Archive for category variety
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.
but that was MY idea!
Posted by Tim in innovation, time, variety on 12 October 2009
I’m not sure if this is just a normal evolutionary step, or if maybe it is just peculiar to a few of the firms that I’ve spoken to, but it seems like often when an organisation decides that it needs to be more innovative, the first step is to try to become more ‘creative’. Consequently, the new innovation initiatives that are undertaken are often oriented entirely around the task of generating new ideas. Now, it’s true that I believe that innovation is an evolutionary process, and that part of that is the generation of variety. So new ideas are important. However, I also think that we frequently place far too much emphasis on the idea part of that process, when in fact selection and replication are the parts that are often more important. They are definitely harder to execute effectively – consequently, they probably deserve more management effort.
I ran across a thought-provoking piece by Kevin Kelly that reminded me of this topic today. Kelly contends that the appearance of new technologies is inevitable once the necessary supporting technologies are in place:
The procession of technological discoveries is inevitable. When the conditions are right — when the necessary web of supporting technology needed for every invention is established — then the next adjacent technological step will emerge as if on cue. If inventor X does not produce it, inventor Y will. The invention of the microphone, the laser, the transistor, the steam turbine, the waterwheel, and the discoveries of oxygen, DNA, and Boolean logic, were all inevitable in roughly the period they appeared. However the particular form of the microphone, its exact circuit, or the specific design of the laser, or the particular materials of the transistor, or the dimensions of the steam turbine, or the peculiar notation of the formula, or the specifics of any invention are not inevitable. Rather they will vary quite widely due to the personality of their finder, the resources at hand, the culture of society they are born into, the economics funding the discovery, and the influence of luck and chance.
One of the examples that he discusses in some detail is the discovery of the incandescent light bulb. Edison discovered it, right? Well, not really. Research by Robert Friedel and Paul Israel shows that at least 23 other people made working incandescent bulbs before Edison! Kelly’s conclusion is that the invention of the light bulb looks something like this:
In this view, the thing that Edison did was to both figure out a way to solve the technological problem while also figuring out a way to get his idea to spread. The innovation came in replication part of the process, not simply the variety-generation part.
Malcolm Gladwell reaches similar conclusions – that many new ideas are ‘in the air’, and that they emerge once the right supporting technologies are in place. He discusses numerous examples from the fields of both science and technology:
The statistician Stephen Stigler once wrote an elegant essay about the futility of the practice of eponymy in science—that is, the practice of naming a scientific discovery after its inventor. That’s another idea inappropriately borrowed from the cultural realm. As Stigler pointed out, “It can be found that Laplace employed Fourier Transforms in print before Fourier published on the topic, that Lagrange presented Laplace Transforms before Laplace began his scientific career, that Poisson published the Cauchy distribution in 1824, twenty-nine years before Cauchy touched on it in an incidental manner, and that Bienaymé stated and proved the Chebychev Inequality a decade before and in greater generality than Chebychev’s first work on the topic.” For that matter, the Pythagorean theorem was known before Pythagoras; Gaussian distributions were not discovered by Gauss. The examples were so legion that Stigler declared the existence of Stigler’s Law: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” There are just too many people with an equal shot at those ideas floating out there in the ether. We think we’re pinning medals on heroes. In fact, we’re pinning tails on donkeys.
I think this raises an extremely important point. To me, it reinforces my belief that idea generation is probably the least important part of the process. If ideas are ‘in the air’, the rewards don’t go to whoever articulates them first – they go to whoever figures out how to get them to spread first. If your organisation is trying to be more innovative, creativity is important, but execution is critical. Focus on getting ideas to spread, rather than on simply having them in the first place.
iterations
Posted by Tim in design, innovation, selection, variety on 28 August 2009
Here’s a video from the people that made the iPhone app Convert, showing all of the different versions that they tried:
Convert Design Evolution from tap tap tap on Vimeo.
There are a couple of things worth noting in this. First, they experimented a lot. They generated a ton of variety, all of which would have been pretty cheap. When I keep talking about failure, people often seem to think that it means that we need to launch products that don’t work, when in fact I mean almost exactly the opposite. We need to do what tap tap tap did, and figure out what doesn’t work before we launch. The second big point is that the big change that makes the whole thing actually work well doesn’t come until about 75% of the way through all of their tinkering (at about 1:10 in the video). This shows again that the big changes often don’t come until you start using things.
