Collaborative Innovation Strategy
At the core of any organization are people. This seems like a really non-profound statement. But, it seems as though leaders who strive to build innovation strategies, models, and plans within their organization often don’t involve the critical core of the organization in the process in effective ways. Without involving the people who implement and deliver solutions to the organization (expected at accelerated rates), how can innovation be achieved much less sustained?
There is an article titled, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg (1994). It is a bit dated. However, I concur with Mr. Mintzberg’s point about the difference between strategic planning and strategic thinking. The most successful strategies are those that arise from vision, not plans. This involves creativity and intuition,… and a gut check. Humanizing the process opens it up to creative insights and allows for a lack of formalities which can be barriers to true authenticity.
I recommend going on a hiking expedition! I think taking your core group to the hills and getting outside of the four walls of where you work offers an immediate challenge: how to survive in the wilderness with your team with a limited amount of gear, food and water. I like it! You have to sustain yourself and focus on the elements of survival while thinking about the strategic vision for the organization. What will emerge is a whole new way of thinking about your organization’s value and purpose. Group think will dissolve and people’s minds will ope
n up to new ways of viewing life and our intention for this life while filtering their water from the stream. What better way to enter into a journey of discovery and build collaborations among your team. This is the first step in understanding the criticality of collaborations for the organization. What better way to grasp this than to see the vastness of our planet from the slopes of the trail and our frailness and vulnerability in it.
What a big world we live in. In this big world there is tremendous potential.
Today’s visions have to incorporate an open mindset to operating business not in isolation, but a vision of connecting to strategic partners, universities, agencies and organizations. The connections need to be rooted in collaborations where the exchange results in value for both organizations and is more than merely communication. Managers need to lead from this vision with a level of commitment to the journey rather than the destination and that the journey is rooted in effective collaborations. If the collaborations are managed right it can lead to collaborative innovations where ideas are exchanged with a currency for exploitation in the marketplace once incorporated into the product and brand. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. The vision is in the mindset. Living in the wilderness for a few days will open up your mindset and bring you back to earth, the ground where things grow and where life happens. In this you may find yourself and hopefully a new appreciation for this world and your place in it. This is a key first step in visioning a future for your organization.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Traditional R&D is Dead
Traditional R&D is dead. I like this moving media to articulate the ways in which R&D has changed in recent times. Check it out!
There is a force stronger than nature which is creating value from customer driven insights and meeting customers needs. R&D must start there, over and above what is interesting to pursue. Having a handy widget and trying to find value in the marketplace is futile. It is about identifying customer needs, and in some cases defining customer needs.
This topic led me to do some digging and in pursuit of understanding cutting edge research better, I found out some interesting things about an interesting organization, Stanford Research Institute, known as SRI International.
SRI, founded as Stanford Research Institute in 1946, is a nonprofit scientific research institute formed under section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue code. It was created by a group of industrialists along with Stanford University to conduct leading edge research. SRI formally separated from the University in 1970, and changed its name to SRI International in 1977.
The organization employs approximately 2100 scientists, researchers, inventors, engineers and staff throughout the world headquartered in Menlo Park, CA.
The mission of SRI is to discover and apply science and technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace. SRI has a broad charter that encourages its people to make a difference in the world through basic and applied research, research services, technology development, and commercialization of innovations. The SRI vision is centered on being the premier independent source of high-value innovations and solutions in the world. Their strategy is to grow by building and leveraging assets; client relationships, intellectual property, and staff, in important markets.
SRI has built a foundation of broad and deep knowledge, including expertise, to serve clients in communications and networks, computing, economic development and science and technology policy, education, energy and environment, engineering systems, health, homeland security and national defense, materials and structures, and robotics.
The company is led today by Dr. Curtis Carlson, President and CEO, who is an active champion of innovation and embedding innovation best practices within the organization. He believes innovation is a means to meeting the needs of customers, and is now the only path to growth, prosperity, environmental sustainability, and national security. His belief in this is so strong that he teaches innovation to all new hires in two-day workshop intensive. And, he is the co-author of one of the top 10 best business books of 2006 by BusinessWeek, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want. In his book he articulates how innovation is not merely about creativity, ideas, new products rather it is about bringing value to customers. Without this, there is no innovation.
As an organization, SRI has accomplished significant innovations over the last several decades and attributes its success to the ability to deliver ideas to customers in an impactful and value driven way. For example, Siri technology now owned by Apple was created by SRI based on decades of work in artificial intelligence for US defense. According to SRI, research in artificial intelligence, including SRI leadership of the largest known artificial intelligence project in U.S. history, led to the development of the groundbreaking virtual personal assistant technology. SRI spun off Siri, Inc. in 2007 to bring the technology to consumers and in April 2010, Apple acquired Siri. In October 2011, Siri was unveiled as an integrated feature of the Apple iPhone 4S.
