BQF Innovation

The annual BQF Innovation Seminar was held in October at the Latimer Conference Centre.  The speakers included Mike Carr, Chief Scientist at BT’s research labs, Philip Anderson, Chairman of the Global Business Partnership Alliance, Kevin McFarthing, Global Director for Strategic Alliances & External Relations at Reckitt Benckiser, and Paul Sloane, head of the BQF Innovation Unit and author of the Innovative Leader. 

Mike Carr emphasised that innovative ideas can come from anywhere so you have to set your antennae to hear ‘weak signals’.  He pointed out that when it comes to research and development, finding the right question is harder than finding the right answer.  And he warned that a good idea can be thwarted at any stage of the adoption process. 

Philip Anderson discussed what makes for successful and unsuccessful business collaborations.  He shared various research findings.  Key among these were the need for shared value systems, objectives and mindsets.  He stressed that relying on the contract and the SLAs were not routes to success.  What was needed was development of trust. 

Reckitt Benckiser is a highly innovative, global company in consumer products with sales in 180 countries and net revenues in excess of £4billion.  Their brands include Cillit Bang, Vanish, Finish, Dettol, Strepsils, Airwick etc.  Kevin McFarthing explained how they have structured ‘RB-Idealink‘ to facilitate open innovation with alliance partners who have appropriate technologies, products or licensing opportunities.  They have strived to make the process easy for potential partners with simple submission processes on their website. Paul Sloane chaired the conference and gave a talk in which he stressed the need for leaders to develop the vision, culture and processes that facilitated innovation.  He gave examples of how this is done with examples from Google, Virgin, Granada, Alessi and Haier. 

The BQF Innovation Unit has regular informal meetings throughout the year as well as its annual conference.

Paul Sloane

Here is an interesting new article by Michael Slocum on the Real Innovation site.  He argues for adaptive innovation and says,’There is an argument that all that can be invented has been invented or, at least, that the number of high-level inventions has diminished over time with the overwhelming majority of patents issued being on a significantly lower innovative level. German writer Johann von Goethe stated that innovation changed such that the solution to a problem may already exist and that the problem solver’s task is to find those pre-existing solutions and adapt them to suit a particular purpose. This is a different approach to the search for an innovative solution – pursuing analogy rather than novelty.

Non-linear problem solving begins with the specific and heads to the generic – this generalization is the key to adaptive innovation. Adaptive innovation is the key to the ability of an organization’s ability to respond quickly to the needs of society and the customer – it leverages any ability to adapt and existing solution to suit for its purposes. This “adaptivation” should be pursued as part of any problem solving activity.’

I would agree with his argument that we should put less energy into trying to find brand new ideas and more into sytematically searching for and adapting existing ideas from other fields.  He is a believer in using processes for this purpose and is an advocate of the TRIZ methodology.

He concludes, ‘Adaptivation provides insight into solutions to analogous problems from differing industries, technologies and scientific fields. This is an open approach to solution generation and it provides additional benefits to the problem solver. Not only are pre-existing approaches considered but the search space for these solutions is considerably larger than the organization’s typical search space. An organization typically looks inward at existing patents, competitive intelligence or for team members to create a solution based on previous experience. Collectively this describes the closed approach to innovation whose narrow-minded focus is no longer an acceptable ideation approach given the evolving natures of competition and innovation.’

Should we switch all our innovation energies into systematic adaptive processes?  It has a lot to offer in terms of creative problem solving but I am sure there is still scope for individual imaginative insights.

Paul Sloane

Chuck Frey of InnovationTools.com and Hitendra Patel will launch an online community for Chief Innovation Officers and innovation managers. The main source of content for this online community will be a series of interviews with innovation experts about important innovation issues and challenges. These interviews will be distributed via e-newsletter and will appear in a new section of the InnovationTools website (http://www.innovationtools.com).
   
This panel of experts will include innovation experts from top tier management consulting and innovation consulting firms like the Monitor Group, Imaginatik and Laga, from Fortune 500 companies like Motorola, Merck, Cadbury Schweppes, Natura, Osram Sylvania and CVS and from academic institutions like Harvard and Hult.

Frey and Patel are now conducting a brief survey of Chief Innovation Officers and innovation manager to identify the key issues they face and questions to which they need answers. The survey is located at this URL:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=A2IDokyNCxxQKudg_2f2vRlw_3d_3d

Their plan is to take the top issues and questions received via this survey, and use them to drive the questions that the panel of respected innovation experts and practitioners will answer.

If you have responsibility for innovation then please take the survey. 

Paul Sloane

One simple technique that can generate fresh thinking is to redefine the problem.  The way we express any issue, the form and choice of words we use, sets expectations and constraints.  There was an ideas meeting at a manufacturing plant where shop floor workers were asked for their suggestions on how to improve productivity.  The response was disappointingly sparse.  A little later a similar group was asked to brainstorm the challenge – how can we make your job easier?  The result was a flood of good ideas.  Most of the ideas that came out were fundamentally productivity improvement ideas.  Just by changing the question and giving it a different focus results were transformed.

If you have laboured with an issue for a while then stop and ask the group to redefine the problem using none of the original words.  Say for example we are an insurance company and the initial challenge is ‘How can we improve company brand awareness?’  Now everyone, working silently, has to express the same aim in different words.  The emphasis is not on finding slavish synonyms but on expressing the essential goal or meaning in a new way.  So people might suggest the following: 

• Get more people to know us.
• Make customers think of us first.
• Get drivers to think of us before they have an accident.
• Double the number of people who call our number.
• Be the first choice for insurance companies.
• Be the first recommendation of brokers.
• When people think insurance they think of our name first.
• Be in front of people.
• Make our name the best known of local businesses.

In this process there is no ‘right answer’.  Each reforming of the issue gives a different perspective.  We could now select some of the most promising and brainstorm them.  For instance one group might consider, ‘How can we get customers to think of us first?’ Another group might use as the starting point, ‘How can we be the first recommendation of brokers?’  Because each group has a slightly different focus for its idea generation they are likely to come up with different ideas.

Paul Sloane