innospivs

Barry Saunders has weighing on the comments section of the previous post with some good ideas and some hot! links!

He's also made me articulate another idea that's been running round my head. You may remember this post from a month ago where I state: Innovation = Invention + Entrepreneurship. Let me spell this out in more detail.

The issue I have with most Idea Management Systems is that they only work for really obvious ideas (often ones that meet explicit needs). The wacky ideas don't get past the first stage gate. The ideation bit (where people are encouraged to come up with & discuss ideas) is fine as far as it goes. But then you get some Stalinist committee of judges and a strict project management framework. Which may be necessary if you are spending big bucks. But more money isn't always better.

Market-based approaches are slightly better but for a proper Innovation Support System you need to recreate an entrepreneurship network inside (& even outside) your organisation:

• You need ways of encouraging your employees to notice things - esp. failures & frustrations.
  
• You need ways of linking people with needs to people who have ideas.
  
• You need ways of linking people who have ideas to people who can sell ideas to others.
  
• You need multiple sources of venture capital inside your organisation.
• You need to acknowledge & reward creative theft as much (or more) than original idea creation.
• You need to actively seek out and embrace innovations that could destroy your business model - because ultimately they will, but the edge is in changing faster than your competitors.
• You need to give simple prototypes of ideas to as diverse a range of people inside your organisation and see what the hell they do with them - because it won't be what you expect.
• You probably need to engage customers, suppliers, business partners & alumni in this process.
  

You need the irate, the dreamers, the spivs & the thieves.

uneven

The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed.- William Gibson

I've been pondering Sean & Ellen's discussion around explicit, tacit & latent needs. It tied to some thinking I've been doing around innovation.

We expect innovation to come from high-tech research labs because that's where the dollars and the brains are. But that's fundamentally wrong. Innovation comes from where the challenges are. Human beings are generally quite lazy and don't want to learn or change. We only do that when we have to.

You want to find out about a possible future of finance in a resource-constrained world? You'd be better off looking in Bangladesh than Wall Street. Innovation is driven by need. You want the future? Follow the need.

It also suggests that in meeting latent needs, we need to cocreate the solutions with the people feeling the problem. Easier all round really.

Still thinking. More soon.

be frustrated

I've been pondering innovation (which is invention + entrepreneurship) for a while now. It strikes me that innovators are frustrated consumers. They want something. It is not there. And rather than just shrug and say "oh well", they decide to do something about it. Innovators differ from the rest of us in that:

• They are willing to act on their frustrations.
• They have the capability to get a result when they do act.

Which means that if we want to be innovative we should cultivate our frustrations rather than ignore them. In fact we should actively seek out frustrating experiences. This is very difficult for me because I was raised with the "mustn't grumble" mentality where you made do with what you got. But I am slowly changing.

When were you frustrated today?

jumping the shark

A sure sign that an organisation's knowledge management programme has passed its prime would be its inclusion in the MAKE awards. Why? The MAKE awards are basically a beauty parade judged by execs & "experts". To get in there, you need to have written articles (preferably a book), schlepped the conference circuit, blown your own trumpet until your lips are cracked and dry. Which means that your best work is probably behind you and your organisation is presumably not getting your full attention.

A similar beauty-parade rigorous survey method is used by Boston Consulting Group to compile Business Week's list of the world's 50 most Innovative companies. It's actually very useful - but not quite for its stated purpose. It tells you what senior execs think innovation is:

• Nifty design ("Yeah, those iPods & iPhones are cool, man. Why can't we make something that f***ing cool?")
• Something about doing things better ("Didn't Toyota come up with six sigma? No? Huh, GE? Who then? Motorola??? Get the f*** outta here!!! S***!!! Can we can that six sigma rustbelt program already?")
• Making truckloads of money ("Bill Gates is an a**hole. A total f***ing a**hole. God, I wish I was him. And as for those Google a**holes...")
• Making stuff cheap ("That cheap Indian car. Yeah, you know the one that looks like it would fall apart if ya farted in it. That's f***ing innovation - you tell me that isn't f***ing innovative!!! But ugly, oh jesus, fugly as all hell. Not like my iPhone, my preciousssss...")

