Category Archives: Innovation

Food Innovation Sighting – Doritos Tacos

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Food Innovation Sighting - Doritos TacosI don’t typically frequent fast food restaurant chains, but today I did, and I had a food innovation sighting for my trouble. I stopped by the local Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Taco Bell combination store and as I was picking up my crispy strips order I heard a guy order two Doritos Tacos.

“Doritos Tacos?” I thought to myself. Then I looked up and sure enough Yum Brands has teamed up with PepsiCo’s Frito Lay to bring you the Doritos Taco. It’s just like it sounds. Frito Lay has created giant round Nacho Cheese Doritos and folded them into the shape of a taco shell, and then Yum Brands employees combine them with the usual Taco Bell taco fillings.

Now I didn’t actually try one, but how could they not be good and absolutely stuffed with calories?

So hats off to Frito Lay and Yum Brands on the creation of this simple food innovation.

For those of you keeping score with your SCAMPER framework scorecard, file this one under Combine.

What other food innovation combinations would make sense for two companies to create?

Innovation Training for your whole organization from Braden Kelley

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Innovating Through Downturns

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Innovating Through DownturnsWhile most individuals and organizations natural reaction to an economic downturn is fear and retrenchment, they also present a time of great opportunity.

Where would Microsoft be if they hadn’t continued investing through the downturn of the early 90’s?

  • Microsoft may never have finished the hugely successful Windows 95.

Where would Apple be if they hadn’t continued investing through the technology crash of 2001-2003?

  • Apple may never have fully realized the promise of the iPod and subsequent iPhone.

  • The unemployment rate increases (more available workers)

  • Interest rates drop (lower cost of capital)

  • People become fearful of losing their jobs making it easier to recruit from companies reducing or eliminating their innovation investments (increased labor mobility)

  • People are more open to moving if a spouse’s job is eliminated or at risk (increased labor mobility)

  • When a recession arrives, it is easier to acquire tax breaks or other incentives for expansion, new sites, etc. (lower investment costs)

So, if companies have positive cash flows or significant amounts of cash on their balance sheet, or promising ideas to invest in, then there is no better time to invest. Companies with the courage and financial capability to invest in innovation through a downturn, absolutely should.

In addition to all of the other benefits, there is no better opportunity to achieve competitive separation through continued investment in innovation.

It does, however, take a strong CEO and steady board to have the courage and conviction to make such an investment. Innovation is not a perfect science and requires a tolerance for failure and a long-term commitment.

In today’s short-term Wall Street quarterly profit-driven corporate reality, investors’ short-term outlook may be the biggest impediment of all. But, smart organizations will find strategic solutions to overcome this impediment.

Organizations should take the following strategic actions to maintain or expand their innovation initiatives, despite the current global economic downturn:

  1. Secure the leadership flexibility capable of continuing to invest in innovation despite financial pressures

  2. Identify resources that you would like to have had access to during good times, that you might now have access to such as:

    • Labor in scarce specialties

    • Affordable capital

    • Scarce real estate

  3. Increase competitive monitoring to identify opportunities that may be created in areas where the competition reduces previous innovation investment

  4. Increase customer research to identify opportunities to refine your ability to deliver products and services that deliver increased customer value, ideally at lower cost

  5. Improve your innovation processes to improve your ability to innovate more quickly and effectively than your competition

  6. Improve your organizational agility to increase its flexibility to adapt to changes in market conditions caused by the downturn and to shift resources efficiently and with increased speed

Organizations that take these necessary strategic actions, will come out the other side stronger than the competition, stronger than ever before, and create opportunities to preserve or attain market leadership.

Happy innovating!

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Interview with Retired President X

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Interview with Retired President XI had lunch in 2009 with the recently-retired president of a multi-billion dollar company and had a great conversation about innovation, leadership, and culture. The insights are still relevant and he enjoys his private life so I won’t be naming any names, but I will share some of the key insights and advice for innovators that came out of the conversation.

  1. Don’t be afraid to pay people well. When people aren’t busy worrying about money, they can focus on how to get more money into the business instead of trying to figure out how to get more money out of the business for themselves. Removing money from the equation also increases the chances that employees will bring their best ideas to the business instead of leaving to create a startup based on them.

