Category Archives: Product Innovation

Why Business Transformations Fail

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(and What Data Centers Can Teach Us About Getting Them Right)

Why Business Transformations Fail - Pexels

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

On May 6, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott joined CNBC’s “Power Lunch” to discuss the companies’ partnership.  But something that Huang said about large-scale cloud service providers (i.e., hyperscalers) at the end of the interview stopped me in my tracks:

It’s not a data center that stores information. It’s a factory that produces intelligence. And these intelligence tokens could be reformulated into music, images, words, avatars, recommendations of music, movies, or, you know, supply chain optimization techniques.

What struck me wasn’t the claim about what data centers and AI could create — we’ve seen evidence of that already. It was the re-framing of data centers from storage solutions to “intelligence factories.”

When leaders fail to lead, or even recognize that the business they’re in is different, even the best efforts at business transformation are doomed.

Because re-framing is how Disruption begins.

Data Centers Are No Longer in the Data Business

Repositioning your company to serve a new job requires rethinking, redesigning, and rebuilding everything.

Consider the old adage that railroads failed because they thought they were in the railroad business. By defining themselves by their offering (railroad transportation) rather than the Jobs to be Done they solve (move people and cargo from A to B), railroads struggled to adapt as automobiles became common and infrastructure investments shifted from railroads to highways.

Data centers have similarly defined themselves by their offering (data storage). However, Huang’s reframing signals a critical shift in thinking about the Jobs that data centers solve: “provide intelligence when I need it” and “create X using this intelligence.”

Intelligence Factories Require a New Business Model

This shift—from providing infrastructure for storing data to producing intelligence, strategic analysis, and creative output—will impact business models dramatically.

Current pricing models based on power consumption or physical space will fail to capture the full value created. Capabilities mustexpand beyond building infrastructure to include machine learning and AI partnerships.

But Intelligence Factories are Just the Beginning

While Intelligence Factories will require data centers to rethink their business models and may even introduce a new basis of competition (a requirement for Disruption), they’re only a stepping-stone to something far more disruptive: Dream Factories.

While the term “Dream Factory” was coined to describe movie studios during  Golden Era, the phrase is starting to be used to describe the next iteration of data centers and AI. Today’s AI is limited to existing data and machine learning capabilities, but we’re approaching the day when it can create wholly new music, images, words, avatars, recommendations, and optimization techniques.

This Is Happening to Your Business, Too

This progression will transform industries far beyond technology. Here’s what the evolution from data storage to Intelligence Factory to Dream Factory could look like for you:

  • Healthcare: From storing medical records to diagnosing conditions to creating novel treatments
  • Financial Services: From tracking transactions to predicting market movements to designing new financial instruments
  • Manufacturing: From inventory management to process optimization to inventing new materials
  • Retail: From cataloging products to personalizing recommendations to generating products that don’t yet exist

How to prepare for your Dream Factory Era

Ask yourself and your team these three questions:

  1. Is my company defining itself by what it produces today or by the evolving needs it serves?
  2. What is our industry’s version of the shift from data storage to dream factory?
  3. What happens to our competitive advantage if someone else creates our industry’s dream factory before we do?

If you’re serious about transformation, take a cue from the data centers: redefine what business you’re in—before someone else does.

After all, the key to success isn’t trying to stay a data center. It’s recognizing you’ve become an intelligence factory, and your long-term success depends on becoming a dream factory.

Image credit: Pexels

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‘Stealing’ from Artists to Make Innovations Both Novel and Familiar

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AKA Self Plagiarism

Stealing from Artists to Make Innovations Both Novel and Familiar

GUEST POST from Pete Foley


This morning I came across a wonderful piece of music by one of my guitar heroes, Robert Fripp, of King Crimson fame.  It was a duet with Andy Sommers (The Police).  You don’t need to listen to it to connect to the insight it gave me, but if you are interested, you can watch it here. It’s interesting and innovative music

I’m a fan of Fripp, in part because of his technical expertise with the guitar, but mostly because of his innovation and restless creativity.   King Crimson are not a top 40 band, but they’ve enjoyed a long and successful career going back to the late 1960’s.  Their longevity derives, at least in part from their ability to completely reinvent themselves, and challenge their audience on a regular basis.  But they do so while also retaining a loyal following and owning a unique space in music.  They have, over 50 odd years, managed to walk the tightrope between constant change and ongoing familiarity.  

The Novelty-Familiarity Dichotomy:  Stepping back, that tightrope is one of the biggest challenges we all face as innovators.  Hitting the sweet spot between novelty and familiarity is key to both trial and repeat. If we don’t offer something new and interesting, then people have no reason to try us, and are better off staying with their existing habits and behaviors.  But make it too different, and we create a barrier to adoption, because we ask potential users to take a risk by straying from the proven and familiar, and to put effort into trying, using and understanding us. 

This reflects the somewhat schizophrenic, or at least dual personality of our collective human behavior.  We are drawn to familiarity, but have also evolved to crave novelty.  Our desire to experiment and explore is key to why we are the dominant species on the planet, and have expanded our presence to just about every habitat on the planet.  But the lower cognitive demands of the familiar mean much of our life is still dominated by habits, comfortable repetition and familiar activities.  Whether we an artist, a brand, work in an office, or are simply in a romantic relationship, we all have to navigate this dichotomy.  

