The other day, I was having some cookies with my daughters and as it so happens, I had a moment of reckoning.

We have an arrangement whereby we each twist one end of an Oreo off and exchange for the portions that we want: they want the ends with the icing and I get the cookie part only sans all that sugar. It’s a symbiotic relationship. The girls take the ends with the icing and stack them onto other ends with icing from their inventory, thereby doubling the sweet treat.

It is easy to imagine that this playful experimentation could precisely be the type of setting that spawned the Double Stuff Oreo line extension that has proved so popular; and one which also may have led to Cakesters and a myriad of brand spin-offs. Once the mold was broken and the sacred Oreo product formula was in play, anything was possible. Now the original Oreo is but one skew among many in the Kraft Food’s Oreo line-up.

The main take-away for me was the un-prompted ease with which this innovative risk-taking took place – granted, it wasn’t a corporate setting, but still there was no fear; just possibilities. This is exactly the kind of environment that people inside and outside your organization need to discover and develop great opportunities for you. Ideas often start life as lumps of clay that need to be shaped, pulled, crimped and manipulated in order to make something more out of them. This takes people who are comfortable taking the risk of trying something new…maybe even zany, without the fear of personal ridicule or professional reprisals – in fact, this risk-taking needs to be encouraged. That is the edge…the line that must be crossed. It’s the price to discover what is on the other side.

Risk-taking becomes easier when your innovation participants see others practicing it – it takes a giant barrier away and says: it’s okay to fail!!

Create the environment that enables fast and frequent failure, whilst capturing the value that boils up from the process. Provide the transparency that tracks the idea’s progress and recognize the efforts so that others are inclined to follow suit.

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.

Innovation is a process that spawns newness in the forms of products, services, efficiencies and a host of other improvements; but the process also creates instances for opportunities. As a process, rigor is essential for proper functioning and flexibility vital for sustainability. The latter is key, as the process itself requires periodic improvement and demands alternate courses of action; sometimes, that kind of change can even lead you onto a completely different track.

To use a contemporary success story as an example, let’s walk through an abridged journey of Steve Jobs’ career:

• Apple (Round 1): Apple l / Apple ll / Apple lll / Lisa / Mac
• NeXT
• Pixar
• Apple (Round 2): iPod, iPhone, iTunes, AppStore, iPad

Each milestone lead to another – without his first gig at Apple SJ could not have created NeXT. His involvement at NeXT (which never enjoyed the commercial success of Apple) introduced him to animation which enabled the step-up to Pixar. And from his experience at Pixar came the impetus for media-rich applications and devices for his second tenure at Apple. Even though the businesses varied, revenue models differed and some endeavors were even flops (Lisa, NeXT), the thread of innovation not only remained a constant, the process itself lead to opportunities that one could not have imagined unless having gone through the process itself. As the a well-quoted idiom reminds us: it’s not the destination but rather the journey.

There have been an increasing number of operators in the Ideas Management community fixated on synthesizing innovation – for both the inspiration and perspiration sides of the equation. Ambitious for sure, but from our point-of-view altogether un-necessary - considering the rich, talented, knowledgeable, available, accessible, motivated and relevant resources that lie in wait; and at the ready. Most of these resources only become aware of the other when connected through an idea that holds a mutual interest. And that’s what most passionate people need to find one another – a common link of interest; a passion for something that brings them together, rather than relying on a location, company or other artificial grouping. These passionate folks share a few characteristics; they are:

• Self organizing
• Self-interested
• Self-motivated

There are legions of collaborators out there waiting to get connected with like-minded individuals who are working on an idea that holds a common interest to all its participants. This affinity and motivation have a name: passion. And it is the crucial element that allows birds-of-a-feather to flock together and create truly inspired results.

For every Alexander Graham-Bell there were passionate enablers like Watson in the mix to support the complete innovation process. Sure Marie Curie, Enzo Ferrari and Jonas Salk were pioneers, but they didn’t get there alone. There were armies of ad hoc collaborators that helped sort-out the intricacies of newness and ignore the naysayers. These folks all had the critical element of passion to forge beyond convention and complete the mission – no matter what the odds.

So when you are designing your new innovation process, or re-jigging the one that sits on the shoulder of the innovation expressway with four flat tires, think of who and how you are going to engage to create good ideas and then bring them to fruition – without interrupting business-as-usual:

• Don’t mandate process roles – explain the roles and allow people to volunteer and/or apply for them
• Let people find their comfort zones and allow them to focus on those areas where they think they can most contribute
• Open your process to all that want to participate
• Recognize the extra effort at every value touch-point
• Provide a platform where participants can self-organize and find one another based on interest, skill, experience, and…

…ideas of common interest. Give people what they want for process and they will return the gesture in kind.

Embarking on any new initiative requires a plan that includes a definition of what one is going to do, how one is going to do it and how one will measure success.

