Innovation Gift Giving

We find ourselves near the end of another fruitful, eventful year, here at December 19, 2017.  All eyes turn toward the holidays (actually, the merchandising happened in October and the Christmas muzak started in early November it seems).  While there are a few working days left in the month, and year, I thought I'd offer up some ideas for those individuals who are hard to shop for on your lists.  Today, gifts for the frustrated corporate innovator.

The Frustrated Corporate Innovator
We all know one of these, and in some cases this may be you.  You've longed for the rights to create some really interesting new products and services.  You've noticed product gaps and market opportunities ripe for the plucking.  Yet the organization you or your friend works for is too conservative, too risk adverse or simply too focused on existing products and services to spend time innovating.  There are several gifts I can offer you:

1. The gift of freedom.  If you honestly believe that the opportunity is out there, and that you have insights that no one else has, then give yourself the gift of freedom.  Go and solve that problem.  Alone or with a small team.  If your existing company or organization can't or won't see the opportunity, and you have passion for the need, don't wait.  Getting frustrated by the decision making processes and slow reaction times of larger corporations isn't the answer.  Give yourself the gift of freedom to pursue the opportunities you see.  This may mean switching teams or even leaving your company.
2. The gift of success.  If the first option is too radical (like the crazy holiday sweaters you know the recipient won't wear) then how about this:  just do something radical within your organization with the resources you can cobble together.  Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness after your idea becomes a success.  Innovators can't afford to wait.  Trying to get everyone to consensus is an exercise in cat herding in a room full of rocking chairs.  Success is first its own reward, and second an opportunity to build on.  If you can't get approval for everything, give yourself approval to do something and build on the success.
3. The gift of education.   There's always room in every budget for training or gaining new skills. After all, gaining new skills is important for personal growth and it's also probably a component of your annual review.  Identify new training or educational opportunities to learn new skills or new methods.  Enrich your own portfolio of innovation techniques, design thinking techniques, open innovation methods or a host of other capabilities.  Even if you don't get to actually implement the training, you'll add to your own resume.
4. The gift of involvement and community.  There are a lot of interest groups and organizations that examine innovation and meet to discuss successes, failures and learnings.  Here in the Carolinas we meet regularly and once a year have an innovation conference focused on local innovators.  There are plenty of conferences and events, national and local, where you can meet with and discuss your ideas and what you want to get done.  Or, go help out a nascent entrepreneur or innovator who needs help getting a new idea off the ground.  Go meet some people who share your passion and can leverage your energy.
5. The gift of a book.  When I was a kid, everyone wanted to give me books, when what I really wanted were footballs or baseball bats or fishing rods.  Now, everyone wants to give me sweaters and ties when what I really want are books.  Good books about innovation are perhaps one of the best gifts you can give yourself, or give to a potential innovator.  Here's a list of some of the books I recommend constantly (note some favoritism for a special author on the list)
1. The Innovator's DNA - great book about some traits or characteristics of good innovators
2. The Art of the Long View - good book on trend spotting and scenario planning
3. Think Better by Tim Hurson
4. Innovator's Dilemma
5. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
6. Relentless Innovation and/or Outmaneuver by yours truly
7. Open Innovation by Chesbrough
8. Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley
9. Ten Types of Innovation by Larry Keeley
10. Business Model Generation
11. Blue Ocean Strategy
12. 101 Design Methods
13. Making innovation work
    There - a baker's dozen of good innovation books that make a great gift for yourself, your boss (good way to hint at opportunities), your team or someone you know.
6. The gift of complacency and serenity.  When all else fails, or seems too bold, like wearing a sweater that lights up and plays football theme songs, then give yourself the gift of complacency.  Acknowledge that innovation is difficult, risky and fraught with danger and uncertainty, and simply allow yourself the peace of knowing that innovation is simply too much to take on.  Give yourself and your co-workers some peace and become the most efficient and effective worker you can be.  There's nothing wrong with doing things exceptionally well. Perhaps a gift of the Serenity prayer?

Regardless of what you give, or get this holiday season, make a new commitment going into the new year to do more, think more, advocate more, train more, commune more, read more, and risk more for innovation.

Communication and repetition are vital for innovation

I was working out this morning before work and as usual, watching the breaking news.  At 7am there are a range of news choices, and strangely each network seems to have the exact same advertisements on during the breaks.  As I was working out I realized that I knew the side effects of several medications that I don't need and don't take.  These side effects include headaches, vomiting, and so on.  The reason I know these is because there seem to be five or six pharmaceutical commercials on heavy rotation.  Thankfully, based on both the conditions they promote and the side effects, I'm not using any of them.  But listening to the adverts and thinking about how much I'd heard about the various medications and their side effects got me thinking.

What if we innovators could create a regular, recurring, looping set of adverts for people in business, so that we were comfortable with the language and approach of unfamiliar methodologies and tools without ever knowing we'd gained the knowledge?  Can we create comfort with unusual techniques and tools by building confidence and awareness slowly over time?

Reach and Frequency

I've written before that good messaging requires both reach and frequency. If you want someone to remember your message, you've got to reach them frequently.  Psychology suggests that you need to hear a message 7 times in order to fully incorporate it in your thinking.  If we only talk about or do innovation in extreme circumstances or very rarely, and fail to communicate about the tools and methods otherwise, we can't indoctrinate people and make them feel comfortable with the tools and methods.  And when people feel uncomfortable with new tools or methods, they follow one of a few well-trodden paths:  1) they stall or stop progress until they do feel comfortable with new language and tools or 2) they simply ignore new tools and methods and revert to older, trusted tools and methods.

Reach, frequency and clear messaging about innovation is important, as my experience with medications I don't need or take demonstrates.  Having seen or heard these commercials for weeks or months as I work out in the morning, I could easily tell you which address specific illnesses or symptoms and even what some of the side effects could be.  Now, imagine that we could do the same thing with a positive force - innovation - that many cultures view as dangerous and disruptive.  How much more receptive and capable would the average employee be to innovation opportunities if the ideas, methods, processes, "rules" and other aspects of innovation were inculcated the way pharmaceutical drug commercials do for the average viewer?

Creating Innovation Commercials

It's not as if corporations lack the ability to "advertise" important information to their employees.  If anything the average corporate employee would probably claim to receive too much communication, which in reality is probably accurate since so much of it is poorly conceived and targeted.  It wouldn't be difficult to include some clear innovation oriented messaging, definitions, background and other messages within existing channels, and to reinforce these in every team meeting, quarterly result and so on.  And the more these messages are consistent, drilling in a specific definition or outcome, or reviewing a specific set of innovation tools, the more quickly these messages will be received and implemented.

Pharma companies use television, radio and print advertising because they know they need to reach many people in many channels, and they repeat the same basic messages over and over again because they recognize it takes many interactions with the same messages to change the way people think.  If they can convince their consumers to acquire and use drugs with the list of side effects that is always listed in the ad, then certainly corporations can build credibility and confidence in innovation methods, skills and tools by using the same communication devices.

I look forward to the day I walk into a large corporation and see an "ad" streaming for innovation tools, which describes how the tool is useful and the positive side effects of actually trying to innovate.  Physicians follow an important oath,  the Hippocratic oath often shortened to "Do no harm".  As innovators our philosophyshould be "Instruct thyself and others".  The difference is our side effects are almost always positive.

Quirky: Traits innovators share

Thanks to my blog, and hopefully the insights I share here, I'm often asked to review books about innovation and innovators.  Recently I was asked to review a book entitled Quirky.  The subtitle is:  The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World.  Their capitalization, not mine.

The traits that innovators possess or share has been an interest of mine for quite a while.  I researched this topic for years, reading academic papers, books and doing our own research to identify traits or characteristics that innovators have in common, so you can imagine this book was of interest to me.

Quirky is as quirky does

Melissa Schilling, who is a professor at NYU, took an interesting approach when writing this book.  She focused on just a handful of breakthrough innovators, going deeply into their development and lives.  This deep dive presents some interesting data, but since the population of innovators is small and, to say the least a bit strange in its selection, I wonder if everything she reports is definitive.

Schilling selects her breakthrough innovators across history, including Madame Curie, Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Tesla, Einstein, Elon Musk and of course Steve Jobs.   These are, without a doubt, important innovators and very quirkly people.  To my way of thinking this is a very expansive group, with very different innovation goals and outcomes.  Several of these never commercialized a product; they created scientific insights.  Some were very mercenary - they only wanted to create things that had value to customers.  Some were serial innovators across a wide spectrum of industries, some were deep thinkers in one specific setting.  While all of these are recognizable innovators, I wonder if the sample size is really large enough - or perhaps too diverse in a small sample - to draw conclusions.

