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.
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.
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A 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?
It 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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A popular set of questions that I get asked repeatedly by clients and audience members includes the following:
We know we need to innovate, but who has time?
How do companies balance the day to day operations with the need to innovate?
Without a budget to allocate people to innovation, how can I make innovation part of people’s day jobs?
We all know that when it comes to business, and life in general, that there are two major constraints we all face – and often trade off one against the other – those two constraints are time and money.
Every organization may understand the need for innovation, but it is difficult to execute in a repeatable way because so many of our organizations are set up to maximize the extraction of value from today’s operations and do a poor job of balancing this admirable and necessary goal with the need to develop tomorrow’s revenue and profit-generating operations.
Some organizations set up research and development departments, new product development departments, corporate venturing arms, incubators, or skunkworks to try and address the needs for future revenue and profit streams, but this limits the number of people that can potentially contribute to the potential innovation process and success of the organization – and isolates the efforts from other valuable perspectives and inputs.
Other organizations like Google and 3M also have some of these structures, but in addition try and say to employees that they can spend up to a certain percentage of their time on innovation projects (or whatever work-related pursuit they might want). In 3M’s case the figure is 15% and in Google’s case it is 20%.
There is only one problem with percent time.
The day-to-day deadline pressures and fire drills never disappear in any organization (even an innovative one), and so often the joke goes – sure Google employees get 20% time, but only if it’s on Saturday or Sunday.
So what’s the solution?
Well, after talking with the folks at Intuit as part of the research for my next book project, I’ve come to discover that they approach the time for innovation problem slightly differently.
Instead of just allowing people to spend up to a blanket 10% of their time on innovation projects, instead they allow employees to accumulate that time and then schedule time off to pursue a specific innovation project, often doing so at the same time with 3-4 other employees so they can collaborate on the project idea and push it forward.
I like to call it taking an innovation vacation.
I think this is the best approach I’ve heard so far to balancing the needs of the day to day business and its need for predictable resourcing, with the desire to invest in innovation to sustain the business into the future.
Allowing employees to schedule a collaborative innovation vacation achieves SEVERAL key business goals:
Predictability – It allows managers to do capacity planning and schedule around the employee’s absence
Retention – Allowing employees to take a week or two here or there to pursue an innovation project they are interested in, is likely to lead to higher job satisfaction and retention
Collaboration – If you encourage people to take their time off as cross-functional groups, we know that not only do diverse teams solve problems better, but we also know from EMC’s data on innovation submissions and finalists that projects pursued as teams instead of by individuals are 33% more likely to make the final cut
Increased Organizational Performance – Organizations that have deeper networks and stronger cross-functional knowledge (more T people) are more likely to work together more efficiently, have fewer blind spots, have higher employee engagement, and just have more fun
Time out for a sanity check. 10% time equates to about five weeks a year, and 20% time would equate to about ten weeks a year. So, if you choose to pursue an innovation investment strategy like innovation vacations, you must plan accordingly in terms of staffing (factoring in of course that most employees won’t make full use of it), but I believe it can be done and should be done – for the long-term health of the business.
We try and convince people to allocate 10-15% of their income towards retirement so that they have money to provide for themselves when they grow old and retire, why shouldn’t an organization allocate a similar percentage?
What do you think, could you establish something like this in your organization?
What would you do with an innovation vacation?
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By now, if you’re in marketing you’re probably familiar with the concept of customer lifetime value. Put simply, it’s the idea that a customer is worth to the organization not just the value of a single transaction, but the collection of all of the transactions that they might make during their relationship with you. And when speaking of customer lifetime value, we generally don’t talk about any single customer, but speak about their value in aggregate, averaging out the high value (many, many purchases) and low value customers (one or a few purchases).
The concept is usually linked to discussions of how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer and whether a particular advertising or marketing effort is worth undertaking.The concept has been even applied to non-profits (lifetime donor value) and even to social media ROI.
But what’s a good outside innovation partner worth?
As I was speaking with several of the innovation leaders at Intuit on their campus in Mountain View last year, it came to me that organizations should be seeking to build and strengthen relationships with their customers, suppliers, and other potential innovation partners in ways similar to their approach to traditional relationship marketing.
Having helped several clients with their relationship marketing strategies, it seems to me that there is no reason why the same principles can’t or shouldn’t be applied to your potential innovation partner community.
After all, as more and more companies begin to understand and engage in the practice of open innovation, then there will be an advantage accumulated by the organizations that do a good job of building strong and profitable relationships with the most passionate and prolific suppliers, customers, academics, etc. over those organizations that don’t.
What organization out there wouldn’t want to accumulate an innovation advantage, a growth advantage, a relationship advantage over their competitors?
But the real questions are of course:
Do you have the required internal innovation capability built already to support open innovation?