Meanwhile Millward Brown's list of the world's Top 100 brands (sorry, brandz) is interesting to compare to Interbrand's list of world's Top 100 brands from 6 months ago. Now is Google or Coca Cola the world's biggest brand? Or are they both? Is this going to be like school sports day - does everyone get a prize? Even the ugly, spastic kid with the mother and the sister who are the same woman*? I'm guessing this brand valuation thing isn't an exact science.

*Now answers on a postcard which brand that would be.

Thanks: Johnnie

open space innovation & consumer research

Jack Leith talks about Open Space Innovation - i.e. getting consumers and corporate (marketing/manufacturing/etc) types to interact and form patterns. I like rhythm to this - first consumers then corporates then consumers then corporates again. A few observations:

• It reminds me a lot of the two-stage emergence bit in archetype production. Complexity requires iteration.
• Is it possible to do part of all of this virtually? Using a mix of discussion, drawing, etc. (I'm thinking blended facilitation here - but more on that in a week or two)
• The contact points between the consumers & corporate types is important - esp. the importance of silence, listening & observation. There's an almost ethnographic quality to it.

I reckon this would be fun to do. Anyone fancy having a go in a relatively safe environment?

Thanks: Johnnie*

*Johnnie's Twittering suggests an absolutely top-notch Phoric in the pipeline.

teens & the elderly getting fresh: innovation & social software

In the late 90s, the joke in KM circles was that KM in business was like teenage sex - lots of people talking about doing it, far fewer people actually doing it. The use of social software inside the firewall (or Enterprise 2.0) is probably the reverse - lots of it going on but very few people willing to talk about it in public - like sex among the elderly in fact.

Which brings me to the topic of innovation. I rocked up to the Innofuture Sydney gig on Thursday. There was a panel featuring people from here, here, here and here. There were some interesting comments from the panel and people on the floor but it felt like a bit of a talkfest (I contributed to this talkfest by getting in a few rants from the floor where I could). There was some debate over "what is innovation?" which I find tediously like the question "what is knowledge?"

On the one hand, they are both very, very important questions. On the other, the answers that are provided are often trite at best or opaque at worst*. Where and when they are asked is of critical importance. Knowledge and innovation are such diverse entities the local context of discussion really defines the answer that will help you. Hence the discussion needs the be anchored in the concrete and those participating in the conversation need a sufficient common context for the discussion to be meaningful.

*Please do not mention Popper's 3 worlds. They do not help. Really. They don't.

whose innovation is it anyway?

So I was talking to a dude at one of Australia's major banks. And he was enthusing about P2P lending (Kiva, Zopa, Prosper). And I said something along the lines of "You know that Grameen bank has been doing microfinance in Bangladesh for over 30 years?" He hadn't. Whilst P2P lending and microfinance are not identical, there are significant similarities.

I had a brief Skype conversation this evening with Sriram Reddy from Infoxchange and Engineers Without Borders. Some of the issues he is working on with farmers in India sound very similar to initiatives I have heard about in rural Australia.

For decades we have assumed that technology transfer in international development basically flows from the Developed World to the Developing World. That assumption is increasingly untenable.

figure it out yet?

Katie has something new & wonderful.

perspective shifts on the innovation process

A few weeks ago, Bob Sutton posted on the veracity (or otherwise) of the innovation process in most organisations. I've been pondering this, esp. after some debate with Lauchlan. My take is that organisations do need processes to manage new product development and other forms of innovation. Such processes will probably take the form of a stage gate system. However Bob's point is that most individuals in an organisation will not experience innovation in the nice linear fashion the stage gate model suggests. The uncertainty and politics of the Volvo cartoon will be closer to the day-to-day lives of those involved.

A similar cognitive dissonance can be felt when comparing a gantt chart to actual memories of a project. Project plans seem sterile compared to the rollercoaster rides of most projects. Understanding, managing & preparing for this dissonance is something that goes on in the background in most organisations. This is especially important for newbies - when the process manual or method says one thing but everyone else knows that in this case, you have to do something else.