Schilling looks for similarities across these innovators, and to no surprise finds many.  They are all self-starters, many are autodidacts, bored with day to day stuff and constantly seeking new solution.  They are passionate about their work, they have visions about better solutions.  They work till they drop and expect others to do the same.  They are almost separate from the people they live and work with.  They were extremely sure of their own insights, rarely doubting themselves.  Most were consummate outsiders.  These findings, of themselves, are interesting but not particularly new.  Clayton Christensen and others wrote about 5 traits they noticed in corporate innovators in the book The Innovator's DNA.  Others have noted that most innovators are motivated by intrinsic issues, which fuels their passion.  Anyone who has attempted to create a new product knows the struggles a new idea faces in becoming a new product or service, so passion and stubbornness are almost a job requirement for innovators.

Positives and Concerns

The book does a good job identifying and calling out some of the core traits that innovators often share.  It does this by digging deeply into the lives of the handful of innovators Schilling profiles.  In many chapters the history and backstory of a selected innovator takes up close to half the chapter.  I learned more about Tesla and Curie than I had known, and gained new insights into Jobs' early career.  This research depth is good but detracts from getting on with the points the author wants to make.

There are really seven attributes that Schilling identifies:

1. Sense of Separateness
2. Extreme Confidence
3. Creativity
4. Higher purpose
5. Driven to Work
6. Opportunities in the era
7. Access to resources

But these aren't all given the same attention.  The separateness, confidence and creativity chapters are long and involved.  Toward the latter half of the book the traits aren't nearly as fleshed out and don't really illuminate the key topic as well as earlier chapters do.

While the research is evident, Schilling is often drawing conclusions or making observations with very limited data and the qualitative nature of the research shows.  In one long paragraph about separateness she uses the word "may" five or six times when showing how separateness contributes to innovation.  Suggestive but not definitive.  And she either ignored or didn't validate some traits that the innovators themselves identified.  For example, Jobs is famous for describing his approach to innovating based on "beginner's mind" - looking at a problem with fresh eyes.

Some of her research and findings conflict with other research, demonstrating how poorly defined and understood innovation is.  She focuses a lot on separateness, noting that "solitude is valuable for creativity" but often fails to note how involved and collaborative much of this work is.  Using Edison as an example for isolation is a bit much - he worked constantly with a large team, many of the "muckers" from his lab (Batchelor, Upton and others) named in the book.

The upshot

This is a good book, worth your time if only for the detailed histories of some very interesting people (Tesla alone is worth the read).  Schilling does a good job identifying some of the characteristics that this handful of innovators shared but doesn't fully prove that these are all necessary or that there aren't other attributes that are just as vital.  This is a book that was clearly carefully researched - the extensive footnotes prove that - but it seems to ignore or overlook some of the good work on innovator characteristics and traits that have been published before.

In short there's not a lot "new" here, but a good encapsulation of some of the traits innovators share and why they matter.

Taking the path of most resistance

I was thinking today about one of my favorite books - The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham - and the quote from the book that forms the title.  I won't bore you with a rehash, except to say that the main character is told that "the path to salvation is as narrow and difficult to walk as a razor's edge".  This from a Buddhist monk the main character, Larry, meets during his journey to find himself and his purpose not long after the end of the first World War.

One of the things we are constantly taught is to find the path of least resistance - the well-defined, well-trodden path that others have taken.  This is the safest, most secure path.  The one that is easiest to travel, has the least amount of risk.  The path is known, secure and goes to a specific destination.  This is the path most of us walk every day.  The only problem is that there isn't anything new on the path.  You don't explore anything new, discover anything new.  You aren't confronted by anything new.  Plenty of people go along with you to explain the path to you and keep you safely in the path.

As you might guess, the path of least resistance is easy to walk, and has little to offer in the way of innovation.  If you want to innovate, you must leave the proven path, take the path of some or most resistance.  Because it's in the exploration and discovery, going where others haven't gone, that you'll learn new things, uncover new issues or challenges, find new opportunities or solutions.

There are several components to walking any path that we must consider here:  the path itself, the people on the path, the "off-piste" that defines the area outside the path.

The Path

While much of this post has been a meditation on "paths" and their purposes, we all live and work in stable, defined paths or processes.  We go to work, follow established and documented processes and procedures, identify and achieve short term milestones and go home.  The next day we do it all again.  These are well-worn, well-described paths that are necessary for effective and efficient operations.  Efficient processes and pathways must exist for a company to scale and operate efficiently.  The problem is that the paths and processes become barriers to thinking and exploration rather than enablers - things that were meant to get you places become things that bar you from new places.  Soon, people are improving the paths and processes, grading them and paving them for even more ease of use, which encourages more alignment and less discovery and exploration.  Soon it becomes difficult and expensive to leave a path or process, and one fraught with risk and the potential of ridicule. 

As hackneyed as the quote is, Frost is right: "I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference".

If you are going to innovate, you need to pioneer your own paths.  Sometimes you'll have a specific destination in mind, sometimes you'll simply go exploring.  But either way, you've got to get out of the existing wheel ruts, pathways and guardrails to go into the untamed areas of your business or industry.  You cannot innovate from within the safe confines of your existing paths and processes.

The people on the path

What's important to understand is that there will be two kinds of people you'll encounter on the path:  those who want to reinforce the importance of the path, and those who are interested in leading you off the path.  Those who want to reinforce the path we call "management".  Management is paid to ensure that a company gets the most from the least amount of resources, that the company is highly predictable and eliminates variability.  This means sticking to the path, and ensuring everyone sticks to the path.  Managers find people who are wandering from the path and bring them back to the path. They enforce focus and attention on the next milestones on the path.

You'll meet a few people on the path who aren't so interested in the path but who are interested in the journey.  These are discoverers and explorers, who are interested and comfortable leaving the path, no matter what the consequences.  They are rare in corporations and are usually outside the mainstream, typically a unit of one, who are allowed to roam and discover because they've proved their value, but they very rarely scale.  Unless you have a thick skin and are dedicated to leaving the path to fully embrace exploration and discovery, you want to ignore these people and never become one.

If you are going to innovate, you must ignore the people who define and maintain the existing paths and processes - which is exceptionally difficult to do within a corporation - and define your own paths and processes, discover your own destinations, experiment and explore as you see fit.  This is remarkably easier to do than it seems, if at first you learn to ignore all the concerns and constraints and just start doing it.  As Arthur Dent learns in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, the trick to flying is  "..The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss..."

Going Off-piste

The French have a lovely word for the area outside of the safe path - off-piste.  It means the areas in a ski slope off of the groomed slope.  Off-piste is uneven, ungroomed, slightly dangerous.  There are few other tracks.  A fall in the off-piste area can lead to greater injury.  Skiing on the off-piste also means more fresh powder, more exciting experiences, more exploration and discovery.  Going off-piste has uncertainties and risks, but going with the right attitude and perhaps a guide can lead to remarkable discoveries.

If you want to innovate, you need to go "off-piste".  Following the safe and practical pathways and processes within your business or industry will only lead to at best incremental change.  To make any new discoveries, to create anything truly new and interesting, you need to leave the path of least resistance and go off-piste.

What does it mean to go off-piste?  When skiing it means more danger, fewer maps, greater risk of falling but in many cases more exhilaration.   When innovating it means leaving the company or industry constraints behind, going exploring without a set destination, learning new things, assimilating new discoveries.  It will mean new work and new experiences that when synthesized may not perfectly fit into the existing way of doing business.  Which is why the path of most resistance is pursued so rarely.  It takes an engaged, dedicated, creative individual or team to go off-piste, and a company ready to embrace novelty and change to accept what the team brings back.

What your language says about your innovation

I've long championed the idea that to change the way people think, you've got to change the way they communicate.  If you want big ideas, you need to encourage them, yes, but also talk about them in ways that open up dialog, thinking and idea generation to a much larger dimension.  While language, word choice and conversation may not seem to have all that much impact on idea generation and innovation, in reality these are the building blocks of a corporate culture.  As a colleague of mine is fond of saying:  we need to switch from "I'll believe it when I see it" to "I'll see it when I believe it".

Your word choice

Think, for just a moment, about the conversations and communications you have every day with your peers, your direct reports and your boss.  When you talk business, what words or phrases immediately come to mind?  Words like cutting, efficiency, process, costs, management, effectiveness are bound to appear frequently in oral and written communications.  In fairness, I'm sure the words innovation and growth will show up occasionally as well.  But for the most part these are constrained words and phrases, focused on doing well what you do today, not focused on expanding thinking and relieving constraints.  Therefore, since much of how we think is governed by how we communicate, we have people and teams that have constrained language, which equates to constrained thinking.

