The last chapter of new content was how to cultivate an innovative culture though philosophies. The key concept here was ensuing it was ingrained into the fabric of the organization - and to do so one must start at the top. By having a CEO who is very innovative, they will surround them selves with like minded people and this trend will hopefully play out to all levels of the organization. To ensure this happens there were some best practices.
The first was underscoring that Innovation doesn't stop at R&D, that all areas of an organization must innovate. That R&D can often have narrow focus, and that perspective from a diverse set of people from the entire company can provide much more insight into problems which can and should be solved. However getting people to recommend innovative ideas can be very difficult, so to ensure this philosophy is followed, safe environment and time must be allocated where ideas can be shared and built upon.
The second is that disruptive innovation must be considered. This may involve entering different market spaced then the organization typically plays in, a la Apple with the iPod/iPhone etc. In most companies the majority of time is actually spend on derivative improvements on existing products, and although important, this will not lead to sustained competitive advantage like disruptive innovation can.
Thirdly, innovation needs to be organized, and it should be organized in small complementary teams. The consensus is that large teams prompt delivery skills, not discovery skills. Amazon suggests that all teams must be fed dinner with two large pizzas. Along with the organization, teams must be giving the autonomy to explore and experiment with ideas to understand what works, and what doesn't. The faster a team can determine if something doesn't work, the faster they can move on to find something that does.
Lastly "smart" risk taking should be encouraged. Failure must not be feared, it should be embraced. By learning how to quickly use discovery skills to find and qualify ideas, a team can learn to better judge risks upfront and thus take smarter more calculated risks to offset the less risky derivative work which makes up the majority of the time and effort in an organization.
There have been a lot of takeaways in this book. I think I've learned that I probably do not want to start my own business, at least not at the moment. I do think I'd be good at helping an existing organization innovate, and perhaps help develop new disruptive ideas at some point in the future. In the mean time there are actions I should do to help develop my discovery skills. I should really start my own book of ideas to take quick notes and sketches down of my ideas. I think I need to continue to read and research about broad areas of science and technology to develop a good "T" shape in my knowledge expertise. I should really improve my networking skills and start attending more innovative type meetings and conferences.
Applying this to our project is difficult, as we would not actually be creating an organization as part of the project. But as with any start-up if we were to create this business of custom 3d printed toys, we would need a very small, dedicated team with specific skills and broad knowledge to come together and converge their expertise into a very new, potentially disruptive technology and market.
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog over the past few weeks. The Innovator's DNA has been a very good read, and I'd recommend it to anybody who is curious about the innovation concept and curious how they would fit into it.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
Week Four
This week I read about how transportation can foster innovation through people and teams as well as through process.
From the people and team perspective, the main premise is that very successful innovative companies have innovative leaders. Innovative leaders then lead to innovative teams and innovation companies. This should ultimately be seen through the innovation premium on the stock price which I discussed last week. Although I can be very difficult to find individuals who excel at all of the discovery skills, it is easier to find individuals which have very high ratings for one or two of the discovery skills. From this you can form complementary skilled teams to provide a boost to innovation up to the leadership of the organization. However it isn't often enough to have a balance of discovery skills, a team also needs a balance of the delivery driven skills in Analyzing, Planning, Detail-oriented implementable and Self-disciplined. When teams had those skills balanced with the discovery skills, Associating, Questioning, Observing, Idea networking and experimenting. Naturally different organization functions would want a different balance for instance the product development would want to be weighted more to the discovery driven side, where was say the finance department would be more weighted to the delivery. The author also discussed the concept of how a "T" type person is important for innovative teams. The "T" person has a wide breadth of general knowledge and is specialized in another area. A team of "T" people with different specialization can be very compelling as holistically the team would have many synergies because of the overlapping of the breadth and many specializations.
