25 Steps to Jump-Start your Innovation Journey

We’ve covered some essential ground to help you prepare your innovation journey, and now it’s time to put these concepts into action. The innovation formula addresses the very specific tasks that have to be accomplished for innovation to emerge from your organization not only as a matter of luck or at random, but through a concentrated effort that results in sustained innovation performance. Here you will find the Taking Action steps along with 25 additional suggestions that we hope will help you to think and plan creatively and productively about how to make innovation a reality in your organization.

• Change and complexity, the external world that seems to be different nearly every day.
• Risk and the need to come up with great ideas, and to balance potential rewards with the risks that come with striving to attain them.
• Speed, the imperative to go fast because the external world isn’t waiting around for you or your organization, and your competitors would be happy to seize your market share and make it their own.
• Engagement, because it takes the observations, expertise, and insights of many people working effectively together to come up with great ideas, and then transform them into working solutions to problems that your customers really do want to solve.
• Leadership, because no innovations happen without courage, commitment, support, and often resources, and these are elements that you, as leader, must provide in highly visible and emphatic ways.
• And then tools, which can make the path much easier and faster even if they’re not fancy.
  

Your Innovation Team

This will be a dynamic group of people from many different backgrounds who have vital roles to play in support of your firm’s innovation management objectives. Without knowing the specifics of your situation, your organization, and the unique challenges you’re facing, please consider the following as a suggestion and a general set of jobs or roles that are useful to the successful pursuit of innovation in a small organization, that is, your company.

Complexity and Change: The Strategy Manager

We began the discussion of your innovation needs, requirements, and opportunities by exploring the driving forces of change that are shaping the world of tomorrow. We talked about technology, science, culture, the population, and climate change, and these broad trends as well as some that may be specific to your industry or your organization present a continually changing panorama that you need to be paying close attention to, for there’s no telling when an external change will lead to a specific requirement or challenge for you.

Getting Started

As you recruit the best people you can find to participate on your innovation team, and work to engage with them as your teammates, colleagues, and fellow travelers on the innovation journey, one of the most important things to remember is that innovation is driven by divergent thinking, which we also know as lateral thinking, and as a leader you must specifically encourage, promote, and indeed insist on the necessity of divergent thinking across all aspects of the work, from the design and management of your innovation efforts, to the conduct of the many ongoing innovation projects.

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Four Tools to Support Creativity and Innovation

There are four different types of innovation tools that we’ll describe here, including the design of the work place itself, practices that encourage and even enable effective collaboration, open innovation approach to connect inside innovation teams with outside partners and experts, and online learning tools that constitute the virtual work place. Separately and especially together, these can make a tremendous enhancement in the performance and the satisfaction of individuals, teams, and your entire organization.

The last element of the innovation formula is the tools that enable you, or support you, to produce better innovation outcomes more quickly. This is often a sensitive topic for small businesses, which generally don’t have the resources to provide innovation teams with big work spaces, generous travel budgets, and fancy prototyping tools.

As we were wrapping up the tour, however, one of the facilities leaders who had been our tour guide, and who had been with the company for decades, mentioned that while the new labs were certainly lovely, he noticed that something had been lost over the years. He remembered the early days of the company, which was started in left over Quonset huts from World War II.

The work place

The qualities and characteristics that make Quonset huts and skunkworks so useful is that they’re open, flexible, and no one is inhibited about messing around in them and trying something new.

Unfortunately, the architecture profession and office furniture manufacturers have standardized on this utterly drab and uninspiring concept of what “the physical space” ought to be.

Tom Allen and Gunter Henn address this issue in their lively book about the design of offices: “Most managers will likely acknowledge the critical role played by organizational structure in the innovation process, but few understand that physical space is equally important. It has tremendous influence on how and where communication takes place, on the quality of that communication, and on the movements – and hence, all interactions – of people within an organization. In fact, some of the most prevalent design elements of buildings nearly shut down the opportunities for the organizations that work within their walls to thrive and innovate.

