Inno This, Inno That

12 Ene Inno This, Inno That

Various analyses of strategic focus-areas (ie. Innovate America, a report and policy making framework published by The American Council on Competitiveness – more than 100 of US thought leaders, fortune 500 CEOs, University Heads etc…) all show innovation to be the absolute top scorer. The main objective of practically each and every company or organisation is to improve their bottom line through radical rethinking. Cool. But how do we get from cliché to business?

More and less talented innovation consultants are skimming the cream these days where companies are thirstily craving for recipes for the innovation elixir. As a decided counterweight to the stop-watch calorie-counters of the LEAN business, the bell-bangle wearing innovation experts are playing new age music in the background while – mimicking the cardboard-beaked plague healers of the dark ages – they venture into entirely uncharted space clutching their alchemist treasure chart of the bonanza of modern times. But is the free fall of trailblazing ideas into unknown air territory really what the organisation-heavy businesses needs? Innovation Lab has prepared a little magazine test taking as our point of departure our own maxims and cases from the most successful and innovative businesses right now. If you can comply with every item, then you're ready to register with the authorities with a dot-address beginning with 'inno'.

1. Avoid Completion

The communication eagerness of the market and the ability to absorb new products has exploded. Thus, the products proving successful now are those that openly and without any hush-hush admit that they are unfinished and ready for external input and ideas. They are always beta versions, always in development mode. Most web 2.0 companies will even advertise this by affixing 'beta' to their product or company name. The superb picture-sharing site Flickr is wholly open to improvement and even advertises that it's in gamma.  So do as the fast ones do, and never dare to strive for completion. This way it is also much easier to explain away any blunders. Some other examples are www.hakia.com (most hyped semantic web search tool, marketing the distinguished beta-mark). Nokia even calls their recent open lab a “beta” lab. YouTube, MySpace, most Google services all bore the beta mark long after their “release”.

2. Employ the wrong people

What will a staff of 15 in any average department have in common? In all probability much too much, and that is exactly the problem. Identical HR staff with identical HR forms will frequently enrol the intake of employees in a company which, as a consequence, may easily become self-sufficient and dead-locked in its own uniformity. An inflexible line of employment leaves very little room for those unpredictable and challenging employee contributions which are, in fact, what will patently bring about new things and set off the dynamics in a development process. It takes potential difference to drive the dynamics of a development process; unilateral thinking will never reach the ideational span accomplished by a motley crew. One certain way to achieve a mixed company profile is to employ candidates decidedly non-complying with the forms, candidates who can contribute with perspectives entirely deviating from the norm. In other words: employ the wrong people.

3. Forget about the business concept

The financially greatest commercial successes of today are generated within the next-generation web 2.0 brood, by internet companies. Hardly more than a year after its upstart, the video-sharing site YouTube had become worth $1.65bn to its buyers in Google. The business concept? Well, in accordance with new 'attention economy'-theories it is a question of being capable of attracting attention. If you can do that, it can be converted into capital through e.g. advertisements. It is, when all is said and done, a question of forgetting about business concepts since the capitalisation motive may act as a deterrent to the huge hordes of free-for-all craving internet users. As long as you have caught people's attention, the business concept will be sure to follow. It certainly followed in Rupert Murdoch's case when, a year after having bought the homepage concept MySpace, he sold the advertisement rights for close to double of the total purchase price of $580 million – which is indeed what can be characterised as a sound business.

4. Give away your products

Conventional business concepts are increasingly being replaced by more indiscernible ones where the immediate consumer seems to gain by receiving a multitude of products – if not free of charge then at considerably reduced prices. Free news sheets have become increasingly common – in circulation figures, they even seem to have taken the lead over conventional newspapers. Advanced machinery such as printers is – if not free – then enormously cheap (the ink, on the other hand, certainly isn't). A lesson to be learned here must be that it pays to get as close as possible to giving away your end product – then the money will eventually come from other things. The classic example, Skype, was, as we know, sold in September 2005 for $2.6bn – a nice lump sum for a company primarily based on giving away telephony.

5. Use your money on hot air

When, going ballooning in 1783, the Montgolfier brothers set new standards for mankind's latitude, it was – in every sense of the word – hot air that prompted the works. Nothing is more momentous than hot air. Hot air, in the sense that there is nothing as momentous as that inescapable stage lying only just prior to scientific proof – i.e. the stage on the bleeding edge. It was hot air when, in 1960, Kennedy wanted people on the moon; and indeed when, in 2000, the provincial Danish town – Horsens – wanted recognition as a cultural capital by means of a Bob Dylan concert. However, Armstrong did land, and – incidentally – Horsens is nowadays spoken of as the leading city of culture in Denmark. So, it definitely pays off if we set out with airy objectives and means, and then let circumstances take shape in the process. The payoffs for those really daring to take off are exorbitant.

