I was explaining the value I've found in Twitter to a skeptical friend not long ago.  But when she asked how often I tweeted, I did have to honestly answer "not much".  It made me think about why I seem to have this love/hate relationship with this tool - and for me it is a tool.

Of course, I do have a Twitter account - @elldir, but I don't tweet much.  When I do, it tends to be in bursts that last a few weeks or months, and then I tend to take a long break from it.  Why? Because I would much rather talk to real, live human beings. For me there really isn't an equivalent online that can truly take the place of meeting people in person.

Also, the Twitter format, 140 characters, isn't really conducive to working out complex ideas.  If I'm going to write, I typically want to convey something I'm thinking about, explain ideas and ask others for feedback.  My online writing is about my work.  I really don't care what people are doing in their personal lives unless they are my personal friends, and i really don't care to broadcast my personal life, so Twitter doesn't really fit into my personal life in any way.

However, I cannot deny the benefits Twitter has brought to my professional life.  The greatest benefit to me is that it is an excellent way to find others like yourself.  I've been very pleasantly surprised to find so many like-minded individuals from all over the world who have given me excellent feedback, criticism, encouragement, and support over the years.  Yes, I get that from this blog, but many people have only found this blog because of the way Twitter makes it easy to be found. I also enjoy reading links that others post to interesting articles I may not have found.

Some people have done very creative things with their Twitter accounts.  I still smile when I think of Brent Spiner's (remember him as Data on Star Trek) suspense story he wrote in 140 character chunks. Brilliant.  But I'm not Brent Spiner, not even close.  For me, I have to sit down and interact with Twitter at the expense of anything else I could be doing in that moment.  Since I work on confidential projects, I can't tweet about what I'm thinking most of the time if it's directly work related.  My writing is about abstracted ideas and models I develop from aggregated work experiences. Tweeting regularly about specific experiences would require that I sanitize my thoughts to the point that I don't fine them particularly interesting or relevant.

And therein lies the rationale for why I both love and hate Twitter.  I love the ability to find people I wouldn't have found. The new connections are very valuable to me.  But I hate the fact that I have to actually sit down and interact with it.  I don't like to divert my attention from what I'm doing at the present moment, so you'll never catch me tweeting from a restaurant, a meeting, or even while I'm watching TV.  For that reason, I will miss things that pass by on the Twitter stream.  Once a woman I know was in town, and the only way she let me know was via Twitter.  I found the tweet a few days after she had come and gone.  So for me it will never replace email or even a text message.

But I do look forward to finding even more great people out there, so I'm going to try (again) to focus on tweeting for brief blocks of time during the week.  If you respond and don't hear from me right away, now you'll know why.

A friend of mine, Alicia Arnold, wrote a new book which will be published in August titled Creatively Ever After; A Path to Innovation. She sent me an advance copy, and there were several things about it that I felt were excellent.

Alicia makes very clever use of nursery rhymes as a non-threatening way to introduce commonly experienced business problems.  In the book, the main problem centers on Jack and Jill's desire to come up with an innovative way to get down the hill with a pail of water - without falling and tumbling down.  Many businesses encounter this type of challenge as they try to develop new solutions to achieve their goals. 

This simple analogy carries through the book in a very engaging way as Jack and Jill experience many of the common pitfalls that companies face during the innovation process.  It then introduces a structured process for creativity called the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS).  Personally, I'm not a fan of structured, facilitated, processes as a way to solve new problems.  However, I do understand that some people, (either very linear thinkers, or those in companies that do not reward deviation from the norm) will often need a structured process to break out of ingrained patterns of thinking.  In that sense, as long as the process focuses on exploring ways to identify the right problem before exploring solutions it can work.  CPS does that.

As Jack and Jill's journey to find a new solution continues, the problems identified and the ultimate solutions developed are ingenious.  It is a great example of how any challenge can be overcome by thinking differently.  While the book does follow the CPS process to achieve that goal, it can be clearly seen that the process alone is not what solves the problem. (This too is a common pitfall that many companies run into.) As new characters are brought in to assist, they are chosen for specific skills that are relevant to the task at hand - the task being to think differently.

