BQF Innovation

The leaders of large organisations recognise the need for innovation and they allocate targets and resources accordingly but often the results are disappointing.  Corporate lectures about the importance of creativity and an increase in the R&D budget are just not enough.  There are too many obstacles within the organisation to the implementation of new and unorthodox ideas.  Often the approval processes are over-elaborate and difficult. 

In an article on this subject on Innovation Tools, Jeffrey Baumgartner explores these issues and gives some specific advice.  His two key recommendations are:

1.  Decentralise research and innovation into smaller units with fast track approval and rejection processes.

2.  Develop methods for buying in ideas from outside the company - ‘open innovation’.

He quotes Glaxo Smith Kline and others as examples succeeding in innovation with these approaches.

Paul Sloane.

The CEO was given a ticket for a performance of Schubert’s unfinished Symphony.  Since he was unable to go, he passed the invitation to the company’s Quality Assurance Manager. The next morning, the CEO asked him how he enjoyed it, and he was handed a report, which read as follows:

For a considerable period, the oboe players had nothing to do. Their number should be reduced, and their work spread over the whole orchestra, thus avoiding peaks of inactivity.  All twelve violins were playing identical notes. This seems unnecessary duplication, and the staff of this section should be drastically cut.  If a large volume of sound is really required, this could be obtained through the use of an amplifier.  Much effort was involved in playing the demi-semiquavers. This seems an excessive refinement, and it is recommended that all notes should be rounded up to the nearest semiquaver.  If this were done, it would be possible to use trainees instead of craftsmen.

No useful purpose is served by repeating with horns the passage that has already been handled by the strings.  If all such redundant passages were eliminated, the concert could be reduced from two hours to twenty minutes.

In light of the above, one can conclude that if Schubert had had basic quality training including six sigma, lean composition and Prince 2, he would have completed a much more efficient symphony.

Paul Sloane

 Selfservice.org  has a great article on Google’s approach to innovation based on a talk by Jim Lecinski, MD of Central Region at Google.  Here are the points in brief:

 1. Innovation, not instant perfection. Google believes in launching new products and ideas early and often, rather than trying to perfect those ideas behind closed doors before releasing them to the public. Then, customer feedback and popularity prove which projects are most successful.

2. Share everything you can. Small teams that communicate openly have proved the best results for Google. They believe in transparency in the workplace so that everyone knows what everyone else is working on.

3. You’re brilliant, we’re hiring. When Google interviews employees, Lecinski said they set the bar very high. They focus more on hiring generalists rather than specialists, as they have found generalists are more valuable and can contribute ideas to different parts of the company.

4.  Allow employees to pursue their dreams. Lecinski said Google allows its employees’ time in a 70/20/10 model. Seventy percent of the time they work on Google’s search and ad flagships; they develop new programs like Images, Desktop and Finance 20 percent of the time; and 10 percent of the time employees are allowed to pursue their own high risk/high reward projects. Lecinski said Google Earth is a result of one of those projects.

5.  Ideas come from everywhere. Sometimes Google turns to the public for new ideas. The Google mastheads, which are customized for holidays and events, are taken from non-employee submissions. One of the mastheads was designed by a 12-year-old girl.

6.  Don’t politic – use data. With all the ideas floating around Google, the best way to determine which may work is to use supportive data. As Lecinski said, “Data beats opinion.”

7.  Creativity loves restraint. Again, Google has to have some way to keep all of the employee-generated ideas streamlined towards the company’s goals. “Let people explore, but set clear boundaries for that exploration,” Lecinski said.

8.  Get users and usage – the money will follow. This goes back to one of Lecinski’s larger points, “respect for end users,” but is a principle to follow in any form of business. He says to focus on creating things that are innovative and useful for people, not something you can sell.

9.  Don’t kill projects, morph them. Google doesn’t waste ideas. Instead, they try to change and transform them into something the company finds useful.

Neil Fairbrother interviewed me on Pod3.tv.  The programme is called Innovate or Die and is available as an iTunes video podcast download.  We discuss issues relating to the need for innovation, how leaders can establish a culture for innovation and what to do if you want to introduce innovation at a lower level in the organisation.

Do you watch or listen to business podcasts?  It is the first time I have tried this communication medium so please let me know your reaction.

Paul Sloane

In the current issue of CEO Refresher Katalin Eibel-Spanyi and Andrew Spanyi give some pertinent advice on how to innovate in services.  They point out that most people think of innovation first in terms of products.  But service or business process innovations can be much more powerful.  Dell, Direct Line and Amazon are all examples of revolutionary service innovations.  Processes apply at all levels of the business so we need to think creatively about our methods and procedures - each of them offers scope for innovation - either incremental improvements or radical replacements.

How can you go about this?  Is there a process for process innovation.  There are several.  Katalin Eibel-Spanyi and Andrew Spanyi give an example of where you sketch out a process from your point of view and then from the customer’s point of view.  Every delay or inconvenience in the customer’s experience is an opportunity for innovation.  The article was written for SMEs but the lessons apply to organisations of all sizes.

 Paul Sloane

It is great to see conventional wisdom challenged head on.  Dominic Kennedy writing in the Times on 4 Aug 2007 says that walking to the shops does more harm to the environment than driving.  Calculations by Chris Goodall author of How to Live a Low Carbon Life show that driving a typical car for 3 miles adds about 0.9 Kg of CO2 to the atmosphere.  Walking the same distance, you would use about 180 calories.  You’d need about 100g of beef to replace these calories and that would take 3.6 Kg to produce - 4 times as much.

Shattering more green myths he points our that diesel trains are more polluting than 4×4 cars, that organic dairy cows are worse for the environment than non-organic cows and that paper bags cause more global warming than plastic bags. 

It turns out that our methods of food production, transport and storage (in chilled conditions) are terribly wasteful of energy.  The answer to global warming might be to keep driving and flying but to slaughter all the cows and eat locally grown vegetables and pulses.  Unconventional wisdom indeed.

 Paul Sloane