Effective collaboration

To create innovation requires that people engage in exploring new topics, understanding, diagnosing, analyzing, modeling, creating, inventing, solving, communicating, and implementing concepts, ideas, insights, and projects. These attributes are all facets of “learning,” and any organization that thrives in a rapidly changing environment has surely encouraged its members to learn and to apply active learning results to keep up with external changes. Read more at >>

Innovation strategy: How to Ask Effective Questions

As someone with an interest in innovation management , you know the importance of asking questions and listening to answers. Indeed, you probably make it a habit to do this as often as possible. However, when it comes to innovation, some kinds of questions are better than others. Let us look at various types of questions and why they are good – or why they stink.
Open questions are best

Open questions are those whose answers are not a simple yes or no. Rather they require the listener give a detailed response. Asking if a customer is happy with a product will elicit a yes or a no. Indeed, unless the customer is distinctly unhappy, she is likely to give a non-committal yes.

Asking the same customer “in what ways might we make this product even better?” on the other hand is likely to elicit a lot of useful information. And the more customers you ask this to, the more useful information you will get.
Focus on positive or constructive answers

Imagine you are a hotelier and want to get ideas from your clients about what they like and dislike about your hotel in order to improve your service.

You could ask, “What did you not like about your stay at our hotel?” in order to find points of dissatisfaction. A guest might reply: “The beds were terrible. I couldn’t sleep.” This identifies a problem, but not a path to solving it.

Alternatively, you could ask “How could we make your stay in our hotel even better?” The same guest might reply: “Provide firmer mattresses. I found it very hard to sleep in your soft mattresses.” As you can see, this not only indicates a problem, but clarifies it making it easier to solve. Moreover, it encourages the guest to think positively towards the hotel!

For more info of full Article please visit the link.
http://www.innovationmanagement.se/imtool-articles/innovation-strategy-how-to-ask-effective-questions/

4 Tricks to Building a Successful Open Innovation Program

One of the most critical professional challenges that employees face today is being able to successfully manage positive change within their organization. Innovation is has become a watch word, with so many divisions not being able to find enough valuable ideas and then successfully manage those ideas into a commercial offering that sometimes companies even respond to customer tickets and bugs and simply label those results as “innovation.”

However, many organizations are still in an experimental phase and need help reaching innovation maturity. For those folks that want to get started, but aren’t sure where to begin we offer these four tips:

Start small

Many departments and organizations are intimidated at the prospect of opening up brainstorming. They worry about the value of ideas and intellectual property .

Build in some room to fail

Not every new project can knock it out of the park. 70% of startups never get out of their first eighteen months, 68% of IT projects aren’t delivered.

Generate some early wins

Not every new idea is complex or disruptive. Some changes are easy to evaluate and easy to implement with big impacts.

Expand

Once an innovation team has proven even some measurable value, it is much easier to apply those same processes and goals to other projects.

For full article visit http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2015/05/20/4-tricks-to-building-a-successful-open-innovation-program/

The Value of Incremental Innovation

In this Blog I want to talk about the value of incremental innovation and why companies should often focus on this, rather than driving as hard as they can to come up with the next breakthrough product or service. Incremental improvements aren’t always cool, but over time they can drive significant business results.

Before proceeding, I should once again outline the kind of companies that I often work with. They are not the Apple’s, Google’s or Amazon’s of the world. I tend to work with organizations that are well established, not at a point of imminent collapse, and often trying to be innovative, but struggling to execute on their ideas. No company that I have ever worked with has a shortage of ideas.

A focus on incremental innovations, and the activities that source and develop them, make sense in the following context:

Pipeline Management: Too often I see organizations filling an innovation pipeline with large-scale, broadly scoped, long-term innovations that leave their programs vulnerable. I say the world “vulnerable” with purpose. Innovation programs are often politically sensitive and need to be extremely conscious of the constant pressure to undermine their achievements and goals (read this article for more details). By having a pipeline that is balanced, there is a better chance that at least some activities will be implemented, balancing out some of the failures which you are sure to encounter.

