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You can’t buy innovation

2012/01/25 in Innovation, Uncategorized by peg | No comments

Why is it so hard to incent our companies or teams to do anything innovative? Something tangible that makes a difference to the top or bottom line. The vast majority of innovation programmes seem to deliver little more that some nice demos before the programme peters out, with stakeholders often happy to return to their usual duties. The problem is that innovation is neither a product or a process, nor is it a skill; innovation is an artefact of culture, and culture is something that you cannot buy, hire or implement. The reason that most companies fail to innovate – despite significant investment in innovation – is that innovation is a result of culture and their culture actively prevents them from realising anything innovative.

Innovation (whatever that is[1]) has become the Mecca for modern business. In today’s turbulent environment everyone is looking for that new idea or product, that innovation, which will give them an edge. Nowhere is this more obvious than the crowded market places for smartphones and mobile applications, where crowds of companies compete to become the next iPhone, Angry Birds or FarmVille. It’s hard to stand out in a crowded market and you need something unique, something innovative to grab the public’s attention.

In their quest for the next big (innovative) thing, management teams engage innovation consultancies, create innovation functions and programmes, and hire the hot new skills which claim to be the next source of innovation. (Yesterday it was portfolio management; today, Design Thinking, next some are claiming that it’s the skills provided by a liberal arts degree.) The hope it that a tangible investment will result in an intangible outcome, as if innovation is something that can be standardised and transformed into a repeatable process. None of these approaches work reliably.

Innovation, of course, extends to more than casual games and mobile phones. Apple seems to have established a track record for innovation across a number of sectors, Amazon has proved itself to be a lot more than a simple web retailer, while 3M has a long history of bringing interesting products to market (PostIt notes, Scotchguard, Goretex…). We’re also seeing success at the bottom end of the market, where companies such as Kogan[2] are finding new (innovative) was to products to waiting customers at a price point radically lower than traditional bricks and mortar retailers.

At the individual level we find the innovator situated in a broader context. The questing of Pablo Picasso, Jimi Hendrix, Laurie Anderson and Miles Davis was woven into and built apon ideas that they found around them as they tried to make sense of the world. Picasso’s desire to draw a picture showing all sides of the subject once built on Cézanne’s abstract shapes and resulted in cubism. Miles Davis wanted to bring the some of the soul from Sly Stone’s work into the world of Jazz, and created fusion and Bitches’ Brew in the process. New work – innovation – is created by cultural accretion, as the artisan pulls in tools, techniques and ideas from the community around them as they search for the best way to express their aspirations. The innovator’s role is to provide the focus, the drive to realise a new idea, that enables these previously disparit threads together. The context that enables them to do this is the culture, the thick soup of ideas that that’s been simmering for generations.

Picasso's Weeping Woman (1937)

Picasso's Femme en pleurs (1937)

The common thread running through innovators — both businesses and individuals — is cultural. They approach the problem of innovation obliquely, if they approach it at all. Jon Ives, for example, is on record as claiming that Apple “just makes products that we would love to own ourselves”. Innovation is not something discovered, rather than something intentionally designed. “I’ll play it first, and tell you what it is later”, as Miles Davis said. Rather than invest in innovation functions and processes, or hire innovation gurus, and striving to be innovative, they are focused on solving problems. Tools, techniques and skills (such as Design Thinking) are pulled in as needed to solve a problem, instead of being implemented in the hope that they will instil innovation in whatever we’re doing. Sometimes the focus, the drive to realise a new idea, comes from the top-down, as in Apple’s case. Other times it works bottom-up, as with 3M’s more organic approach to innovation that allows individuals to vote with their feet.

Whether organic or structured, innovation is the result of two things. First is a rich and diverse cultural soup full of the ideas and skills that the innovator can draw on. A culture that values the learning and investigation needed to constantly enrich the soup, and one that extends beyond the wall of the organisation or individual to draw on, and appropriate, ideas an needed.

