Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’

« Older Entries

Next Meeting of the Innovation Unit – London Apr 19

Friday, March 12th, 2010

We have a new agenda for the next Innovation Unit meeting on the morning of Monday 19 April and we will have a leading speaker from Nokia.

 

Since the early 1990’s Nokia has invested close to €35 billion in research and development to build one of the strongest and broadest intellectual property rights (IPR) portfolios in the wireless industry. They invest heavily in innovation because ‘our business is about delivering new technologies, products and services to our customers and consumers’. Nokia now owns approximately 11,000 patented innovations and its global patent portfolio includes approximately 42,000 patents and patent applications. Nokia files approximately 1,000 new patent applications annually.

One of Nokia’s characteristics is their innovative approach to innovation. For example, their Growth Economy Venture Challenge will provide a venture capital investment in the winning proposal of $1 million. The Challenge is looking for one idea that stands above all the rest; one that could truly change the way people use Nokia mobile devices and that demonstrates how mobility improves the lives of millions of people in developing nations.

The morning will be a great opportunity to learn about innovation from leading practitioners and to network with fellow professionals.

Date: Monday 19 April 2010
Title: Innovation at Nokia
Venue: Central London
Time: Registration and refreshments from 0900. Meeting from 09.30 – 1300 followed by a sandwich lunch
Guest Speakers:

  • Pekka Pohjakallio, Vice President, Concepting & Innovation Solutions Unit
  • Paul Sloane, Head, BQF Innovation Unit
    Paul will lead an interactive workshop exercise on corporate differentiation and positioning

Please also forward this invitation to others in your organisation who may be interested in attending.  Book here.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Events | No Comments »

Why CEOs just don’t get Innovation

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Stefan Lindegaard has written an interesting piece in Business Week arguing that most CEOs just don’t understand what innovation needs and entails.  As evidence he quotes research by the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C., which interviewed 247 executives and managers who supervised at least 500 people and had more than 15 years of management experience.  When asked what they were doing to promote innovation in their organizations, the most popular strategy, adopting “overt innovation processes,” was named by only 25%. Only 17% said they were undertaking “talent/talent development,” the second most often mentioned answer, and 13% said they had rewards/recognition programs to support innovation.

The author contends that these responses show that chief executives are doing surprisingly little to build innovation cultures in their companies. He gives the following reasons why CEOs and other C-level officers often don’t support innovation, even though the business climate of our time demands it:

1.  The demand for short-term gains nearly always wins the day. Top executives at public companies are under enormous pressure to produce strong financial results each and every quarter. This is the area where they are rewarded for producing results, and their job security increasingly depends on it.

2.   They missed out on innovation education. Many of today’s top executives got their business education before innovation was a significant part of the curriculum at many MBA programs. They could compensate for this with experience, but many also missed on-the-job training, because innovation training usually happens from the top down, not vice versa. They were trained to be problem solvers, not innovators. Innovation education didn’t really take root until the early-to-mid-1990s, when thought leaders such as Clayton Christensen, Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad, and others emerged.

3.  Top executives are risk-averse. Innovation, especially open innovation, is scary on many levels. People who make it to the top because of their knowledge of existing businesses aren’t that interested in considering a new business model or going after an amazing yet high-risk breakthrough when that may undermine their own expertise. And who wants to risk having a major innovation effort fail on their watch?  People who truly understand innovation embrace failure as an inherent part of innovation. They realize that big lessons that lead to success often come from the biggest failures. An attitude that doesn’t allow for failure is contrary to an innovation culture, yet that’s the kind of attitude that too many company leaders possess.

4.   They don’t see why a networking culture is important for open innovation. In a world of open innovation, you need to be an expert at networking and building relationships. This holds true at the corporate level as well as the personal level. So I ask leaders and managers: Where is the strategy, commitment, and structure that you need to create a networking culture? Many of them have not bothered to give this important subject any thought.

