Imaginatik CEO Speaks on Innovation and Idea Management on YouTube

Imaginatik have been putting quite a bit of good content on Innovation and Idea Management up on YouTube.

This video was posted recently. In this video, Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell talks about how he captures ideas personally from his daily life and argues that Idea Management Systems used by Dell and Starbucks are not as effective as they could be because they focus on the 'front end' of Idea Capture and do not develop the back end processes of assessing and filtering the ideas as strongly as other products in the Idea Management space.

Part II of the discussion can be found here. In Part II, some of the interesting points include the centrality of effective processes to effective organisation and emphasises the importance of software support for people implementing idea assessment and selection processes to realise a high return on investment

The Idea Hunter on Sustaining the Innovation Process

Andrew Greaves from the Idea Hunter blog recently posted an article on sustaining the innovation process.

Andrew proposes 18 relevant steps for sustaining innovation, which are also highly relevant also for organisation implementing an innovation initiative from scratch.

I won't reproduce Andrew's list here, as - due to the power of the internet - his list is only a click away. However I will comment there would be a few elements I would add to his list:

1. Strategic alignment

Align the innovation initiative with the organisational strategic objectives from the outset. What is the organisation committed to achieving? Ensure that the innovation agenda and infrastructure is aligned with this.

2. Use project management and change management methodologies to initiate and embed innovation structures, processes and culture

Implement the innovation initiative as related projects with appropriate change management to integrate an innovation mindset and behaviours into the organisation. Reinforce, sustain and reward the new culture and behaviours.

3. Tailor the innovation initiative to the specific organisation

Every organisation is different. The leadership is different, the culture is different, and across different industries or different competitive positioning the dynamics of an organisation and its relationship to the market and competitors may be different. While some of the structure of Idea Management may be generic in its general features, think carefully about your needs and tailor your innovation solution to meet your needs and your culture.

2008: The Year Of Idea Management?

Over at Business Week, Bruce Nausbaum is making his predictions for innovation in 2008. Bruce writes:

The demand for innovation is soaring in the business community . . . nearly all CEOs and top managers who have learned the language of innovation are now seeking the means to make it happen. It took the Quality Movement a generation to change business culture. The Innovation Movement is still in its infancy, but it's growing fast. You can see that in the vast changes taking place within the field. Companies are demanding new tools and methods to execute that change within their existing organizations

Idea Management Systems are one of the central new tools and methods for consistently achieving significant innovation outcomes, and for managing innovation with the same degree of rigour and discipline as other core business functions. Idea Management is a mature and evolving toolset that's ready for more consistent and widespread adoption, and companies are likely to increasingly focus on Idea Management as a key point of differentiation and competitive advantage through consistent and repeatable innovation across products, services, processes and business models.

It will be interesting to see what 2008 brings for Idea Management.

What Practitioners Want To Know About Innovation

Innovation Tools recently conducted a survey of innovation practitioners to determine the most important innovation issues to practitioners. Over 250 people responded, representing a broad cross-section of industries and geography.

The responses were grouped by Innovation Tools into 9 topics:

1. Defining innovation and making it saleable and practical to senior management
2. Sourcing and managing ideas to come up with the best innovation opportunities
3. Connecting innovation to business strategy - and getting funding and executive support for medium and long term innovation initiatives
4. Identifying the best processes and tools to satisfy the needs of all parties to the innovation initiative
5. Building and sustaining an innovation and entrepreneurship culture
6. Measuring innovation outcomes across all stages of the process - and motivating the organization to deliver across all stages of the innovation process
7. Finding or building the people and capabilities to be successful in innovation
8. Organizing to drive innovation in our company and across the value chain - with particular reference to decision rights and accountabilities
9. Identifying the characteristics of innovation leaders at different levels of the organization - and recognizing and rewarding them

I think the list is terrific - comprehensively covering some of the key issues in innovation.

I would however be tempted to make a slight tweak to the topics list - the rewards and incentives to motivate employees (which appear in topics 6 and 9 and relate strongly to 5) could, I suggest, be usefully be brought out into a separate 'incentives and rewards' topic - bringing the list to a 'top 10' topic areas for innovation.

Idea Management Systems, while playing a very explicit role in relation to topics 2, 4, 6 and 8, also relates very strongly to topics 1 and 3. Idea Management Systems provide the rigour and repeatable results in innovation that are saleable to senior management. Idea Management Systems also align innovation activity with business strategy through implementing a Stage-Gate system that is necessarily aligned with business strategy as ideas are considered, screened or tested at various early stages in the innovation process and business strategy and objectives necessarily define the evaluation or screening criteria.

Booze Allen Hamilton Global Innovation 1000 Survey - 2007 Report Released

Booze Allen Hamilton have released their report for the third Global 1000 Innovation Survey outcomes.

The report confirmed that "as in years past, we found no statistically significant connection between the amount of money a company spent on innovation and its financial performance." High-leverage innovators - "the companies that, compared to other companies in 2006, got a significantly bigger performance bang for their R&D buck" - achieved "better sustained financial performance than their industry peers while spending less on R&D."

The report found that:

When listing the reasons for their success, [high leverage innovators] all mention two key factors. The first is strategic alignment: They work hard to align their innovation strategies closely to overall corporate strategy. The second is customer focus: They all have processes in place to pay close attention to their customers in every phase of the innovation value chain, from idea generation to product development to marketing.

