clair075

I've been pondering for several weeks, at least since the start of the new year, the state of play of innovation in large corporations. I think I can speak with some knowledge about this, having conducted innovation activities and projects in a wide array of Fortune 500 companies, having talked and been in sales processes with far more, and having conducted innovation programs, training and presentations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Central and South America, as well as North America.  Thus, I've got a few bona fides where innovation is concerned, a lot of successes and a few scars as well. After more than a decade of doing innovation work, there are some simple truths I'd like to impart.  None of them are especially shocking, but for some reason they need constant reinforcement.  Almost every new innovation activity seems destined to experience some, if not all, of the same challenges and traps that previous innovation programs encountered, so i...

The post today frames a classic issue in communications:  how to improve a signal and hopefully eliminate or at least mitigate noise.  The noisier the communication is, the more difficult it is for the sender and the receiver to communicate.  Thus, we try to eliminate noise from the communication, so only the signal is received. That sounds easy, but it is actually difficult, because there are no pure communication media.  Noise always creeps in, and conflicts or masks the signal.  This is true in electronics - the noise on your cell phone or fuzziness on your TV screen - as well as in business and life.  Our verbal communications, whether face to face or over a communication infrastructure, are full of noise. The attempt to eliminate noise from an operating system or a business process is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile challenge, until one considers the question:  what is the real signal?  What is creating the noise?  In many business...

First, a slight diatribe.  Why is it that companies think their people can do successful innovation when they don't share a common language?  In the title I've used the word "disruptive", and by this I mean innovation in the "third horizon" - incremental, breakthrough and disruptive.  I'm defining disruptive innovation as new products, services or business models that "disrupt" existing products or markets.  For example, Apple and iTunes disrupted Tower Records.  Netflix and its rental model disrupted Blockbuster's retail store model.  But I've been in plenty of places and talked with plenty of customers who don't have a consistent language.  They toss around "breakthrough", transformative, disruptive and other language without defining it, and then are dismayed when they get at best incremental innovation.  But this is just a language problem, you'll say.  And I'll say you are correct, but if we depend on language...

So, after over a decade of innovation consulting, I can say without doubt that companies that are just starting to innovate have it much better than those that were attempting it years ago.  That's because as more companies try more innovation, more tools are vetted, more methods explored and exposed.  Today, there are more proven methods and more people with more innovation skill and experience, so if you are starting now you can get started on the right foot.  In this case it may be better to be late. But if you are just starting out, here are some recommendations I'd make that may be a bit counter-intuitive based on experiences in the past. Determine what innovation should do for you In the past, all innovation was focused on product innovation, to create new and better products.  While product innovation is a good place to get experience, you'll want to move quickly to other forms and types of innovation, because product innovation is so well understood, and beco...

Recently I read a nice article in Inc Magazine about 10 Innovation Killers .  The author refers to a lot of factors that stymie innovation, including many of the usual suspects: holding a brainstorm and then doing nothing sustaining a fear of failure thinking innovation is something the technology guys do One of the factors that caught my eye also got me thinking, however. That factor was "create an obstacle course for ideas".  Here the author was talking about making it difficult for people to work on ideas or making the process difficult.  Now, being a natural contrarian (I know, strange attribute for an innovator) I thought:  the only ideas that matter are those that can make it through a number of hoops and hurdles, internal and external.  What's wrong with an obstacle course?  Shouldn't the best ideas be the result of an obstacle course?  And then I remembered that my father, once and always a Marine, never referred to these as obstacle courses, b...

One of my favorite apocalyptic texts is the saying that if you sow the wind you'll reap the whirlwind.  This is from the Old Testament, where the prophet Hosea is telling the people that they need to change their ways.  Obviously the passage has a rather negative connotation.  I think, however, we are the brink of some seismic changes and those firms that are ready will be able to ride the coming whirlwind, surf the tsunami, or benefit from the size and magnitude of the coming change. Change is coming Dylan said you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.  Right now, the wind is at our backs, propelling us forward.  That wind is the increasing pace and nature of change - technological, societal, governmental, economic, ecological, you name it.  There are only a few times in history when so many different forces were converging, and so much change was accelerating at the same time.  This consistent breeze at our backs which nudges us a...