Ideation Facilitators are Part of the Problem - the Jerry Seinfeld Syndrome

Categories: Innovation Insights

The traditional way of collecting ideas is brainstorming. Many firms have found that they require a process to brainstorm, a form of structure, to help them manage people issues and to get higher quality ideas. To achieve this, there is a burgeoning industry of ideation consultants and facilitators.

I am writing this note in the middle of one of the worst facilitated ideation sessions, led by an apparently world-acclaimed expert in ideation. She provided some structure for ideation, explained the rules, and started gathering ideas. She described bad ideation techniques, and encouraged us to do it better. She then proceeded to turn into Jerry Seinfeld, grandstanding at every opportunity, taking over a person's idea and sharing her own special insights. She listened to the ideas, and used her magic idea-translator pen to write them on her flipchart - you know, someone shouts out an idea, and she writes down something completely different on the board. She disrupted the flow of ideation, criticizing people in mid-sentence.

It was just at this point that I have realized that most of the facilitators I have met and worked with are often part of the problem, not really part of the solution. It is rare to find a facilitator who is truly good at extracting the best from their participants. I know a few (Jonathan Vehar, Charlie Prather and Blair Miller spring to mind), but these are unicorns in a field full of mules.

The best companies have been moving away from facilitated sessions, drawing on new forms of interaction such as the mass participation systems of Idea Management. We may miss the comedy routines, but our sanity may be spared.

Designing a Decent Innovation Conference - Some Guidelines

Categories: Innovation Insights, Innovation Conferences

I hate bad conferences. You sit in a room, surrounded by bright, interesting people, watching a series of PowerPoint slides. The first speakers overrun, there is no time for questions, and you only get to speak to people in hushed whispers at your table, or a quick hi in the restroom queue.

I am in the middle of such a conference (I will spare the name for their benefit). It would be a beautiful, stimulating place if only it was structured differently.

I am an organizer of an innovation conference, InnovateEurope, which runs every year in London in October. When we were designing the conference, we tried to make it the conference we wanted to attend. Some areas we worked on were:

• lots of time to interact with fellow delegates

draconian management of time to ensure enough time for questions

• long lunches to have time to speak with one another (and no lunch time speakers!)


• communal inclusive dinner on the first night with unlimited drinks

printouts of all presentations ahead of time to allow people to read-ahead and take notes

• few favors for speakers based on quid pro quo


• speaker choice of 45 minute standard-style presentation with questions, or extended one hour session with built-in activity session for delegates to work together

We ran the first conference in 2004 and I can honestly say that I learned more on innovation in general and new specific methods that at any of the other conferences in the same year. The benefits of innovating the innovation process are visible and can now be shared with all.

A Message to Innovation Directors - Take off the Blindfold

Categories: Innovation Insights, Innovation Conferences

I have just got off the phone with the most blinkered VP of Innovation imaginable. This man is responsible for innovation in a manufacturing firm employing thousands of people, and his new revenue target is well in excess of $25m. And yet, he was entirely uninterested in anything to do with innovation. "I am the only person responsible for innovation and growth in the company. I have no interest in conferences, what other companies are doing, what you can do for us". Needless to say, it was a short phone call.

I have some experience in these matters. The most likely reason for his attitude is that his firm is going through a reorganization, and his relative lack of visible success over the past year (his reputation preceded my call) would indicate that he will draw a short straw. But it is also likely that he honestly believes that he is the master of all he sees, that he alone has the right vision for innovation in his firm, and that his superior intellect will carry his initiative forward to success.

The odds of any one corporate innovator knowing everything is zero. The odds of even just one of us knowing most of today's good stuff is pretty low (hey, I'm trying), and these odds go down dramatically if we think ahead to the next three years of innovation process discoveries. We simply cannot afford to innovate with our eyes closed to the outside world. There are too many good new things going on, and the books will take years to catch up.

So, with this thought in mind, I urge you to innovate Eyes Wide Open and to take every opportunity you can to learn from others inside and outside your company, and better yet, outside your industry and geographic region. An easy place to start is going to conferences and workshops and spending quality time networking (quick recommendations for now would be InnovateEurope in London and PMDA 2005 in San Diego). After that there are emerging innovation networking groups that you can join (mail me if you are interested). The world is big, and all kinds of good things await!

We will solve all the impossible problems - eventually

Categories: Innovation Insights

Today I am writing in a flying tube that, according to the wisest people just one hundred years ago, cannot fly. I am typing into a tiny computer - my second HP iPaq - despite claims that there would only be a need for a few computers - ever. Before I left the ground, I called Sweden, the UK, I left a voice mail for someone in the US, all from a gadget - the mobile phone - that was unimaginable just twenty-five years ago by all the experts in telephony.

I have been reading a good book - The Fruits of War - that raises many issues about how innovations come about, and how warfare makes basic needs all the more pressing. I intend to write more on this topic, but one subtle message did ring out, and that was the general negativity and apathy towards new inventions. It seems as though many people are programmed to be negative, to squish the visions of the innovator, to replay the role the original luddites played when they destroyed farm machinery.

