Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

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Innovation tip – look for remote as well as local opportunities

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

Most businesses look for new opportunities in obvious places, adjacent to their current position. They typically ask two questions:

1. What new markets can we sell our existing products or services into?

2. What new products or services can we sell to our existing customers?

These are perfectly valid questions. You should ask them and you explore the possibilities that the answers bring. But don’t stop there. If you do then may miss other and more exciting possibilities. Look for some distant relations as well as close cousins.

Caterpillar was a well-established leader in heavy earth-moving equipment. Then in 1996 they started selling ‘Cat’ branded work boots. These were successful with young consumers who would never use or buy heavy Caterpillar machinery. By 2000 they were selling over 25 million pairs of boots. They have now branched out into other kinds of clothing and toys to exploit the Cat brand.

Disney Corporation was a leader in cartoon films before it made the bold choice to go into theme parks. There were some synergies but it was not exactly an adjacent space in the market. It was a great success and Disney subsequently branched into other areas such as musical shows (such as the Lion King) and stores selling related Disney products.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Group takes this principle to extremes. They deliberately break the marketing rules about only choosing adjacent markets or products. Virgin, having started in music, has launched companies in airlines, trains, banking, cola, wines, bridal wear and so on. Indeed Richard Branson has founded over 200 separate companies. The only thing they have in common is the brand image of aggressive innovators and upstarts.

How can you find distant relations? Watch out for unexpected customer orders or compliments. Look for skills, strengths, extra services or by-products that your business has today but is not commercialising. Ponder what you are really good at. What is it that you can get passionate about? Ask employees and customers for ideas and suggestions. Above all, keep an open mind as regards possibilities.

Paul Sloane

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Assess your Innovation Capability with a Healthcheck

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Paul Sloane

Just how innovative is your organisation? What is holding you back from being truly agile?

The BQF Innovation Healthcheck is a proven method of improving innovation. It examines key indicators, determines strengths and weaknesses and identifies ways of improving innovation
throughout the organisation. The healthcheck is undertaken through a web-based survey followed by a one-day workshop on the your premises and is completely confidential.

The benefits are as follows:
• Clear identification of issues and obstacles to innovation
• An action plan to resolve the issues
• A better understanding of what is needed to inspire positive change
• Higher levels of motivation and innovation throughout the organisation
• The ability to implement fresh ideas to generate revenue or reduce cost
• The opportunity to improve the culture and process of innovation within your business

I facilitate the workshop which enables you to improve the culture and process of innovation in your organisation, to unlock the creative talents of your people and to build an innovative, entrepreneurial organisation that welcomes and initiates change.

Paul Sloane

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Poll – Who is blocking innovation?

Friday, July 9th, 2010


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To boost innovation just keep the boss away!

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Billions of dollars are spent on developing and launching new consumer packaged goods (CPG) products each year, and some companies see tremendous success while others – don’t.  Why?  One secret appears to lie in the degree of senior management involvement in the creative process, according to a study by The Nielsen Company. 

Nielsen’s research of the innovation processes at 30 large CPG companies operating in the U.S. reveals that companies with less senior management involvement in the new product development process generate 80 percent more new product revenue than those with heavy senior management involvement.  Companies that employ this and other best innovation practices derive on average 650 percent more revenue from new products compared to companies that do not. 

Nielsen’s research shows that simply being physically near corporate headquarters can stifle new idea generation.  In fact, it turns out that having no Blue Sky innovation team at all is better than having a team on-site at corporate headquarters.  The best place for your breakthrough innovators?  Far, far away.  According to Nielsen, companies with an off-site Blue Sky innovation team report 5.7 percent of revenues coming from new products, compared to 4.8 percent from companies with no Blue Sky team at all.  Companies with Blue Sky teams on site report just 2.7 percent of revenues coming from new products. 