Explore, Experiment, Discover

Now, imagine conversations that include words like explore, experiment, discover and other such words and phrases.  These words indicate an expansive way of thinking, they signal activities that require going beyond the existing scope or constraints.  We often talk about balancing "convergent" words and activities (those that move quickly to a solution and typically revolve around doing the day to day work well) with "divergent" words and activities (those that expand scope, remove constraints, encourage new thinking, exploration and so on).  If your words and communications don't signal the importance of these activities, then your culture won't reinforce them, and your thinking will be constrained.

In all forms, in all channels

This reliance on language, words and communication to shape and form our cultures goes beyond an occasional email from the CEO, exhorting the teams to more innovation.  It goes beyond a quarterly review that emphasizes efficiency and meeting quarterly objectives.  Changing language and culture requires the introduction and reinforcement of words and phrases, which begin to change thinking and behaviors, in all communication forms (written, oral, visual) and in all channels (presentations, emails, evaluations).  The two fastest ways to change a culture and have it embrace more innovation are to 1) change the compensation and reward schemes and 2) change what the culture talks about and how frequently key words and phrases are used.

Right now we talk about innovation but the sustained communications are overwhelming the need for cultural change and embracing innovation as a sustained capability.  Until and unless you introduce the types of thinking you want by changing the words you use, you'll get the same thinking you've always had.

Starting the innovation fire

I've been thinking, long and hard, about the correct analogy to describe a lot of corporate innovation efforts.  I'm sorry to say that the best analogy I can come up with is a campfire.  I hope you'll stick with me on this, because I think it can be illuminating (couldn't resist the pun).

Most of us who participated in scouts or went to a summer camp where they had a bonfire are familiar with the idea of a campfire. It's a must have for any outdoor event, and rarely complete without graham crackers, chocolate and marshmallows.  It's a good place to tell ghost stories or have a sing along.  A fire, once started and with the right fuel, can burn well and hot for hours, and in some cases if not carefully tended can become dangerous.  But I digress...

How corporate innovation is like a campfire

If you think about the basic ingredients required for a campfire, they are relatively basic.  We need some type of fuel, typically small twigs which catch up quickly and larger branches and logs that don't burn as quickly but provide coals and sustain the fire over time.  We also need an ignition source, most typically a match or a lighter.  Some folks also cheat a bit and use an accelerant - gasoline or lighter fluid or "fatwood" which burns more easily and dependably.  Of course good fire etiquette (at least from my scouting days) would suggest that we clear a small patch of land so the fire is easily contained and doesn't spread to the woods.

Now, let's map what's going on in corporate settings to the ingredients for a campfire, to understand what's underway, what's working and what's missing in corporate innovation.

First, there's the desire to have a fire.  Every company wants innovation, so desire isn't always the challenge.

Second is understanding the ingredients.  For a fire this is simple:  ignition, accelerant, fuel.  In a corporate setting, these three factors are also important: ignition (what are the driving needs or burning platforms that require innovation), accelerant (what are the skills and insights that accelerate innovation) and fuel (what are the cultural and human capital capabilities to keep the projects running).  It makes sense to look at each of these in greater detail.

Ignition

For a fire, ignition is easy.  You need matches, or a lighter, or some other mechanism to create a spark.  Often all you need is a momentary flame to get a good fire going.  The same is true for innovation.  A single executive's need can spark an innovation opportunity.  A significant product line gap or the introduction of a new product by a competitor can spark an innovation need.  Ignition simply isn't the problem, although many corporate innovation activities are ignited by the wrong issues and for the wrong reasons.  The old saying - play with matches and you'll get burned holds true for innovation as well.

Accelerant

As a scout, we always carried a few slivers of "fatwood", typically wood found in the trunks of old pine trees.  Fatwood is a great accelerant because it is loaded with turpentine, catches fire easily and burns hot.  Others might cheat with lighter fluid or gasoline, but just a few bits of fatwood really help accelerate a fire.  In a corporate setting, aspects like innovation tools and knowledge of those tools, past innovation experience, third party consulting help and other factors can accelerate an innovation activity.  At this point in the innovation life cycle, many companies have conducted some training on innovation for their teams, or have access to innovation consultants, so some acceleration can be achieved, but it always works against existing culture, which typically dampens the accelerant.

Fuel

A good fire starts with small twigs and moves on to consume larger branches and logs.  These burn for a much longer time, making it easier to enjoy the fire and build a good set of coals.  The best wood is dry, not green but dead for some time, preferably hardwoods as pine or soft woods don't burn well.  The worst types of fuel are logs that are wet, or wood that is "green" - that is, just off the tree with sap still in it.  From a corporate innovation perspective, the best fuel is committed teams, working on important and relevant projects, working within a supportive culture.  As these factors mature, success builds on success, much like a good fire builds coals to sustain a fire over time.

Where does the problem lie?

The problems with corporate innovation don't like with ignition, although we could discuss for hours whether the "right" sparks are being used about the right problems.  But that's a discussion about problem or opportunity definition.

The real problems are with accelerants and fuel.  As we've described, there aren't enough accelerants in most corporations (trained people who are familiar with innovation tools and methods and a supportive culture).  In fact most corporate innovation activities look a lot like trying to start a fire in the rain:  it's easy to spark a flame with a lighter or a match, but difficult to get a real fire burning that can be sustained.  Too often the wood is too green or too wet to burn, so the fire simply smokes a bit and dies out.  The same is true for many corporate innovation activities:  easy to start, difficult to really ignite a large fire and far too quickly doused and rarely sustained.

How can we fix this problem?

Good firebuilders lay aside accelerants and prep or age the wood they hope to use in a fire, curing it and drying it to be ready when it is needed.  Likewise, corporations must improve the accelerants (training, process definition and skill building) and build the fuel (culture change and the ability to sustain innovation activities over time through strategic alignment, measures, metrics and building on success) in order to sustain a fire once it is started.  This means making an investment in innovation skills, people and tools before they are needed and keeping the skills up to date.

Today, an awful lot of corporate innovation looks a lot like starting a campfire on a cold, wet day with a good match and poor fuel: easy to start, difficult to build a real fire, and a quick, smoky end that no one wants to be around.  The way to change this is not to focus on the spark or ignition quite so much, but to focus on the accelerants and especially the fuel, which will sustain the fire long after it is burning well.

Shared innovation language accelerates innovation

I was leading an innovation workshop recently with a company that invited in some of its customers to talk about the future.  We were interested in getting feedback from key B2B customers about the future of the industry, where things were heading and what strategies and programs my customer should begin to put in place.  I was hired to lead a trend spotting and scenario planning workshop, but I had successfully convinced my client that we needed to establish a common framework and language about innovation first.

The participants were senior executives drawn from several industries the company serves.  Each were leaders in their respective industries and several of them promote innovation as a core operating capability.  Nevertheless I felt it was important to establish a common definition and scope of innovation before moving ahead.  What surprised me was the response from the participants when I started defining innovation, and seeking their definitions so we could arrive at a common framework.

I'll know it when I see it

Like the Supreme Court justice called on to define pornography (I know it when I see it) the participants had very different, and frequently very narrow definitions of "innovation".  While they were casually tossing words around like "disruptive", they couldn't really describe what it meant.  Further, the narrow definitions extended to outcomes.  For the most part many of them were focused, when they were spending time on innovation, almost exclusively on product innovation.

Needless to say, I spent time talking about the difference between "incremental" innovation and disruptive innovation, their purposes and meaning, and the "three horizons" model of innovation, as well as a 70:20:10 portfolio plan.  Thinking about concurrent innovation across several goals and horizons was really new and interesting for these participants.

Ten Types

But we went further.  It's really a waste, I told them, to only focus on product innovation, when so many potential types are available.  I then introduced Doblin's Ten Types, which is basically received gospel to innovators but may as well be Sanskrit for most business types.  They've never seen it, never thought deeply about it, but when its deciphered they understand it immediately.  What was funny about this was several of the participants were talking about the importance of customer experience but never seemed to realize that CX could be an intent or outcome of an innovation exercise.

Freeing their thinking

By working collectively to create a shared (if just for the moment) definition of innovation, which seems like a constricting activity, we actually freed up some thinking because we were broadening the definitions of innovation, in several dimensions.  First, across a spectrum of incremental to disruptive.  Second, from discrete to continuous and often concurrent projects.  And third, from an overemphasis on product innovation to the realization that innovation can happen over a range of outcomes (products, services, channels, business models, experiences, etc).

Once you fully grapple with the opportunities and range of innovation activities and outcomes, the range of innovation possibility can seem a bit limitless.  Then will come the natural convergence to start choosing where or what you want to innovate, and a natural divergence as you start to explore the possibilities again.

