Fresh Takes on Innovation

In a recent BBC News article Technology reporter Jonathan Fildes talks about an extraordinary experiment conducted by Professor Sugata Mitra from India.

10 years ago, he started researching the way children teach themselves and each other with the use of computers and completely without teachers. The experiment started in a slum in India, where Mitra put a computer into the wall of his office and surveyed the children of the slum interacting with the machine.

Today, he has introduced similar experiments in many countries, with great success.

I very much loved the following part of the article:

“I wanted to test the limits of this system,” he said. “I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-olds in south India teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?”

The researcher gathered 26 children and gave them computers preloaded with information in English.

“I told them: ‘there is some very difficult stuff on this computer, I won’t be surprised if you don’t understand anything’.”

Two months later, he returned.

Initially the children said they had not learnt anything, despite the fact that they used the computers everyday.

“Then a 12-year-old girl raised her hand and said ‘apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA contributes to genetic disease – we’ve understood nothing else’.”

Kids apparently can teach themselves pretty much everything without adult interference, but one thing was highly interesting throughout all experiments: The kids need to be in teams or groups, gathering around a computer. The experiment won’t work as well when a kid just sit in front of one computer.

The power of self-organisation and of teamwork is truly amazing.

Did you ever ask yourself why key players in a market are – often fairly quickly – replaced by unexpected, sometimes even unknown competitors? How can it be that big companies, even whole industries, miss big trends, fail to invest in them, and go the way of the dinosaur? The answer is likely: Because their business model was disrupted.

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, distinguishes between incremental and disruptive innovation. Incremental innovation improves a product in an predictable, steady way: Every new version is a little bit better, a little bit more effective, a little bit cheaper. Remember the bulky CRT monitors we had on our desks? Every year, their resolution became a little bit higher, and the screen size a little bit bigger.

Disruptive innovation is not a little bit better – it is radically different. It is so different that regular customers don’t want them in the beginning. These products are often produced by small companies and enter the market in a state that is not competitive for the existing markets. In their search for customers these companies find new, unexpected markets. For example, the technology for LCD flatscreens has been around for a while – but to produce an LCD flatscreen fifteen years ago would have been too expensive for regular screen customers. What did the producers do? They looked for other markets – manufacturers of small devices such as handheld games, musical instruments, or car dashboards, and continually improved their product until it completely replaced the existing technology (or do you still have a bulky screen on your desk?).

The question is: Why don’t the disrupted companies react to the new technology? Don’t they realize what is happening to them? Christensen says, they do – but the decision to bet on the “new horse” would mean to neglect the needs of their current customers: Those that expect a little bit more, a little bit better – not different. They follow their core markets, listen to their core customers, until it is too late to change to the new technology. To turn a company (or an industry) around to adapt is possible, but incredibly difficult, because leaders at the same time have to fight internal resistance and prioritize against their key customers.

At BrainStore, we can help you become one of the innovators – for example through a targeted innovation training or a customized idea event for your company.

A few weeks ago, BrainStore organised a conference about the future for one of our clients. The goal was to give 120 people from this organisation the chance to reflect on the future, to get a sense of urgency and to trigger a desire for immediate action. Because, believe it or not, the Future is approaching with considerable speed, and as companies and organisations we need to ready ourselves for it.

To achieve this goal, BrainStore created an exhibit about the future at the Idea Factory in Biel and invited the participants to go through this exhibit, to write down statements about the future that are relevant to the company, and, based on those statements, to draft future scenarios for the company. Based on the best-rated scenario, they formulated commitments for the different departments of the company. The participants left the Idea Factory with a clear sense of what the future will bring and what they need to do as an organisation and as individuals to be prepared for this future.

Of course, we cannot share any outcome of this project nor our clients name, but what we can and want to show to you are a few of the 11 different stations we created to get people thinking about the future:

Waste not, want not

What participants saw: Lots and lots of trash.Purpose: Innovation creates value. Innovation also creates waste. Everything that humans ever produce eventually becomes trash. What, then, are we to do as consumers? As designers? Europeans generate 71 billion kilos of packaging waste each year. Who participants talked to: Packaging Designer Richard Williams.

The Future Forecast

What participants saw: Nine talking heads on nine different monitors. Purpose: The world’s leading thinkers have a lot to say about the future. How do you know who’s right? In this room, you will hear aligned and contradictory voices speaking from digital podiums. Who participants talked to: No one, but they listened to nine different futurologists and their predictions about the future. It was unnerving.

The New Producers

What participants saw: Two inventions by young students Purpose: To show that young people are not waiting for grownups to create solutions for them – they create their own solutions. Who participants talked to: Two design students from Germany who had created the prototype a product generator that comes up with a product based on different indicators from your body, and a team of highschool students who had created a solar kiosk.

Minus 10, Plus 10

What participants saw: In form of a tunnel, familiar objects that didn’t exist 10 years ago and fictious headlines we might see during the next ten years. Purpose: To show people how quickly the future approaches.