“One of the keys to successful new product innovation is to manage new ideas lightly,” said Tom Agan, Nielsen MD. “While we don’t dispute senior management’s strengths and good intentions, they are often too quick to get involved in the creative process, especially when things are not going well, and their mere presence can stifle free-thinking and boundaryless ideas – which can doom the new product development process to failure.”

Senior management needs to play a different, more important role in new product development. Nielsen’s research shows that another important key to success is for senior management to precisely manage the new product development process, not the ideas themselves.  According to Nielsen, CPG companies with rigid stage gates – - decision points in the process where a new product idea must pass certain criteria to proceed forward – - average 130 percent more new product revenue than companies with loose processes.

“New product development success comes down to two important principles – - managing ideas lightly while managing the process precisely,” said Agan.

Paul Sloane

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How a Corporate Innovation Camp Works

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

I recently helped facilitate a corporate innovation camp for Amdocs, a $3B software and services company that supplies mobile service providers.   It took place over four days: the first two were spent on a bewildering variety of crazy creativity activities.  These included blowing huge soap bubbles, a giant pacman, wacky physics experiments, lateral thinking puzzles, improv theatre and music etc.  You can get a flavour of what was going on from this video on youtube.  There were 75 Amdocs participants, 9 customer delegates and a number of outside helpers and facilitators including me and Dimis Michaelides, a Cypriot magician and creativity expert.

Despite the frivolity there was a hard edge to the event – its purpose was to generate ideas for new business ventures that would generate at least $100m.  We used a number of different brainstorming methods to come up with hundreds of ideas.  We whittled these down to 85 and then to 15 using criteria described in more detail in this article on Businessweek.

Tal Givoly, Amdocs Chief Scientist & organiser of the event

The customers then reviewed the 15 best proposals and using their feedback we selected three for development into business plans.  Three teams of 25 people worked for a full day on each of the three ideas and created detailed demos and presentations which were shown to a group of senior executives.  This was the climax of the camp.  Two ideas were approved and funds released for further prototyping work.  One was sent back for further work.  The remaining ideas were not lost; they will be examined in more detail.

Overall it was an exciting and enjoyable event.  The early wacky activities helped break down barriers and release people’s inhibitions.  This assisted us to be much more radical in approaching the real business issues. 

One of the customers was David Amazallag, Chief Scientist of BT 21CN who said ‘I was inspired by the innovation camp.  The first two days were highly valuable, full of creative sessions and enabled the participants to be “distilled” from their every-day work and to focus on creating new ideas. This concept was very fruitful and full of business potential.’

The participants certainly went away energised and motivated.  Time will tell whether the ideas deliver on their promise. 

Paul Sloane

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Two things that lead to innovation – Pain and Slack

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

If you want innovation then think about these two words – pain and slack. They can lead you to innovation success.

Wherever there is a pain there is a need for innovation. So if you are looking to create new products or services look for the pain points. Study your customers and their everyday activities. Where do they have difficulties in using the product or services that you and your competitors provide? What inconveniences them? What costs them time and effort? What slows them down? What is awkward or clumsy?

People have been taking their pet dogs for a walk for as long as the dog has been man’s best friend. In all that time people threw sticks or balls for their dogs to chase and retrieve. It seems a simple process with no pain point. Then some product designer noticed that it was awkward for people who did not throw well. Also there was the inconvenience of picking up a muddy ball. So the ball thrower was invented. It is a flexible piece of rubber that allows you to grasp a ball in the device and then to easily flick it a fair distance. Now when you go for a walk in the park you see many people using their ball thrower to amuse and distract their dog. Find the pain point and you have the starting point for an innovation that people need.

If you want your team to be creative and to turn creative ideas into prototypes then you have to cut them some slack. People who are working flat out all day on their normal work cannot find the time or energy to experiment with promising ideas but that is exactly what is needed for innovation to happen. You do not get innovation for free. You have to allocate time, people and money. You should allocate some time for your staff for the following activities; thinking about problems, well-facilitated brainstorm meetings, research , experimentation, prototyping and testing. 3M were leaders in this area with their famous precept that any engineer or scientist could spend 15% of his or her time on any research topic they wanted. They did not need to get their manager’s permission to pursue an interest but they did need to keep their manager informed. Google go further with their renowned allowance of 20% of time for all employees to explore any business topic that interests them. You do not have to be equally generous – a smaller amount of time can pay dividends. Give your people some clear challenges that need creative thinking and then give them some slack time to tackle these problems. You will be surprised at the results.