Self Plagiarizing:  That brings me back to Robert Fripp.  Given his history of continuous change, and much as I enjoyed the track, I was surprised that the core riff sounded very, very similar to a King Crimson song Thela Hut Ginje, released the year before.  They are both Robert Fripp co-compositions, so he was effectively ‘stealing’ his own ideas, or self plagiarizing. 

Initially that seemed odd for someone who has for decades been a formidable change agent.   But I often learn a lot about the innovation process via analogy from music and fine arts.  So I started thinking about self plagiarism, and if it is a tool we could or should use more in innovation in general, as a potential way to maintain familiarity while also driving change  

Transferring our own signatures into multiple new executions ensures familiarity and hence reassures to our ‘loyal’ users.  But in parallel, putting those signatures in new contexts also provides a way to draw in new ‘fans’, or safely break monotony for our ‘regulars’.   Of course, at one level, the reassurance element is exactly what branding does.   But the concept of self plagiarism is potentially a way to achieve this on a more subtle, implicit level.   

Name that Band!  The arts community are masters of this.   It’s amazing to me how often we almost instantly recognize an artist, even if the painting or song itself is not familiar.  Maybe it’s a unique voice, a unique style or sound, or perhaps a signature motif.  Whether it’s David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Pablo Picasso,  Salvador Dali or Taylor Swift, we intuitively and largely unconsciously recognize their ‘style’.   Of course, explicit continuity and consistency is also important.  The wall of color in a supermarket acts as both a signpost, and reinforces important popularity cues.   Even in more dispersed digital environments, more ‘explicit’  cues provide important and cognitively simple cues that tie individual innovations to over-arching brands.  

But self reference, or self plagiarism is an additional tool that I think is worth exploring.  It allows us to leverage (implicit) sensory cues to reinforce brand consistency, and is one potential way to reinforce continuity in the face of evolutionary or even disruptive change. And just as you may intuitively recognize a song by your favorite artist without having to ‘think’ about it, it can operate very quickly, and help an innovation to ‘feel’ right.

Bob Dylan Goes Electric: And having more implicit tools can help with some of the inherent constraints of consistent branding.  Chasing familiarity can be both a blessing and a curse; ask any classic rock band on a greatest hits tour.  Or for any of you who saw the excellent “A Complete Unknown’ movie about Dylan, that culminates in the outrage he created with his core fan base by ‘going electric.  Maintaining familiarity ‘talks’ to a loyal audience, but can also be quite constraining, especially for the most innovative amongst us. And this can be especially challenging if, as in Dylan’s case, the outside world is changing quickly and we need or want to respond.  But there are numerous examples of artists who have done this quite successfully.  For better or for worse, Dylan still sounded distinctly like Dylan after he ‘rebranded’ as electric.  David Bowie, Madonna, or the different ‘periods’ that describe Picasso’s catalog are good examples of dramatic change and reinvention that still maintain some familiarity and consistency.  

What taking this kind of approach looks like for us will of course depend upon the area in which we are innovating.  But sensory cues, shapes, or relative design elements are all cues we can self-plagiarize, that add layers of familiarity, and are often difficult for competition to copy without evoking as, and hence increasing the ‘mind-share’ of their competitor.     

Of course, this is not to suggest replacing brand (visual) language and brand first design with subtle, implicit cues.   But the journey of a brand is complex, and in today’s world of rapid change, we are likely to increasingly need ways to manage ever greater changes within a ‘familiar’ context.  Thinking about different, potentially complementary ways to do this is never a bad idea. 

Image credits: Pixabay

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Product-Lifecycle Management 2.0

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A Kaizen Approach to Market-Driven Innovation

Product-Lifecycle Management 2.0

GUEST POST from Dr. Matthew Heim

In today’s competitive business environment, companies are under constant pressure to innovate, streamline processes, and improve product quality. One powerful way to achieve these goals is by applying the principles of Kaizen—the Japanese concept of continuous improvement—to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). By viewing PLM as a Kaizen loop, organizations can foster a culture of ongoing innovation and refinement, ensuring that products evolve in line with customer needs, technological advances, and market demands.

In this blog, we’ll explore how managing Product Lifecycle Management as a Kaizen loop can drive better results, improve efficiency, and lead to the creation of superior products that resonate with customers.

What is Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)?

Before we dive into how PLM can benefit from a Kaizen approach, let’s define what PLM is.

Product Lifecycle Management is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from inception, through design and manufacturing, to service and disposal. It involves integrating people, processes, business systems, and information to streamline product development, reduce costs, enhance quality, and improve collaboration across the product’s life.

While PLM has traditionally been seen as a linear process—moving from concept to production and then to end-of-life—a Kaizen loop introduces a more fluid, iterative approach that can enhance every stage of the lifecycle.

What is Kaizen?

Kaizen is a Japanese term that translates to “continuous improvement.” It refers to the practice of making small, incremental improvements in processes, products, or services on a regular basis. Rather than focusing on large, disruptive changes, Kaizen promotes consistent, sustainable improvements through the involvement of all employees.

Incorporating Kaizen into PLM means shifting from a linear, static approach to a dynamic, feedback-driven system where every phase of the product’s life is optimized and refined continuously.

