivity.

Do you need permission to proceed any further?

The likely answer is “Yes”.

So before you get started, you might want to make sure that you’re working on a problem that solves a deep and compelling customer need. Because ultimately you will need permission from your company to deliver your solution into the hands of customers.

Delivery is the difference between an inventor (generates ideas) and an intrapreneur (generates and deliver ideas).

Want to innovate? Go ahead, you have my permission.

You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles from the different contributing authors on ‘What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?’ by clicking the link in this sentence.

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

This is the seventh of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on “Where should innovation reside?” Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Paul Hobcraft

Residing in something we own is desired by nearly all people. Creating the same desire is what is needed with innovation. It needs to ‘reside’ in us all and we need to feel we ‘own’ or identify with part of the innovation process. It is not just what we do…it is the way we set about and do it, so innovation becomes part of our natural everyday thinking. Getting to this ideal state, for a person, a team or for any organization is hard work and needs many things to come together.

So where should innovation reside?

Innovation can only be encouraged, managed, tracked and measured if it is a core element in organizations growth aspirations. So it needs to be fully integrated into the strategic-management agenda and the executives top down need so as to create the conditions that allow a more dynamic innovating environment to emerge by setting out and providing the context. The very same people must be explicit in their steps to foster an innovation culture where trust, ideas are valued, these can be freely expressed and can help oversee risk collectively.

So who should own or manage innovation?

Clearly it starts at the top in making a serious, deep personal commitment to innovation in time and understanding, vision and passion and ensuring it has the right context in place in direction, systems, processes, support, structures and incentives and most importantly adequate investment to move it from a desire to a sustaining part of everyone’s lives within the organization. The management of innovation is complex and difficult. There are multiple roles and levels of influence that need to be brought to bear on making this happen, the larger the organization, the greater the multiplicity. To start, employees’ primary role is to generate and influence, the team or group leader level is to nurture, support, listen and provide and the organizational leadership is to communicate, decide, relate and sustain the culture of trust that is needed. This ‘state’ to allow innovation to flow needs champions at all levels to stimulate and encourage this climate that ‘promotes and allows’ us all to engage within the identification and ownership of innovation.

We all want to ‘reside’ or identify and have an ownership stake – it empowers and liberates us to be more creative, innovative and satisfied. We all want to feel that ownership that we are contributing to something that gives greater value than previously, that is innovation.

You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles from the different contributing authors on “Where should innovation reside?” by clicking the link in this sentence.

Paul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Steve Todd

This is the first of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on the following question:

“Where should innovation reside in an organization, and who should ‘own’ or manage innovation?”

To kick it off, here is ‘Trench Innovation’:

by Steve Todd

Where should innovation reside in an organization?

For many decades the answers have ranged from ‘dedicated research facilities’ to ‘globally distributed research teams’. Hewlett-Packard has HP-Labs in Palo Alto. IBM has eight distributed research teams.

The highest executive levels within a corporation have looked to these teams and asked “where do we go next?”

These research teams often ‘hand off’ the latest innovative ideas to dedicated development organizations.

A recent article in the NY Times is questioning the efficiency of dedicated corporate R&D labs.

The truth of the matter is that innovation cannot solely reside in these organizations any more.

Innovation should reside in the corporate trenches.

Innovation by Pain

Consider a salesperson that loses a deal to a competitive rival, or a field engineer being raked over the coals for a product bug or feature deficiency. Are they motivated to come up with an innovative solution?

Consider a software engineer with a legacy software architecture that’s hard to maintain. Consider a manager leading a team with a seemingly impossible deadline. Think about the pressure they feel when sales and support report the urgent laundry list of problems. Are the developers motivated to come up with a better way of doing things?

The people in the trenches are feeling the pain, and they operate with a sense of urgency that maximizes productivity. If innovation is all about the delivery of ideas, then the trenches is where innovation truly belongs.

