Archive for category variety
Innovation as an Evolutionary Process
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, replication, selection, variety on 13 June 2010
Here’s another clip from the video series that we did a couple of years ago for our Innovation Leadership course. This time it’s John talking about how innovation is an evolutionary process:
Generic evolutionary processes have three parts – generation of variety, selection, and replication. This maps on to the three steps in the innovation value chain. The Innovation Value Chain also has three steps – idea generation, idea selection and execution, and idea diffusion. The connections between the two models should be fairly apparent!
Innovation as evolution has some interesting implications, including:
- The ideas that spread are often not optimal solutions to problems, they simply happen to be the best solutions currently available. In other words, our innovations just have to be good enough, not perfect.
- Consequently, the idea that we’re not looking for a perfect execution of our new ideas is a strong argument in favour of taking a build, launch, tweak approach to getting our new ideas out there. We’re most likely to get to the best solutions to the problems we are interested in through an iterative process, rather than through pure development.
- This leads to the last point, which is that the evolution of our great ideas is built on collaborative networks. The sooner we can enlist the help of our network (customers, partners, suppliers, etc.), the more likely we are to come up with the best version of our great new idea.
The economy is an evolving system. Thinking of it in this way gives us some important insights into how to best manage innovation.
The Changing Innovation Process
Posted by Tim in innovation, selection, variety on 10 June 2010
How has the internet changed the innovation process? It has had a number of impacts, particularly on collaborative innovation, which is becoming increasingly important. Here is a short discussion on this topic from one of our previous Innovation Leadership Executive Education courses:
George Dyson has a nice metaphor for the changes involved in answer to one of the big questions from edge.org – how has the internet changed the way you think? (via Simon Bostock’s excellent blog)
KAYAKS vs CANOES
In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.
The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material — by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don’t will be left paddling logs, not canoes.
This same process drives the shift towards distributed innovation. When the raw materials (great ideas) for innovation are relatively rare, it makes sense to try to control the source (creative people) as much as possible. So you hire as many innovative people as you can, and you retain all the resources inside of your firm.
However, when the raw materials are abundant, the problem isn’t finding them, it’s figuring out which ones are good. In this environment, it makes more sense to let idea generation come from anywhere, while you focus on getting very good at selecting and executing great ideas.
All of us are building canoes now.
Experiments – the Key to Innovation
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, variety on 28 March 2010
There is a big problem that organisations often face: they want to be innovative, but they also want to minimise risk. This creates a certain amount of tension. If I had to pick the number one thing that I would recommend to organisations that are trying to become more innovative, it would be this: experiment. Experiment all the time. Try everything that you can possibly think of to try. An experimental mindset is absolutely essential to successful innovation.
We were talking about this idea in class this week, and it clearly makes people nervous. I was suggesting that in an uncertain environment, normal strategy tools such as SWOT analysis, five forces and so on are actually pretty dangerous to use. One of the students asked “so everything is chaos, and we throw out the tools and models, then what? What are we supposed to do?”
That’s a good question. I replied that in part this was a rhetorical trick – in terms of the narrative of the class, we were at a point equivalent to just before the end of the Two Towers in The Lord of the Rings trilogy: we’re trapped in a castle surrounded by tens of thousands of orcs, Gandalf is missing, the hobbits are spread all over middle earth, and we have absolutely no idea what is going on. How do we navigate from this point to the five different happy endings that conclude the story?
Again, my answer is to experiment. The tools that I have talked about previously that are designed for linking innovation to strategy are all built around experimenting. The way to combat high levels of uncertainty is to spread your bets. Try as many cheap experiments as you can.
There must be something to this idea, because I’ve run across three different people saying basically the same thing in the past three days. The first was Dan Ariely:
They asked me what I thought the best approach was. I told them that I was willing to share my intuition but that intuition is a remarkably bad thing to rely on. Only an experiment gives you the evidence you need. …
Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.
Unsurprisingly, he goes on to make a case for the value of experimenting. Part of this reluctance is that experimenting leads to short-term losses – if you try several things to find out what works best, you have wasted resources by trying the ideas that end up not working. Or do you? Rita McGrath doesn’t think so:
If your organization can approach uncertain decisions as experiments and adopt the idea of intelligently failing, so much more can be learned (so much more quickly) than if failures or disappointments are covered up.