Language and common definitions are critical to any interaction.  When each party has their own definitions of innovation and rather narrow definitions at that, little can be accomplished and many opportunities are left by the wayside.  Stopping to create a shared definition, expanding the range of opportunities and options, means we can explore more together.  Why we still need to do this - go back to the basics of key factors like definitions and language, exploring the range and potential outcomes of innovation - indicates that we are closer to the end of the beginning of innovation as a corporate capability, rather than at the beginning of the end.

Understanding the future leads to better innovation

As many of you loyal readers know (thanks Mom!) I'm a big believer that success in life, as in innovation, is about understanding the future and bringing products and solutions to the market just as the market realizes its needs.  This builds on the famous quip that to win the future you should create the future.  The unspoken but obvious counterpoint is that you can wait to see what the future holds and then react to it.  Many is the company that has decided to take the more passive, reactive, wait and see model, rather than invest a few dollars into trend spotting and scenario planning.

Why aren't we doing more work on understanding and predicting the future?  It's pretty obvious that most companies aren't good at understanding and predicting the future, and they are so bound up in efficiency and quantitative metrics about the next month or quarter that they don't believe they have the time or insights to get it right.  There's a famous quote attributed to Niels Bohr, a renown physicist, who said it is very hard to predict, especially about the future.

The future is already here

Contrast that quote with one of my favorites, by William Gibson.  Gibson is quoted as saying "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed".  What he meant was that there are events and trends underway in some corners of the world that are advanced and futuristic.  Imagine how primitive tribes in the Amazon jungle think about airplanes.  In the same way imagine how your grandparents think about Snapchat and Facebook.  Signals about the future are all around us.  Some places (Tokyo and Dubai come to mind) feel like they are already a few years or even a decade ahead of us.  What's required is for us to identify the trends that are occurring and make sense of them, to visit the places that are moving forward and experimenting, to see what the future might hold.

Rejecting the "straight line" future

I've coined what I call the "straight line" future, from my work with customers in trend spotting and scenario planning.  When we ask people to imagine what the future will look like 3-5 years from now, most people will imagine a future that looks and feels exactly like the one they are living in, with minor tweaks around the edges.  In other words, the journey from here to there is a straight line with few disruptions or deviations.  This is the future that we expect and want if we are comfortable and don't want uncertainty or risk.  This is not what is going to happen.

Just a few years ago, Obama was president and the thought of Donald Trump becoming president would have seemed laughable.  Hillary Clinton seemed likely to win and there were an acceptable range of leading, plausible Republican candidates.  Yet history and fate intervened and we have a future few would have expected, with very different political, economic and perhaps military consequences.

The future will look subtly different than the present does, in ways we often don't anticipate or expect.  Those companies that discover the differences with enough time to create valuable products and services will win big.  Bill Gates of Microsoft fame said that we often overestimate the change that will occur in the next 2 years and underestimate the amount of change that will happen in the next ten.  With the pace of change accelerating, we might make that 2 years and 5 years, as you'll see further down the page.


The Point of all This

The point of this post is that change is happening very quickly, and companies that wait to react to emerging events simply cannot react fast enough, with products and services that are compelling enough to win.  Rather than wait, you must create and shape the future that you want to participate in.  Much of the information and signals about the future are out there, waiting to be discovered.  Don't fall into the trap of plotting "straight line" futures, because they aren't real.  Small, subtle changes in the economy, technology or society will create new customer segments, new needs and introduce new threats and potential product or service substitutions. 

Think this can't happen very fast?  iTunes was first released in 2001 as a way to store and manage music.  It was the first really successful commercial way to acquire and manage digital music files.  Tower Records, the largest distributor of CD and albums, declared bankruptcy five years later.  An entire music industry and major distribution channel was destroyed in only five years.  And this didn't happen without clear signals.  Napster and other music sharing platforms proved that customers could strip and share music files for years before iTunes was released by Apple.  The future, as Gibson said, was out there, just not widely recognized or distributed.

Even if you aren't interested in innovation, but merely want to remain competitive and keep pace with your industry and your competitors, understanding trends and predicting the potential direction of your industry and customer base is vital.  It's the minimum to simply keep up with your market.  Good innovators will be looking for clues to find the big shifts that they can take advantage of.

We could all use a little Sharknado thinking

I saw a sign in my Twitter feed recently that spoke volumes about innovation culture.

 

Let's contemplate the audacity of suggesting an idea about a movie full of sharks in tornadoes for just a moment.

Creativity and Combinations
To suggest a movie about sharks in a tornado demonstrates creativity.  Good innovation often happens when you combine two unexpected attributes or components together to create something new.  In this case I think everyone understood that Sharknado was over the top. And why not?  If you look at the rest of the movies being made, something a little tongue in cheek makes sense.  The first thing to take away that someone in Hollywood did right from an innovation perspective is making unusual connections.

The guts to go beyond the obvious
But beyond the idea of combining unlike objects, imagine the guts it takes to suggest something so new and unusual.  In many organizations even reasonable ideas get shot down very quickly.  Participants will wonder about profitability or ROI.  Others will question customer demand or technical feasibility of ideas that seem possible and not outlandish.  That's because all of the possibility and "wonder" has been squeezed out of us in the corporate world.  The vast majority of people live lives of quiet desperation, recognizing opportunities but quickly looking away, aware of the challenge to create new ideas or the price one might pay for suggestion them.  What environmental, economic, and emotional conditions must exist for people to suggest outlandish ideas?

Accepting the impossible
Now, place yourself back in that setting, where some low level production assistant has just suggested making a disaster movie, one that places sharks (looking back to Jaws and other killer aquatic animals) in tornadoes (again, looking back at classic disaster movies).  The idea combines two traditional Hollywood tropes, but in an unexpected way.  You'd think even Hollywood producers would have laughed the idea out of the room.  But they didn't, and that's why Hollywood creates more stuff (that's good and bad) than most other organizations and industries even contemplate.

Some producer or producer's assistant had the guts to say:  tell me more.  Rather than shooting down an idea that marries two very unlikely protagonists, someone accepted the nearly impossible idea and said, go further.  This is what divides innovators and creatives from the realists and the execution-oriented folks.  Realists and operationalists would scoff. They'd say "Sharks don't get caught up in tornadoes" or "That's unrealistic, no one would believe it".  Yet today we walk around with more processing power in our smart phones than a spaceship had that carried men to the moon.

We in corporate America need to regain a sense of wonder and possibility.  We need to stop thinking about what customers need next week, and start imagining what they'll be doing or what need they'll have in 3, 5 or 10 years.

But that's Hollywood, you'll say
Some of you reading this will argue that it's Hollywood's job to create funny, compelling, mindless entertainment, and that means stretching the genre or combining or creating really different concepts to attract and retain an audience.  But isn't that also our jobs in corporations?  To create really interesting and valuable products to attract the attention and revenue of new and existing customers?  Do we really think that in a time and place where change happens so frequently, societal norms and tastes shift rapidly, where information flows so freely that we can win by developing safe, me-too products?

Did AirBnB or Uber create a safe, me too product, or did they dream up something new, audacious and quite different that clearly threatens the existing industry players?  Corporations, in all industries and of all sizes need to get some of this Hollywood spirit, to foster new and outrageous ideas, to encourage new growth, to create new and interesting products and services for customers.

Conclusion

We need a little more Sharknado thinking in corporate America, and to get it we'll need a lot more Hollywood style interaction - mixing unusual stuff together, extending ideas or concepts beyond the breaking point, being willing to generate and speak out loud really outlandish ideas, with the sense that someone will say:  tell me more.  The people in Hollywood aren't that much more creative than the folks you'll find in many Fortune 500 companies, but they have an expectation and culture of creating new things, and a tolerance and expectation of failure and experimentation that many companies lack.

Authoring ideas

As a sometimes writer of blogs, white papers and even a few books, I understand the challenge of facing a blank page, trying to form the words into meaningful and insightful sentences.  A lot of times the concepts and ideas that sound so good in my head get misplaced and mis-translated on the page or simply don't ring with the same clarity when written that they seemed to have when I thought about them.  Writing in any form is a challenge, and increasingly I think writing is very similar to innovation.  Writing, after all, is the act of dreaming up something new to say about something old, bringing new concepts or new stories to light in a new way.  Writing, like innovating, is creating.

What's more, writing, especially stories, takes real creativity.  Tolstoy wrote that there are only two basic story lines:  a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.  When you think of the diversity of stories, the creativity it takes to make them compelling and the range of story types, characters and plots, you can easily see that writing is creativity and innovation.  So perhaps we innovators can learn something from good writers.

