lead/marke | ralf schwartz

Innovation Needs a Focussed CEO

"... Trying to implement more innovation is noble, but requires a lot of work, work that will distract the business from its normally efficient, effective processes.

Middle managers who’ve spent years developing robust processes to achieve short term financial success are loathe to see their work go to waste and don’t want to distract their people and processes from what they do best.

Thus, the importance of “focus”. If CEOs really want innovation, they must focus, focus, focus on innovation. A one time off-handed request for more innovation simply won’t create much change..."

Via innovationexcellence.

Please read Misserfolgsstrategien alter Männer, and Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln, too.

Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln @wiwo

Ich habe in unserer Wiwo-Kolumne mal etwas zu Mark Zuckerberg, dem Netz und der Dringlichkeit des Wandels für alle anderen geschrieben: Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln.

"Jobs taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product introductions"

"Jobs is ahead of his time in other ways too: He has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product introductions.

Apple designers say that now, each design they create has to be presented alongside a mock-up of how that design might evolve in the second or third generation.

That should ensure Apple’s continued success for a long time, aided, of course, by the tremendous momentum that Jobs’s leadership has provided the company."

Via.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Why (Almost) Everything is Lousy"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:

Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

I recently read an article on BNet by Geoffrey James called “Top 5 Totally Useless Business Experts“. James usually writes an interesting column, and even in this one he makes some good points. But he also uses a form of argument that is deeply flawed.

Here is part of the post:

Useless Expert #1: Management Consultant

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Anything You Want" - "Experiment. Go!"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

Experimenting is the key to innovation success.

The new book Anything You Want by Derek Sivers is worth a read (there’s tons of information about the book, and some great videos here). The book tells lessons that Sivers learned while running his website CDBaby. My first thought in reading the experiences of one person is “your mileage my vary” – but Sivers makes some excellent points that do generalise, including a couple about experimenting.

One is that whatever business model you have is simply one option of many possible ones.

He tells the story of the voice coach that he had when he was singing in a band. He’d have Sivers sing a song an octave higher, then an octave lower, then fast, slow, like Tom Waits, etc. After doing all of that there was always a choice about the best way to sing each song.

It’s the same for business models. Here is how Sivers puts it:

I’m taking an entrepreneurship class now. I’ve never studied business before.

We analyzed a business plan for a mail-order pantyhose company. Like all business plans, it proposed only one plan.

After reading the whole thing, I felt like saying things my old voice teacher would have said:

• “OK, make a plan that requires only $1000. Go!”
• “Now make a plan for ten times as many customers. Go!”
• “Now do it without a website. Go!”
• “Now make all your initial assumptions wrong, and have it work anyway. Go!”
• “Now show how you would franchise it. Go!”

You can’t pretend there’s only way to do it. Your first idea is just one of many options. No business goes as planned, so make ten radically different plans.

This is good advice for business plans, and it’s good advice for implementing any new idea.

The more ways you work out how an idea might be executed, the more likely it is that you’ll stumble upon a good plan once your idea hits reality.

Remember – every part of a business model is actually a hypothesis. You should figure out how to test each part.

Here’s another bit from the book:

If it's not a hit, switch from Derek Sivers on Vimeo.

 

Watch the whole thing, but here’s the key quote:

We’ve all heard about the importance of persistence, but I had misunderstood.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.

We all have lots of ideas, creations and projects. When you present one to the world, and it’s not a hit, don’t keep pushing it as is. Instead, get back to improving and inventing.

Innovation is about experimenting. This story from Sivers is a story about experimenting – keep trying things to improve them. You show persistence with the experiments, not just by sticking with an idea that’s not working.

“Experiment. Go!”

(ralf says:
I just want you to have a look at that picture/quote.
Keep adjusting, Adjusting is not a weakness, it is a virtue!)

Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle

[L/M NET] Helge Tenno > What makes a great planner - what makes a bad one

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

What makes a great planner? This is a personal compilation from the last few years of thinking about thinking.

1. We are not explorers, we are inventors
Planning is not excavation, its not digging into the ground to find something that is already there. Its digging into the ground to find something that didn’t exist five minutes ago. Our job is not to copy some affinity brand of the Internet or mumble some top-of-mind conclusion at the end of a standardized strategic process. If you’re not bringing something new to the table, you are wasting a lot of peoples time and money.

2. Nobody’s there to listen to you
Planners are not presenting their insight to show of their own brilliance. Our job is to empower others. If the people at the other end can’t make something useful with an insight, then we shouldn’t waste their time presenting it.

My old photography teacher used to say “half the job is editing the pictures”. Planners should spend more time editing and reshaping their insight and strategies. We need to be constantly thinking: “how is this useful for the people at the other end?”.

3. Respect
I’ve sat through planner get-togethers with people more full of themselves than a newly poured stout. Planners are not the most important people in the room, they are not excellent, they do not belong in every part of the creative process. A planner is an integrated team player, understanding that the job is to make the next ones down the food chain as brilliant as possible, and know when to get out of the way.

