Monthly Archives: June 2011
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to talk about innovation inside organizations. One way is to talk about the systems and processes that are in place to manage innovation. These include things like new product pipelines, stage gate reviews, idea management programs, online portals for open innovation and so forth. It may include elaborate research & development programs and cross-discipline innovation teams. It’s whatever innovation “infrastructure” an organization may have or create. The other way is to talk about the personal and interpersonal behaviors, and ways of thinking that people in the organization engage in. How innovation friendly is the company’s culture? How welcome are new ideas and fresh perspectives? How open are folks to change? How willing are they to take calculated risks? I doubt that anyone would disagree with me when I say that these are both important aspects of the innovation picture. Yet I think there’s great … Continue reading
In my last blog I outlined some of the challenges facing Open Innovation in the context of large contracting relationships. I’ll now move on to some of the top line considerations when working with suppliers, from the perspective of both customer and supplier. The first guideline, very familiar to those companies who follow the Want/Find/Get/Manage sequence, is to fully understand what you want before you engage the supplier. If you start the discussion by simply challenging the supplier to “bring me innovation”, you will both be disappointed. You won’t have your expectations met, and your supplier will invest a lot of time and effort bringing you options that won’t interest you. It’s much more interesting if you share your strategy, customer needs, technology gaps etc before describing specific challenges. Not only does this set the context for the innovation gaps you need to fill, it employs the creativity …
Here’s a shortcut to developing effective messaging to influence your prospects. Your product or service is intended to create a successful outcome. We talk a lot about painting a picture of success for your prospects. What will their life look like six months from now? How do they envision their business, their personal objectives? Prospects will be drawn to that positive future. But achieving that positive future still isn’t a priority for many buyers, especially if there’s little perceived pain in their world today. Your job is to identify that pain. Communicate that pain. Quantify the impact of not making a change or not taking advantage of an opportunity. If the detail of that pain isn’t compelling to your prospect, move on. You’re not talking to a qualified prospect. But if you can isolate and enumerate the pain, you can also describe the pain killer. The pain killer is not … Continue reading
My friend Dave is a great guy, but terrible to go to restaurants with. Invariably, he ends up peppering the server with endless questions, trying to order things not on the menu, and complaining about the food once it’s served. People like Dave may be hard to dine with, but they can be great for innovation. That’s because they’re continually dissatisfied with what’s available, looking instead for an ideal experience. The best innovators utilize several techniques to understand consumer dissatisfaction – and then use that understanding to drive innovative ideas. Listen to problems, not solutions Recently, many have cited Henry Ford (who famously quipped, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”) and Steve Jobs (“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them”) to make the case that listening to customer feedback is pointless. But as … Continue reading
Below is a rough draft of an article I wrote for the current issue iSixSigma magazine – to see the finished version – subscribe here. Can the popular Six Sigma framework be adapted to look at innovation? Much has been written about how a formal Six Sigma approach and a formal approach to innovation cannot co-exist. But is that really true? On the surface these two formal approaches personify the natural tension between exploitation and exploration activities within any organization. Six Sigma is generally thought of as an exploitation activity, while innovation is usually associated with exploration. When I speak of exploitation, I’m not speaking of child labor and deforestation, but of optimizing the transformation of organization’s inputs into profitable outputs under its existing business model. And when I speak of exploration, I’m referring to the organization’s efforts to pursue new potential business models, new product or service areas, or … Continue reading
Braden Kelley posted a great transcript of a talk from Jeff Bezos of Amazon recently on Blogging Innovation. Here is one of the sections that I thought was really interesting: “If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give … Continue reading