This is a Critical Success Factor for Innovation Processes, its practitioners and the leadership that have the expectation of results for the money spent.

Setting performance-metrics goals for both process and role players is not a particularly popular initiative, as it ultimately spells-out more W-O-R-K under the gun. However, if properly prepared and supported, it is always worth the additional effort. Much like an athlete looking to improve their time or achieve a new milestone, pushing the limits of what we are accustomed to is a must. These athletic über-performers push themselves and manage to surpass their current thresholds of excellence to arrive at new personal bests; or better yet, break records. Similarly, organizations can stretch and flex in the same way, but only when given the complete Innovation environment to do so; namely the confidence to strive, the tools to execute and the motivation to succeed.

To arrive at these outcomes it is critical for senior management to not only get involved, but to stay involved. They have to set the Innovation pace for the rest of the organization by targeting desired process performance benchmarks – without them, the overall goal becomes a disjointed and murky target. Benchmark goals can come in specific permutations that affect every level of the process; here are a few:

Much like the aforementioned athlete’s performance goals, process benchmarks calibrated to overall goals have to be part of the Corporate Innovation Plan from Day 1. After all, a long distance runner would not  set-off to improve their time for a specific distance without coordinating their route, hydration and caloric intake to optimize their chances of success – and they would set a target-time for each leg, measuring  intervals and split times to insure there are on pace for success. Without it, how would they know if they’ve improved, succeeded or even arrived?

As competition eats away at the market you live from, loyalty in all forms erodes and consumer tastes grow ever more fickle, the task facing marketers in charge of fielding their organization’s next product winner could drive any normal person insane with trepidation and angst. After all, many contemporary marketing pundits profess that the average business today will be or should be generating at least 50% of its revenues five years out from entirely new products. No pressure to deliver…right? This need to innovate products has produced some interesting theories about ideation, development and deliverables – many of which are often incongruent with one another.

The first conflict arises around ideation – an otherwise organic and serendipitous process now meant to be encapsulated into a repetitive formula and thrust upon participants who are expected to save the day with sudden ingenuity. What depends on the intersection of diversities and timing is all too often boxed into a series of steps with the hope of replicating the collision of free-wheeling conversations, notions, ideas and experiences based on interest - that need to collide by randomness rather than in contrived settings. I was watching some kids the other day snacking on cheese cubes – they decided to start using them to play dice – should the company print dice patterns on the wrapping and a packaging is idea born to drive more sales? Maybe – but the point being that the process was natural – un-staged, un-aided and un-provoked; it just happened and they all loved it!!!

The second conflict is about creating competitive differentiation while remaining in the tight confines of existing production, marketing and staffing frameworks. If you want to be different, you need the flexibility to be different – act different, execute different and deliver different – otherwise, what is it about you or the product that is going to be different?

The third conflict is scale - has its own set of problems – the desire to command and control form a central point has stifled the benefit for distributed tasking; when a simple measurement and recognition structure could free managers to experiment more on their own without driving the existing business off a cliff.

Managing Innovation for new products should be a ongoing, collaborative and passionate adventure, rather than the corporate equivalent of a root canal. The participants can be engaged from all walks of life and the tasking around the process distributed to trusted and passionate stakeholders. Without them, it will not only be increasingly difficult to discover desirable new products to market, but also incrementally more difficult to pull together the disparate parts needed for success.

Writing a blog about innovation is an activity that I have come to really enjoy; it’s like thinking out loud. Authoring the BrainBank blog also has a fringe benefit, in that every now and again, I use this soapbox to grind an axe about something that really annoys me – in this installment of such an occasion, the target of my ire is the organization that never has enough time to do it right the first time, but always seems to have the time to do it again (and increasingly, looking to charge for the negative experience all over again!!).

Now I am certain that many of you have fallen victim to this nuisance yourself; the problem is, unless I am mad and/or am the only one to discern this particular pattern, that do-it-over-ism is reaching pandemic proportions. It seems that the majority of service purveyors today are better-versed in excuse-giving than in delivering on a promise. When was the last time your can remember having your car serviced without the need for some type of a follow-up? Or a store delivery where they got the item right and/or was delivered and on time? Or the carpet batch colors being identical even after the carpet-layers had finished their installation? Take whatever example that fits a recent personal experience – the point I am making is that speed has started to trump quality in the deliverables equation; and therein lies a simple yet powerful innovation: get back to basics – the core reason why customers choose your brand and presumably the competitive advantage that built your franchise in the first place.

The corporate response to this slow slide into mediocrity has been the venerable Customer Support, Customer Care or other nomenclatures that are euphemisms to what is really a Complaint Department; many of which today are handled by way of call centers. Getting through the endless telephone navigation options is a pain – in many instances, one should receive a medal just for tracking down a human to interface with. And even when you happen to get the right person on the phone, their eagerness to flush you is downright palpable; and for good reason, when one considers that a key metric for in-bound call centers is the brevity of engagement and the speed with which a complaint can be processed. Now there’s an enlightened way to connect with your rainmakers!! Why not just shoot them!