The next chapter was how an organizations process can help with innovation. The idea was turning the "B employees into "A+" employees through process. The process to do this in Questioning was by using the "5 whys" of Toyota to find the root cause of their issues was an example of how to innovate. As a person who's job it is to find root cause of issues on a daily basis, I personally found the examples they gave as very over simplified. Often it isn't enough to have 5 whys. We take the approach to question to the void, until no more information can be gathered. That was part of the Kepner-Tregoe troubleshooting which I discussed previously. For Observing the process recommendation was to focus on how your customers were operating and what pain they were seeing and from there one could observe new ideas for doing things better perhaps though new products or services. Networking was particularly interesting. I had always heard of Google's 25% unscheduled time for employees to contribute to products of their choice. However I never looked at it from the same angle as the author. By allowing employees choose which products they put time in, they are allowing the free market (internally) to guide the products which they develop and ultimately sell. They also externally network by having beta programs where people can test out products in a more controlled environment before being externally available. Lastly Experimenting has never been easier and is recommended by a crucial part of any development cycle. Again this can be accomplished with beta testing, rapid prototyping via exciting new technologies (3D printing) or simply by launching test sites to gauge interest. Another key process which was discussed was the hiring process, to ensure that you get an innovative A+ employee. The authors suggest finding people who "demonstrate strong discovery skills", "have T shaped knowledge profile", and lastly "displays a passion to change the world and make a difference". It sounds a lot easier than it probably is, but it is certinly a process to consider when looking to hire a new employee.
Relating these concepts back to our project is a little difficult since they are all about ensuing that an organization has the people and process to be innovative. If the project were to continue beyond the business validation stage, then it would be very important to form a team with more diversified discovery and delivery skills. With only four people, two of which have telecom expertise we are not a diversified bunch. Ultimately we would want an image processing expert as well as somebody with experience in 3D printing. Without two people with these skills I don't believe we could launch the business.
From the people and team perspective, the main premise is that very successful innovative companies have innovative leaders. Innovative leaders then lead to innovative teams and innovation companies. This should ultimately be seen through the innovation premium on the stock price which I discussed last week. Although I can be very difficult to find individuals who excel at all of the discovery skills, it is easier to find individuals which have very high ratings for one or two of the discovery skills. From this you can form complementary skilled teams to provide a boost to innovation up to the leadership of the organization. However it isn't often enough to have a balance of discovery skills, a team also needs a balance of the delivery driven skills in Analyzing, Planning, Detail-oriented implementable and Self-disciplined. When teams had those skills balanced with the discovery skills, Associating, Questioning, Observing, Idea networking and experimenting. Naturally different organization functions would want a different balance for instance the product development would want to be weighted more to the discovery driven side, where was say the finance department would be more weighted to the delivery. The author also discussed the concept of how a "T" type person is important for innovative teams. The "T" person has a wide breadth of general knowledge and is specialized in another area. A team of "T" people with different specialization can be very compelling as holistically the team would have many synergies because of the overlapping of the breadth and many specializations.
The next chapter was how an organizations process can help with innovation. The idea was turning the "B employees into "A+" employees through process. The process to do this in Questioning was by using the "5 whys" of Toyota to find the root cause of their issues was an example of how to innovate. As a person who's job it is to find root cause of issues on a daily basis, I personally found the examples they gave as very over simplified. Often it isn't enough to have 5 whys. We take the approach to question to the void, until no more information can be gathered. That was part of the Kepner-Tregoe troubleshooting which I discussed previously. For Observing the process recommendation was to focus on how your customers were operating and what pain they were seeing and from there one could observe new ideas for doing things better perhaps though new products or services. Networking was particularly interesting. I had always heard of Google's 25% unscheduled time for employees to contribute to products of their choice. However I never looked at it from the same angle as the author. By allowing employees choose which products they put time in, they are allowing the free market (internally) to guide the products which they develop and ultimately sell. They also externally network by having beta programs where people can test out products in a more controlled environment before being externally available. Lastly Experimenting has never been easier and is recommended by a crucial part of any development cycle. Again this can be accomplished with beta testing, rapid prototyping via exciting new technologies (3D printing) or simply by launching test sites to gauge interest. Another key process which was discussed was the hiring process, to ensure that you get an innovative A+ employee. The authors suggest finding people who "demonstrate strong discovery skills", "have T shaped knowledge profile", and lastly "displays a passion to change the world and make a difference". It sounds a lot easier than it probably is, but it is certinly a process to consider when looking to hire a new employee.