(Hat tip to Endless Innovation…)
creative spaces
Posted by Tim in innovation, variety on 16 August 2009
I just want to pick up on a couple of ideas that I raised over the past week. The first was that of scheduling time so that you can pursue innovative activities, and the second talked about intersections between science fiction writing and economics. I thought of both of these things again when I ran across a link from Boing Boing to the ‘Where I Write’ project by Kyle Cassidy, in which Cassidy takes photos of science fiction & fantasy authors in their writing spaces.
Most of the writing spaces are pretty idiosyncratic, like that of Michael Swanwick (above). And then I got to thinking that my office is pretty idiosyncratic too – and I go through all kinds of strange activities when it comes time to write. For me that is a central part of being creative.
The obvious question then is this: if we have to make allowances for creative people to organise their schedules like makers instead of managers, don’t we also have to allow them to organise their personal spaces like writers instead of drones? Do we do this? A lot of times, I don’t think we do. One thing that I’m reasonably sure of though, is that a clean-desk policy does not fit very well with an innovative culture…
What does your creative space look like?
picking winners
Posted by Tim in innovation, selection, variety on 15 August 2009
Now that preseason pro gridiron games have started up again, I’ve been thinking about whether or not I want to play in the game-picking pool I’ve participated in over the past few seasons. I’ve had some interesting results in the pool – I’ve done extremely well in the regular season, but horribly during the playoffs. I know exactly why this is so, but I don’t think I can fix it.
My secret during the regular season is that I’m the only person in the group (usually 15-20 people) who understands that no one can actually pick football games. So I’ve developed an algorithm. It only consists of two rules, which are very simple to apply. Now, instead of agonising over who to pick – looking at point spreads, and stats, and the results of previous match-ups, doing research on who’s hot and who’s not, checking on weather conditions, thinking about whether games are being played on natural grass or astro-turf, and so on – it takes about 2 minutes of research and 3 minutes to write out my picks. And I don’t have to worry about whether or not my logic is right, or if there’s some hidden factor that I’ve forgotten to take into account. It’s much less stressful.
Using my algorithm, I’ve won the regular season pool two years in a row, and I’ve outperformed guys that know a whole lot more about football than I do who pick games for outfits like yahoo sports and espn. Why does this system work? The outcomes of games are genuinely uncertain. When face with uncertainty, we usually like to do things that make us feel in control. That’s why most people trying to pick winners put so much effort into research and number crunching. The problem is that results are pretty random. On average, the better team usually wins, but it’s often difficult to figure out which team is actually better. Having a good algorithm is actually an excellent strategy when you’re facing genuine uncertainty. A lot of people try to have a perfect week, where they pick every game correctly. My system will probably never do that – but on the other hand, it also won’t blow up. I’m very confident that my algorithm will win out over the course of 300 or so games each season. The people that are convinced that they know the game inevitably pick a few too many plausible upsets that don’t occur, or pick their favourite team to win an improbably game – but one way or another they are usually misled by the details of individual games.
However, my algorithm is close to worthless when the playoffs roll around. There are only 12 games in the playoffs. Over that small a number, the strength of the algorithm becomes a weakness – there’s no value in not blowing up, and the winner is the one that actually gambles and gets things right the most. So in the playoffs I get killed. All the analysis that other people do might help here, but so do judgement and luck (the person picking their favourite team all the way through when that team happens to win it all, for example).
What’s this got to do with innovation? A lot, actually. Big firms (or granting agencies, or state governments) with a lot of available resources, need a good innovation algorithm. They don’t need to pick individual projects that will win – they need processes in place that generate enough variety, that can experiment with the ideas relatively cheaply to see what works and what doesn’t, and that can amplify the ideas that are most promising. The focus needs to be on the process – not the individual cases. For these larger economic actors, innovation is the regular season, and over time, the best algorithm will win out.
However, if you’re in charge of an individual innovation project, or if you’re a small firm trying to execute one big idea, then it’s more like the playoffs. You need to be lucky, and you need to be passionate about supporting your particular idea. This requires a different skill set, and a different way of picturing the innovation process.