The method for doing innovation within SRI involves five elements or disciplines outlined in great detail in Dr. Carlson’s book: 1) Focus on customer and market needs; 2) Create value by way of a thorough articulation of customer needs, the approach and benefit cost analysis; 3) Innovation champion driven projects to implement approach; 4) Leveraging open innovation to bring the best multi-disciplinary innovation team together of collaborators; and 5) Organizational alignment with customers and partners throughout the process.
According to Dr. Carlson, innovation is the creation and delivery of new customer value in the marketplace. And this plays out internally in how you structure the organization and where you place your focus. According to Norman Winarsky, SRI’s vice president for ventures, licensing, and strategic programs, “at any given time, SRI has around 2,000 projects in the pipeline, spread across five major divisions.” (CNET News, 2010) The divisions act as technology generators for the organization. 
They consist of information technology; engineering and systems; advanced materials, microsystems and nanotechnology; biotechnology; health, education, and economic policy. Within these divisions, core teams consider what the major important needs of the customers are. The focus is generated along the needs as opposed to what is most interesting to SRI researchers. This in the forefront serves as a driver for new ideas, technologies and products.
The second fundamental discipline is value creation which is defined by a viable and well-articulated value proposition. All ideas are put through this innovation process rigor in what is referred to as “NABC” or need, approach, benefit and competition. Once the need is known and an approach is identified, customer stakeholder value is addressed through assessing benefit per cost to produce. Lastly, competition analysis is conducted for marketplace assessment. SRI conducts the full business analysis in forums called watering holes where the teams in place come together regularly to collect ideas, break down organizational barriers, and provide resources.
At SRI each new project is led by an innovation champion. They operate under a motto of ‘no champion, no project, no exception.’ Every project requires someone who believes passionately in innovation, understands the process, and will do whatever it takes to make it work. The right person has the values, respect for others, and operates with great ethics. According to Dr. Carlson, “we teach all of our folks these elements and we hire people who want to be a part of this.”
Project teams at SRI are designed specifically to the challenge. The belief is if you want to be successful in today’s world, the best ideas come from the best people. They teach their people how to select people who share the vision, have unique skills, and therefore the full team shares in the rewards. For them it is not just about assembling the best team, but also the right team. New possible innovations are managed by small teams of three to five with complementary skills and those who share the vision who can work collaboratively through the issues. Once the ideas are ready for implementation, bigger teams are assembled to move the idea to something meaningful.
The fifth discipline is about organizational alignment. SRI purports to implement scalable organizational plans that liberate creativity, enhance collaborations, and sustain continuous, successful innovations. Within SRI they have methods to incubate ideas collaboratively across the enterprise tied to funding dollars that motivates and incentivizes idea generation. In addition, leadership champions the innovation process across the organization rigorously through instituting workshops and trainings and communicating its value continuously.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Ray Anderson and Climate Neutral Carpet
Climate Neutral Carpet, by Ray Anderson
Ray C. Anderson (July 28, 1934 – August 8, 2011)was founder and chairman of Interface Inc., one of the world’s largest manufacturers of modular carpet for commercial and residential applications and a leading producer of commercial broadloom and commercial fabrics. (source: wikipedia)
Mr. Anderson understood the issue with sustainability and the role business and industry plays. He reframed the problem of consumption and affluence to a problem of happiness. Perhaps there is a way to be happy to take from the earth only what can be renewed by the earth? He conceded that Interface was as a plunderer of the earth. But, did not leave it there. He conceded that by digging up the earth and converting natural resources to products for a profit, he himself was a plunderer. However, he discovered that through transformative technologies and unique supplier relationships his company’s product could be created from materials of the earth in a sustainable way. He called it ‘cool’ carpet. According to Environmental Leader article dated August, 2011, “Interface says that in the past 17 years, it has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 24 percent, fossil fuel consumption by 60 percent, waste to landfill by 82 percent and water use by 82 percent, while avoiding over $450 million in costs, increasing sales by 63 percent and more than doubling earnings.” That is some kind of cool.
How did they do it? They started by using less oil, using less energy overall and less material. They made products last longer and recycled old carpet into new. They worked deals with nylon suppliers to get pre- and post-consumer recycled content materials– including a 100% recycled content fiber by sending fiber from reclaimed carpet.
We could all stand to learn from Ray Anderson, an inspirational entrepreneur and environmental visionary and businessman. Cool indeed.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Crowd Accelerated Innovation
Crowd Accelerated Innovation by Chris Anderson
Crowd sourcing says, let’s outsource our tasks, our needs from an employee or a contractor to a large group of people as an open call or challenge or need. (see wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing)
But Chris Anderson is saying something different! And, he is calling it Crowd Accelerated Innovation. Watch and listen for new ways of thinking about your stuff, your ideas, your teams ideas, and how you view your community and your life. It is great!
