Tag Archives: Innovation

Las Vegas Formula One

Successful Innovation, Learning Experience or Total Disaster?

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

In Las Vegas, we are now clearing up after the Formula 1 Grand Prix on the Strip. This extremely complex event required a great deal of executional innovation, and one that I think as innovators, we can learn quite a lot from.

It was certainly a bumpy ride, both for the multi-million dollar Ferrari that hit an errant drain cover during practice, but also with respect to broader preparation, logistics, pricing and projections of consumer behavior. Despite this, race itself was exciting and largely issue free, and even won over some of the most skeptical drivers. In terms of Kahneman’s peak-end effects, there were both memorable lows, but also a triumphant end result. So did this ultimately amount to success?

Success?: For now, I think it very much depends upon your perspective and who you talk to. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, but in Las Vegas, the race was extremely polarizing, with often heated debates between pro- and anti- F1-ers that were often as competitive as the race.

The reality is that it will be months, or more likely years before the dust settles, and we know the answer. And I strongly suspect that even then, those who are for and against it will all likely be able to claim support for their point of view. One insight I think innovators can take from this is that success can be quite subjective in of itself, and greatly depends upon what factors you measure, what period of time you measure over, and often your ingoing biases. And the bigger and more complex the innovation, often the harder it is to define and measure success.

Compromise Effects: When you launch a new product, it is often simpler and cheaper to measure its success narrowly in terms of specific dollar contribution to your business. But this often misses its holistic impact. Premium products can elevate an entire category or brand, while poorly executed innovations can do the opposite. For example, the compromise effect from Behavioral Economics suggests that a premium addition to a brand line up can shift the ‘Good, Better, Best’ spectrum of a category upwards. This can boost dollar sales across a line up, even if the new premium product itself has only moderate sales. For example, the addition of high priced wines to a menu can often increase the average dollars per bottle spent by diners, even if the expensive wine itself doesn’t sell. The expensive wines shift the ‘safe middle’ of the consideration set upwards, and thus increase revenue, and hopefully profit.

Money, Scope and Intangibles: In the case of F1, how far can and should we cast the net when trying to measure success? Can we look just at the bottom line? Did this specific weekend bring in more than the same weekend the previous year in sports betting, rooms and entertainment? Did that difference exceed the investments?

Or is that too narrow? What about the $$ impact on the weeks surrounding the event? We know that some people stayed away because of the construction and congestion in the lead up to the race. That should probably be added into, or subtracted from the equation.

And then there’s the ‘who won and who lost question’? The benefits and losses were certainly not homogeneous across stakeholders. The big casinos benefited disproportionately in comparison to the smaller restaurants that lost business due to construction, some to a degree that almost rivaled Covid. Gig workers also fared differently. I have friends who gained business from the event, and friends who lost. Many Uber drivers simply gave up and stopped working. But those who stayed, or the high-end limo drivers likely had bumper weekends. Entertainers working shows that were disrupted by F1 lost out, but the plethora of special events that came with F1 also provided a major uptick in business for many performers and entertainers.

There is also substantial public investment to consider. Somewhat bizarrely, the contribution of public funds was not agreed prior to the race, and the public-private cost sharing of tens of millions is still being negotiated. But even facing that moving target, did increased (or decreased) tax income before, during and after the race offset those still to be determined costs?

Intangibles: And then there’s the intangibles. While Vegas is not exactly an unknown entity, F1 certainly upped its exposure, or in marketing terms, it’s mental availability. It brought Vegas into the news, but was that in a positive or negative light? Or is all publicity good publicity in this context? News coverage was mixed, with a lot of negative focus on the logistic issues, but also global coverage of what was generally regarded as an exciting race. And of course, that media coverage also by definition marketed other businesses, including the spectacular Sphere.

Logistics: Traffic has been a nightmare with many who work on the strip facing unprecedented delays in their commutes for many weeks, with many commutes going from minutes to hours. This reached a point where casinos were raffling substantial prizes, including a Tesla, just to persuade people to not call in sick. Longer term, it’s hard to determine the impact on employee morale and retention, but its hard to imagine that it will be zero, and that brings costs of its own that go well beyond a raffled Tesla

Measuring Success? In conclusion, this was a huge operation, and its impact by definition is going to be multidimensional. The outcome was, not surprisingly, a mixed bag. It could have been a lot better, or a lot worse. And even as the dust settles, it’s likely that different groups will be able to cherry pick data to support their current opinions and biases.

Innovation Insights: So what are some of the more generalized innovation insights we can draw?

(a) Innovation is rarely a one and done process. We rarely get it right first time, and the bigger and more complex an innovation is, the more we usually have to learn. F1 is the poster child for this, and the organization is going to have an enormous amount of data to plough through. The value of this will greatly depend on F1’s internal innovation culture. Is it a learning organization? In a situation like this, where billions of dollars, and careers are on the line, will it be open or defensive? Great innovation organizations mostly put defensiveness aside, actively learn from mistakes, and adopt Devils Advocate approaches to learn from hard earned data. But culture is deeply embedded, and difficult to change, so much depends on the current culture of the organizations involved.

(b) Going Fast versus Going Slow: This project moved very, very quickly. Turning a city like Las Vegas from scratch into a top of the line race track in less than a year was a massive challenge. The upside is that if you go fast, you learn fast. And the complexity of the task meant much of the insight could pragmatically only be achieved ‘on the ground’. But conversely, better scenario planning might have helped anticipate some of the biggest issues, especially around traffic disruption, loss of business to smaller organizations, commuting issues and community outreach. And things like not finalizing public-private contracts prior to execution will likely end up prolonging the agony. Whatever our innovation is, big or small, hitting that sweet spot between winging it and over-thinking is key.

