People regularly ask me about the benefits of automating Innovation Management. Many don’t just ask, but argue that Innovation Management “must” be automated.

How can you automatically create value?

• Is there more financial value to a sculpture that was hand-crafted by an artist or one shaped in a mold and cooked in an oven?
• Is there more financial value to going to a 5-star restaurant with a dress code or getting a sandwich from a vending machine?
• Is there more value from a personal financial advisor or with applying for credit online?
• Is there more value from going in an antique shop to see and touch the goods or shopping online from an auction site that shows pictures?
• Would you prefer to go see a hair dresser for $50 or would you actually agree to sit in an “automated” barber machine get their hair cut for simply $5?
• Would you prefer to cook yourself a meal or eat a frozen dinner?

When you automate something you *think* that you are making things easier. But the actual goal of automation is to be able to perform mass-execution and mass-production through an optimized and measured, repeatable execution plan. Ford did not create the first assembly line so that he could deliver better cars – the goal was to cut costs. By automating the process he only had to train staff on doing a portion of the process, and repeat this step for several hours until end-of-day. Were cars better? That is a subject that one could debate for a long time. I’m sure that when you are trained to install one part and repeat the process 10,000 times during the day you should become an expert at it, but if that is the case then why do cars still break down – why do warranties even exist? The argument of automation bringing quality after 100 years of learning should have given us a process that produces perfection by now.

The reason is that, automation (even today) does not produce perfection – it is clear that it has instead *lowered quality* for manufactured goods. The result of automation is therefore *not* to produce better goods but to *reduce costs* by using “identical” repetition. Even today, the value is in the aesthetic design qualities and brilliance of engineering IP; the automation component is repetitive execution.

Ford produced identical cars down to the color. They knew exactly how much money it cost to make one – the variables were completely known even before they started the first car every morning. If they did not have X number of bolts in their boxes, the workers knew that there was going to be a problem at around a certain time during the day (they could even guess at what time).

Today people suggest automated workflows for Idea Management. Parts of this make sense; the majority however, doesn’t.

We have already established the following about a process:

• The goal is to produce identical things
• The goal is to lower costs by repeating actions
• The outcome will be of lesser quality and therefore far from perfection
• Participants will not understand the whole process, therefore can’t bring value to it

So the next time that you think about a great new concept that will Lower Costs, Increase Revenues, Open new Markets, Bring in New Client – don’t think that the solution will be as easy a throwing a frozen dinner in the microwave and hitting Preset-1 – we’ve already established that you won’t get an outcome that will be any different than the day before.

If you want to Innovate, don’t try what you’ve tried before – don’t do what you’ve done before – do something different. Cook yourself a real meal. You may think that it’s just as awful as that frozen dinner the first time (or maybe even worse) but you’ll learn and next time it will be better. Gradually you will learn to cook and that frozen dinner won’t be appealing anymore. Then you can cook something that you don’t find in the frozen dinner section, something new.

You just learned to Innovate and created *real* value at the same time. Well done.

As a company, have you ever wondered what you clients are thinking?

As a company, are you even sure that clients *like* your products?

Two very simple questions, simple *if* you actually ask.

For the last few years one could swear that companies don’t ask these questions anymore. How many times have you actually told something to a representative *hoping* that it would actually go somewhere but never see anything come out of it. The scary thing is that you weren’t really expecting anything to happen. Our minds today are so warped from “the spin” that we believe that our opinion has become worthless.

Maybe so, maybe not – but sometimes it really feels like this is where things are going, if not already there.

People need to provide opinions, they need to communicate, they need to say that they love/hate something and they will; maybe just not to you because you won’t let them. No matter how much marketing you apply to the masses, you cannot control them. No matter how many times you tell them that your new product is good for them, you can’t make them buy it.

Then what happens when you start running-out of ideas for new products? Are you actually going to dig into your “failure” bag to try and resuscitate bad ideas that already were shelved? Of course not. So why not ask your customers what it is they like and what kind of products they would like you to produce so that they can then buy them?

I think that companies don’t ask because they don’t want to hear the truth; truth means change.

If I ask my two questions I’m going to get a lot of answers, ranging from “useless” to “priceless”. But if I don’t ask fearing that I have to listen through “the negative and the useless”, then how am I going to find “the essential and the priceless”? If a company is so busy listening to itself that it doesn’t hear what everybody else is saying, then how can it possibly come up with that amazing “something new” that customers really want?