Over the long run, the people and firms that win through innovation are the ones that can do both – they have a good overall management process in place, but they also have people that can champion and execute individual ideas. Another key skill is to be able to identify when you need an algorithm and when you need judgement and luck. One of the reasons that a lot of big firms and government agencies get in trouble when they try to stimulate innovation is that even though they need an algorithm, the try the judgement and luck approach. This often misfires – leading to the truism that picking winners is bad policy.
The good news in innovation is that we can actually do some things ourselves to improve the odds in our favour – so outcomes aren’t quite as random as they are for football games. Having good processes is one of these things. Especially if we’re in a situation that calls for an algorithm.
(photo from flickr/ladybugbkt)
more on academic blogging
Posted by Tim in replication, selection, variety on 1 July 2009
I’ve written about Lilia Efimova’s excellent PhD research before, and now she’s written another really good post. It’s structured around this table:
This is a really nice taxonomy, and there’s not a whole lot that needs to be added to it. I suppose I take a bit more of an evolutionary view of academic blogging. You can use the blog to generate variety – which corresponds with Lilia’s low-level blog entry creation. You just use the blog to generate ideas, and it can also function as a catalog of the ideas that you’ve generated in this way. You can also use a blog to help with idea selection, by looking at which ideas people respond to (this can be in terms of number of readers, comments, trackbacks, amount of controversy generated, etc.). Or you can blog to help get your ideas replicated – to get them to spread. This maps on to a couple of different categories of Lilia’s.
In my previous post, Marco commented about how he has found more value from wikis than blogs. He uses wikis really well, so I can see why he says that. On the other hand, I was talking with my friend Alex over the weekend about electronic communication, and how each new medium requires the acquisition of a new set of skill sets. For me, I pretty much know how to make a blog work, so that is mostly what I stick with. I’m not sure that there is one method that is best for everyone… In part, the media that you choose will depend on which of three evolutionary functions you are most interested in achieving, as well as which suits your personal communication style.
googlenomics
Posted by Tim in innovation, innovation strategy, time, variety on 1 June 2009
First off, I apologise for the title of the post. I’m now declaring a moratorium on all titles of anything (especially books) that end in ‘nomics’ or ‘ology’. I just wanted to get one of my own in before I started enforcing the moratorium (still not sure how I’m going to get the publishers to comply, but I’m working on it…).
That formula is from a great article in Wired about the economics of google. It explains how the auctions work for adwords, and how google makes money. They’ve actually solved the question of how to monetise the net very creatively. Another example of business model innovation. Google actually innovates effectively across a number of time horizons. You could argue that their search algorithm is an incremental innovation – after all, we had search engines before google, it’s just that google’s was better.
However, their auction system for selling ads on the internet is revolutionary. So while the product/service that they provide in the search engine has remained basically the same, the revenue generation mechansim has changed dramatically. Like I keep saying, business model innovation is one of the most fruitful arenas around, and it’s something that everyone has a chance to work at.
On the other hand, google constantly works at product innovation too. The demo of google wave is definitely worth checking out (at least the first 20 minutes or so). That looks like a fairly radical product innovation – from the guys that developed google maps.
And if you listen to Seth Godin, google is even pretty innovative in their presentations!
One thing I’ve always liked about google is that they appear to have been acutely aware of the threat that someone might devise a better search algorithm, or even a better search model (something that Wolfram|Alpha is aiming for…) – so they’ve constantly looked for new products, for ways to improve existing products, and for ways to change their business model. I think that this level of change is absolutely necessary. If you don’t come up with these ideas yourself, someone else inevitably will. Whatever you might think of google, their approach to innovation is certainly worth replicating.
albatrosses v. salmon
Posted by Tim in evolving economic entities, innovation, selection, variety on 19 May 2009
I think that last Friday’s post on ideas being cheap ended up being less clear than I had hoped. Ironically, it’s because I tried to tackle too many ideas at once – which supports my main point, but which detracted from my ability to make it! So I’m going to have another go at just part of it…
That part is the contention that we often overvalue our ideas, especially if we only have a few. In many cases, we treat our ideas like albatrosses treat their chicks. Most species of albatross breed only every two years, because the process of raising a chick is so resource intensive. They travel thousands of kilometers on feeding trips to get enough protein to bring back to their quickly growing kid. And after months of nurturing and caring, eventually the parents take off and don’t come back. When the chick gets hungry enough, it eventually tries flying for the first time so that it can head off looking for food on its own. Unfortunately, not all of the young albatrosses are that competent at flying, and if they don’t get too far off shore, they run into a group that gathers every year for the first flights of the albatrosses:
Tiger sharks!
