Category Archives: Innovation

Making Innovation Sustainable – Part 3 of 4

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Making Innovation Sustainable - Part 3 of 4Click on Part 1 or Part 2 if you missed them

Purpose and Passion

Ultimately, successful and sustainable innovation is all about purpose and passion. The people in your organization have to be clear on what the purpose of the organization is. Ideally, that purpose has to be something bigger than the individuals and something that people can get passionate about, because first and foremost, as Jeffrey Phillips has said, “You can’t force a disinterested person to innovate.”

Passion is a prerequisite not just for getting started with innovation; people leading innovation projects must have enough passion to fight through, over, around, or under any obstacles they may encounter in their effort to make a new idea a reality.

“Passion-based organizations stop at nothing to accomplish their goals and are able to attract people and resources to their causes. That got me thinking. Over all of my years as an innovation junkie, the common denominator, among the innovators I have connected with and the most successful enterprises I have observed and worked with, is passion. They started with a passion or cause and then organized around it to make it happen. Not the other way around.” — Saul Kaplan

Blogging Innovation as a Case Study in Passion

I started innovating long ago, but I didn’t start Blogging Innovation until 2006. I realized I needed an outlet to express my passion for innovation, and blogging offered the perfect opportunity. I kept reading and writing about innovation despite getting only a couple of hundred people to read my articles each day. Then at the start of 2009 I completed a marketing strategy project for Wunderman and Microsoft Windows Live, and, using some great tools including Website Grader, I discovered that the blog had some technical challenges. After fixing those, traffic to Blogging Innovation finally started to take off. Now instead of averaging more than 200 daily visits, the blog averages nearly 10,000 and the numbers are still growing. Do I spend less time on the blog now than I used to? No!

Most people would consider an increase in traffic of 2,500 percent in one year as being a huge success and a chance to relax, but I don’t see it that way. Back in August 2009 I decided to commit the blog to a mission of making innovation and marketing insights accessible for the greater good. As a consequence of that mission, I decided to open up the blog to the very best contributing authors on the topic of innovation and other marketing – related subjects that I could find.

Instead of using the blog as an extension of my company, Blogging Innovation exists to help raise the baseline understanding of innovation and marketing so that organizations can become better at satisfying the needs of their customers, the first time they try. After all, the more efficient our organizations are at meeting their customers’ needs, the less waste of human capital and natural resources. That’s what drives me to get up at 5:00 a.m. seven days a week to start letting people know about all the great content our contributing authors have published that day.

We have recently decided to take on a monthly sponsor who wants to be associated with innovation in a tasteful way, but that is not for commercial reasons but because the blog needs additional people power to run it and a new site design to make the content even more accessible. As I go out to look for the assistance I need to take Blogging Innovation to the next level, I’ll be looking for one thing in the people I choose to help make the community stronger — passion.

Note: For the newer readers, Blogging Innovation formed the foundation of Innovation Excellence before I sold it and re-booted Blogging Innovation as Human-Centered Change & Innovation.

Passion versus Obsession

There is a great article “Passion versus Obsession” by John Hagel that explores the differences between passion and obsession. This is an important distinction to understand in order to make sure you are hiring people to power your innovation efforts who are passionate and not obsessive. Here are a few key quotes from the article:

“The first significant difference between passion and obsession is the role free will plays in each disposition: passionate people fight their way willingly to the edge to find places where they can pursue their passions more freely, while obsessive people (at best) passively drift there or (at worst) are exiled there.

It’s not an accident that we speak of an “object of obsession,” but the “subject of passion.” That’s because obsession tends towards highly specific focal points or goals, whereas passion is oriented toward networked, diversified spaces.

The subjects of passion invite and even demand connections with others who share the passion.

Because passionate people are driven to create as a way to grow and achieve their potential, they are constantly seeking out others who share their passion in a quest for collaboration, friction and inspiration . . . . The key difference between passion and obsession is fundamentally social: passion helps build relationships and obsession inhibits them.