(c) Understanding Real Consumer Behavior. The casinos got pricing horribly wrong. When the race was announced, hotel prices and race packages for the F1 weekend went through the roof. But in the final run up to the race, prices for both rooms and the race itself plummeted. One news article reported a hotel room on the strip as low as $18! Tickets for the race that the previous month had cost $1600 had dropped to $800 or less on race day. Visitors who had earlier paid top dollar for rooms were reported to be cancelling and rebooking, while those locked into rates were frustrated. There is even a major lawsuit in progress around a cancelled practice. I don’t know any details around how pricing was researched, and predicting the market for a new product or innovation is always a challenge. In addition, the bigger the innovation, the more challenging the prediction game is, as there are less relevant anchors for consumers or the business to work from. But I think the generalizable lesson for all innovators is to be humble. Assume you don’t know, that your models are approximate, do as much research as you can in contexts that are a close to realistic as possible, don’t squeeze margins based on unrealistic expectations for the accuracy of business models, and build as much agility into innovation launches as possible. Easier said than done I know, but one of the most consistent reasons for new product failure is over confidence in understanding real consumer response when the rubber hits the road (pun intended), and how it can differ from articulated consumer response derived in unrealistic contexts. Focus groups and on-line surveys can be quite misleading when it comes down to the reality of handing over hard cash, opportunity cost, or how we value ur precious time short versus long-term term.

Conclusion: Full disclosure, I’ve personally gone through the full spectrum with Formula One in Vegas. I loved the idea when it was announced, but 6 months of construction, disruption, and the prospect of another two months of tear down have severely dented my enthusiasm. Ultimately I went from coveting tickets to avoiding the event altogether. People I know range from ecstatic to furious, and everything in between. Did I mention it was polarizing?

The reality is that this is an ongoing innovation process. There is a 3-year contract with options to extend to 10 years. How successful it ultimately is will likely be very dependent upon how good a learning and innovation culture Formula One and its partners are, or can become. It’s a steep and expensive learning curve, and how it moves forward is going to be interesting if nothing else. And being Vegas, we have both CES and the Super Bowl to distract us in the next few months, before we start preparing again for next year.

Image credits: Pexels

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Eddie Van Halen, Simultaneous Innovation and the AI Regulation Conundrum

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Eddie Van Halen, Simultaneous Innovation and the AI Regulation Conundrum

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

It’s great to have an excuse to post an Eddie Van Halen video to the innovation community. It’s of course fun just to watch Eddie, but I also have a deeper, innovation relevant reason for doing so.

Art & Science: I’m a passionate believer in cross-pollination between art and science. And I especially believe we can learn a great deal from artists and musicians like Eddie who have innovated consistently over a career. Dig into their processes, and we see serial innovators like The Beatles, Picasso, Elton John, Bowie, George Martin, Freddie Mercury, William Gibson, Lady Gaga, Paul Simon and so many others apply techniques that are highly applicable to all innovation fields. Techniques such as analogy, conceptual blending, collaboration, reapplication, boundary stretching, risk taking, learning from failure and T-Shaped innovation all crop up fairly consistently. And these creative approaches are typically also built upon deep expertise, passion, motivation, and an ability to connect with future consumer needs, and to tap into early adopters and passionate consumers. For me at least, that’s a pretty good innovation toolkit for innovation in any field. Now, to be fair, often their process is intuitive, and many truly prolific artists are lucky enough to automatically and intuitively ‘think that way’. But understanding and then stealing some of their techniques, either implicit or explicit, can be a great way to both jump-start our own innovative processes, and also to understand how innovation works. As Picasso said, ‘great artists steal’, but I’d argue that so do good innovators, at least within the bounds allowed by the patent literature!

In the past I’ve written quite a lot about Picasso and The Beatles use of conceptual blending, Paul Simon’s analogies, reapplication and collaboration, Bowie’s innovative courage, and William Gibson’s ability to project s-curves. Today, I’d like to to focus on some insights I see in the guitar innovations of Eddie.

(a) Parallel or Simultaneous Innovation. I suspect this is one of the most important yet under-appreciated concepts in innovation today. Virtually every innovation is built upon the shoulders of giants. Past innovations provide the foundation for future ones, to the point where once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, many innovations become inevitable. It still takes an agile and creative mind to come up with innovative ideas, but contemporary innovations often set the stage for the next leap forward. And this applies both to the innovative process, and also to a customers ability to understand and embrace it. The design of the first skyscraper was innovative, but it was made a lot more obvious by the construction of the Eiffel Tower. The ubiquitous mobile phone may now seem obvious, but it owes its existence to a very long list of enabling technologies that paved the way for it’s invention, from electricity to chips to Wi-Fi, etc.

The outcome of this ‘stage setting’ is that often even really big innovations occur simultaneously yet independently. We’ve seen this play out with calculus (independently developed by Newton and Leibnitz), the atomic bomb, where Oppenheimer and company only just beat the Nazi’s, the theory of evolution, the invention of the thermometer, nylon and so many others. We even see it in evolution, where scavenger birds vultures and condors superficially appear quite similar due to adaptations that allow them to eat carrion, but actually have quite different genetic lineages. Similarly many marsupials look very similar to placental mammals that fill similar ecological niches, but typically evolved independently. Context has a huge impact on innovation, and similar contexts typical create parallel, and often similar innovations. As the world becomes more interconnected, and context becomes more homogenized, we are going to see more and more examples of simultaneous innovation.