  2. If you are an innovator and want to develop your idea within the company you are working for (whether it is an incremental innovation or a radical innovation), try to take it to someone who can say yes. There are far too many people in organizations that are trained to say no, and far too few who are equipped to say yes. Unfortunately, most organizations reinforce the importance of saying no, without empowering enough managers to say yes.

  3. Run as flat an organization as possible is crucial to innovation. Flatter organizations have fewer people in the middle to say no, and flatter organizations require managers to push more decisions to the edges of the organization. Pushing decisions to the edge of an organization tends to result in better decisions. The farther removed you are from all of the factors in decisions, the less successful you will be in making them correctly.

  4. Echoing former Halliburton CEO John Gibson’s thoughts – people brought in to help re-make the organization will ultimately be defeated by the processes and culture of the organization. Organizational change must occur from within and will generally occur quite slowly.

  5. Big ideas should be separated from the main organization into a new organization funded by the board of directors and reporting directly to them. They should also be staffed with employees from outside the main organization as well (except maybe Finance to enable consistent reporting). When you try and keep these potential radical innovations within the main organization, inevitably conflicts of interest will emerge between funding the idea and funding other transitory short-term leadership priorities.

  6. Upper management doesn’t generally know the best ways to effectively improve individual components of the organization. One approach to maximizing incremental innovation and improvement possibilities is to give the employees (not management) of a factory, a business unit, etc. a pile of money to use to improve the organization. You will be surprised how quickly employees can self-organize to determine the best uses for the money, how good they will be in selecting the best improvements to fund, and how fast stories about such an effort will spread to other parts of the organization.

  7. When people have an idea, they often just jump in and start developing the idea (even those ideas that others have had before), often reinventing the wheel and repeating many of the mistakes of those who have gone before them. To reduce waste and to accelerate success, consider having people submit a short research paper on the area of innovation they plan to pursue (to show that they have researched those that have gone before them). At the same time, somehow we have to find a better way of capturing the learnings from failed efforts for those undertaking new projects to learn from.

Finally, President X expressed that he would encourage anyone about to rise to the top job to take a break before assuming the top job to refresh, reflect, and to bring renewed energy and insights into the job. Whether or not you are in the top job or several levels down, I think there are some interesting insights to ponder here.

What do you think?

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Did you like Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire?

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Did you like Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire?My book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire has gotten a lot of great reviews on Amazon already, and several likes, and an increasing number of companies are buying it in bulk to help set a common language of innovation in their organization.

I am constantly humbled by the support that people show for my writing, most recently in a post on the Harvard Business Review Blog by Scott D Anthony titled The Making of an Innovation Master.

If you would like to show support for my writing endeavors, please click the ‘like’ button on Amazon (the international flavors have like buttons too).

If you have already read the book, please let others know what you found useful or valuable about it by writing a short review on your favorite book site. Don’t forget to grab your free stuff here.

And if you would like to build a common language of innovation in your organization, I can help organize a bulk order at up to 35% off the list price for USA deliveries (usually with no shipping and no tax) through a bookseller I’ve had great success with – just contact me. 800-CEO-READ also does a great job with bulk orders and can do some customizations.

Thank you very much for showing your support for Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.

Happy Innovating!

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The Nine Innovation Roles

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I’m seeing an increasing number of articles about innovation personalities and the like, and I’m a firm believer that it’s not personalities that matter so much when it comes to innovation, it’s the roles that we play in making innovation happen (or not). So, I would like to add my Nine Innovation Roles to the conversation.

The Nine Innovation RolesThe following is an excerpt from my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire:

Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative 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 of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.

Here are The Nine Innovation Roles:

1. Revolutionary

  • The Revolutionary is the person who is always eager to change things, to shake them up, and to share his or her opinion. These people tend to have a lot of great ideas and are not shy about sharing them. They are likely to contribute 80 to 90 percent of your ideas in open scenarios.

2. Conscript

  • The Conscript has a lot of great ideas but doesn’t willingly share them, either because such people don’t know anyone is looking for ideas, don’t know how to express their ideas, prefer to keep their head down and execute, or all three.

3. Connector

  • The Connector does just that. These people hear a Conscript say something interesting and put him together with a Revolutionary; The Connector listens to the Artist and knows exactly where to find the Troubleshooter that his idea needs.