It has been a long journey and it is far from over, but it has taught me that obsession confines while passion liberates.”

You can read ahead by getting the book or downloading the sample chapter, or by checking out the other parts here:

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Rise of the Social Business Architect

Rise of the Social Business Architect

Download the Rise of the Social Business Architect PDF

The world is changing and needs Social Business Architects. Gone is the epoch of the passive consumer, now customers want a say. At the same time, the quest for survival and growth is causing companies to stop looking at suppliers as someone to squeeze on price and instead as partners in innovation. And, employers are realizing that to maximize their success they need to attract and engage the best talent not just into internal talent pools, but external ones as well.

Social Business IntersectionsIt feels like you can’t go a day without hearing someone or some publication mention Facebook, Twitter or some other component of the social media universe. The fact is that social media has invaded the public consciousness and people are now more suspicious of someone who doesn’t have a social media presence than someone who does. People are starting to judge others based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profile they ever meet them, and expecting companies to answer the tweet they’ve sent them or the question they’ve posted on their Facebook wall within the day, the hour, the minute (believe me the expected pace of response is accelerating).

Social media has become so important and pervasive that it is beginning to co-opt the term ‘social business’ into its lexicon to describe an organization’s engagement with people outside of its borders across a variety of channels and for a variety of purposes. Social media is stealing the term ‘social business’ away from the social enterprise folks, and that’s okay – they can’t possibly use ‘social business’ and ‘social enterprise’ at the same time anyways.

The importance of ‘social business’ and social business design has grown as our technologies have matured from contact management to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, from bulletin boards to discussion forums, from static to dynamic html, from social networks to social media, and from media consumer to media producer. Ultimately ‘social business’ is the science of optimizing the intersection of people, process, and technology. If we look at ‘social business’ as the discipline managing that intersection and helping an organization focusing on how it engages with others and maximizes the value of its relationships, I’ve been working in social business for more than 15 years as what I like to call a Social Business Architect.

Social Business ConnectionsIn addition to facilitating and optimizing the group dynamics and interactions inside the organization, a Social Business Architect specializes in identifying the different parts of an organization that need to interact with groups of people outside the organization, how those parts of the organization should work together to communicate with people outside the organization, and helps to identify and implement communications solutions that connect the organization with the target groups so that a meaningful connection and conversation can be built, and then helps to manage the conversations and the information and learnings from their outcomes for the benefit of the organization.

A Social Business Architect keeps the organizations focused on the goals of its relationships with the outside, works with the organization’s technologists and other specialists in other departments to enable the necessary conversations to take place for the benefit of the organization.

From building Symantec’s first web-based multi-lingual technical support and customer service capabilities to working with the Windows Live team at Microsoft to building the world’s most popular innovation community centered around https://www.disruptorleague.com, I’ve seen the importance of finding the right intersection between primary connection points and sources of value for the community to establish itself, grow and thrive.

To build a successful community and attract talent to your organization you must try to identify as an organization what resources you already have (or could create) that will have some value to the community that you are trying to build. These sources of value to the community could be:

  1. Financial
  2. Informational
  3. Educational
  4. Social
  5. Or come from another store of value

You must give people a reason to want to connect with you and to stay close – and yes, hopefully contribute over time.

In addition to identifying the value that you can bring to the community you must also identify which connection points will multiply the attractive power of the sources of value you choose to focus on. There are three primary connection points to consider:

1. Passion – One of the ways that you can attract people to your community is to leverage the power of passion. Seek to identify what people are passionate about when it comes to your company or your products. Passion can be extremely contagious. Is there a way that you can inject the passion that people may have for your company or products into your community?

2. Purpose – Another connection point to consider is to tap into the power of purpose. Not all organizations are committed to serving a larger social purpose, but all can consider introducing elements of public outreach or philanthropy that the community can engage with and feel good about contributing to. Are you building walls to keep people out? Or are you creating something that people can feel a part of?