4. Companies compromise, customers don’t
Its easy to create strategies for companies; its a handful of people in a room wanting an answer that’s good enough for senior management to approve. Companies are political, they compromise, they make boxes with rounded corners. Customers on the other hand don’t compromise they don’t have the time. They either notice you or they don’t.

For them the product is a bar of chocolate – not the reason for waking up in the morning.

Designing strategies for people who give you a split second is completely different from designing strategies for people who will spend months tinkering on every word and possible meaning.

5. Listen
I’ve hear planners are essentially curious people, they listen – a lot, because they are more interested in other peoples wisdom than their own.

6. You don’t have format
How often is the delivery in the shape of a brief and/or a Powerpoint? We are stuck in old formats. The way we communicate our knowledge and insight is as important as editing the content. Powerpoint is a lazy man/womans tool. And take note next time; it’s never the facts that ignite the audience – it’s the stories you tell. Planners need to get better at storytelling, at analogies – and stop lazing over their powerpoints.

7. You’re job is to minimize risk, not enable it
Risk and guts are often cited as key ingredients to a successful creative process. I couldn’t disagree more. Risk is about uncertainty, it’s about not having the answers that gives the client the confidence they need to see that the “riskiest” option is the safest option. Clients shouldn’t need to take risks, and we shouldn’t demand it.

8. Nuanced
Nothing is black or white, we don’t shower in hot or cold water. The world is nuanced. When do we include nuance in our work, and when do we ignore it?

(ralf says:
Every APG (eg: apgd) should copy that!)

Helge works as a Planner for SDG, helping brands and organizations discover WHY they are valuable in consumers lives, and HOW they can create deliberate value on the arenas and inside the interfaces where they connect with them. Twitter: @congbo

"Don't be afraid of new ideas; be afraid of old ones" [Quote]

"...many firms rest comfortably in the knowledge that while new ideas may arise, their "old" idea provides substantial value.  With luck, the old idea can be extended for many years and the firm can build defenses against the preponderance of new ideas.  Over time comfort, inertia and a defensive mindset take hold.  It is far easier to defend, after all, than to attack."
...
"It's not merely old ideas that are dangerous, it is old expectations, old rules of thumb and old methods of managing.  The pace is changing, and old theories and old expectations are just as dangerous as old ideas."

Via Innovate on Purpose.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Are You Climbing Hills or Crossing Valleys?"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

One of the key issues we face in managing organisations is the state of the environment surrounding us. Is it stable or turbulent? This has an impact on our innovation strategy. In stable environments, we can afford to concentrate just on getting better at what we’re doing. However, in turbulent environments, we need to undertake more exploratory innovation efforts.

One problem with this scenario is that stable environments can turn turbulent quickly and without warning. Think about the housing markets in the US and the UK in 2008 (and all the markets related to those two). This is the basis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s black swan theory.

Lee Smolin makes some important points about coping with these types of shifts. The main thrust of the article is that scientific research may be too conservative these days as researchers focus more on taking a safe approach to facilitate publishing, while not spending enough time on the riskier big questions. While black swan events (things with a low probability of occurring, but which have a large impact if they do actually arise) are often negative in financial markets, they are sought after in science and innnovation.

I found the article through a good post by Roland Harwood. The angle that he thought was most interesting was that the article proposes the formation of markets for research. That is an interesting angle, but not the one that grabbed me. I was struck by this section:

Some scientists, he suggests, are what we might call “hill climbers”. They tend to be highly skilled in technical terms and their work mostly takes established lines of insight that pushes them further; they climb upward into the hills in some abstract space of scientific fitness, always taking small steps to improve the agreement of theory and observation. These scientists do “normal” science. In contrast, other scientists are more radical and adventurous in spirit, and they can be seen as “valley crossers”. They may be less skilled technically, but they tend to have strong scientific intuition — the ability to spot hidden assumptions and to look at familiar topics in totally new ways.

To be most effective, Smolin argues, science needs a mix of hill climbers and valley crossers. Too many hill climbers doing normal science, and you end up sooner or later with lots of them stuck on the tops of local hills, each defending their own territory. Science then suffers from a lack of enough valley crossers able to strike out from those intellectually tidy positions to explore further away and find higher peaks.

This is a nice description of innovating on fitness landscapes, an idea that John and I have been talking about in our classes. And it is particularly important now. There are numerous reports coming out showing that companies have become increasingly conservative in their innovation efforts as a response to the global financial crisis. In Smolin’s analogy, companies are reverting to only undertaking hill climbing. Many have never thought much about valley crossing in the first place, while many others are pulling resources out of more speculative ideas.

This is as wrong for business as it is for science. Innovation is central to survival, and successful innovation requires both hill climbing and valley crossing. Now more than ever it is critical for firms to figure out a way to continue to invest in areas that have breakthrough potential. Newspapers and record companies have collectively been very effective at getting to the top of their hills. And these industries are in big trouble now because they have completely missed on out the discovery of new, better hills. It’s a challenging process to manage in good times, and probably even harder now. But it’s still essential.