Starting a program: Often leaders of new innovation management programs are tempted to focus on big thinking. And why not? It is sexy, cool and fun! The reality is that new programs will face some healthy skepticism by their leadership, especially within established business units, so it is important to get some runs on the board. By quickly demonstrating success, even with smaller ideas, you are able to create an impression of momentum and a build towards bigger ticket thinking.

Pressure on results: Innovation leaders are often told by leadership that they want “Big I” ideas, but at the same time (or soon after) there is pressure to generate immediate financial impact. In this case you just don’t have the time to develop the big ideas, so it can be a better position to generate some incremental improvements. This can take the immediate pressure off and allow you to demonstrate a rate of success in order to build some political capital to focus on bigger ideas.

Generating Stakeholder buy-in: If you are struggling to secure and maintain stakeholder buy-in, focusing on incremental improvements can demonstrate your ability to drive change, without destroying their organization (often their concern) or needlessly redirecting resources. By building success, aligned with their needs (an important point to understand), you can secure their buy-in and support over time.

Launching innovation challenges: There is no shortage of innovation platform vendors in the marketplace, and many of them will encourage you to run challenges or campaigns that focus on big, bold visions of the future. This is especially true when they are launching their product into your organization, as they want substantial engagement metrics to justify investment in their platform. In my experience, and this may be controversial, launching with these “Big I” crowdsourced challenges early will encourage a lot of employee excitement. However if you don’t have an established model of idea execution, that excitement will dissipate (at best) or turn negative when the participants realize that their ideas haven’t been built. By focusing on smaller areas of improvement, especially when launching these efforts, you can build community trust and demonstrate real traction with the winning ideas.

Cultural pushback: Many mature and regulated organizations often have cultures that pushback on new thinking, in any form. Within this environment, it is important to assess how much you can enhance the culture, in terms of new ideas development. Focusing on smaller improvements can be a way to limit potential pushback, and give you a chance to demonstrate that something can be built effectively within that culture. By the way, a goal should absolutely be to change that culture over time.

In conclusion, I am not saying that innovation program leaders should focus on incremental innovation at all times. What I am saying, is that just because an idea is small, or a program is in place to generate responses to more modest issues, it shouldn’t be discarded. By considering the broader context of the organization’s culture, and also the ecosystem of innovative activity within an organization, incremental improvements should make some level of sense. These smaller ideas aren’t going to get you on the cover of Time magazine, but they may help your retain you job and drive real, cumulative business impact over time.

To Focus Employees on Innovation, Align Their Goals and Compensation

The ability to deliver new value requires systemic evolution in business strategy, culture, organizational design, and customer awareness. Employees can and will deliver new customer value, but the way they are paid and directed must change first and then the results will follow.

People perform the way they are compensated to perform. If an enterprise is structured and compensates its people to be creative, it receives creativity from them. If the company preaches that creativity and innovation are valued but don’t align their compensation and employee goal setting with these objectives, not surprisingly, very little innovation happens.

With all of the downsizing, offshoring, and Six Sigma/Lean that people have been living through for the past 20 years, they have learned to, “keep their eyes inside the boat” and not to stray too far from their defined goals and objectives.

People who are engaged in profit-orientated businesses are, for the most part, employed to perform specific types of tasks. Whether the task is on a production line or producing invoices, people develop a set of skills and sell those skills to an employer. So it should come as no surprise that the employees of a company are focused on what they are compensated to produce. If people are not compensated or rewarded in some way to be creative, to produce changes that delight a customer, and to find new opportunity areas, why would anyone expect them to do so?

A variety of tools have emerged over the years to assist managers in directing their employees’ efforts. Key performance indicators, 360 degree performance, management by objectives. Do any of these ring a bell? Performance management should be focused on setting goals that are aligned with business strategy, extending a person’s skill set, and aligning resources to achieve business strategy.
Most people are compensated based on their ability to achieve a predetermined set of goals and objectives. Managers review employee performance based on their ability to meet the goals. Many, many words are being written currently about organizations delivering innovation . Executives are refocusing their attention on delivering new value to their customers, but how many executives are looking at the way they compensate their people? It doesn’t make much sense to tell people to be creative, to discover opportunities, to increase customer value when these same people are being paid to deliver completely different things.

