As things go, there is a certain status that comes with size. Scale it seems is the street cred that makes the good..great; the known...ubiquitous; the powerful...mighty. And because folks immersed in innovation are  as susceptible as any to this seek out this revered status, the temptations is to think and go big. Which is fine when it comes  to process branding, increasing idea generation volumes and attracting a greater number of participants. It is less desirable when it comes to turning ideas into innovations.

Innovation communities that work on evolving an idea need not be enormous; in fact, rather than trying to big at everything, things often work-out best when smaller more specialized groups “break-off” to work on ideas that interest them – besides making the process more manageable, it is a key driver for self-motivation and bringing the right expertise to a given idea.

This approach forms small social networks around a specific vision and/or goal - as such, they don't necessarily need to be big; just purposeful and with the right players. The potential of many smaller groups working on many more focused initiatives creates an “ant farm” efficiency that can’t be matched by any centralized mechanism. Direction, motivation and management are shared and understood by the team and overseen by each idea’s champion; task and deliverables are handled by their respective experts or offered out for ownership rather than being delegated - and the output consistent with a format established beforehand that calls for certain requisite knowledge , data and information in order to aide accelerated decision-making when the idea is ready for Prime Time.

This more organic, agile and holistic approach enables participants to work on ideas and tasks that they know they can contribute to in a meaningful and rewarding capacity. As a result, it creates better developed ideas and accelerates an idea’s evolutionary trajectory.

Now imagine a whole bunch of these self-managing posses working away at innovations for your organizations; individually they appear small, but together, they are acting big.

Last week-end, I went shopping and decided to buy an iPad. There are many outlets within the mall I was at where I could purchase this device; but since there was an Apple Store nearby, I decided on it.

It appears that I wasn’t the only person with the same idea…because when I got there, the place was jammed. But here is the silver lining: despite being crowded, there was room to move about, there were three tables dedicated to the “consumer touch” experience with ten devices at each table (each loaded with a bevy of apps) and better yet, a representative to greet and help me no more than 30-seconds after entering the store. She was pleasant, knowledgeable about her products and efficient in her delivery of service; she answered everyone one of my questions to my satisfaction (and I have a tendency to ask a lot).

This totally satisfying shopping experience is a testament of a company’s passion for what it does; right down to the clever way in which the sales person rang-up my iPad sale (accompanied by a tag-on purchase of iPhone and iPod ear buds) on her handy iPod and reached under one of the three experiential counters to instantly retrieve my receipt – I never even had to move. In this case, passion brought about excellence that was manifested across the retail value chain; in the form of:

• Innovative products
• Innovative displays
• Innovative “consumer touch” experience
• Innovative customer service
• Innovative transaction processes

Now I’m not one of these Apple fanatics that wears the brand on my sleeve; in fact, the first Apple product that I ever bought was an iPod for my wife two years ago. I don’t  need the product for street cred or to feel satisfied – I bought the iPad so my kids could experience another technology that promises to be relevant into their adult years.

The point here is that the experience was so good that it was noticeable. That’s hard to do with today’s picky customer. But Apple pulled it off because they have passion for everything Apple. Passion to innovate across the organizational spectrum is key to drive performance to new heights – it must permeate your very culture so that it’s a feeling, rather than a thing. And you can get started on that today, if you dare position the organization to accept that challenge and respond as promised.

When you look at the origins of innovations, one thing quickly becomes clear: it happens anywhere and everywhere,

Take the innovative art of Bjork; it hails from Iceland.

The Ski-Doo snowmobile; it’s from Quebec.

Apple electronic devices; California.

Red Bull from Austria.

Creative spark and visionary execution can happen anywhere...providing they are enabled. The ingredients for this alchemy are made up of ideas, timing, expertise, capital and distribution; and most importantly, the passion and collaboration of willing participants. As this mix is hard to assemble and even harder to keep together for any length of time, the need for an ad hoc platform to leverage opportunities is a must if your innovation process is going to be effective. Conversations leads to ideas, ideas engender to concepts, concepts evolve into actions and actions lead to outcomes. These are all driven by altering and converging participants motivated by a passion for the piece that they want to play within this realm. Few activities self-motivates people more  than working on something that is of interest to them, to prove a point they want to make or to showcase what they know. So in order to have an innovation process that delivers sustainable results, it has to be organic enough for the various and necessary role-players to collaborate on their terms; while purposefully contributing to the overall innovation mission.

Innovation is an opportunistic pursuit; it can only spawn value if the conditions and resources are aligned. As cycle times decrease and demands increase, the need for an agile innovation process will be paramount. Ideas, timing and talent must have a common place to converge so that innovation can occur anytime and anyplace.

The following example is a case study among many highlighting why outside innovations can have such a hard time gaining traction.