One way to cope with this problem is to maintain an innovation portfolio. The idea with this is that we always need to investigate ideas that both help us climb hills and cross valleys. A large percentage of our efforts do need to go into hill climbing. This leads to incremental innovations that keep us competitive.

However, it is essential to always be working on a few ideas that will lead to valley crossing. This can prepare us for times when our environment becomes turbulent unexpectedly. This turbulence can come from an unexpected financial shock, a natural disaster, or the introduction of a disruptive innovation.

In all of these cases, maintaining an innovation portfolio will make you better equipped to deal with this change.

On the innovation journey, we need to be climbing hills, but we also have to cross a valley every now then as well.

(ralf says: Companies should adapt their bonus schemes to the above. And they should become much more rigid about it.

Everybody can do improvements. Improvements are bread & butter. But only if you truly innovate, you will carry your success to your future.

You will have to disrupt. You will have to anticipate, not follow, to inspire people, to lead a market.

You will have to lead your people and your consumers across the valley to where dragons live.)

Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Make Little Bets for Innovation Success"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

To succeed at innovation, you need to be making a lot of little bets. What are little bets? According to Peter Sims in his excellent book called Little Bets, they are:

A small, affordable action that anyone can take to discover and develop ideas.

Here is a more complete explanation in an interview with Andrew Keen:

 

When I was in Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago, there was a huge buzz going around about the book, and I was fortunate enough to hear Peter talk about it at a TEDxBayArea event. Interestingly, two different people who had read the book used almost identical words to describe it – they both said something like: “If you’ve been reading the research there isn’t anything new here, but he pulls it together really well.”

That doesn’t sound like the highest of praise, but it actually illustrates one of the main points of the book perfectly: that ground-breaking ideas don’t always look ground-breaking when they launch, instead, they tend to build up out of a series of experiments. Sims has done a great job of connecting up a bunch of ideas that were already out there in a novel way, and building an important new idea out of them. This is the essence of innovation.

He includes a great quote from Steve Jobs that explains the importance of connecting up ideas:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how the did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had an synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people… Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

There are several key actions that you can take based on reading this book that will make more innovative, including:

• Focus on what you can afford to lose, rather than what you might gain: This is similar to my suggestion that you do as much as you can get away with. The critical point of little bets is that they are little – so if they don’t work, you don’t lose too much. Don’t try to figure out the net present value of a potential idea based on growth projections in which no one can ever have any confidence. Just find a way to test your idea as quickly and cheaply as possible. This is central to any little bets approach.
• Build as much diversity into your personal network as possible: the best way to make these creative, novel connections between ideas is to have a diversity of experience, and to encounter a diversity of ideas. One great way to accomplish both is to consciously build links with people that don’t think in the same way that you do. Tom Peters sums this up perfectly: Hang out with the freaks. Peters has been making this recommendation for a long time – find the people that are outsiders, that don’t fit, and spend time talking to them. It’s the easiest way to start making novel connections between ideas.
• Don’t expect to have a great big idea come to you in perfect form: the reason that Sims marshalls all of the evidence that he has is to show us that big ideas don’t spring fully-formed from peoples’ minds. Instead, they build over time. As Linus Pauling said, the best way to have a great idea is to have a lot of ideas. The belief that we have to have a great idea in order to start something is a myth, and one of the main ones that Sims is trying to dispel. If you won’t start until you have a great idea, you won’t start. Instead, it is better to execute an idea, any idea, figure out what works, and build from there (he expands on this idea in an excellent interview with Nilofer Merchant).

It’s no coincidence that John and I have used the word “experiment” in 103 different posts on this blog. We keep talking about it because it works, and anyone can do it. To innovate, you need to figure out how much you can get away with (how much can you afford to lose?), figure out how to test an idea within the scope that provides you, learn from your experiment, and build on it.

That’s a little bet.

That’s innovation.

If you want to learn more about the book, here is Sims’ talk as part of the Authors @Google series:

 

(ralf says:
As diversity is crucial for innovation we try to achieve that at least a little by building the L/M NET. Sometimes you might think we show you strange things, but they are just sparks to your imagination. You take those into your business context and they connect with your experience, ie. creating new sensations.

Have a look here too: Innovation is a Culture - Not a Process!)

Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle

Innovation is a Culture - Not a Process!

Innovation is dripping from the walls. It is at the water cooler, in the kitchen, the cantina. You feel it on the floors, in the lobby, even outside the building, at the campus, the street. You may lick it from the logo, smell it in the elevator.

You don't get it? That's the problem.

You are the innovation. And innovation is all around you. Innovation is in every person around - or nowhere.

You cannot catch innovation and lock it into a room. You cannot add a price tag or a stop watch. You cannot restrict it to certain meeting hours or opening times.

You cannot process innovation, cannot produce it. Cannot compute it. You can just allow it. Foster it. Empower it.

You are the innovation. Your diversity is innovation. Your beginner's mind. Your curiosity, your openness and transparency. Your wisdom. Your common sense. Your creativity, inspiration.