So ask yourself: are we genuinely reaping the benefit of the investments we’ve made in learning under uncertain conditions? Do we have mechanisms in place to benefit from our intelligent failures? And, if not, who might be taking advantage of the knowledge we are depriving ourselves of?
She includes a list of conditions that can lead to what she’s calling ‘intelligent failures’, the approach that she outlines is both good and practical. Then I ran across this by Bob Sutton:
The final point that Jeff Pfeffer and I make in Hard Facts is about failure. We emphasize that is impossible to run an organization without making a lot of mistakes. Innovation always entails failure. Most new products and companies don’t survive. And if you want creativity without failure, you are living in a fool’s paradise. It is also impossible to learn something new without making mistakes. …
Failure will never be eliminated, and so the best we can hope for from human beings and organizations is that they learn from their mistakes, that rather than making the same mistakes over and over again, they make new and different mistakes.
To be innovative, we have to try out new ideas. Some of these will fail. If we’re smart, we’ll set up our experiments so that we can learn as much as possible from the ideas that don’t work.
We face an environment that is filled with uncertainty. This makes planning dangerous. The best possible way to meet this uncertainty is not with intuition and guesswork, but with experimentation. If you can combine experimenting with empathy, then you’ll be building a formidable innovation capability.
(Photo from flickr/jurvetson under a Creative Commons license)
You Don’t Need Any More New Ideas!
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, replication, selection, variety on 30 December 2009
Scott Berkun let out the secret of innovation today in an outstanding blog post. It’s a secret that Rowan Gibson tried to let out of the bag recently, and so did Braden Kelley on Blogging Innovation. I’ve tried to tell you about it too, using both analogies and statistics. The secret idea of innovation is this:
You don’t need any more new ideas.
Here is Berkun on the what we really need:
If there’s any secret to be derived from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or any of the dozens of people who often have the name innovator next to their names, is the diversity of talents they had to posses, or acquire, to overcome the wide range of challenges in converting their ideas into successful businesses.
That’s it. The problem is executing your ideas. Here’s an example – yesterday I talked about mousetraps – here are some interesting stats.
The patent for the flip-trap mousetrap design was filed in 1899. That’s a better mousetrap, right? We’re still using that design over 110 years later, so it’s probably pretty good. And yet, since 1899, the US Patent Office has granted over 4400 mousetrap patents. They receive more than 400 new mousetrap patents every year. So there’s no shortage of ideas. But fewer than 20 mousetrap designs have led to products that have actually made money. The problem in innovation is executing your new idea, and getting it to spread.
There is so much effort put into improving innovation by generating more ideas. This isn’t necessarily wasted effort, but it’s not the smartest use of resources. My MBA students evaluated innovation within their firms:
This approach is flawed, and my MBA students demonstrated why. They came from a wide range of organisations – huge multinationals, small start-ups, government departments, and educational institutions. Despite these different backgrounds, their findings were remarkably consistent – only 3 of the 60 organisations that they work in are ideas-poor. The other 57 (that’s 95%!) have problems with either selecting or diffusing ideas.
Here’s more from Berkun:
The closest thing to a real secret is this: In my years studying and teaching all things innovation, there’s one fact that’s the hardest for people to swallow and it goes as follows – To invent or create is to take a bet against the unknown. No matter what you do, you are still betting you can do well in the face of many things that are out of your control. Don’t like that? Don’t want uncertainty? Then do something else. Comfort with risk and uncertainty is the real secret. Or at least acceptance of the fact you can work your ass off for uncertain rewards.
Where does this leave us? Here are some conclusions:
- If you’re going to get some help to improve innovation at your firm, don’t focus on generating ideas. Get help on selecting ideas, or on getting them to spread. Those are the hard parts.
- Innovation is a bet – you’re betting that your new idea will work better, that it will meet needs, that it will fit into the value network. All of these things have to happen for your innovation to work. Like Berkun says, this is a leap into uncertainty.
- Most of the innovation problems that organisations face are problems with innovation diffusion – the challenge is to get your new ideas to spread.
