Fresh Takes on Innovation

When talking about Innovation and the crucial factors for a company becoming more innovative, there are three key ingredients we have discovered need to be in balance:

Obviously, you need a framework or process to make sure that great ideas can be captured and also actively developed within the organisation. There are a number of processes or frameworks, and to pick the right one depends on your current needs, size, culture and other factors, but it is clear that in order to create great content you need to have an underlying system that can be followed and understood by everyone in the organisation.

No matter how fantastic the stuff is that you create using that framework or process, you also need two other key ingredients: Awareness and an enabled team. Both ingredients are cultural and are crucial for your innovation success.

Let’s first talk about enabling, because it seems more obvious. You need to enable each individual in the organisation to use the framework or process and to be able to take on the right roles at the right times. There are people providing the process, others preparing the different steps or stages that lead to implemented ideas and ultimately to innovation, and the ones that participate in different process steps.

It is important that each individual on the team understands what their role(s) can be and what their responsibilites are when taking on that role. For instance, a person that participates in a process should know that his or her ideas are welcome, no matter how small, silly or indadequate they may seem at that moment. At the same time, people providing the process should know that they should refrain from coming up with ideas themselves, but rather provide the right framework in which the idea community can come up with suggestions. This provides a very agile environment in which ideas can grow.

Of course, enabling also involves just plain learning about the tools that are used in the process, how to use them and how to contribute a maimum of results in the process.

With awareness, the story is rather different and not so obvious. In our work during the last 21 years we have met many organisations that had the need to create great content, and they also provided the enabling factors for the team to make use of them, but somehow the ideas that were generated in the process were not implemented, or just the most boring ideas were implemented, or they were implemented halfheartedly. What had happened? Why did these teams not take action on the great ideas they had created in the process?

It took a long time until we realized that these teams were missing the third key ingredient: The awareness that indeed, if they wanted to innovate, they had to be prepared for drastic change. They needed to see that it was not enough to come up with great ideas, they also had to overcome the angst of taking action on those ideas by implementing them. This third, very human factor, is crucial in achieving real innovation culture that does not just involve processes and skills, but also an open mind and a sense of urgency for change.

Whenever we work with companes who are looking to create innovation, even if they “just” order an idea for a new name, we work hard to make sure that all three key ingredients are a part of the process we go through together, because only then innovation will get implemented and lead to success in the market.

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.

With spring just on the horizon, it’s almost that time again.  No… not wedding season… conference season!

Here at BrainStore, we keep hearing about tons of really innovative conferences in Europe and America.  Some are directly about innovation, while others just create an atmosphere perfect for innovation.

So, since it’s often hard to find out about all the cool conferences out there, we thought we’d share some of our upcoming favorites with you.   Perhaps you’ll even meet us at some of them!

Upcoming conferences we like (March through July):

SxSW Interactive (12-16 March in Austin, Texas) South by SouthWest Interactive is the place to be if you’re interested in emergecing technology, especially if it’s online.  The conference is five days of presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of networking events hosted by industry leaders and a huge showcase of the best new websites, video games and startup ideas.  It’s also chockfull of great music, fun events and networking – not to be missed!

Innovation: Fresh thinking for the ideas economy (23-24 March in Berkeley, USA) This inaugural conference, put on by the Economist Magazine, will examine the latest thinking on what makes innovation possible, how innovation is changing, and why innovation matters today more than ever.  The goal of this event is to expand or overturn established thinking about what innovation is, where it comes from, and how to make it work.

99% Conference (15-16 April 15-16 in New York City, USA) This conference is unfortunately already sold out, but it’s still so cool that we’re going to tell you about it anyways.  Most innovation conferences are all about how to have new ideas – the 99% Conference is all about idea execution – providing road-tested insights on how to make ideas happen. They don’t want to give attendees new ideas, they want to empower attendees to make good on the ones they’ve got.  If that sounds interesting to you, sign-up for their newsletter so you can find out about the 2011 conference right away!

Front End of Innovation (3-5 May, Boston, USA) The European version of this conference was last week, but if you weren’t able to make it to Amsterdam, you can still sign-up for the Boston event.  The Front End of Innovation Conference features fantastic presentations by visionaries who are passionate about innovation and have delivered real results.  The conference has four distinct tracks, from open innovation to green innovation, and most of the presentations are done by companies who talk about how they have applied the innovation concepts to the real world.

LIFT Conference (5-7 May in Geneva, Switzerland) The Lift Conference brings together a community of doers and thinkers to explore the social consequences of new technologies. The conference is a chance to turn changes into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meeting the people who drive them.  The three day conference will combine speeches selected by Lift curators with speeches proposed and selected by the online Lift community, as well as artistic and social events.