Relating these concepts back to our project is a little difficult since they are all about ensuing that an organization has the people and process to be innovative. If the project were to continue beyond the business validation stage, then it would be very important to form a team with more diversified discovery and delivery skills. With only four people, two of which have telecom expertise we are not a diversified bunch. Ultimately we would want an image processing expert as well as somebody with experience in 3D printing. Without two people with these skills I don't believe we could launch the business.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Week Three
Another week, and two more chapters down. This week I covered the last discovery skill in Experimenting as well as started the next section on looking at what makes an Innovative company.
Experimenting in terms of starting a business or innovating is much different from the typical experimenting we commonly see in our educational careers. Having a degree in Engineering Physics, I'm very accustom to the traditional experiments, the Physics half of that degree; however I'm also used to the tinkering aspect of experimentation which is emphasized in the book and was certainly part of the Engineering half of my degree. More the three suggested ways of experimenting are as follows:
Experimenting in terms of starting a business or innovating is much different from the typical experimenting we commonly see in our educational careers. Having a degree in Engineering Physics, I'm very accustom to the traditional experiments, the Physics half of that degree; however I'm also used to the tinkering aspect of experimentation which is emphasized in the book and was certainly part of the Engineering half of my degree. More the three suggested ways of experimenting are as follows:
- Take apart products, process and ideas;
- Build pilots and prototypes;
- Try out new experiences.
The first two bullets above as an engineer really make sense, and is something that I believe every engineer does. However, the new experiences at first seemed out of place. However, when taking a step back, trying something for the first time can certainly be an experiment of sorts. After all we can all remember the first time we did something - all of these first were experiments.
This is type of experimenting is suggested to be done by immersing once self in different cultures, living over seas and learning new seemingly unrelated skills. Of course all of these experiments without great questioning and observing discovery skills would be useless as one would not be able to make the associative connections to form a disruptive idea. There seems to be an implicit inter-connected-ness to all of the discovery skills. I'll chew on that for a while and see if I can expand on that in a later post.
The first part of the second section of the book looked at whether innovation is rewarded. Ultimately if it is not rewarded then few companies would take the risk to actually innovate. Luckily for this class and society, based on the authors research a companies ability to innovate in the future and generate profits on those innovations is rewarded, or speculated upon in the stock price. This is referred to the innovation premium, which is "the proportion of a company's market value that cannot be accounted for from cash flows of its current products and businesses in its current markets". I won't spoil the list for you, but of the top ten companies, I'd bet you'd only guess three. When looking at what was distinct about the companies with a high innovation premium from those with a low premium were the classic: People, Processes and Philosophies (aka culture, but the 3 P's are sexier than the two P's and a C).
In my previous two posts I've neglected to relate them to our project, so going forward I will try to do that. Our project is validating the idea of using 3d printing to create custom replica toys for children. For our project to be successful there would need to be a lot of experiments once the initial ideas are validated with surveys.
Experiments:
- Creating 3d Renders from 2d pictures
- Creating a process to take the render to the printer with no human intervention (save money)
Those two are certainly important, and are deal breakers for our assumed market if they don't work, however there is one experiment that would need to be done before even considering those two.
I would think once we have identified our markets and performed initial tests, we would want to test a human process to see if people use it. That is to have people take photos, through a test application (mobile or web) and then have human create the render. From there the render could be printed using existing 3d printing companies - which are becoming more common for rapid prototyping and then mailed out. Once mailed a feedback survey would need to be used to assess what the customer is happy with and what ht customer is concerned with. From there appropriate pivots can be made based process and product feedback.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Week Two
In week one of my thoughts on the Innovator's DNA I discussed the first part of the book and the first discovery skill in associative thinking. This week I read about the next three discovery skills. Namely:
Lastly from class looking at where the creation of ideas comes from was pretty interesting. The main ideas were:
There were lots of examples of Personal Pain - most notably from the founder of Shopify because he couldn't create his on-line snow board store easily
Being a former Nortel employee I've seen businesses start when entire teams at Nortel were laid off and they reformed a new company doing something very similar and because of their severance they had the time and money to invest.
