OVO | October 2006 Newsletter

OVO Views

Conversations about Innovation

October 2006 - Vol 1, Issue 5

In This Issue
	Innovation Conference Roundup Give the people what they want An Innovation process and tools framework Innovation Success - The "C" Factor Low Cost, Low Risk idea management

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Greetings!

Welcome to the OVO innovation newsletter. It's October and that means Halloween and conferences. In this issue of the Innovation Newsletter we'll provide a recap of some of the recent innovation conferences including the Business Innovation Factory's storytelling conference, the Innovation Immersion conference and the PDMA's Innovation conference. In addition, we'll introduce our framework for thinking about innovation processes and tools, and the data and software necessary to support sustainable innovation. Finally, we'll begin a serialized look at the important "Cs" for innovation- Context, Control, Convenience and other factors that will make or break an innovation.

Innovation Conference Roundup

As a consultant, software developer and commentator in the innovation space, OVO is fortunate to be invited to exhibit, speak and participate in a wide array of conferences, trade shows and other events focused on creativity and innovation. In just the last few months we've had the good fortune to participate in a wide array of events, several of which I'd like to highlight, and recap the best content we've seen so far. The Business Innovation Factory Storytelling Conference The Bu siness Innovation Factory (BIF) is an interesting organization, focused on presenting Rhode Island as a leader in innovation. The BIF was formed as a public/private partnership between the state of Rhode Island, interested innovators and larger corporations in Rhode Island. For the last two years the BIF has hosted a storytelling conference about innovation. I was lucky enough to be invited along with a number of other bloggers to cover the event. What was interesting about the event was the format and speakers. The speakers were drawn from a wide array of industries and interest groups - from high tech to consumer packaged goods to oceanography. These were senior leaders in the respective businesses talking about innovation and why it matters in their businesses. The format was focused on telling stories: why did this business need innovation? What was innovative about the business? How was innovation perceived? There were few PowerPoint slides and more straight from the gut stories that I felt really resonated. Check out the BIF and their archived footage of some of the storytellers. The Innovation Immersion Conference The Immersion conference has been held for over a decade and has been organized and managed by Joyce Wycoff, a long time leader and respected thinker about innovation. The conference was organized around tracks and featured a number of innovation consultants and industry practitioners, including Jeneanne Rae from Peer Insight speaking on service innovation and Gerald Haman, who spoke on processes for innovation. This conference felt a bit like preaching to the choir, since many of the attendees have experience with innovation and were getting their work and experience reinforced. The few people in attendance who were new to innovation had a bit of the "deer in the headlights" look because innovation can be much more complex than it might first appear. For example, Carol Pletcher from Cargill spoke about Cargill's innovation initiative - which at this point is five years in the making and beginning to show some really great results. For a firm like Cargill, that's great, but many people just getting started need an innovation bootcamp to identify the few things they need to start working on now. The Immersion conference was definitely a practitioner's conference and the level of knowledge and experience about innovation was very high. The PDMA's Innovation Conference The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) holds several conferences a year with some innovation flavor. The "Front End" conference in the spring has a lot of good information and has drawn a number of attendees focused on innovation. The event just held in Atlanta was nominally about innovation, but I felt the program held more value for people who are interested in the nuts and bolts of product development, rather than innovators. The audience for the event was made up of product managers who seemed more interested in stage gate and other approaches that are useful once an idea is ready to become a product, and less interested in trend management, idea generation and the so called fuzzy front end. I think the PDMA is doing a good job building awareness about innovation and the upstream activities to product development, but it seemed many of the attendees were much more comfortable thinking about the "downstream" product management issues, not the innovation issues. Take Aways There are a few things I have learned across these conferences about the state of innovation: 1. If you've been doing "innovation" for a while, be kind to those just starting out. Many firms and people attending these conferences are just beginning to get their feet wet, and I think they may be swimming in the "deep end" of the pool too quickly. We need to find ways to offer a boot camp to help these folks get started quickly. 2. Storytelling is WAAAY in. After sitting through a number of breakout sessions and listening to the presenters, those individuals that tell stories to illustrate their key points are more compelling, and the attendees seem to retain those points for a longer period of time. 3. Ethnography is becoming very popular. I began to feel a little disconcerted that I did not have an anthropology degree. There's a lot of focus around understanding customer needs, especially unmet or unrecognized needs, and a close examination of the customer and how he or she interacts with your products or services is in order. Don't outsource this stuff - go do it yourself. 4. The more mundane the industry, the more likely innovation is happening in that industry. Some of the most compelling stories were from industries like packaging, agricultural products and other verticals that would seem to be sleepy or out of touch. The commoditization of these products is driving innovation to help these firms sustain market share and differentiation. 5. If you think your organization is behind the innovation curve, don't worry. There is a lot of innovation work being done across industries, but much of it is still at a business unit or product group level. Few firms have mastered an enterprise concept of innovation. So you've still got some time to catch up and even pull ahead. Get started!