The new idea that I’d like you to accept is that you don’t need any more new ideas. Instead of generating more ideas, let’s develop some plans for getting better at executing our ideas. That seems like a good idea heading into the new year, doesn’t it?
How to Assess Your Innovation Capability
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, replication, selection, variety on 18 December 2009
How do you know how good you are at innovation? One of the tools that we have found very useful for assessing innovation within organisations is the Innovation Value Chain. The tool was developed by Morten Hansen and Julien Birkinshaw and published in an article called The Innovation Value Chain in Harvard Business Review in 2007.
I’ve talked about this before – There are two key points with this model. The first is that there are three stages in the process of innovation: idea generation, selecting & developing ideas, and diffusing ideas. The key part, however, is that all three parts of that process have to be working well in order to innovate.
The three step aspect of the innovation process is important. Measuring idea generation, selection and diffusion helps organisations get around the problem of simply equating innovation with ideation. Organisations that do this often find that they have plenty of ideas, but they’re still not being very innovative. This is because innovation actually doesn’t occur until you execute new ideas. To do that, you have to be good at having ideas, but more importantly you also have to be good at selecting ideas and getting them to spread.
This leads to the second key point of the Innovation Value Chain – your innovation process is only as good as your weakest link. This is not simply a linear model of how things happen, it is a description of a complex system. For example, if you are bad at selecting ideas, people will become less willing to give you their new ideas. This means that there are feedback loops between the three parts of the process. If you are going to improve your innovation, the whole system has to get better. You can use the IVC to identify your weak point and take steps to improve it. Then you can move on to whichever step is your weakest point now. If you keep doing this, you will build excellent innovation capability within your organisation.
Here is a Special Deal!
Our research has shown that while organisations usually first try to improve their idea generation, 95% of the time, this is not their weakest area. I’m curious to see how broadly this is true – so I would like you to please
In exchange for your time, I’ll give you some feedback on your results. If you’d like some information about what your organisation’s innovation strengths and weaknesses are relative to others who have taken the survey, just leave an email address when you take the survey. If you would like several people from your organisation to take the survey, I can compile the results – just have everyone indicate the name of the organisation when they fill out the survey. All results are, of course, confidential. To get the most meaningful results, please tell everyone you know that might be interested about this survey. Thanks for your help!
Innovation is about more than just coming up with new ideas. If we’re going to be innovative, we have to be able to execute new ideas. The Innovation Value Chain is one tool that can help us get better at this.
What is an Innovation Culture?
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, replication, selection, variety on 27 November 2009
Here are the slides + audio from the talk I gave this morning for the UQ Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology‘s planning day. One of the things that they were working on was thinking about what they want their innovation culture to be, so Phil asked me along to give some thoughts on that. I’m not sure how close my talk was to what he wanted, but I gave it a go. It’s too bad I didn’t record the Q&A at the end, because some really good ideas came up during that too. They’re a really bright group and I’m looking forward to seeing what they’re able to do.
Even though slideshare says that this runs for over an hour, the talk is just 18 minutes.
As usual, if I sound like Jabba the Hut, you have to upgrade your flash player – slideshare doesn’t play well with older versions.
Also, I’ve added an index page with links to all of the talks that we’ve put up. There are a couple more (with video) coming soon!
focus on process, not tools
Posted by Tim in book riffs, innovation strategy, networks, replication, selection, variety on 22 November 2009
I’m reading Kill All Your Darlings by Luc Sante at the moment, which is very good. It includes a number of pieces on culture, many originally from Village Voice or the New York Review of Books. Sante is a fantastic writer and there are a number of great lines throughout the book, but one just jumped out at me in his piece on the photographer Walker Evans.
He had never been a camera snob, or even, although he was a superb printer, much concerned with the mechanics of his art (once when a student asked him what camera he had employed to take a particular shot, he became irate, declaring the question tantamount to asking a writer what sort of typewriter he’d used).
I love this little story for a number of reasons. The simplest is because I’ve never been a big fan of camera snobs, or anyone that gets too hung up on equipment. Equipment can make some things easier, but it can’t replace knowledge and experience accumulated over time.