If business strategy requires new products, services, or business models to extend its competitive advantage, it also requires new ways to focus and reward the people who work for the enterprise. If people are compensated based on their ability to complete tasks, it isn’t logical to also expect them to create new things unless they are rewarded and recognized for this ability.

The ability to deliver new value to the customer (i.e., innovation Management) requires systemic evolution in business strategy, culture, organizational design, and customer awareness. Employees can and will deliver new customer value, but the way they are paid and directed must change first and then the results will follow.

Elements of The Innovation Formula

In the first chapter of The Innovation Formula for small business leaders and entrepreneurs, Langdon Morris explained the importance of questions and maps that describe competition, change, the future, innovation and strategy that are intended to help you understand the significant forces that are shaping business today, and to harness the ones that are already shaping tomorrow. In the second chapter, we look at a third core element that this book is organized around, which is the innovation formula.

Yes, we do believe that there is a formula for success at innovation, and we have found over the years that it doesn’t matter whether you’re running a garage, a sandwich shop, or a multinational auto manufacturer, success in each case relies on your performance in the same five areas. Whether you’re the CEO of GM or the chief cook and bottle washer, you have to think about the same problems, study, learn, research, experiment, engage in some risk, and manage it closely. How you do these, of course, is entirely different depending on the size of your business, but nevertheless the actual elements seem to be consistent across all businesses.
The formula consists of the six major topics: complexity and change, risk, speed, engagement, leadership, and tools. Here is a quick summary of the key ideas and the reasoning that you’ll find throughout the rest of this serialized book.

Complexity and Change

The external environment is an unyielding and unceasing source of change, and your organization must adapt to it if it’s going to survive. Hence, complexity and change literally define the context in which innovation and its close cousin, strategy, are relevant. It is to external change that drives market needs and preferences, and hence it is a critical role of leadership to be attuned to the rhythm, character, and specifics of what is happening out there in the increasingly wild world. The other critical role is of course leading the process of responding to those changes.

Risk

When we understand what’s happening in the external environment we can organize the pursuit of innovation, correctly targeted, so that we produce the right innovations to meet current and future market needs. But if only it were so easy. In fact, it is intellectually and operationally challenging to figure out what’s the right thing to do, the right products and services to create.
Furthermore, having a clear vision of the future products and services is not at all the same as actually having them in hand.
Hence, there is a double risk. First, anticipating future needs correctly is by no means an easy task. What if, for example, you see clearly what the needs of the future will be, but in the end it turns out that you’re wrong? This, of course, is the story of countless failed companies, which aimed for a target in the future market that the actual market itself never selected?
Second, even if you do get it right, there’s still the many problems associated with developing the right products and services to meet the anticipated needs. Can your designs and plans actually work? Can you complete the development work in a timely way? Does your organization have the internal talent and the right external partners to master the many challenges?
Risk, then, is inherent in the innovation management problem, and it is inescapable. So the right amount of risk is essentially the least possible risk.
“Least possible,” however, is trickier than it may at first sound. Least, after all, is really none, but of course the point of competition and change and all that is that taking no risk means making no innovations at all, which is actually a very risky approach, because it leaves you entirely vulnerable to those very changes. Consequently, “least possible” really means the least you can take on while still remaining viable, but even knowing exactly how much risk that is, is actually unknowable.
And so the problem now becomes one of information, because you probably don’t know what innovations your competitors are working on, nor everything about the new and innovative technologies that may be coming, etc., etc., which means that while you cannot afford to do nothing, to just wait for the future to bury your business, you are obliged to act, compelled to act, to act proactively yet with incomplete information.
This is the character of the risks you must take. Taking them well, thoughtfully, strategically is what’s necessary. Achieving this, navigating through this difficult but fascinating landscape will take some thought and a lot of effort.

