business strategy « The Complete Innovator

The Key Ingredient to visionary Open Innovation

14 08 2011

“Go forth and Innovate” – whilst I have yet to hear those immortal words actually uttered by any senior executive (at least not without tongue-in-cheek) – it is the virtual call to arms that many Innovation execs receive nowadays.

The resulting rush to show action prior to thinking that action through is probably one of the greatest contributors to corporate malaise around the expectations for a fledgling innovation program.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in corporate innovation programs where, in a bid to emulate their own version of a P&G-style “Connect & Develop* program, Innovation exes rush in to embrace ideas from the outside without stopping to think about whether or not the audience they’re asking is actually capable of the answers they’re looking for…

For example – let’s look at what’s probably the most obvious place for a company to start – existing customers. Even better – let’s choose our long term customers with which we already have good relationships – surely that will lead to some synergistic big ideas that will result in big sales down the line…it sounds like a good idea, no? And it continues to sound like a good idea until you realize that, whilst prolific with ideas for your company, the vast majority of ideas you get from your customers seem to always end up being iterations on your existing product lines… new colors, new flavors, new add-ons – but primarily minor changes – why aren’t they delivering on those big ideas I was looking for?….

The Answer: Because they lack one vital Innovation ingredient… Unhappiness.

In order to be able to innovate – in order to even want to innovate – you have to, be default, be in a motivated state to look at/consider new options and solutions – you have to be unhappy with the current status quo.

After all, your customers are already buying from you – you’ve already satisfied the “job they’re trying to get done” (to borrow a Clayton Christensen-ism) – so why would they even consider any radical alternatives?

And the bigger the ideas you’re looking for – the higher up the “unhappiness-scale” you’ve got to go up to stand a chance of finding it.

So let’s go up that unhappiness scale – next up are groups known as “lead users”. Lead users (not to be confused with Lead/Early adopters) are people who are only buying your product because it’s the closest darn thing to what they really wished you’d made.

They use and adapt and do all sorts of crazy things to your product in order to satisfy their real need. Get them to open up those real needs to you, and you unlock the potential to find the next generations of your current product lines as you uncover tangential markets, brand extensions, and new applications of existing/modified product sets that satisfy new niches and customer segments.

Want an example of how powerful this can be? I had one former client of mine go out to all his customer facing staff to ask for “all the crazy, wacky, and abusive things that our clients are using our products for, that we never envisioned them being used for”. After searching far and wide, they found a small company in New England that was using a product they made to waterproof new housing, to waterproof boats instead. Why? Because it was a quicker, easier, and simpler method than the traditional way they’d done it before. It took my client all of a few months to repackage the existing product to target the boating community and create an entirely new market for themselves that added an additional $7 Million in its debut year – not too bad, eh?

What if we want to go for the really big ideas? Well then we have to go to the most unhappy person of all – the people who aren’t buying your product at all because the product you make don’t even come close to what they are looking for. Listen to these people and you might just find the future of your company.

These last two groups represent the “fringe” of the populations available to you – the edges of where your company is, and where it could be. Engage those and bring them in to reinvent your core business, and you’ll find the way to ensure your company lasts the next 5 years.

In the meantime, keep in mind this mantra I give to my clients:

Customers give you Iterations…

Lead users give you Generations…

Non-customers give you the Future…

As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments below!

Comments : 5 Comments »

Categories : business strategy, collaboration, innovation

The Next Evolution of Open Innovation – What’s Next?

20 04 2011

This last week I was at the Marcus Evans Open Innovation Conference giving a presentation on “The Next Evolution of Openness” – Getting back on the speaking circuit finally gave me a little thinking time away from building a rapidly growing consulting practice at my new company Spigit and I wanted to share with you some of the key points of that talk over the next few blog posts.

Things change quickly in the Innovation world – and as I was writing the title of the presentation I was struggling whether the word “evolution” was quite the right one – maybe “Revolution” would’ve been a better word to use in the circumstances.

There’s supposed to be an ancient Chinese curse that goes along the lines of “May you live in interesting times” – and I don’t think that times get any more interesting than the business environment we currently find ourselves in.

We live in a time of massive change – both in terms of the size of changes we’re asked to take on, and the frequency with which change now happens.

The recent financial depression has had profound consequences on the businesses that survived. We’ve come out the other end to a world that demands greater accountability, greater participation, and greater transparency than ever before. We’re in the middle of a social revolution where the strength is slowly moving away from corporations and moving into to the hands of the consumer. Where power is moving from the Core of a company to its “Edges”.

As a result, businesses are waking up (rudely in some cases) to a new way of working, a new way of organizing, and a new brand of leadership. Innovation, as a corporate discipline is no different.

Indeed, if we look at the history of Innovation over the years, there are definite trends to be seen:

We started with the lone inventor, working alone to build an advantage that no one else could copy.