While the report did not focus specifically on company's approaches to Idea Management, Idea Management concepts permeated the report, particularly in relation to "customer focus." High-leverage innovators:

" . . . all have processes in place to pay close attention to their customers in every phase of the innovation value chain, from idea generation to product development to marketing."

Customer focus is a key element in idea generation, particular for organizations following a "need seeking" innovation strategy.

More on Top Swedish Innovators

Idea Management Systems recently posted on Top Swedish Innovators.

It turns out that the study was originally undertaken by two Swedish Masters students, Claudia Suraga and Ulrika Schleimann-Jensen, and the results were subsequently further publicised by some of the companies involved in the study such as CapGemini.

For those interested, the original thesis may be obtained on request from the Masters students' academic supervisor, Alf Rehn, reachable at http://www.alfrehn.com/

Innovation as One of the Two Strategies of Market Leaders

The McKinsey Quarterly recently published an interview with Richard Rumelt on corporate strategy.

Rumelt argued that companies become successful either through innovation, or through finding an emerging trend in the market and exploiting it earlier and more successfully than others. In Rumelt's view, there are only two paths to strategic success, and neither of them are simply resource management plans:

There are only two ways . . . One, you can invent your way to success. Unfortunately, you can’t count on that. The second path is to exploit some change in your environment—in technology, consumer tastes, laws, resource prices, or competitive behavior—and ride that change with quickness and skill. This second path is how most successful companies make it. Changes, however, don’t come along in nice annual packages, so the need for strategy work is episodic, not necessarily annual.

I disagree with Rumelt on the first point - companies can innovate consistently and successfully, and many do. The heart of that success is managing innovation effectively. And the successful management of innovation typically requires, in some form or another, an Idea Management System.

And, if the objective is to identify emerging trends and take an effective position on them quickly, then an Idea Management System - plugged in to the ideas and insights of frontline workers - couldn't hurt the cause either.

Top Swedish Innovators Using Innovation Metrics and Idea Management Systems

Swedish innovation consultancy Idélaboratoriet has posted a recent article on leading Swedish Innovators in their newsletter.

The study, conducted by the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Cap Gemini., addressed innovation in leading Swedish companies such as Ericsson and Ikea and identified three key trends: the top ten ranked Swedish innovators

1. continuously made benchmarking studies concerning innovation
2. developed innovation metrics for their own situation
3. had an Idea Management software base to stand on

Thank you to EndlessInnovation for pointing me towards this study.

Current Thought on Innovation Management in Banks

James Gardner, Head of Innovation and Research in Group IT at Lloyds TSB, has posted a great article in his Bankervision blog on current experiences in innovation management within the banking industry.

Gardner canvasses a range of issues, including different approaches to awards / incentives structures, approaches to managing innovation, and the use of vendors.

For example,

. . . the second part of the discussion really focussed on the process banks used to get their great ideas into the market . . . If you have a formal innovation programme, you probably won't know what is going to come out the end of it, and so driving a decent business case for such activity is quite difficult. It speaks volumes for the maturity of some banks' innovation processes that they are able to measure the returns of their programmes sufficiently to make these kind of investments sensibly.

On the use of vendors:

Some of the group expressed the view that using vendors was a great way to de-risk the whole innovation thing. The idea is that vendors should be spreading the risk of their propositions across many customers and, therefore, that the incremental risk to a particular bank should be less. An alternate view was expressed however: that vendors, by virtue of this risk sharing behaviour, would not be able to drive specific competitive advantage for an individual bank, and that the process of innovation was best left as an internal one with pieces being bought in as necessary.

Overall, an interesting and thought-provoking window into one industry wrestling with the challenges of innovation.

CIO On Innovation

In a July article in CIO, Diann Daniel lists "Seven Highly Effective Ways to Kill Innovation (and Seven to Make Sure You Don't)" - a similar exercise to Joyce Wycoff 's article on the top 10 innovation killers.

In #3, Daniel argues that IT should support the innovation process after ideas are generated:

In any situation, you get two activities—the invention and the innovation, or the actual process of innovating . . . technology’s role falls after invention. IT should be involved with implementing the technology that best supports the innovation process. For example, many companies are turning to vendors that offer idea management technology, such as iBank and Brightidea.com.

Of course, before facilitating the process with IT, some thought needs to go into the Idea Management process, and this kind of thinking has gone into the development of Idea Management software products such as iBank and BrightIdea.com.

Innovation Killers

Joyce Wycoff of the Innovation Network has listed the top 10 "innovation killers":

1. Not removing fear of doing something new or of failing.
2. Not making innovation performance part of everyone's review performance review process, with innovation targets and KPIs
3. Not documenting, communicating and getting buy-in to the innovation process
4. Not allowing flexibility to explore new possibilities and collaborate with others inside and outside the organization.
5. Failing to ensure that everyone understands the corporate strategy, and that all innovation efforts are aligned with it - while still catching ideas from the left field
6. Not scanning the environment for new ideas and stimulation
7. Not honouring a diversity of thinking styles, experience, perspectives and expertise.
8. Not finding a balance between good focal criteria that can focus ideation and restrictive criteria can stifle ideation and perpetuate assumptions and mindsets from the past.
9. Not treating innovation teams differently to “regular” project teams: Innovation needs different tools and different mindsets, different training and a different mix of skills and personalities.
10. Not buying or developing an idea management system that captures ideas in a way that encourages people to build on and evaluate new possibilities.

Coming in at number 10 is not managing Innovation systematically through an Idea Management System