4. Artist

  • The Artist doesn’t always come up with great ideas, but artists are really good at making them better.

5. Customer Champion

  • The Customer Champion may live on the edge of the organization. Not only does he have constant contact with the customer, but he also understands their needs, is familiar with their actions and behaviors, and is as close as you can get to interviewing a real customer about a nascent idea.

6. Troubleshooter

  • Every great idea has at least one or two major roadblocks to overcome before the idea is ready to be judged or before its magic can be made. This is where the Troubleshooter comes in. Troubleshooters love tough problems and often have the deep knowledge or expertise to help solve them.

7. Judge

  • The Judge is really good at determining what can be made profitably and what will be successful in the marketplace.

8. Magic Maker

  • The Magic Maker takes an idea and makes it real. These are the people who can picture how something is going to be made and line up the right resources to make it happen.

9. Evangelist

  • The Evangelist knows how to educate people on what the idea is and help them understand it. Evangelists are great people to help build support for an idea internally, and also to help educate customers on its value.

As you can see, creating and maintaining a healthy innovation portfolio requires that you develop the organizational capability of identifying what role each individual is best at playing in your organization. It should be obvious that a failure to involve and leverage all nine roles along the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea commercialization path will lead to suboptimal results. To be truly successful, you must be able to bring in the right roles at the right times to make your promising ideas stronger on your way to making them successful. Most organizations focus too much energy on generating the ideas and not enough on developing their ideas or their people.

If you would prefer, here is a slide deck that I posted to slideshare.net:

The Nine Innovation Roles

Action Items

  1. Download the simple Nine Innovation Roles Worksheet from my FREE STUFF page and use it in your groups to help understand what innovation roles people tend towards and which ones are underrepresented.

  2. Do you believe these are the roles that drive successful innovation? If not, why not.

  3. Book a Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop

  4. This is just an excerpt. Please check out the whole book.

Sound off in the comments below.

Book a Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop

Download the PDF version of the Nine Innovation Roles:

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Innovation Can Come From Anyone

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Innovation Can Come From Anyone“Innovation can come from anyone, but it is required from everyone for an organization to remain successful.”

Or taken another way:

“Innovation can come from anywhere, but you must be looking everywhere to find it.”

Innovation comes from good listening, observing, watching, waiting, connecting, and synthesizing.

Innovation comes from the creation of a unique, differentiated customer insight that you can build your ideation, your experimentation, your collaboration, and your commercialization efforts around. The goal of course is to turn that unique, differentiated insight into solutions valued above every existing alternative. Solutions that not only create value, but that you also stand ready and able to help people access and understand the need for and relevance in their life.

It is because innovation can come from anywhere and can involve everyone in the organization in making innovation happen that I created The Nine Innovation Roles and my innovation value framework, to help people make sense of what is necessary to make innovation successful as they form their innovation project teams and process, and to give people a simple framework to hold close as they think about creating innovation success.

I hope you’ll check out both of these and let me know what you think!

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Innovation or Invention? – Nokia’s Vibrating Tattoos

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Innovation or Invention? - Nokia's Vibrating TattoosIt was recently discovered that Nokia Corp. has filed for a tattoo that would send “a perceivable impulse” to your skin whenever someone pings you on your phone, ensuring you may never miss another phone call, text or email alert again.

According to the patent filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, your phone would communicate with a magnetic tattoo you placed on your body. The phone would transmit magnetic waves that the tattoo could receive. When the waves hit the tattoo, you would feel something. Patent filings suggest that it would be possible to customize the physical response depending on who is calling.

In the patent filing, Nokia also proposes a slightly less invasive version of this technology, which would include a magnetic receiver that could be worn on the skin like a sticker and would vibrate when the phone rings.

So do you think this is destined to become an innovation or is it merely an interesting invention?

Nokia Vibrating Tattoo Patent

Personally, at this point I believe it is merely an interesting invention. I’m not sure something like this will reach the mass adoption necessary to turn it into an innovation. Plus, at this point it is only a patent application and the amount of work that would go into getting the cost down to where it would need to be and to build some kind of channel of distribution makes it likely that something like this would take years to develop, plan and launch.

It is however a brilliant public relations coup for a company that is struggling on the brink of becoming irrelevant as the advanced world moves quickly to adopt smartphones, a category where Nokia is struggling.