If one bright person could achieve an advantage, it didn’t take rocket science to realize that maybe we could put several bright people in the same room and multiply the effect – so we built R&D labs to take advantage of that.

R&D labs worked well, so we started wondering if anyone else in the company had useful input too – so we invented the suggestion box as a corporate tool.

The advent of technology brought with it the ability to ask a broader range of employees than ever before – reaching out across business silos and traditional geographic boundaries to grab ideas wherever they lay. We started putting effective processes around the use of the technology and Idea Management came about.

Innovation Management came along when we then figured out that ideas without execution were worthless – so we changed to focus on an end to end process that drove the ideas we were collecting all the way through a formal pipeline to execution and thus started creating an engine for creating new value for corporations.

Collaborative Innovation brought in the concept that people could add value even if they didn’t have an idea themselves. We started using leading edge social technologies to allow people to work together on building ideas together and driving new levels of value creation.

Open Innovation brought in the idea that the best ideas didn’t necessarily (and probably didn’t) reside solely within the corporate four walls. So we started to look at sourcing ideas from anywhere and everywhere outside of our own organizations.

We then reevaluated the innovation process – realizing what was really at the heart of our activities was a robust problem solving process and so collaborative problem solving became the big focus.

When we started considering Innovation as a problem solving process we also then realized that the applicability of what we were doing became broader – we could now push a flow of new ideas across the entire enterprise, building a cultural shift of not just reacting to, but actively driving massive continuous change at all times – We created Enterprise-wide Social Innovation.

So, what’s the next step I hear you ask? For me – it’s realizing that maybe even problems aren’t the right focus – that maybe, just maybe, we need to embrace the larger social revolution and realize that we’re on the brink of a new future for business as a whole.

That future sees companies using Innovation as the gateway drug on their route to incorporating broad level social feedback and input across every aspect of the enterprise.

That future sees us bringing in and co-creating with the masses to create the ultimate engagement model with would-be customers – that of a conspirator or co-owner in the very business they helped to create.

Maybe then, it’s not Innovation that should be Open – but rather Business as a whole.

If we just follow the trends from the timeline above, we see that there has always been value in building our companies outwards. That there has always been value in continuously increasing the number of people in “the room”, in increasing the transparency of the organization, in pulling the outside in, and ultimately in the engaging, at scale, the broader world around us.

That the leaders amongst us are those who are continuously exploring the boundaries of their companies and learning how to embrace the fringes and edges to drive value at the core.

Could this be the Open Business revolution at last?

I look forward to reading your thoughts

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Tags: accountability, business, change, collaborative innovation, collaborative problem solving, conference, corporate, enterprise, evolution, history, idea management, innovation, innovation management, inventor, Marcus Evans, open business, Open Innovation, participation, R&D Labs, research and development, revolution, social enterprise, social revolution, speaking, spigit, strategy, suggestion box, transparency
Categories : business strategy, collaboration, innovation, Uncategorized

2011 – The Year of The Social Enterprise?

4 01 2011

A New Year brings with it many opportunities – and we generally take advantage of the new start every year gives us to make numerous promises and resolutions for change in our life.

For me, Jan 1^st 2011 saw me make promises to write more often, get fitter, achieve great things for my clients, and generally embrace what is sure to be a year of great changes for me.

However, another opportunity afforded by the New Year is the ability to look like a right royal fool, or alternatively a prescient visionary genius, by looking to the year ahead to predict what it will bring.

My track record at these predictions is not necessarily to be envied – although I don’t seem to usually be “completely wrong”, my timing seems to be somewhat off.

Had the predictions of my youth come true, we’d all be living in a Star-Trek like world of spaceships, teleportation, and holographic entertainment systems in every home. Heck, even more recent predictions of a global ubiquitous Internet connection seem to be off by several years at least.

Nevertheless, it’s fun to look to the future, and I’d like to think that with age comes a certain realism as to what’s possible in a year – so here goes this year’s effort.

I think 2011 is going to be an especially exciting year – especially if the one big prediction I have for this coming year ends up coming true – that we’re about to embark on a new era of unprecedented collaboration and social interaction, that we’re doing that with a renewed sense of discipline, all-inclusion, and transparency, that we are, in short – on the cusp of seeing the world’s first fully social business.

Companies embracing social is nothing new admittedly – indeed my own work has centered on helping companies to use social technologies to drive corporate strategies for over 15 years now. So what’s different now?

For starters, I think this year sees companies finally take it seriously – as a corporate competence to be achieved and maintained, rather than a faddish concept to be played with in any of its prior incarnations (knowledge management, collaboration, social media, etc). I see companies increasingly throwing away the intangible mantle of “social media” programs focused on improved interactions with the consumer – and instead looking for ways to integrate social technologies to produce some very tangibly sized profitable gains. Nothing moves a company to embrace a new way of working more than big profits.