Jim Jarmusch on biting

Jim Jarmusch on biting

Second is the imperative, the desire, to follow through on an idea, to realise an idea or find a more elegant solution to a problem. Sometimes is means providing the time and space to develop and idea, but often it means proving constraints to drive the creative process. These constraints might involve time and money, forcing a team to solve a problem faster or more cheaply than a conventional approach would allow. Or the constraints might be written into the requirements, such as Steve Job’s desire to eliminate all but one button to create a more elegant solution.

The failure of many efforts to instil innovation into existing organisations is that they focus on the tools, and forget that innovation is the result of a culture more than it is a process. Without the drive to try something new, and permission to pull in the ideas and tools are most valuable, any investment in innovation will just result in little more than a bright flash followed by silence. Innovation is not something you can buy. It’s the result of the organisational culture you have create, and culture is the hardest thing to change.


References


1. What is innovation? @ PEG↑
2. Kogan↑

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Outsourcing in an increasingly complex world

2011/11/16 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Publications by peg | No comments

Sometimes posts become a tad to long and unwieldily to drop onto the blog. One such post was a thing I put together around some work I’ve been doing over the last few years on outsourcing. A friend suggested that, rather than letting it languish, it could be interesting to clean it up and publish the result as a (short) ebook; which is what I’ve done.

Find the blurb below, and to can grab the complete text from the iBookstore or Lulu (epub) (Amazon is in the pipeline).

Outsourcing in an increasingly complex world

Outsourcing in an increasingly complex world

by Peter Evans-Greenwood

Support independent publishing: Buy this e-book on Lulu.

Pressure on margins is driving organizations to increasingly rationalize and externalize supporting functions as they search for more efficient and flexible delivery approaches.

Most common approaches to outsourcing center on establishing target service levels and a unit cost, treating the negotiation of an outsourcing engagement in a similar fashion to the procurement of other materials that the business needs.

Outsourcing, however, is becoming more complicated as we move functions closer to the heart of the business into the hands of partners and suppliers. This represents a shift from an approach based on paying invoices for the raw materials we need to run the business, to one based on delegating core, business-critical functions to suppliers, and then requiring them to deliver the outcomes that we need.

Crafting a successful outsourcing engagement in this environment requires us to align the supplier’s incentives, and therefore their objectives, with the client’s business drivers. It’s not enough to take a piecemeal approach, imposing additional requirements and constraints in the hope that these will shape supplier behaviour.

It’s a truism that what gets measured is what gets done; outsourcing is no different. Existing approaches to crafting outsourcing agreements attempt to shape supplier behavior by imposing large and inconsistent sets of requirements, with the result that both parties search for loopholes in an attempt to optimize their position.

A successful contract will be based on the customer’s business drivers, aligning supplier incentives with them to ensure that the agreement drives the right behaviors

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Death of the shopping mission

2011/11/14 in Business-Technology by peg | No comments

When did you last go on a mission to buy something? Something specific that you had decided you needed. Were you looking for a book to read, heading to a nearest bookstore to browse the shelves? Was it a trip to the local big-box store to stock up on toilet paper and other household odds and ends? Or did you wander around a department store at the local mall looking for something to wear? Our behaviour – consumer behaviour – has changed. Shopping has historically been a search problem: how do we find the products we need need? Today, though, we increasingly buy on impulse, selecting the cheapest – or the best at the most competitive price – from the wealth of products and merchants around the global. The shopping mission is going the way of the dodo. If we see a book we like, then we add it to our list at Amazon or Book Depository and it’s delivered direct to our front door. We’re getting household consumables delivered direct to our homes. And we’re even sourcing clothes online where we can find lower prices and a larger selection. Our behaviour is changing, and the retailers and merchants who don’t adapt are being left behind. A lot of the turmoil we’re seeing in the current economy is likely due to a reconfiguration of business, driven by the changes in consumer behaviour.