These people have universally been proved wrong. Often they have been right, but for a period of time only. Sometimes they highlighted the right problems, and then were frustrated by some bright solution to an insoluble problem.

My prediction is that this will always be the same. We will always have naysayers stating that problems cannot be solved, and bright people solving impossible problems. To me this means that all the impossible problems, from finding drugs that cure people to reaching Mars and beyond, are all doable. The naysayers are will always be there, but there is nothing like a challenge to stimulate human creativity!

The Patterns of the Past Define the Future - Unless Something Changes

Categories: Innovation Insights

The past is an excellent guide to the present, if nothing changes. It is also a good predictor of the future if no change is planned, or the proposed changes do not address the weaknesses of the past.

It is nigh on impossible to criticize a group's current innovation or product development initiatives - if any of these activities were wrong, they would not be doing them. Even in product development situations where there is a known failure rate for projects and later for launched products, it is logically and emotionally hard for individuals to incorporate such logic into decision making processes.

However, in spite of reluctance to question current initiatives, the patterns of the past provide a much better picture of what will happen compared to any overly hopeful current plan.

The best companies in new product development and innovation realize this and spend time analyzing past performance. They learn from failures and successes, ideally focusing on key metrics to introduce more objectivity to the analysis. Based on this method, P&G, for example calculated that the best launch revenue a major New Product Development (NPD) initiative could reach was $200m in year one revenue. Knowing that you are unlikely to beat the odds is important. Using the historic odds to design a better process is the route to success.

EnterpriseInnovator - "Innovation Capacity - Not IT Spend - Matters Most" - a critique

Categories: Innovation Insights, Innovation Software

I had a conversation yesterday with a top 10 innvoation guru - you have read his book, I am sure, if you are working in the field. The discussion turned to IT and how IT supports innovation initiatives. At this point, I now go back to my notes... and he said "I have never found a single IT group who is in line with and truly supportive of the business". Bearing in mind that this individual has designed programs in at least 20 of the Global 100 clients, this is a damning indictment.

The more research I do on the subject, the more polarized my personal view becomes. IT very rarely supports innovation initiatives. And if they get too involved, their loving touch can smother any chance of good things coming out. They were the guys who brought us e-mail rather than collaboration systems, they are the ones who shout at us for using shared drives, whilst their fancy-dancy knowledge management repository gathers dust.

My spark for today was reading an article on EnterpriseInnovator about "IT Capacity". The article is largely a synopsis of a recent Forrester Research article: "Memo To CEOs And CIOs: IT Innovation Capacity — Not IT Spend — Is What Matters," August 3, 2005. To start with, some direct quotes:

• CEOs should keep their focus on what Forrester describes as “innovation capacity” – which is “the potential for the IT function to support new products, processes, and opportunities.”


• To fully assess their “innovation potential,” Forrester advises CEOs and CIOs to “look back at the past three years” and “examine the trend line of innovation capacity” - and then to “look ahead to the next three years to set a target for what they want their innovation capacity to be.” Forrester explains that “negative innovation potential” - or a reduction in capacity - is a “recipe for a variety of unpleasant scenarios, including growing business frustration with an ever-scarcer IT resource pool, business units’ avoidance of the IT organization, and CEO dissatisfaction with the performance of the CIO.”


• Having More To Spend On Innovation By Spending Less On O&M: Forrester observes that innovation capacity is really just “the amount of available funds that IT can spend on new initiatives in any given year,” which is “typically total IT spending minus IT spending on ongoing O&M.” Forrester explains that by making savings in ongoing IT O&M, companies can “free up a constrained resource pool to do new projects and investments” - driving greater innovation. As such, by looking to innovation capacity, companies may use that “difference between ongoing IT O&M and total IT spending as a percentage of total revenue as an indicator of IT’s capacity to support business innovation.”

First issue: Innovation Capacity. The definition used here is way out of the mainstream. IT rarely factors into most companies definition of innovation capacity (the capacity of handling new things that deliver value). I think this is a mistake because IT is a powerful enabler of new types of business, and in finding efficiencies that allow you to redeploy resources to more valuable activities. But, come on. IT - the people who maintain mail servers, databases, spend 3 years implementing SAP (hey, wasn't that project even outsouced??) - these guys are going to be driving innovation? There are definitely exceptions to the rule (I count Georgia-Pacific and GM at the leading edge of IT innovation), but the point is that they are the exceptions to the rule, not the norm.

Second: Trends and past scarce IT-resources. Now we are getting somewhere. The trend that IT is very bad at supporting real business objectives (I am thinking sales, marketing, etc), and most effort on back-office activities is a big trend, and that trend is not going to suddenly reverse itself. Innovation will NOT be driven by IT - they could not drive other initiatives successfully before, and it ain't going to happen now.