I also think that Social Technology companies themselves have matured more – taking ownership of the need to provide companies with a tangible route to those big gains. The increasing differentiation within the current software market is proof of that as vendors realize that companies don’t (and can’t) buy general “Collaboration” or “Social” tools – because they simply can’t achieve anything (let alone everything) with them. General collaboration platforms like Sharepoint and Jive will continue to exist – but will continue to become secondary to the applications, (like Spigit, Yammer and others), that are developed to run on top of them and will drive the real value of social tools to the organization.

2011 will see Innovation continue to be the “Gateway Drug” to Social Tool adoption in the enterprise – providing an easy route for large companies to value and monetize the global interaction of the “social populations” (employees, customers, vendors, strategic partners, shareholders, and more) at their disposal.

Once that value is established – I see companies starting to effectively inject “social input” into increasingly strategic parts of their business. We’re already starting to see the first variants of this emerging in Finance (eg Microfinancing), Manufacturing and Design (eg Crowdsourcing), HR (eg Employee Engagement initiatives), and even Management generally (eg Collaborative Decision Making).

All this leads me back to my initial prediction – the emergence of the first true Social Enterprise. That is, a company that has social input strategically injected into EVERY part of their organization. Where every business process includes elements of mass social interaction between people inside and/or outside the traditional company walls. A fully open business that is able to leverage a global knowledge resources pool in multiple ways to achieve its strategic goals.

Is that possible in 2011? It’s a bit of a stretch I admit – and more likely to happen at the start-up level rather than a large global enterprise at this stage – but I believe that even that’s coming in the longer run. In the words of Hamel and late C K Prahalad – companies will eventually be forced to redefine what their true “core competencies” are – and then outsource the rest. Although instead of outsourcing it to an emerging global economy because labor is cheaper, they’ll be outsourcing it to a global social population because the work, the solutions, and the results will simply be better than they can achieve on their own.

The winners in the next generation of businesses won’t be the companies that can come up with and produce the next winning product – but will be instead the companies that can rally the world around to do it for them.

That’s my big bet for 2011 – what’s yours?

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Tags: 2011, business strategy, collaboration, companies, core competencies, hamel, jive, knowledge management, open business, outsource, prahalad, predictions, sharepoint, social, social enterprise, social media, social populations, social technologies, social tools, spigit, transparency, yammer
Categories : business strategy, collaboration, innovation, social media

Innovation – do you WANT to win? Well, do you?

13 10 2010

If you’ve never been to the annual Business Innovation Factory conference (#BIF6 on twitter), it’s really quite a trip. More of a mini-TED conference than anything specifically innovation related – it’s all about enabling people to share stories about things they’ve achieved, thought of, experienced, and so on. The end result is that you don’t necessarily walk away with a series of bullet point “To-Do”’s like you might at other conferences – but you do end up with a simmering pot of interesting thoughts and ideas just waiting to boil over the top.

This year, two speakers said things that stuck in my head and kept me thinking. Such is the way my mind works that unfortunately I can no longer remember who they were – but I’m sure someone will eventually remind me in the comments below this post

The first of these insights was an observation that, if you have two equally matched sports teams, and one team’s members actively want to win, whilst the other team isn’t bothered – then chances are, the team that wants to win, will do so. Sounds obvious really, but it brings an interesting question to mind when you bring that concept into the business world – which, at the heart of it, has similar competitive dynamics.

If you have two equally matched companies competing against each other, the company that collectively wants to win more – will probably do so. “Desire to Win” is a competitive differentiator in effect.

With that in mind, however – how many of us actively try to instill that desire to win into our employees? How many companies actively engage in “Win Management”? You could even say that what really differentiates a successful innovator/entrepreneur from normal people is that never-ending drive to win “the game” of business.

This is even more amplified in the Innovation world where the risk of failure is ever present and embraced as a part of everyday life. It is a daily competition to beat the odds and win the game of innovation.

Pair that thought up now with another insight from that same conference. Apparently, at any one point in most organizations, only 20% of the staff are actively engaged and enjoying the job they’re doing. I would personally argue that that number seems a little high to me – and is probably rotating too – that is, we’re not necessarily talking about the same 20% year round, as people naturally go through cycles of loving/hating/being indifferent to their work.

I would also argue that one of the reasons why people don’t get engaged in their jobs, is because their jobs (ie their companies) don’t engage them. They feel like they have no say, no ability to make an impact, no reason to want to win….

So it stands to reason that if a company really wants to win at Innovation they need to both instill a competitive desire to win in their organizations, and to tap into and maintain that desire by actively engaging their population in strategic innovation decisions.

And by “Engagement” I don’t mean just listening to your employees – I mean actually “Doing” something with their input. Business, and especially Innovation – is a team sport – and no one wants to be relegated to being the guy on the subs bench that never gets on the field.