Faster and More Competitive Innovation: Today social media, search technology and the web mean that more people know more of the same ‘stuff’ more quickly than before. This near instantaneous and democratized access to the latest knowledge sets the scene and context for a next generation of innovation that is faster and more competitive than we’ve ever seen. More people have access to the pieces of the puzzle far more quickly than ever before; background information that acts as a precursor for the next innovative leap. Eddie had to go and watch Jimmy Paige live and in person to get his inspiration for ‘tapping’. Today he, and a few million others would simply need to go onto YouTube. He therefore discovered Paige’s hammer-on years after Paige started using them. Today it would likely be days. That acceleration of ‘innovation context’ has a couple of major implications:

1. If you think you’ve just come up with something new, it’s more than likely that several other people have too, or will do so very soon. More than ever before you are more than likely in a race from the moment you have an idea! So snooze and you loose. Assume several others are working on the same idea.

2. Regulating Innovation is becoming really, really difficult. I think this is possibly the most profound implication. For example, a very current and somewhat contentious topic today is if and how we should regulate AI. And it’s a pretty big decision. We really don’t know how AI will evolve, but it is certainly moving very quickly, and comes with the potential for earthshaking pros and cons. It is also almost inevitably subject to simultaneous invention. So many people are working on it, and so much adjacent innovation is occurring, that it’s somewhat unlikely that any single group is going to get very far out in front. The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and the race is on. The issue for regulation then becomes painfully obvious. Unless we can somehow implement universal regulation, then any regulations simply slow down those who follow the rules. This unfortunately opens the doors to bad actors taking the lead, and controlling potentially devastating technology.

So we are somewhat damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. If we don’t regulate, then we run the risk of potentially dangerous technology getting out of control. But if do regulate, we run the risk of enabling bad actors to own that dangerous technology. We’ve of course been here before. The race for the nuclear bomb between the Allies and the Nazi’s was a great example of simultaneous innovation with potentially catastrophic outcomes. Imagine if we’d decided fission was simply too dangerous, and regulated it’s development to the point where the Nazi’s had got there first. We’d likely be living in a very different world today! Much like AI, it was a tough decision, as without regulation, there was a small but possible scenario where the outcome could have been devastating.

Today we have a raft of rapidly evolving technologies that I’d both love to regulate, but am also profoundly worried about the unintended consequences of doing so. AI of course, but also genetic engineering, gene manipulating medicines, even climate mediation and behavioral science! With respect to the latter, the better we get at nudging behavior, and the more reach we have with those techniques, the more dangerous miss-use becomes.

The core problem underlying all of this is that we are human. Most people try to do the right thing, but there are always bad actors. And even those trying to do the right thing all too often get it wrong. And the more democratized access to cutting edge insight becomes, parallel innovation means the more contenders we have for mistakes and bad bad choices, intentional or unintentional.

(b) Innovation versus Invention: A less dramatic, but I think similarly interesting insight we can draw from Eddie lies in the difference between innovation and invention He certainly wasn’t the first guitarist to use the tapping technique. That goes back centuries! At least as far as classical composer Paganini, and it was a required technique for playing the Chapman stick in the 1970’s, popularized by the great Tony Levin in King Crimson. It was also widely, albeit sparingly (and often obscurely) used by jazz guitarists in the 1950’s and 60’s. But Eddie was the first to feature it, and turn it into a meaningful innovation in of itself. Until him, nobody had packaged the technique in a way that it could be ‘marketed’ and ‘sold’ as a viable product. He found the killer application, made it his own, and made it a ‘thing’. I would therefore argue that he wasn’t the inventor, but he was the ‘innovator’. This points to the value of innovation over invention. If you don’t have the capability or the partners to turn an invention into something useful, its still just an idea. Invention is a critical part of the broader innovation process, but in isolation it’s more curiosity than useful. Innovation is about reduction to practice and communication as well a great ideas

Art & science: I love the arts. I play guitar, paint, and photograph. It’s a lot of fun, and provides a invaluable outlet from the stresses involved in business and innovation. But as I suggested at the beginning, a lot of the boundaries we place between art and science, and by extension business, are artificial and counter-productive. Some of my most productive collaborations as a scientist have been with designers and artists. As a visual scientist, I’ve found that artists often intuitively have a command of attentional insights that our cutting edge science is still trying to understand. It’s a lot of fun to watch Eddie Van Halen, but learning from great artists like him can, via analogy, also be surprisingly insightful and instructive.

Image credits: Unsplash

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AI and Human Creativity Solving Complex Problems Together

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AI and Human Creativity Solving Complex Problems Together

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

A recent McKinsey Leading Off – Essentials for leaders and those they lead email newsletter, referred to an article “The organization of the future: Enabled by gen AI, driven by people” which stated that digitization, automation, and AI will reshape whole industries and every enterprise. The article elaborated further by saying that, in terms of magnitude, the challenge is akin to coping with the large-scale shift from agricultural work to manufacturing that occurred in the early 20th century in North America and Europe, and more recently in China. This shift was powered by the defining trait of our species, our human creativity, which is at the heart of all creative problem-solving endeavors, where innovation is the engine of growth, no matter, what the context.

Moving into Unchartered Job and Skills Territory

We don’t yet know what exact technological, or soft skills, new occupations, or jobs will be required in this fast-moving transformation, or how we might further advance generative AI, digitization, and automation.

We also don’t know how AI will impact the need for humans to tap even more into the defining trait of our species, our human creativity. To enable us to become more imaginative, curious, and creative in the way we solve some of the world’s greatest challenges and most complex and pressing problems, and transform them into innovative solutions.

We can be proactive by asking these two generative questions:

What if the true potential of AI lies in embracing its ability to augment human creativity and aid innovation, especially in enhancing creative problem solving, at all levels of civil society, instead of avoiding it? (Ideascale)
How might we develop AI as a creative thinking partner to effect profound change, and create innovative solutions that help us build a more equitable and sustainable planet for all humanity? (Hal Gregersen)

Because our human creativity is at the heart of creative problem-solving, and innovation is the engine of growth, competitiveness, and profound and positive change.