5.   Top executives are too far away from the action. It is easy to preach innovation when you do not have to make it happen.  The problem is that top executives reward middle managers for getting stuff done and executing flawlessly. This can be counterintuitive to innovating. But top executives are often too far away from the action to understand how this compensation structure makes it harder for innovation leaders to succeed. Most leaders are more wedded to rewarding the core business rather than pursuing something new and untested.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »

International Innovation League Table

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Here is a report drawn up by the IMF, OECD and the UN to rank international innovation competitiveness.  The authors constructed an Innovation Capacity Index (ICI) that draws on a range of  available data to correlate the wide-ranging set of relevant factors, policies, and institutional characteristics which play a central role in boosting a nation’s capacity for innovation. In its 2009 edition, the ICI covers 131 countries and identifies over 60 factors that are seen to have a bearing on a country’s ability to create an environment that encourages innovation, such as a nation’s institutional environment, human capital endowment, the presence of social inclusion, the regulatory and legal framework, the infrastructure for research and development, and the adoption and use of information and communication technologies, among others.

The top 25 countries with their ICI scores are:

1.  Sweden      82.2

2.  Finland     77.8

3.  United States   77.5

4.  Switzerland   77.0

5.  Netherlands    76.6

6.  Singapore   76.5

7.  Canada    74.8

8.  United Kingdom   74.6

9.  Norway    73.5

10.  New Zealand   73.4

11.  Luxembourg    73.3

11.  Denmark   73.3

13.  Taiwan    72.9

14.  Iceland    72.6

15.  Japan    72.1

16.  Hong Kong    71.3

17.  Australia   71.2

18.  Ireland    70.5

19.  Korea    70.0

20.  Germany   68.8

21.  Israel    68.2

22.  Belgium  67.6

23.  Austria    66.7

24.  France    65.4

25.  Estonia   62.7

 And the bottom three are:

129.  Haiti    28.7

130.  Chad    25.6

131.  Afghanistan   24.0

It is notable that China does not do well – it comes in at number 65 with a score of 49.5.

The Executive Summary contains many interesting insights.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »

Don’t cut Innovation

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Alistair Darling (photo by the Sun)

In December the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, announced that he would make cuts of £600m in funding for higher education, research and science by 2012.  Shortly afterwards the Science and Technology Facilities council announced a range of cuts in experimental programmes.  The number of students funded to take PhD degrees is expected to fall by 25%.  It is remarkable that these announcements have not generated national concern because they strike at our national ability to innovate.  On Dec 16th over 100 leading scientists and academics published a letter criticising the cuts and pointing out that research is essential to scientific discovery and innovation.

Currently interest for postgraduate education is very high but funding is being slashed.  At a national level it is recognised that our dependence on financial services should be reduced.  A good way to do this is to encourage the growth of high-tech start-ups.  There is considerable evidence from the OECD among others that people educated to doctoral level are ‘key players in innovation.’  We clearly need to cut public spending in order to rein in our enormous debts but even so the country needs to increase not reduce spending on science, research and postgraduate studies as these are shown to fuel the technology start-ups that will give us future economic growth and employment.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in DIUS | No Comments »

The ‘Break the Rules’ Exercise

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Innovators are rule breakers.  We often see how new entrants to a market break the rules to which that the existing players conform.  The low cost airlines did this when they challenged the ways in which the major airlines did business.  The new players used electronic tickets, bypassed travel agents, did away with allocated seating, flew to new smaller airports and so on. 

Break the Rules is a workshop method that I use to challenge the fundamental assumptions of your business.  It can be used to illustrate the number and level of restrictions on how you work.  It can also be the basis for new ideas.