In a recent TED talk, (http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/955) Chris Anderson (who started TED) suggests a different way of interacting with people, different from what I understand crowd-sourcing to be about—and this intrigued me. This is about sharing creative ideas, connecting with these ideas and how these ideas stimulate your thoughts and ideas, your groups and teams thoughts and ideas. And, how new ideas propel your learning, your team’s learning, and accelerate ideas to innovations.
In Innovation in R&D, video is changing the game.
Examples include Jove (http://www.jove.com/); a peer reviewed, PubMed indexed journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format or UrWeb.Tv (http://urweb.tv/index.html) where Cyberpitches are video produced to demonstrate a technology and its capability in order to accelerate technology transfer efforts from government, university, emerging companies and research labs to commercial markets.
The ‘primal medium’ Chris refers to is simple, VIDEO connected through the internet, but it is profoundly demonstrated in its impact on accelerating innovation and transferring knowledge, information, ideas to people from people.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Innovation in R&D
Wouldn’t it be nice to read about applied innovation at the R&D level, rather than one more story about the ‘disruptive’ razor blade solution or the ‘breakthrough’ car foam turned household cleaner?
What opportunities are out there for innovation practitioners to develop and collaborate with communities of practice on applied innovation processes in R&D? In my current knowledge, I know of none.
Much of what is out there in the public domain in written form (blogs, articles, tweets, etc.) is largely ‘case study’ oriented, written from a distance by educated journalists, reporters, business or innovation analysts….but not much out there from the people who actually DO innovation within their organizations. And by that I mean literally, the doers…not the upper management with visions of grandeur.
I think it would be great to have this practice-level work exposed beyond stories about solution seekers finding unlikely found solution solvers for big companies to pump into a product portfolio for billion dollar gains. Now, I realize that this proposition can bring all kinds of anxiety up. Innovation practices are proprietary and clearly confidential, for good competitive reasons within companies. And, the consulting firms that provide these services to corporations also hold close their methods and approaches. But, wouldn’t it be nice to read more about applied innovation at the R&D level, rather than one more story about the ‘disruptive’ razor blade solution or the ‘breakthrough’ car foam turned household cleaner?
Just asking.
Seeking opportunities for non-academic, rather hands-on learnings, that can be shared collaboratively with peers developing and conducting innovation and open innovation processes and practices within their organizations for advancing R&D in meaningful and value-add ways that supports long term, complex research efforts.
See discussion in the IDEA Lab group on linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=3048930&trk=anet_ug_hm&goback=.anh_3048930
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Knowing what you don’t know….
Currently sitting at National Innovation Conference in Dayton Ohio at the Hope Hotel.
Getting energized by the creative energy, the openness to learning, and the courage of people.
What sticks out in my mind is a question for the ‘problem space’ of innovation: If you don’t go where you don’t want to go, how will you know what you don’t know?
This was something I used with my students years ago (back in the day as a high school science teacher in the southwest of Ohio) who were resistant to learning something new that by appearance seemed to have nothing to do with their life, and nothing to do with their future.
What happened through consistent presence was ‘trust’ that if we collectively go together, something awesome could happen to them:
For example: Ms. Riley what does an atom have to do with me?
we found that the way an atom lives and how it lives in balance and dances with other atoms to make molecules was instructive to us in our lives and our life’s challenges. Not to mention that the obvious was learned—I am atoms that are compressible to the head of a pin, and together in unison with energy makes me a human ‘being.’ Talk about a gee-whiz moment!
Where is it that you feel resistance within? What or who do you feel resistant to? What is it that you don’t want to learn?
Steve Goubeaux from Goodwill and Easter Seals asked us this morning: Do you know how to think BIG, and try small? Do you try stupid things and turn something into stupendous? Can you accept being challenged?
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
National Innovation TRIZCON 2010 Oct. 7-8th coming up soon!
I am working with colleagues from Cincinnati Ohio to co-host and co-sponsor the National Innovation TRIZCON 2010 event this October in Dayton, OH. The event traditionally is held to expose and train people interested in Altshuller’s theory of inventive problem solving (acronym: TRIZ or TIPS). This year is different. The event will couple an additional track on innovation with speakers who will be covering topics such as front-end problem deconstruction, innovation end-to-end approaches, methods, tools, innovation culture and leadership, etc. I am very excited to be working to bring methods of practice into the fold of the innovation discussion. I think this event will be a great chance for small-medium sized business leaders of Dayton and Cincinnati to immerse themselves into the best-in-class thinkers on innovation, build networks, and learn practical approaches for implementation.
