Remove The Blockages And Let The Solutions Flow

There are many ways in which you can be stopped from creating solutions and generating ideas. Some are physical but many are psychological. Here are five such blockages together with suggestions for removing them.

1. Copying is cheating
This may be the case for school examinations but not in the world of business. Really great ideas are often protected with patents and copyright so you cannot use them (not without fear of legal action anyway). If an idea is not protected then you can use it, I call it 'creative swiping'. Tell the doubters that this will get things done quickly and that you can make your own mark by tailoring the idea for you own purposes. This is exactly the philosophy behind Open Source Software.

2. We Must Figure It Out Ourselves
There is great pleasure in doing this however why should you do this if someone else has already done so? Save time and create original ideas elsewhere. Avoid getting into this situation by rewarding people according to the generation of a solution rather than for the effort put in to generating a solution. They will soon get the message.

3. We Are Inferior If We Cannot Figure Things Out
This is a natural feeling and if bad if you are always taking in ideas from outside (some people do however make a good business out of this). At some point your problem solving team will generate ideas that other people will wish to use so the balance can be redressed. You should emphasise that customisation and adaptation are as important as original thought.

4. Problems Are Owned By Individuals
People have a great attachment to the problems that they work on, particularly engineers and scientists. They can be reluctant to share their problems so you can explain that the issue is critical (making them feel important) so it might be necessary to involve others or look outside the organisation as a normal part of solving problems. Do not remove ownership from the original owner if at all possible and never force people to work on issues that they do not own or have no interest in if you wish them to remain motivated.

5. Fear Of Being Replaced
This is common when it is suggested that problem owners share their problems of look for outside help. Reinforce the idea that nobody is being replaced and that looking elsewhere for solutions is part of the problem solver's toolkit.

Address the above and you will notice an improvement immediately.

Audacious Ideas

With most ideas, there is a correlation between how audacious or risky an idea is and its potential for economic reward. Disruptive or radical innovation produce  ideas which disrupt industry and dramatically change a business sector. These are audacious and highly risky but if they work out as hoped, they bring huge rewards.

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis developed their own voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and then built a business around it - Skype. They offered free telephone calls over the World Wide Web as well as cheap calls via the Web to ordinary telephones. Their business model was audacious. A couple of unknown Swedish guys took on the world's telephone service providers. Their idea was both innovative and seriously risky. Potential users might well have decided they did not trust  VoIP or Internet Service Providers who  might have tried to block Skype calls. In which case, the two Swedish guys would have lost a lot of money.

Skype has been a huge success story. There are more than 100 million Skype users around the world and the two founders sold their company to eBay for USD2.4 billion. Not bad for an audacious idea.

To visualise the importance of audaciousness in business innovation, imagine a simple graph with X and Y axis. The right end of the X axis is marked "Audacity", the left end is marked "Boringness". The top of the Y axis is labelled "Risk/Rewards". The bottom is labelled "Stability". Next, draw a narrow diagonal bar from the bottom left corner of the graph to the upper right corner. This bar represents the range where most business ideas fall. Audacious business ideas are risky yet innovative. Boring business ideas are safe and not very risky. But they do not bring high rewards. Most business ideas, of course, tend to fall near the axis.

There are several useful things we can learn from this exercise.

1. In Europe and America we tend to favour highly innovative ideas, but it seems that a handful of boring business ideas resulting in incremental innovation can also bring benefits. You should not focus all your innovative efforts on big, disruptive innovation. A number of smaller, moderately innovative ideas should be mixed in.
2. Many companies have an overly strict review process that requires every single dea pass a number of hurdles before it is implemented. All too often committees reduce the risk of the idea. They seek to protect the company against risk or most likely they seek to protect their own jobs by not sanctioning risk projects. By reducing risk, they are also making an idea more boring, less innovative and reducing the potential reward.
3. Conversely, an idea can often be pushed to be more audacious, thus increasing its reward potential - but also its risk. Bear this in mind the next time you brainstorm ideas. When you get a few good ideas, don't stop there. Push the best ideas further.
4. If an idea is very boring and of low risk, its reward potential is also low. Thus you need to be certain that the cost of implementing the idea will not be greater than the rewards it brings in.

So, the next time you have a business idea, go on and be audacious. Push the idea to the limits and don't be afraid to go with it.

Do you belong to the Ideas Cult?

The Cult of Ideas is a dangerous body lurking within the field of corporate innovation. It is a disturbing grouping in which members worship massive numbers of ideas above all else. On the surface, this seems a good thing. After all, innovations are founded on ideas, are they not? So, if a company wants to innovate, the more ideas it creates the better. Sadly, however, the truth is that the cult of ideas can actually stifle creativity and inhibit innovation.

The cult manifests itself when Starbucks proclaims that they have received over 100,000 ideas from their on-line suggestion web site or when IBM boasts of Idea Jams that generate many tens of thousands of ideas.  It is easy to understand why the Cult has grown so powerful. Most senior managers come from analytical backgrounds, often with MBAs from prestigious academic institutions.

Unfortunately, finding meaningful numbers in the innovation process can be tricky. Technology and pharmaceutical companies can count their patents - and many do. But patents fail to measure efficiency and business model innovation, which are also important. Moreover, many innovative firms take out few patents. The number of new products launched every year, or the income generated by products introduced in the past five years is another approach for measuring product innovation - but it also fails to recognise other forms of innovation. A visit to any supermarket suggests we must question whether the introduction of new products truly represents innovation. A look at all the variations of washing up liquid or soap powder, many of which claim to be "new", for instance, is hardly indicative of product innovation.

