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.

I think one can now let go of the security blanket of denial and face the fact that we are in a recession – most leading economic indicators have been pointing to its imminence for the past two years or so and now every reliable metric is bearing this stark reality out – whether on Wall Street and on Main Street. And no matter whether we like it or not, work needs to be done, bills need to be paid and life goes on – but, if you are an innovative manager or a management innovation crusader, the opportunity of a business cycle (if not a career) has arrived.

Human nature being what it is, the flight-or-fight instinct that is intended to serve us best depending on the situation, has all too often erred on the side of caution in times such as these. In the short term, it is the safe option – problem being that it doesn’t really drive growth – it maintains a certain stability. Worse than that, it usually has one running with the pack, because everyone else has chosen the path well-travelled. The opportunity to exercise un-common leadership and create real change inherently requires risk – a four real four letter word in business parlance; Kryptonite to the play-it-safe type. That’s a hot potato no self-respecting manager wants around on their watch. But when one looks at the Pantheon of business leaders who have folk-hero status for new thinking (think: Lee Iacocca, Steve Jobs and their ilk), it is precisely in times of crisis when they made their boldest and most enduring moves.

Accelerated and differentiated progress comes from leverage – and arguably the variety with the highest ROI impact is that of talent. And to maximize the talent one has is to also understand how broad of a talent base one has at their disposal – not just in one function or on the payroll. When the broader talent pool of employees, suppliers and customers is unleashed to interact, truly amazing things will happen. The creative ability to unlock new value occurs when diverse ideas meet diverse visions, and then actualize when appropriate skills-sets meet diverse expertise – in an eco-system that is self-organizing and where availability is based on affinity and interest. Pushing the boundaries of collaborative discovery, inclusionary co-creation and distributed tasking is a readily available conduit to differentiated leverage – the only cost: risk of newness.

One can only see what one chooses to see – the world is changing fast and engaged innovation is here to stay. The early adopters will have a significant if not un-breakable first-mover advantage, as the new bonds formed by co-creation that will be hard to supplant – and then playing it safe may well prove itself to have been an irreversible non-mover disadvantage.

Many a frazzled workers, managers and executives are expressing a growing burnout. While busy delivering on next quarter’s constantly growing expectations, they need to come-up with operational and growth innovation - the associated activities of which are clamoring for an increasing slice of their time. Sure everybody wants the benefits of innovation, but why is achieving this Nirvana so painful? Well the answer lies in organization – funny how that word is related to the word “organic”, something few companies truly are in practice. In many current innovation processes, information doesn’t flow freely and things often wind-up getting done for fear of not doing them – rather than because of the opportunity that they can bring. People in an idea’s loop are often grudging followers rather than willing participants; the whole thing feels wrong.

The fundamental problem, whether recognized or not, is that many organizations today are a series of independent yet connected businesses bound by structures too rigid to promote organic metamorphoses. These structures are still based on a model where a few decision-makers held much of the information – which we know is no longer the case. In fact, the true knowledge base of any organization is the distributed and diverse pool that makes-up the eco-system between employees, suppliers, customers and other interested stakeholders. This is a seismic shift that has fundamentally altered the balance of power and the nature in which we behave; around everything. So one must ask why we insist on maintaining “control and command” (yes in that order) structures and expect a different outcome? It is illogical.

The way many organizations are still structured today around innovation, is that when a good idea comes across the radar, the organization has small groups or individuals (the usual suspects) that are turned to for collaboration, evaluation and go-forward decisions. These “go-to” people are trusted to deliver the bacon and heavily relied-upon for many other things – they have many responsibilities and are busy people. The core of the problem is that more often than not, these folks are being called-on above and beyond the call of duty. Because without Open Innovation and Distributed Tasking, most ideas land on their desk as raw concepts – thinly expressed, under researched, un-justified and poorly documented; and now the onus is placed on them to do the legwork to develop them into innovations – or at the very least, into something with enough substance to make a sound decision on. That’s not their job and they don’t have the time or inclination to make it so. So these critical role players are the ones to usually disengage from a structured innovation process first; leaving a vacuum that is hard, if not impossible to fill – and in doing so,  leaving a visible, negative and contagious endorsement of the innovation process’ value for those who remain.

Open Innovation and Distributed Tasking can largely address this conundrum. By setting the stage for information expectations, management can establish pre-requisites for advancement to decision; community members and role players now can drive towards corralling the minimum information-set, reaching for resources and shepherding the right protagonists around an idea - in a direction that the organization can make decisions on.   These pre-conditions are purely operational rather than creative ones. And with the understanding that none of us is smarter than all of us, the participation, diversity, expertise and expediency are all there for the leveraging. One just has to see the light and have the courage to try. As sure as mistakes will be made, success will come with them.