The event will be held on Oct. 7-8th at the Hope Hotel near Wright Patterson Air Force Base and Wright State University. Stay tuned for details real soon on getting registered, the agenda filled with top creative problem solvers, innovation strategists, practitioners, and thought leaders from NASA, AFRL, P&G, and many more.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Landscaping global talent and state-of-the-art just got easier: Elsevier acquires Collexis
See article here for news story: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_01551
Elsevier contains many, many journals containing millions of publications with loads of connections to university scholars, researchers, and institutes. They are appealing to me for many reason including the fact that they house robust tools to enable your R&D work including: CAPCAS, ChemVillage, CrossFire Beilstein, CrossFire Gmelin, EngineeringVillage 2, illumin8, PharmaPendium, Scopus
Conducting secondary research isn’t an easy task. Working across various data sources to locate the expertise and landscape technical spaces for problem deconstruction is tedious and not just an act of science, but is an art. I think the science part may be a little lighter with this new development. We’ll see. Elsevier product expansion is something to watch.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Innovation in US Department of Education
The US Department of Education has released just recently (~late March) the first ever Open Innovation Portal for the agency to leverage the ingenuity of our people in order to drive new ideas, create collaborative groups, and generate innovations for education in our schools, for our teachers, for our education leaders, for our children, and for improved learning. This portal “provides a public forum for all who wish to participate in creating opportunities for partnership and local private and public funding – potentially multiplying many times over the federal funding opportunity,” James H. Shelton III, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement said upon release of the site.
https://innovation.ed.gov/index/
It looks to me like a great idea that I am hopeful will produce some results. But as Sir Ken Robinson stated in a recent TED presentation, “we need a revolution, not an evolution” in education. Having taught high school chemistry and physics for 11 years in the public education system and worked on many reform efforts including a few funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I would have to agree with Sir Ken Robinson. Reform approaches mean that we are only looking to evolve what is, in incremental isolated ways. We need a revolution of what is.
On a funding note, President Obama put forth $650 Million or so as part of the $5 billion investment in school reform in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). This money, some $100M will be allocated in FY10 from a grant effort called Investing in Innovation Fund (i3). In February 2009, President Obama stood before a joint session of Congress and announced that by 2020 the United States would once again have the highest percentage of college-educated adults in the world.” More information on the i3 can be found at: http://ed.gov/programs/innovation/factsheet.html
I think of the testing mandates of No Child Left Behind, and I think of the multitudes of 12th grade, senior students that I tutored in the late hour afternoons of April and May going over and over again with them Newton’s Laws, the organelles of the animal cell, and the fundamentals of the atom. Their graduation diploma hung in the balance of the Science Ohio Graduation Test, the famous OGT. Where were they? Were we NOT leaving them behind by ensuring that they could answer the correct multiple choice questions about forces, mitochondria, and protons? A singular score of a 401 would release them, a 399 or less would humiliate them.
I am hopeful, I am hopeful indeed that we will begin to revolutionize the US Education system to truly and earnestly leave no child behind.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Front end innovation = Open innovation????
So as I am sitting here thinking about the recent Front End Innovation (FEI) conference I attended in Boston. I am wondering what the fundamental driver for that event was? There was a diversity of speakers, theorists, business folk, thought leaders, executives, marketers, tool providers, service providers, etc. I felt the driver was very unclear, and so was the take-home message. When I tried to elicit help from the top tier company leaders known for their success with Open Innovation (OI) practices, I was left dumbfounded.
My question specifically was something along the lines of, how does open innovation fit in when speaking of the front end? The responses were a bit muddled and quick, and along the lines of ‘they are one in the same’ and ‘they are essentially different ways of saying the same thing’ and ‘our front end is open innovation.’ My take-away from the response was twofold: first, I took it to mean that front end innovation and open innovation are not distinguishable from each other within the internal innovation practices and/or two, who cares if they appear or are different- it’s irrelevant. Hmmmm? Perhaps I misunderstood the answers. But, later in the event, it became evermore clear that there was one loud and clear unifying message: find out what consumers/customers want, dream, envision, and need. This is front end.
In my thinking, front end innovation is VERY distinguishable from open innovation. I think front end is a state of being within the practitioner mindset when actively engaged in doing innovation, and it also is a demarcation of where you are in the end-to-end innovation process or cycle. Whereas, open innovation is an act of looking outside and externally seeking new ideas, new potential collaborators, solvers, or partners.
IF front end = identifying/shaping the nugget(s) of truth of what consumers want, dream, envision, and need and to do this the organization looks outside to small and large volumes of external consumers for these insights, then, ok….. I can logically see the way in which front end = open innovation.
However, I fundamentally believe FEI is being in the problem space, and OI is working the solution space. A mindset versus an act.
And, regardless of whether you are consumer packaged goods company or a research lab, front end is not an action. It is an acknowledgment that there is great value in staying in the problem space.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