Complaints, if handled properly, are a fantastic source of ideas – if we distill a complaint down to its most basic form, one could look at it as a problem statement. A problem statement is often the focus of Idea Challenges at the heart of many an Innovation Management initiative; and almost always the source of a new product or service idea.

How this narrative has become stooped in negativity is a mystery to me – after all, someone is making the effort to tell you how to improve your product/service so they can buy more of it. Am I missing a point or just grinding my axe?

For those out there who can identify, watching monolithic organizations trying to add accents of management innovation to outdated collaboration models and tired workplace strategies is like…seeing a creepy 50-year-old guy hanging around at a rave; the effort is contrived and the miss-fit painfully obvious. For the intended beneficiaries, the effort is dismissed and a complete turn-off.

Whether young or old, people like to be communicated to in their own fashion; one that identifies with their value-set and in a manner that resonates with their comfort zones. The upcoming generation of Knowledge Workers will demand even more from their workplace experience - the universe they operate in requires the speed and diversity of Open Collaboration - growing-up with IM, FaceBook, MySpace, Flkr and Wikipedia, one can’t expect anti-diluvian strategies and glib management practices to excite and engage this bunch. They have been conditioned to want it now and it better be bang-on. These gizmo junkies are energized by electronic shortcuts and personalized everything. Getting an insight into how the younger generation interacts, one can simply observe their behavior: even when sitting side-by-side in an office setting, it is more natural for them to text one another than to turn and speak to each other- devices are their engines and speed is their fuel !!! With the prospect of the Baby Boom’s mass retirement (as a group, what don’t they do massively…?), companies must act now to insure that the best and brightest of this new lot wind-up on their shores. They’re skills are hard to separate from their networking abilities – the two seem inextricably merged. Moreover, they’re ability to find what they need either in terms of data and/or people is absolutely unparalleled in the history of mankind – if the conduit is there, the world is at their fingertips.

So if you are your organization’s Innovation Champion, how are you going get their attention, engage them, keep them motivated and make it so that their workplace experience is one that drives those break-out ideas that only passion can engender?

The answer is twofold:

· Management innovation that recognizes the need for Open Collaboration in its many permutations

· Technology platform that embraces an Open Innovation process (preferably mobile-enabled)

The standards that the new Knowledge Workers live by represent an evolutionary shift – professional and social norms are no longer mutually-exclusive domains and an organization’s reputation earns or loses its luster in the same informal online way that recruiters now use the net to search for skeletons in a candidate's closet. Everyone is watching and they know the real score. So trying to pretend that you’re something you’re not, is like showing your age at the rave.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Expecting extraordinary results while deploying the same ordinary innovation strategies is really the embodiment of this ubiquitous Einstein truism. Organizations are being dealt an increasingly difficult set of challenges, the global financial meltdown being just the latest, and are expected by their stakeholders to not only deliver what I call the minimum (an unbroken flow of ever-increasing results), but also respond with the game changers that will separate their organization from the rest of the pack. It can be argued that organizations are pretty close to running flat out – in every category of the resources mix. But nowhere is that growing strain felt more acutely than on the rank-and-file side of the deliverables equation. This circumstance is particularly important in the innovation realm, as many companies aren’t so much in a fight to get more good ideas (although in this aspect, more is always better)…their principle conundrum is the ability to select, develop, augment, validate, decide and implement the ones they already have – in an effective and efficient manner that doesn’t break stride in the delivery of the minimum.

Now we all pretty much know that collaboration is a big part of the answer – how that lever is pulled within the process, however, is the source of much consternation. hand-wringing and delay inducing over-analysis.

The central debate, and that which holds the promise of the greatest return, demands a different approach to collaboration than the one companies are most accustomed (read: comfortable) with.

There is an extraordinary collaboration strategy that is sitting in the lap of management called Open Innovation and Distributed Tasking. The internal and external leveraging of self-organizing and self-motivated people, collaborative birds-of-a-feather that get something special they need out of the innovation process – and the innovation process gets something extra it needs out of them; a symbiotic relationship if there ever was one.

The early adopters to this approach have seen the light and have jumped in – interestingly enough, in the case of our clients, they are market leaders in their segments and now I fully understand what keeps them there (in certain cases for over 100 years!!). They don’t always have all the answers neatly fettered-out in front of them, but they see enough benefit to instinctively move on an opportunity.

Indecision carries its own set of costs, so for the Open innovation fence sitters out there who aren’t yet decided, it may be time for a leap of faith. Otherwise, even the minimum may soon become unattainable despite their best ordinary maximum.