When I was a sophomore at college, I had an idea for a portable toothbrush.  The value proposition was to enable consumers to connect a toothpaste tube to the shaft of this new toothbrush, fill it with product and when desired slide the shaft forward thereby pushing the toothpaste through the bristles. With a handy (and presumably sanitary)  cap over the bristles, users could now have the convenience of brushing on-the-go without the hassle. I thought the idea was good, so I approached my Marketing 350 teacher about it – he happened to contemporaneously be in product marketing (for a different brand category) at the Canadian division of J&J® and arranged for me to meet with his boss, the group product manager. So far so good. The latter was intrigued by my idea’s potential and arranged for me to meet with the production manager for Reach Toothbrushes™ in another part of the country – we were making good progress. I  went to the plant and met with the production manager – he was very focused on producing the Reach toothbrushes that were currently coming-off the line; innovative products were “not part of what he did”. The feedback loop broke-down with this individual, no take-up or recovery structure was in place and the idea faded into the sunset. There was no follow-up mechanism to support the process. Two week ago, while in New York city, I came across product called Colgate Wisp™ – the concept was the same but with a few elegant twists on the execution: the brush was smaller, there was a toothpick at the end of the handle and the toothpaste at the centre of the bristles was a dissolvable gel.

Now through the right input, my original idea had evolved and definitely had been improved – the only problem is that this was done some 20-years later, and worse...BY A DIRECT COMPETITOR (Colgate®). This missed opportunity is not one individual’s fault: there was no Open Innovation structure in place to capitalize on the idea; what we all needed was a mechanism that was agile enough to circumvent the rigid process of product delivery; without interrupting the model that was delivering current value. Had this Open Innovation environment been available and the collaboration and workflow components flexible enough to align with opportunity, J&J could have capitalized on the particular opportunity long ago and potentially become category leader. In the absence of this, the outcome was a lot of money and brand equity left on the table. And a customer that never returned to submit another idea.

Now the question is: in this day and age, how often does your organization still fall prey to the same circumstance?

*The brands mentioned are trademarked to their respective owners.

Ask anyone about their organization and they’ll tell you that they’re different – fair enough and true enough.

This raises an interesting question: if being different is so important that it bears mentioning, why then should any company want to emulate the innovation processes of an other? You can’t have it both ways – it doesn’t work. Using another organization’s innovation process is like having everyone in your group borrow the wrong size boots from another group before setting off on a major hike – with the wrong fit, there’s going to be pain. The kind of lasting pain that might turn everyone in your group off from hiking for a long time; or ever again.

If you rely on someone else’s model, sooner-or-latter the differences will start working against you. The point here is that to do innovation right, you have to figure it out for yourself – the process that will best work for:

• your people
• your culture
• your operations
• your innovation goals
• your budget cycles
• your decision-making mechanisms

A holistic innovation structure should take into account and leverage existing processes while giving you the flexibility to periodically invent/re-invent new paths, activities and participants for workflow and collaboration optimization. Add to this the novelty that ideas coming in are “innovative” and as such often don’t always fit into the neat little boxes that currently drive your existing process channels – so in order for your innovation process to be effective, it can’t treat these new ideas in a “business as usual” manner. The critical first step represents the process innovation that will spawn a growing and purposeful innovation process; one that can deliver the desired outcomes across the operational, financial and cultural matrix.

To get there, you can utilize pieces and practices from others – there are plenty of goodies to tap into. But to emulate someone else’s incarnation of an innovation process would not be doing your effort justice. The act of process innovation is at once educational, liberating, opportunistic and organic. It does require time, attention, care and commitment – plus two essential elements that need to be present for the others to follow: leadership and vision. Because in the end, your process has to fit who you are as an organization and where you want to get to.

Innovation processes are different animals from your typical corporate engagement program – they’re part technology and part people – the sum of which make a whole process. So think of the uniqueness of your positioning in the market, your company’s operations and the people-driven culture that makes you…you. And ask yourself if you should use somebody else’s innovation process or whether it’s worth it to create your own. 

There usually is only one right answer.

Every now and again, we like to use simple everyday situations to illustrate how easy Innovation and Idea Management can be.

In the latest installation of this theme, I will share a simple example of collaboration and its ripple effects across a seemingly complex, diverse and siloed environment.

Last Friday evening I was returning home from work by car. The highway was jammed so I decided to take the longer, more pastoral and usually less congested road that runs along Montreal’s lakeshore (Montreal for those who don’t know is an island-city). When the cross-street that I was on hit Lakeshore Road, traffic was bumper-to-bumper; as a result of the single-lane only configuration, this had all the potential of being a worse case scenario than the multi-lane freeway. But a remarkable thing happened on our way to gridlock: the person in front of me who was waiting to merge was let in  by a driver already on Lakeshore Road. That helped our situation and we got moving. A little ways down, another car was waiting to merge onto Lakeshore Road and the car in front of me (the lady who had been let in) now let that person in; and the driver waived “thank you” in appreciation. Everyone in sight followed the example and cars started merging like the teeth meshing on a zipper. However, a couple of Stop signs later, the original car that had let the lady in front of me in had to turn onto another congested road. This time, no one let her in and everyone around us stopped moving again.