The Kaizen Loop in Product Lifecycle Management

A traditional PLM approach tends to follow a set sequence of stages: concept, design, manufacture, test, launch, and then end-of-life. However, when applying Kaizen, this cycle is treated as an ongoing loop, where each stage is continuously revisited and improved. Here’s how it works:

  1. Define the Initial Goal (Plan)
    The first step in the Kaizen loop is to define the goals for the product, based on customer needs, market research, and business objectives. Involving stakeholders from the Product, Sales and Marketing to ensure the plan’s success is the way to begin. Then, ensure that the product development process is aligned with the company’s strategic drivers. Unlike traditional planning, Kaizen planning doesn’t end here, it merely establishes a baseline for ongoing improvement. Each of the stakeholders involved should plan for feedback loops and potential adjustments early on.
  2. Develop the Product (Develop)
    The next phase involves the design and development of the product. However, under the Kaizen approach, development isn’t a one-time, isolated effort. Rather, it’s a continuous process of iteration. As prototypes are created, the design is continuously tested and refined. Feedback from customers, production teams, and stakeholders is used to make adjustments and enhancements during the development stage.
  3. Measure and Analyze Performance (Review)
    Once the product is in production, it is crucial to continuously monitor and analyze its performance. In a Kaizen-driven PLM environment, this doesn’t just happen at the end of the development cycle. Rather, measurement and analysis are built into every phase. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as product quality, customer satisfaction, production efficiency, and cost control should be regularly reviewed. This ongoing feedback helps to identify areas for improvement, even after the product is launched.
  4. Implement Improvements (Revise)
    The beauty of Kaizen is its focus on action. Based on the insights gained from the measurement phase, teams are empowered to implement improvements quickly. If customers are experiencing issues, fixes are developed and rolled out rapidly. If new technologies become available that could improve the product, they are incorporated into future iterations. These incremental improvements are the driving force of the Kaizen loop, enabling the product to continuously evolve and stay competitive.
  5. Refinement Through Feedback (Iterate)
    The final step in the Kaizen loop is to integrate the improvements back into the product and into future development. The loop continues, with each cycle bringing new insights, innovations, and refinements to all of the teams involved. This feedback-driven model ensures that every product phase—whether it’s design, manufacturing, or customer feedback—is part of an ongoing process of improvement.

PLM Kaizen Infographic Ezassi

Key Benefits of Managing PLM as a Kaizen Loop

  1. Faster Time-to-Market
    Because Kaizen encourages rapid feedback and iteration, product improvements can be made in real-time. This reduces delays and accelerates the development process, enabling companies to bring products to market more quickly.
  2. Increased Product Quality
    Continuous improvement ensures that the product is constantly evolving based on real-world data and user feedback. This approach leads to higher product quality, as the product is fine-tuned over time and refined based on actual performance.
  3. Better Collaboration and Communication
    Kaizen is inherently a team-driven approach, where everyone from engineers to salespeople to customers has input into the product’s development. This fosters a culture of collaboration and ensures that all perspectives are considered, leading to a more well-rounded and successful product.
  4. Lower Costs
    By focusing on small, incremental improvements, Kaizen minimizes the risk of costly mistakes. Rather than investing large sums in a single, big change, incremental changes allow teams to make improvements more affordably and with fewer risks. Moreover, early identification of inefficiencies during production or design stages helps to avoid costly fixes down the line.
  5. Improved Customer Satisfaction
    Since customer feedback is central to the Kaizen approach, PLM that incorporates Kaizen ensures that products are always aligned with customer needs. This ongoing dialogue with customers leads to higher satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

Overcoming Challenges in Implementing Kaizen in PLM

While applying Kaizen principles to PLM offers immense benefits, there are some challenges companies may face:

  • Cultural Shift: Employees need to embrace a mindset of continuous improvement, which can require significant cultural change, especially in traditional, hierarchical organizations.
  • Resource Constraints: Regular feedback and iterative improvements require resources, including time and manpower, which can be stretched thin in high-pressure environments.
  • Technology Integration: To enable real-time feedback and iteration, companies must leverage advanced PLM tools, which may require investment in software systems and employee training.

However, the long-term benefits of adopting a Kaizen-driven PLM system often outweigh these challenges. Companies that successfully integrate Kaizen into their PLM processes can look forward to better products, more satisfied customers, enhanced enterprise collaboration and increased profitability.

Conclusion

Product Lifecycle Management, when managed as a Kaizen loop, transforms the traditional product development approach into a dynamic, continuous improvement system. By focusing on incremental, data-driven improvements at every stage of the product’s lifecycle, organizations can produce better products, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.

In an age of fast-changing technology and evolving customer expectations, adopting a Kaizen mindset for PLM can ensure that a company stays ahead of the competition, continually innovating and refining its products to meet the needs of tomorrow.

By embracing Kaizen, PLM becomes not just a process but a philosophy—one that fosters growth, adaptability, and success for the long term.

Ready to implement Kaizen in your PLM process?  Contact Ezassi to learn more about how to put these principles into action.

Image credits: Ezassi

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When Scaling Innovation Backfires

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How One Company Became the Theranos of Marshmallows

When Scaling Innovation Backfires

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Here’s a head-scratcher when it comes to scaling innovation: What happens when your innovative product is a hit with customers, but you still fail spectacularly? Just ask the folks behind Smashmallow, the gourmet marshmallow company that went from sweet success to sticky situation faster than you can say “s’mores.”

The Recipe for Initial Success

Jon Sebastiani sold his premium jerky company Krave to Hershey for $240 million and thought he’d found his next billion-dollar idea in fancy French marshmallows. And initially, it looked like he had. 

Smashmallow’s artisanal, flavor-packed treats weren’t just another fluffy, tasteless sugar puff – they created an entirely new snack category. Customers couldn’t get enough of their handcrafted, churro-dusted, chocolate-chip-studded clouds of happiness. The company hit $5 million in sales in its first year, doubled that the next, and was available in 15,000 stores nationwide in only its third year.

