We live in an amazing age. An era when barriers to entry and barriers to scale sometimes seem to decreasing faster than the size of semiconductors. If Moore’s law states that the number of transistors per square inch doubles approximately every two years, what would you call the similar increase in speed to scale that has emerged over the past decade?
Two weeks ago I came across a couple of videos showing not one, but two different companies who are already shipping clones of Apple’s iPhone 6, a phone that Apple hasn’t yet been able to announce and get out the door?
Do we live in an amazing era or what?
The first video is of the iPhone 6 clone called the Wico i6:
The second video is of an iPhone 6 clone called the Goophone:
Now, people are very loyal to Apple (at least outside of China) and so this is likely to impact their business very little. But would the same be true in your business?
What would the impact be to your business if a competitor launched your new flagship product before you could?
Are you creating an overall solution that is more valuable than every existing alternative and likely to be widely adopted when you launch it?
If not, shouldn’t you be?
After all if you’ve been following me for any length of time you’ll know that my definition of innovation is the following:
“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.”
By this very definition, these clones may attempt to copy the inventions contained in the iPhone 6, but if Apple has truly packed any innovation into their forthcoming handset, it will take more than copying the look and feel of their hardware and GUI to steal any of their innovation thunder.
Innovation is of course all about value, and so any true innovation will not only excel at Value Creation, but the creators will also have put a lot of effort into Value Access AND Value Translation. Follow the link for more on my value innovation framework.
So, if you link my value innovation framework together with my definition of innovation and work to satisfy the conditions of both, you’ll see it doesn’t really matter what the competition does as long as you focus on creating value in all three areas and launching a solution truly valued above every existing alternative (including copycats, clones, or pre-emptive launches), you can still have a wildly successful launch.
So, keep innovating!
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“We need to out-innovate, outeducate, and outbuild the rest of the world”
– United States President Barack Obama
In the quote above the American President implies that it is somehow the role of the government to drive innovation? But can they? And should they?
Governments and leaders around the world spend a great deal of time talking about innovation and its importance to their economies, but nearly all political leaders and governments have no idea about how to actually foster innovation.
There is a model for how governments can encourage innovation, and boost the performance of their economy as a result, and it is really quite simple. I call it the ICE Model of Innovation, and it’s focused on three key areas where the government can focus its investments of time and money, and both facilitate and fund efforts to advance the public involvement and education deeper into these three areas of ICE:
Invention
Collaboration
Entrepreneurship
1. Invention
Innovation in any country, especially in the short term, is not achieved by pumping huge sums of money into government-sponsored research and development efforts. Yes, many successful innovations have resulted from government research investments, but we need to take a more strategic approach to these efforts.
The Internet itself may be one of the most successful government research and development efforts, and it has served as a platform for an enormous amount of other innovations to build upon. This type of platform innovation is where governments should target their investment dollars. We need more of these types of platform innovation investments, not just spending on basic research. Governments need to think strategically and fund those research efforts that could serve as platform innovations to power a whole new wave of innovative business ideas and job-creating companies in their country.
At the same time governments need to take another look at what they are teaching the children in their country. 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…
And parents can either pray that the government will revise the curriculum and start focusing more energy on teaching some of these things, or band together and create supplemental learning opportunities for their kids. Seth Godin and I spoke about education and other topics in this interview from 2010:
Some of the work that Dean Kamen is doing with FIRST is a great example of how individuals and non-profits can supplement the educational work of the government to give kids the invention skills and inspiration that they’ll need to help invent a better future.
2. Collaboration
Another important component of innovation is collaboration. People learn more when they connect and share, idea fragments have the opportunity to collect and connect into potentially viable innovation ideas, and are made stronger from additional perspectives and new inputs. In every economy the government has a role to play in helping to encourage collaboration.
Every potential innovation always needs additional human and financial resources to thrive. When done well, the government can help to foster collaboration directly or indirectly. One of my favorite examples of this is the work that NESTA does in the United Kingdom (UK). If you’re not familiar with the organization, it is a charity that was funded by the UK government and NESTA stands for National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, and their mission is to help people and organizations bring great ideas to life.
What does Nesta do? Watch the video:
They host a series of innovation, entrepreneurship, science and technology events for citizens of the United Kingdom, produce a collection of complimentary research publications, and are quite active in the social sharing of information (including their own popular blog).
In the United States, the government encourages collaboration through events hosted by the Small Business Administration (SBA) and its public universities around the country to connect scientists, businesspeople and entrepreneurs for collaboration purposes.
And several countries’ efforts to encourage university-business research collaboration is referenced in this report.