You cannot change things by listening to yourself. In order to change things you have to receive honest and unvarnished input from others; and if that input can be well described, validated, justified and structured, that rigor alone will infinitely accelerate your innovation process; and ignite the passion of the people who care.

And showing you care is a big motivator for engagement. Think that in a world where you often can’t even find a phone number from a company’s website, then what message are we sending out? We are telling our clients:  We don’t want your input !!

If we don’t want our client’s input then two things will happen:

1. Our clients are going to start thinking that we don’t care
2. Our clients will eventually think that our products are worthless and will start looking around for alternatives

Why? The days of  “spinning” the customer into believing are fast approaching the day-of-reckoning; customers have seen it all before. They’re not buying it anymore. You could spend millions programming them to perceive that you care, but the act of going through their own experiences (or learning from those of many more via the web) will be much more powerful (perhaps even traumatizing) - that this is the impression that they will *walk away* with.

Are you asking your clients the tough questions? Or are you masking the reality with spin questions? Better yet, are you going beyond the conversation into a meaningful engagement that enables them to create or help dictate what they are willing to spend their money with you on?

Are you actually asking just the happy clients what their experience was like or are you actually also going to ask the unhappy ones what went wrong? If you accept the premise that unbiased feedback is the most valuable (and accurate) form around, then putting people in a room and paying them for their opinion is a waste of time and money.

Telling people what to think is temporary at most. Showing people that you listen will be remembered for a long time; enabling them to participate in a solution will stay with them forever - and they won’t be shy about sharing this good news either. Conversely, showing to someone that you don’t care will never be forgotten - they will tell all of their friends, their family, the people around them…and in today’s Web 2.0 world, they will also tell “the internet”.

Don’t underestimate the power of a single person telling - In 1980, losing a client would mean perhaps losing 2-3 others. Today, with the internet, losing a client could mean losing millions. Can you afford to ignore clients?

One of the most misunderstood concepts regarding innovation management is the Idea Processing Workflow.

First, what is a workflow?

Here is a definition from Wikipedia:
“A workflow is a model to represent real work for further assessment, e.g., for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. More abstractly, a workflow is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing.”

I believe that our slightly modified version of the latter is more à propos:
More abstractly, a workflow is a path of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles, energy and information flows, into a work process that delivers desired results; in the case of repeatable patterns, workflows can be standardized, documented and learned. Workflows are designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing…whatever the goal is,  in the end, it has to be measurable.”

Ok, so in plain English:
A workflow is about organizing work (a workflow does not eliminate work, it structures it) that is known into a sequence of steps. You will usually but not always involve other people and resources to help you out. A workflow is a process towards a known agreed goal.

So is a workflow good or bad?
A workflow is a good thing, when you know what you are doing. How can you possibly workflow something that you’ve never done before? More ludicrous yet, how can you possibly automate something that you’ve never done before? Or anticipate all the permutations that this newness will bring with it?

The Ford Model T is a good example of a product that comes from a workflow, as the old saying goes: “You can have it any color you want, as long as it’s black”

Actually, that adage says a lot about a workflow because it essentially means that the purpose of a workflow is to process identical (or quasi identical) requests.

1. When you apply for a credit card, we will go through a workflow and you will either get approved or declined
2. When you apply for a loan, we will go through a workflow and you will either get approved or declined
3. When you have a claim from your insurer, we will go through a workflow and you will either get approved or declined
4. When you have a flat tire, you will go through a workflow to get the old tire off and the new one on - and you will either succeed or fail

Here are a few facts about these examples:

1. Thousands of people (if not millions) have done these things before you
2. These processes have evolved over many years and have been perfected over time
3. All of these, at some point or another – were being performed either manually or by a person that had the authority/knowledge/resources that were pivotal to making a certain part of the process work

Gradually, most of these processes were perfected and streamlined. This didn’t happen overnight – it took years. Today, these processes are streamlined because we have (I hope) a near-perfect understanding of how to

1. Get all the data (we have a flat tire, rear-driver side)
2. Determine what resources we need if any (call road side, spouse, friend, do it yourself)
3. Execute the steps (or have someone else do them for you while you watch)
4. Complete the process successfully (get back in the car and continue to your destination)

So a workflow is good then?
A workflow is only as good as its design, and its design is only as good as the understanding of the people creating the design for a particular task or set of tasks. It is also only as good as its user’s understanding of the workflow. While the process may be streamlined and well known by a large percentage of people – not just anyone will feel comfortable changing that first flat tire on their own. Making the perfect workflow is only 50% of the equation – people then need to understand it in order to use it.