They say "It ain't easy being easy", and this book, with it's engaging, entertaining story that can be read in about an hour surely couldn't have been easy to develop.  But it is this accessibility that makes it a great tool for anyone trying to get their organization unstuck. This is not one of those books that will be handed out that no one ever finds the time to read.  It's something that parents could enjoy with their kids, with each one getting tremendous value from it.

Well done Alicia!

Last week I gave a talk in a class called Organizing for Innovation and Design, taught by Siobhan O'Mahony at Boston University.  At the start of the class, I asked the students if there were any topics they wanted to cover specifically.  They had read my bio, and checked out this blog, and one of the students wanted to understand the "method to my madness" in terms of my diverse educational background.  They also were interested in my thoughts about continuing directly to grad school vs working before continuing their education.

During the course of my talk and Q&A, I managed to cover most of my thoughts on the multidisciplinary background - we were calling it the "patchwork education."  In short, I feel that it is important to understand how different disciplines need to work together, and I felt I needed to learn about several of them in order to make better connections between them.  My fields of study were engineering, design, and business, and rather than jumping between them, I fuse them together every day.  Don't get me wrong, subject matter expertise is important, but innovation is not very successful when attempted by groups that live in isolated silos.  Innovation requires making connections between seemingly disconnected disciplines.

By the end of the talk, I realized that I hadn't covered all the questions, so I sent Prof. O'Mahony an email with my follow-up responses, which included these thoughts on the multidisciplinary education question. 

Also, in terms of learning to combine creative problem solving and critical thinking skills, I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend taking a course or two in English Literature and/or Social Anthropology.  My undergraduate minor was in English Literature, and in terms of learning how to discern what consumers mean from what they say, it was invaluable.  In courses where you are expected to critically analyze the literature, you are learning to articulate the motivations of the characters beyond what is written, and to understand how the author is using language to create a mood or feeling.  With Social Anthropology you are doing the same thing in terms of understanding cultures through their artifacts.  The most important thing we can do through in-depth consumer interviewing is to develop an understanding that is deep enough that we can anticipate a consumer’s likely response to stimulus. (By stimulus I mean a new feature or product introduction, a competitor’s likely action, etc)  You just don’t learn that in traditional Market Research – sorry!

I would love to hear from others who have pursued similar paths.  One thing I know we will all have in common is that our experience in creating our own educational path serves us well as we connect seemingly disconnected silos in our careers!

There is an interesting post on the Innovation Policy Blog.  In this post they echo and comment on many of the statements from the President's State of the Union address about the need to invest in innovation.  I agree with most of these statements, but like many ideas I hear about innovation, they are "correct but insufficient" to truly encourage American innovation.

Why? First, they make some fairly explicit assumptions that innovation is synonymous with explorations in science and technology.  Granted, the group that supports the blog is the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, but I feel that these assumptions define innovation too narrowly.  This can lead to a misunderstanding of innovation by the people needed to support the right innovation policies.  I would not expect politicians to understand all the details involved to realize the greatest value from innovation.  It is our job to present the issues so that the right decisions will be made.

Second, it talks about funding scientific exploration without much discussion of what the goals of the exploration would be, or how progress would be measured.  While the blog is supposedly non-partisan, framing the issue in this way will probably scare anyone who thinks we need better controls on government spending.  These same people would most likely invest in sound propositions with a likelyhood of a positive return.

If it were up to me, I would reframe this discussion.  The way it is presented, spending on innovation could easily be perceived as throwing money into a deep abyss that would create a scientific playground without much value coming from it.  Instead, there is an opportunity to discuss the fact that there is much more to innovation than scientific skunkworks.  From my experience, there are many areas of innovation that would benefit from increased funding.  Here's a short list:

• When working in innovation, it's important to understand that there are right answers and wrong answers.  Often there is more than one right answer, and that can confuse people into thinking that anything new is good.  The rest of the list is based on this understanding.
• Some people are better at the cognitive skills necessary for innovation. They are inherently better at recognizing right from wrong answers when presented with new ideas.  This skill needs to be better understood and developed.  I see at as having similar to having aptitude toward math, art, science, etc.
• There are ways to make sure we are solving the right problem before we start offering solutions.  No matter how "new", "innovative", or "different" an idea is, if it doesn't solve a necessary problem, it's not a necessary solution.
• There are ways to assess the viability of new ideas in context before investing in development. Even those who are the best will benefit from evaluating and improving ideas before they are developed. This helps to develop financial projections so development dollars are channeled to the right places.
• We can create metrics to evaluate innovation performance. They will be different from measures currently used to evaluate performance on known initiatives.
• There are ways to make the logic behind a new idea more transparent.  This helps those who are not as skilled to make better downstream decisions during development.