6. Never think about the future

George Orwell (of all people) believed that we can predict no other future than the one we ourselves want. Projections and futurology often tend to constitute an excuse to make an exhaustive examination of present-day issues and of prevalent attitudes. To far too many people, future is nothing more than an extension of the past. If, instead, people would look right into the eyes of 'right now', then there would be a much better chance that they would aim forward in time when reigning requirements and wants as to attitude and action are realised. Today, a few (far-sighted!) companies have stopped drawing up budgets, because a budget will mean a freezing of focus and a limitation of the liability to seize the sudden opportunities occurring. It is namely to an increasing extent the capacity for swift change and adaptability that will come to constitute a decisive competition parameter – rather than the capacity for future escapism.

7. Never abide by the management theories

Only a very small minority of trailblazing companies makes speeches of thanks to certain defined management theories. And perhaps it goes without saying that a book on how to create unique concepts on the basis of one predefined management prescription, sold in 500,000 copies, will not necessarily result in as many unique concepts. Management theories come into existence on the basis of the groundbreaking cases – NOT the other way round. So there seems to be only one valid formula – viz. to make one of your own. Obviously, this will also entail that one should not believe every popular ten-staged paved road to innovation…

8. Define a diffuse strategy

Is it really so important to know where one is going? When Lou Gerstner took over the helm at IBM for a legendary sharp turn, the first thing he said was, "The last thing a company needs is a vision". Over the years, much valuable time has been lost on unimaginative people willing forth fantasises of directions either pointing in the wrong direction – or in no direction at all. And does anyone at all know which direction is the right one? The very same companies, who during the 90s were making their brands into religions and had every employee sworn into a uniform company spirit –  into the same one-way direction, are now fighting the plights of rigid and immensely heavy organisations which are virtually impossible to change in relation to a market moving faster and faster. So give yourself the gift of a satisfactorily diffuse and comprehensive strategy ready to take aboard each and every subculture of the new enterprise – a strategy where they will see a slot for themselves.

9. Don't invent new products

He who waits for the uniquely unique groundbreaking novelty to constitute the basis of his 'innovation' will have a long wait coming. A very long wait. As early as 1898, the US Patent Office announced that everything that could be invented had been invented. Some authors reveal that "announcement" to be only a myth. This may be taking it a bit too far; but when –by combining existing knowledge, or by placing existing things in new settings – new trails may be blazed, the incentive to repeated invention of the plate rack all over again will certainly not be very high. Unfortunately, it is a widespread misconception that innovation has to do with the ability to invent something that has never been seen before. Wrong. Innovation is as much about combination, at the least. Hence, you should use your energy intelligently and establish a new business on an existing product – rather than on believing that all advance starts at zero point.

10. Share all your secrets

In former times, secret recipes and extensive patent designs were all-decisive for the creation of a success. It was all about hedging in your bull's eye, and the end goal was the monopoly. Many arduous years of white-coated laboratory work paid back in products fit for centuries of survival – provided the correct overdose of marketing. Today the average product-life cycle is dwindling concurrently with the rate of development. So the reality is undergoing a radical change. Meanwhile developers have holed up to think. The first result of this development was seen when developers from Japanese competitors in the motor industry sat down shoulder to shoulder; and since then many more have followed their example– in line with the Harvard-economic watchword open innovation – for the mutual exploitation of each other's ideas potential and developmental resources across employment relations. According to a survey in the Harvard Business Review (HBR, Vol. 84, No. 3, March 2006, showcasing a Conference Board survey + an in depth P&G analysis), this is a worthwhile procedure. There is more business volume in other people's ideas than in your own ones. So, out with your secrets! You will never lose your knowledge just because you give it away.

* Mads Thimmer is Co-Founder of InnovationLab, an International Non-Profit Knowledge center for New Technology. Mads is a thought-leader within the area of the innovative use of new technology within business, society and everyday life. He is consultant in high demand and a speaker at international conferences around the world. He has tried his hand at translating Virginia Woolf to Danish and developing computer games for Games Workshop. Mads is Literary historian from Aarhus University and has studied at University of Cambridge.