Archive for August, 2011

Mind the Gap

Posted by Tim in innovation strategy on 31 August 2011

I did a workshop last week with a group working on improving innovation within the Australian school system. I played my normal role of grenade-thrower, errr, thought-provoker on the topic of innovation, while working with eight other people that all have backgrounds in education. As the day went on, I noticed something interesting.

In sessions like this, people always pick up on different points that I make. This is one of the reasons that I try to make a wide variety of points – I never know for sure which ones will stick! On this day, one of the points that I made is that any time you have a gap between where you currently are and where you want to be, you have to innovate. You can’t bridge these gaps by simply doing more of what you’re currently doing.

This is a really important point when thinking about public sector innovation. In this context, all the justifications for innovating based on improving profit, market share, survival odds, and so on don’t really apply. And yet, innovation is still critical. Why? To bridge those gaps.

It was fascinating on this day to see how the teachers seized on this idea. The group included people that were passionate about trying to improve teaching, and it was clear that they have been looking for a way to support the case for innovation within their schools. For the rest of the day, as I eavesdropped on the breakout groups, everyone was talking about the gap – how do we identify the gap? What strategies can we use to bridge the gap?

The experience illustrates some important points:

Organisations always have a gap to bridge, even if they’re not financially driven: I’ve found the idea of the gap to consistently work when I talk about innovation people from the public sector or non-profits. It seems to be a good way to motivate the case for innovation in these settings.
We need different ways to talk about innovation: when we started the day, everyone in the room seemed to be wary of innovation. It wasn’t until we framed it in this way that they really started to respond – but once they did, they took off! There are many settings in which “innovation” might seem like a threatening concept. When we’re working in these settings, we need other ways to discuss the concept.
Innovative teachers face many of the same problems that other innovators do: how can I get support for innovation? How can we make time in our organisation to innovate? How can I get other people to buy into new ideas? How can we make innovation a sustainable process? These are some of the questions that I was asked in the course of the day. They don’t sound that different from what we hear on other organisations, right? Innovators face many of the same problems, regardless of their context.

It was an intense but fun day. It’s always interesting to see which concepts resonate with people. In this case, the idea was a simple one:

Mind the gap!

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Innovation Makes Everything Amazing

Posted by Tim in evolving economic entities on 25 August 2011

One of my friends reminded me today about Louis CK’s great discussion of the benefits of innovation:

That might not seem like an innovation discussion, but it sure is.

One of the difficulties with innovating is that it takes so long to get an idea into circulation, but once it’s there, it gets taken for granted incredibly quickly.

On the other hand, this animated GIF shows why people can resist innovation – it makes everything amazing for us the consumers, but it can major disruptions within industries:

(Rob Paterson has some interesting things to say about this as well)

That’s the two sides of innovation – when we innovate we have the chance to make everything amazing, but we do this by changing things. We need to be aware of both outcomes.

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Twitter’s Business Model Innovation

Posted by Tim in business models on 22 August 2011

In an excellent article on the impact of twitter on the Arab Spring revolutions, Blake Hounshell makes an important point about twitter itself:

But five years since its founding, Twitter has hit a critical mass of activists and casual observers on the ground, journalists in the office and in the field, and analysts behind their desks. Twitter today is always buzzing with news, ideas, rumors, speculation, and juicy gossip. (It was Twitter itself that understood this shift from vanity tool to news platform earlier than anyone else, when in November 2009 it changed its prompt from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” One of the fastest ways to tell whether someone’s not worth following is if they’re still answering that first question.)

This is true in politics, and it is true in other fields as well (on a related point, you can also tell which critiques of twitter aren’t worth reading – they are the ones that criticise the stream of tweets answering the “what are you doing question”). It is certainly the case that there is a thriving discussion of innovation on twitter now too.

If you think about it, that change in question actually represents a business model innovation on the part of twitter. Once the question being answered changes, so does the value being created.

And once the value created changes, you have a new business model.

If changing one small question can change the business model for twitter, what might change the business model for your organisation?

It’s a question worth thinking about…

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Why (Almost) Everything is Lousy

Posted by Tim in business models, innovation on 21 August 2011

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

These are the vampires of the corporate world. They latch onto a corporate artery (usually a C-level exec) and then use the management fad du jour to set up dozens of meetings where they provide mountains of unwanted and unneeded advice. At the same time, they neatly remove themselves from any responsibility for results. If something bad happens, it’s because you didn’t follow their advice carefully enough. If something good happens, well, you know…

I personally watched McKinsey suck $2 million in blood money out of an engineering budget inside a company on the verge of major layoffs. And that was just the direct cost of the consulting. The lost opportunity cost was probably in the order of $10 million more.

The project that he discusses is horrible – it’s an example of terrible consulting. And in fact, in my experience, most management consultants are lousy. Many of them do things that harm their clients rather than help.

Or they come back with meaningless buzzwords that don’t actually help with anything. Tom Fishburne illustrates this with his latest post (and you should be subscribed to his RSS feed – he’s doing consistently fantastic work):

But here’s the thing – Nothing is always absolutely so. That’s Sturgeon’s Law, and it is even more important, though less widely known than Moore’s Law. Here’s is what Sturgeon wrote in Venture in 1958:

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.

Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.

It’s the same in business. There are lots of stories about bad consultants, because 90% of consultants are crud. Lots of companies fail using social marketing, because 90% of social marketing initiatives are crud. And so on…

Nothing is always absolutely so.

