BQF Innovation

Today’s meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit discussed the issue of Competency Traps. The session was led by Richard Granger of Arthur D Little. He presented a comprehensive review of the topic and then facilitated a workshop where delegates assessed their organisational competence in 7 key areas. Competency traps are skills, attributes and things we are proud of, that constrain our thinking.  They break down into a Vision trap, a Routinisation trap and Technology traps.  Richard advised that the best way to combat these hazards is to open the organisation up to external stimuli.  This led into a discussion of many aspects of open innovation and we reviewed what P&G, Rolls-Royce and Philips Research were doing in these areas.  Seven key management capabilities were identified:

1. Innovation Sourcing Strategy
2. Ideas Management
3. Business Intelligence
4. Relationship Management
5. Project Management
6. Competence Management
7. Innovation Culture

In the workshop session delegates identified the areas of greatness weakness as being Innovation Culture, Business Intelligence and Project Management.

There followed a presentation on Innovation actitivities at EDF Energy given by Kathy Hart.  She covered a range of initiatives including ‘Let’s Try it’, Dragon’s Lair, Ambassadors, Innovation Funding Incentives and E-Factor and described some of the successful innovations that have resulted.

Delegates who attended and BQF members can obtain copies of the powerpoint presentations from Pat Myles.

Our thanks go to our presenters Richard Granger and Kathy Hart for making the morning stimulating and productive.

Paul Sloane

If you ever get frustrated with Windows errors then try some of these Japanese Haiku computer messages for an altogether calmer point of view.

The Web site you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred?

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you’re seeking
Must now be retyped.

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Paul Sloane

Customers can be an important source of innovative ideas.  Many companies conduct conventional customer surveys and focus groups.  These are useful channels of feedback but in terms of original ideas they are often disappointing.  Customers are good at demanding incremental improvements in products, lower prices and better service but they are notoriously poor at predicting significant new products or innovations to meet their needs.  Before the fax machine was invented who would have predicted he needed it?  Which wearer of spectacles in the 1950s would have said that he wanted a lens to put on his eyeball or laser surgery to reshape his eye?  You can expect customers to tell you that they want more of what you offer and they want it better, faster and cheaper.  But do not count on them to tell you about different ways to meet their needs.

A more lateral approach to gain insights from customers is to study in detail how they use your type of product or service and to observe what practical problems they have.

Fluke Corporation of Seattle is noted for innovative hand-held measurement products.  They sent teams of observers to watch maintenance engineers in chemical plants.  They discovered that the engineers had to carry a variety of different instruments to calibrate different temperature and pressure gauges.  They also noticed that after taking the calibration measurement the engineer would write the readings on a clipboard and then transcribe them into a computer.  The process was time-consuming and prone to errors.  Fluke therefore designed a new product that used flexible software to allow it to calibrate any gauge in the chemical plant.  It also recorded the results, which could be directly downloaded to the engineer’s computer.  The resulting product was the Fluke Document Process Calibrator, which became a great success.

Haier is a leading Chinese manufacturer of white goods such as freezers and cookers.  Its engineers in rural China were surprised to find that people were using Haier washing machines to wash the vegetables they had grown in their gardens.  Turning this unexpected use into a new application, the Haier development team came up with a new wash cycle designed specifically for vegetables.  On another occasion a sharp-eyed engineer saw that a student had placed a plank between two Haier fridges to form a makeshift desk.  The company responded by designing a fridge with a fold-out desktop – ideal for small rooms that need an extra table or desk top.

Asking customers for feedback is good but observing them can be much better.  If you want to gain a march on the competition and design the products and services of the future watch your customers carefully.  Look for the areas of unexpected use, the headaches and problems that want to be solved or the unusual combinations of needs or uses.  They can give you the insights you need to generate successful innovations in products, services and processes.

I thought it was an urban legend; the story of the student who mistakes a pair of ‘unsolvable’ maths problems for his homework assignment and solves them.  It has been used as an example of the power of positive thinking.  If you do not know that a problem is unsolvable then you have a better chance of solving it.

I discovered that it is based in truth.  It happened in 1939 to the American mathematician, George Dantzig (1914 - 2005) when he was a graduate student.  Here is the story in his own words:

‘It happened because during my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day to one of Neyman’s classes.  On the blackboard were two problems which I assumed had been assigned for homework.  I copied them down.  A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do  the homework–the problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual.  I asked him if he still wanted the work.  He told me to throw it on his desk.  I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever.  About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o’clock, Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door.  It was Neyman.  He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers.  Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.”  For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about.  To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard which I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics.  That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.’

Here is the link describing the way the myth has developed on Snopes.

Paul Sloane

We can broadly simplify innovations into two kinds – incremental and radical.  Incremental innovations are improvements to current products, methods, processes, services, partnerships and so on.  Customer complaints and suggestions are a good source of ideas for incremental improvements.  So are the people who work in the organisation.  If you ask customers how your product could be better or if you ask employees how their job could made easier they will come up with plenty of proposals.  Most organisations are good at incremental innovation – they make things better.  However, very few organisations are good at radical innovations.  As Gary Hamel puts it – businesses are good at getting better but poor at getting different.  Indeed Clayton Christenson in his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, argues that it is very difficult for successful organisations to develop disruptive innovations that would threaten the basis of their success.  Often they are put out of business when some smaller company develops a radically new technology.  Which employee working in a booming telecoms company in the 1990s would have suggested that free voice over internet telephony would be something they should develop?  It took a start-up, Skype, to make a success of this radical idea.

How can you encourage your people to countenance drastic innovations?  One way is to run creativity sessions where the objective is to conceive them.  Ask the question, ‘Who killed our business?’  Get small teams to imagine entirely new business models that could deliver the benefits that your customers want.  Each team has to present a scenario of a force so powerful that it could completely replace you.  Starting with a blank piece of paper and none of the encumbrances that limit your organisation they design a super competitor.  They are encouraged to go to extremes and to think completely outside the current model.  The exercise is stimulating and can be very revealing.

Most organisations have natural defence mechanisms against disruptive or threatening ideas.  People immediately find reasons why they should not be considered.  It is difficult to change the culture to one where such ideas are not only heard but are actively encouraged and developed.  The ’Who killed our business?’ exercise is a good way to start.

Paul Sloane