The PINC Conference (11 May in  Zeist, Netherlands) is a conference that combines new ideas, great stories and impressive presentations with speakers from all over the world and from every industry.  PINC stands for “People, Ideas, Nature, Creativity” and the conference’s goal is to touch on each one of those subjects while exposing attendees not only to great speakers, but also to an environment filled with creativity.

World Innovation Forum (8-9 June in New York City, USA) A 2-day conference right in the heart of NYC where the world’s greatest thought leaders in the field of innovation come together to provide actionable insights to revolutionize all aspects of business.  The conference covers everything from future trends, to innovation in fields such as marketing, health care and green technology and is attended by many of the most innovative companies in the US.

InnoTown (9-10 June 2010 in Ålesund, Norway ) InnoTown is a conference that seeks to open people up to innovation.  The conference emphasizes innovation, vision, inspiration, strategy, creativity, promotion and internationalisation. It brings together people from different countries, trades, environments and professions, and challenges all of them to find new ideas, to think new thoughts and to dare to fail (in order to succeed in the end!)

TED Global (12-16 July 2010 in Oxford, UK) TED is a legendary invitation-only conference that started in the US and has become so popular that additional TED events are held biannually in different locations around the world. The US-based TED ended last week (so get your tickets now if you want to go next year!) but the European conference will happen in July.  Just like the original version, TED Global will feature four days of short, fast-paced talks on everything from ecological debt to whether music can teach math.

Of course, those aren’t all the cool conferences happening in 2010, but it will give you a taste of what’s happening in the next couple months.  Please let us know if we’ve missed any that you recommend, or what ones we should be aware of later in the year.  We’ll do another post later on with what’s happening during the summer and fall.

As a company that works with a lot of big organizations, we often don’t get the chance to share the results of our Idea Events.  Sometimes we get to talk about specific products and services that came about as a result of working with us – but we rarely get to give people a real glimpse into how our process unfolds.

But today we do!  Last month, BrainStore was one of the sponsors of  the Young Hoteliers Summit (YHS), a new hospitality conference put on by the Career Club of the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne (an internationally-renowned Swiss hotel school). As part of our contribution to the event, we ran the attendees through our Idea Factory process to come up with solutions to one of the challenges faced by luxury hotels today.

The Young Hoteliers Summit and Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne are graciously allowing us to share all their inspirations, raw ideas, the top 10 finished ideas and the results of their Idea Selection.

So, if you’d like to get a glimpse of the amazing results of one of our Idea Events, read on!

The Challenge

The Jumeirah Group, another sponsor of the event, proposed the following challenge to the attendees of the Young Hoteliers Summit:

“In the face of an overall decrease in demand, how to boost occupancy levels in luxury hotels without pushing prices lower?”

From that challenge, BrainStore developed a series of thought-provoking questions and criteria to come up with 10 great ideas.

The Process

We started by leading the students through one of our Creative Teams.  Creative Teams are the part of our process where we do quick, short exercises that result in thousands of “inspirations” rapidly.  We call the results of those sessions “inspirations” because – while they might not be a full idea in their own right – each inspiration has the potential to become, or inspire an actual idea later on in our process.

To get those inspirations, we first asked questions that don’t require a lot of thought, but require participants to consider different viewpoints.  Those included:

What do millionaires expect from a stay in a luxury hotel?

What do business travelers expect from a stay in a luxury hotel?

What do sporty people expect from a stay in a luxury hotel?

Then we moved onto more challenging questions that require participants to stretch their brains, such as:

How can one positively surprise various customer groups, in a way that leaves a lasting impression?

Imagine you are living in prohibitive times – alcohol has recently been outlawed – You are a wine merchant, and you must now find a way to continue selling your exclusive alcohol despite the ban.  How can you do this?

How do get your guests to feel completely comfortable in your hotel? Pay special attention to the five senses.

Through those questions, and the others that we rapid-fired at participants, we gathered over 2500 inspirations!

If you’d like to see the questions we asked and the responses, take a look at our records from the Creative Team:

(FYI, those results are rough – the goal for participants were to get as many inspirations as quickly as possible.)

After the Creative Team, we then moved onto the next part of our process: the Idea City.  In the Idea City, BrainStore pushed the YHS participants to combine all the inspirations generated in the Creative Team – and to turn those into fresh new ideas. During this phase, we still give participants challenges to think about, but now they have the time to create concrete ideas.

The ideas generated during this phase ranged from tempting guests with sensory experiences like baking bread in the morning, to providing above-and-beyond services such as adapter plugs (for travelers from different countries), to giving guest the ability to customize their rooms before they even arrive (like rock stars!)