Are you engaging in open innovation already? Or are your competitors?
What are you doing to build strong relationships with you potential innovation partners?
Are you tasking skilled relationship marketers with creating and maintaining these conversations and building these relationships?
So, do you? Are you?
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In collaboration with IIR and the Back End of Innovation conference, I hosted a webinar last year titled ‘Mobilizing Your Innovation Army’ examining how organizations can engage the hearts, minds, and eyes of employees into the innovation efforts of the organization. Here is a video recording from the webinar:
Too much of the time the innovation conversation focuses on whether someone is innovative or not. We waste far too much time focusing on how people can become more innovative instead of stopping to think about the possibility that everyone is innovative in their own way.
The lone innovator myth needs to die.
Great ‘lone innovators’ like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison had teams of people surrounding them and helping them succeed.
Innovation is a team sport, and in this webinar we will take a look at how to engage your entire workforce in the innovation process by leveraging The Nine Innovation Roles to harness the different unique innovation capabilities that we all possess. We are all innovative in our own ways, and The Nine Innovation Roles help you evaluate your current workforce and provide insight into how to mobilize an innovation army.
In this recording of my webinar for the Back End of Innovation conference, I focus on:
The importance of building a common language of innovation
I do a lot of work as a social business and innovation speaker at events all around the world. If you’d like me to speak at your company or event, please contact me.
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I’ve been talking for a while now as an innovation speaker how crucial value is to innovation. It is no consequence as a result that value sits at the center of my definition of innovation:
Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into solutions valued above every existing alternative – and widely adopted.
In this definition you will also see that I draw a distinction between useful and valuable, and I develop it further in my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – the following is an excerpt on the topic from the book:
“Often usefulness comes from what a product or service does for you, and value comes from how it does it. If you’re looking to truly deliver innovative products and services into the marketplace, then once you succeed at the designing and developing the ‘what’, don’t forget to also focus on achieving excellence in the ‘how’.”
One of my favorite example of the useful versus valuable distinction is the mousetrap. Despite the hundreds or thousands of patent applications submitted every year for new mousetrap designs, most people still purchase the same simple snapping mousetrap that you see in cartoons and that has been around for a hundred years. The mousetrap is a great example of how easy it is to generate innovation investment opportunities and how difficult it is to create something that is truly valuable.
This distinction between useful and valuable is one that you must seek to understand and by turning this into a lens through which you can look at the potential of your innovation investment opportunities, the higher the return you will have from your innovation portfolio.
Speaking of which, maybe we should stop talking about idea generation, idea management and idea evaluation and instead begin thinking about ideas as innovation investment opportunities. Just changing the language we use in talking about innovation can change the way we think about things and the outcomes that we are able to generate. The images we choose and the language we use is incredibly important and we’ll discuss this in more detail here in a moment. But first I would like to share my innovation equation to counter the popular (innovation = idea + execution) equation. I like to say that:
Innovation = Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation
Now you will notice that the components are multiplicative not additive. Do one or two well and one poorly and it doesn’t necessarily add up to a positive result. Doing one poorly and two well can still doom your innovation investment to failure. Let’s look at the three equation components in brief:
Value Creation is pretty self-explanatory. Your innovation investment must create incremental or completely new value large enough to overcome the switching costs of moving to your new solution from the old solution (including the ‘Do Nothing Solution’). New value can be created by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or create new psychological or emotional benefits.
Value Access could also be thought of as 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?
Value Translation is all about helping people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Value translation is also about understanding where on a continuum between the need for explanation and education that your solution falls. 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).
Done really well, value translation also helps to communicate how easy it will be for customers and consumers to exchange their old solution for the new solution. My favorite example of poor value translation and brilliant value translation come from the same company and the same product launch – The Apple iPad. It’s hard to believe, but Apple actually announced the iPad with the following statement:
“Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”
This set off a firestorm of criticism and put the launch at risk of failure. But amazingly Apple managed to come up with the Out of Home (OOH) advertisements with a person with their feet up on a couch and the iPad on their lap (see above) by the time the product shipping. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this particular picture will probably end up being worth billions of dollars to Apple.
Never Forget!
Value creation is important, but you can’t succeed without equal attention being paid to both value access and value translation…
Because innovation is all about value…
Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation = Success!
This is the first of a series of video and text interviews with innovation leaders at a range of companies that are seeking to create innovation excellence in their organizations. This interview, and many others with innovation leaders from trailblazing organizations around the globe, will build upon the foundation of the research and findings contained in my first book – Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – and will form part of a case study on Intuit for my next publishing effort. This effort will be a highly collaborative and interactive endeavor looking at what is required to make innovation a deep capability in successful organizations.
If you think your organization is doing some really great work to create innovation excellence in your organization, please contact me.