What good authors know about writing

It turns out that many writers don't think they know much about writing.  Joe Fassler, who wrote the article that prompted this post, says that many authors find writing difficult, frustrating and challenging.  Even those that you would think are "experts" describe their struggles.  Steven King, Amy Tan and others talk about writing and re-writing, often rethinking and reworking their ideas and stories over and over again.

Reading Fassler's article made me think of my own writing and how it relates to innovation.  There are a number of interesting parallels.  First, when writing an article, blog or story, the author must have an interesting story to tell, a new perspective, and make the story as interesting as possible to the potential reader. In the same way an innovator must target customers who have needs, and shape ideas into new products or services that customers want to buy.

Second, authors will tell you (and they do so repeatedly in the article) that first drafts are for discovery and experimentation.  These drafts identify gaps and weaknesses and potential areas of opportunity or discovery.  Amy Tan notes that she throws out 90 to 95 percent of her initial work.  Innovators face the same challenge, but often have very different expectations.  In business we think because we have detailed processes and deep experience, we should get ideas right the first time.  Instead we should learn to diverge and converge and iterate until the ideas achieve their correct shape, but time and cost pressures rarely allow innovators to fail, restart and reshape ideas.

Finally, the article says that the artistic process never gets easier. Even experienced authors struggle with phrasing, story lines and plots.  They constantly work at their craft.  Innovators could learn from this dogged determination.  Most innovators arrive unready and unseasoned, attempt to perform an innovation activity quickly, declare victory once they've defined a new product or service, and return to their regular jobs.  They don't hone their innovation skills and are surprised when innovation is difficult or requires learning, discovery and iteration.

Paralyzed by your thoughts

One author described being "paralyzed by her thoughts".  This statement made me think of many people in idea generation or brainstorming sessions who are unable to generate ideas in the moment, placing far too much pressure on themselves to get an idea right.  The pressure we place on ourselves as writers or innovators is often detrimental to creative thinking.

The author of the paper sums it up nicely when he says "I’ve learned, bigger feats, bolder ideas unfold over the long haul—in the space where success feels uncertain, even unlikely".  Good innovators recognize the agony and humility in this statement, but the best ideas do take time and require hard work. 

One final quote that I think captures both writing and innovating:  "I'll keep at it stubbornly and gladly until the job is finished".

Innovators and authors have similar jobs and similar challenges.  Most authors write because of a passion for a story or an idea, and learn to iterate and rewrite/rework.  Most true innovators also have a burning passion for an idea or a problem, and most successful innovators are more than willing to describe their experiments, their failures and their iterations that ultimately led them to success.  We need to understand how these two jobs are similar, and what authors and innovators could learn from each other.

Context Matters in Successful Innovation

I think we often over complicate the work of innovation, because we believe it cannot be simple and straightforward.  After all, how can an activity that can disrupt an industry, create compelling new products or services and reap significant riches be simple?  To drive all of this change, certainly innovation must be difficult and complex, right?  Consultants often benefit from this assumption that innovation is difficult or unusual.  Unfortunately the presumption that it must be difficult also means that many people are afraid they don't have the requisite skills.  Fear, uncertainty and doubt about innovation and the knowledge and skills it takes to do it well mean that far less innovation is attempted than probably should be.

In order to accelerate the pace of innovation and increase the amount of innovation that's done, we need to simplify it, or at least remove some of the uncertainty.  To do that I'm going to argue in this relatively short post that innovation has three important deliverables:

• problem definition, 
• ideas and 
• solutions.

Between those deliverables are two very important activities that illuminate and contribute the the generation of those deliverables.  Those two activities create context and content. While we focus on the deliverables it's actually the content/context that really drives innovation value.  Let's review the deliverables and the activities between them to understand what I mean.

Problems/Opportunities

The first real deliverable in any innovation activity should be defining and scoping an interesting problem or opportunity.  To ask for innovation without defining a need or opportunity is useless - but to innovate based on a key insight, opportunity or problem is exceptionally valuable.  Your first goal is to find the right problems to solve, the right opportunities to address.  I don't have enough pixels in this blog post to tell you how to do that, but have written about this previously.

Too many innovators and innovation teams start out without a good problem definition or opportunity, and this lack of scope dooms their work.

Ideas

Many people think an innovation activity begins with an idea, but they are wrong.  An innovation activity begins with a problem or opportunity that you investigate, and learn more about, and discover needs, all of which is context, and the next deliverable is a set of viable ideas to solve the problem.  Ideas are simply a waypoint in an innovation process or exercise.  Unfortunately many people think they are the output. 

And, even when innovation teams generate ideas, they often limit their thinking to small changes, incremental ideas, and a small handful of ideas rather than fully exploring the innovation opportunity.

Solutions

Innovation doesn't begin or end with ideas.  It ends with a valuable solution that customers can acquire and use, that makes their lives better or easier or more valuable.  There really isn't any innovation without this final value realization, so a valuable solution, well launched and well marketed, is the final deliverable of an innovation activity.

Now that we've identified the three deliverables of an innovation activity, let's turn to the activities that shape and inform the deliverables:  the context setting and content development that helps shape and inform ideas and solutions.

Trends and Needs:  Context/Content between problems and ideas

Once you have settled on a problem or opportunity to solve, you need to back up and gather context.  What are the issues?  What are the challenges?  Why does this problem or opportunity exist?  Who else is working on it?  Do customers understand the need or opportunity?  Is there value in solving it?  This context helps you shape the problem and begins to point at potential solutions (ideas).

We typically frame this in two activities:  trend spotting to understand the evolving nature of the world, the market, customers and technologies, and customer insight gathering, to understand the gaps and needs of customers and what they value.Without this insight, discovery and context you cannot generate meaningful ideas, and if you do manage to generate good ideas you won't be able to describe to anyone why they matter.  Too often innovators assume that they know what customers want or need, or simply believe their solutions and technologies are so valuable that they can address any needs or gaps.

Evaluation, Prototyping and Development: Context/Content between ideas and solutions

Once you have good ideas you must evaluate them against customer needs, corporate viability and competitive reality.  Then you must determine how to produce them and launch them in a timely fashion.  These activities too require investigation, discovery and context setting.  In many cases if the ideas are very new or different, you may need to create new product or service development capabilities or develop new business models or channels.  This may require new discovery and new experimentation - something your existing product development processes won't value or understand.  You may simply need new context for new ideas to be realized as new products.

Where the real work lies

The real work of innovation lies in this context and content development, between a good problem statement, ideas and solutions.  We often get far too caught up in these discrete deliverables, never realizing that the value lies in how well we understand the context and generate and evaluate the content between the deliverables.  If you want to know - its in these content and context activities that the innovation magic happens.

We innovators place far too much emphasis on the deliverables of innovation, and on ideas in particular, when we should be focused on the generation and understanding of the context and content activities that must occur between the deliverables.

3 innovation types: evolution, preventative and creative

I was thinking over the weekend that for years we've positioned innovation incorrectly.  Too often we position innovation as creating a new and valuable offering or solution, ready when customers are ready to demand new products and services.  In other words, we've positioned innovation as something to do to prepare for future business, future needs and future demands.  Innovation does answer for these issues - identifying needs and developing ideas for products and services for unmet and perhaps unanticipated needs. 

But in the hustle and bustle of day to day business, the main focus is on the now.  What can you deliver today, this week, this month, this quarter?  How can you help me achieve my quarterly revenue and income goals?  Sure, the future is nice, but I'll worry about that when I get there.  With this mentality, cost cutting, becoming more efficient, gradual but general improvement is the key focus, not innovation per se.

Making innovation more relevant right now

So the question becomes, how do you make innovation more relevant, right now, to executives and managers who are so focused on the short term?  One approach would be to focus on the "short term", what can innovation do for us to put better products on the shelves in less than 90 days.  The general answer to that, given product development cycles, channel issues and customer awareness is:  no much, except perhaps in the virtual world.  Building, modifying and releasing a physical product is going to take more than 90 days, and 90 days is the magic timeframe.  Anything we can do to impact revenue and cost within 90 days is good.  The timeframe beyond 90 days seems almost imaginary.

Innovation, where practiced at all, becomes incremental because of this pressure to generate rapid results.  Even if we can speed up innovation activities (we've run innovation programs from problem definition to fully developed prototypes in under a week) you've still got to go through the product development and launch cycle.  This means innovation will be focused on items and attributes around the periphery - messaging, packaging, claims, rather than interesting or radical innovation of the product or solution.

Another approach is to use innovation to ferret out efficiency gaps.  If we can't create better products and services, can we use innovative thinking to shorten any barriers or gaps to bringing our products to market with less cost or with fewer inputs?  This has been the management focus for years - right-sizing, outsourcing, automating.  It doesn't necessarily lead to new products but may lead to less expensive products or more rapid turns of incremental products. 