Perception is Everything

What participants saw:A movie called “perception is everything” Purpose: To show that good things can have a bad effect and vice versa: A movie featuring provocative imagery from our world. Economy, commerce, conflict, and social tensions all clamor to be interpreted and understood. Still, not everything is as it seems. What if bad is good and good is bad?

The Real Deal

What participants saw: Eight real, ordinary people from greater London, ranging in age from 11 to nearly eighty.Purpose: To get participants to talk to real consumers, aged from 11 to 90, who had travelled to Biel as a group that had just met 2 days before. The bonding experience for the group was a big important part of the group meeting with the exhibit participants.

After the immersion exercise, the participants then went through a BrainStore Idea Event to create specific ideas on how to act as a company to be ready for the future. They formulated commitments and rated them, creating a specific action plan for the next years.

At BrainStore, we believe that in order to create successful innovation, the process of coming up with ideas and the decision about which ideas will be implemented has much to do with the right roles and the right process. Today, we would like to look at the roles in our Idea Factory Process. The role model of our process has always been the classical production factory. In a factory, clear roles are assigned to different people in order to guarantee the quality of the resulting product. When it comes to great ideas (that will also be successfully implemented), we believe a similar system of checks and balances is helpful.

Firstly, we are convinced that there is a difference between the people who are steering the innovation process and the ones participating in it. We call them Innovation Team (the ones who steer the process) and Creating Community (the participants). By making this distinction, it becomes possible to steer an innovation process in a more systematic way, because the people who are responsible for the process are not producing the ideas themselves, and the people participating in the process do not need to worry about how the process is actually run. This way, the process is more efficient and the results are more broadly accepted.

Now let’s have a closer look at the people who are responsible for making an innovation process successful. There are 5 different roles. Two of the people (Head of Innovation and Innovation Promotion) are more auxiliary to the innovation culture and the relationship with clients (whether those clients are internal or external clients is not important), and three roles (the ones we will describe in more detail right now) are responsible for the whole process of developing ideas and bringing them to the point of implementation.

The first role is the Process Manager: He or she is responsible for steering the process, for ensuring the communication between the project owner (client) and the other members of the innovation team, and for making sure that the quality of the content is exceeding the clients expectations.

The Content Manager is responsible for setting up the search fields and methods for the idea generation and idea compression process, for monitoring the content, working together with internal or external people who ensure the process is running smoothly and for doing editorial work on the content that is generated in the process.

The Community Manager makes sure that for each process, the right community of participants is coming together to work on the project question. He or she is responsible for a balanced mix of participants, for their motivation and remuneration and for communicating the results (in accordance with the client) to the community.

At each process step, one of the innovation team members has the lead, while the others check the results. This way, quality is monitored and there is no risk that the content or the process deviate from the project objectives.

Look at this amazing invention by designer Andrew Bosley: The Brainstormer. Turn one of the three wheels or just press “random” to get a new and absolutely crazy suggestion for… well… I don’t know, but the design is awsome!

What about using this as a real tool for coming up with combined solutions, for instance for products or services? Or even just as a tool for decision making, for instance on how to spend your free time.

Every single week we visit companies in Switzerland and Germany, sometimes also in other parts of the world, and we often hear a variation of what we like to call the “we have more than enough ideas” myth, a story that is told to us by decision makers in companies of all sizes and industries. It is told in different variations, of which the most common one is something like the following:

In our company, we actually do not have a problem with generating ideas. We have so many ideas that we do not know which ones to implement or we have problems with the implementation of ideas that are new in general, because we face internal resistance in many cases.

It is, of course, true, that in all companies new ideas are constantly generated in one way or the other. New ideas for products are discussed in meetings, new improvement for processes are suggested by people who use them, and clients come with needs and ideas that will help them do better business.

Still, the question is: Are the ideas that are developed in this way truly relevant? Are they the most innovative ideas that can be generated? And to which question are these ideas an answer?

You see, the problem with “free floating” ideas like the ones described is that they are not rooted within strategy and they are not generated in a systematic way with a carefully chosen set of participants. And this, ultimately, is also the reason that implementation of these ideas often seems difficult, time consuming, expensive etc. Needless to say that if ideas are driven by individuals, it is always also a political choice which ideas should be implemented and which ones do not deserve another minute of attention.

So our answer to companies and organisations that say “we have more than enough ideas, we just do now know which ones to implement” is to say:

- Please set up a structured innovation management in your company. This can be a process like the Idea Factory process and software that BrainStore uses, and we are happy to provide the training for your team.

- Use this process to work on truly strategic projects, generating ideas for clearly targeted questions, not general ideas for your business

- Work together with internal and external people in this process, do do not just rely on the ideas from within your organisation, but invite your clients, partners and lateral thinkers into the process

- Dare to share ideas with others and improve them by having ongoing discussions about them with a diverse set of people.