3. Entrepreneurship
Everywhere you go cities, states, countries, universities, and private companies are setting up incubators or startup accelerators to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. This is important, but the importance of entrepreneurship is not limited only to the entrepreneur. At the same time, we must not forget the importance of intrapreneurship to the continuing health of our organizations.
In some ways, intrapreneurship is MORE important to the innovation success of a country than entrepreneurship because collaborative, creative intrapreneurship is the flavor of entrepreneurship that keeps a country’s great companies alive (through this innovation intersection of course).
Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are both important and we must consciously try to grow both in a successful society, and while intrapreneurs may not have the same tolerance for risk as an entrepreneur, they also need to understand how to make a business case and other core tenets of entrepreneurship.
There are many government sponsored efforts all around the world to encourage entrepreneurship, including SCORE (Service Corp of Retired Executives), which while technically a charity and not a government entity, received a great deal of support from the SBA in getting started as a national organization and the two entities continue to partner together to encourage, guide, and help entrepreneurs in the United States.
But, the best government programs in the world will still fail to encourage entrepreneurship unless you work to remove the social stigma of failure and examine the penalties for bankruptcy in your country. In countries like the United States and the United Kingdom where bankruptcy penalties are much lower, the level of entrepreneurship is higher. Coincidence?
Conclusion
I hope by now you see that it is possible (but difficult) for governments to encourage innovation IF they focus on increasing the support and skill bases around – invention, collaboration and entrepreneurship. Which countries will have the courage to completely revamp their educational systems to focus on teaching the skills that drive these behaviors? Which countries will create the policies, organizations, events and connections that accelerate these ICE capabilities?
“In the 1980s, the [watchword] was quality; today, it’s innovation . . . But the two are not mutually exclusive . . . Now we want superior quality and faster cost reduction, plus innovation—all at once.”
— Harry Burritt , Whirlpool VP of Corporate Planning and Development
It seems like everywhere you turn these days, people are talking about innovation, and that is both a good thing and a bad thing. It is good because true innovations deliver more value than the solutions they replace and so hopefully most of us are better off when new innovations are introduced and adopted. It is bad because everyone means something slightly different when they talk about innovation. So what is innovation?
My definition for innovation is:
“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.”
Key points highlighted in my definition are the distinction between invention and innovation, the importance of value, and the requirement that any potential innovation deliver more value than every existing solution (even the “do nothing” solution) in order to become widely adopted. But, this is my definition, and each organization will need to define what innovation means for their organization, and ideally pair this definition with an innovation vision, strategy, and goals that align with their organization’s broader vision, strategy, and goals.
At the same time you hear people talking about innovation, you sometimes hear people say things like “oh, I’m not creative” or “I’ll never get a chance to innovate” or “innovation is not for me” and I have to say that nothing could be further from the truth. Innovation is a team sport, and so nobody should ask whether they are innovative or not, or whether they possess the innovator’s DNA. When it comes to innovation, we all have a role to play.
In my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, I detail the Nine Innovation Roles that must be filled at various stages of the innovation process in order for your innovation efforts to be successful. They include the:
Revolutionary
Conscript
Artist
Troubleshooter
Magic Maker
Connector
Judge
Customer Champion
Evangelist
I’m of the opinion that all people are innovative, in their own way. This is not to say that all people are innovative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one or more of the Nine Innovation Roles, and that when organizations engage the right people for the right innovation roles, the organization’s innovation speed and capacity will increase.
And as I mentioned earlier, innovation is all about value and so innovation in the organization does not have to be confined to a few people locked away in a research lab or some secret skunk works project in the company, but instead every manager can create innovation in his or her group. How is this possible?
If we refer back to my definition of innovation above, one of the key components is that innovation creates “widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.” There is nothing preventing those solutions from being solutions that provide value inside the organization or solutions that form a component of a larger customer solution. As a result, this puts the opportunity to innovate within reach of every manager in every organization as long as they do three things well:
1. Value Creation
You can create new value by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or by creating new psychological or emotional benefits.
2. Value Translation
Here you must help people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Incremental innovations can usually just be explained to people because they anchor to something they already understand, but radical or disruptive innovations inevitably require some level of education (often far in advance of the launch).
3. Value Access (aka Friction Reduction)
How easy do you make it for customers and consumers to access the value you’ve created. How well has the product or service been designed to allow people to access the value easily? How easy is it for the solution to be created? How easy is it for people to do business with you?