Give the people what they want

At the recent PDMA conference, I heard someone say that they felt innovation is easy. In fact, his company has been doing innovation for quite some time. Their approach to innovation? Ask customers what they want and build those products as defined by the customer. Leaving aside the risks of simply building what customers ask for, think about the differences between what people say they want and their actual behavior. Certainly talking with customers about their wants and needs is a good idea, but it cannot be the entirety of your innovation process. Another concern - unless your firm does broad customer sampling, even these incremental ideas may lead you to build products or services that have very limited market appeal. Understanding unmet needs - needs that a customer has assumed are too difficult to solve, or has become so accustomed to a work around that he or she is unaware of the problem - is probably one of the most important skills in innovation. For many disruptive products and services, it would be almost impossible for a customer to request them since they either don't know the possibility exists or have discounted the opportunity as too difficult. For years, people wanted a technique to cook food more quickly, but no one ever asked a product developer to create a microwave oven. In fact the microwave cooking technique was discovered by accident, as scientists found animals near microwave transmitters charred from the microwaves. The point is - innovation is about a lot more than simply asking customers what they want. The fact is that often they don't know and believe that scientific or bureaucratic constraints will make it impossible for them to receive the products or services they really want.

An Innovation process and tools framework

Innovation Software and Process Framework We've developed some thinking around the processes and tools necessary to support sustainable innovation and we've created this "Framework" to examine how processes and software tools will support innovation. If you have a passing knowledge of physics, you've heard of the GUT - the grand unified theory. This is the concept that pulls together all the knowledge of physics from gravity to atomic-level attraction in one theory. In every area of knowledge, thinkers attempt to synthesize what we know and create a unifying theory or framework to shape and define what we know. With that in mind, we at OVO have begun working on the grand unified theory for innovation processes and tools. Note that we are leaving out one important item - strategy - which is really driven by an organization's competitive differentiation and decision making. We believe, however, that innovation processes and tools can be relatively consistent across organizations and industries, in much the same way that purchasing processes and tools are similar from organization to organization, or customer relationship management solutions are similar. The graphic above reflects our thinking about innovation processes as a lifecycle, and the data, systems and information necessary to make innovation sustainable and repeatable. The innovation lifecycle as we define it begins with trend spotting and moves to idea generation, idea capture and idea evaluation, then to the development of the idea as a product or service and finally to product or service launch. This represents the end to end innovation process from early idea concept to final product or service. Underneath that process and within the steps of that process we've identified the data, systems and tools necessary to capture and manage the data and workflow to support the process. Much like sales teams have Miller-Heiman or Strategic Selling methodologies and CRM software, innovation teams need defined processes and software tools to improve their processes. For example, when a firm "captures" idea it needs a collaborative, shared database to store those ideas, add value and context to those ideas and begin to shape those ideas. As the firm evaluates ideas to determine whether or not to move forward with them, it needs the ability to rank ideas, vote on ideas, create evaluation matrices or other evaluation techniques that are transparent and consistent. Underneath the process, it needs tools to capture metrics across the process, identify participants and determine the motivations and rewards, and databases and archives to retain the corporate knowledge. Clearly a firm operating in accordance with this recommended framework would have a significant data stream and close monitoring of its ideas and idea management process. Is all of this information and process necessary? Not when you get started, but if your innovation process is to grow and become sustainable, it must become an integrated, end to end process with established workflow and tools, just like any other process in your business. If this seems somewhat familiar - it is. Your sales staff has a defined set of processes and a suite of software tools to support their work. So does your purchasing team, and most other business processes within your organization. We work best when a clear process is defined, and then scale those processes with supporting software tools. Innovation should become another managed process within your organization, and our Framework demonstrates how we believe that sustainable framework will be achieved. Read more about integrated innovation software