So, while we can speed up the existing processes and use innovation to identify gaps or inefficiencies, or use innovation to make some changes to the periphery of the product or service, there's not a lot of innovation that can be delivered and impact the bottom line in 90 days or less.  So we need to think about innovation differently, or perhaps in different categories.

Categorizing innovation

Clearly, as I've defined above, there's a real need for focus on process and peripheral innovation.  These innovations are meant to gradually improve the product or service, cut costs and deliver more bottom line value, and to do so quickly.  The driving pressure for this innovation focus is cost reduction, time reduction and the desire to show customers something "new", even if the newness is relatively minor.

There's also a need for preventative innovation.  I'll call any work to blunt attacks by existing competitors or new entrants as preventative. This kind of innovation identifies potential openings and gaps in a product line, or new "in demand" features or benefits that you don't currently offer.  Preventative innovation considers a slightly longer time frame - perhaps 2 or 3 quarters - doesn't necessarily create a new product as much as identify missing features or product line gaps and carefully evaluate what competitors and potential entrants are doing. 

Then there's radical or disruptive innovation, creating a completely new product or service, or disrupting an existing adjacent market.  This kind of innovation takes focus and planning, commitment for quarters or even years, and full commitment over several planning and budgeting cycles.  This kind of innovation ends up on the magazine covers and is what every CEO wants but can't quite understand how to deliver given the demands for quarterly results.

Three horizons

The three categories I've defined above are exceptionally similar to the "three horizons" model that many innovation consultants talk about.  But rather than call them "incremental", "radical" and "disruptive" I think it makes more sense to describe them based on what they are:  constant evolution, preventative and creative.

The first type of innovation is necessary (and is almost always underway) because your products and offerings can't sit still.  You must find ways to cut costs, make your delivery more efficient and tinker around the edges of existing products.  The second type of innovation is probably the least understood, because too many companies don't understand what their competitors are doing, and are often shocked by the offerings of new entrants.  Companies need to do a lot more preventative innovation, from a defensive point of view, to ward off new entrants and sustain or grow market share. 

Everyone acknowledges the importance of creative innovation - that is, the creation of a completely new offering that radically changes the competitive landscape - but few truly know how to do it or are willing to commit the resources to do it.

Investment cycles

Here's where every innovation consultant will lecture you about how much time and investment should be made in each of these three portfolio segments.  You can think about the three horizons, or my evolution, preventative and creative phases, as components of an innovation portfolio and next ask:  how much time, energy and investments should go into each one?  The general rule of thumb answer is 70:20:10.  Seventy percent of your innovation effort should go into evolution, 20% into preventative and so on.  But what if your budget for innovation is:  zero?  What if executives demand innovation but don't provide budgets or funding or resources?

The inevitable fall back position is to conduct efficiency innovation (evolution) because that's something your teams understand and can do relatively well now.  And, of course, you'll build and staff one high profile team to explore some really interesting innovation (creative) but they won't have the commitment or funding to stick it out - it's merely window dressing, because you expect to show some immediate results from the evolution innovation in the next few weeks and everyone will be satisfied.

Let's change the language

I think innovation champions and teams would do themselves a big favor by refocusing innovation language and talk about innovation in line with processes and outcomes.  We can flavor our language with:  evolutionary innovation to deliver short term benefits, preventative innovation to resist new entrants and sustain market share, creative innovation to win adjacent markets and customers. 

Once we win the language battle and demonstrate we can deliver on evolution and preventative efforts, we can get the funds and resources to do truly creative innovation.

Innovation lessons from Lego

In television, an outlandish episode that seeks to introduce revive a series often signals the eventual downfall of the show.  Those old enough to remember the TV series Happy Days will remember the episode when Fonzi jumped the shark on water skis.  This gave us the expression that something had "jumped the shark", an event signalling an inevitable downfall.

Today I'm wondering if making a movie about toys is a signal that something has "jumped the shark".  In strange and disappointing news, Lego announced that it was facing dire sales projections, with growth slowing from over 25% per year to low single digits.  Strange, when just a few years ago Lego was on top of the world, with great new toys, Lego kits, Lego Robots and the Lego movies.  While the management team blames internal complexity for the slowdown, those factors don't necessarily contribute to slowing sales.  Rather, I suspect that a company that had been on the brink of bankruptcy only a little over a decade ago discovered how to innovate in desperation, and began to neglect innovation as growth accelerated.  What we are seeing now is the aftermath of too little innovation and too much marketing.

What lessons can we learn?

Of course I should admit I'm doing this analysis from a distance, without complete information since Lego is a private company, but over the last few years Lego hasn't done nearly the innovation or introduced nearly the range of products and services that it did from the mid 2000s until 2012 or so.  Lego management turned the company around in the mid to late 2000s, and growth accelerated, only slowing in the last year or so.  The signals were out there, of course.  A new CEO was hired and let go within only 8 months.  What can we learn from Lego's example?

Growth can lead to bureaucracy and risk avoidance
Lego may be challenged by its aggressive growth, and with that growth came size and complexity.  However, and complexity isn't necessarily a factor in its innovation success, unless Lego allowed complacency and bureaucracy and risk avoidance to grow as sales grew.  Innovating at the brink of bankruptcy clarifies the mind (Steve Jobs would agree) and forces companies to focus on what's really important.  Getting large and perhaps bureaucratic can mean that concerns grow about taking new risks.  Internal bureaucracy didn't cause slow sales growth unless it blocked new innovative products or redirected investments.  Lego probably just lost some of its edge and taste for risk and innovation.

Only the paranoid survive
To me, one of the most important take aways should be, you simply cannot become complacent.  Good innovations from just a few years ago will only sustain your growth and differentiation for so long.  Customers are hungry for new solutions, rapacious in their research and unforgiving in their quest for new stuff.  In the past products and solutions had long shelf lives.  You could create an interesting product and merely tweak it, adding a handful of new features every few years.  Those days are over.  Customers demand and expect new capabilities and features on a regular, recurring basis.

Companies need to gin up a consistent innovation program which aims for incremental and disruptive innovations to occur all the time.  Lego is just an extreme example of desperate but winning innovation to avoid bankruptcy followed by a period of less interesting or less successful innovations while harvesting the profits of the prior innovations.  Lego and companies like this are particularly subject to this boom and bust cycle because of their target audience (children and teenagers primarily) who age out and don't want the same toys their siblings or parents had.  But while Lego is an extreme example, companies in every industry should take note.  From the peaks of profitability and industry acclaim to laying off 8% of its workforce in a period of only a few years.

Explore the adjacencies
I had hopes for Lego when they built some of the early Lego robots, because 1) the robots were cool 2) the robots extended Lego's audience into older kids, teens and even adults and 3) they were more expensive and had pull through.  But more importantly the robots were an exploration of an adjacent market or customer group.  Good innovators must constantly evaluate the adjacent markets and customer segments and provide new capabilities, features and products that entice new customers.  The apocryphal story is that Lego discovered lead users building robots with basic Legos and entered the market with their own product.  If that story is true, perhaps it's time for Lego to go back to evaluating what users are doing with Legos and capitalizing on new adjacencies.

The quote from the Lego chairman that he wanted to simplify the business model in order to reach more children suggests that Lego isn't reaching for new adjacencies, but doubling down on a fickle core market.

Grow up but don't grow old
Lego's problem mirrors Disney's problem in a way.  The business scales, but only so far.  Both attract children and young adults, but have difficulty really capitalizing on the adult market.  Disney has made forays into music and movies with some success, but they should be able to win more share and more business from adults.  Both of these firms need to grow up (expand their customer base using their trusted names and capabilities) but not grow old (build sclerotic bureaucracies that resist innovation).

You don't lack time to innovate. You lack allocation and purpose.

You'll forgive me if I lapse into a bit of consultant speak - can't help but do so since I've been in consulting for many years.  One of the factors that dictates what people do as consultants (and in other jobs or industries where time is tracked to projects or other expense categories) is the availability of charge codes.  Everyone knows that lawyers, for example, typically bill their time in 15 minute increments.  They need not only to bill their time in these time segments, but they also need a "charge code" - some mechanism to associate the time they just spent to a client, a business development activity or some overhead charge.

As consultants, most of us are no different.  Regardless of how you ultimately bill the client (time and materials, fixed fee, gain-sharing or other mechanisms) almost every consultant and consulting firm I'm aware of tracks consulting time.  I'm sure the same is true in many other industries where people are accountable for a time sheet at the end of a week or month. 