The second reason that I like the quote though is that it illustrates a problem that we often run into in firms that are trying to implement a new innovation program. Often these initiatives come about because someone at the top has said something like “innovation has been one of our ‘core values’ for values, so we better start doing something about it.” The first thing that always happens in these cases is that the organisation goes out and gets some software. It might be something that supports message forums for Communities of Practice, or a tool for capturing ideas. The flaw in this approach is that the minute you approach Knowledge or Innovation Management as an IT problem, the initiative is dead.
Managing innovation is a people and process problem, not a technical one. Yes, it helps to have some tools to use, but if you want your organisation to be more innovative, you have to be good at generating ideas, choosing the best ones, and getting those ideas to spread (variety, selection and replication – an evolutionary process). These are people problems, and they are often network problems. Get your processes right first, then you can get some tools to help facilitate them.
If you focus on improving the innovation process, not the tool, you will be much more likely to be successful.
(photo by Walker Evans)
Do strategy and innovation converge under uncertainty?
Posted by John in evolving economic entities, innovation, innovation strategy, variety on 6 November 2009
Last week I was a panelist on an event hosted by CEDA on the topic of strategy after the global financial crisis. One particular theme that came out of the discussions was a reduced reliance upon prediction and planning. This is significant becuase traditionally, this is what strategy is all about. There was some recognition of the value of scenario planning, but still, not as a tool for prediction, but as a tool for helping managers respond to unforseen changes.
Now its hard to tell if the economic shocks from the past 12 months will have a lasting effect on the way organisations approach strategy, but there was a definite level of disatisfaction with current strategy practices and a broad agreement that we need to stragegy in a different way, that is more compatible with being ‘nimble’ and ‘adaptable’. If we can’t predict the future of our business envrionments, then how do we stay ahead by being better at sensing opportunties, adapting to changes and experimenting with ideas?
Perhaps the broad framework for strategy in the 21st century is a process of managed evolution. In Eric Beinhocker’s excellent book “The Origin of Wealth” is a chapter on strategy called “Racing the Red Queen”. The title refers to the character from “Through the Looking Glass” who tells Alice that you have to do all the running you can to stand still. In other words, Beinhocker’s argument is firms that stop evolving become history.
So what does it mean to manage evolutionary strategy? Beinhocker’s advice is straightforward…
“The key to doing better is to ‘bring evolution inside’ and get the wheels of differentiation, selection, and ampification spinning within a company’s four walls. Rather than thinking of strategy as a single plan built on predictions of the future, we should think of strategy as a portfolio of experiments, a population of competing Business Plans that evolves over time”.
The thing about Beinhocker’s approach to evolutionary strategy is that it mirrors the processes around good innovation management, but at the level of business plans. If both strategy and innovation are processes that are deeply affected by uncertainty, then managing them both as an evolutionary process makes a lot of sense.
It’s about time we stopped pretending that we can predict the future and start feeling at home in a very uncertain world with both pitfalls and tremendous opportunties.
my boss won’t let me
Seth Godin wrote a piece for the Guardian a couple of years ago now, which included a list of ways to be remarkable. All of that is useful advice, and it’s a good piece that’s worth reading. The part that caught my eye though was the conclusion, because it reminded me of some of the discussion here around the idea of public sector innovation, or innovating in situations where you feel like you can’t. Here’s the quote:
“But wait!” I hear you say. “My boss won’t let me. I want to do something great, but she won’t let me.”
This is, of course, nonsense. Your boss won’t let you because what you’re really asking is: “May I do something silly and fun and, if it doesn’t work, will you take the blame – but if it does work, I get the credit?” What would you say to an offer like that?
The alternative sounds scary, but I don’t think it is. The alternative is to just be remarkable. Go all the way to the edge. Not in a big thing, perhaps, but in a little one. Find some area where you have a tiny bit of authority and run with it. After you succeed, you’ll discover you’ve got more leeway for next time. And if you fail? Don’t worry. Your organisation secretly wants employees willing to push hard even if it means failing every so often.
And when? When should you start being remarkable? How’s this: if you don’t start tomorrow, you’re not really serious. Tomorrow night by midnight or don’t bother. You’re too talented to sit around waiting for the perfect moment. Go start.