We used to engage in a shopping mission, a quest to find the goods we need to solve problems that we know we have. This was a journey that would bring us into contact with quirky in-store marketing displays designed to influence our purchasing decision. Product companies tried to build brand awareness, hoping to create a spark of recognition that, when you found yourselves standing in front of the shelves, would tilt you toward selecting their product over the others. Will be it Heinz tomato sauce? The store’s home brand? Or something gourmet from a boutique manufacturer. Merchants worked hard to ensure that they had the best selection of products they could find – the brands that would pull the customers into their store rather then those of the competition.

Standing before the grocery shelf or clothes rack, we would sort through the brands on offer, trying to find the one that we though to be the best value. This roughly translates into selecting the best quality that we could afford. The only products and information at our disposal was what the retailer chose to present us with, unless we were willing to trudge over to another shop so that we could we see what products it had on offer (and what it was willing to tell us about them). The result was usually a compromise: we’d select the best product we could see in front of us, knowing that it was probably neither the cheapest we might find if we kept searching, nor would it be the best we could find. Finding a better solution to our problem – that pair of jeans with a nicer fit, or the tomato sauce with just a hint of something interesting – was too hard.

The world has changed a lot since then. Firstly, globalisation means that it is now possible to reach around the global, conducting an extensive search for the cheapest, or the best (at the most competitive price). This is as simple as typing a few words into Google or visiting you favourite comparison shopping site. Secondly, quality is a solved problem. Twenty years ago that store brand ice-cream or tomato sauce, or the no-name t-shirt, were obviously inferior to the brand name product. Twenty years is a long time, and manufacturing’s relentless focus on quality management over that time means the cheapest product in the market is virtually indistinguishable from the brand names. They were probably even made in the same ingredients or components in the same factory by the same people.

Consumers no longer need to compromise. With little difference between products and the ability to source them from around the globe, many consumers opt for the cheapest they can find from the global market. Nor are consumers who are willing to pay a premium restricted to selecting from the products on offer locally, reaching around the globe find to the exact product they want at the best possible price.

“Price comparisons would be between first and second, or fourth and fifth. What we’re seeing now is a consumer who shops either on price, or on quality – the number one premium, or the retail price point. All the middle brands have gone.”

Sue Morphet, CEO PacBrands[1]

The balance of power has shifted from retailer to consumer, and the shopping mission is collateral damage. A consumer standing in front of the gaggle of tomato sauces offered by a merchant now has enough information to make an informed decision, and a brand means nothing unless it offers something unique. Consumers are buying the cheapest product, or they are buying the most interesting product (to them). The mass-market brands we grew up with, those labels we trusted because they were reliable, are being demolished, caught in a no man’s land between cheap and premium[2].

An avid reader wanting a specific book will source it from an online retailer such as Amazon or Book Depository who can offer lower prices and a larger selection, delivered direct to the front door. The time poor professional at the supermarket will often simply pick the cheapest bottle of tomato sauce they can see in front of them, knowing that it will be as good as any of the other. That teenager interested in those green sneakers with black skulls will try on their friends for size and then use an comparison shopping site on the Internet to find the best deal globally. Now that the consumer is in control, and they have the information and services they need at the tip of their smart phone, they are becoming much more impulsive with their approach to buying the goods they want.

The cost of finding the goods and services has plummeted, and consumers are responding by taking a much more opportunistic approach to purchasing. Rather engaging in a search to find goods we need, we’re deciding to buy them impulsively once a need is recognised. Consumers are building relationships with organisations that provide the premium products they desire, or who can be relied on to provide them with the lowest cost items that can be found. Purchases are made opportunistically, built on the shared social connection that has already been established. Customers skip across channels – both real and virtual – learning more about the company’s products and how they can help them. Eventually they realise that there is something they would like, and purchasing is now simply a matter of acknowledging their desire. They might purchase a TV from a company known for bringing cheap but innovative electronics to market, one more focused on putting all the features the customers want into one box, rather than trying to up sell and cross sell. It might be an expensive meal at a restaurant, triggered by the knowledge that a table had just become free for that night. It could the milk man offering to drop off some veg and a steak with the morning milk and bread, guaranteed to arrive before you leave for work. Or it might be that premium computer or tablet with that carefully designed case that you were playing with at your friend’s house.