Developing a Co-Creative Thinking Partnership

In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review “AI Can Help You Ask Better Questions – and Solve Bigger Problems” by Hal Gregersen and Nicola Morini Bianzino, they state:

“Artificial intelligence may be superhuman in some ways, but it also has considerable weaknesses. For starters, the technology is fundamentally backward-looking, trained on yesterday’s data – and the future might not look anything like the past. What’s more, inaccurate or otherwise flawed training data (for instance, data skewed by inherent biases) produces poor outcomes.”

The authors say that dealing with this issue requires people to manage this limitation if they are going to treat AI as a creative-thinking partner in solving complex problems, that enable people to live healthy and happy lives and to co-create an equitable and sustainable planet.

We can achieve this by focusing on specific areas where the human brain and machines might possibly complement one another to co-create the systemic changes the world badly needs through creative problem-solving.

A double-edged sword

This perspective is further complimented by a recent Boston Consulting Group article “How people can create-and destroy value- with generative AI” where they found that the adoption of generative AI is, in fact, a double-edged sword.

In an experiment, participants using GPT-4 for creative product innovation outperformed the control group (those who completed the task without using GPT-4) by 40%. But for business problem solving, using GPT-4 resulted in performance that was 23% lower than that of the control group.

“Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, current GenAI models tend to do better on the first type of task; it is easier for LLMs to come up with creative, novel, or useful ideas based on the vast amounts of data on which they have been trained. Where there’s more room for error is when LLMs are asked to weigh nuanced qualitative and quantitative data to answer a complex question. Given this shortcoming, we as researchers knew that GPT-4 was likely to mislead participants if they relied completely on the tool, and not also on their own judgment, to arrive at the solution to the business problem-solving task (this task had a “right” answer)”.

Taking the path of least resistance

In McKinsey’s Top Ten Reports This Quarter blog, seven out of the ten articles relate specifically to generative AI: technology trends, state of AI, future of work, future of AI, the new AI playbook, questions to ask about AI and healthcare and AI.

As it is the most dominant topic across the board globally, if we are not both vigilant and intentional, a myopic focus on this one significant technology will take us all down the path of least resistance – where our energy will move to where it is easiest to go. Rather than being like a river, which takes the path of least resistance to its surrounding terrain, and not by taking a strategic and systemic perspective, we will always go, and end up, where we have always gone.

Living our lives forwards

According to the Boston Consulting Group article:

“The primary locus of human-driven value creation lies not in enhancing generative AI where it is already great, but in focusing on tasks beyond the frontier of the technology’s core competencies.”

This means that a whole lot of other variables need to be at play, and a newly emerging set of human skills, especially in creative problem solving, need to be developed to maximize the most value from generative AI, to generate the most imaginative, novel and value adding landing strips of the future.

Creative Problem Solving

In my previous blog posts “Imagination versus Knowledge” and “Why Successful Innovators Are Curious Like Cats” we shared that we are in the midst of a “Sputnik Moment” where we have the opportunity to advance our human creativity.

This human creativity is inside all of us, it involves the process of bringing something new into being, that is original, surprising useful, or desirable, in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, in ways they appreciate and cherish.

Taking a both/and approach

Our human creativity will be paralysed, if we focus our attention and intention only on the technology, and on the financial gains or potential profits we will get from it, and if we exclude the possibilities of a co-creative thinking partnership with the technology.

To deeply engage people in true creative problem solving – and involving them in impacting positively on our crucial relationships and connectedness, with one another and with the natural world, and the planet.

A marriage between creatives, technologists, and humanities

In a recent Fast Company video presentation, “Innovating Imagination: How Airbnb Is Using AI to Foster Creativity” Brian Chesky CEO of Airbnb, states that we need to consider and focus our attention and intention on discovering what is good for people.

To develop a “marriage between creatives, technologists, and the humanities” that brings the human out and doesn’t let technology overtake our human element.

Developing Creative Problem-Solving Skills

At ImagineNation, we teach, mentor, and coach clients in creative problem-solving, through developing their Generative Discovery skills.

This involves developing an open and active mind and heart, by becoming flexible, adaptive, and playful in the ways we engage and focus our human creativity in the four stages of creative problem-solving.

Including sensing, perceiving, and enabling people to deeply listen, inquire, question, and debate from the edges of temporarily hidden or emerging fields of the future.

To know how to emerge, diverge, and converge creative insights, collective breakthroughs, an ideation process, and cognitive and emotional agility shifts to:

Deepen our attending, observing, and discerning capabilities to consciously connect with, explore, and discover possibilities that create tension and cognitive dissonance to disrupt and challenge the status quo, and other conventional thinking and feeling processes.
Create cracks, openings, and creative thresholds by asking generative questions to push the boundaries, and challenge assumptions and mental and emotional models to pull people towards evoking, provoking, and generating boldly creative ideas.
Unleash possibilities, and opportunities for creative problem solving to contribute towards generating innovative solutions to complex problems, and pressing challenges, that may not have been previously imagined.

Experimenting with the generative discovery skill set enables us to juggle multiple theories, models, and strategies to create and plan in an emergent, and non-linear way through creative problem-solving.

As stated by Hal Gregersen:

“Partnering with the technology in this way can help people ask smarter questions, making them better problem solvers and breakthrough innovators.”

Succeeding in the Age of AI

We know that Generative AI will change much of what we do and how we do it, in ways that we cannot yet anticipate.

Success in the age of AI will largely depend on our ability to learn and change faster than we ever have before, in ways that preserve our well-being, connectedness, imagination, curiosity, human creativity, and our collective humanity through partnering with generative AI in the creative problem-solving process.