Divide into teams of 6 to 8 people.  Each team must list as many rules as they can think of that apply in the organization.  They should spend say 30 minutes capturing as many rules as possible – both obvious explicit rules and the unwritten, implicit rules – ‘the way we do things around here.’   What do you always do?  What do you never do?  What rules apply to hiring, to firing, to people, to finance, to approvals, to customers, to competitors etc.  Typically groups find anywhere from 60 to 100 rules. When you have a long list of rules you then deliberately challenge each of them in turn. For each rule you ask the question – ‘Can we break this rule for the benefit of the business?’  You can use the broken rules as springboards for new ideas.

Say for example you were looking for ways to improve the productivity of a telemarketing department.  Here are some of the rules that you might list as applying to the business today:

  1. We use the telephone
  2. We call between 9 a.m. and 12 and 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
  3. We are always polite and professional.
  4. We use a script which has been carefully developed to deliver the right messages.
  5. We reward our agents for the number of leads they generate.
  6. We follow-up each appointment with a confirmation letter and information pack.

 Now we break the rules:

  1. We will use other methods of contacting people than the telephone
  2. We will contact people outside normal business hours e.g. early in the morning, at lunch time or in the evening.
  3. We will be rude and unprofessional.
  4. We will let our agents say whatever they want.
  5. We will fine our agents for every lead they get.
  6. We will not send out a confirmation by post.

How can any of these ideas help us to make the department more effective?  Items 1 to 3 might suggest that we find creative ways to approach our target prospects as they arrive at or leave work.  The telemarketing team could dress up as clowns and approach commuters getting off trains with humorous and outrageous messages which solicit responses.  Item 4. might prompt us to think of ways in which we could make our message more interesting and less mechanical.  The idea of fines might prompt us to emphasize to potential customers the costs and penalties from not responding.  Finally item 6 might lead to the ideas of confirming appointments through a special website or hand-delivering to customers a package containing an attractive wall calendar with the date and time of our appointment highlighted.

When I facilitate this exercise in my workshops I often find that teams decide that they can break some 40% to 50% of the rules beneficially.  They are surprised at how many self-imposed limits are holding them back.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Innovation | 1 Comment »

Don’t Take the First Answer

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

The macho manager is keen to be seen as decisive and can quickly come up with an idea for tackling most problems.  Doing something is generally (but not always) a better option that doing nothing.  But the first answer we come up with is unlikely to be the best answer. 

Photo by Bernie Condon

A better approach is to take a little time to generate a long list of possible ideas and then evaluate them in order to select one or more to try.  Our first idea is often the most obvious, the most straightforward response.  It is rarely the best response.  As we mull over the problem and force more and more possible solutions we generate less conventional, less routine, less automatic choices – we come up with the creative, the radical and the better options. 

When men first wanted to fly the most obvious way to do it was to copy birds by beating two large wings against the air.  This was tried and failed many times.  But people kept on trying it.  In the year that the Wright brothers first flew the US Congress voted to stop funding heavier-than-air flying experiments because they were such an obvious waste of time and money. The aerofoil wing section, which gives lift when driven forward, was a very different and much better option than flapping wings.

When you find yourself tempted to rush into a quick answer, force yourself to pause for a moment.  Would it be better to get the opinions of others?  Should you run a short brainstorm meeting?  Should you ponder the issue yourself for a while?  Could you write down several different approaches rather than just one?  Some problems demand an immediate response but many do not; they favour a more considered approach.  The first idea you come up with may be great, but the chances are that the tenth, twentieth or fortieth will be much better.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »

Competitive Advantage through Innovation Workshop

Friday, January 15th, 2010

I am running three one-day workshops for BQF entitled Gaining Competitive Advantage through Innovation.  These workshops will cover advanced idea generation techniques that really work for new products and services.  Delegates will practise and learn practical methods that they can take back and use in their organisations to help improve innovation.

There are details here.