Innovation is your culture is innovation.

[L/M NET] Konstantin Weiss > "Don't pitch. But if you do - here's how to."

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

The best advice I got so far about pitches: don't pitch. Pitch is against the nature of user experience design process. But if you want and need to pitch anyway - here are some aspects I learnt so far.

Is there a pitch at all?

In most cases, there is no pitch. Instead, you are in one of these situations:

1. There never was a pitch. The decision was already made and you lost.
2. There never was a pitch. The client just wants an agency presentation but fails to communicate it.
3. There never was a project. Not even a budget. The middle management is having fun.
4. You have already lost the pitch. Because neither you have good connection nor preparation. Pitching would be a waste of time and energy.
5. You have already won the pitch. The battle was won even before it took place, because you have good connection and preparation.
6. There was a pitch. You did not recognize it. Because it was just testing your daily work.

What is your goal?

If you are sure there is a pitch and you want to pitch, ask yourself: What is it you want to achieve? - Do you want to present a solution that you are convinced of as the best one? Then don't be upset if you lose - the client wouldn't value your work anyway, so you and the client are not the best fit. But your time/resources will still be lost. - Do you want to win the pitch above all? Have in mind: you might end up paying with your nerves during the project. Many projects are doomed from the start because clients' and your expectations are not in sync.

Refine the pitch for audience

Your preparation and acting should depend on the people you are presenting to.

For the Top Management:

• Be honest.
• Address their goals.
• Transcend their goals. Show them there is a bigger vision.
• Ask uncomfortable questions.
• Propose a solution.
• Focus on the essence.
• Show them you can handle the complexity.
• Exercise uninteresting listening.

For the Middle Management:

• Formost: Understand the middle managements real (egoistic) goals.
• The IBM-principle: Show them that they can't make a wrong decision because you're the pick of the bunch. If the project fails, it's not their fault. They've taken the best agency there is. (That's how IBM was so successful in the past)
• Make clear that choosing you will be appreciated by the top management.
• Make clear that not choosing you will result in big justification to the top management.

For the Experts:

• Be honest.
• Don't overestimate.
• Show that you respect their expertise.
• Dive into detail.
• Ask critical questions.
• Treat them as your partner, who they actually are.

The ingredients of a pitch

Connections - 45%

1. If you have deep relationships into the client's company + know the relationships of your competitors - pitch.
2. If you have deep relationships into the client's company, but don't know the relationships of your competitors - consider a pitch.
3. If you don't have relationships into the client's company - you are free to test what you always wanted to test, but never dared. Minimum risc. Minimum cost. Just do it! Pitch!

Concept - 10%

• Take this for granted, you will not achieve an extraordinary solution if you follow all rules of the briefing. You may get an ordinary solution. So do your competitors. That's not worth the fight. Disobey. Come up with good arguments, why you disobey. You have a chance to win:
  1. You show deep understanding of the issues, not only symptoms.
  2. Your solution is thus surprisingly performative.
  3. You are hardly comparable.
• Tell a scenario from the user's point of view. Mention that you are eager to understand the business and technology aspects of the project. But the user (normally) does not care. It's the users view that matters here, and you are their advocate. In the end, show how business goals are met as well as the tech feasibility.
• Work on decent rhetorics. Address the obvious pain. Guide through your approach to your positions. Surprise with your manifestation, but make it damn rooted in the issues and positions.
• Be a story teller. Look for the catharsis. And in between - make the audience smile.
• Don't overestimate the concept. Most decision makers don't have much of a clue. Visual Design and Budget plays a much greater role.
• Last: Show them that your idea is not boring common sense, but surprising.

Visual Design - 20%

• 90% of all visual designs with finesse and balance fail. They are badly projected in the conference room of decision makers.
• Consider a realistic design - and decide against it. Do rock 'n roll instead. Your references designate you as an expert, you don't have to prove it now. Instead, aim at their hearts. Emotion wins.

Budget - 20%

Concerning money I have to say: It depends so much on the client. The only rules of thumb that I know are:

• If you are far too expensive, you're out.
• If the client is a big company, don't be cheap. For them it's far too expensive if the project fails. If you are too cheap and the project fails, the client's responsibles will have problems to justify their choice. So in order to minimize the risk, they'll rather take somebody with a realistic estimation.
• Don't forget the IBM-principle (see "Middle Management" above).

Luck - 5%

• You can never be sure. You can't predict everything. Be prepared to lose anyway.

"I can't afford not to pitch"

Agencies easily say, that they cannot afford to leave out pitches. That's a valid conclusion, but not before considering this aspect: If you are a small agency, pitching is expensive. Even if it is a small one, it will bind - say - one consultant and a visual designer for a week. That's two weeks of manpower that you can spend on something maybe more meaningful. You could make a small project with a client you love for free, knowing that the output will be not designed by committee. This project may generate enough buzz to get clients just by appreciating your agency.