Now, that’s a really bad point to try to build a blog post around. It’s always a lot harder to explain why there are exceptions to every rule. It’s easier to make big categorical statements. It’s more fun, it’s easier to make lists out of them, they get more tweets, and +1s, etc.

It’s a lot harder to figure out how to identify the 10% of something that isn’t crud. But if you’re looking for a management consultant, here are some of the questions you can ask that might help:

Do they have experience with my type of problem?
Do they use one-size-fits-all tools or do they really learn about what’s going on inside an organisation?
Do they only focus on the easy part (pointing out what’s wrong), or do they have useful things to say about execution as well?

That’s just a start, and you can build a similar list of questions for everything.

The good news about Sturgeon’s Law though is that 90% of your competitors are crud too! So how can you get into the 10% that’s good?

It takes some work. For one thing, this is a good argument against benchmarking, doing what everyone else in your industry does, or using the same business model as everyone else.

This is a huge innovation opportunity. What can you do that is genuinely different? You need to write your own map for that.

Sturgeon’s Law explains why almost everything is lousy. It also explains why you can’t take anecdotes (or even trends) and use them to categorically dismiss something. You have to figure out a way to identify who in a field might provide you with genuine value.

More importantly, it means that you have a real chance to set yourself apart by providing genuine value.

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Is It an Innovation if No One Knows About It?

Posted by Tim in innovation on 19 August 2011

The first clocks using mechanical movements kept time by regulating a flow of water. For seven hundred years or so, everyone knew that these clocks were invented in Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. No one is quite sure where exactly, as several cities at roughly the same time erected central clock towers. However, in the middle of the 20th century, Joseph Needham came across a diary written by Su Song that documented a clock that he built in China at the end of the 11th century. The diary had been lost for hundreds of years, and even in China it was well known that mechanical clocks were a European invention.

Needham continued to dig, and eventually found records of four different clocks that had been built in China about the same time. Each only worked for a short period of time. All early clocks required a huge amount of maintenance, and it appears as though the makers of these clocks all either died or moved on after they were built. No one else had the knowledge required to keep them running.

So can we say that mechanical clocks are a Chinese innovation?

In one sense, who cares? But in another sense, this illustrates an important point.

Innovation isn’t just about having ideas. It’s not even simply about executing ideas. To innovate, you have to do both of these things. But you also have to get the idea to spread.

Su wrote a book describing the workings of his clock, but the plans were insufficient to build or maintain a working clock. His son believed that he left out crucial details so that his ideas wouldn’t be stolen.

Su had a very successful career and was widely acclaimed in his time, so from a personal standpoint, this may have been a good strategy. On the other hand, he didn’t get full credit for his ideas for 900 years, mainly because he tried to keep them from spreading.

Finding the right balance between rewarding inventors for successfully executing ideas and getting these ideas to diffuse to improve overall economic outcomes is a difficult problem – one that still bedevils discussion of intellectual property today.

To me though, if your ideas don’t spread, then you aren’t innovating.

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Innovation: Do What You Can, With What You Have, Where You Are

Posted by Tim in book riffs on 10 August 2011

One of the key points that Peter Sims makes in Little Bets is that if you wait until your idea is perfect before you act on it, your chances of success are greatly reduced. This means that if you are trying to innovate, you have to be able to work with what you have right now.

When I worked at the radio station, we used to joke about the technical manager that fixed the control board using “a piece of string, a bandaid and a fish” – though I’m still a bit fuzzy on the role of the fish. In New Zealand, this spirit is captured by Number 8 Wire – the idea that anything can be fixed with a bit of barbed wire combined with Kiwi ingenuity.

Here’s another example from the surprisingly good and very well written book The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman by Karen Karbo:

… Bob Dylan, another master of self-invention tried once to explain his success: “I was just doing what I could with what I had where I was.” He was not just making it up as he went along; he was also using everything he stumbled upon. He was both weaving the rope and climbing it at the same time.
And so was Coco Chanel.
…
Most of us, when we land upon a great idea, a lifesaving idea, immediately turn it into our baby. And like our real-life babies, we only want the best for it. We love it. We coddle it. It’s our great idea, and who knows when we might have another one! We want to implement it at the right time with the best materials possible. We want the stars to be right.

But Chanel’s chutzpah dictated the opposite. She was going to reinvent the female wardrobe, and she was going to do it now with whatever was at hand.

Coco Chanel Pictures

Here are some key points:

“Both weaving the rope and climbing it at the same time” is a great metaphor for innovation. It captures the imaginative leap that you have to make to execute a new idea. Even though new innovations usually come from connecting ideas that already exist, we’re still making this leap.
Ideas actually are a bit like babies: this is a metaphor that I’ve used before myself. We can think of ideas as rare and precious, like one of our babies, or like an albatross chick. Or, we can think of them as numerous, like salmon eggs, where the key issue isn’t nurturing our single idea, but rather it is to figure out which idea is the good one.
Finally, I love the just-get-to-work attitudes shown by both Dylan and Chanel. Sims is right in saying that waiting too long to execute an idea leads to failure. You can’t wait for permission to innovate. The way to find the good ideas is to try them out right now, using whatever resources you have available.

The odds were heavily stacked against Coco Chanel when she started out. And yet she really did reinvent women’s clothing (and she’d make a terrific topic for an Ada Lovelace Day post, which everyone should be thinking about now). She did it by having a series of great ideas (and a few that weren’t so good), and more importantly, by executing them to see which ones really were great.

That’s innovation – doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.

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