Tracking Time

In a consulting firm, where you spend your time matters, especially if you are expected to generate revenues by billing clients.  As a consultant one of your primary goals is to generate enough business to sustain your salary and overhead costs.  A second goal is develop new and interesting value propositions or skills that can provide customers with new insights and create service differentiation for yourself or your company.  In the consulting business we call this "practice development".  A third goal is business development, spending time to talk to new prospects and existing customers about new work. Finally, in every business there is some time that is simply "overhead" - filing, retrieving data, filling out time cards, doing stuff that drives the business forward but isn't billable.

As an individual with a time sheet, you are constantly evaluating your time commitments:  how much time for this customer?  How much time and effort for that customer?  How much time in business development? How much time in practice development?  Time and how it is accounted for, becomes a major consideration in everything you do.

Cobbler's Kids

Which is why even consulting firms need a charge code for innovation.  While we in the consulting industry are good at tracking and allocating time, we aren't always good about spending time innovating our own products, services and business models.  And time allocation matters - if you have a goal of being 70% chargeable, that's where your focus and emphasis will be.  Which means you'll spend more time with customers and less on business development, practice development and lastly, of course, will be innovation.  This is why even consulting firms that lead innovation efforts are often like the Cobbler's kids - they have the worst shoes.  Even those of us who talk to our customers about making time for innovation often fail to do it well.

If we, who track time so assiduously fail to define time and account for time spent on innovation, what must it be like for corporate practitioners who don't account for their time or worst, don't have specific time allocations?  As we know, innovation is very important but rarely urgent, so it frequently slips down the "to do" list until it becomes an utter necessity, at which point it becomes a "rush job".  No time allocation, no fixed expectation of time spent in innovation and an acceptance of allowing innovation to fall to the bottom of priorities mean that very little time is spent building skills to become better at innovation, let alone actually doing innovation.

What If

But what if everyone in your company had to account for their time, and what if everyone had a specific time allocation for innovation?  That might differ depending on the individual, their experience and interest in innovation of course, but what if at the end of each year you could look across your team and see how much time an individual spent building innovation skills and contributing to innovation projects.  Wouldn't that be valuable as a manager?

Wouldn't the signal that people will be expected to spend time on innovation, and that time will be managed and accounted for, send signals about the importance of innovation and the expectations that innovation must deliver results?    All too often we hear that people within corporations don't have time for innovation.  That's because they believe they are 100% allocated to their "day jobs" and can't afford distractions or time away.  What if managers and executives specifically allocated and measured time spent in innovation by individual, team and department, and set goals for each individual or group, and examined the outputs and outcome.  Do you think people would find time for innovation?  Do you think more innovation would get done?  Of course the answer to these questions is "yes".

Innovation with a purpose

But the final twist to this story isn't just that people should spend significant time, but that they should be focused on significant opportunities.  It's easy for people to commit 5% of their time to innovation and to generate really incremental ideas.  That outcome isn't really all that better than what happens today.  Beyond simply allocating and evaluating time, management teams should include specific portfolio goals - 70% of your innovation time on incremental tasks, 30% on disruptive ideas, and then measure against those goals.  If every individual or team in your company spent 5% of their time on innovation (100 hours in a 2000 hour work year) and 30% of that time was focused on disruptive innovation (30 hours per individual per year), could we expect some really new and interesting ideas?  You bet we could.

What's holding innovation back?  Time.  Time to think, time to explore, time to experiment.  And strangely, we aren't time deficient.  Most people work a 9-5 job and spend inordinate amounts of time in meetings where very little gets decided or done.  If we could reclaim even a modest amount of that time and reallocate it to more important activities, and direct those innovation activities to more interesting outcomes, the innovation most companies could create would be incredible.

Overcoming fixedness before being locked in amber

It seems strange to me, after working for over 12 years in innovation, that so many people can view the same set of circumstances and opportunities in so many different ways.  Our economy is awash in innovation opportunities, and the opportunities are growing and expanding.  There are opportunities to innovate new products and services, of course, but also new channels and new business models.  Customer experience is rapidly becoming an important innovation avenue.  Paul Hobcraft and I have been writing about the opportunities that are available in entire platforms and ecosystems, and these of course create in turn new opportunities.

The basic building blocks of opportunities - customers, unmet needs, emerging trends and technologies - are all growing.  Beyond that most of us have our basic needs fully met - food, clothing, shelter are all reasonably achieved.  That means that new innovations may be more intangible, psychological, emotional, notional - but there are as many opportunities there as there are in tangible innovations, if not more so.

With this opportunity abundance, why is it that so many individuals and companies see restrictions, limits and barriers to innovation, rather than the vast potential that's available if only they'd set aside past conventions and risk tolerances.  After all, this isn't a 'glass half empty, glass half full' conundrum. This is more akin to a 'glass half empty, barrel overflowing' situation.  People simply aren't paying attention, are too distracted or too fearful to really think about all the potential innovation opportunity.  Or, as I'll explore below, we give into a perspective that suggests that many issues, conventions, regulations and cultures are fixed, unable to move.

Like an insect in amber

You may be familiar with amber - the gemstone that originates from ancient tree sap that hardened over time.  The Czar of Russia had an entire room that was covered in amber - supposedly one of the most beautiful rooms in the world.  You'll often find in amber insects from long ago that were captured by the sap as it flowed down pre-historic trees.  I often think of modern business executives and their teams share similarities with those insects.  They are caught up, stuck, and have lost their freedom of movement. But unlike the insects, that loss of freedom isn't because of a tangible, sticky substance, but because of the stickiness of their perspectives, their cultures, their experiences and education and their industry conventions.  They are insects in a virtual amber, doomed to limits that are dictated and prescribed by their own thinking.

Innovation comes from outside

It may not seem evident at first, but virtually all radical and disruptive innovation originates from outside an industry's boundaries, by people who often weren't even in the industry, who were serving other clients or other needs and saw a way to serve a new set of customers or solve a new set of needs.  The reason these outsiders can so easily disrupt an existing industry is because they haven't been paying homage to the conventions and cultures that built the industry or market.  These entrants have little or no stake in how the industry or market is built or its existing business models, and in fact can profit by radically changing the business model.  These individuals, like Richard Branson or increasingly Elon Musk, are radical free agents, who aren't bound by industry conventions or past expectations, who actively look across industries for rigid decision making and adherence to past ways of doing business.

Weak links / Strong links

The other way to think about this stickiness is a "weak link/strong link" framework.  There are two perspectives: first, the linkages within the industry or convention and second the linkages between the participants.  Disruptive innovation is easier in the first example when there are few strong industry conventions or shifting from existing conventions is relatively painless for the consumer, or when everything is shifting, so the customer accepts that shifts are necessary and important.  An example is when digital music appeared via MP3s and Napster made music sharing acceptable.  Apple was able to disrupt music distribution and publishing because the form factors changed, the technology (digital versus physical media) changed and the music players themselves changed.  When multiple factors are changing, disruption is easier to accept.

Conversely we can see why it is difficult to innovate in the airline industry.  There are too many rigid, regulated or business model conditions.  Safety concerns, unions, the transparency of pricing, the reliance on key volatile inputs (oil, labor), the fixed number of gates and so on don't leave a lot of options for innovation. This means that much of the innovation needs to happen outside of the core offering, and explains why the most interesting innovation has come from outsiders (Branson for branding) or new entrants (Emirates/Qatar) for new services.  But even these innovations pale when we compare them to innovations in technology, in software and in other markets or industries where conventions or regulations are absent or easier to ignore.

What's fixed / what mutable?

So the questions a potential innovator must ask themselves in any situation is:  what's fixed, and cannot be changed?  What do competitors assume is fixed but could change?  Where are there strong linkages that would be difficult to change, and where is change already occurring that we can surf to greater success?  And, how "fixed" or transmutable is my company's culture, perspective and thinking?  Can others around me recognize opportunity and move with it?

Innovation is possible in any setting and in any industry.  Even a very heavily regulated industry such as air travel has plenty of potential for innovation if only the participants would think beyond product innovation.  In other industries that are less regulated, innovation opportunities abound.  Innovators must determine the "fixedness" of their perspectives and cultures, and then the fixedness of the industry or market they compete in.  Otherwise, like the insect swallowed by the tree sap, they'll find themselves encased, unable to move and unable to innovate.

The most innovative man in the world

For the last few years a commercial has been running to advertise Dos Equis.  In these commercials there's always some hyperbole (I know, who would of thunk it in a beer commercial) about a suave, sophisticated gentleman who can simultaneously drink Dos Equis and entertain heads of state.  He is, we are constantly reminded, the most interesting man in the world.  We are told that his mother has tattoos that say "Son" on them.  Superman has pyjamas with his face on them.  And so on.  And because he drinks Dos Equis beer, you should too.