Retail is reconfiguring, splitting into the cheapest and the best, with a gap appearing the middle. Apple, for example, seems to be the only consumer IT brand still experiencing robust growth and profits[3], with the majority of PC manufactures struggling to pull slim margins from a declining market. At the other end of the market, Kogan Technologies is rapidly building a profitable business[4] around a low cost, direct to consumer model founded on using a community of low cost manufacturers to rapidly create cheap but functional products target at specific consumer needs. Harvey Norman, a traditional bricks-and-morter retailer, is seeing revenue fall and profits slump[5].

The new generation of companies – the Apples and Kogans, the Zaras and the explosion of boutique fashion houses – are playing to our new tendency to buy impulsively. They build relationships with their customers, allowing them to skip across channels without purchasing, to reduce the resistance to transacting when the time comes. They avoid sales and regular discounting so tht there’s no reason to hold off a purchase. Some, such as Betabrands, are turning this art into a science, using our desire to be seen as original and our tendency to want to grab bargains when we stumble across them to overcome our reluctance to buy something we can’t touch and feel and accelerate their sales cycle[6].

A chasm is opening up under the traditional mass-market brands, brands that rely on the shopping mission, while companies which can establish themselves at one of the two ends of the spectrum are seeing robust growth. Companies caught in the middle, companies built around the traditional shopping mission are seeing their margins decline and revenues fall, unable to compete. The shopping mission is dying, and it appears that many companies might die with it.

Update:


References


1. Speech at the Australian Institute of Company Directors lunch in Brisbane, May 26, 2011.↑
2. Eli Greenbla (Aug 30, 2011), Heinz cans Coles, Woolworths, The Sydney Morning Herald↑
3. Charles Arthur (July 2011), Apple profits up 124% year-on-year after record iPhone sales, The Guardian↑
4. Neha Kale (August 2011), Kogan Technologies reports 100% increase in revenue, PowerRetail↑
5. Anhar Khanbhai, Harvey Norman profits fall 20%, Connected Australia↑
6. Amy Wallace (October 2010), Whimsy (and clothes) for sale, The New York Times↑

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Innovation [2010-11-29]

2010/11/29 in Innovation, Mailing List by peg | 2 comments

Another week and another collection of interesting ideas from around the internet.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

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How to cope with an IT transformation

2010/10/21 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | 2 comments

Once started, an IT transformation is hard to stop. Such huge efforts – often involving investments of hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars – take on a life of their own. Once the requirements have been scoped and IT has started the hard work of development, business’s thoughts often turn from anticipation to dread. How do we understand what we’re getting? How do we cope with business change between when we signed off the requirements to the solution entering production? Will the solution actually be able support an operating and constantly evolving business?

Transformations take a lot of time and huge amount of resources, giving them a life of their own within the business. It’s not uncommon for the team responsible for the transformation to absorb a significant proportion of the people and capital from the main business, often into the double-digit percentages. It’s also not uncommon for the the time between kicking off the project and delivery of the first components in to the business to be five years or more.

The world can change a lot in five years. Take Apple for example: sixty percent of the products they sell did not exist three years ago[1]. It’s not rare for the business to have a little buyers remorse once the requirements have been sign-off and we sit waiting for the solution to arrive. Did we ask for the right thing? Will the platforms and infrastructure perform as expected? Are our requirements good enough for IT to deliver what we need? Will what we asked for be relevant when it’s delivered?

Apple quarterly sales by product

Apple quarterly sales by product

The business has placed a large bet – often putting the entire company’s life on the line – so it’s understandable to be a little worried, and the investment is usually large enough that the business is committed: there’s no backing out now. However, the decision to undertake the transformation has been made, our bets have been placed, and there’s no point regretting carefully considered decisions made in the past with the best evidence and information we could gather at the time. We should be looking forward, focusing on how we can best leverage this investment once it is delivered.