Social Business Attraction3. Fun – And don’t forget the power of fun. One of the ways of connecting people to your community is to have something fun for people to do. Recognize people for their participation in your community in fun and different ways to keep them interested and engaged, and have some fun reinforcing the ethos of the community.

And when you bring the right sources of value together with the right connection points that is when the magic of attraction and engagement happens and a community starts to grow its membership and participation. But we are not just seeking to build a community; we are looking to activate it as well (to get people engaged, contributing, discussing, connecting, etc.).

Social Business EngagementThis is where Social Business Architects prove their worth to the organization. They can use social media, digital communications, value analysis, and other collaborative tools to help organizations attract and engage customers, partners and employees to help the organization achieve its commercial goals. Whether the future direction of your social business architecture includes beginning collaborative innovation, increasing employee retention, building stronger partnerships, growing customer lifetime value, or another effort, be sure that you are involving the Social Business Architects in your organization to help set the right goals and find the right tools to ensure the effort’s success. Only then will you put your organization on the path it needs to be to transform itself from an internally focused product and service factory to a truly internally and externally focused and integrated social business capable of sustainable innovation, retention of the growing millennial work force, long-term customer relationships and loyalty, and true partnerships with its vendors and suppliers for mutual benefit.

Are you ready to architect a social business foundation under your organization?

Stay tuned for more on this topic in a white paper I am publishing with Innocentive very soon.

UPDATE: You can find all of my commissioned white papers here (including the Innocentive White Paper – “Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation”) or contact me to commission one for your company’s inbound or content marketing efforts here.

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Image credit: Ringling Bros.

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Making Innovation Sustainable – Part 2 of 4

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Making Innovation Sustainable – Part 2 of 4If you missed Part 1, you can find it here

If You Want Systemic Innovation, You Need Systems to Manage It

If you are really serious about creating sustainable innovation in your organization and engaging more than just a handful of people in the generation of ideas, you not only need to have a group of people to manage the process (either part – time or full – time), but you also need systems to manage the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea development processes. This class of software is commonly referred to as innovation management software and it is often sold in a Software as a Service (SaaS) manner. Organizations with above average privacy or security concerns may choose to run this software locally in their own organization (see Figure 10.1 ).

There are tons of companies selling innovation management software, but the four heavyweights in this area are Brightidea, Hype, Imaginatik, and Spigit, but you also have software like Invention Machine and others that serve similar or adjacent needs (patent searches, etc.). But there is no reason you couldn’t build your own innovation management solution into your enterprise portal or collaboration software platform such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint, and others (see Figure 10.2).

It’s not completely accurate to call it innovation management software because it only manages ideas, but having a software platform for managing ideas is crucial to ensure that you are able to do the following five key tasks.

  1. Capture all of the ideas.
  2. Allow employees to collaborate on evolving ideas.
  3. Allow program managers to evaluate them.
  4. Allow program managers to track idea development progress.
  5. Allow program managers to monitor commercial success of ideas.

No matter how you choose to solve the need for an innovation management software solution, make sure that you have a plan for how you are going to address these five tasks, both in the software and in your organization’s policies and processes.

Innovation versus Flexibility

Does your organization focus on identifying only new innovation projects and not on making the organization itself more agile? For innovation to be sustainable, the organization has to become flexible enough to remake itself as its environment changes and succeed at completely new ways of doing business. Think about Nokia going from tires to mobile phones. Could your organization do that?

Or, think about the Apple iPod, and how Apple went from being a computer company to a consumer electronics company. Figure 10.3 shows one way to think about the changes that both the organization and the customer had to think about (see the case study at the end of this section for more detail).

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – Figure 10-3

Innovation is all about change. It’s about finding a new set of solutions that customers value above every existing alternative – including your current products and services. While investing in innovation projects is important, you have to also make sure that your organization is capable of adapting to the changes in the marketplace. What good is coming up with a breakthrough customer insight that drives great innovation ideas and projects if your organization isn’t capable of making the internal changes that are necessary to execute upon the insight and bring the product or service solution successfully to market?

