14 Mar Mads Thimmer, Innovation Lab, by Mads Thimmer
The idea delivery
When Danish innovation pioneers Innovation Lab started out four years ago, they had no idea what tsunamic ?wall of demand? that a company with new ways, new ideas, and new technology on the menu would meet.
Three employees has now become 35 with five more in the intake as contracts from abroad are poring in. And the crew still struggles to meet the demand.
Here?s where the demand is coming from according to co-founder Mads Thimmer.
We probably have the world?s worst company name. ?Innovation? is at the height of all hype curves though very few can accurately describe the term, never mind explain how to obtain and maintain a state of innovation.
It?s on every webpage and in most logos. Even then, definitions vary. And as for the latter part of our name, ?Lab? is a term used to describe anything from a rave party to multibillion dollar nanotechnology research outfit. Which isn?t saying much.
But we ARE an innovation lab. A place where you experiment with new approaches, hatching new services, new products, and new ways, in our case primarily based on new technology and user centric foci.
Innovation Lab is a kind of watchdog on new technologies and new product opportunities that keep an open mind so that companies can keep a peace of mind. We look at implications and applications of the latest technologies and fit this overview to the individual organisation, to its visions and wishes for a product portfolio.
To prevent us from ?falling in love? with an individual direction in research and to help keep focus on what makes sense to consumers, markets and thus companies, Innovation Lab employs virtually no-one with an educational background in technology. Psychologists, astronomers, journalists, architects, a musical conductor, and even an Irish catholic priests make up some of the HR raw material. Here, combination and the ability to focus on impact is the essence of innovation.
Large, international companies come to us because they cannot afford to be innovative themselves. A successful company doing a truly groundbreaking innovation is unlikely to be rewarded by is stakeholders ? take Finnish mobile giant Nokia, previously famous for rubber boots, who recently were punished by users and shareholders alike for their paradigm shift into mobile gaming.
You are only as innovative as your controlling body allows you to be. And the larger the company, the larger the controlling body, the dead weight of an organisational obesity, seems to be. This creates a huge demand for a more flexible external organ that can act as a probe and test pod for new ideas, new aspirations, and as a feeder pipe for screened ideas and fresh inspiration.
Small companies come to Innovation Lab because they feed on innovation and they want someone else to feed on them. Startups are fed and fuelled by an obsessive idea, which –if it?s a good, unique and well timed one –more often than not lives to be swallowed, bought, and consumed by a larger corporate entity. Or a market. Unique really means ?the only one? which is all the more focus on refining, benchmarking, and perspectivating your basis.
CustomerMade is a revolution from below.
Customer passions are turned into profit by facilitation rather than persuation and marketing.
Here, Innovation Lab acts as an intermediary and help combine large and small, public and private, tech and non-tech. Unlike R&D division in major companies, smaller companies desperately need to bring their new inventions and developments into play and not only seek but depend on a huge degree of openness.
Major corporations, on the other hand, have painted themselves into a world market floor corner using corporate identity program, branding campaigns, and set company values to impair their ability to embrace new ideas, partnerships, and market driven redirections.
These top-down management fashions leave little or no room for the individual manoeuvring, the essential company multi-culture, and facilitation for creative and bright minded employees that is increasingly necessary in order to keep up with ever shifting markets, short product life cycles, and fierce competition from always unexpected angles.
The pursuit of a world patent is certain to yield a self-sufficient hush hush culture that prohibits out-of-house interaction and an introverted and eventually paranoid frame of mind that renders consumer dialogue impossible. You may end up with the secret recipe but in the end, noone wants to know what it?s for.
New technology is soon to become an even more universally adopted aspect of product development than design. With price, size, and processing power doubling in performance pro annum, it is a question of years, not decades, before everything from cereal boxes to underwear will have some kind of technology onboard.
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Major companies, eg. food and clothing manufacturers, that have never before dealt with information and communication technology on a product level will have to think in these terms to stay on top of their game. And companies specializing in a particular technology will have to keep a close eye on all other directions technology is taking to make sure that they have boarded the right train. Both types of organisations come to Innovation Lab for the missing part, the overview, the direction, the contacts.
In a highly specialized company culture, we have found that is an extremely coveted speciality not to be specialized. That is to say most companies do not have the time, energy or resources to look in other directions than the one immediately in front of them.
The best ideas are not your own. Most are starting to realize this. But what you must also realize is the importance of a professional industry built round idea making, knowledge screening, and business intelligence support.
Too much of what should have been intelligent intelligence ends up as bad and ill placed ideas, irrelevant information inflow or, in the worst cases, so-called innovation or idea management from quacks that have interesting power point slides but little grasp of reality, no idea of impact and absolutely no clue whatsoever about the path from idea to value adding implementation. These are the true enemies of forward thinking.
Luckily, forgery is easily exposed by a simple demand for a proven record of results. Innovation is about impact, not about intentions.
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