We can break our concerns into a few distinct groups: completeness, suitability, relevance and adaptability.

First, we tend to worry that our requirements were complete. Did we give IT the information they need to do their job? Or were there holes and oversights in the requirements which will require interpretation by IT, interpretation which may or may-not align with how the business conceived the requirement when we wrote down the bullet points.

Next, we are concerned that we asked for the right thing. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to imagine a finished solution from tables, bullet points and process diagrams. And I know that if I’m having trouble, then you’re probably imagining a slightly different finished solution than I’m thinking of. And IT probably has a different picture in their heads again. Someone is bound to be disappointed when the final solution is rolled out.

Thirdly, we have relevance. Five years is a long time. Even three years is long, as Apple has shown us. Our requirements were conceived in a very different business environment to the one that the solution will be deployed into. We probably did our best to guess what will change during the delivery journey, we can also be sure that some of our predictions will be wrong. How accurate our predictions are (which is largely a question of how lucky we were) will determine how relevant the solution will be. If our predictions were off the mark, then we might have a lot of work to do after the final release to bring the solution up to scratch.

Finally, we have adaptability. A business is not a fixed target, as it constantly evolves and adapts in response to the business environment it is situated in. Hopefully we specified the right flex-points – areas in the solution which will need to change rapidly in response to changing business need – back at the start of the journey. We don’t want our transformed IT estate to become instant legacy.

A lot of these concerns have already been address with ideas like rapid-productionisation[2] and (gasp!) agile methodologies, but they’re solving a different problem. Once you have a transformation underway, advice that you should hire lots of Scrum masters will fall on dead ears. While there’s a lot of good advice in these methodologies, our concern is coping with the transformation we have, not to throw away all effort to-date and try something different.

So what can we do to help IT ensure that the transformed IT estate is the best that it can be?

We could try to test to success, making IT jump through even more hoops by create more and increasing strenuous tests to add to the acceptance criteria, but while faster and more intense might work for George Lucas[3], it doesn’t add a lot of value in this instance. Our concerns are understanding the requirements we have and safeguarding the relevance of our IT estate in a rapidly evolving business environment. We’re less concerned that existing requirements are implemented correctly (we should have already done that work).

I can see two clear strategies for coping with the IT transformation we have. First, is to create a better shared understanding of what the final solution might look like (shared between business and IT, as well as between business stakeholders). Second is to start understanding how the future IT estate might need to evolve and adapt in the future. Learnings from both of these activities can be feed back into the transformation to help improve the outcomes, as well as providing the business with a platform to communicate the potential scale and impact of the change with the broader user population.

There are a number of light-weight approaches to building and testing new user interfaces and workflows, putting the to-be requirements in the hands of the users in a very real and tactic way which enables them to understand what the world will look like post transformation. This needs to be more than UI wireframes or user storyboards. We need to trial new work practice, process improvements and decisioning logic. The team members at the coalface of the business also need to use these new tools in anger before we really under their impact. Above all, they need time with these solutions, time to form an opinion, as I’ve written about before[4].

Much like the retail industry, with their trial stores, we can create a trial solution to explore how the final solution should move and act. We’re less worried about the plumbing and infrastructure, as we’re focused on the layout and how the trial store is used. This trial solution can be integrated with existing operations and provided to a small user population -– perhaps a branch in a bank, an single operations centre for back-office processing, or a one factory operated by a manufacturer – where we can realise, measure, test and update our understanding of what the to-be solution should look like, bringing our business and technology stakeholders to a single shared understanding of what we’re trying to achieve.

Our trial solution need not be on the production platform, as we’re trying to understand how the final solution should work and be used, not how it should be implemented. Startups are already providing enterprise mash-up platforms[5] which let you integrate UI, process and decisioning elements into one coherent user interface, often in weeks rather than months or years. Larger vendors – such as IBM and Oracle – are already integrating these technologies into their platforms. New vendors are also emerging which offer BPM on demand via a SaaS model.