Ask  yourself if you would feel comfortable learning how to change a flat tire on the side of a busy highway?

So a workflow is complicated then?
No, a workflow doesn’t need to be complicated – people make them complicated because they don’t understand the problem they are trying to solve. When you don’t understand something – you always end up with a complex solution. A genius is not someone that can solve any problem, a genius is someone that can solve a problem “simply”. If you have a complicated workflow that is impossible to put on a single piece of paper – it’s too complicated. If it takes more than 10 minutes to go over a workflow, it’s too complicated. The conflicts emerge from the fact that we are trying to organize something that we don’t understand. When you don’t understand the whole problem, you can’t solve it. Ask yourself what the steps are for processing an idea in your company?

We want to process ideas!
Yes, but – what are those ideas? And how does the uniqueness of one make it’s needs different from the needs of the next? Not all wheels only have four lugs-nuts that need to be removed; some have five – others, like trucks, can have many more. Therefore, one size workflow does not fit all. Flexibility is a must in order to keep things moving at a pace where we can continuously increase process performance while keeping participants engaged. So lets allow people to grasp the issue first and then break it down into manageable (workflow) chunks. Don’t worry if you don’t understand all of the idea’s workflow from the get go – how could you be expected to? So long as you have the tools and mechanisms to adapt direction, correct path(s) and allot the appropriate resources when and how they needed, you have the workflow that you need.

As abstract of a process as this may appear, it actually gives you the tools but doesn’t force you down a specific “hard-wired” path – an abstract process is a workflow where you can decide what next step makes sense for the uniqueness of each idea. Provide an abstract workflow to users with guidelines and then watch them use the pieces that they need. It’s like a carpenter or any other trades-people – they don’t just use hammers – that’s why they have a toolbox.

An Open Workflow is an Abstract Workflow – you cannot predict all the possible subjects, shapes, paths and details of all the ideas and concepts that you are going to receive. Once you accept that fact…the solution becomes simpler. An Open Workflow does not kill any opportunity for automation, it simply changes how you approach and leverage automation.

A subject of intense debates during client implementation sessions is the need for setting up the Idea Classifiers to feed a workflow.

Idea Classifiers are relatively important as they enable us to see an idea’s “area(s) of effect(s)” or “area(s) of benefit(s)”. It makes sense to be able to place some categorizers on an idea because it allows us to break the information down into more manageable chunks. An idea that explains a cost saving scenario versus a policy change is different and will be handled by potentially different people, departments or processes; even if the idea type is the same, it’s constitution will often require different expertise and resources than an other idea in the same category.

The are typically two main reasons why these discussions tend to take a long time (and sometimes are not recoverable and will go in a bad direction – leading to the wrong decision).

1. People want to use the company’s department structure as at least one dimension of the classifiers
2. People want to over-categorize things because they perceive that the data will me more manageable

Before I go on, let me say this: targeting where an idea should go is not about hitting “the bulls eye”; it’s about being “close enough”. You will rarely if ever be able to precisely pigeonhole an idea no matter how much time you spend listing tens…hundreds…thousands of classifiers, because you will always miss some.  And the combinations are limitless – so to have an automated workflow to route the fuzzy front-end is like going prescribing therapy before knowing what the patient is suffering from. Innovation is about breaking out of your comfort zone. And a good starting practice is to apply this new approach to categorization. Innovation is also about trying new things – when an idea comes in and doesn’t have a proper category what happens? In reality there will be two outcomes: Either the user will pick a bogus option just to get past your “road block” or they won’t get past the road block and simply won’t submit for lack of the proper selection (confusion and let-down – immediately followed by disengagement).