Employees in the trenches are not motivated by solutions coming from a corporate R&D lab. They often view the research facility as an ivory tower.

My message to the trenches is this: you don’t need permission from your corporation to innovate. Just do it. But it’s a lot easier if the corporation knows how to leverage intrapreneurs. Here are two ways that a corporation can ‘own’ or ‘manage’ trench innovation.

“What are you working on that I don’t know about”

Line managers working for a company with a ‘trench innovation’ mentality should be regularly asking their employees the above question. They should challenge their direct reports to pursue answers to pressing customer needs by researching creative solutions in a skunkworks fashion.

Some managers will punish their employees for working on solutions that are outside of their core job. I’m suggesting that managers encourage them to do just that. This is the most direct way to ‘manage’ innovation.

Corporate Ownership

Ownership of this type of innovation should be loosely coupled. A central monitoring entity should exist, typically in the office of the corporate CTO. They should be innovation ringmasters under the big tent of corporate, academic, and industrial circles.

The final piece of corporate ownership is a strong social media strategy. There needs to be a corporate backbone that enables collaboration between corporate intrapreneurs, academia, industry, and customers. Managers and employees should ‘bubble up’ their ideas through this mechanism.

When the highest levels of corporate executives asks “where do we go next?”, they should look to their innovators in the trenches.

They’re the ones standing right next to the customer.

You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles published so far from the different contributing authors on “Where should innovation reside?” by clicking the link in this sentence.

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

This is the second of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on The Importance of Innovation Strategy. On the heels of Braden Kelley’s kickoff, here is another perspective:

by Steve Todd

If a corporation lacks a cohesive and well understood innovation strategy, can it still be productive and creative? I believe the answer is yes. Individual pockets of innovation can result in new products and services that significantly add to the corporate bottom line.

The downside of this approach is the amount of potential corporate energy that gets left on the table. Corporate intrapreneurs should be aware of and rallying around a well-defined innovation strategy. If they are not, then the company is missing out on a great opportunity to generate (and deliver!) breakthrough innovation.

The Role of an Innovation Strategy

I like this simple definition of a corporate intrapreneur: an innovator that conceives and delivers an idea at a large corporation. Every business unit has these types of individuals. They are uniquely creative, they are extraordinarily productive, and they collaborate well. They have successfully guided their idea through the hands of marketers, designers, testers, documenters, and salespeople. They are influential.

And their business units want to keep them right where they are.

Without a corporate innovation strategy, that’s right where they’ll stay. They will continue to innovate within their stovepipe and grow their core business.

A corporate innovation strategy must unite intrapreneurs by encouraging collaboration among them, without undue disruption to their respective business units!

Best Practices in Creating the Innovation Strategy

A corporate innovation strategy that effectively leverages intrapreneurs has the following characteristics. If implemented properly, it:

• searches for, identifies, and engages corporate intrapreneurs
• enables corporate (and global) relationships via social media tools
• provides a career growth track that rewards intrapreneurial collaboration
• gathers intrapreneurs for idea submissions and innovation summits
• provides opportunity for external collaboration with industry and university experts
• sends them to customers for bi-directional conversations

This strategy should be “loosely centralized” within a corporation, and is often funded as part of the office of the CTO.

Integrating Innovation and Corporate Strategies

This type of innovation strategy establishes a strong intrapreneurial community. When critical changes in corporate strategy occur, new directions and edicts can be directly presented to the most influential innovators in the corporation. They can collaborate amongst themselves and brainstorm new ways to combine technologies and meet market needs. They can recommend the creation of new business units with new processes. They know how to get “new things” done and can influence their co-workers to implement the strategy.

Intrapreneurs become stifled when they remain in their stovepipes. Get them to collaborate across boundaries and expose them to corporate direction.

And most importantly, get them in front of their customers.

You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles from the different contributing authors on The Importance of Innovation Strategy by clicking the link in this sentence.

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