Concerns about the scaleability and maintainability of these new technologies can be balanced with the limited scale and lifetime of our trial deployment. A trial operations centre in one city often need not require 24×7 support, perfectly capable of limping along with a nine-to-five phone number of someone from the development team. We can also always fail back to the older solution if the trial solution isn’t up to scratch.

Our second strategy might be to experiment with new ideas and wholly new models of operation, collecting data and insight on how the transformed IT estate might need to evolve once it becomes operational. This is the disruptive sibling of the incremental improvements in the trial solution. (Indeed, some of the insights from these experiments might even be tested in a trial solution, if feasible.)

In the spirit of experimental scenario planning, a bank might look to Mint[6] or Kiva[7], while a retailer might look to Zara[8]. Or, even more interesting, you might look across industries, with a bank looking to Zara for inspiration, for example. The scenarios we identify might range from tactical plays, through major disruptions. What would happen if you took a different approach to planning[9], as Tesco did[10] or if we, like Zara, focused on time to market rather than cost, and inverted how we think about our supply chain in the process[11].

We can frame what we learn from these experiments in terms of the business drivers and activities they impact, allowing us to understand how the transformed IT estate would need to change in response. The data we obtain can be compiled and weighted to create a heat map which highlights potential change hotspots in the to-be IT estate, valuable information which can be feed back into the transformation effort, while the (measured, evaluated and updated) scenarios can be compiled into a playbook to prepare use when the new IT estate goes live.

Whatever we do, we can can’t sit by passively waiting for our new, transformed IT estate to be handed to us. Five years is a very long time in business, and if we want an IT estate that will support us into the future, then we need to start thinking about it now.


References


1. 60 percent of Apple’s sales are from products that did not exist three years ago @ asumco.com↑
2. Rapid productionising @ Shermo↑
3. Fan criticism of George Lucas: Ability as a film director @ Wookieepedia↑
4. I’ve already told you 125% of what I know @ PEG↑
5. Enterprise Mash-Ups defined at Wikipedia↑
6. Mint↑
7. Kiva↑
8. Zara↑
9. Inside vs. Outside @ PEG↑
10. Tesco is looking outside the building to predict customer needs @ PEG↑
11. Accelerate along the road to happiness @ PEG↑

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What is innovation?

2010/07/26 in Innovation by peg | 8 comments

What is innovation? I don’t know, but then I’m not even sure that it’s an interesting question. The yearning so many companies have to be innovative often seems to prevent them from actually doing anything innovative. They get so caught up in trying to come up with the next innovation — the next big product — that they often fail to do anything innovative at all. It’s more productive to define innovation by understanding what it’s not: doing the same thing as the rest of the crowd, while accepting that there are no silver bullets and that you don’t control all the variables.

So, what is innovation? This seems to be a common question thats comes up whenever a company wants to innovate. After all, the first step in solving a problem is usually to define our terms.

Innovation is a bit like quantum theory’s spooky action at a distance[1], where stuff we know and understand behaves in a way we don’t expect. It can be easy to spot an innovative outcome (hindsight is a wonderful thing), but it’s hard to predict what will be innovative in the future. Just spend some time browsing Paleo-Future[2] (one of my favourite blogs) to see just how far off the mark we’ve been in the past.

The problem is that as it’s all relative; what’s innovative in one context may (or may not) be innovative in another. You need an environment that brings together a confluence of factors — ideas, skills, the right business and market drivers, the time and space to try something new — before there’s a chance that something innovative might happen.

Unfortunately innovation has been claimed as the engine behind the success of more than a few leading companies, so we all wanted to know what it is (and how to get some). Many books have been written promising to tell you exactly what to do to create innovation, providing you with a twelve step program[3] to a happier and more innovative future. If you just do this, then you too can invent the next iPhone[4].