In light of this (admittedly interesting and captivating) advertising, I thought it would be interesting to describe in the same way what the most innovative man (or woman) in the world might think, might do and how they might behave.  While the most innovative man in the world doesn't exist, wouldn't it be worthwhile to imagine what skills, attitudes, perspectives and beliefs that individual would have?  Here we go...

The most innovative man (or woman) in the world

Motto
The most innovative man or woman in the world would have to have a motto.  The most interesting man says "stay thirsty" because he's selling beer.  I believe the mantra of the most innovative man in the world would be "stay curious", because he's interested in identifying and solving interesting problems.

Sidekicks
The most interesting man in the world, according to the ads, is almost always surrounded by supermodels and beer.  The most innovative man (or woman) in the world would be surrounded by customers and prospects, because he or she would be constantly trying to ascertain what the really interesting, unmet needs were.

Settings
The most interesting man in the world is always shown in exotic locations - skiing in the Alps or yachting in the Med.  The most innovative man or woman in the world would be found in more mundane places - research labs, startups, focus groups - always searching, always curious, open for any new insight.

Connections
One thing both share is the desire for connections, but for very different reasons.  For the most interesting man, connections are about social advancement, getting invited to the right party.  For the most innovative person, connections are about exchanging new ideas, mixing, combining and blending new ideas and experiences to create new solutions.

Approach
The most interesting man in the world has a "been there, done that" aspect, always with a wry twinkle in his eye that suggests he's done this before and knows how it will end.  The most innovative person in the world approaches every experience as if for the first time, with a Beginner's Mind approach, hoping to learn something new.

Conventions
Another thing they share is the lack of conventions.  Neither are interested in following conventions but in setting new conventions, new ways of thinking.  The interesting person does it for attention and followership, the innovative person does it to disrupt markets and industries and create new solutions and value.

Insider/Outsider
The most interesting person is a total insider - knows everyone, knows where the bodies are buried and his or her social capital is built on that, and on sustaining the status quo or bettering it.  The most innovative person is a near outsider - knows a lot of people in the in-crowd but also knows plenty who aren't "in".  He or she understands the social conventions and industry standards but doesn't rely on them, just as happy to subvert them as to sustain them.

Amalgamation
Finally, the most interesting man in the world is an amalgamation - the combination of a number of stories and people combined into one fictional person.  Likewise, the most innovative person in the world is also fictional, because it takes a group of people or a team to bring an idea to full reality, and few people possess all of these traits.

 Just as no man is an island, no one person can contain all of the skills and traits to take an idea from concept to realization.  The sooner corporations understand that innovation is a team sport that requires an interesting blend of different skills and experiences, and the environment in which these teams can thrive, the sooner we'll see more interesting products and services.

The most innovative person on the planet isn't known, and probably won't be, because innovation is a team sport, where many different people bring many different skills, perspectives and experiences to bear.  Stop searching for the most innovative person and start building the right teams and placing them in cultural and business environments where they can succeed.

Innovation requires learning, relearning and unlearning

There's probably few activities that corporate folks enjoy less than corporate training.  For most it's guaranteed to be a slog, or a review of policies and procedures rarely used and important only to a specific team or set of circumstances.  While people are attending the "mandatory" training to learn material of vague importance to their day to day jobs, their inboxes are filling up, cat videos are going unwatched.  Most people assume they have enough knowledge to do the jobs they have, and they are often comfortable simply winging the rest.

That's why innovation often presents such an interesting challenge.  For the most part people have the suspicion that innovation is unusual and requires new insights and skills they don't possess.  And, since they don't possess those skills, they will avoid doing innovation work (from fear of failure) or will make innovation work align to existing programs and policies (which they know well).  In response, many organizations are turning to innovation training and innovation workshops.

I'm just back from leading a couple days of innovation training with a client, and the more we do this, the more convinced I am that 1) corporations can do a very good job innovating with the people they have 2) innovation training - learning the skills that make up a good innovation activity isn't difficult and 3) people will need to both learn, relearn and unlearn some things in order to achieve innovation success.

Learning

The fact of the matter is that most of us have spent the last 20 to 30 years learning to be efficient, to succeed at our first attempt.  This makes all of our efforts very careful and very incremental, and doesn't embrace innovation or disruption.  We aren't good at discovering new needs or experimenting with new ideas, and we need to learn some tools and methods to help us do a better job of finding unmet needs and creating interesting ideas.  You can learn the tools to innovate, and the more you practice these tools and methods the more creative and capable you'll become.  In this regard, innovation training is important, but must be quickly followed up with putting the learning into practice.

Relearning

A lot of what we teach when we teach innovation skills is going back to basics.  First is doing a good job defining an opportunity or problem to tackle, rather than simply solving the most obvious problems or symptoms.  Next is taking the time to understand what customers actually want and need, rather than presenting your latest technologies.  Third is having an open mind, creating and combining ideas.  Like Fulghum's book All I needed to know I learned in kindergarten, some innovation thinking is simply taking the time to contemplate and analyze a lot of ideas, using interaction methods and perspectives that you learned earlier in life and later abandoned.  It's also important to allow ideas to evolve and not judge them immediately - to build on and expand ideas and to provide the room for really crazy ideas to develop.

Unlearning

There is some unlearning that's required when people learn about innovation.  For too long we've settled for success, lack of variation, efficiency.  This means we've curtailed exploration, discovery, and wonder.  We approach problems as experts rather than as naive beginners, which shuts down a lot of good ideas and exploration.  We rush to converge when we should take time to diverge.  A lot of innovation seems almost counterintuitive, not because the tools and methods are difficult but because they seem to conflict with how we operate our businesses today.  To do good innovation you must sometimes take the opposite view, take on new perspectives, ask what would happen if industry norms were eliminated.  You have to unlearn some of your assumptions and ask unusual questions.

The benefits of innovation training

Like us old guys who laughed off yoga, stretching and warming up who are, later in life, coming to realize how important core strength and flexibility are in day to day life, you can get a lot out of innovation training and can become far more creative and innovative if you are willing to adopt some new tools and a new perspective or mindset.  This is true for individuals, small teams and ideally for an entire corporate culture.  You simply need to learn the tools and methods that work, relearn how to work together and unlearn some of the things that seem so certain.  Once you do that, or your teams or culture does that, you have the chance to be far more innovative.

Is innovation unreasonable?

Thank goodness for Twitter.  What would we do without this constantly refreshing stream of bromides, insights, accusations and occasional bursts of wisdom?  Just yesterday while perusing the Twitter stream I saw a quote attributed to Jonathan Ive that made me want to sit up and scream.  The quote was relatively straightforward and seems innocuous on its face:

"To do something innovative means you reject reason"

Sounds about right, doesn't it?  Innovation means that you are creating something new and potentially disruptive, and that means that you may have to go against "reason".  As I've said before, I'm a big fan of George Bernard Shaw, who said that all progress is due to "unreasonable" men and women. But do we have to reject reason in order to innovate?  I don't think so - in fact I think we have to embrace reason, knowledge and insight in order to innovate.

Reason or Convention

What I think gets confused here is the idea of fighting "convention" and somehow that becomes conflated with reason.  When we innovate we are often changing the status quo, and there are plenty of people with reasons to protect and sustain the status quo, who can give you plenty of..wait for it.. reasons why you shouldn't disrupt or change the status quo.  Convention is powerful, and if the quote had said, "To do something innovative means you reject convention" I would have said: Amen.

However, we cannot reject reason when we innovate, in fact we must rely on insight, intelligence, research and reason when we innovate.  That's because the only way to encourage people to commit to new ideas is to demonstrate new insights, new needs or new experiences, which are all based on research, insights into unsolved problems or challenges or new technologies.  This all appeals to reason - why would I choose an uncertain unknown over a predictable certainty?  Only if the unknown is promising, compelling and valuable.  And how would I communicate those benefits?  By appealing to your reason, and overcoming your fear of rejecting convention.

Innovators/Artists/Creatives

So, it might be rightly said that innovators, artists, creatives and others of a similar ilk are unconventional, even unreasonable in their pursuit of new ideas, but not that they lack or reject reason.  Shaw suggests that only people who are willing to bend the world to their viewpoint, who don't accept the status quo, create change and progress.  Only those who use insight, research, intelligence and sometimes their gut see what's coming and apply their reason to overcome conventions and objections to create a new reality.

I didn't have the opportunity to work with Jobs - Ive did - but I'd think Jobs was often unreasonable in his pursuits of innovation and rejected convention, but his insights called on his reason and his intellect.  And Jobs was simply better at spotting emerging needs and markets than others were - this isn't a rejection of reason, it is a validation of reason and a rejection of convention.