Speed

Despite the many risks you plunge ahead, thoughtfully, to create your organization’s future. You are now engaged in the depths of the innovation process itself.
That process is not such an easy one, as it must be thorough and thoughtful, of course, but above all it must be fast. Again, the premise here is that your information is incomplete, and you just don’t know how fast your competitors will move, nor do you know exactly how the market will respond to their new ideas, nor to yours. So the best way to deal with the compounding of uncertainty is to go fast, to learn fast, to learn what works and what doesn’t work through techniques such as agile sprints, rapid prototyping, minimum viable products, a-b testing, and related techniques (which we will discuss in chapter 5). We express this in the innovation formula as speed, and of course there is a lot of value in getting solid results fast, faster than your competitors.

Engagement

The next element of the formula relates to the culture of your organization, for you and your partner are the ones who are going to develop ideas, figure out which ones are great, and turn them into something useful, test them, and bring the very best to the market.
Theoretically, you could find the smartest person in your organization, set them to the innovation task, and achieve good or even great results. Practically, though, the issues that have to be dealt with are probably deeper and broader than a single individual can master, because today’s innovation projects integrate knowledge across multiple domains, each of which itself runs quite deep.
Hence, we know that innovation is not an individual activity, but a team sport. The optimal innovation process is one in which your organization is engaged, one in which all of the strengths, thoughts, and talents of everyone, and also those of the broader ecosystem in which your organization participates, are fully engaged.

Leadership

It’s also true of organizations that deep and thorough engagement comes about only when there is superbly focused leadership. We know that innovation can happen in organizations where the risks are understood, and where the ambiguities and uncertainties that are inherent in the process are known and acknowledged, and where there is willingness to engage in the necessary levels of risk taking.
We also know that in organizations where people are punished for making intelligent mistakes, for thoughtfully trying new things that fail, for thinking about how to do things better, and differently, the spirit of innovation is swiftly and decisively stifled. Hence, leaders must embrace and promote the critical elements which enable an innovation culture to emerge, or it will not emerge.

Tools

The last clause of the formula concerns the tools and methods that we use to manage the entire innovation effort. All other things being equal, better tools and methods are likely to support better results, and while this does not necessarily mean that you have to invest a lot of money in new technology, you do need to think through carefully and invest appropriately in methods, processes, and organizational structures that enable and promote innovation efforts, and which set the tone and context in which innovation can thrive.

So these are the six elements in the innovation formula; here they are expressed in pseudo math:

(Complexity and Change) > Innovation
Innovation = f (Risk) (Speed) (Engagement) (Leadership) + (Tools)

Or in English, Complexity and change means that Innovation is essential for survival. Achieving innovation a function of Risk, times Speed, times Engagement, times Leadership, plus Tools.
In previous books, I and co-authors have examined many aspects and facets of this formula in considerable detail, and in our work with enterprises large and small all around the world we’ve worked with them to implement it, to make innovation real, important, and effective for their organizations.
And as I mentioned above, we believe that exactly the same innovation formula works for GM and Toyota as it does for the local restaurant and the auto garage, and that it will probably work for your small business too. So while nearly all of the nuances and details or its implementation will certainly be different from the Fortune 500 firm to the local business in Peru, China, New York, or Auckland, we are convinced based on many years of practice that the actual thinking process, that the critical questions and the guiding maps, will be nearly the same.

This book is the fifth one in a series that explores all of this in a lot detail. It was preceded by Permanent Innovation, The Innovation Master Plan, The Chief Innovation Officer, and Agile Innovation, and you may be interested in checking these out if you’re the sort of person who likes to absorb a lot of detail and wants to study the deeper reasoning.

If you’re not the person who wants to read a lot of detail, then hopefully the concise contents of this book will help you to understand the challenges, and design the right responses.

In each subsequent chapter we will explore the formula one element at a time, beginning with a quick look at the broader context of complexity and change, followed by the remaining five elements, with a particular focus on what they mean for you, the small and medium sized business leader or entrepreneur, and also with focus on action and implementation.

This is not intended as theoretical exercise, but rather an entirely practical guidebook. We hope it helps you to arrive at the right destination, namely an innovative and thereby successful firm.