One last piece of advice

Use pitches (at minimum risc, minimum cost) to let your junior, but most promising people get the experience, smell the pitch air, get addicted to the sitaution, lose their nervousness, and learn.

If there is no need for that: avoid pitching if you can. Rather invest the energy elsewhere. Share your thoughts. Teach. Play. Make your own products.

My best advice is: invest in people you love to work with, no matter what positions they are in. It does not pay off in the short run. But after a while you'll have a great working environment and be able to do have great outcome. That's something, considering how much time you spend at work in your life.

Hopefully you enjoyed the advices. I'll be glad to know what you experienced and think.

---

Thanks to Benjamin Birkenhake, Tobias Jordans, Indra Schlachter, Lutz Schmitt, Marian Steinbach and Ralf Schwartz for the feedback to drafts of this article, as well as Saneef Ansari for correcting my poor English.

(ralf says:
For once please find my comments incorporated.)

Konstantin is partner of iA in Zurich. He consults and develops concepts focusing on User and Reading Experience. He blogs at konnexus about the impact of culture technologies and UX. Twitter: @konnexus

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Am I Allowed? - Nilofer Merchant on Innovation"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

Here is an outstanding talk from Nilofer Merchant (and an interesting post about the background to it) – it is well worth your time:

 

Here are some of the key points that jump out at me in this talk:

• New ideas should change us: One of her first points is that even though people frequently talk about being in favour of innovation, in practice many of these same people actually block it. Why? Because new ideas lead to change, and we often don’t like to change. Do we secretly resist innovation? This is a question that merits serious thought.

  I was fortunate enough to talk with Nilofer face-to-face last week. We discussed a variety of things, including management books. She strongly made the point that if we’re going to write things that genuinely have an impact on people, then we should be explicit about how we want them to behave differently after reading these offerings. New ideas should change us, and we should be conscious of this whenever we create, share, or encounter new ideas. And we should be open to this in all of these situations as well.

• The key question that you encounter about innovation is: Am I Allowed Here? Are organisations serious about wanting ideas from people? In many cases, again, there is a gap between the rhetoric and the practice. This relates very strongly with the first point. Seeing the world differently drives innovation. But in many places, seeing the world differently is not welcome – and this contributes to the feeling that you’re not allowed to innovate. Giving yourself permission is often the biggest step you take in becoming innovative. If you’re a manager, supporting people who see the world differently is critical.
• We often filter out ideas that we haven’t encountered before: normal is good, and fitting in is good. At least, that’s what our brain tells us. One consequence of thinking this way is that if we run across an idea that is novel (at least to us), we block it out. This is a problem. A lot of our management practice is designed to reduce variation – to make things more efficient, to eliminate problems, to turn as much of our work as possible into a routine, or an algorithm. But innovation requires increasing variation.
• Ideas grow when they are shared: the last big idea in the talk is that ideas get better when they’re built upon. In order for this to happen, we have to let them go. This again is counterintuitive. Our great ideas are ours, right? Nope.

These are just three of the ways that we block innovation, even if we think we’re in favour of it.

How I’d Like You to Change Your Behaviour After Reading This

Here are some things you can do to address these issues:

• Give yourself permission to innovate, even if you think you’re not allowed to.
• If you’re a manager, find ways to support people that increase the diversity of ideas in your organisation. Don’t just focus on improving efficiency.
• Make a conscious effort to run across new ideas. Subscribe to blogs that you don’t agree with, or that make you mad, and engage with these ideas.
• Let your next idea go. Share it, and see how it grows.

Ideas have power, and great ideas should change how we act. And remember, that’s how we act, collectively.

(ralf says:
Start with small ideas and innovations. Get used to it yourself. Let your people get used to ideas and innovation.
People kill ideas, if they feel uncomfortable, because these ideas change grown behaviour, change ways of working, doing business, getting done your daily routine.
Try to get people to think, ask them for their opinion, their experiences, their ideas(!). Try to get people to write their own agenda, not yours.
Try to get people acquainted to small changes of behaviour. Let them lead the  meeting. ...
If they love all this, talk about that great feeling of embracing change, being creative, and innovative.
Then try the next step, the bigger idea ...

Innovation is a culture - not a process!)

Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle

Dear Bill, Let Steve Ballmer Pay Skype's $8.5 billion from his Private Assets!

Bill, I know, you are out of that business, sort of. But that is the time to speak out. This is ridiculous.

What is Steve Ballmer doing? He is the CEO, he has to know what the future brings, years ahead. Otherwise he, no one, can truly lead a company or brand.

Come on, buying Skype for $ 8.5 billion? WTF!?

"It was two years after launch, in October 2005, that Skype shook off its skinny startup status and was at the centre of a whopping $2.5bn buyout from eBay, paid half in cash and half in shares." (tnw)

He could have bought it back then - if he had only known where to head with his company. He joined Microsoft in 1980, and is leading (sort of) it since 2000 - he should know.

By acting as a truly visionary leader he could have saved the company some $ 6,000 million!