The dates are

London    Feb 25 and Sept 16

Midlands   June 17

These workshops are open to non-members of the British Quality Foundation.  Places are limited so please book early.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , ,
Posted in Events | Comments Off

21 Great Ways to Innovate

Friday, January 8th, 2010

How hard is it to innovate?  Not once but over and over?  How can you repeatedly implement great new products, processes or services?  Continuous innovation is not easy and if you keep using the same method you will experience diminishing results.  Try innovating how you innovate by employing some of these ideas. 

1. Copy someone else’s idea.  One of the best ways to innovate is to pinch an idea that works elsewhere and apply it in your business.  Henry Ford saw the production line working in a meat packing plant and then applied to the automobile industry thereby dramatically reducing assembly times and costs.

2. Ask customers.  If you simply ask your customers how you could improve your product or service they will give you plenty of ideas for incremental innovations.  Typically they will ask for new features or that you make your product cheaper, faster, easier to use, available in different styles and colours etc.  Listen to these requests carefully and choose the ones that will really pay back.

3. Observe customers.  Do not just ask them, watch them.  Try to see how customers use your products.  Do they use them in new ways?  This was what Levi Strauss saw when they found that customers ripped the jeans – so they brought a line of pre-ripped jeans. Heinz noticed that people stored their sauce jars upside down so they designed an upside down bottle.

4. Use difficulties and complaints.  If customers have difficulties with any aspect of using your product or if they register complaints then you have a strong starting point for innovations.  Make your product easier to use, eliminate the current inconveniences and introduce improvements that overcome the complaints.

5. Combine.  Combine your product with something else to make something new.  It works at all levels.  Think of a suitcase with wheels, or a mobile phone with a camera or a flight with a massage.

6. Eliminate.  What could you take out of your product or service to make it better?  Dell eliminated the computer store, Amazon eliminated the bookstore, the Sony Walkman eliminated speakers and record functions.

7. Ask your staff.  Challenge the people who work in the business to find new and better ways to do things and new and better ways to please customers.  They are close to the action and can see opportunities for innovation.  Often they just need encouragement to bring forward great ideas.

8. Plan.  Include targets for new products and services in your business plan.  Put it onto the balanced scorecard.  Write innovation into everyone’s objectives.  Measure it and it will happen.

9. Run brainstorms.  Have regular brainstorm meetings where you generate a large quantity of new product ideas.  Use diverse groups from different areas of the business and include a provocative outsider e.g. a customer or supplier.

10. Examine patents.  Check through patents that apply in your field.  Are there some that you could license?  Are some expiring so that you can now use that method?  Is there a different way of achieving the essential idea in a patent?

11. Collaborate.  Work with another company who can take you to places you can’t go.  Choose a partner with a similar philosophy but different skills.  That is what Mercedes did with Swatch when they came up with the Smart car.

12. Minimize or Maximize.  Take something that is standard in the industry and minimise or maximise it.  Ryanair minimized price and customer service.  Starbucks maximised price and customer experience.  It is better to be different than to be better.

13. Run a contest.  Ask members of the public to suggest great new product ideas.  Offer a prize.  Give people a clear focussed goal and they will surprise you with novel ideas.  Good for innovation and PR.

14. Ask – What if?  Do some lateral thinking by asking what if…..? Challenge every boundary and assumption that applies in your field.  You and your group will come up with amazing ideas once the normal constraints are lifted.

15. Watch the competition.  Do not slavishly follow the competition but watch them intelligently.  The small guys are often the most innovative so see if you can adapt or license one of their ideas – or even buy the company!

16. Outsource.  Subcontract your new product development challenge to a design company, a University, a start-up or a crowdsourcing site like Innocentive or Ninesigma.

17. Use Open Innovation.  Big consumer products companies like Proctor and Gamble or Reckitt Benckiser encourage developers to bring novel products to them.  They are flexible on IP protection and give a clear focus on what they are looking for.  A large proportion of their new products now start life outside the company.

18. Adapt a Product to a New Use.  Find an entirely different application for an existing product.  De Beers produced industrial diamonds but found a new use for diamonds when they introduced the concept of engagement rings.  It opened up a large new market for them.