If you live in the United States, you may be familiar with a couple of failed airlines — Ted and Song. United started the ill-fated Ted, and Delta started the equally unsuccessful Song in response to the growing success of low-cost competitors like Southwest and Jet Blue. Given that Ted and Song came along and copied a successful, proven business model, how did they manage to fail so miserably?

The answer is not a simple one, but in addition to the brand confusion they caused among customers, the harsh reality is that neither organization could change fast enough to operate as efficiently or effectively as Southwest Airlines and then create any innovation capable of proving their solution to be valued above every existing alternative.

Quite often it is not the technical aspects of invention that keep established companies from delivering disruptive innovations, but the change that is required either on the part of the customer in order to adopt an innovation, or on the company’s part in order to deliver the innovation to the marketplace (or both). Investing in innovation without also investing in organizational agility is often a fool’s bet.

You can read ahead by getting the book or downloading the sample chapter, or by checking out the other parts here:

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Making Innovation Sustainable – Part 1 of 4

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Making Innovation Sustainable - Part 1 of 4Key Dangers:

  • Viewing innovation as a temporary, extraordinary effort in response to a crisis, or pursuing innovation as a competitive response.

  • Treating innovation as the domain of only the R & D or Marketing department, or some other subgroup.

  • Treating innovation as a project-based activity, instead of as an integral organizational capability to be invested in and professionally managed.

Success can be blinding. Organizations often drive themselves by trying to look through the windscreen and in the rearview mirror, only to get blindsided by something from the left or the right. Put another way, organizations often focus on what they’ve already done and moving it forward (often in an incremental way). Organizations also invest in defending and extending the core products and services that made them successful — focusing a huge amount of energy on protecting their flank. Don’t get me wrong, incremental innovation is important, but all of your competitors are trying to make their products and services incrementally better than yours at the same time. At best, your efforts will allow you to maintain or make slight improvements in revenue and profitability.

Success can be blinding. Organizations often drive themselves by trying to look through the windscreen and in the rearview mirror, only to get blindsided by something from the left or the right. Put another way, organizations often focus on what they’ve already done and moving it forward (often in an incremental way). Organizations also invest in defending and extending the core products and services that made them successful — focusing a huge amount of energy on protecting their flank. Don’t get me wrong, incremental innovation is important, but all of your competitors are trying to make their products and services incrementally better than yours at the same time. At best, your efforts will allow you to maintain or make slight improvements in revenue and profitability.

And of course, companies that fail to invest in at least incremental innovation efforts often find themselves getting less and less competitive in the marketplace. Ultimately, the organizations that create sustainable success are those that invest in not only identifying and implementing the change that their customers desire and require, but also the change that is necessary inside the organization to deliver it.

Who Innovates?

Do you have a group of innovation elites in your organization? Maybe these are folks in Marketing or in Research & Development. Or do you make a concerted effort for all of your employees to feel that it is part of their job to innovate? If people feel that innovation is someone else ’ s job, then they ’ re not going to participate, and you are going to miss out on a whole spectrum of interesting innovation ideas. The fact is that markets are too big, too complex, and opportunities for insight lie in too many different reference industries and geographies for any small number of people to be able to successfully sense and ideate. I heard Dr. Alph Bingham, founder of Innocentive, recently talking about who actually solves most of their challenges, and he said that if you were to classify people across a spectrum of those who you believed would be most likely to solve the challenges on the left and those you believed would be least likely to solve the challenges on the right, most of the solutions come from the right-hand side. So if the best solutions are most likely to come from those you would deem least likely, wouldn’t it make sense to include everyone in your organization in your innovation efforts? And possibly people outside your organization?