So, what do you think – invention or innovation?

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Innovation Insights for March 21, 2012

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Innovation Insights for March 21, 2012I am in the middle of putting together a substantial innovation training proposal for senior leaders at another Fortune 100 company. As part of the proposal I included a few phrases about my innovation philosophy and thought I would share them here as well as on Twitter and Linkedin as part of a new series of short posts.

Here are the quotes worth sharing:

“Sustainable innovation is more about people, process, and communications than it is about inventions created by science and technology.”

“Every organization has a different level of innovation maturity and needs a system to embed innovation within the organization and its culture.”

“Innovation requires that you unlock the very best from your people and maintain a laser focus on value.”

“Creating and sustaining an innovation culture requires creating consistency across beliefs, communications and behavior.”

I’m in the process of creating a page about all of my innovation training offerings. Please contact me for all of your innovation training needs.

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Guest Innovation Blogger in the Language of Your Choice

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Guest Innovation Blogger in the Language of Your ChoiceAre you looking for a way to increase the innovation knowledge in your organization?

Looking for a way to begin installing a common innovation language in your organization?

Well then, why not have me (Braden Kelley) as a guest blogger on your site or otherwise republish any of my own personal stash of 650+ articles from Human-Centered Change & Innovation directly as articles onto your web site or enterprise portal, you are more than welcome to do so as long you preserve proper attribution using this HTML snippet at the bottom of the article:

Braden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, workshop leader, and creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan. Braden has been advising companies since 1996, while living and working in England, Germany, and the United States. Braden is a US Navy veteran and earned his MBA from top-rated London Business School. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Go ahead, integrate some of my 650+ articles into your corporate portal, innovation management system, or open innovation community and I’m sure you will experience not only more informed conversations and contributions, but also possibly greater innovation success.

Happy innovating!

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Personal Innovation – Star Shining Example

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Personal Innovation - Star Shining ExampleI came across a queue reduction application for the iPhone and iPod Touch four years ago that was intriguing. At the time it looked like the application wasn’t quite finished or certified for use yet by Apple and Starbucks, but from what I gathered at the time it was meant to work something like this:

  1. User comes in range of a Starbucks WiFi Hotspot
  2. Application recognizes the Starbucks WiFi Hotspot or user initiates application
  3. Application engages the user interface portion of the application
  4. Application makes a connection
  5. Application prompts user to order a Starbucks beverage
  6. Application user interface facilitates the selection and transmission of the drink order (including a list of saved favorites to speed the process)
  7. Application connects to the user’s iTunes account
  8. Application deducts funds from the user’s iTunes account
  9. Application creates a visual barcode with the information necessary to register payment
  10. User places iPhone or iPod Touch with visual barcode under a reader at the pickup counter
  11. User collects their beverage

The visual barcode (semacode) and scanner portion of the system could be made unnecessary (or relegated to backup system status), by instead transmitting a payment confirmation to Starbuck’s on-site systems directly via the WiFi connection. In the backup scenario, the visual barcode would serve as an electronic receipt to show proof of payment in case the systems in the store doesn’t receive the systematic payment immediately.

Imagine the convenience of getting a block or two from your favorite Starbucks, connecting, clicking ‘The Usual’ and proceeding directly to the drink pickup counter instead of waiting in line to order and pay.

Of course there is no reason why companies like McDonald’s or Cinemark couldn’t create similar applications to eliminate some of the queueing from our lives. If people could order this easily with their phones then businesses could reduce staffing or reallocate resources from order taking and payment processing to more value-added activities like preparing food or beverage orders.

Apps like this could be extended to the Web through the introduction of a store number field or store locator mini-application or pulldown at the beginning of the application sequence. This would allow you to order out of range of the in-store WiFi over your cellular network or from your home or office internet connection.

Less time spent waiting in lines?

Oh what a beautiful world.

But, as I looked to refresh this article from 2008 and bring it to the Innovation Excellence readers I checked back and it turned out that the creator, Phil Lu, is a designer and created this as a mockup not as real app. This is a great example of shining your star and engaging in personal innovation. Just look at all of the coverage he got of his design and visioning skills for this prototype back in 2008 when I first wrote this article.

If you missed my previous personal innovation article on shining your star, it is here.

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