If you follow these few suggestions, you will still have lots of ideas, and you still will not be able to implement all of them, but you will know exactly which ones to implement, how, and when. And you will face a lot less resistance, because you have integrated all relevant stakeholders into the process. Sounds easy? It is.

At Brainstore, we have a special liking for ideas that incite controversy.  Whenever we see an idea that half the groups hates, we know it’s a good one.  Even if that idea isn’t adapted, by simply including it in the discussion, we can often open up the group’s thinking to totally new horizons.

A recent article from the New York Times is one of those ideas.  In it, the author proposes that if we want humans to travel to Mars in the near future, we should send them on a one-way trip!

While it sounds like an awful idea at first, the article points out that there are benefits to sending astronauts only one-way.  It would be significantly cheaper and would move up human-travel to Mars by decades (at least).   It could even be staffed by  aging scientists who dreamed of going to space their entire lives, thought their chances were over and who would be thrilled to “boldly go where no one has gone before”.  It would let astronauts build-up a sustainable colony on Mars where other humans could eventually live – and the technology to make the return journey could be built there for future two-way travel.

See how considering a “ludicrous” idea can actually lead to new paths of thinking?  The first idea might never pan out… but by simply considering it, we end up looking at the challenge from a new angle.

I will say it right away that I have no statistics (yet) to prove my case, but I have a very strong gut feeling that what I am about to say is abolutely true yet not enough recognised with policy makers throughout Europe. I invite each our blog readers to contribute with whatever research material they can find to back this assumption.

Here goes: The most innovative countries in the world invest heavily in their education system, that is to say daycare, preschool, K-12 and higher education. It is NOT the countries that put the emphasis on strenghtening only the higher education.

Also, the most innovative countries would probably need to be those that already foster skills like problem solving, creative thinking and collaboration in the early childhood years.

I am very interested in learning about statistics and materials that back this gut feeling as well as schooling concepts that tell us something about how innovative kids that went through such systems become. Please contribute and we will share the results with you.

Hans Rosling from Sweden is – in my opinion – the king of statistics. He studied Medicine and Statistics and is founder of the Gapminder Foundation that created a software that will show you statistics as you have never seen them before!

Enjoy one of the latest statistical contributions from Hans by looking at this interesting comparison of the news ratio between news about the swine flu and news about tuberculosis.

sticky ideas

The tricky thing with new ideas is that they are very elusive and easily dismissed as compared to old, known ideas that stick in people’s minds and habits.

So this is my own personal recipe to make new ideas stick within the organization.

1. make yourself acquainted with the culture in the organization. You need to learn the way people argue for ideas, how they communicate with each other and how they deal with the “new” in general to be prepared to sell your idea.

2. For a new idea to succeed, you need accomplices. In general, there are three types of potential accomplices in the organization that you can work with to sell your idea:

a) the professional / expert. You need people who will help you with the “proof of concept”, who will waiver all the “is this even feasible” talk and who can back you up on the more technical side of things

b) the organizational expert. Usually these people are found in HR or related departments and know exactly how the organization works. Who needs to be convinced of what, how and most importantly, when?

c) The motivators: People who can motivate other people to move in a new direction, who are role models and users of new technology and new tools, can help you sell your idea.

Find these people within the organization and make them your accomplices.

3. Do not present one idea. Present many solutions to a problem. If your idea is a new specific product, for instance, do not try to sell that product, but talk about the need to add new products to the portfolio in general and then engage as many stakeholders as possible in the dialogue about what that new potential product could be. Talk about criteria, about goals, about new markets, about the customers need, etc. On the one hand, you will then be able to talk about your specific idea in a context, on the other hand, it might very well be the case that your idea gets much better by the additional input, and it might even be the case (I consider it to be very likely) that you find many other product ideas that are at least as good as yours. This will give everyone the chance to choose the best solution instead of just having one idea to deal with, that can be easily dismissed. Most importantly, the idea will now be the idea of the entire team and not the idea of one individual.

4. If you have more than one idea, be prepared to visualize them in a comparable way so people actually get a chance to compare them with each other and to choose the best solution in a structured way.

5. If your idea (or a variation or alternative of said idea) is accepted, you need to go on a campaign for this idea. Having been accepted does not mean that it is implemented; people may not even remember it in a week. Use all the materials you have gathered in the process to make the idea stick. Invent a claim, a logo, a motivational quote or whatever you might need to make the idea stick. Be prepared to talk about it every minute of every day. Remember “Yes, we can?”. That is a powerful idea, but it needed to be repeated over a long period of time to become truly sticky in everyone’s mind.

6. Use your accomplices (see point 2) and your knowledge about the organization (see point 1) to steer the implementation of the idea in the right direction.

7. Talk about the idea as if it were already a reality. This will help people see it as something that will truly be there in a short while and not just a fantasy that you have.

8. Celebrate milestones: Make sure that every significant move towards the implementation is celebrated or at least mentioned publicly. This will make your idea truly stick.