So, find out what innovation roles your employees excel at, involve them in looking for opportunities in your department to create a leap in value in what you do, seek out new tools to help them stretch their creative problem solving muscles, experiment, learn from your failures, build upon your successes, and most of all, enjoy your chance to help drive innovation in your organization no matter where you sit on the org chart.
Happy innovating!
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The Maker movement is steadily gaining steam and some cities are looking to help it grow and thrive, seeing it as an opportunity to inspire artists and entrepreneurs. One such city is Edmonton, which lies in the Alberta province of Canada, and its program in their public library system to provide maker spaces staffed with library employees and equipped with 3D printers, computers with Apple’s Garage Band and Adobe’s Creative Suite, and more.
Here is a video of Peter Schoenberg of the Edmonton Public Library introducing the EPL MakerSpace:
If you’re not familiar with the Maker movement, then check out these pages:
“According to Atmel, a major backer of the Maker movement, there are approximately 135 million U.S. adults who are makers, and the overall market for 3D printing products and various maker services hit $2.2 billion in 2012. That number is expected to reach $6 billion by 2017 and $8.41 billion by 2020. According to USA Today, makers fuel business with some $29 billion poured into the world economy each year.”
“As someone who has seen firsthand what can happen if the right tools, inspiration and opportunity are available to people, I see the Maker Movement and these types of Maker Faires as being important for fostering innovation. The result is that more and more people create products instead of only consuming them, and it’s my view that moving people from being only consumers to creators is critical to America’s future. At the very least, some of these folks will discover life long hobbies, but many of them could eventually use their tools and creativity to start businesses. And it would not surprise me if the next major inventor or tech leader was a product of the Maker Movement.”
So what do you think?
How much of a contribution to the future of innovation will the Maker Movement make?
How important is supporting the maker movement to the future of an economy?
Is this trend sustainable?
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If your innovation culture leaves something to be desired and its your job to make it better, and you missed my virtual keynote at the June 6, 2014 Pipeline 2014 conference, then you can register now and watch my FREE keynote ON DEMAND and find out five actions you can take to change your innovation culture for the better.
Here is a description of the session:
When it comes to innovation, far too much emphasis is placed on creativity, ideas and products. Innovation requires more than ‘aha’ moments. Innovation is a team sport, not an individual one, and while it may be easier for our reptilian brain to understand a single innovation hero, the truth is that every innovation figurehead from Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison had a whole lab or team of people behind them making the real innovation happen. In this session we will investigate what it takes to build a successful team of capable innovation practitioners and contributors that will effectively form a strong and sustainable innovation culture to power success for the organization, not just for the moment, but for the lifetime of the organization.
And here is some information on this FREE virtual conference:
If you’re not familiar with the Pipeline Conference, it is a virtual conference with more than 4,000 participants from 95 countries over the past four years. PIPELINE offers product development practitioners access to experts as well as practical information they can use right away – all from the comfort of their desks. From idea to launch to end-of-life, the content will appeal to any professional involved in the end-to-end product development process. In addition, the newly designed PIPELINE virtual platform serves as a resource center for 12 months following the live event with new content each quarter.
Register now and get free access to the resource center. PIPELINE 2013 was named Event of the Year category in Best in Biz Awards for virtual conference on innovative product development. For more information and to register, visit:
http://www.pipelineconference.com
Please check out my keynote and Q&A session and let me know your thoughts!
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The competition among countries around the world for attention for their innovation efforts, and to find corporate buyers for the intellectual property being developed in their universities, is heating up.
This week I came across the following sizzle reel from New Zealand’s KiwiNet, otherwise known as The Kiwi Innovation Network:
This is just a taste of what is coming…
A heated BATTLE is brewing among not just countries or regions, but cities too, as they all ratchet up their competition for public/private partnerships, publicity for existing local innovators, and to attract additional innovative people and businesses to their city, region, or country.
People are writing about Chicago struggling and Seattle surging for example.
One look at the Top 5 cities in the Seattle article link and you’ll quickly see the link.
What is your city, region or country doing to attract innovation talent?
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As innovation becomes increasingly recognized as the sustaining lifeforce of any company, more organizations are investing in improving their connections to startups, entrepreneurs, academic institutions, researchers and other outside entities to strengthen their pipelines for insights, ideas, and collaboration.
To support this effort, some companies are even creating dedicated physical spaces for this collaboration to occur, and regular events to attract startups, entrepreneurs, and the like for collaboration events.
The embedded video provides a peek inside Johnson & Johnson’s Innovation Center and some of their efforts in this area.
Is your organization undertaking similar efforts?
Are they considering it?
And those of you that have done something like this already, have you been satisfied with the results?