Looking at a market gap or need seems pretty straight forward - this to me would be where a lot of franchises or other types of business starts.
Lastly client access seems a bit like serendipity to me. For this to happen one must have an expertise and a large network. Then they have to be in the right position in the right time where somebody in their network thinks of you to solve a problem for them. Although one could create the seeds of this by maintaining a healthy network and staying up to date on trends, there is a certain amount of luck in this.
See you next week when we discuss experimentation as a discovery skill. I don't think this means using drugs to be more creative, but only time will tell.
- Questioning
- Observing
- Networking
The Questioning section was very interesting In my professional life I work as a second level support for Optical network equipment at Ciena. Often one of the hardest parts of the job is getting an accurate problem description - and based on this book, it seems like this problem is wide spread. We've taken courses on decision making and determining what the real problem was. The main initiative was through Kepner-Tregoe This book echo's the approach of questioning to the void to determine what the true problem is. Oven problems are like onions, and you have to peel back the many layers until you understand the root of the issue. Oven in the heat of an issue or discussion it is easy to get lost in the conversation and not take the step back to truly understand what the issue is. The book also highlights a large conundrum with questioning - that is - how does one question without coming across as difficult or worse. A good tip for this was to introduce yourself and simply mention that you will be asking a lot of dumb questions to ensure that you have a good understand of what the idea or issue is. This sets the stage for questioning and hopefully avoids any confrontational discussions.
Observing was up next. The book takes a slightly more meta approach to observing. Most people when they observe, really only observe with their eyes. They don't engage their other senses. In some instances this may not be possible, but more often than not there is more to the interaction then just watching it. Observing a phenomena is so much more informative than just discussing or reading about it. Again, where I come from professionally, we can see issues in the analysis of logs in our systems, but to actually go in an see the issues, to reproduce them, to understand the steps in them gives a much better understanding of the issue. Often to do this it takes a lot of observing of how our customers and software are interacting
The last chapter for this week as networking. The most interesting aspect of networking was the question "who else has solved this problem". I think this is one of the most important questions which can be asked. Too often do we spend huge amounts of time solving issues which have already been solved. At work we devote a signification amount of time to knowledge sharing to avoid two people trying to solve the same problem on different days. By sharing our knowledge we can become more efficient and ultimately serve our customers faster and more accurately because of it. The book highlights how this can be difficult to do without infringing on intellectual property, but gives ideas around it. I especially like the idea of networking and observing outside of your own field to other fields which may have had similar issues. For instance a lot of newer optical technology was first developed for wireless systems and is now being applied to fiber optics.
- Personal Pain
- Team/Exertise
- Market Gap/Need
- Client Access
There were lots of examples of Personal Pain - most notably from the founder of Shopify because he couldn't create his on-line snow board store easily
Being a former Nortel employee I've seen businesses start when entire teams at Nortel were laid off and they reformed a new company doing something very similar and because of their severance they had the time and money to invest.
Looking at a market gap or need seems pretty straight forward - this to me would be where a lot of franchises or other types of business starts.
Lastly client access seems a bit like serendipity to me. For this to happen one must have an expertise and a large network. Then they have to be in the right position in the right time where somebody in their network thinks of you to solve a problem for them. Although one could create the seeds of this by maintaining a healthy network and staying up to date on trends, there is a certain amount of luck in this.
See you next week when we discuss experimentation as a discovery skill. I don't think this means using drugs to be more creative, but only time will tell.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Week One
Hello curious onlookers. I'm creating this blog as a requirement for my Entrepreneurship class as part of my MBA. The requirement is that once a week after attending the class and completing the readings that a blog entry be created based on what we've learned and discussed.
