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Corporate Innovation Managers Exchange Best Practices

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About the Publisher of Tucker on Innovation

Robert B. Tucker is author of 'Driving Growth Through Innovation: How Leading Firms Are Transforming Their Futures', a three-year study of 23 of the most innovation-adept companies in the world. He is president of The Innovation Resource, a consulting & speaking firm based in Santa Barbara, CA. Phone: (805) 682-1012. http://www.innovationresource.com

TUCKER ON INNOVATION - THIRD QUARTER 2004

1. Is Innovation the Next, New Thing?
2. Case Study: Avoid These Mistakes in Launching an Innovation Initiative
3. Corporate Innovation Managers Exchange Best Practices (Idea Central User Group - Boston May 2004)

1. Is Innovation the Next, New Thing?

The predictions many of us made about innovation becoming the next big thing appear to be coming to pass – even more rapidly than expected. Think back to a year ago when the global economy was in the tank, and a hunker down mood dominated most organizations. Then consider these indicators:

Attendance at the $2895 per person Front End of Innovation Conference in Boston in June was so over-enrolled that sponsors were forced to change hotels to accommodate the unexpectedly large crowd.
Convergence 2004, which will be held in Minneapolis September 26-29, has already surpassed last year’s numbers, and conference producer Elizabeth Kamper tells us that she expects record turnout.
Most of the innovation consultants I’ve spoken to tell me that they are busier than ever.
Germany has declared 2004 to be The Year of Innovation.

Of course these disparate indicators do not necessarily make a trend. But interest in jump-starting top-line revenue growth via innovation initiatives does appear to be on the upswing.

Leading the pack are chemical companies, refining companies, food companies and all manner of manufacturers. Beset by lower-cost competitors from China, they must innovate costs out while innovating in new value-adding services, business models and customer loyalty inducing strategies, while at the same time continuing to move first in introducing product improvements. I have been surprised at the number of manufacturing trade associations that have invited me to assist their members in increasing their IQ – innovation quotient by presenting sessions at their annual meetings.

More recently service firms, including banks like Washington Mutual, insurance companies like SunLife and Progressive, and even retailers like Radio Shack, have begun to get serious about systematic innovation, rather than being content with piecemeal, ad hoc efforts confined in traditional functions like new product development.

So the news is good for the Innovation Movement as we approach our field’s version of “old home week” Convergence 2004 in Minneapolis, September 26-29. Today there is a small but growing cadre of vanguard companies whose innovation work brings tangible results quarter in and quarter out. They now approach innovation as a discipline, while continuing to cultivate a culture that supports prudent risk-taking. They constantly involve their customers in new and exciting ways to suss out their unarticulated needs, and they continue to tweak their front-end processes to keep ahead of ever-changing customer demands.

Because of the learning and the sharing in our field, we may be getting better at our craft. Companies just jumping in don’t have to make the same damn-fool mistakes others have made. If only their leaders are willing to read and study and learn before launching blindly. And only if we keep sharing candidly what’s going on behind the moats that companies build around them.

2. Case Study: Avoid These Mistakes in Launching an Innovation Initiative

Recently we had occasion to return to a large financial service company that operates in multiple countries and has multiple divisions. We had assisted the company in launching an innovation initiative in 2000, and their efforts to derive revenue growth via innovation continue after several years of turbulence in their market environment as well as numerous changes in leadership.

During my recent assignment, I informally surveyed a group of 20 managers who were heavily involved in the implementation of that ambitious, even groundbreaking innovation initiative. Here’s what they agreed were the key learnings:

You must keep metrics simple. The metrics apparently became burdensome in many cases. Additional metrics for innovation should be easy to capture, easy to track, and should not cause behavior that is engaged in only to "look good" with reported results. It’s a “big mistake” to have more than 4 or 5 innovation metrics.
You need to invest in innovation. Product manufacturers often have a metric of "percentage of sales spent on R&D." This service business, like so many others, has no budget or earmarked resources for innovation. How can we do innovation without budget?
You must continue to work on the culture. The innovation culture suffered greatly with staff cutbacks and general uncertainty in the air.
You must show people examples of regular contributors and managers coming up with value adding, customer pleasing innovations. If you do, you'll get more of that behavior.
You must find and build new champions - people who are responsible for making innovation happen, enhancing enablers of innovation and busting barriers.
Senior management emphasis is critical. When it wanes, innovation emphasis dies. When it's present, you are bound to see big and little results in terms of top-line revenue growth, strategy innovations, new products, and process improvements,

3. Corporate Innovation Managers Exchange Best Practices

If a recent users meeting I attended in Boston is any guide, we may be on the cusp of a whole new way of tapping the creative problem-solving potential of large companies, and finally making the phrase “idea management” a reality.

This was my reaction to spending a day participating at an idea exchange of what I’ll call here “innovation managers,” although the work these people do in their respective organizations is so new that there is not yet a widely-accepted term to describe their occupation.

Brought together by Imaginatik, a Boston-based purveyor of idea management software, the dozen or so directors from WR Grace, Georgia-Pacific, Bayer, Goodyear and other companies spent the day discussing what’s working and what’s not in the fast-evolving craft of soliciting, selecting, recognizing and implementing ideas that ultimately drive profitable growth.

Idea management systems build on the notion that your rank and file contributor, whether in sales, R&D, purchasing or payroll, might just have an ingenious solution to a problem someone else in the company is struggling with, if only he or she is asked.

The idea of asking employees for their ideas is nothing new. Company suggestion programs have invited employees to submit ideas that save money, increase safety and improve productivity for over a hundred years.

But idea management systems go much further. By using the company’s intranet portal to appeal for ideas, the suggestion box is brought to the desk of the employee. And queries for help with specific problems can target select groups of people in the company the way upscale catalogs get mailed to affluent zip codes.

Employees who see a problem posted on the company’s innovation portal can easily submit their ideas, whether they work in Bombay, Boston or Berlin. And idea management technology enables managers to work with innovation directors to develop campaigns that solicit ideas from across the value chain: from customers, suppliers, advertising firms, think tanks, universities. The state-of-the-art today is the idea campaign, which commonly lasts only a few weeks, and then it’s over.

Such campaigns are often launched using what Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell calls Flash Sessions, where brainstormers are brought together in real time to play off each other people’s creativity, and spawn dozens of ideas that get posted for other problem-solvers to see and add to. Other campaigns might involve large-scale, company-wide events where everyone in the division is urged to submit ideas on topics like “how do we eliminate ‘I can’t believe we do this’ situations", or “how can we improve plant safety”?

One innovation manager from a petroleum refining company shared how he and his team seed their ideation events with ideas they’ve thought of ahead of time. They gather 20 people in a conference room with a router to each person’s laptop, and the ideas get projected up on a screen for all to see. These ideas in turn are posted on the division’s customized version of Idea Central.

The innovation manager at SunLife Financial told colleagues that she gets the creative juices flowing by asking an easy question like “what silly rules exist in the company that should be gotten rid of?” In one meet-up of employees from eight regional offices of the company, 800 clerical workers all went online at the same time to brainstorm ways to improve productivity by 10 percent.

One rubber company innovation manager, who participated from Europe, told the group that “our best events are where we have an implementation team in place and the worst, where we don’t.” “The books all say that the review team and the implementation teams should be different, but we found that it’s okay to have the team do both.”

Intranet-based idea management systems such as Imaginatik’s popular Idea Central software, when combined with full-time efforts on the part of innovation managers, are achieving impressive results for their companies. Indeed, they are empowering significant changes in how organizations ideate – and their potential is only just beginning to be exploited.