Increase your innovation capability by focusing on pain and creating some slack.

Paul Sloane

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Try a Virtual Failure to help build Success

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

Jurgen Wolff

I heard this story from creative thinking expert Jurgen Wolff.   Steve Loranger, CEO of ITT Industries, shared this technique with Business 2.0:  ”If you’re working on an important contract, a ‘must-win’ program, give your team a much shorter deadline than actually exists.  Afterward you tell your team, ‘I just got a phone call from the buyer today and he told us that we lost – he didn’t tell us why.’  You ask them why they think you lost.  You’ll be amazed at how they come up with things that they hadn’t thought about before…as soon as you capture what your team is guessing, you use those points to rework your proposal.”

You might consider this idea to be somwehat underhand but it does seem to be very lateral and it might be highly effective in improving your bid.  It works on the basis that after a failure we can critically and constructively examine what went wrong.  You can adapt this idea and apply it to any project even if you’re working on it on your own.  Imagine the project is done and released to the target audience.  Now imagine that this group or person turns it down.  Why might that happen?  What features might he or she want that aren’t there?  Make notes of the ideas that occur to you and use them to strengthen your project.  Anticipate all the ways in which you could fail and then mitigate or eliminate them.

Paul Sloane

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Three things the Government can do to boost Innovation

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

I was recently asked in an interview what advice I would give to an incoming government on how to increase innovation in our economy. Here is what I would recommend:

1. Make it as easy as possible to start a new business.  Most radical innovations come from start-ups and we need a lot more of them. It is already reasonably easy to start a new business in the UK. However, we could further reduce administration and tax on new businesses e.g. no corporation tax for the first two years trading.

2. Increase the availability of loans for small and medium sized businesses (SMEs).   At the moment many smaller enterprises cannot raise the finance they need to expand. We need to encourage venture capital funds, business angels and banks to invest in or lend to start-ups and smaller enterprises. This is risky so the government can help lay-off some of the risk.

3. Tilt higher education towards Science.   Somehow our country has lost faith in Science. The media is cynical about Science in general. It is no longer seen as something that can solve problems and make life better. We need to rediscover the belief in Science and Engineering displayed by the Victorians. Many valuable high-tech start-ups come out of PhD studies or University research departments. We should encourage more bright students to take degrees and further degrees in Science based subjects. We should say that a degree in Physics is more valuable than a degree in History. One way to tilt the playing field would be to make tuition fees lower in science and engineering courses and higher in arts subjects.

We need more innovation in all parts of the economy including large corporations and the public sector. However, I would start with the SME sector. These three proposals would cost little but over a period they would encourage more start-up businesses and more high-tech businesses. This will help fuel innovation.

Paul Sloane

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Where are you most innovative – on your own or in a crowd?

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

There is an interesting blog on Zenhabits which looks at the habits of highly creative people. It finds that most of them rate solitude as the best way to find creative ideas. However others prefer the stimuation of participation in a group. When do you get your best ideas – when on your own or in a brainstorm or in some other situation?

Paul Sloane

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Siemens report on Open Innovation

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

Siemens have published a detailed report on Open Innovation.  It contains many interesting points including a report from Grant Thornton on the sources of ideas.  Their survey revealed that the best sources of ideas were as follows as rated by percentage of respondents:

Customers                              41%

Heads of Business Units           35%

Employees                              33%

Internal R&D                         33%

CEO                                      27%

Partners & Suppliers               26%   

Sales                                    17%

Do you work with customers on a systematic basis as a source of innovation?

Paul Sloane

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