Sounds like a startup fairy tale, right? Right!  If we’re talking about the original Brothers Grimm versions.  Corporate innovators start taking notes.

The Candy-coated Vision

Sebastiani and his investors weren’t content with building a successful premium regional brand. They wanted to become the Kraft of craft marshmallows, scaling from artisanal to industrial without losing what made the product special. It’s a story that plays out in corporations every day: the pressure to turn every successful pilot into a billion-dollar business.

So, they invested.  Big time.

They signed a contract with “an internationally respected builder of candy-making machines” to design and build a $3 million custom-built machine and another with a copacker to build an entirely new facility to accommodate the custom machine.

Bold visions require bold moves, and Sebastiani was a bold guy.

The Scale-up Meltdown

But boldness can’t overcome reality, and the custom machine couldn’t replicate the magic of handmade marshmallows. It couldn’t even make the marshmallows.

Starch dust created explosion hazards. Cinnamon wouldn’t stick. Workers couldn’t breathe through spice clouds. The handmade ethos of imperfect squares gave way to industrialized perfection. Each attempt to solve one problem created three more, like a game of confectionery whack-a-mole.

By 2022, Smashmallow was gone, leaving behind a cautionary tale about the gap between what customers value and what executives and investors want. The irony? They succeeded in their mission to disrupt the market – by 2028, the North American marshmallow market is projected to more than double its 2019 size, largely thanks to the premium category Smashmallow created. They just won’t be around to enjoy it.

A Bittersweet Paradox

For so many corporate innovators, this story hits close to home. How many promising projects died not because customers didn’t love them but because they couldn’t scale to “move the needle” for a multi-billion dollar corporation? A $15 million business might be a champagne-popping moment for an entrepreneur, but it barely registers as a rounding error on a Fortune 500 income statement.

This is the innovation paradox facing corporate innovators: The very pressure to go big or go home often destroys what makes an innovation special in the first place. It’s not enough to create something customers love – you must create something that can scale to satisfy the corporate appetite for growth.

Finding the Sweet Spot

The lesson isn’t that we should abandon ambitious scaling plans. Instead, we must be brutally honest about whether our drive for scale aligns with what makes our innovation valuable to customers. If it doesn’t, we must choose whether to scale back our ambitions (unlikely) or let go of our successful-but-small idea.   

After all, not every marshmallow needs to be a mountain, but every mountain climber (that’s you) needs a mountain.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Innovation Mythbusters – Top 5

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Innovation Mythbusters - Top 5

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Amazingly Fabulous Tools is an award-winning, entrepreneurial market leader in the global machine engineering industry. The ambitious and proactive CEO Charlie Chaps invested in dispatching a Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley to research, investigate, and report on how to capture and emulate the critical ingredients of its “secret innovative sauce.” Upon their return, the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers created and shared a beautiful, illustrated PowerPoint presentation with the board despite secretly knowing and passively avoiding saying that Amazingly Fabulous Tools could not replicate what they had discovered, primarily due to how the top five innovation myths clandestinely operated in the organization.

The Corporate Antibodies

This is due to their overt experience with the organization’s “innovation antibodies,” which cause an organization to resist change and protect the status quo. These antibodies consist of rigid people and inconsistent processes that extinguish a new idea as soon as it begins to course through the organization. In the Amazingly Fabulous Tool company, most people, especially the founders and the board, unconsciously and powerfully neutralized any forces that threatened to destabilize the company’s current state and stunt its growth by shutting down the fresh ideas and unconventional thinking their company badly needed.

Charlie Chaps built a fantastic, largely incomprehensible strategic plan with a BHAG, strategic goals, and sets of individual KPIs. This plan provided concrete evidence that reassured the board that the company was taking action to sustain its leadership position in the market and would take the business to the next level by growing its ROI. It also aimed to leverage the collective genius of its owners, Bob the Brave Builder and Eric the Energetic Entrepreneur, to ensure a legacy was left no matter who was at the helm.

The Innovation Culture Diagnostic Findings

A quantitative and qualitative cultural diagnostic revealed that people lacked permission, safety, and trust to speak up, rock the boat and challenge the status quo. It also showed that the organization lacked rigor in its process disciplines and a focus on developing its people’s capabilities.

It also revealed that Amazingly Fabulous Tools was secretly driven by its founders’ and sales directors’ self-interest and greed due to the highly competitive profit-share sales model. Not by an obligation and commitment to creating, inventing, designing, and delivering disciplined, innovative process improvements, products, and services that their customers purchased and did not appreciate and cherish.

This was a stark contradiction and barrier to the company’s ability to sustain its enviable global reputation. Finally, people believed that Charlie Chaps’ fantastic strategic plan, BHAG, goals, and KPIs were confusing and disconnected from the organization’s current reality and would not produce a collaborative and innovative organization.

So, they did not accept or apply the plan and kept safe by conducting business as usual.

The Top Five Innovation Myths

Because the corporate antibodies revealed that people unanimously believed each of the key myths, including:

Myth # 1: Innovation is a solo activity; people believe that ” only the owners can innovate.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is impossible without inclusion and collaboration, which are achieved through practical and disciplined teaming and networking.