Find Out More About Our Work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, which can be customised 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 focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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LEGO Knows Why Companies Don’t Innovate

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LEGO Knows Why Companies Don't Innovate

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Lego’s Latest Effort to Avoid Oil-Based Plastic Hits Brick Wall” – WSJ

“Lego axes plans to make bricks from recycled bottles” – BBC

“Lego ditches oil-free brick in sustainability setback” – The Financial Times

Recently, LEGO found itself doing the Walk of Atonement (see video below) after announcing to The Financial Times that it was scrapping plans to make bricks from recycled bottles, and media outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Fast Company to WIRED were more than happy to play the Shame Nun.

And it wasn’t just media outlets ringing the Shame Bell:

“In the future, they should not make these kinds of announcements (prototype made from recyclable plastic) until they actually do it,” Judith Enck, President of Beyond Plastics
“They are not going to survive as an organization if they don’t find a solution,” Paolo Taticchi, corporate sustainability expert at University College London.
“Lego undoubtedly had good intentions, but if you’re going to to (sic) announce a major environmental initiative like this—one that affects the core of your company—good intentions aren’t enough. And in this instance, it can even undermine progress.” Jesus Diaz, creative director, screenwriter, and producer at The Magic Sauce, writing forFast Company

As a LEGO lover, I am not unbiased, but WOW, the amount of hypocritical, self-righteous judgment is astounding! All these publications and pundits espouse the need for innovation, yet when a company falls even the tiniest bit short of aspirations, it’s just SHAME (clang) SHAME (clang) SHAME.

A LEGO Atlantis 8073 Manta Warrior (i.e., tiny) bit of context

In 1946, LEGO founder Ole Kirk Christiansen purchased Denmark’s first plastic injection molding machine. Today, 95% of the company’s 4,400 different bricks are made using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), a plastic that requires 4.4 pounds of oil to produce 2.2 pounds of brick. Admittedly, it’s not a great ratio, and it gets worse. The material isn’t biodegradable or easily recyclable, so when the 3% of bricks not handed down to the next generation end up in a landfill, they’ll break down into highly polluting microplastics.

With this context, it’s easy to understand why LEGO’s 2018 announcement that it will move to all non-plastic or recycled materials by 2030 and reduce its carbon emissions by 37% (from 2019’s 1.2 million tons) by 2032 was such big news.

Three years later, in 2021, LEGO announced that its prototype bricks made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles offered a promising alternative to its oil-based plastic bricks.

But last Monday, after two years of testing, the company shared that what was promising as a prototype isn’t possible at scale because the process required to produce PET-based bricks actually increases carbon emissions.

SHAME!

A LEGO Art World Map (i.e. massive) amount of praise for LEGO

LEGO is doing everything that innovation theorists, consultants, and practitioners recommend:

Setting a clear vision and measurable goals so that people know what the priorities are (reduce carbon emissions), why they’re important (“playing our part in building a sustainable future and creating a better world for our children to inherit”), and the magnitude of change required
Defining what is on and off the table in terms of innovation, specifically that they are not willing to compromise the quality, durability, or “clutch power” of bricks to improve sustainability
Developing a portfolio of bets that includes new materials for products and packaging, new services to keep bricks out of landfills and in kids’ hands, new building and production processes, and active partnerships with suppliers to reduce their climate footprint
Prototyping and learning before committing to scale because what is possible at a prototype level is different than what’s possible at pilot, which is different from what’s possible at scale.
Focusing on the big picture and the long-term by not going for the near-term myopic win of declaring “we’re making bricks from more sustainable materials” and instead deciding “not to progress” with something that, when taken as a whole process, moves the company further away from its 2032 goal.

Just one minifig’s opinion

If we want companies to innovate (and we do), shaming them for falling short of perfection is the absolute wrong way to do it.

Is it disappointing that something that seemed promising didn’t work out? Of course. But it’s just one of many avenues and experiments being pursued. This project ended, but the pursuit of the goal hasn’t.

Is 2 years a long time to figure out that you can’t scale a prototype and still meet your goals? Maybe. But, then again, it took P&G 10 years to figure out how to develop and scale a perforation that improved one-handed toilet paper tearing.

Should LEGO have kept all its efforts and success a secret until everything was perfect and ready to launch? Absolutely not. Sharing its goals and priorities, experiments and results, learnings and decisions shows employees, partners, and other companies what it means to innovate and lead.

Is LEGO perfect? No.

Is it trying to be better? Yes.

Isn’t that what we want?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The Comforter Cold War of 2006

(or How Assumptions Stifle Innovation)

The Comforter Cold War of 2006

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In the room were two single beds, each with a fluffy white comforter folded neatly on top.

“Yeah, this is not gonna work.”

I had just entered my one-bedroom corporate apartment in Copenhagen, and while everything else was pleasantly light and spacious, there was no way I would spend the next six months sleeping in a single bed.

So, I set down my suitcases and immediately pushed the two beds together, using the two nightstands to secure them. The two comforters would work since there was just one of me, and I made a mental note to request a king-sized comforter from the desk when I left for work in the morning.

Thus began the great Comforter Cold War of 2006/2007.

Every few days, I would request a king-sized comforter for my jerry-rigged king-sized bed. I would return to find one queen-sized comforter. The luxury of a larger comforter would diminish the disappointment of not getting an appropriately sized one, and I would bask in the warmth of fully covered sleep. For one night. The next day, I would return to my room only to find that the two single comforters had returned.

This went on for nine months.

I shared this story of passive-aggressive housekeeping at my going away party with my colleagues. Midway through the story, I noticed the absolutely baffled looks on their faces.

“What?”

