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OVO Views
Conversations about Innovation
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July 2007
- Vol 2, Issue 1
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In This Issue
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Quick Links
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Greetings!
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Welcome to the OVO innovation newsletter.
We're half-way through the summer and staring
hard at "back to school". Are you sending
your team back to school to learn more about
creativity and innovation? Keep reading.
So, you'd like to generate some really
radical ideas? Want to disrupt the existing
market space but aren't sure how to get
started? Read our article on disruptive
thinking for a shot in the arm.
No matter what the Rolling Stones said, time
is
not on your side.
Read our commentary on
how long it takes to get an idea from concept
to new product or service, and what you can
do about improving the process and setting
the right expectations.
We welcome Mike Maddock from 3-2-1 Launch! as
a guest contributor this month, writing on
the topic of healthy innovation.
Stay Cool!
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Generating disruptive ideas
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Over the last few months we've worked
with several firms in very different
industries as they tried to generate new
ideas. In each case we've used some of the
tried and true ideation, brainstorming and
creativity methods to generate ideas. While
these methods have been successful, they
rarely generate disruptive ideas.
Disruptive vs incremental
During most "traditional" ideation work,
the ideas are generally very
realistic - concepts that can be implemented
in the near to mid-term. Within a
traditional brainstorming context, it's hard
to get really disruptive or crazy ideas, for
several reasons. One very important
reason: the more people that are involved,
the more group dynamics take over. As your
ideation team grows, consciously or
unconsciously the individuals within the
group monitor themselves and submit ideas
they believe the group will accept, rather
than the full range of ideas they have.
Participants become concerned about the
acceptability of an idea and ridicule from
other participants. Other "blockers" to
really creative and disruptive ideas include
the expectations on the group, the freedom
the group has to experiment (what we call
"permission"), the culture of the
organization and the vision of the
participants.
Brainstorming is a great technique, but we
believe a different approach is called for
when you are seeking disruptive ideas. These
approaches may call for a bit more
imagination than you've had the chance to
exercise at work before.
Generating Disruptive ideas
If your team's goal is to generate really
disruptive ideas, we'd recommend several
different approaches from traditional
brainstorming, including:
- Violate an existing "given"
- Define a future scenario and work
backwards
- Become the disrupter
- Translate unmet and unspoken needs into
realities
Let's examine each of these in a bit more
detail.
The first example - to violate an existing
"given" means to break down your core
assumptions about what the market expects as
a constraint or a requirement. For example,
look at
the transportation industry. In the US it is a
given that we all need a car. What if we
eliminated cars all together? Another given,
we assume
that most personal transportation must be
earth bound on wheels. What if we all had
helicopters
or small airplanes? In any industry there
are many firmly held convictions, givens
or constraints. What if one or more of those
were changed completely or ignored?
Look at the Swiffer, for example. While I
don't know if the developers of the Swiffer
meant to disrupt the mop industry, the
inventors of the Swiffer may have asked
themselves "Do mops have to be wet? Do they
have to be dunked in a sink?" They may have
challenged an assumption that clean floors
require mops, which require buckets and water
and cleansers. Whether they went through
this thinking or not, they disrupted the mop
industry.
Scenario Planning
Scenario Planning is a tool that's been used
in the past for developing corporate
strategy. Using Scenario Planning, a company
will forecast a number of variables along a
timeline and seek to understand what will
happen and what their actions should be. For
disruptive ideation, your team can use a
variant of Scenario Planning, but in a
proactive way. Your team can define a
preferred future state, define the products,
services and business models that "should"
exist, and then determine how to achieve that
vision.
Become the Disrupter
Often when firms generate ideas, they seek
ideas that extend an existing franchise or
ideas that will help defend an existing
market. Meanwhile, firms that
seek to disrupt a space examine the ways to
topple a market or product positioning. For
truly disruptive ideas, become the
disrupter. If you were an outsider seeking
to disrupt the market and create a completely
new market or completely new product, what
would you do? Think like an outsider and a
guerrilla - your company isn't likely to be
disrupted by your close competitors, but by
someone you don't expect, who will compete
with you in a way you don't anticipate.
Perhaps another way to think of this is WWGD
- what would Google do?
Translating unmet needs
No one before 1970 ever said they wanted a
microwave oven. They did say they wanted the
ability to cook food more quickly and shorten
food preparation time. An accidental
discovery led to the conclusion that
microwaves cooked food very quickly, and an
existing technology met an unmet need and now
we all live in fear that the microwave oven
in our workspace will render us genderless.
Understanding the unmet and unspoken needs of
consumers and translating those needs into a
useful product can dramatically disrupt an
industry. Too many times we accept the short
comings or limitations of a product or
service rather than
challenging an assumption or addressing an
unmet need.
What do I need to succeed?
To generate truly disruptive ideas, you need
"permission" to think broadly, information
about your industry or products, a small,
focused team and the ability to think very
creatively. There are no special tools
necessary. You'll want to include people
with very different perspectives and who are
not tied down to quarterly timeframes.