Myth #2: Innovation is top-down; people believed they were not responsible or accountable for planning and were forced to be reactive. “The planning is difficult, that is for sure, because we are firefighting all the time, and that goes back to the frustration of not having enough time to do what needs to get done…and resources and …tools.”
The Brutal Truth: When people have the permission and safety to challenge the status quo, make mistakes, and are trusted to learn through experimentation, innovation can emerge anywhere in an organization, or team.


Myth #3: Innovation is about the newest thing; people believed that radical innovation was needed when agility was the problem; “The scary thing is our key competitor is getting more flexible (agile); we’re just getting more reliable (stable). It’s the stupid things that are so annoying. It’s the embarrassing things.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is guided by its strategic intent. It can be incremental, continuous, radical, breakthrough, disruptive, or differentiated, as there is no one best way of innovating.


Myth # 4: Innovation can’t be taught; people believed that they did not have to learn to improve or innovate when they encountered quality issues continuously; “A lot of times, it’s not because the customer wants the machine tomorrow but because we want to ship it tomorrow because we want to get it off the floor, we want to meet numbers, we want the cash. We usually drive the time frame and rush it out the door, creating many internal problems. It also creates problems externally with the customer when they think they’re getting a machine fully intact, but half its parts are missing….”
The Brutal Truth: Innovators are not born and are made. Anyone can learn to innovate,


Myth #5: You can’t force innovation; people were dis-empowered and did not take responsibility for influencing their environment to provide order and discipline; “It’s a traffic jam. That’s what we’ve got. It’s a traffic jam. Cars sitting bumper to bumper look like they are gridlocked. It represents the log jam of our activities. Where people are trying to push so many activities through two lanes of traffic when we’ve got six lanes worth of traffic.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation can emerge when people have a sense of urgency, understand, and are motivated to engage in necessary, high-impact cultural and organizational change.

People must be prepared for it, change-ready and receptive, and intentionally pulled towards a compelling and desired future within an equalized environment that balances chaos and creativity with rigidity and discipline through rigorous planning.

The real costs to the organization

People believed that “This business makes money despite itself. There is potential to be truly great”. This was the most significant innovation antibody because there was no sense of urgency or even a financial or growth necessity to innovate. The company was quite comfortable with the status quo and had no reason to shift its habitual and unconscious comfort zone in ways that people and organizations must do to innovate because it involves being ready and receptive to mega-changes.

The significant investment in sending the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley sadly remained in the mythical realm of Innovation Dreamland.

So, lacking focus, discipline and rigor, the group of seriously qualified and intelligent engineers knowingly consistently dispatched faulty million-dollar machines to highly valued, global customers.

The cost of rework and brand erosion were considerable.

These machines required considerable analysis, problem-solving, and rework upon their return. Their costs were not recorded as repairs, causing the engineering division to be consistently over budget. Charlie Chaps reacted by restricting its budget and inhibiting its investment in critical research and development, which is needed to create, invent, and innovate to repair and sustain its global reputation as an innovator.

Innovation Dreamland remained a mythical and magical fantasy in Amazingly Fabulous Tools.

Sadly, the organization failed to shift its focus from challenge to opportunity because it could not resolve the corporate antibodies (implicit killers), remove the roadblocks, break down the internal cultural barriers to innovation and develop the agility necessary to become both a people-centric and customer-centric organization.

It lost an opportunity to make innovation a daily habit for everyone by failing to embed it in its organization as a way of life. It needed to empower, enable, and equip its talented, experienced and motivated people with the emotional energy, change, cognitive, and innovation agility to expose, challenge and resolve the underlying corporate antibodies.

It did not prioritize customer satisfaction and keep its promises by creating, inventing, and innovating high-value, quality products and services that improve the quality of their lives that are appreciated and cherished.

Many transformations and change-led innovation initiatives designed as strategic interventions fail due to a lack of alignment between strategy, structure, processes, and human skills, resulting in unproductive actions and poor human behaviors.

This is a short section from Chapter One of our new book, “Conscious Innovation – Empowering People to Be, Think and Act Differently in a Constantly Changing World”, which will be published in 2025.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, it is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Coping with the Chasm

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Coping with the Chasm

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

I’ve been talking about crossing the chasm incessantly for over thirty years, and I’m not likely to stop, but it does beg the question, how should you operate when you are in the chasm? What is the chasm itself about, and what actions is it likely to reward or punish?

The chasm is a lull in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, one that comes after the enthusiasts and visionaries have made their splash and before the pragmatists are willing to commit. At this time the new category is on the map, people are talking about it, often quite enthusiastically, but no one has budgeted for it as yet. That means that conventional go-to-market efforts, based on generating and pursuing qualified leads with prospects who have both budget and intent to purchase, cannot get traction. It does not mean, however, that they won’t entertain sales meetings and demos. They actually want to learn more about this amazing new thing, and so they can keep your go-to-market engine humming with activity. They just won’t buy anything.

Crossing the Chasm says it is time for you to select a beachhead market segment with a compelling reason to buy and approach them with a whole product that addresses an urgent unsolved problem. All well and good, but what if you don’t know enough about the market (or your own product for that matter) to make a sound choice? What if you are stuck in the chasm and have to stay there for a while? What can you do?

First of all, take good care of the early adopter customers you do have. Give them more service than you normally would, in part because you want them to succeed and be good references, but also because in delivering that service, you can get a closer look at their use cases and learn more about the ones that might pull you out of the chasm.