Or could have saved about the same amount - if he had bought Skype 4 years later from ebay, like those guys did:

"Ebay has agree to sell Skype to a group of private investors including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen in a deal which values the internet telephony company at $2.75 billion." (wired)

These were the guys who now sold Skype to Steve for $ 8.5 Billion! Ain't that truly ridiculous?

This adds up to 3 misjudgements justs concerning Skype - not to mention the NOKIA thing.

Of course managers do make mistakes and they should be encouraged to do so - but not the same mistake over and over again!

He should pay the on-top out of his private pocket, as he owns "$14.5 billion and is ranked number 46 on the Forbes list of billionaires", or?

[L/M NET] Tom Fishburne > "Innovation Funnel"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Business Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility: Tom - Tim - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

Every company has some form of innovation funnel. The funnel is wide at the front to capture potential ideas and narrows to the select few that launch. Projects progress from the idea stage through design and ultimately to market.

Amazingly, the average new product success rate is less than 10%. So companies spend a lot of time on this innovation funnel looking for ways to boost their hit rate. Most companies focus on the back end. They raise the bar, elevate the hurdles, and tighten the scrutiny, allowing fewer ideas to make it through. They inject more idea killers and sharp teeth into the process.

Yet running a more severe gauntlet doesn’t necessarily lead to better ideas. It can lead to safer ideas, but the added internal review cycles and scrutiny sometimes sand away what makes ideas most unique.

Funnel focus is better placed on the front end. Ensure a heavier and constant stream of new ideas and then find ways to test versions of those ideas in the market. Learn from actual use of the ideas and spend less time in stage gates.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman shared some entrepreneurial observations recently, including this gem on innovation:

“Launch early. Unless you’re Steve Jobs, you’re most likely partially wrong about what your theory was. So launch early and often. Launching early attracts customer engagement, and it’s the customer who’s going to tell you what’s wrong so you can correct it.”

I think this iterative approach can apply to physical products, not just web products. Betabrand in San Francisco launches a new idea each and every week. Some do well and some don’t, but they learn with small stakes. Small stakes allow them to place frequent bets.

Rather than try to lower the failure rate, lower the cost of failure.

(ralf says:
In most companies the above procedure is derived directly from their (ineffective) strategy & innovation process, thinking, talking deciding just once a year: all brains, man power and commitment are put behind one single meeting, shot, window of opportunity.

But these times are over for good. You cannot manage the new individuality, independence, and impatience of people at just 3 days of 365. You have to live the new life, second by second, day by day.

Changing this will automatically lead to Tom's reco.)

Tom, when not cartooning (eg. for Marketing Week), is method's international managing director. Based in London, he frequently speaks at campuses, companies, and conferences about marketing, cartooning, and how to spread business ideas. Twitter: @tomfishburne

Business Innovation: One Tonne Life - Actions Speak Louder than Words!

From the One Tonne Life project website:

"One tonne of carbon dioxide per person and year is a major challenge bearing in mind that the global average today is about seven tonnes.

However, house specialists A-hus, power supplier Vattenfall and Volvo Cars believe that with the right know-how, the right technology and confident, consistent behaviour it is possible for the test family to approach the one-tonne target figure without departing significantly from its regular lifestyle or standard of living.

Much of the technology and the solutions the family will use are already available to the general public or will be in the near future. The necessary preconditions are there – right now!"

...

"One Tonne Life” is a project in which A-hus, Vattenfall, Volvo Cars and other partners will create a climate-smart household. A selected couple with young children will try to meet the low carbon dioxide target yet at the same time live a normal life. They will be helped in a variety of ways, not least with a climate-smart house featuring solar cells on the roof that are used to recharge the electric car parked in the driveway.

Experts from the Chalmers University of Technology with take part in the project in order to ensure a reliable calculation of the family’s carbon dioxide emissions."

Why this is important? Because all innovation will have to inhale and incorporate that philosophy to be/come successful in the future. You better start today!

EVERY product, service, offering may support that goal! And the more the more disruptive you become!

Brand Engagement: 7 Myths of Hyper-Social Organizations and Why Human 1.0 is Key

“With the rise of social media, which provides a massive platform of participation and a social infrastructure that is finally catching up with the conference infrastructure, the social element is reentering commerce and business with a vengeance.

People can now claim a share of voices that is equal or larger than that of companies, employees can now develop support networks that cross the traditional hierarchical organization charts, and people can once again behave the way they were hardwired to behave in business and commerce–tribally, humanly, and socially.

To understand the changes that are afoot in the world of business you are better off understanding Human 1.0, which took tens of thousands of years to develop, rather than Web 2.0, which took merely a decade.”

- Francois Gossieaux, via changethis

A click downloads the full presentation, a pdf, by Francois.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Tools Don’t Solve Problems, People Do"

Note:  Please welcome Tim Kastelle at lead/marke NET. He is a lecturer in Innovation Management at the University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle.
Please enjoy Tim's thoughtful contributions!
(L/M NET features Tim's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

 

What do you do if the tools you use to improve your innovation process actually make it worse?