So when you look at your organization to see where your process is at a roadblock, find the laggards who don’t play as a team and either honk at them or pull them out of the flow. It only takes one road-hog to slow everyone else down.

There is a healthy debate regarding the benefits of automating the innovation workflow process versus routing ideas manually. From our perspective, both sides are right.

Because we would be loathe to create more ambiguity about this thorny subject, let us outline why a workflow strategy designed around inclusiveness is better than choosing one methodology exclusively.

Ideas are lumps of clay until the communal artist refines it into a masterpiece; and all that takes the right input, in the right amount, by the right participants and at right time. The combination of these is often different for each idea, given that they have:

• Varying benefits
• Differing goals
• More or less complexity
• Faster or slower speed of execution
• More or fewer participants
• Ranges of expertise
• Scope of financial impacts
• Market (Internal/external) timing considerations

Now if one adds subsets to each of these attributes, which could easily multiply the characteristics, features and ultimate needs-sets, how can anyone anticipate the many workflow permutations that will be right for any given (and yet unknown) idea? So when we return to the bi-polar answer of having both routing types, the Fuzzy Front-End is best serviced with human intervention to get the idea off on the right track; within a couple of exchanges, the promising idea already narrows in focus and can then be picked-up by an automated workflow – once we know where we’re going, it makes sense to channel it into a workflow model that is used to delivering that part of the business model.

Because there is a lot of multi and concurrent tasking that occurs at the Front-End, flexibility is your greatest ally to insure that your idea can overcome submission-inertia and build the kind of momentum thru the development chain in order to get the right resources. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee that each idea will be a winner, but it does deliver the promise that each idea will have the same optimized chance for success.

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?

It is exciting to see the rate at which innovation activities are being initiated. It is equally amazing to see how many of these forays are steeped in buzz versus idea progression. It would appear that people like to avoid the meaningful work around innovation processes and process innovation in favor of just pushing buttons.

Take the example of predictive markets. When one strips away all the bells and whistles, predictive markets really just amount to another voting mechanism. So if your Idea and Innovation Process already has a voting scheme to it, why have a predictive market on top of that? How many voting systems do you need before getting to work on building an idea towards a next step...or making it great... or getting it closer to market ready?

How many votes does it take before you stop voting and start developing that idea? Or does it just become a mutual admiration society for ideas? All this voting creates activity but does not create added value. If we agree the idea is good, that's great - there is a next step; in fact, there are several - collaboration...and then development; and then validation and then decision...and then planning...and so on. You get the picture.

The vote is an indication of intent; not a solution. Worse yet, it is statistically proven that the more you ask the same question, the more it skews responses from the original, un-skewed reaction.

So if instead of a bunch of two-line ideas with multiple layers of votes each telling us the same thing, how about an idea that has progressed and evolved into a mini-business case, replete with vote results, operational and/or market validation, some cost/revenue justification and a semblance of implementation - in order to move forward, one has to simply stop agreeing over-and-over and at some point start contributing real value.

Making innovations out of ideas takes more than votes - it takes meaningful contributions that build incremental value at every stage of an idea's ascension. So with less tabulation and more idea development, one can move towards a process that delivers innovation substance, not just more votes.

Because we are in the Innovation and Idea Management space, thinking analogously about process in our day-to-day is just an occupational by-product – everything that moves or grows has some type of process associated to it. And with that comes the opportunity for continuous improvement. As we like to say in our industry, and because of Omni-present competitive forces, standing still is actually falling behind.

So as the week-end approached and a winter camping trip needed preparing for, I was packing a sleeping bag into the miniature sack it was meant to fit in (presumably inserted by a machine at the factory or my some highly-experienced hands on a production line). I was struggling to fit more of the sleeping bag into the seemingly full sack when I realized that sticking my hand deeper into the sack and pushing from that vantage point actually allowed me to jam more of the %”$”!* thing in; until it was completely packed. Whew!! Upon reflection of  a job well done, I made the link between this banal situation and some of the more common workflow process choke-points; and how typically force in its many permutations is exercised to try and alleviate the impasse - either through:

• Punitive measures such as:
• as being “outed” on a report
• having benefits taken away
• negative entry on an Annual Performance Review
• demotion
• Etc.
• Incentives such as:
• Cash
• Travel
• Merchandise
• Recognition
• ESOP
• Etc.

The sleeping bag analogy is particularly relevant to process innovation and the innovation process, as the targeted reach required to unblock resources (in this simplistic example being space), was the only leverage needed to remediate the blockage. It didn't require anything more than creating space where I thought there was none – I was counting on the pressure exerted against the portion of the sleeping bag already in the sack to do the pushing for me, when in fact, it was fully compressed already; making the chore of pushing exponentially harder. When one looks at the innovation process, this chain reaction not only creates the same resistance, but adds to it  from a human-dynamics perspective; as it produces ambivalence from very people you need engaged - because they are being pushed to do more or work harder when they already are. They`re often not the problem; rather the process is.

Without process innovation to go with your innovation process, pushing ideas down the same old channels will likely deliver the same old results in terms of quality, speed, engagement and overall success.