Second, keep your go-to-market organization lean and mean. You cannot sell your way out of the chasm. You cannot market your way out either. The only way out is to find that targetable beachhead segment with the compelling use case that they cannot address through any conventional means. This is an exercise in discovery, so your go-to-market efforts need to be provocative enough to get the meeting (this is where thought leadership marketing is so valuable) and your sales calls need to be intellectually curious about the prospect’s current business challenges (and not presentations about how amazing your company is or flashy demos to show off your product). In short, in the chasm, you are a solution looking for a problem.

Third, get your R&D team directly in contact with the customer, blending engineering, professional services, and customer success all into one flexible organization, all in search of the beachhead use case and the means for mastering its challenges. You made it to the chasm based on breakthrough technology that won the hearts of enthusiasts and visionaries, but that won’t get you across. You have to get pulled out of the chasm by prospective customers who will make a bet on you because they are desperate for a new approach to an increasingly vexing problem, and you have made a convincing case that your technology, product, talent, and commitment can fill the bill.

Finally, let’s talk about what you should not do. You cannot perform your way out of the chasm. You have no power. So, this is not a time to focus on execution. Instead, you have to find a way to increase your power. In the short term, you can do this through consulting projects—you have unique technology power that people want to consume; they just don’t want to consume through a product model at this time. They are happy to pay for bespoke projects, however, and that is really what the Early Market playbook is all about. Of course, projects don’t scale, so they are not a long-term answer, but they do generate income, and they do keep you in contact with the market. What you are looking for is solution power, tying your technology power to a specific use case in a specific segment, one that you could deliver on a repeatable basis and get you out of the chasm. Often these use cases are embedded in bespoke projects, just a part of the visionary’s big picture, but with more than enough meat on the bone to warrant a pragmatist’s attention.

Sooner or later you have to make a bet. You can recognize a good opportunity by the following traits:

  • There is budget to address the problem, and it is being spent now.
  • The results the prospect is getting are not promising and, if anything, the situation is deteriorating.
  • You know from at least one of your projects that you can do a lot better.

That’s about all the data you are going to get. That’s why we call crossing the chasm a high-risk, low-data decision. But it beats staying in the chasm by a long shot.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot

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Is Disruption About to Claim a New Victim?

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Kodak. Blockbuster. Google?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You know the stories.  Kodak developed a digital camera in the 1970s, but its images weren’t as good as film images, so it ended the project.  Decades later, that decision ended Kodak.  Blockbuster was given the chance to buy Netflix but declined due to its paltry library of titles (and the absence of late fees).  A few years later, that decision led to Blockbuster’s decline and demise.  Now, in the age of AI, disruption may be about to claim another victim – Google.

A very brief history of Google’s AI efforts

In 2017, Google Research invented Transformer, a neural network architecture that could be trained to read sentences and paragraphs, pay attention to how the words relate to each other, and predict the words that would come next. 

In 2020, Google developed LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, using Transformer-based models trained on dialogue and able to chat. 

Three years later, Google began developing its own conversational AI using its LaMDA system. The only wrinkle is that OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. 

Now to The Financial Times for the current state of things

“In early 2023, months after the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT, Google was gearing up to launch its competitor to the model that underpinned the chatbot.

.

The search company had been testing generative AI software internally for several months by then.  But as the company rallied its resources, multiple competing models emerged from different divisions within Google, vying for internal attention.”

That last sentence is worrying.  Competition in the early days of innovation can be great because it pushes people to think differently, ask tough questions, and take risks. But, eventually, one solution should emerge as superior to the others so you can focus your scarce resources on refining, launching, and scaling it. Multiple models “vying for internal attention” so close to launch indicate that something isn’t right and about to go very wrong.

“None was considered good enough to launch as the singular competitor to OpenAI’s model, known as ChatGPT-4.  The company was forced to postpone its plans while it tried to sort through the scramble of research projects.  Meanwhile, it pushed out a chatbot, Bard, that was widely viewed to be far less sophisticated than ChatGPT.”

Nothing signals the threat of disruption more than “good enough.”  If Google, like most incumbent companies, defined “good enough” as “better than the best thing out there,” then it’s no surprise that they wouldn’t want to launch anything. 

What’s weird is that instead of launching one of the “not good enough” models, they launched Bard, an obviously inferior product. Either the other models were terrible (or non-functional), or different people were making different decisions to achieve different definitions of success.  Neither is a good sign.

“When Google’s finished product, Gemini, was finally ready nearly a year later, it came with flaws in image generation that CEO Sundar Pichai called ‘completely unacceptable’ – a let-down for what was meant to be a demonstration of Google’s lead in a key new technology.”

“A let-down” is an understatement.  You don’t have to be first.  You don’t have to be the best.  But you also shouldn’t embarrass yourself.  And you definitely shouldn’t launch things that are “completely unacceptable.”

What happens next?

Disruption takes a long time and doesn’t always mean death.  Blackberry still exists, and integrated steel mills, one of Clayton Christensen’s original examples of disruption, still operate.

AI, LLMs, and LaMDAs are still in their infancy, so it’s too early to declare a winner.  Market creation and consumer behavior change take time, and Google certainly has the knowledge and resources to stage a comeback.

Except that that knowledge may be their undoing.  Companies aren’t disrupted because their executives are idiots. They’re disrupted because their executives focus on extending existing technologies and business models to better serve their best customers with higher-profit offerings.  In fact, Professor Christensen often warned that one of the first signs of disruption was a year of record profits.

In 2021, Google posted a profit of $76.033 billion. An 88.81% increase from the previous year.

2022 and 2023 profits have both been lower.