Innovating in a Crisis

Companies that only have the courage to innovate when there is a crisis, or a competitive response is needed, will be unable to achieve sustainable innovation. Not only that, but their innovation attempts are likely to lack the vision necessary to leap ahead of the crisis or competition — instead they will merely meet the threat and keep the organization as a reactionary pursuer of innovation instead of becoming a leader. This is the GM approach to innovation — constantly trying to catch up to where Toyota was five years ago — instead of trying to jump the next curve and regaining a leadership position. Innovating in crisis often means that the main motivator is going to be fear. Fear does not serve as an effective motivator for innovation. We know because of the inverse correlation between the fear of failure and the quantity and quality of innovation in organizations. Organizations looking to innovate in a crisis cannot do so over and over, and so they must find a way to transform feelings of fear into a believable, committed challenge mentality. To make an analogy: When the Russians launch Sputnik, you have to commit to an innovation moonshot.

Innovation Is Not a Project

Often when companies attempt to innovate because of a crisis or in response to the competition, they pursue innovation as a project. When you pursue innovation as a project, the organization does not build any kind of innovation capability. Instead a group of people come together to tackle a particular challenge, and when the work is complete everyone goes back to their day jobs. None of the learnings are retained in a meaningful and easy-to-access manner for future projects, and there is no opportunity for policies and processes to be refined for greater efficiency next time. You may be pursuing a portfolio of innovation projects, but innovation itself is not a project. Projects start and stop, but for innovation to be sustainable, it must be continuous. This often means investing in a small core team of people (maybe only allocating part of their time) to serve as innovation shepherds — identifying and cataloging innovation best practices and building the innovation capabilities of the organization so that all innovation projects in the portfolio
may benefit.

Excerpted from Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. You can read ahead by getting the book or downloading the sample chapter, or by checking out parts 2-4 here:

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Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation

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In this webinar hosted by Innocentive I explore how organizations can utilize open innovation and crowdsourcing resources as an essential talent management strategy to drive their business.

You can engage me to create a webinar or white paper for your audience here.

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VIDEO – Innovation is All About Value

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I share my definition of innovation and the role of value in innovation in this clip from one of my many innovation speeches. This clip is from a corporate event to kick off the next phase of innovation efforts at FCS America.

This video brings to life some of the content in the popular article Innovation is All About Value.

I am the author of the popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons, and advise clients beginning their innovation journey or seeking to enhance the innovation efforts they’ve begun already.

I am an experienced innovation keynote speaker at conferences and private innovation events for corporations, government, and other organizations, and also deliver a two-day Masterclass around the content in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire to organizations around the world.

To book me for your conference or event, please click here.


Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Innovation is Up in the Air

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Innovation is Up in the AirA 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?

Innovation BlindersIt 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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Steve Jobs is Dead – Whither innovation at Apple?

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Steve Jobs lost his battle against pancreatic cancer. Surely this is a huge loss for his family and friends, for the fans and employees of Apple, and for the business world as a whole because he was one of its most prominent icons. To all of you, I’m sorry for your loss.

But is it the end of innovation at Apple?

Is Apple incapable of innovating without Steve Jobs?

Can you have sustainable innovation without a CEO who sees himself as the Chief Innovation Officer?

Is innovation the purview of the lone inventor, or does it take a village to innovate?

For those of you who know me, or have heard me speak or read my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire or my other writings here on the site, you can probably guess which side of the fence I stand on.

Personally, I don’t buy the lone innovator myth and instead think my Nine Innovation Roles is a better way to look at things. Look at the labs of Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison decades ago, or the impact of private and hookah clubs or coffee shops and universities throughout time. Instead I think that organizations need to be looking at the innovation that has come from the interconnectedness of our economies and make sure that their organizations are as interconnected as they need to be to maximize their own innovation capacity. Has your organization built a global sensing network? Should it?

If you were to ask me to describe Steve Jobs from the outside in, I would describe him as a great entrepreneur, not a great innovator. There is a subtle distinction there. Innovators create value, entrepreneurs help people access and translate that value into their life. Entrepreneurs are also really good at helping innovators commercialize things and turn inventions into innovations. Steve Jobs was really good at driving his deep team of talented innovators towards innovative solutions. He was a great innovation leader, but not necessarily a great innovator. In that way it seems like he might have been very much like Thomas Edison, which if he is to be remembered in a comparative sense, is not a bad way at all to be remembered.