1 – Using departments

One of the main reasons why this is a bad idea is that it requires a complete understanding of the company hierarchy in order to be effective. While this may make sense for a lot of middle managers and most (one would hope) members of upper management – it becomes completely meaningless to the majority of the company’s rank-and-file frighteningly fast. The other problem is that many large corporations have in excess of 20 departments and business units. What could one expect to happen when a new employee (my favorite kind of employee, unaffected by any negative culture exposure and enthusiastic about making a contribution – they’re often more capable to think outside of the box) with an excellent idea and has to pick one department from a list and sublist of 62 selections. In 99% of the cases where they still end up submitting the idea, they will get the department wrong. In the case of long-standing employees this error margin comes down but never really goes below 40%.

The other problem with departments is where does the idea go when it affects equally two or more departments? Or what about the new product/service type of idea that doesn’t have a department? For those of you that consider adding a department called “Other”, here is a fact: If you have “Other” as a selection, and the right category from their perspective isn’t available, people will pick it out of intellectual laziness; or for lack of the necessary alternative. So the intention of using departments to be precise goes out the window with the error margin, actually prevents submission of content by setting up a huge road block and finally will give you mountains of work in the end; as someone will have to manually throw these ideas around hoping that one day they land at the right place – that is if they have the flexibility to quickly circumvent the “hard-wired” workflow and still maintain process rigor and task accountability.

If you ever wonder why ideas take forever to be processed at your company, chances are that you started with a department list early in your process.

2 – Too much selection

This usually happens when someone has the clear mindedness of not going with departments but ends up asking for too much feedback for alternatives without setting a threshold. Again the purpose of categorizing ideas is not to be able to position them in the company using the precision of a pin hole. The intent is to be “close enough” so that during the entire process and the continual R&D of the idea you will refine its purpose and content which will give you the tools to have more precision.

You cannot be precise about something that is vague – when you get an initial concept through an innovation system it will be vague. The collaboration and evaluation processes are the tools that people use to build the concept, augment support, reinforce validation and refine it into a proposal; and only when it’s good enough can someone make a decision to take it to the next level.

In conclusion, Innovation can be a scary concept because it forces people into a position where they have to admit that they can’t know – when you don’t understand something, your first instinct is to try to “put it somewhere” so that it becomes easier to understand. The problem with that approach is that if you apply it early on, you are expecting too much too early. You have to be able to accept (and move on) that you will receive a vague concept early on but that it will be developed over time. When it will be developed enough, then it will be ready to be formally processed. Expecting someone to submit a “ready to go” idea that has everything you need on initial submission may guarantee quality but low volume; it will also guarantee that all the random ideas with big potential but no immediate clear shape will never be received or advanced to their full upside.

A few weeks back, Andre blogged about correlating everyday activities to innovation processes; well here we go again.

Have you ever noticed how workflows and public transit system are so similar? You rarely have a direct path from origin to destination. When you reach a stop you wait. You get on another bus/metro/train only to wait for the next stop and repeat until you reach your destination. The nice things about using the public transit to go to work for instance, is that you know where you leaving from and you know where you want to wind up. The transportation workflow is always going to be the same and after a while you accept it as reality.

Now imagine that it’s the last minute for you to get a Christmas gift for your spouse. You not only have no idea what to get, but also no idea where to get it. How is the workflow that you are used to using going to help you then? What bus do you take? You are in a situation where you have to some extent “discover” many unknowns before you even begin to uncover the workflow process. And guess what? For your anniversary and for her birthday, you will be going through the same machinations - even if the year before you managed to pull the whole thing off; but this year the purpose and destination will require you to adopt a different transportation mode along with a completely different path.

In a lot of ways, the innovation process is almost identical to Christmas shopping using public transit. You may know where your idea is starting from but you do not yet have an inkling of the path that you need to take to achieve your goal. A set workflow is perfect to carry the worker from Point A to Point B daily; the routine doesn’t break. It is also perfect when you are dealing with known factors.

Consider the following questions: Is it going to be clothes? Jewellery? Something they can use for work? Is it going to be heavy? Will it actually be in stock? Something that you may consider obvious and nice may actually be the worst thing for her (hint - don’t buy your wife a vacuum cleaner for Christmas).

Let’s repeat the same questions for an idea: Is it a cost saving idea or a new product? It is a process change? Do you need upper management approval? Are all the participants needed known and available? Trying to automate an unknown at the front-end often create more problems that you started-out trying to solve.

For workflows to enable your process,  they need to be adaptive, flexible and configurable around each idea’s needs - not vice versa.