You'll need to question every firmly held
belief and seek to attack your own market as
a disrupter.
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Healthy Innovation from 3-2-1 Launch
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Each month we try to feature a firm that we
believe has a unique viewpoint or an
interesting insight for innovation. This
month Mike Maddock from 3-2-1 Launch! is our
featured contributor.
3-2-1Launch! is a leading new product
development firm that has been engaged by
over 20% of the Fortune 100. They have
literally done hundreds of projects and have
the benefit of more than a decade's worth of
data on virtually every aspect of bringing
new products to market. Mike shares his
thoughts on "healthy innovation".
3 Ways to Ensure Healthy
Innovation
"What is the biggest opportunity most
companies face in innovation?" We hear this
question more often than any other so it
seems to make a good topic for an article.
Remember the game "telephone"? A message is
whispered from ear to ear and then everyone
laughs at how much it has changed when it
reaches the end of the line. This game has
become the perfect metaphor for how many
companies manage their innovation process. Or
more importantly, how they poorly manage
their process.
Surprisingly, in most companies, multiple
departments and multiple vendors
inconsistently check-in and out of their
innovation projects. There's zero upside to
this and every lucky step forward comes with
the requisite four steps back. So, here are
three reasons this hurts your chances of
launching industry-changing ideas:
- Insights are lost or modified along the
way, making concepts less evocative
- Off-strategy ideas are not identified and
eliminated early in the process
- The project loses momentum as multiple
departments, factions and levels of
management are brought up to speed.
Unfortunately, this often results in the
safest, most easy-to-agree-upon concepts
making the cut. Not surprisingly, these ideas
will not be enthusiastically supported into
the market nor will they have the
head-turning power it takes to get consumers'
attention. At best, you get small,
incremental innovation. On the other end of
the spectrum, the launch falls completely flat.
Three simple ways to solve this
challenge
- Empower a small, 4-6 person,
cross-functional group to manage each
innovation initiative. This group needs a
single leader with the power and influence to
make courageous choices - the proverbial
"fearless leader," as it were. Ideally, this
group should live above the brand groups.
- Employ innovation partners who have the
ability to help manage the process from
conceptualization to commercialization of the
best ideas. You can't afford to risk losing
momentum or insights in the hand-off.
- Make sure BOTH teams are fully engaged in
the entire process. Everyone should agree on
success criteria and should know immediately
when a concept is off strategy or
communicated incorrectly.
In my opinion, these three simple steps will
help solve the most prevalent innovation
challenges. Now, while nothing can guarantee
a home-run, they will help you create a
happier, more cohesive team with the enviable
challenge of prioritizing a powerful pipeline
of new products set-up for market success.
And really, who doesn't want that?
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Building on existing skills
As I noted earlier, my kids are looking
rather anxiously at the calendar, as each day
ticks away and the return to school draws
ever nearer. As part of an innovative team,
you too should be drawing ever
closer to more education on creativity and
innovation.
Most of us receive very little training
related to our existing jobs. Oh, I know
that each year in your annual review you
include a small aside about obtaining some
more training, but in the pressures of day to
day work that rarely happens. Then, one day
we ask a disparate group of people who
haven't met before to spend a few days coming
up with ideas that will change the way the
business works, with no advance warning, no
training on the methods and no certainty as
to how the information will be used. Sounds
like a recipe for success, no?
The reason most firms enjoy some success in
spite of their lack of education and training
on innovation and creativity is that all of
us have some creative energy and ideas about
new products and services. If we can
accomplish the good work that we do without
any training, imagine what we can do with a
little more schooling!
Learning how to think
While you may have been led to believe that
most innovation work is smoke and mirrors,
that's not exactly the case. Innovation,
like a lot of other disciplines, has an
underpinning of rigor and discipline, and
there are a number of tools and techniques
that you can learn and use. The problem with
many of these approaches is that they may
lead to having fun - and that's generally
frowned on at work.
From the time you first went to kindergarten
you were taught to color in the lines.
Everyone is born creative and then many of us
have that sucked right out of us, to be
replaced with conformance to the expected
norms. Innovation requires that you question
the reasons for things that seem
unquestionable, that you create ideas that
seem nonsensical, and that you communicate
and interact with people that you don't
understand (like those guys in accounting).
You can learn to be more creative and
innovative, personally, as part of a team,
and corporately. And as you do that, you add
skills that will be valuable to yourself and
your team.
Impacting the culture
Training people to become more innovative and
creative has another purpose beyond simply
unlocking their creative capability. As a
firm demonstrates that it is committed to
gaining the best ideas from its people, and
is willing to enhance their creative and
innovative skills through training, it
impacts a powerful force in the business -
the corporate culture.
Talking about innovation is easy, and that's what
happens in many companies - just talk. Doing
some
ideation work and moving a few ideas around
is more difficult, but does not mean
innovation takes root. Spending the time to
train people to become more innovative - to
encourage their "wild" ideas, to demonstrate
their thinking is important - will begin to
change the expectations of the culture. And
that's where real innovation begins. As a
firm demonstrates it's commitment to train
its employees in innovative and creative
skills, it communicates the value of
innovation as part of the culture and focus
of the organization.