An enlightened management model is what will unleash the innovation potential every organization has. As many innovation practitioners can attest, the problem isn’t getting ideas, it is getting them done. And because of the lop-sided success ratio, a lot of legwork needs to be carried-out before we can find the elusive winning needle in the proverbial haystack.  Confined tasking is the problem - distributed tasking is the answer. Sounds simple enough, yet resistance to it is formidable. In fact, it is the single biggest factor restraining the innovation process. The real madness of the situation is that the people most impacted by this miss-alignment are those who are resisting the change the most – and having to endure the consequences.

It has often been said that bankers will lend you an umbrella when the sun shines and will ask for it back when there’s a chance of rain.

Risk is inherently based on uncertain outcomes and thus is the main harbinger of fear. When it comes to innovation, risk is a necessary ingredient; if not the central one. Now this doesn’t mean throwing caution to the wind, but it does require doing things differently – a new approach. How else can we expect change?

Over the past ten years, a pattern has emerged from some of the managers that approach our organization looking for change through innovation:

• Initial contact is filled with optimism, motivation and desire for change
• As implementation analysis and planning progress, the bold changes that were envisioned quickly get pared down through “risk mitigation”, and, inevitably, organizational apathy settles back in

For those who even dare act on their innovation dreams, this often results in a starting point that isn’t much different than the status quo they were looking to leave behind – and managers then wonder why the electrifying changes that they were seeking haven’t materialized. Well what’d ya know…?

If you want break-out innovations you need break-out management – as Einstein once said (I am paraphrasing): “To do the same thing repeatedly and expect a different outcome is insanity”. Of course, to achieve an enduring culture of innovation requires direction that only true leadership can provide – the kind of hands-on championing that energizes all levels in our corporate ranks, confirms the message to all stakeholders, personifies the mission and actualizes operational change.

To be clear, innovation really only begins with Management Innovation – how far it’s allowed to go depends on management commitment. As with anything else, when leading men and women, whether platoons or organizational departments, leadership by example provides the troops with the cultural direction of the mission – and the confidence to go for it. By creating the template, the organization will fall in line. And as with any such drive, checks and balances can keep the initiative between the lines without stifling the new process. As Churchill once so adroitly put it: “Trust, but verify”.

As with any new approach, oversight and guidance are paramount; the energy of unbridled activity is only scalar – but blossoms to vector when coupled with direction. These innovation activities need to be directed towards goals. But in today’s rapidly changing environment, the way to get to these new objectives now requires new routes and new drivers – in this case the path for both is Open Innovation; which starts at the senior management level. Give all your interested and motivated stakeholders the opportunity to try new things by starting with a new Management Innovation approach – few things can better express your readiness for change or more clearly demonstrate true leadership.

It seems that with every new business shift, some pundit comes out with a statement meant to re-define the era. These are unprecedented times. Well they are right to a large extent, because with every major business trend, we have seen a couple of constants:

• Fantastic selection of new products
• Faster cycle times
• Greater end-user demands
• Price hyper-sensitivity
• More players in to a crowded field

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But because of the recent growth intensity of these constants, the phenomenon has pushed once lackadaisical organizations to understand the need for a structured innovation approach; urgently. However, many among them seem to have a hard time letting go of an entrenched dogma: one that dictates that the workflows around innovation activities can remain standardized. Much like old-school marketing executives who once dismissed the power and value of online community engagement, managers who still believe that a cookie-cutter workflow will obtain across the channels, whether internal and/or external, are fooling themselves into rapid obsolescence.

Is it the inability to see this or the fear of the unknown?

Traditional models called for a fairly rigid and compliant set of stops along an idea’s path – informal stage gates if you will – if one part of the routing and task-set didn’t jive with a particular department or individual (process role player), they would have to adapt, re-route, escalate, wait or eventually disengage out of frustration. Not only is this approach ineffective and unproductive, it sends some of an organization’s best and brightest away with a negative experience; not many returned for repeat engagements – would you?. After all, seeing the progress of the idea one is engaged with is a huge part of the intrinsic reward of participation. There are many factors that can affect routing: type of idea, department affected, response capability, complexity…the list can be extensive.

There are three workflows that a company with an innovation process ideally should have:

1. Challenge workflow
2. Open workflow
3. Sequential workflow

These all must have a degree of malleability, adaptability and configurability – after all, could we expect the same forms, templates, participants (read SMEs) and turn-around times for idea that affects engineering than one that affects HR…or accounting…or production?

The most underdeveloped (speaking on a human dynamics level – not a technological one) and under-utilized of these three models is the Open workflow approach – not coincidentally, the newest of the three. It is by far the most significant in its capacity to engage, accelerate and deliver – with the most exciting aspect of this nascent practice lying in its potential to produce the much-lauded break-out innovations that we all yearn for.

If ideas are the lifeblood of innovation, then workflows are the cardio-vascular system.