The Idea City is a little more relaxing than the Creative Team – but all the brains in the room were obviously working madly away!  We had nearly 500 raw ideas come out of the Idea City.

Take a look at the raw ideas:

The Results

After the crazy inspiration generating of the Creative Team, and the quieter idea-generation of the Idea City, we hung up all the ideas and let the students pick their favorites.  This is always a favorite part of the Idea Event because participants get to see the results of their labor.  Plus, it’s a lot of fun to see the wide variety of ideas!

Then, we gave the students a little break while we evaluated their top ideas based on criteria and then put the top 10 ideas into a visual format so they could be easily understood and compared with each other.

After that, the Idea Selection began.  We turned on some fun music and projected the top 10 ideas in front of the participants from the YHS.  It was fun, and quick – with music (of course!)  We kept things moving because we didn’t want participants to overanalyze each idea (that comes later in a normal process during the Roadmap workshop) we just wanted to learn their initial impressions.

Meanwhile, in the background, we were crunching the students’ ratings of the ideas to find out what ideas were liked by all, and also which ideas were liked by some and hated by others.  (Those polarizing ideas are incredibly important to us!)

And then, in less than a day, it was done!  We compiled a document with the top ideas and showed how participants viewed their viability.

If you’d like to see the final results of our Idea Event for the Young Hoteliers Summit, with the top 10 ideas and how the students ranked them, check them out here.

Normally, this wouldn’t be the final stage of our Idea Event.  We typically helps companies thoroughly evaluate each idea with the help of experts, and then run a Roadmap workshop where the leaders of the company determine which ideas should be implemented, in what order and what resources/partnerships they need to make it happen.

In that way, we ensure that ideas generated with BrainStore don’t simply disappear into thin air – unlike many ideas that get pushed aside when other commitments get in the way.

But in a short workshop like this one for the Young Hoteliers, the process we described above gave the participants (and their sponsors) a series of great new ideas, a big gain in enthusiasm for solving challenges in their industry and many innovative building blocks and raw ideas to work with in the future.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the BrainStore process!

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.

This fun commercial sent to us from Japan shows people at the moment of inspiration in their everyday lives.

The commercial shows people being inspired in bed, in the park, in the WC, in-transit, at the beach and even in board meetings.

What’s really remarkable about this commercial though is how similar it is to the grumpy thinker who stars in the first part of the presentations we give about BrainStore!

Check out some of our images for where people get ideas:

And, we both have the same conclusions: that it’s much better to be proactive and actively try to get ideas than to just wait for creative inspiration.

Of course, our solutions are a little different!  In the commercial, the solution to lacking inspiration is a stick of gum.  Here at BrainStore, our solution is the Idea Machine – which seems like a much more reliable method of ensuring results!

Young Innovations Europe (YIE) is a fresh and exciting magazine created for and by young people interested in exercising positive leadership in their own communities in groundbreaking ways.

YIE are interested in showcasing the best initiatives, programs and innovations young people are implementing throughout Europe.

In their first magazine, YIE also portrais the Idea Factory BrainStore on page 9. You can read the article online on YIE’s website.

I visited www.eternit.ch today. Eternit is the market leader in the roofing and façades sector in Switzerland. The company also acts as an important partner for fireproof and aesthetic interior fittings and design products.

Mr Daniel Hauri, who is responsible for the sales of garden and design products kindly showed me the production and explained the process of fibre cement, which is fascinating.

In the factory in Payerne (in the French speaking part of Switzerland) the company produces roof tiles and wall claddings in different forms and colors, but also gardening pots and design objects like the Guhl Chair (by Willi Guhl, Swiss Designer 1915 – 2004).

What impressed me is the way the company has expanded it’s product portfolio from typical building elements to design objects.

But what truly convinced me today about eternit was a very simple and meaningful marketing idea that was presented to me by Daniel Hauri.

“Because the design products section grew significantly over the last years, we had to hire new workers for our manufacturing process here in Payerne. As the demand rose, the quality (the gardening pots and design objects are produced largely by hand) was getting a bit below standard. We searched some ideas on what we could do and found a very simple solution: A sticker with the personal signature of the person who made the object can now be found in every finished object. It was great marketing in the shops because people realised that the object was actually produced by a person, but it also helped us raise the quality standards, because suddenly the workers went to the shops as well and searched for the pots and objects they had made”.

What I really liked about this idea is the fact that one idea worked perfectly to solve to issues at the same time: Quality and Image.

Thank you, eternit and Daniel Hauri, for sharing this idea with me.