19. Try Triz.  Triz is a systematic method for solving problems.  It can be applied in many fields but is particularly useful in engineering and product design.  Triz gives you a toolbox of methods to solve contradictions e.g. how can we make this product run faster but with less power?

20. Go Back in Time.  Look back at methods and services that were used in your sector years ago but have now fallen out of use.  Can you bring one back in a new updated form?  It has been said that Speed Dating is really a relaunch of a Victorian dance format where ladies had cards marked with appointments.

21. Use Social Networks.  Follow trends and ask questions on groups like Twitter or Facebook.  Ask what people want to see in future products or what the big new idea will be.  Many early adopters are active on social network groups and will happily respond with suggestions.

The ways to innovate are legion.  Try some approaches that are new to you in order to boost your innovation capability.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Innovation | 2 Comments »

Innovation needs Passion

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

P Sloane 054People will not follow an unenthusiastic leader.  They will follow someone who has a vision and is passionate about it.  Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela showed great passion for what they believed – it was what made them great leaders.

The sales training expert Robin Fielder says, ‘Never, ever forget that people are more persuaded by your convictions than by your arguments.’

Jim Collins puts it like this; the good to great companies did not say, ‘Okay folks, let’s get passionate about what we do.’  Sensibly, they went about it the other way round entirely: We should only do those things that we can get passionate about.  Kimberley-Clark executives made the shift to paper-based consumer products in large part because they could get more passionate about them.

Here is an exercise that we sometimes conduct on leadership courses.  Think for a moment about a key component of your vision for what you want to achieve for the business this year.  Choose a single important goal that you as a leader want to accomplish.  Now imagine that you expressed that goal to your people in a dull, boring, unenthusiastic way.  What would happen?  Now consider how you could communicate the goal again, but this time with passion, with energy, with commitment, with enthusiasm.  If you were receiving those two kinds of messages how would you react?  Which message would inspire you to change your behaviour, to do something extraordinary, to go the extra mile?

Focus on the things that you want to change, the most important challenges you face and be passionate about overcoming them.  Your energy and drive will translate itself into direction and inspiration for your people.

It is no good filling your bus with contented, complacent passengers.  You want evangelists, passionate supporters; people who believe that reaching the destination is really worthwhile; people who are on a mission to make the world a better place.  This drive and enthusiasm starts with the leader.  If you want to inspire people to innovate, to change the way they do things and to achieve extraordinary results then you have to be passionate about what you believe in and you have to communicate that passion every time you speak.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Innovation | 1 Comment »

Why does Roger Federer serve Double Faults?

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Why does Roger Federer serve double faults?  Every double fault is a failure – it gives a precious point to his opponent. He could easily cut out all double faults by slowing down his second serve to ensure that it lands safely in the service box.  Yet in most long matches Federer, like most other top players, will serve at least 3 double faults.

Clearly the tennis champion has made a careful calculation of the trade-off between being bold or cautious on his second serve.  He knows that if he makes his serves safe he will make the returns easier for his opponent.  He wants to win a high percentage of points on his serve and use it as an attacking tactic.  He is quite prepared to lose some points as double faults if it means that most of the time his serves are difficult to return.  There is an optimum number of double faults that a tennis player should serve in a match and the number is not zero.

The same principle applies to us in our enterprises.  Caution can be an enemy of success.  If every new thing that we try works it almost certainly means that we are not being bold enough.  We should take some courageous initiatives.  We should sometimes fail.  We should serve some double faults.

What innovations have you tried in the last three months?  Make a list.  How many succeeded and how many failed?  For those that failed, why did they fail?  What lessons can you learn?  Obviously you aim for success and you want to win.  But there will be failures on the road to success.  If you cut out the possibility of failure then you limit your chances of success.

Paul Sloane

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Innovation | Comments Off

« Older Entries