Here is a rare Steve Jobs narrated version of the iconic Think Different ad done as a tribute by jeremytai:

Again from the outside looking in, Apple started as a very entrepreneurial company when it was led by an entrepreneur, but lost its way when Steve Jobs was forced out by the executive mindset, only to buy NeXT to get a modern OS to rescue the company (and get Steve Jobs back in the bargain – but also its entrepreneurial mindset). Every organization must continuously look to balance the tension between the entrepreneurial mindset and the executive mindset. Which begs the question:

Should an organization be led by an executive or an entrepreneur?

I have two more final points I want to examine before I go to bed. The first is that I found myself thinking while I was sitting there eating dinner in a coffee shop in New York City when I heard the news that Steve Jobs had died I thought to myself:

  • Is the death of Steve Jobs, my generation’s or avocation’s JFK moment?
  • Will people forever remember where they were when they heard that Steve Jobs died?
  • Have people ever felt that about a business leader before?

And second, in talking with one of my co-founders, Julie Anixter, the question was sparked about whether you can have sustainable innovation without someone fanatical in charge of innovation that isn’t afraid to tell people that their solution sucks and send them back to the drawing board, pushing them towards greatness instead of feeling the need to praise and accept the merely good. This has been the popular outside in perspective on Steve Jobs’ approach to innovation. Is this what it takes? What do you think?

Now, I’ve posed a lot of questions in this piece because death presents more questions than it answers, and I’ll leave you with one or two more.

Am I completely off base here? Will Apple fall into complete disrepair again now that Steve Jobs is gone, again?

Sound off in the comments.

I hope to see you next week at the Business Innovation Conference 2011 or the following week at the Back End of Innovation conference – October 17-19, 2011 in sunny San Diego.

You might also enjoy Renee Blodgett’s post here.

If you’ve read this far down, here are a couple of bonus items:

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Embedding Innovation

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Distributing Innovation Knowledge for Innovation Success

Embedding InnovationIs innovation in your organization a project?

Or are you trying to embed innovation into your organization as a new core competency?

Is innovation part of the new business as usual you are trying to create for sustained growth?

If so, you must take real actions to not only create a culture of continuous innovation but to sustain it.

You must consciously and continuously manage two of the key tensions that often inhibit innovation:

  1. Exploitation versus Exploration – Maximizing existing revenue possibilities while also creating new revenue opportunities
  2. Executive Mindset versus Entrepreneurial Mindset – Unleashing your executives to create predictability and repeatability in the existing business while also unleashing intrapreneurs to create new businesses

To be successful in the long run, you must pursue operational excellence AND innovation excellence at the same time.

And you must provide your entire workforce with the tools and training to support continuous, sustainable innovation.

Ideally this would include:

  1. Creating a common language of innovation in your organization

  2. Communicating an innovation vision, strategy, and goals across the organization

  3. Creating instructor-led and/or e-learning with Human-Centered Change & Innovation founder Braden Kelley to set a baseline understanding in your organization of your innovation process and the innovation tools available to help stimulate increased innovation in your organization

  4. Give your employees a steady diet of innovation inspiration and education by embedding an RSS Feed (or feedburner) from Human-Centered Change & Innovation into your corporate portal or into your Idea Management System

  5. Get involved with the Human-Centered Change & Innovation blog to showcase the fantastic innovation work you are doing and to be one of the first organizations to get an inside look at what others are doing

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Innovation in the Fairway

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Innovation in the Fairway

Twenty-three-year-old inventor Arnold Du Toit was recently named Britain’s best young entrepreneur by PC World Business for the Rolley. Here is some background information about Arnold from the announcement:

“Arnold started his firm when he was 21 years old in his final year of university. The idea came about after his friend complained that a full round of 18 holes took too long. Arnold captured the judges’ imaginations with his entrepreneurial spirit in getting the Rolley to market by overcoming financial and patent issues. The judges praised the Rolley’s design, with its lightweight fold-up dynamics that make it easily transportable, and his use of social media. They were also excited by the potential to rent fleets of Rolleys to golf courses and Arnold’s plans to diversify the technology into security, airports and factories.”