Third: Innovation Capacity is driven by the amount of money IT can spend on new toys. What planet are they living on. Does P&G drive innovation through ethnographic research and deep customer insight, or by upgrading their collaboration software? Is the IPOD a success because Apple really improved self-service support for employees to access their 401Ks on the intranet. This sounds like an excuse for IT to spend money on new toys, like WIFIMax, RFID, just about anything that takes 1 - 4 years to deliver. That sounds like innovation to me.

I am a converted IT, by the way (although few would realize that now). My IT experience was formed at Intel and GM. I am passionate about the world of innovation, and extremely annoyed on behalf of the business sponsors we work with that non-business focused IT gets in the way of doing good things, or delays projects by six months for no good reason. This has got to stop - the future is coming towards us, the innovators will not stand for it.

Technology and the Fortune 500 - A New Type of Software Company?

Categories: Innovation Insights, Innovation Software

Many thanks for Avi for the comment:

"Mark - I agree with you 100% when you say that ... Idea Management is fundamentally a people and management process supported by technology... Do you think, however, that long term this reality will transform your firm to more of a professional services company with unique business expertise in idea management/innovation rather than becoming a pure software provider?

I have been working with a Fortune 500 company on establishing an innovation process. At the core of this business process is Idea Management which includes the capture/creation, management, collaboration, ranking, and ultimately the identification of ideas that can be monetized. They, like others, are using existing applications that are already part of the technology messaging infrastructure that can be extended to provide Idea Management. The need by large organizations to leverage existing investments may be part of the issue that you are facing when leading sales with software."

You raise an interesting point about where we are going, and where clients are going. I do not think there will be any successful pure-play software company in innovation. There will be pure play software companies who have their applications used for innovation-related activities, but history shows that these are unlikely to be stellar successes. Naked sofware is still naked, however you cut it.

As for Imaginatik, we have always been a curious breed. You cannot do this well without being deep process experts, and you cannot scale an innovation process without solid, flexible technology. We were born of this conundrum in the mid-1990s. AMR even highlighted this bizarre combination when they highlighted Imaginatik as one of the "5 Vendors to Watch in PLM". We may be an unusal combination, but we may be "just what the doctor ordered".

In terms of the large companies trying to leverage their infrastructure, what is really going on is IT departments trying to leverage their large IT investment, to occasionally deliver a modicum of business value to the 'low-end' business processes. I have yet to see a world class innovation system built by in-house IT, and I would be stunned to see one in practice. It is just not a core business. If you add on to this that many companies have outsourced their IT departments, who is left to do the work.

The other thing is a case of working out what 'leveraging the IT investments' really means. We, like other vendors, use the intranet layer, the pervasive web browser, existing web servers, VPN connections to the outside, security models, ActiveDirectory, LDAP, SiteMinder single-sign on, messaging, etc. We leverage the IT infrastructure layer. The weak-minded business users allow in-house IT to make business applications that sit on top of that layer - and suffer as a consequence in the main.

The messaging layer is renouned for being a BAD platform for Idea Management - and for just about any serious, collaborative, secure, sustainable business process. I wrote about this a while back on the perils of e-mail based Idea Management - the situation has not changed (I just need to get the word out a little more).

Turn your Shower Stall into an Ideation Zone

Categories: Innovation Insights

I just watched a FedEx Kinkos advert - a group of executives cram into a shower stall. The leader, surprisingly bald (most executives have good hair), is asked why they are all in there tohether. "We are opening a new business next week - and I have my best ideas in the shower". Of course, the answer for their new business problem is to print signs and flyers at FedEx Kinkos.

Still, the broader question is why do companies persist running ideation sessions in the same tried - and tired - old ways? The shower stall approach is at least somewhat novel, but come on. Well-designed (non-naked) Idea Management software, available on a company intranet, provides a much better way of achieving the same goals. And no need to get scared if someone drops the soap ;)

What the Hell is Google Doing?

Categories: Innovation Insights,Innovation News Commentary

Google is always in the news - adding all kinds of new business services to their core search and advertising business: wireless access, telphony, news aggregation, and the built-it-yourself software company. I was reading a BusinessWeek article - "Google's Grand Ambitions" - Sept 5 (registeration required). By the sound of things, they are actively planning to compete against just about everyone in every technology industry, from eBay to Nokia, the Yellow Pages to TimeWarner.

Over my vacation I read "Beyong the Core", written by leading Bain & Co consultant, Chris Zook. The book highlights the success of firms who look to grow outside their classic core business. In general, for all firms, the results are not good. Just 25% make a success of growing outside their core into market adjacencies.


Now, I am a big Google supporter. My firm, Imaginatik, has used Adwords for almost four years to advertise our business, and I use Google several times a day. But in terms of a business, what do they believe is their core business, and how thinly do they plan to spread themselves. It is as though they want to do everything that is technology and Internet related, and deliver it all in three short years. Supercharged with billions of dollars in cash (they are raising another $4bn), supported by a stratospheric share price, and a fawning press, they are invincible. One could argue that their ambitions are almost... Titanic.

No one knows what will happen next, but history is a good judge of the future. Watch this space