I think that his advice there in the third paragraph is exactly correct. The way to be innovative is to try stuff. Start with whatever small stuff you can get away with, then build from there. Why not?
innovating with constraints
Posted by Tim in innovation, networks, replication, selection, variety on 19 October 2009
I’ve been giving further thought to the issue of public sector innovation which I discussed briefly last week. John and I do a lot of work with people in the public sector as that makes up a fairly big part of Brisbane’s economy, and I know that people often find it difficult to be innovative in that area. However, it is essential that we have good public sector innovation because large parts of our economies are in the public sector, and these parts are often very important. We just can’t afford to have industries like health and education stagnate – innovation is critical in these fields, as it is in the other areas that fall within the public sector.
So what’s the problem? There are a few. One is that overall, the public sector is not viewed as being very dynamic. Consequently, it does not attract a lot of attention from those of us that are interested in innovation. The Australian government is currently undertaking a review to try to devise strategies to improve public sector innovation. The website for this project includes a list of links to resources on public sector innovation (at the bottom of the page) – and you can see that there are not a lot of resources available (the project has a twitter feed too which updates new resources as they find them). This reflects a lack of interest at the levels of both research and policy.
The second issue is that government departments are often fairly risk averse – which makes innovation challenging. This issue is consistently raised by people in our innovation classes that come from the public sector, but it is a common issue for many people in other sectors as well – particularly middle managers that don’t have much scope for action. When I talk to people in this situation they often say that the only way they can be more innovative is if they get more support from top management. It is true that top level support generally helps improve innovation. However, if you are waiting for increased upper management support before you start trying to innovate, in most cases, you’re likely to be waiting for a long time.
There are a few things you can do to get out of the straightjacket. The main thing is to figure out how to try things. Experimenting is the key to innovating. “The secret of fast progress is inefficiency, fast and furious and
numerous failures.” — Kevin Kelly Now, obviously, failure is not a very popular idea within most government departments. The key to the whole idea though is to figure out ways to generate ideas and discard the ones that don’t work as quickly and cheaply as possible. There are three steps here.
The first is to generate ideas. “The secret to having good ideas is to have a lot of ideas, then throw the bad ones away.” — Linus Pauling Usually, this isn’t the problem. People are naturally creative, and the number of untapped ideas that are in your organisation will probably surprise you. One way or another, you need to figure out how to tap into these. If you want some place to start, go to the Tom Peters site and download the Innovation Tactics paper that he has there.
The second step is the tricky one in public sector organisations – you have to select which ideas to try out. The central idea here is to look at how much authority you have. This might be as simple as signing authority – if you can authorise items worth up to $100, then what new ideas can you try to implement for $100 or less? What if you can’t authorise any expenditures? The two jobs in which I’ve been the most innovative have actually both been in the public sector. In the first, I worked out at the start 47 ideas that I thought might make my section run better. Over 18 months, I tried out 45, at a total implementation cost of $0. At the end of that time, my section was just under 20% more effective in turning enquiries into new students, in part as a result of some of those 45 ideas that we tried. Not all of them worked, but a lot of them did – and some of the simplest had the biggest impacts. My bosses weren’t too enthusiastic about new ideas when I started, but they were very enthusiastic about results. Most bosses are. So the second step is to figure out what you can get away with, and start trying things that fall within your scope of power. That’s how select the ideas to try – you may have to wait on the big ones that will change the world, but if you succeed with some small ones, you may eventually get to try those out too.
The final step is getting the ideas that work to spread. “Some people look for things that went wrong and try to fix them. I look for things that went right, and try to build off them.” —Bob Stone You need a strategy for amplifying the good ideas. Part of this is selling them to the people around you. To do this, you need to figure out which of the ideas are working. An important activity here is measurement – if you’re able to measure the outcomes of your ideas, it is easier to gain support for trying more things.
Innovating is always hard. It’s especially hard if you don’t feel supported. But the key to innovating when you have constraints is to try things. Try as many as you can, figure out what works, and do more of that. It’s a formula that you can follow in nearly every work setting. Instead of telling me why it won’t work in yours, why don’t you spend the time figuring out a new idea to try yourself instead?
“We have a ‘strategic plan.’ It’s called doing things.” — Herb Kelleher
(photo from flickr/djwudi – creative commons licensed)
This article was one of the winners of Blogging Innovation’s October Innovation Contest.