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An Innovation Lesson From The Rolling Stones

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An Innovation Lesson From The Rolling Stones

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

If you’re like most people, you’ve faced disappointment. Maybe the love of your life didn’t return your affection, you didn’t get into your dream college, or you were passed over for promotion.  It hurts.  And sometimes, that hurt lingers for a long time.

Until one day, something happens, and you realize your disappointment was a gift.  You meet the true love of your life while attending college at your fallback school, and years later, when you get passed over for promotion, the two of you quit your jobs, pursue your dreams, and live happily ever after. Or something like that.

We all experience disappointment.  We also all get to choose whether we stay there, lamenting the loss of what coulda shoulda woulda been, or we can persevere, putting one foot in front of the other and playing The Rolling Stones on repeat:

“You can’t always get what you want

But if you try sometimes, well, you might just find

You get what you need”

That’s life.

That’s also innovation.

As innovators, especially leaders of innovators, we rarely get what we want.  But we always get what we need (whether we like it or not)

We want to know. 
We need to be comfortable not knowing.

Most of us want to know the answer because if we know the answer, there is no risk. There is no chance of being wrong, embarrassed, judged, or punished.  But if there is no risk, there is no growth, expansion, or discovery.

Innovation is something new that creates value. If you know everything, you can’t innovate.

As innovators, we need to be comfortable not knowing.  When we admit to ourselves that we don’t know something, we open our minds to new information, new perspectives, and new opportunities. When we say we don’t know, we give others permission to be curious, learn, and create. 

We want the creative genius and billion-dollar idea. 
We need the team and the steady stream of big ideas.

We want to believe that one person blessed with sufficient time, money, and genius can change the world.  Some people like to believe they are that person, and most of us think we can hire that person, and when we do find that person and give them the resources they need, they will give us the billion-dollar idea that transforms our company, disrupts the industry, and change the world.

Innovation isn’t magic.  Innovation is team work.

We need other people to help us see what we can’t and do what we struggle to do.  The idea-person needs the optimizer to bring her idea to life, and the optimizer needs the idea-person so he has a starting point.  We need lots of ideas because most won’t work, but we don’t know which ones those are, so we prototype, experiment, assess, and refine our way to the ones that will succeed.   

We want to be special.
We need to be equal.

We want to work on the latest and most cutting-edge technology and discuss it using terms that no one outside of Innovation understands. We want our work to be on stage, oohed and aahed over on analyst calls, and talked about with envy and reverence in every meeting. We want to be the cool kids, strutting around our super hip offices in our hoodies and flip-flops or calling into the meeting from Burning Man. 

Innovation isn’t about you.  It’s about serving others.

As innovators, we create value by solving problems.  But we can’t do it alone.  We need experienced operators who can quickly spot design flaws and propose modifications.  We need accountants and attorneys who instantly see risks and help you navigate around them.  We need people to help us bring our ideas to life, but that won’t happen if we act like we’re different or better.  Just as we work in service to our customers, we must also work in service to our colleagues by working with them, listening, compromising, and offering help.

What about you?
What do you want?
What are you learning you need?

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3 Ways to View Your Innovation Basket

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(including one that makes Radical Innovation easy)

3 Ways to View Your Innovation Basket

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You are a rolling stone, and that means you gather no moss!  You read the September issue of HBR (and maybe last week’s article), tossed out your innovation portfolio, and wove yourself an innovation basket to “differentiate the concept from finance and avoid the mistake of treating projects like financial securities, where the goal is usually to maximize returns through diversification [and instead] remember that innovation projects are creative acts.”   

Then you explained this to your CFO and received side-eye so devastating it would make Sophie Loren proud.

The reality is that the innovation projects you’re working on are investments, and because they’re risky, diversification is the best way to maximize the returns your company needs.

But it’s not the only way we should communicate, evaluate, and treat them.

Different innovation basket views for different customers

When compiling an innovation basket, the highest priority is having a single source of truth.  If people in the organization disagree on what is in and out of the basket, how you measure and manage the portfolio doesn’t matter.

But a single source of truth doesn’t mean you can’t look at that truth from multiple angles.

Having multiple views showing the whole basket while being customized to address each of your internal customer’s Jobs to be Done will turbocharge your ability to get support and resources.

The CFO: What returns will we get and when?

The classic core/adjacent/transformational portfolio is your answer.  By examining each project based on where to play (markets and customers) and how to win (offerings, profit models, key resources and activities), you can quickly assess each project’s relative riskiness, potential return, time to ROI, and resource requirements.

The CEO: How does this support and accelerate our strategic priorities?

This is where the new innovation basket is most helpful.  By starting with the company’s strategic goals and asking, “What needs to change to achieve our strategy?” leadership teams immediately align innovation goals with corporate strategic priorities.  When projects and investments are placed at the intersection of the goal they support, and the mechanism of value creation (e.g., product, process, brand), the CEO can quickly see how investments align with strategic priorities and actively engage in reallocation decisions.

You: Will any of these ever see the light of day?

As much as you hope the answer is “Yes!”, you know the answer is “Some.  Maybe.  Hopefully.”  You also know that the “some” that survive might not be the biggest or the best of the basket.  They’ll be the most palatable.

Ignoring that fact won’t make it untrue. Instead, acknowledge it and use it to expand stakeholders’ palates.

Start by articulating your organization’s identity, the answers to “who we are” and “what we do.” 