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Helping People Extract the Value You’ve Worked So Hard to Create
I came across this great video from Domino’s Pizza Brazil that shows their new Steady Pizza concept.
It’s a perfect example of the Value Access component of my Value Framework for Innovation, and how Value Access can help you better deliver the value you’ve created for customers (literally).
The concept of the video starts with a simple question:
How do we help to reduce the chances of a delivery fail?
I love this.
The result of the concept is a piece of delivery equipment that not only helps to reduce the chances of a delivery fail, but also serves as a great marketing gimmick.
Too many people after working so hard in the Value Creation step of innovation (which in large part is invention), just stop there and think they’re done. Don’t!
So ask yourself:
Value Access — What can we do to help people access this value?
Value Translation — And even more important, you must keep in mind how you are going to translate that value for people, to help them understand how this new solution will fit into their lives AND is better than their existing solution and worth the trouble of replacing it.
Always remember:
Innovation = Value Creation (X) Value Access (X) Value Translation
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You can’t go an entire commercial break during the Super Bowl or a State of the Union address (okay, sorry, both American examples) without hearing the word innovation pop up at least once or twice. Companies have added innovation to their company values and mission statements in accelerating numbers. Some organizations have implemented idea management systems. And others are willing to spend large sums of money on design firms and innovation boutique consultancies to get help designing some new widget or service to flog to new or existing customers. Based on all of that you would think that most companies are committed to innovation, right?
If you asked most CEOs “Is your organization committed to innovation?”, do you think you could find a single CEO that would say no?
So, why do think I’m about to make the following statement?
90+% of organizations have no sustained commitment to innovation.
When it comes to fostering continuous innovation, most organizational cultures stink at it.
Let’s look at some data, because anyone who is committed to innovation (and not just creativity) should love data (especially unstructured data from customers):
Over the last 50 years the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has dropped from 61 years to 18 years (and is forecast to grow even shorter in the future)1
In a worldwide survey of 175 companies by Hill & Knowlton (a communications consultancy), executives cited “promoting continuous innovation” as the most difficult goal for their company to get right. “Structurally, many companies just aren’t set up to deliver continuous innovation.”2
84% of more than 2,200 executives agree that their organization’s culture is critical to business success3
“96% of respondents say some change is needed to their culture, and 51% think their culture requires a major overhaul.”3
So what does this data tell us?
For one thing, it helps to reinforce the notion that the pace of innovation is increasing.
For another thing, it doesn’t exactly scream that organizations are as committed to building an innovation culture internally as their words externally say about being committed to innovation.
Why is this?
Well, as fellow Innovation Excellence contributor Jeffrey Phillips once said:
“When it comes to innovation, ideas are the easy part. The cultural resistance learned over 30 years of efficiency is the hard part.”
And when you get right down to it, most employees in most organizations are slaves to execution, efficiency, and improvement. And while those things are all important (you can’t have innovation without execution), organizations that fail to strike a balance between improvement/efficiency and innovation/entrepreneurship, are well, doomed to fail.
This increasing pace of innovation along with the lower cost of starting/scaling a business and the always difficult challenge of building a productive culture of continuous innovation, is the reason that the lifespan of organizations is shrinking.
So if it isn’t enough to talk about innovation, or to invest in trying to come up with new products and services, shouldn’t more organizations be also investing to making sure their innovation culture doesn’t, well, stink?
The obvious answer is… (insert yours here)
So, if your innovation culture stinks, I encourage you to come join me at Pipeline 2014 and attend my keynote session on exploring five ways to make it smell better:
“Our Innovation Culture Stinks – Five Ways to Make it Smell Better”
It’s a free virtual event on June 6, 2014.
I look forward to seeing you there!
Sources:
1. Innosight/Richard N. Foster/Standard & Poor’s
2. Hill & Knowlton Executive Survey
3. Booz & Company Global Culture and Change Management Survey 2013
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“Industries are being commoditized at a faster rate and you have to look for ways to create more value and set yourself apart,” says Braden Kelley of Business Strategy Innovation. “Innovation is one of the few ways to do that because people use the same best practices for operational excellence. The way they innovate and the culture they build are the ways they can differentiate.”
To help companies with their quest to sustain their innovation efforts, Microsoft has reached out to collect a number of innovation best practices into an evolving framework, that I’ve provided a preview of below.