“Why did you want one comforter?”

“Because I have one bed. A comforter should cover the bed.”

“Why? A bed doesn’t need a comforter. A person does. You just need a comforter to cover you.”

[extended silence while we try to process each other’s points]

“So, does that mean that in Denmark, if a couple sleeps together, they each have their own comforter?”

“Yes, of course! Why would we share? Each person has their own temperature preferences, and there’s no worry about someone stealing your covers.”

My mind. Was. Blown.

This made so much sense. A comforter covers a person, so the 1:1 ratio of comforter to people is far more logical than a 1:1 ratio of comforter to bed (and often a 1:2 ratio of comforter to people). Seriously, how many relationships would be saved by simply having separate comforters?

Yet, for nine months, it made more sense to me to battle for a comforter size that apparently doesn’t exist in the country without ever asking why I couldn’t get what I was so clearly and reasonably (in my mind) requesting.

I assumed the apartment building didn’t have king-sized comforters or only enough for the actual king-sized beds. I assumed housekeeping was on automatic pilot, not realizing they were replacing a queen-sized comforter with two single ones. I assumed that communication amongst the staff was poor, so my request wasn’t being shared. I assumed a lot.

But I never assumed that I was wrong and that the root of the problem was a cultural difference so deeply ingrained and subtle that it never occurred to anyone to question it.

Question your assumptions.

Assumptions are a shortcut to understanding our world. Based on culture, experiences, and even stereotypes, we make assumptions about what came before, who we’re interacting with, what’s happening now, and what will happen next.

Most of the time, we’re right (or at least more right than wrong), so we keep making assumptions. It’s also why, when our assumptions are wrong, we tend to question everything but our assumptions.

And that kills innovation because it limits our curiosity and imagination, our perception of what’s possible, and our willingness to engage with and learn from others.

We all cling to assumptions that lead to Cold Wars.

What’s yours?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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What Einstein Got Wrong

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Defining Design

What Einstein Got Wrong - Defining Design

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”Albert Einstein (supposedly)

This is one of my favorite quotes because it’s an absolute gut punch. You think you know something, probably because you’ve been saying and doing it for years. Then someone comes along and asks you to explain it, and suddenly, you’re just standing there, mouth agape, gesturing, hoping that this wacky game of charades produces an answer.

This happened to me last Monday.

While preparing to teach a course titled “Design Innovation Lab,” I thought it would be a good idea to define “design” and “innovation.” I already had a slide with the definition of “innovation” – something new that creates value – but when I had to make one for “design,” my stomach sank.

My first definition was “pretty pictures,” which is both wrong and slightly demeaning because designers do that and so much more. My second definition, I know it when I see it, was worse.

So, I Googled the definition.

Then I asked ChatGPT.

Then I asked some designer friends.

No one had a simple definition of Design.

As the clock ticked closer to 6:00 pm, I defaulted to a definition from the International Council of Design:

“Design is a discipline of study and practice focused on the interaction between a person – a “user” – and the man-made environment, taking into account aesthetic, functional, contextual, cultural, and societal considerations. As a formalized discipline, design is a modern construct.”

Before unveiling this definition to a classroom full of degreed designers pursuing their Master’s in Design, I asked them to define “design.”

It went as well as all my previous attempts. Lots of thoughts and ideas. Lots of “it’s this but not that.” Lots of debate about whether it needs to have a purpose for it to be distinct from art.

Absolutely no simple explanations or punchy definitions.

So, when I unveiled the definition from the very official-sounding International Council of Design, we all just stared at it.

“Yes, but it’s not quite right.”

“It is all those things, but it’s more than just those things.”

“I guess it is a ‘modern construct’ when you think of it as a job, but we’ve done it forever.”

As we squinted and puzzled, what was missing slowly dawned on us.

There was nothing human in this definition. There was no mention of feelings or empathy, life or nature, connection or community, aspirations or dreams.

In this definition, designers consider multiple aspects of an unnatural environment in creating something to be used. Designers are simply the step before mass production begins.

Who wants to do that?

Who wants to be a stop, however necessary, on a conveyor belt of sameness?

Yet that’s what we become when we strip the humanness out of our work.

Humans are messy, emotional, unpredictable, irrational, challenging, and infuriating.

We’re also interesting, creative, imaginative, hopeful, kind, curious, hard-working, and resilient.

When we try to strip away human messiness to create MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) target markets and customer personas, we strip away the human we’re creating for.

When we ignore unpredictable and irrational feedback on our ideas, we ignore the creative and imaginative answers that could improve our ideas.

When we give up on a challenge because it’s more difficult than expected and doesn’t produce immediate results, we give up hope, resiliency, and the opportunity to improve things.

I still don’t have a simple definition of design, but I know that one that doesn’t acknowledge all the aspects of a human beyond just being a “user” isn’t correct.

Even if you explain something simply, you may not understand it well enough.

Image Credit: Misterinnovation.com

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An Innovation Rant: Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should

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An Innovation Rant: Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Why are people so concerned about, afraid of, or resistant to new things?

Innovation, by its very nature, is good. It is something new that creates value.

Naturally, the answer has nothing to do with innovation.

It has everything to do with how we experience it.

And innovation without humanity is a very bad experience.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve heard so many stories of inhuman innovation that I have said, “I hate innovation” more than once.

Of course, I don’t mean that (I would be at an extraordinary career crossroads if I did). What I mean is that I hate the choices we make about how to use innovation.

Just because AI can filter resumes doesn’t mean you should remove humans from the process.

Years ago, I oversaw recruiting for a small consulting firm of about 50 people. I was a full-time project manager, but given our size, everyone was expected to pitch in and take on extra responsibilities. Because of our founder, we received more resumes than most firms our size, so I usually spent 2 to 3 hours a week reviewing them and responding to applicants. It was usually boring, sometimes hilarious, and always essential because of our people-based business.