Then place each innovation in one of three buckets based on its fit with the organization’s identity:

  • Identity-enhancing innovations that enhance or strengthen the identity
  • Identity-stretching innovations that “do not fit with the core of an organization’s identity, but are related enough that if the scope of organizational identity were expanded, the innovation would fit.”
  • Identity-challenging innovations that are “in direct conflict with the existing organizational identity.”

It probably won’t surprise you that identity-enhancing innovations are far more likely to receive internal support than identity-challenging innovations.  But what may surprise you is that core, adjacent, and transformational innovations can all be identity-enhancing.

For example, Luxxotica and Bausch & Lomb are both in the vision correction industry (eyeglasses and contact lenses, respectively) but have very different identities.  Luxxotica views itself as “an eyewear company,” while Bausch & Lomb sees itself as an “eye health company” (apologies for the puns). 

When laser-vision correction surgery became widely available, Bausch & Lomb was an early investor because, while the technology would be considered a breakthrough innovation, it was also identity-enhancing.  A decade later, Bausch & Lomb’s surgical solutions and ophthalmic pharmaceuticals businesses account for 38% of the company’s revenue and one-third of the growth.

One basket.  Multiple Views.  All the Answers.

Words are powerful, and using a new one, especially in writing,  can change your behavior and brain. But calling a portfolio a basket won’t change the results of your innovation efforts.  To do that, you need to understand why you have a basket and look at it in all the ways required to maximize creativity, measure results, and avoid stakeholder side-eye.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Why You Should Care About Service Design

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Why You Should Care About Service Design

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

What if a tool had the power to delight your customers, cut your costs, increase your bottom line, and maybe double your stock price? You’d use it, right?

That’s precisely the power and impact of Service Design and service blueprints. Yet very few people, especially in the US, know, understand, or use them. Including me.

Thankfully, Leala Abbott, a strategist and researcher at the intersection of experience, innovation, and digital transformation and a lecturer at Parsons School of Design, clued me in.

What is Service Design?

RB: Hi, Leala, thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.

LA: My pleasure! I’m excited about this topic. I’ve managed teams with service designers, and I’ve always been impressed by the magical way they brought together experience strategy, UX, and operations.

RB: I felt the same way after you explained it to me. Before we get too geeked up about the topic, let’s go back to the beginning and define “service.”

LA: Service is something that helps someone accomplish a goal. As a result, every business needs service design because every business is in the service industry.

RB: I’ll be honest, I got a little agitated when I read that because that’s how I define “solution.” But then I saw your illustration explaining that service design moves us from seeing and problem-solving isolated moments to seeing an integrated process. And that’s when it clicked.

LA:  That illustration is from Lou Downe’s talk Design in Government Impact for All . Service Design helps us identify what customers want and how to deliver those services effectively by bringing together all the pieces within the organization. It moves us away from fragmented experiences created by different departments and teams within the same company to an integrated process that enables customers to achieve their goals.

Why You Need It

RB: It seems so obvious when you say it. Yet so often, the innovation team spends all their time focused on the customer only to develop the perfect solution that, when they toss it over the wall for colleagues to make, they’re told it’s not possible, and everything stops. Why aren’t we always considering both sides?

LA: One reason, I think, is people don’t want to add one more person to the team. Over the past two decades, the number of individuals required to build something has grown exponentially. It used to be that one person could build your whole website, but now you need user experience designers, researchers, product managers, and more. I think it’s just overwhelming for people to add another individual to the mix. We believe we have all the tools to fix the problem, so we don’t want to add another voice, even if that voice explains the huge disconnect between everything built and their operational failures.

RB: Speaking of operational failures, one of the most surprising things about Service Design is that it almost always results in cost savings. That’s not something most people think about when they hear “design.”

LA: The significant impact on the bottom line is one of the most persuasive aspects of service design. It shifts the focus from pretty pictures to the actual cost implications. Bringing in the operational side of the business is crucial. Building a great customer journey and experience is important, but it’s also important to tie it back to lost revenue and increased cost to serve

Proof It Works 

LA: One of the most compelling cases I recently read was about Autodesk’s transition to SaaS, they brought in a service design company called Future Proof. Autodesk wanted to transition from a software licensing model to a software-as-a-service model. It’s a significant transition not just in terms of the business model and pricing but also in how it affects customers.

If you’re a customer of Autodesk, you used to pay a one-time fee for your software, but now you are paying based on users and services. Budgeting becomes messy. The costs are no longer simple and predictable. Plus, it raises lots of questions about the transition, cost predictability, control over access, managing subscriptions, and flexibility. Notice that these issues are about people managing their money and increasing costs. These are the areas where service design can truly help. 

Future Proof conducted customer interviews, analyzed each stage of the customer journey, looked at pricing models and renewal protocols, and performed usability studies. When they audited support ticket data for the top five common customer issues, they realized that if Autodesk didn’t change their model, the cost of running software for every customer would increase by 40%, and profit margins would decrease by 15% to 20%.

Autodesk made the change, revenue increased significantly, and their stock price doubled. Service design allows for this kind of analysis and consideration of operational costs.

How to Learn More

RB: Wow, not many things can deliver better service, happier customers, and doubling a stock price. Solid proof that companies, and innovation teams in particular, need to get smart on service design. We’ve talked a lot about the What and Why of Service Design. How can people learn more about the How?

LA: Lou Downe’s book is a great place to start Good Services: How to Design Services That Work. So is Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight by Thomas A Stewart and Patricia O’Connell.  I also recommend people check out The Service Design Network for tools and case studies and TheyDo, which helps companies visualize and manage their service design.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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