Becoming more innovative
There are two big "IFs" here: IF we make the
culture more accepting of innovation and more
prepared to take advantage of great ideas,
and IF we help our people tap into their
creative capabilities and great ideas, then
the outcome will be an organization that can
create new products and services. These two
concepts are intertwined - you may be able to
tap into some people's creative energy some
of the time with a culture that does not
support innovation, but when the culture is
aligned with innovation and the people in
that culture have their skills sharpened, the
firm will move from an occasional innovator
to a consistent innovator.
Training Options
While there are a lot of training options
available, I thought I'd identify a few here
that are available to improve innovation and
creativity, just to demonstrate the
opportunities available on the commercial
market.
Personal
Drawing
on the right side of the brain - from the
people I know who have taken this course,
anyone can learn to draw and tap into
capabilities they did not know they had.
Personal or Team
A Whack on the side of the head - or any
other book, program or class from Roger
von Oech.
Personal or Team
The
Creative Problem Solving Institute -
founded by the "father" of brainstorming,
this group offers training in a range of
innovative techniques and holds a yearly
symposium with additional training
opportunities.
These are just a few examples of innovation
and creativity training available. Within
your organization, you may find other
opportunities. We've worked with firms to
define entire coursework within a corporate
training environment dedicated to innovation
and creativity.
Everyone has some creative and innovative
capabilities within them. Providing training
to harness those capabilities and direct them
will only improve your firm's abilities to
generate new ideas and bring them to life as
new products and services.
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When do we want innovative new products and
services? Right NOW! That's
generally what we hear just after defining
the plans to get an innovation project
underway, and setting expectations for
results. The focus on quarterly results has
conditioned people in most firms to
expect that anything can happen in 90 days.
Well, as the old saying goes, nine men can't
make a baby in a month. Likewise, creating
an innovation capability and generating new
ideas can take some time. Since it is
difficult to generate new products within 90
days, the question becomes - why does it take
so long?
Backing Into the timeframes
Let's assume that your firm has a product
development cycle that is 12 months long.
That is, from the time someone approves a new
idea for a product or service, it takes 12
months to
develop the product and the ancillary
documents, training, processes and so forth
necessary to support and launch the new idea.
Assume as well that it will take
approximately 3 to 6 months thereafter to
determine whether or not the product or
service has been a success in the market.
That means from the time an idea is approved
until a true measurement of the idea can be
accomplished in this example is at least 15
and more likely 18 months. And that's just
the part of the process we're confident we
understand!
Origins of the idea
In most businesses, ideas for new products
and services start out in a dimly understood
process and require a lot of evaluation,
sponsorship and definition before they ever
reach the point where a management team
approves the idea for funding. Some ideas or
technologies take years to reach a point
where they are ready to be approved.
Clearly, few people within the management
team understand or appreciate how long it
takes a new idea to swim upstream to the
point where it can be approved. Let's
assume, just for grins, that a typical idea
takes 2 years to reach the stage where
management can approve it for development as
a new product or service. In this example,
it would take on average over three and a
half years from the time an idea is generated
until it is successful launched in the
market. During that time hundreds of ideas
have been considered and eliminated for
consideration.
Meanwhile, your management team is breathing
down your neck - seeking new products and
services while you are simultaneously
generating ideas, evaluating them and trying
to define the process all at the same time.
Unless you've set the right expectations and
defined the processes accordingly, you are
bound to disappoint the executive team.
The need for speed
What can you do to improve the speed of the
process and set the right expectations?
There are several actions to take:
- Work to implement a more defined
idea generation and evaluation process to
reduce the time it takes to get to idea
approval and funding. The need for speed is
evident. Product
development is much more optimized than idea
generation. Improve the idea generation and
approval processes.
- Generate a lot of ideas, especially if
the timeframes are long. Many ideas will be
evaluated and discarded. If you don't
generate a lot of ideas, you may find
yourself without "anything" left in the
pipeline once the few you've generated have
been discarded.
- Generate a wide variety of ideas with
different risk profiles and development
timeframes. Don't place all your "eggs" in a
disruptive basket, since disruptive ideas
take a long time to develop and launch.
- Set reasonable expectations up front.
Don't allow the management team to expect
disruptive ideas that will dramatically
change the market which can be implemented in
30 days. Don't let the innovation processes
be judged on unrealistic timeframes.
Married before dating
In effect, you are selling a long term
benefit based on a high short term
investment. Given the compensation
structures and need for new products and
services, it will be difficult to contain and
manage the expectations. Your innovation
initiatives will fail if you don't establish
the right expectations up front, and work to
improve the entire process from idea
generation to product launch.
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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
phone:
919-844-5644 x789
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OVO | 220 Horizon Drive | Suite 117 | Raleigh | NC | 27615
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