I am excited to present the first innovation interview in this video interview series examining some of the topic surrounding the development of a deep innovation capability. I had the opportunity to interview Scott Cook, Co-Founder and Chairman of Intuit, at The Economist’s “Innovation 2011: Entrepreneurship for a Disruptive World” event in Berkeley, CA. In this video Scott talks about some of the key factors required in helping an organization become excellent at innovation. Below you will find the video and a written transcript.
Here is the innovation interview transcript:
Hello everyone this is Braden Kelley of Blogging Innovation. here with Scott Cook the founder of Intuit. Scott, I would really like to ask you about innovation and building innovation as a deep capability within the organization and as you started Intuit and as you look to grow and make it a successful company, what are some of the key things that you tried to do to help make innovation a capability in a continuous possibility for the organization.
Scott: Yeah that is something we have been spending a lot of time on over the last 4 years so I think a lot of the DNA we have on innovation is good in the company but we had lost some of the skill and capabilities. We hired new people, new managers so we went into a big rebuilding starting in 07. Things that have been very— I mean what you are trying to do, is change and improve the way teams do their daily work and the way managers, what they expect of teams.
So we worked it at all levels, so I work with teams from the top and it changes your expectations of what business unit leaders do with their teams and then we have innovation catalysts who work to couch teams and help teams when they hit innovation roadblocks or trying to leap and really change their thinking. We also work on skill building so one example is that a number of our executives had actually narrowed who we would hire from various companies, good folks but it never actually done innovation in a way that we teach people to do it.
So we took 2 days of an off site with just the top 18 people in the company and had our innovation catalyst come in and have them do the very process that we expect to our teams. Customer immersion with the customers and the executives did it, why we recruited customers as they came in. The nature of going broad that day— in a nature of trying to come to a key insight, testing that insight back with the customers then going broad, I don’t care with that insight, what could you do and then narrowing.
We made them go through the same steps that we expect as a team so they personally could have done it. I find it hard for leaders to lead to a destination, they have not yet been. So that is why we had to work on a leash up level but at the same time we were working on the team so how they work. So that is, we also do internal company broadcasts where we take teams inside Intuit and they tell their stories of how they did it step-by-step because we all learn from stories.
Another thing that we do is we teach by doing. We used to teach by preaching, talk at people. I don’t find adults learn from being talked at. They just retain the same habits they already have. So if we really want to change habits you have to get them to practice the new habits. So now when we do company meetings or leadership development sessions most of it is doing very little of it as listening. We get them busy doing the very things we want them to do or with homework in advance where they had to interview people who do what we want, then to do and learning from that and report back into a very doing process.
So that has been a big change we have made as from how we actually conduct the meetings where we want to use them to change habits so it is a series of things, note it happens fast step-by-step. Some teams move faster than others and we try to use those to inspire the rest but I think as I worked with teams now I see them— we are getting better outputs higher success rates with customers much higher than ratings of new products, fewer failures are pruned out early and cheap which is the whole goal. So I have seen the output metrics now finally after 4 years at working at this that you would project in the desire from making these sorts of interventions.
Braden:So in talking with other people in Intuit, it became very clear that when the company started small there was this idea of Follow Me Home’s, and then you know kind of follow me into the office and the catalyst programs sounds like one of the things that you are doing to try to instill some of these behaviors across the company and expose people to some of the ideas. And as I, you know talked with people at the organization it became very clear that the design for the like concept that you are trying to move across the organization is spreading farther and wider and then as you pursue that what are some of the key challenges that you found and that you have overcome over time in relation to trying to take some of the small company ethos as you have grown and maintain that those aspects of designing for a customer to like?
Scott: I want to say 2 things one is there is a challenge of team size. The team’s size when we started of course was small so everyone in the team was very close to customers. Our team size has grew and it grew and it grew and once you get a bigger team you move from 4 people working on a product to the 20 or 30 or 50, well then you have got some people in the team who go out and meet with customers. Other people say “Nah, I don’t need to do that, you do that, oh just listen to what you are saying” and suddenly you just get most of the team who has never met with customers or has not met in the last year with customers or with prospects.
And then you have much more communication problems, you don’t have shared vision, you don’t have shared understanding, a lot of things go haywire so key is to get back to smaller team sizes. So we have been busting up the team sizes sort of taking teams that used to be 30 or 40 and broken up some note in some cases no team bigger than 4. And we have to architect the work a lot more if those teams are truly going to be independent and that is our jobs as leaders. So that has been one very helpful thing. I think another. I would focus on learning from customer behaviors, not learning from customers, learning from customer behaviors.