Initially we were told that we just needed to find the big idea, a concept which will form the basis of our industry shattering innovation. We hired consultants to run ideation[5] workshops for us, or even outsourced ideation to an innovation consultancy asking them to hunt down the big idea for us. A whole industry has sprung up around the quest for the big idea, with TED[6] (which I have mixed feelings about) being the most obvious example.

As I’ve said before, the quest for the new-new thing is pointless[7].

The challenge when managing innovation is not in capturing ideas before they develop into market shaping innovations. If we see an innovative idea outside our organization, then we must assume that we’re not the first to see it, and ideas are easily copied. If innovation is a transferable good, then we’d all have the latest version.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, so real challenge is to execute on an idea (i.e. pick one and do something meaningful with it). If you get involved in that ideas arms race, then you will come last as someone will always have the idea before you. As Scott McNealy at Sun likes to say:

Statistically, most of the smart people work for somebody else.

More recently our focus has shifted from ideas to method. Realising that a good idea is not enough, we’ve tried to find a repeatable method with which we can manufacture innovation. This is what business does after all; formalise and systematise a skill, and then deploy it at huge scale to generate a profit. Think Henry Ford and the creation of that first production line.

Design Thinking[8] is the most popular candidate for method of innovation, due largely to the role of Jonathan Ive[9] and design in Apple’s rise from also-ran to market leader. There’s a lot of good stuff in Design Thinking — concepts and practices anyone with an engineering background[10] would recognise. Understand the context that your product or solution must work in. Build up the ideas used in your solution in an incremental and iterative fashion, testing and prototyping as you go. Teamwork and collaboration. And so on…

The fairly obvious problem with this is that Design Thinking does not guarantee an innovative outcome. For every Apple with their iPhone there’s an Apple with a Newton[12]. Or Microsoft with a Kin[11]. Or a host of other carefully designed and crafted products which failed to have any impact in the market. I’ll let the blog-sphere debate the precise reason for each failure, but we can’t escape the fact the best people with a perfect method cannot guarantee us success.

People make bad decisions. You might have followed the method correctly, but perhaps you didn’t quite identify the right target audience. Or the technology might not quite be where you need it to be. Or something a competitor did might render all your blood sweet and tears irrelevant.

Design Thinking (and innovation) is not chess: a game where all variables are known and we have complete information, allowing us to make perfect decisions. We can’t expect a method like Design Thinking to provide an innovative outcome.

Why then do we try and define innovation in terms of the big idea or perfect methodology? I put this down to the quest for a silver bullet: most people hope that there’s a magic cure for their problems which requires little effort to implement, and they dislike the notion that hard work is key.

This is true in many of life’s facets. We prefer diet pills and magic foods over exercise and eating less. If I pay for this, then it will all come good. If we just can just find that innovative idea in our next facilitated ideation workshop. Or hire more designers and implement Design Thinking across our organisation.

Success with innovation, as with so many things, is more a question of hard work than anything else. We forget that the person behind P&G’s Design Thinking efforts[13], Cindy Tripp, came out of marketing and finance, not design. She chose Design Thinking as the right tool for the problems she needed to solve — Design Thinking didn’t choose her. And she worked hard, pulling in ideas from left, right and centre, to find, test and implement the tools she needed.

So innovation is not the big idea. Nor is it a process like Design Thinking.

For me, innovation is simply:

  • working toward a meaningful goal, and
  • being empower to use whichever tools will be most beneficial.

If I was to try and define innovation more formally, then I would say that innovation is a combination of two key concepts: obliquity[14] and Jeet Kune Do[15]‘s concept of absorbing what is useful.

Obliquity is the simple idea that the best way to achieve a goal in a complex environment is to take an indirect approach. The fastest and most productive path to the top of the mountain might be to take the path that winds its way around the mountain, rather than to try and walk directly up the steepest face.

Apple is a good example of obliquity in action. Both Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ives are on record as wanting to make “great products that we want to own ourselves,” rather than plotting to build the biggest and most innovative company on the planet. Rather than try and game the financial metrics, they are focusing on making great products.