Microsoft’s Innovation Management Framework
Every company serious about innovation should anchor their pursuit in a vision, strategy and goals for innovation. These core innovation components should address not just enabling technology but processes and culture too. Microsoft has published this Innovation Management Framework as the culmination of a collaboration with a consortium of visionaries and practitioners to ensure that it includes thought leadership on innovation from Microsoft and its broader ecosystem, including current charter members and contributors to the framework:
3M
Avanade
Capgemini
Ericsson
Business Strategy Innovation
Microsoft
Pcubed
PTC
Quantum PM
Siemens PLM
Sopheon
Tech-Clarity
UMT
United Healthcare
Wolters Kluwer
“Microsoft’s Innovation Management Framework is designed to help companies develop a comprehensive, integrated approach to implement and support an innovation management strategy. This framework is a repeatable reference architecture for innovation and is intended to allow companies to share and learn about innovation management best practices and enabling technologies as a starting point for strategic discussions for their company’s innovation management strategy.
The framework includes best practice processes and solutions that offer a strategic roadmap. The roadmap offers techniques that are proven through experience to improve innovation and innovation management performance. For example, the framework shares lessons learned from Microsoft’s own innovation strategies and processes that help fuel innovation across the Microsoft enterprise. These processes are used within Microsoft, enabling teams to quickly implement innovation programs that are fit for purpose.”
At its core the framework focuses on five main innovation sub-processes that we’ll give you a very brief preview of here:
1. Envision
Innovation is critical to achieving the goals of the modern business strategy. The Envision process should put in place the strategy and plan to achieve the innovation goals in the business strategy.
2. Engage
At the front end of innovation where ideas are generated, sometimes referred to as “ideation,” is where Engage occurs.
In this process, companies engage employees, customers, and partners in an innovation community to capture and share new ideas. Formalizing engagement transforms it from a passive, unfocused, ineffective “suggestion box” to a proactive approach that effectively produces targeted ideas. The goal is to generate ideas that will drive new business value. As Braden Kelley of Business Strategy Innovation explains, “The key in the engage processes is to get closer to the customer, what they desire, how they will make their lives better, and how your product will displace something.”
3. Evolve
The third process, “Evolve,” takes the output of the Engage process to the next level. In this process, companies evolve ideas – as individuals or as teams – to increase their quality and value. Soliciting and capturing ideas is not enough. Early feedback allows great ideas to be improved upon and issues to be raised so they can be resolved (if possible).
4. Evaluate
Simply discussing ideas is not enough. “It’s important to be able to organize, de-duplicate, and merge ideas and take them to the next step in order to turn ideas into money,” offers Newsgator’s Markus von Aschoff. At some point companies must identify the innovations they believe are candidates for further investment. Unfortunately, many companies are drowning in too many ideas.
5. Execute
Of course all of the best ideas, proposals and business plans in the world are of no value unless they can be turned into a reality. The “Execute” sub-process takes the input from the previous processes and executes a formal project to further develop the idea or commercialize it.
The Microsoft DIRA Framework
This Innovation Management Framework is tightly aligned with Microsoft’s Discrete Industry Reference Architecture for the discrete manufacturing industry. The DIRA framework covers three primary business imperatives that are critical to the growth and profitability of a manufacturing enterprise. These imperatives are:
Innovate – Manage cross-boundary innovation and accelerate time-to-market
Perform – Deliver operational excellence with reliable business continuity
Grow – “Observe & serve” customers globally to drive growth with profitable proximity
This framework represents the “Innovation Management” portion of the “Innovate” imperative (see diagram). This framework will also align with the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Framework, which also falls under the Innovate imperative of DIRA.
I’m sure you can tell by now, or at least I hope you can tell, that this has just been a teaser of some of the great content that exists in the full document.
For more detail on Microsoft’s DIRA Framework and to see the complete Microsoft Innovation Framework, be sure and download it as a PDF.
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We live in an amazing age. An era when barriers to entry and barriers to scale sometimes seem to decreasing faster than the size of semiconductors. If Moore’s law states that the number of transistors per square inch doubles approximately every two years, what would you call the similar increase in speed to scale that has emerged over the past decade?
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“We need to out-innovate, outeducate, and outbuild the rest of the world”
Innovation in any country, especially in the short term, is not achieved by pumping huge sums of money into government-sponsored research and development efforts. Yes, many successful innovations have resulted from government research investments, but we need to take a more strategic approach to these efforts.
The Maker movement is steadily gaining steam and some cities are looking to help it grow and thrive, seeing it as an opportunity to inspire artists and entrepreneurs. One such city is Edmonton, which lies in the Alberta province of Canada, and its program in their public library system to provide maker spaces staffed with library employees and equipped with 3D printers, computers with Apple’s Garage Band and Adobe’s Creative Suite, and more.