These are topics that have evolved from my years of working in the innovation space, and they are the focus of my current research. I would hate to think they wouldn't get funded because they would not fit under the heading "scientific exploration".  It's time to elevate the general comprehension of innovation.  While I absolutely do not believe that every dollar spent needs to have a specific return identified before starting (then it wouldn't be innovation after all), I do not believe that just throwing money at "exploration" will be very useful in the long run either.

I hope I read the blog post too literally.  I hope that everything I've talked about is embedded in the agenda to "invest in innovation".  However, based on what I hear I'm not sure it is.  Any ideas for what we can do to to get more money spent, in the right ways, and on the right things to ensure that investment in innovation is a true opportunity and not an abyss?

I talk a lot about how innovation work is different if you are developing an incremental innovation vs a truly breakthrough product.  As you can expect, the question then comes up about how a breakthrough product should be defined.  This is a great question, and I’ve done a lot of thinking about it.  What’s interesting is that the definition can change if you take an internal company perspective, vs a market perspective, so I’ll try to reconcile why these differences may exist. 

From a market oriented perspective, a true breakthrough is a product (or service, or other type of offering) that enables people to access benefits that would otherwise be out of reach.  Sometimes we see this happen through products that have been incrementally improved to the point that the originally intended benefits are finally accessible to the intended consumers.  Other times, this happens when a technology or category is created that makes all existing alternatives obsolete.

This is why it can be confusing to define a breakthrough from an internal company perspective.  Inside a company, an incremental improvement may not be seen as a breakthrough innovation, even though it may be the point at which the market is finally disrupted.  This is why I choose to take the market perspective, since an innovation is ultimately judged by its impact on the market.  A breakthrough disrupts a market dynamic.  It doesn’t really matter how you get there, but it does matter that you understand your market well enough to identify the dynamics you want to disrupt, and intentionally develop products that will achieve that goal.

In my last post I discussed four dimensions of innovation. Innovation is a very broad term, and impasses in understanding often result when people are using similar terms to describe very different things. In summary:

Innovation for Optimization - Creating and developing new ways to manufacture and deliver existing offerings to the market.

Innovation for Improvement - Improving the existing offering as it is perceived by the market.

Innovation for Invention - Developing new offerings that will deliver known benefits in ways that are currently unknown, but ultimately more relevant to the market.

Innovation for Disruption - Developing an offering that changes the competitive landscape of the market.

In distinguishing between different dimensions of innovation, we can begin to see that working to achieve the goals of each type of innovation requires very different types of problem-posing and problem-solving skills.  This also results in the need to make sure the innovation process itself is conducive to the work that needs to be done.  Let's think about how the process may differ to best enable each Dimension.

If we think about the first two Dimensions - Optimization and Improvement - the similarity is that the criteria for a successful is already defined, and the benchmarks are well established.  With Optimization, the goal is to deliver the same offering that has always been delivered.  Success can be easily measured.  With Improvement, the offering is different from the existing offering, but the existing offering is used in comparison and as a benchmark.  Since both of these Dimensions can be compared to what the company is currently doing, the existing development process is probably fine for managing the work.  Yes, issues arise when teams try to introduce levels of variation in Improvement projects, but most often, the process itself will dictate how far the variation can stray from the norm. 

In most companies, Innovation for Improvement is about as far as they can go in developing something new.  That's because that's the limit of most existing development processes.  If they can even attempt the second two Dimensions - Invention and Disruption - they struggle with them at best.  Think of the large corporations that spend lots of money on blue-sky R&D, open-ended market research, and open solicitation of new ideas that have a difficult time getting a new invention or disruption out the door.  That's because the existing development processes are not equiped to handle such a great variation on the theme.  Different processes are necessary to achieve the goals of the Invention and Disruption Dimensions.