Would I have loved to have an AI system sort through the resumes for me? Absolutely!

Would we have missed out on incredible talent because they weren’t out “type?” Absolutely!

AI judges a resume based on keywords and other factors you program in. This probably means that it filters out people who worked in multiple industries, aren’t following a traditional career path, or don’t have the right degree.

This also means that you are not accessing people who bring a new perspective to your business, who can make the non-obvious connections that drive innovation and growth, and who bring unique skills and experiences to your team and its ideas.

If you permit AI to find all your talent, pretty soon, the only talent you’ll have is AI.

Just because you can ghost people doesn’t mean you should.

Rejection sucks. When you reject someone, and they take it well, you still feel a bit icky and sad. When they don’t take it well, as one of my colleagues said when viewing a response from a candidate who did not take the decision well, “I feel like I was just assaulted by a bag of feathers. I’m not hurt. I’m just shocked.”

So, I understand ghosting feels like the better option. It’s not. At best, it’s lazy, and at worst, it’s selfish. Especially if you’re a big company using AI to screen resumes.

It’s not hard to add a function that triggers a standard rejection email when the AI filters someone out. It’s not that hard to have a pre-programmed email that can quickly be clicked and sent when a human makes a decision.

The Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have done unto you – doesn’t apply to AI. It does apply to you.

Just because you can stack bots on bots doesn’t mean you should.

At this point, we all know that our first interaction with customer service will be with a bot. Whether it’s an online chatbot or an automated phone tree, the journey to a human is often long and frustrating. Fine. We don’t like it, but we don’t have a choice.

But when a bot transfers us to a bot masquerading as a person? Do you hate your customers that much?

Some companies do, as my husband and I discovered. I was on the phone with one company trying to resolve a problem, and he was in a completely different part of the house on the phone with another company trying to fix a separate issue. When I wandered to the room where my husband was to get information that the “person” I was talking to needed, I noticed he was on hold. Then he started staring at me funny (not as unusual as you might think). Then he asked me to put my call on speaker (that was unusual). After listening for a few minutes, he said, “I’m talking to the same woman.”

He was right. As we listened to each other’s calls, we heard the same “woman” with the same tenor of voice, unusual cadence of speech, and indecipherable accent. We were talking to a bot. It was not helpful. It took each of us several days and several more calls to finally reach humans. When that happened, our issues were resolved in minutes.

Just because innovation can doesn’t mean you should allow it to.

You are a human. You know more than the machine knows (for now).

You are interacting with other humans who, like you, have a right to be treated with respect.

If you forget these things – how important you and your choices are and how you want to be treated – you won’t have to worry about AI taking your job. You already gave it away.

Image Credit: Pexels

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A New Innovation Sphere

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A New Innovation Sphere

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

I’m obsessed with the newly opened Sphere in Las Vegas as an example of Innovation. As I write this, U2 are preparing for their second show there, and Vegas is buzzing about the new innovation they are performing in. That in of itself is quite something. Vegas is a city that is nor short of entertainment and visual spectacle, so for an innovation to capture the collective imagination in this way it has to be genuinely Wow. And that ‘Wow’ means there are opportunities for the innovation community to learn from it.

For those of you who might have missed it, The Sphere is an approximately 20,000 seat auditorium with razor sharp cutting edge multisensory capabilities that include a 16K resolution wraparound interior LED screen, speakers with beamforming and wave field synthesis technology, and 4D haptic physical effects built into the seats. The exterior of the 366 foot high building features 580,000 sq ft of LED displays which have transformed the already ostentatious Las Vegas skyline. Images including a giant eye, moon, earth, smiley face, Halloween pumpkin and various underwater scenes and geometric animations light up the sky, together with advertisements that are rumored to cost almost $500,000 per day. Together with giant drone displays and giant LED displays on adjacent casinos mean that Bladerunner has truly come to Vegas. But these descriptions simply don’t do it justice, you really, really have to see it.

Las Vegas U2 Residency at the Sphere

Master of Attention – Leveraging Visual Science to the Full: The outside is a brilliant example of visual marketing that leverages just about every insight possible for grabbing attention. It’s scale is simply ‘Wow!’, and you can see it from the mountains surrounding Vegas, or from the plane as you come into land. The content it displays on its outside is brilliantly designed to capture attention. It has the fundamental visual cues of movement, color, luminescence, contrast and scale, but these are all turned up to 11, maybe even 12. This alone pretty much compels attention, even in a city whose skyline is already replete with all of these. When designing for visual attention, I often invoke the ‘Times Square analogy’. When trying to grab attention in a visually crowded context, signal to noise is your friend, and a simple, ‘less is more’ design can stand out against a background context of intense, complex visual noise. But the Sphere has instead leapt s-curves, and has instead leveraged new technology to be brighter, bigger, more colorful and create an order of magnitude more movement than its surroundings. It visually shouts above the surrounding visual noise, and has created genuine separation, at least for now.

But it also leverages many other elements that we know command attention. It uses faces, eyes, and natural cues that tap into our unconscious cognitive attentional architecture. The giant eye, giant pumpkin and giant smiley face tap these attentional mechanisms, but in a playful way. The orange and black of the pumpkin or the yellow and black of the smiley face tap into implicit biomimetic ‘danger’ clues, but in a way that resolves instantly to turn attention from avoid to approach. The giant jellyfish and whales floating above the strip tap into our attentional priority mechanisms for natural cues. And of course, it all fits the surprisingly obvious cognitive structure that creates ‘Wow!’. A giant smiley emoji floating above the Vegas skyline is initially surprising, but also pretty obvious once you realize it is the sphere!