When I came across this announcement, a couple of things struck me. First, the power of programs like the Enterprise Associate Scheme at London South Bank University to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship by supporting aspiring inventors and entrepreneurs in their quest to find out whether they may have the next great innovation.

Second, it was interesting in speaking with Arnold that the concept of a hop-on power trolley has been around for some time, but has not made the leap yet from invention to innovation. As I have said before, true innovation is typically a slow process, and often we forget that. Inventions do not often turn into innovations until the solution has passed a certain price/performance threshold and until a certain person in the chain of inventors identifies where the biggest value is created by the solution, and helps people access that value and translates that value for the target customers better than any of those that came before them. It looks to me like the Rolley may be achieving the right combination of value creation, value access, and value translation to become a successful innovation. Only time will tell.

I had the opportunity to interview Arnold recently about his experience in developing the Rolley and the text of the interview and some bonus material follows:

1.Why is now the right time for the Rolley?

The Rolley stands at the forefront of Electric Vehicle (EV) management, which is what the Drive Daddy Ltd Brand is all about. Using our TWINDRIVE technology we are introducing the Hop-On Rolley Golf now, but this is the only first of many innovative Rolley concepts. We have other concepts in the pipeline including our Rolley Port/Lift… project with factories and logistic sectors that will feature our new EV technology. There is no better time than now to be thinking about where the future of transport is going. The popularity of hybrid cars, electric bicycles, folding “transportables” and the growing need to for space conservation are all intersecting to point to a future where smart lifestyle products such as the Rolley will be an increasingly integrated part of our life.

2. Does the Rolley augment or transform the golfing experience? How so?

Rolley Video PrepGolf is a delicate and well-refined sport and leisure activity, with quality, confidence and professionalism at its core. The Rolley Golf offers freedom to golfers who want or need to maximise their golf performance and get exercise to maintain health, without hindering the consistent energy needed to complete a round of 18/36 holes. Some golfer need to relax during the back nine or simply do not have the time to otherwise get the most out of the memberships, given that young golfers need to typically invest 4 hours on average to complete a round (their through rate). Golfers can either walk freely with the Rolley Golf in power assisted trolley mode, utilize the Rolley Remote-Control, or green to tee or on a steep long incline utilize the unit in a swift Hop-On & ride mode. Rolley Golf boasts a compact and lightweight folding dynamic which rivals or betters the current power assisted trolleys which do not offer a hop-on aspect.

3. Why hasn’t someone done this before?

Hop-On is our own unique design/engineering philosophy, allowing golfers to walk, or to hop on and rolley about so they can streamline and focus performance effort where its needed, their swing. The idea of a ride-on golf trolley has been around since the 60s, Google this if you like. But these, albeit great concepts, focused primarily on the ride-ability and not on what golfers actually want to-date. So the Rolley grabs an entirely new market with a Hop-On Philosophy. Golfers and people in general are smart by nature. Therefore the Rolley Golf caters for choice, and how you chose your choices is how you determine smartness (that is a little deep) and we are working with a unique team of young creatives based in London, YawnCreative.com, who are helping us share the Hop-On Rolley revolution. This is our greatest value proposition (USP).