So managers have latched on to the counting of ideas and the assumption that lots and lots of ideas must be a good thing. This has been enhanced by innovation service providers who also espouse the notion that more ideas are better than fewer. And from this situation has grown the Cult of Ideas which is further fuelled by the efforts of Innovation consultants and vendors of Idea Management solutions.

So why is this cult bad? Ideas on their own are good but it is the pursuit of ever increasing numbers that is not so good. We tend to forget what we are supposed to do next! If we do not actually implement ideas but simply sit around and make plans then our innovation programs are guaranteed to fail. Ideas must be put into practice and economic value created. Companies such as Google and Apple rarely brag about how many ideas they generate. They demonstrate innovation. Take a look at Fast Company's list of most innovative companies (http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011/). Those at the top of the pile are recognised for their innovations and not for quantities of ideas.

Creativity in Business from GuruView.tv

At the end of last year I was interviewed by Dave Harries for GuruView.tv. You can see the result below. Visit GuruView.tv for other interesting and useful video interviews.

How To Estimate Your Innovation Costs

There is no manual that says exactly how to do this or how much you are likely to spend innovating but here is a common sense approach that seems to work well. Imagine that you are a company that needs to introduce 5 new products into the market place. First of all you need to spend some time generating ideas. Without knowing your actual method of idea generation and until you have had time to calibrate your own process then this is a bit of 'wetted finger in the air' calculation. We know that the ration of truly wacky ideas to those that might be worth looking at is one order of magnitude i.e. 10 to 1. Similarly, the ratio of 'might be worth looking at' to 'definitely worth a look' is once again an order of magnitude.

So if we want to have just one idea that is worth pursuing then we should expect to generate at least 100 crazy ideas, thus our small company wishing to create 5 new products will need at least 500 crazy ideas. So far so good, but how do we generate the ideas? You could collect them in a suggestion box but the quality would be variable and it may take a while although the cost would be low. An idea generation session with a group of people could generate your ideas in less than a day. This would be more expensive and would only use a 'snapshot' of the expertise and knowledge available to you.

By now you should get the idea that we can roughly work out how many ideas are required, and how long this would take and the resources that would be used. Not all ideas make it to products so some extra redundancy needs to be built in, and then there are overheads such as management and the costs of prototyping and manufacture, but these should be aspects with which you are already familiar.

So there you are, a simple way of working out your Innovation costs. But hang on a minute, life is not quite that simple. Below is a list of other things that you might wish to consider:

• HR requirements (culture, motivation, working practices)
• Idea capture systems (how do you record ideas and avoid forgetting them)
• Knowledge transfer (what worked, what did not, avoiding reinventing the wheel)
• Feedback for improving all aspects of your process (including estimating costs!)

This is a simple guide but good enough to allow you to get some sort of handle on the cost of Innovation if you have never done anything quite like this before. Reality is a little more complex - good luck.

Innovation or Lean?

A recent article published on the Knowledge@Wharton website suggested that the philosophy of Lean could exist along with Innovation. After reading the article I have two questions:

1. Why would you want them to?
2. Why put Innovation into a box (like Lean or BPR) when an Innovation system has the ability to change and respond to its surroundings?

The article states "Lean has come to mean an integrated, end-to-end process viewpoint that combines the concepts of waste elimination, just-in time inventory management, built-in quality, and worker involvement -- supported by a cultural focus on problem solving. Can such practical principles be applied to innovation, or would lean's structure and discipline snuff out the creative spark that underlies the birth and development of great ideas? Can lean co-exist with innovation?"

The article suggests that Lean brings structure and predictability to Innovation without sufficiently defining Innovation. Innovation requires a framework within which we generate ideas, experiment and develop new products, services and processes. Such frameworks exist and also provide ways of measuring and monitoring Innovation. In that sense we have structure and predictability within Innovation so we do not need Lean also. The very definition of Lean also implies that the flexibility and adaptability required to change, either in times of crisis or to seize opportunities, may have been engineered out of an organisation.

Those who fully embrace Innovation will understand that Innovation systems evolve and fully embrace such aspects as new ideas of collaborative working, new leadership and organisational models, empowerment and customer engagement. These attributes are not specific to Innovation systems nor are they specific characteristics of Lean.

An Innovation system can exhibit Lean characteristics if necessary, but a Lean system cannot be truly Innovative since there is always be an intellectual overhead in an Innovation system and so the Lean system will become 'non Lean'.

Another contentious topic is that of separating idea from development. It is true that the mix of people that are required during the many phases of Innovation may change, but once more this is a characteristic of Innovation, that things change. In fact, idea and development must be connected. What if the technology to implement an idea does not exist and ideas must be generated in order to put an idea into production? Imagine the first time Silicon wafers were used to produce chips in large numbers. I cannot imagine that those who developed the chips were completely separated from those who developed production processes.

So if Innovation is an end to end process which provides a framework, is adaptable to changing conditions and which can be measured, why would we wish to consider Lean? One possible (and perhaps cynical) answer is that those who promote Lean would lose a possible source of revenue or that they simply do not understand Innovation - after all, it does have ambiguity built in!