Because the tempting tendency is for people on teams to rely on what customers say and maybe that works if you are selling to specialists. Let us say you are selling to a doctor who does cardiac surgery 8 hours a day, 5 days a week maybe that person can really tell you accurately what they are going to do if confronted with a new offering. But for regular people that just sell regular stuff to who might do taxes ones a year or might work with a bank ones in a week or pay their employees ones every 2 weeks. What they tell you, maybe half of it they will actually do, but you actually don’t know which half you are listening to.
So I learn much more reliable behaviors, trust observable behaviors that you can observe and measure either measure remotely through what happens in the web or you can measure by observing with your own eyes. The tendency though when you take people having them trained and send them out to meet with customers is they have got to interview customers. Well you just invented the word’s most expensive way to do a customer interview. If you are going to interview them call them on the phone or send survey, don’t do Follow Me Home.
Follow me homes are there so you can see with your eyes so shut up, say nothing, watch for an hour or two, or three then you can ask him about what you saw and then you are asking about behaviors. That is still an interview, not the most reliable but it will be better because you are probing about specific behaviors yourself. So I say that is the second thing that we have worked to re-instill this trust behaviors and behavioral data, not attitudes or words.
Braden:Very good, well I think the insight is very important and really and the taking the time to listen like you said is very important to innovation, I mean that is what we are all trying to do there early is the people that follow blogging innovation so on behalf of the readers and the viewers of Blogging Innovation, I think you very much Scott for your time and again this has been Braden Kelley of Blogging Innovation here with Scott Cook of Intuit.
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Is the era of innovation over? Or is the war for innovation just beginning?
I came across an article in one of Canada’s main newspapers — The Globe and Mail — by Barrie McKenna titled ominously, ‘Has Innovation Hit a Brick Wall?’
The article speaks to how the Canadian government sinks billions of dollars into research and development every year, yet the country remains an innovation laggard compared with most of its trading partners. The author refers to this as Canada’s “innovation deficit.” The article then goes on to examine some research from University of British Columbia economics professor James Brander that examines whether Canada’s problem is part of a much broader global phenomenon.
The conclusions that Dr. Brander comes to are less than comforting (if you agree with his view of innovation); his research found the pace of innovation to be slowing dramatically in four key areas: agriculture, energy, transportation, and health care.
As someone who works with companies to help foster innovation and whom frequently writes and speaks on the topic, I have a problem with Dr. Brander’s conclusions about Canada and the world in the same way that I have issues with the way that the U.S. Congress and President Obama approach innovation in the United States. In fact the American government’s approach to innovation prompted me to write the controversial ‘An Open Letter on Innovation to President Obama.’
I’m working on a white paper for a client, and as part of my research, I’m looking for a few people who are willing to share what the innovation imperative was for their organization to start innovating (or to increase their effort spent on innovation).
Why did your organization decide to make a commitment to innovation?
Why did management decide that they wanted to sustain an effort to make innovation a deep capability of the organization?
Or even, what was the fire that caused management to commit to an innovation project?
Ideally I am looking for people who are willing to be quoted, but if you are not, that’s okay too.
Sound off in the comments or use the contact form.
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Ideas are easy; innovation is hard. Ideas are exciting, but innovation is scary because it is all about change. The changes required by minor innovations are easier for customers and organizations to absorb. But the large changes generated by major innovations often disrupt not only the market, but the internal workings of the organization as well. This requires organizations to become increasingly flexible and adaptable. And companies that successfully innovate in a repeatable fashion have one thing in common: they are good at managing and adapting to change and complexity.
People often fail to imagine just how the change injected into organizations by innovation ebbs and flows across the whole organization’s ecosystem. Innovation creates a complex web of change not just for customers, but also for employees, suppliers, marketing, operations, and many other groups. Let’s explore some of the change categories visualized in this framework using an Apple iPod example from my book, Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire:
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A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an 
It 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.
A popular set of questions that I get asked repeatedly by clients and audience members includes the following:
By now, if you’re in marketing you’re probably familiar with the concept of 
I’ve been talking for a while now as an 
This is the first of a series of video and text interviews with innovation leaders at a range of companies that are seeking to create innovation excellence in their organizations. This interview, and many others with innovation leaders from trailblazing organizations around the globe, will build upon the foundation of the research and findings contained in my first book – 
Is the era of innovation over? Or is the war for innovation just beginning?
I’m working on a white paper for a client, and as part of my research, I’m looking for a few people who are willing to share what the innovation imperative was for their organization to start innovating (or to increase their effort spent on innovation).
Ideas are easy; innovation is hard. Ideas are exciting, but innovation is scary because it is all about change. The changes required by minor innovations are easier for customers and organizations to absorb. But the large changes generated by major innovations often disrupt not only the market, but the internal workings of the organization as well. This requires organizations to become increasingly flexible and adaptable. And companies that successfully innovate in a repeatable fashion have one thing in common: they are good at managing and adapting to change and complexity.