I had a meeting yesterday with one of our research partners to go over some of the results of our recent survey. The research has two parts – we are mapping the innovation and knowledge-sharing networks within the organisation, and we are also looking at how effective they are at managing the innovation process. Finally, we’re trying to figure out how these two things interact. Yesterday we were talking about their innovation process.

We surveyed about 100 people about the organisation’s effectiveness in managing the innovation value chain. The innovation value chain looks at how effective you are at generating ideas, selecting and testing ideas, and getting ideas to spread. I’ve pictured it previously like this:

In order to innovate effectively, you need to be good at all three parts of the process. Firms rarely suffer from a lack of ideas, and our partner is the same. The part of the process that they are the worst at is selecting and testing ideas. These are some of the questions on which they scored particularly poorly:

• It takes too long to develop novel project solutions to the point where they can be used.
• We do not have the time to develop innovative ideas for potential reuse outside of the project they were invented on.
• We have a risk-averse attitude towards trying novel project solutions.

The irony of this situation is that they have invested a fair bit of money into a software package which has the primary purpose of helping them with exactly this step in the process.

As I discussed this with our contact, she looked at the survey results, then she said “You know, none of those things are problems that can be solved with technology.”

I thought that this was a fantastic piece of insight.

A big part of the problem here is that they invested in a tool, and the expected the tool to solve their problem. Unfortunately, the tool doesn’t create more time for people, and it doesn’t increase their innovation skills. Their tool has moved them to the right on the Innovation Matrix, but it hasn’t moved them up it:

This is why the Innovation Matrix is useful – because tools and skills are two separate things. You can increase one without affecting the other. As Jeffrey Phillips wrote in a perceptive post today, innovation is the last people-centric process:

The fact is that people play a disproportionate role in innovation when compared to any other important function. That’s because, unlike many other processes, the work can’t be divided into simple tasks that can be automated by a computer or accelerated by inanimate processes. So here’s the important question: if people play such a vital role in innovation, why do we starve innovation of the best people in the organization? If people are so vital to innovation, why do we intentionally limit the amount of time we allow for innovators to work?

There are a few key lessons in this:

• Innovation tools and innovation skills are two separate things: people often think that they can solve their innovation problems simply by finding the right tool. This is rarely true. In general, to improve innovation you have to improve skills and capabilities. Tools can be used to facilitate this process, but they can’t do it on their own.
• One of the biggest obstacles to innovation is lack of time: if innovation is important, people need the time and space to work on developing, testing, and spreading new ideas. If you are a manager and you want your people to be more innovative, you have to give them the time needed to do this.
• Tools don’t solve problems, people do: this is why innovation is still people-centric. It’s more important to remove obstacles to innovation than it is to give people tools.

There’s no magic bullet here, no perfect tool. So stop looking for one. Instead, start experimenting. Find the things that work, and scale these up.

Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. @timkastelle.

Drew Neisser > "Eight Tips on Loving Your Start-Up"

Note:  Don't miss 5 Most Basic Entrepreneurial Lessons from 5 Years of Pro Bono Consultancy at my distinctive leadership blog. ... But before: Enjoy Drew's post!
(L/M NET features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

Job satisfaction need not be fleeting for entrepreneurs especially if they follow these 8 tips gleaned from an interview with ZogSports founder, Robert Herzog.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

Robert Herzog founded ZogSports a few months after watching an airplane crash into what was his office on the 96^th floor of the World Trade Center tower.  Eight years later, after growing his company from one sport to a dozen, from five hundred participants on 29 teams to sixty thousand on 4,000 teams in three markets, Herzog happily admits that, “I love what I do everyday.”  How Herzog has been able to sustain his initial enthusiasm is both instructive and inspiring, revealing 8 tips for just about any entrepreneur who actually wants to enjoy the journey.

1. Pursue your Passions

Duh, right?  After all, why would you go to the trouble of starting a business if you didn’t love the idea?  [Pause here if you’re in it for the money.]   With passion comes insight and hopefully an unmet need.  In Herzog’s case, the insight came after meeting his wife playing co-ed softball.  “I played in all these other recreational sports leagues and while I had fun with the sports aspect of it, they provided terrible customer service,” explained Herzog.  Knowing he could do better, he added “I wanted to create what I wished had existed when I was single.”

2. Make sure its Meaningful

This is one of the lofty notions that sounds good at the beginning but can be tough to sustain once an organization matures.  Recognizing a growing interest in altruism, Herzog made charity the third pillar of ZogSports along with the sports and social aspects of the service.  Herzog is understandably proud that the organization has helped raise one million for charity thus far but takes just as much joy from the sports and social aspects.  “I organize other people’s fun for a living,” explained Herzog, offering a broader perspective on what can make a job meaningful.

3. Hire the Happy

While most entrepreneurs will tell you the importance of building a team of different personalities and skill sets, few will call serious attention to the attitudes of these hires.  “When I hire people, I ask a whole series of questions about how much fun they are,” explained Herzog.  “We don’t hire people who are really uptight,” added Herzog, who considers himself the most uptight of the bunch.   “When I started Zog, I wanted to create a workplace that was fun, open and collaborative,” noted Herzog, who I witnessed greet a random team captain with outright exuberance.