And this is of course a dynamic display, that once it captures your attention, then advertises the upcoming U2 show or other paid advertising. As I mentioned before, that advertising does not come cheap, but it does come with pretty much guaranteed engagement. You really do need to see it for yourself if you can, but I’ve also captured some video here:

The Real Innovation Magic: The outside of The Sphere is stunning, but the inside goes even further, and provides a new and disruptive technology platform that opens the door for all sorts of creativity and innovation in entertainment and beyond. The potential to leverage the super-additive power of multi-sensory combinations to command attention and emotion is staggering.

The opening act was U2, and the show has received mostly positive but also mixed reviews. Everyone raves about the staggering visual effects, the sound quality, and the spectacle. But others do point out that the band itself gets somewhat lost, and/or is overshadowed by the new technology.

But this is just the beginning. The technology platform is truly disruptive innovation that will open the door for all sorts of innovation and creativity. It fundamentally challenges the ‘givens’ of what a concert is. The U2 show is still based on and marketed as the band being the ‘star’ of the show. But the Sphere is an unprecedented immersive multimedia experience that can and likely will change that completely, making the venue the star itself. The potential for great musicians, visual and multisensory artist to create unprecedented customer experience is enormous. Artists from Gaga to Muse, or their successors must be salivating at the potential to bring until now impossible visions to life, and deliver multi-sensory experience to audiences on a scale not previously imagined. Disruptive innovation often emerges at the interface of previous expertise, and the potential for hybrid sensory experiences that the Sphere offer are unprecedented. Imagine visuals created and inspired by the Webb telescope accompanied by an orchestra that sonically surrounds the audience in ways they’ve never experienced or perhaps imagined. And of course, new technology will challenge new creative’s to leverage it in ways we haven’t yet imagined. Cawsie Jijina, the engineer who designed the Sphere maybe says it best:

“You have the best audio there possibly can be today. You have the best visual there can possible be today. Now you just have to wait and let some artist meet some batshit crazy engineer and techie and create something totally new.”

This technology platform will stimulate emergent blends of creative innovation that will challenge our expectations of what a show is. It will likely require both creative’s and audiences to give up on some pre-conceptions. But I love to see a new technology emerge in front of my eyes. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

Las Vegas Sphere Halloween

Image credits: Pete Foley

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Your Innovation is Dictated by Who You Are & What You Do

Your identity is killing innovation.

Innovation is something new that creates value.

Identity is carefully constructed, enduring, and fiercely protected and reinforced.

When innovation and identity conflict, innovation usually loses.

Whether the innovation is incremental, adjacent, or radical doesn’t matter. If it conflicts with the company’s identity, it will join the 99.9% of innovations that are canceled before they ever launch.

Your identity can supercharge innovation.

When innovation and identity guide and reinforce each other, it doesn’t matter if the innovation is incremental, adjacent, or radical. It can win.

Identity-based Innovation changes your perspective.

We typically think about innovation as falling into three types based on the scope of change to the business model:

Incremental innovations that make existing offerings better, faster, and cheaper for existing customers and use our existing business model
Adjacent innovations are new offerings in new categories, appeal to new customers, require new processes and activities to create or use new revenue models
Radical innovations that change everything – offerings, customers, processes and activities, and revenue models

These types make sense IF we’re perfectly logical and rational beings capable of dispassionately evaluating data and making decisions. SPOILER ALERT: We’re not. We decide with our hearts (emotions, values, fears, and desires) and justify those decisions with our heads (logic and data).

So, why not use an innovation-typing scheme that reflects our humanity and reality?

That’s where Id entity-based Innovation categories come in:

Identity-enhancing innovations reinforce and strengthen people’s comfort and certainty in who they are and what they do relative to the organization. “Organizational members all ‘know’ what actions are acceptable based on a shared understanding of what the organization represents, and this knowledge becomes codified u a set of heuristics about which innovative activities should be pursued and which should be dismissed.”
Identity-stretching innovations enable and stretch people’s understanding of who they are and what they do in an additive, not threatening, way to their current identities.
Identity-challenging innovations are threats and tend to occur in one of two contexts:
- Extreme technological change that “results in the obsolescence of a product market or the convergence of multiple product markets.” (challenges “who we are”)
- Competitors or new entrants that launch new offerings or change the basis of competition (challenges “what we do”)

By looking at your innovations through the lens of identity (and, therefore, people’s decision-making hearts), you can more easily identify the ones that will be supported and those that will be axed.

It also changes your results.

“Ok, nerd,” you’re probably thinking. “Thanks for dragging me into your innovation portfolio geek-out.”

Fair, but let me illustrate the power of this perspective using some examples from P&G.

Offering	Business-Model Types	Identity-based Categories
Charmin Smooth Tea r	Incremental Made Charmin easier to tear	Identity-enhancing Reinforced Charmin’s premium experience
Swiffer	Adjacent New durable product in an existing category (floor cleaning)	Identity-enhancing Reinforced P&G’s identity as a provider of best-in-class cleaning products
Tide Dry Cleaner s	Radical Moved P&G into services and uses a franchise model	Identity-stretching Dry cleaning service is consistent with P&G’s identity but stretches into providing services vs. just products

Do you see what happened on that third line? A Radical Innovation was identity-stretching (not challenging), and it’s in the 0.1% of corporate innovations that launched! It’s in 22 states!

The Bottom Line

If you look at innovation in the same way you always have, through the lens of changes to your business model, you’ll get the same innovation results you always have.

If you look at innovation differently, through the lens of how it affects personal and organizational identity, you’ll get different results. You may even get radical results.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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An Innovation Lesson From The Rolling Stones

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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?

Image Credit: Unsplash

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