So what does a process for Innovation for Invention and Disruption look like?  While the details may vary, there are some basic components that are necessary:

The main goal of this process is to define the criteria for a successful offering.  Just as Innovation for Optimization and Improvement start with a benchmark, it is equally necessary to know how to tell if we've done a good job.  This criteria is more fundamental than a benchmark, and is often described in terms of market motivation as expressed as an opportunity that informs all the other business disciplines. (Notice that it is not a fully formed solution. It needs to enable multiple solutions, and transcend specific technology solutions.  It should guide the development of new technology, not be a result of it.) Once this is in place, the other components follow:

It is not random.  Just because existing benchmarks are not relevant, that does not give license to just make things up.  This does not mean that everything needs to be linear, quite the contrary.  Non-linear and random are not always related.  If you've done a good job of creating the success criteria this will become obvious to the right people.  Which leads us to people:

The people need to have strong problem-posing abilities.  Too many random solutions live past their useful life because of a lack of problem-posing abilities in an organization.  In this process we must first pose the right problem, the solution to which will satisfy the success criteria.  This will then set the stage for any problem-solving activities.

The team should be multi-disciplinary.  Although people must first be selected for problem-posing abilities, they should also come from different disciplines.  This will help the team to avoid blind-spots, as well as ensure that the opportunity is translated accurately to the rest of the organization.

It must feed a development process.  Development processes are good at delivering an offering to the market.  The opportunity must be defined in such a way that the following development processes is informed, but not spoon-fed.  Therefore it is good to have some crossover people from the development team involved in the innovation process, as well as have some innovation team members move into the beginning of the development process.  Think of a baton hand-off in a relay.  It's not an abrupt hand-off at one point in time, but a gradual ramping up and down of the team members doing the transition.

These are the most important aspects, and I'm sure more points could be added.  But the important point is that this process is different from the development process: It is comprised of people with different skills, has different goals and outcomes, and should not be force-fit into an existing development process.  When people at your company talk about innovation, stop and think about defining what type of innovation is really needed, and then make sure the right process is being used to realistically enable it, and outsource it if you need to. 

A couple of months ago I was discussing models that help to think about focusing innovation efforts with Hutch Carpenter.  I said I would post one that I use, and Ooops!  I forgot to do that.  So here's a model that I often use when discussing the type of innovation capability a client wants to build.  My working definition of innovation is "doing something new that adds value to the business."  It's not just about making new products or technology.  For that reason, the people, processes and skills necessary to innovate can vary greatly, and we need to be very clear about what is necessary for each specific situation.

This model is based on two points that drive the approach to the innovation effort.  First, the degree to which the lines in each box are orderly or chaotic represents how well the end solution can be defined before the project starts.  Second, success criteria is determined differently at each innovation dimension. Let's look at how they differ.

Dimension 1 - I call this Innovation for Optimization.  The product or service that the company develops will stay the same, and innovation will focus on new ways to manufacture and deliver the offering to the market.  New technologies, processes, and organizational structures may be introduced.  Clear benchmarks for success exist, and the results can be tangibly measured with existing metrics.  The consumer will not notice a difference in the product or service, but may share in the benefits of the innovation through cost savings and ease of access to the product or service.  An example would be a new manufacturing technology that reduces production costs by 50%.

Dimension 2 - I call this Innovation for Improvement.  The goal is to improve the existing offerings themselves.  It may be that the product becomes easier to use, or new technologies will enable enhanced functionality.  In this dimension, success criteria may not exist already, and can be derived by learning directly from the market. It may involve learning what pain points the consumer has with existing products, or uncovering new uses that an upgrade can deliver.  An example would be the addition of calcium to an orange juice product.

Dimension 3 - I call this Innovation for Invention.  The goal is to develop new products and services that will provide the same benefits as existing options, but in new and better ways.  In this dimension, success criteria for the specific product attributes does not exist, and consumers may not be able to articulate the potential solutions. However, the benefits are well recognized. An example would be new products that increase the ease of eating yogurt on the go.  A yogurt company may develop new technologies or formulations to enable drinkable yogurt or yogurt in a tube. New internal benchmarks for manufacturing and cost structures may need to be created, as the company is making different products.