4. Prepare yourself Properly

The serial entrepreneur is often content to get his/her idea off the ground and then move on, requiring a modest amount of prior experience.  Herzog, on the other hand, brought a wide range of experience to his new company, enabling him to adapt to the changing nature of his job.  “I feel like having a whole bunch of different jobs before this was incredibly helpful,” insisted Herzog.  Having been both a management and operations consultant and executive at several start-ups, Herzog “was about making things better,” which also ensured he was unlikely to get bored as the company grew.

5. Forget about Funding

Spend time with entrepreneurs and inevitably the conversation drifts back to finding VC funding.  And while not every entrepreneur is in a position to bootstrap his or her idea, don’t assume that outside funding equates to job satisfaction.  Self-funded from the start, Herzog has not sought outside investors.  Explained Herzog, “I have found that my job is so much easier because I don’t have anybody else’s money in here telling me how fast we should grow.”  Also relating this independence to his high job satisfaction, Herzog offered emphatically, “I don’t ever want to work for anybody else again!”

6. Emphasize the Experience

A lot of start-ups narrowly define their offering to the product or service at hand and in doing so miss the larger opportunity.  In the case of ZogSports, Herzog is quick to note that their business transcends sports.  “Our goal is to be the highlight of a ‘zoggers’ week,” and to do that explained Herzog means that every customer interaction from registration to the games to the post-game happy hours needs “to be overwhelmingly positive and fun.”  The end of result of this emphasis on experience is that 80-85% of the new zoggers come from positive referrals, keeping marketing costs down and CEO smiles up.

7. Live your Life

While working long hours is hard to avoid at the start-up stage, entrepreneurs who continue at this pace year after year are unlikely to say, “I love my job.”  Although Herzog admits to having worked 80-90 hours a week initially, he has avoided over-extending himself and the business since then.  “I never wanted to work that much and completely sacrifice every other aspect of my life,” explained Herzog.  A father of two, Herzog also derives helpful instruction from his family time.  Admiring his son’s ability to be happy 24/7, Herzog explained, “I look at him and say, wow that’s just amazing, why should I dwell on this thing that’s bothering me?”

8. Grow your Goals

Like sharks, entrepreneurs have to keep moving, challenging themselves and their employees to do better.  The gleeful Herzog is no different here.  “I see my enjoyment in my job being tied to being able to grow the business and provide my staff new and exciting opportunities,” he added.  As such, Herzog is investing in new systems that will make it easier to offer a standardized experience from game to game, sport to sport and market to market.  With these systems in place, Herzog hopes to be able to expand to 15-20 markets in the next five years, a growth pace that will be hard not to love.

Final Note:

Given that he is in the business of providing “an escape from people’s daily lives,” it is little wonder that Herzog puts a premium on having a well-balanced life himself.  He also is well aware that his situation is not the norm nor easy to maintain, “I couldn’t think of a better job for me but if I didn’t have to work hard at it, I might not appreciate it.”

[Robert Herzog, Founder of ZogSports]

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

Business Innovation > Kevin Kelly: No Harmony, All Flux

"Hollywood has mutated from an industry of classic huge, vertically integrated corporations into the world's best example of a network economy.

Eventually, every knowledge-intensive industry will end up in the same flattened, atomized state.

Hollywood just has gotten there first."

Kevin Kelly

Business Innovation: 20 Predictions for the Next 25 Years

The first week of 2011 ends. If you still think about strategy once a year (in September!?), you better start today with rolling micro strategies.

Here are 20 scenarios from the Observer's team of experts for the next 25 years - a foundation for your vision and longterm strategy, and of course to direct your micro strategies:

"1 Geopolitics: 'Rivals will take greater risks against the US'

2 The UK economy: 'The popular revolt against bankers will become impossible to resist'

3 Global development: 'A vaccine will rid the world of Aids'

4 Energy: 'Returning to a world that relies on muscle power is not an option'

5 Advertising: 'All sorts of things will just be sold in plain packages'

6 Neuroscience: 'We'll be able to plug information streams directly into the cortex'

7 Physics: 'Within a decade, we'll know what dark matter is'

8 Food: 'Russia will become a global food superpower'

9 Nanotechnology: 'Privacy will be a quaint obsession'

10 Gaming: 'We'll play games to solve problems'

11 Web/internet: 'Quantum computing is the future'

12 Fashion: 'Technology creates smarter clothes'

13 Nature: 'We'll redefine the wild'

14 Architecture: What constitutes a 'city' will change

15 Sport: 'Broadcasts will use holograms'

16 Transport: 'There will be more automated cars'

17 Health: 'We'll feel less healthy'

18 Religion: 'Secularists will flatter to deceive'

19 Theatre: 'Cuts could force a new political fringe'

20 Storytelling: 'Eventually there'll be a Twitter classic'"