4. Tell us about the Enterprise Associate Scheme and how it helped make the Rolley a reality

London South Bank University’s Enterprise Associate Scheme (EAS) acts as a board of investors who (like Dragons Den) allow entrepreneurs to pitch for a 2 year business incubator, with Legal, Patent protection, Finance, business support, office space, laboratories, machine shops… and a Masters degree in Enterprise (and trust me, completing a masters and trying to run your own start-up is a hand-full, many late night classes, but worth every minute). Well, if you are lucky enough and you make the cut (only 3-4 ideas a year get chosen out of hundreds of applications), then they financially support you, and offer unique financing processes to help you develop your idea and business into concepts. And, if you really gun-it then you could even reach manufacturing and sales in your two year stint as a enterprise associate. And for this “investment” – which is hard to quantify (around £100-200k of value) – they only have a 10% share in your company. The support can even continue in terms of free office space and IP protection for as long as you have a business. I believe it is the closest to winning the lottery that any hard working entrepreneur can get. Especially as they take you through this EAS from as little as an idea on a napkin (providing you can sell your pitch of course).

5. Who are the inventors, entrepreneurs, or innovators that have inspired you?

I am proudly the inventor of TWINDRIVE and the Rolley innovations, but I work in a business incubator where you are surrounded by aspiring and hungry entrepreneurs who alone can make you happy it is Monday again and sad when Friday arrives. Luckily we can even work weekends! These young venturists support and drive you through the rough patches (which there are many, many of these). On the other hand, I love meeting people and I have met some great and inspiring Inventors through the EAS such as James Barnham (to name one of many) and also some truly amazing entrepreneurs such as Neil Whitehead from Stuff ID. There is also a truly supportive group of mentors from all walks of life. But the one person who requires a stand alone recognition for inspiration is my farther David du Toit – my foundation and idol.

6. Tell us about your aha moment

Rolley FounderI have many loves in life – women, cars, golf and engineering. These passions help me notice opportunities. I spotted one on the golf course one day playing a round with dad, as one of his friends was a little tired (hungover) and tried to hop on his power trolley. This unfortunately did not carry him as he’d hoped but instead broke. Frustrated at the £800 he spent on it (about $1300), he started giving it the 7 iron. Through the shards of plastic and circuitry I got my eureka moment for a final year project – this was back in 2006. I developed the concept of a hop-on golf trolley during 2008/2009 as a final year project for my undergraduate course in Engineering Design at London South Bank University (LSBU). The chap with the busted up power trolley would soon become my first customer 🙂

7. What was the obstacle that almost kept the Rolley from becoming a reality?

If I look back at who I was two years ago, I would have to say finance was a big obstacle, but you soon realise that there are ways around the money hurdle. It gave me a good lesson, and over time I’ve learned to negotiate and present opportunities to those who hide behind invoices. Strategic partnerships can also be a smart way of sharing technology platforms, finance and advice. They can also be founded upon contract and equity sharing, thus reducing the hard cash requirements of the venture. Another real hurdle would be time, but being aware of the constraints that this presents helps has helped reinforce the golden rule of under promising and over delivering.

8. Do you have any advice to other inventors/entrepreneurs/innovators out there?

Look after every single person who seeks advice from you, or admires a quality that they see in you. As entrepreneurs in our day and age it is vital to support each other. Seek events and enterprising communities that will provide mutual encouragement and support. In London we have the Virgin Media Pioneers, and this is a great place to share advice and meet like minded folk. Your contacts, and I mean “real relationships with honest people”, and working to create win-win relationships are going to be two ways to move things forward. Most importantly, where possibly try not to re-invent the wheel. Look at your idea and see if there are companies who do an aspect of your invention better that you, talk to them, and remember that any new revenue stream for a smart company must be structured as a win-win. And, of course please feel free to follow @RolleyGolf to see our progress 🙂

Conclusion

I will be interested to see how the Rolley progresses. Arnold and the crew have embarked on a world tour to launch the product and are producing a video to showcase it (sneak peek here). It will be interesting to see whether now is the time for the hop-on golfing revolution to begin.

The Rolley is not the first invention addressing the hop-on golf trolley idea, but will it be the first one to bridge the gap between invention and innovation?

To watch some of the progression in this solution area, here are two other takes on the hop-on golf trolley. The first is the SWIGO from three and a half years ago, followed by the MANTYS from 21 months ago:

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