For this participial class we get to choose our book for our primary readings. I've chosen the Innovator's DNA. I choose this because it was sold as a more generic topic on entrepreneurship; specifically for those that are unsure if they want to become (of even able to become) and entrepreneurship. The obvious questions is, well if you aren't sure or are unable to become an entrepreneur then why are you taking the course. The answer is simple, small and medium businesses are often have entrepreneurs at the helm and ultimately have the entrepreneurship culture. Understanding this culture and how you can contribute is important because there is a very good possibility that at some point you will be working with or for one. The statistic in class was that 60% of employment opportunities are in this area. A staggering number. Furthermore a lot of larger companies are tying to capitalize on intrapreneurship to develop and innovate new ideas in the existing enterprise.
I've read the first two chapters. The book is very interesting. It postulates that the 5 traits that make innovators different are their discorvery stills, which are summarized here:
An interesting concept unrelated to what is discussed above is that idea of "test" store for any online products or services. To create a store with product descriptions and mock ups but with 0 stock (here). Now that I've heard the idea it seems like a no brainer, but this idea is genius What a great way to get real world demand and feedback. I've often though that this is the way that a company like Apple get generate a lot of ideas for features for phones. At any given time there are at least half a million rumours floating around on the next generation of devices and their feature set. This seems to be a cheap and easy way to generate ideas on what the population is looking for in the future.
Anyways, I think that's about it for week one.
For this participial class we get to choose our book for our primary readings. I've chosen the Innovator's DNA. I choose this because it was sold as a more generic topic on entrepreneurship; specifically for those that are unsure if they want to become (of even able to become) and entrepreneurship. The obvious questions is, well if you aren't sure or are unable to become an entrepreneur then why are you taking the course. The answer is simple, small and medium businesses are often have entrepreneurs at the helm and ultimately have the entrepreneurship culture. Understanding this culture and how you can contribute is important because there is a very good possibility that at some point you will be working with or for one. The statistic in class was that 60% of employment opportunities are in this area. A staggering number. Furthermore a lot of larger companies are tying to capitalize on intrapreneurship to develop and innovate new ideas in the existing enterprise.
I've read the first two chapters. The book is very interesting. It postulates that the 5 traits that make innovators different are their discorvery stills, which are summarized here:
- Associational Thinking: that is the ability to "discover new directions my making connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas".
- Questioning
- Observing
- Networking
- Experimenting
There was even a quick sample of a survey for assessing your discovery vs delivery skills. I was fairly balanced 41 and 39 respectively. Highly fuctional innovators are usually highly skewed to the discrovery skill, the balanced managers are usually ones that take the innovators ideas and brings them to Growth and Maturity on the traditional "S" curve.
What I've found very interesting was the chapter on associative thinking. Making connections between new ideas has always generated disruptive change. Google, Apple, Amazon and more recently companies like SpaceX are completely changing the world. Investors would love to be able to get a leg up and be able to predict which technologies and trends are going to take off and be the next Google. In our Competitive Intelligence class I (with two other students) did a project on a company called Quid. Basically this company mines the latest research, press releases, news articles and much more then they maps them onto a network map. From here one can see traditional businesses or research ideas clustered together but in the white spaces between clusters, there could be a few new research topics or small companies forming. These seeds can represent the association between two or more traditional businesses/ideas used to solve new, unrelated problems. This technique was originally pioneered in bioinformatics as an analysis tool but has since branched out to help in many industries, including business intelligence. Quid is used by investment companies looking to invest in new start-ups as well as existing companies looking to capabilities on new business opportunities. I believe that Associational Thinking would be the most critical skill for an innovator. With all the explosion of research, data and ideas that the internet has fostered, having a tool like Quid to aid in making these associations seems like a logical step. Of course it is important to realize that this is just a tool and the the human factor of having somebody like Steve Jobs qualifying and creating completely new seeds is not something that a computer can do for the foreseeable future. But I digress...
An interesting concept unrelated to what is discussed above is that idea of "test" store for any online products or services. To create a store with product descriptions and mock ups but with 0 stock (here). Now that I've heard the idea it seems like a no brainer, but this idea is genius What a great way to get real world demand and feedback. I've often though that this is the way that a company like Apple get generate a lot of ideas for features for phones. At any given time there are at least half a million rumours floating around on the next generation of devices and their feature set. This seems to be a cheap and easy way to generate ideas on what the population is looking for in the future.
Anyways, I think that's about it for week one.
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