I've been playing with the Cynefin framework & innovation stories - getting people to map the experiences of protagonists in these stories as journeys across the model as a contrast to linear innovation models. Does anyone have other ideas on dealing with this area?

actkm conference

So it is the actkm Conference 2007 tomorrow & Wednesday. I will be running on Wednesday afternoon after lunch. I have 75 mins. When I ran something similar with a bunch of UTS postgrads a couple of weeks ago, it went for 3 hours. I have no idea what will work and what won't - but hey, that's half the fun.

I am quite excited - Dave Gurteen will be there. As will Patrick Lambe, Laurie Lock Lee, Luke Naismith and a bunch of other people.

Dave Snowden casts his pod

First Patrick, then Shawn & now Dave hits us with his KM Australia 2007 gear. What is it with my favorite KM thinkers putting their stuff out there for free!!!

I agree with most of DS's positions (which will not doubt infuriate him). There is one thing that I think he is half wrong about at the 22:40 on the KM Australia keynote mp3.

DS states that creativity does not lead to innovation but rather the reverse - i.e. creativity is the product of an innovative system. And that innovation requires starvation, pressure & diversity.

Here I think he's half right. Trying to get people to be "creative" if everything around them shows that such creativity will not be recognised, rewarded, etc is foolish and heart-breaking. Innovation (as a complex social system) determines and is determined by individual creativity. However, research indicates that starvation & pressure is not always useful for creativity. It may be useful at an organisational level for innovation because a threatening environment can increase an organisation's appetite for risk.

If you want creativity & innovation there is a productive tension between giving people the room (intellectual, emotional) they need to innovate and allowing the organisation to stay off-balance enough to implement those innovations.

BTW I hadn't seen the traffic light /roundabout example before - loved 'em...

Brainstorming (2): Initial comments

Gavin makes the following comments to the previous post:

You know, I am not a great fan of brainstorming ... it can and does waste a great deal of time and the benefits are questionable.

I'd like to draw Gavin out a bit more on the details around this. I suspect he could be referring to badly-done brainstorming - which is probably 95% of the brainstorming that goes on in the world. Brainstorming can waste time if:

• Participants haven't prepared. A lot of brainstorming is done "cold". People come into a room and they are expected to come up with creative ideas. Brains are a bit like cars or ovens - they take a while to warm up.
• This warming-up process will take much, much longer if participants don't already know & trust each other. In fact, it probably won't happen. You don't want to say anything stupid in front of strangers. And if someone doesn't say something stupid during an exercise like brainstorming then you're not doing it right.
• The facilitation is weak. Brainstorming requires a strong yet subtle facilitator. Otherwise people start arguing the merits of the ideas presented - rather than building on them and offering new ones.

Gavin then makes the following comment:

As a workshop technique, it can however, be a very good way of creating consensus amongst a disparate group.

Which I have also observed though I'd like Gavin to add a bit more detail here. The point should be made that brainstorming in its original form is not something that would work well with disparate groups without a lot of preparation. You are interested in wild, divergent thinking and you need people around you that you trust. However a technique like brainstorming can allow a group to develop a common yet multi-faceted view of a problem and then feel a sense of ownership around the outputs.

Anyone out there want to share their experiences with brainstorming?

Narrative

I had the great pleasure of attending a workshop run by the Anecdote crew yesterday with a few other people. I first met Shawn back when he was in the IBM Cynefin Centre and I was impressed by the extent to which they had simplified and refined many of the ideas and added from other sources - such as Most Significant Change.

Key takeaway: narrative management is all about managing with stories rather than the management of stories. You cannot control stories but you can use them to gain a rich-picture understanding of your environment.

One thought: Lauchlan discusses an HBR article on innovation. The overall framework of the authors is useful as a diagnostic - and presumably narrative techniques could be applied to this. Anecdotes around successes, failures & managerial attitudes could be matched to 6 categories: If you have mainly positive stories around a particular area then good! If you have mainly negative stories then something needs urgent attention. If you have few stories then you have an opportunity to create a capability you don't currently have...