Bruce Lee[16] came up with the idea of “absorbing what is useful”[17] when he created Jeet Kune Do. He promoted the idea that students should learn a range of methods and doctrines, experiment to learn what works (and what doesn’t work) for them, “absorb what is useful” while discarding the remainder. The critical point of this principle is that the choice of what to keep is based on personal experimentation. It is not based on how a technique may look or feel, or how precisely the artist can mimic tradition. In the final analysis, if the technique is not beneficial, it is discarded. Lee believed that only the individual could come to understand what worked; based on critical self analysis, and by, “honestly expressing oneself, without lying to oneself.”

Cindy Tripp at P&G is a good example of someone absorbing what is useful. Her career has her investigating different topics and domains, more a sun shaped individual than a t-shaped one[18]. Starting from a core passion, she accreted a collection of disciplines, tools and techniques which are beneficial. Design Thinking is one of these techniques (which she uses as a reframing tool).

I suppose you could say that I’ve defined innovation by identifying what it’s not: innovation is the courage to find a different way up the hill, while accepting that there are no silver bullets and that you don’t control all the variables.

Updated: Tweeked the wording in the (lucky) 13th paragraph in line with Bill Buxton’s comment.

For every Apple with their iPhone there’s an Apple with a Newton. Or Microsoft with a Kin.


References


1. Spooky action at a distance? @ Fact and Fiction↑
2. Paleo-Future↑
3. Twelve step programs @ Wikipedia↑
4. iPhone — the Apple innovation everyone expected @ Fast Company↑
5. Ideation defined at Wikipedia↑
6. TED↑
7. Innovation should not be the quest for the new-new thing @ PEG↑
8. Design Thinking … what is that? @ Fast Company↑
9. Jonathan Ive @ Design Museum↑
10. Sorry,
software engineering doesn’t count.↑
12. The story behind the Apple Newton @ Gizmodo↑
11. Microsoft Said to Blame Low Sales, High Price for Kin’s Failure @ Business Week↑
13. P&G changes it’s game @ Business Week↑
14. Obliquity defined at SearchCRM↑
15. Jeet Kune Do, a martial art discipline developed by Bruce Lee @ Wikipedia↑
16. Bruce Lee: the devine wind↑
17. Absorbing what is useful @ Wikipedia↑
18. T-Shaped + Sun-Shaped People @ Logic + Emotion↑

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Innovation [2010-07-05]

2010/07/05 in Innovation, Mailing List by peg | No comments

Another week and another collection of interesting ideas from around the internet.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

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Innovation [2010-06-07]

2010/06/07 in Innovation, Mailing List by peg | No comments

Another week and another collection of interesting ideas from around the internet.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

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A nice visual argument for the value of mash-ups

2009/12/08 in Business-Technology, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Worker of the Future, Posterous by peg | No comments

As I’ve mentioned before, I would like a nice, clear, crisp definition for mash-up. A definition which captures the benefits that mash-ups can bring, rather than detailing a collection of tools, technologies and standards that we happen to find interesting at the time. For me, this is the TQM argument of fusing data and process to eliminate unnecessary decisions—make-work or swivel chair integration—to create a more efficient and effective work environment.

It’s Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens has done a brilliant job of capturing this visually (included below). I like the usability aspect this highlights. A mash-up’s focus is cross-application usability—removing the annoyances of dealing with separate information sources. We could simply take these sources and squish them up against the glass, delivering the content into iGoogle or NetVibes gadgets. But what those original push-pins on a map mash-ups did was improve the usability of these information sources by eliminating the decisions required to navigate across them. Just as Apple did with the iPod and iPhone, eliminating or fusing functions to eliminate the (unnecessary) decisions required to navigate the overly complex and confusing interfaces of the mobile phones that came before them.

iGoogle and NetVibes are the Symbian to a mash-up’s iPhone.

Symplicity

Posted via web from PEG @ Posterous

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Innovation [2009-08-10]

2009/08/10 in Innovation by peg | No comments

Another week and another collection of interesting ideas from around the internet.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

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