And this is the risk with a lot of ideas – if they’re not sound, they don’t fly. This is fine if you are in a stable environment that requires little change, and consequently little variety. How many businesses are in that situation these days?
That’s why I say we have to be more like salmon. Salmon generate lots and lots of eggs, and out of the thousands laid, a couple with good genes and lucky circumstances are fortunate enough to grow up to be adults. The odds are pretty low, but once they make it, things are generally pretty good. This is a good strategy for situations where the environment is unpredictable, and you consequently need to generate a lot of variety.
So when we’re thinking about innovation one of the key questions we have to think about is how turbulent is our environment? If the level of uncertainty is high, we need to try a wide variety of ideas. It’s too dangerous to pick just one idea and sink all of our resources into it. We need to try out many ideas, and sink the resources into the ones that show the most promise once we’ve executed.
In a stable environment, it’s fine to be an albatross. But in uncertain times, we need to be salmon!
ideas are cheap
Posted by Tim in evolving economic entities, networks, selection, variety on 15 May 2009
I’ve had a strange week. I’ve spent a lot of it working around some network data so that I can analyse it. It’s for a consulting job, and the guy that collected it gave it to me in a state that was ….. not what I was looking for. So it’s been a bit of a frustrating week. On the other hand, nearly every data analysis exercise that I’ve gone through has had some drama attached to it. The simple fact of the matter is that it takes a fair bit of work to go from raw data, which is messy, to network diagrams like the one above, which also include lots of stats. Once I’ve got a picture and stats, then I can tell a story. It takes work to get to that point, but once I’ve told a story about the data, then I’ve executed an idea. The idea might be a hypothesis to be tested, a hunch about a firm, a cool new way to analyse something, or any number of things. One of the ideas that I keep stressing to everyone I talk to (students, research students, colleagues, industry partners, you, EVERYONE!) is that ideas are cheap.
There’s a nice post by Doug Neff on Nancy Duarte’s blog that gets at this idea from a different direction. He tells a story about doodling on the whiteboard to illustrate how the creative atmosphere at Duarte encourages a proliferation of ideas. And it reinforces an idea that I’ve had, which is that generating ideas is a process that accelerates exponentially. If I try to write one blog post a week, I struggle to come up with a good idea. If I try to write one post per day, I end up with 3 or 4 good ideas nearly every day. It’s weird, but that’s always the way it has worked for me.
But I think the reason for this is that it is actually executing ideas that leads to increased creativity. Every time I actually write a post, I’ve executed the idea. If I’m trying to store up ideas, they have less value. It’s harder to figure out exactly how to make the idea work, ideas run together, I become convinced that they’re crap, or I think they’re so great I freeze up and can’t figure out how to express them. This last one is a key point – I think we often end up vastly overvaluing ideas because of their enormous potential. But really, unexecuted ideas are nothing but trouble. The one advantage to unexecuted ideas is that you don’t have to go through the tedious work of sorting out data so that you can analyse it, you don’t have to go through the mental grief of writing – in short, you can dodge all the hard work.
You can’t really judge the value of an idea though, without putting in the work to test it, and to execute it. If we get too caught up in ideas, we overvalue them. We end up thinking that each idea is precious, and shouldn’t be wasted. From this perspective, we’re like albatrosses – who raise one chick every two years. I think we need to be more like salmon – rattling out ideas in volume (the obvious flaw in this metaphor is that salmon do that with their eggs, and then they die – so we don’t want to be exactly like salmon…). I think we should figure out ways to test out ideas quickly, so we can figure out which work and which don’t, and then nurture and grow the good ones. Humans are inherently problem-solving animals. Consequently, we don’t usually suffer from a shortage of ideas. We need to focus more on figuring out which ones are the good ones. We need to be salmon!
So I say go out and execute ideas. Do some work, try them out and figure out which ones are the good ones. But one way or another – execute! I guess I’m saying that the people at Duarte, in addition to continuing to write their excellent blog and to create great presentations, should go ahead and build their moat, complete with sharks (with laser beams attached to their frickin’ heads).
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the variety category.