Innovation Success - The "C" Factor

It's almost a fact of life that in any industry there needs to be a list of the five factors or seven habits for success. We at OVO have identified a number of factors that must be in place for an innovation to succeed, which we call the "C" factors. Over the next few newsletters we'll reveal one "C" factor at a time and provide a short discussion as to why it is important for your innovation to succeed. October's "C" - Choice and Control This month we'll look at the C factors "Choice" and "Control". I am borrowing these "Cs" from a book I reviewed recently called "Follow the Other Hand" which is a book about magic and applying the concepts of magic to running a business. One of the key ideas from the book is presenting a customer with more choice and control. For an innovation to succeed, it must provide the consumer more choice than what's currently available without a loss of control or sacrifice of options. Henry Ford lost control of the automobile market when Alfred Sloan created cars that had more options and colors, giving the consumer greater choice. Most successful innovations create more choice for consumers, and increasingly enable and simplify making the choice. In many ways Amazon and other online retailers simplify choice by presenting options that are similar to books or products you've purchased before. In this matter the choice is actually simplified and more options are presented that are more likely to be of interest to you. Traditionally, choice and control were tradeoffs. If I gave you a choice, then I as the vendor had control over options. If you had control, you had very few choices. Most innovation succeed when they provide more control to the consumer, without limiting choice. Successful innovations provide a consumer with more control. Open source software is a great example of increased control. Packaged software provides necessary functions at a reasonable cost, but provides the user virtually no control. The features in the software are those determined by the developer of the software. A purchaser has virtually no control over new features and when those features will be implemented. Open Source software provides the consumer with much more control - allowing the software to be updated with new features when and where the user demands, without a significant sacrifice in quality or choice. To succeed, an innovation needs to provide a user or consumer more choice and control than a product or service already in use. An innovation can provide either more choice - in other words greater variety - or improve the consumer's choice process and criteria. However, the increase in choice should not limit options or reduce the consumer's control of the product, service or transaction. What can your firm do about the Choice and Control factors? Any idea can look good on paper, but as you evaluate your ideas and begin to pick the ones to bring to market, ask yourself if your innovation gives the customer more choice and/or more control than the existing solutions. If not, can you change the idea to provide more choice or control? Next Month, the next "C" - Convenience

Low Cost, Low Risk idea management

OVO has recently announced that its software - specifically Spark and Incubator - are now available as a hosted service. What this means to you is that your team can get started very quickly and easily generating and capturing ideas in a hosted model, for much less cost and effort than you might expect. Spark, a web-based application for brainstorming, ideation and whiteboarding, is priced in the hosted model at $20 per concurrent user per month. Incubator, a collaborative idea management system, is priced at $40 per concurrent user per month. These are powerful software applications offered at a price that means you should act now to get your innovation teams started generating and capturing ideas in a consistent application framework. There are two real innovations in this offer: the concurrent software model and the ability to move quickly from a hosted version to an internally managed licensed version. OVO offers its hosted software in a concurrent model. This means you can license the software in blocks of 5 concurrent users, but sign up 5 users for each concurrent license. For example, if you buy 5 concurrent users, your team can establish as many as 25 registered users. Any 5 of those accounts can be active at one time. You'll pay less but provide the functionality to a much broader audience. OVO also offers the ability to quickly move from a hosted model, where we host and manage the data for you, to an internally managed and licensed model, where your team hosts and manages the software. This means your team can get started quickly, often within a day or two, using the hosted model, and bring the management of the ideas and software in house when the time is right. With this offer there is simply no reason to wait - your team can access powerful software and get started using that software very quickly at an exceptionally affordable price. Robert Tucker, in his book "Driving Growth through Innovation" recommends using a collaborative idea management system as one of the first steps towards becoming more innovative. You won't find a more powerful application that provides you with the flexibility and capability that OVO offers right now. Read more about our hosted applications

If you'd like to discuss how OVO can work with you to improve your innovation strategies, ideation sessions, innovation processes or software, contact us today at our website or (919) 844-5644 x789. If you enjoyed this innovation newsletter, please pass it along to your friends. If you wish to unsubscribe, please see the link below.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Phillips

OVO

email: jphillips@ovoinnovation.com

phone: 919-844-5644 x789

web: http://www.ovoinnovation.com