Dimension 4 - I call this Innovation for Disruption.  The result of this type of innovation is that it fundamentally changes the competitive landscape.  Very often - but not always, this type of innovation focuses more on changing existing business models than on changing the products themselves.  We can see this type of innovation playing out in the publishing and other media industries, as existing business models are becoming irrelevant.  New products and technologies play a part, but they are enablers that allow consumers to access media more easily and inexpensively than ever before.  The sources of power are shifting in the market, and existing benchmarks become irrelevant. Consumer research is very important here, but as a source of information about what is valued, not as a source of solutions as in dimension 2.

Since my work involves ensuring that new offerings are relevant to the market, the focus is from the perspective of how the consumer (or other end-user) will perceive the differences.  It also sets the stage for how directly the consumer can give input to what the end result will be, and guides the type of work we need to do.  From my experience, most companies are very good at Optimization, and they can often stretch to create innovative improvements.  This work can be handled in existing development processes.  In future posts, I will describe the fundamental difference in the work necessary to innovate in the 3rd and 4th dimensions, as this is where the existing development processes typically break down.

Of course your company isn't running a casino on purpose. But is it running one accidentally? You can tell based on its approach to innovation investment.

Does your company solicit new ideas for products and technologies in a more random fashion, investing in those that either can be executed with current resources, or do not pose much risk to the status quo?  Do people know the success criteria for a breakthrough idea?  In other words, is there a way to tell if a new offering with no current benchmarks is likely to succeed?  Usually the answer is no.

Does this sound familiar?  If it does, then your company probably casts a wide net in terms of investing in innovation.  Since most ideas are likely to fail, it's better to invest in more, and more varied, options to hedge your bets.  Notice I said bets, because that's exactly what the organization is doing.  The innovation process is essentially providing a mechanism to place bets knowing that most will lose, and hoping that the one(s) that succeed will cover the losses.  Isn't that what happens in a casino?  It provides a place for people to come and place many bets, hoping that a few wins will cover the losses.

On the other hand, does your company understand its market, define new opportunities to better meet the market's needs, and develop technologies that enable new products and services to satisfy those opportunities?  This may not be nearly as sexy an option at first glance, however it does provide a way to tell if radical new ideas have a chance of succeeding before investin in their development.  The chance of failure in developing something truly new and different is greatly mitigated. This is the difference between investing and betting.

In a real casino, the house always wins when most bets are lost.  In a real company, the only way the house always wins is to ensure success.  So why are most companies pursuing the casino model?

We've changed the name and look of the blog to better integrate with my consulting practice.  The new name for the practice is Synaptics Group, Inc., and the blog will now be called the Synaptics Blog.   These changes should better reflect the focus of the work, which is on Market Relevant Innovation. 

What's Market Relevant Innovation?  Think of it this way.  Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, nor did they invent e-commerce.  But they did develop the most market relevant way to access media, through the development of the iPod, iTunes, and the business model that connects them.

This is just the first step in connecting the two sites.  The design will probably go through another iteration or two in the next few months, and I'll continue to post the latest thinking on Market Relevant Innovation!

If your organization is like most, there are many processes in place that ensure no one can make a mistake that could cost the company vast sums of money, damage its reputation, or do other terrible damage.  While many of these processes are in place for a good reason, has anyone ever looked at the trade-offs that have been made as a result?

The reason I point this out is that I find it interesting that these processes are never, ever questioned.  Even though I've watched companies miss out on very lucrative opportunities as a result of blindly following existing processes, I have been left wondering why no one questioned what else could have been done to have avoided missing out on the opportunity.  A lot of effort goes into protecting the company from harm, which makes it all the more interesting that missed opportunities are seldom viewed as harmful.

I highly value thoughtfulness, and due diligence, and I am not advocating that companies abandon all existing processes to encourage people to chase after anything they want.  Far from it.  I just wanted to point out that it does seem a bit odd that questions about the value of missed opportunities are seldom, if ever, raised.  It would be interesting to see if there are some processes that are costing more than they save.

Do you know why all the processes at your company exist?  Would you know when their use should be questioned and/or challenged?