Point: Inventing new management techniques offers big paybacks.

Story: What’s more valuable than a new product or service innovation?  An innovation in a management technique, said business strategy expert Gary Hamel at the Spigit Innovation Summit last week. Innovations in management techniques have far-reaching impact.

Consider Thomas Edison. He’s credited with 1093 patents, but one underlying invention is what made such a multitude of patents possible: the invention of the corporate R&D lab. Edison was the first to bring management discipline to research & development to enable a more powerful method of invention than the lone inventor of the past. Edison’s 1093 patents had less to do with technological genius and more to do with management genius: creating and managing an R&D lab that could efficiently and effectively crank out new inventions.

So, what steps can you take to innovate the management of innovation? Management is the effective control of resources to execute tasks that achieve goals. What, then, does effective management of innovation look like? Hamel talked about the need for a combination of freedom and discipline: the freedom to come up with ideas but also the discipline to find the best ideas, refine them, and channel them into something that creates value for the firm. He posed it as a paradox, which is always a clue to generative potential.

As you think about improving the management of innovation, think about the recent inventions that you can draw on. For example, in my previous post, I wrote about how social media tools support innovation processes. These tools let you invite ideas from across the whole organization and provide a way to refine, track and vote on those ideas. Other advancements, like open sourcing and open innovation (see earlier post), help you tap into almost-free resources. Furthermore, widespread adoption of smartphones changes the fundamental equation of management in terms of reach and timeliness. All these technologies support new approaches to management, especially the management of innovation.

Action

• Take a step back from inventing and innovation to think about how to improve the management of innovation
• Ask: how can we generate new ideas more effectively with available resources? (freedom)
• Ask: how can we develop and validate new ideas more effectively with available resources? (discipline)
• Create coherent processes that balance resources between freedom and discipline

Further information:

Gary Hamel’s book, The Future of Management and his blog

I enjoyed hearing Gary speak and having the opportunity to ask him questions. If you’d like to do the same, consider joining me at the World Business Forum October 6-7, 2009 in New York City. Gary will be one of the speakers, along with former president Bill Clinton, Jack Welch, George Lucas, Paul Krugman and others. You can see the full agenda here.

Point: Social networking tools help capture the “quiet contributions” from the fringes of your company

Story: In the typical company, innovation relies on a hand-picked team leading an innovation project. The trouble is, these teams often have no good way of tapping the expertise of the whole company. They tend to call on the small circle of colleagues they know or on the acknowledged experts in an established field. But they have a hard time identifying people whom they don’t already know but who might have new knowledge relevant to the problem at hand. As a result, potential good ideas are lost or hidden.

That’s where social software tools come in handy. With a tool like InnovationSpigit, for example, a company can start a discussion on a topic and employees who know about the topic self-identify by posting ideas, refining the ideas of others, and voting on ideas.

For example, a company could start discussion like “Can we develop a new water filtration product?” People from market research might identify the top-selling filtration products and their value propositions (e.g., “BrandA removes chlorine and lead”).  Someone from HR, who recently bought a water filtration system for her family, might contribute her own insights gathered from what blogs and outside websites were saying about all the competing products (e.g., “BrandB sucks because it’s hard to install”). Unforeseen expertise & spark-generating ideas might come from an employee who’s studied marine animals who might suggest “have you looked at how fish gills work? Perhaps we could base an idea around that.” Other employees might point out the engineering deficits of a proposed technology (e.g., a potential filter material is too expensive for consumer water filters). Another person might have good suggestions for how to solve the cost problem (e.g., to coat the expensive filter ingredient on a cheaper material).

The point is that these contributions can come from anywhere, not just the hand-picked team members and their inner circle. Happenstance insights and contributions from non-obvious personnel help increase the volume and quality of ideas. Reputation systems and voting mechanisms, built into innovation-specific social applications like InnovationSpigit 2.0, help direct innovation efforts into the most productive directions.

Action

• Explore how innovation-specific social applications like InnovationSpigit can be used to improve innovation in your organization.
• Look for tools that expand the range of idea sources to more people and leverage the intelligence of crowds to focus innovation efforts.
• Create a vibrant set of communities around open-ended problems to get new and disruptive ideas.
• Use small incentives, reputation engines, and voting systems to encourage fast feedback that focuses efforts on the best ideas.
  

Point: Develop new products and services by applying innovative analytics to unused data.

Story: Three companies presenting at Techstars Demo Day last week illustrate a category of innovation that is based on new uses of data. First, Retel Technologies is a new company that helps retailers understand patterns of behavior at store locations. Many retailers have security cameras on site, but they rarely look at the data generated by those cameras because of the sheer volume of data. The raw data is typically viewed only in the event of a robbery. Retel, however, developed a cost-effective human-aided video data analysis service that extracts workplace performance analytics from all that unused video footage. For example, the system can help spot problems such as dirty tables at fast-food locations, employee theft, and capacity bottlenecks (such as a shortage of  cashiers during certain hours). Retel provides its clients monthly reports to help managers see trends, behaviors, and time-of-day patterns that can help them better manage their stores.

Second, a new company named Next Big Sound uses the realtime flow of events in social media to help band managers. The music industry is undergoing big changes, but sales of concert tickets are the highest they’ve been in ten years, and people are buying more music than ever. Giving band managers data can help them make better decisions. For example, real-time data from Twitter can be captured and analyzed to show who’s talking about which band and where they are — data that can provide great insight into a band’s fan base. Next Big Sound collects a host of both social media and web data to provide real-time marketing analytics that bands can use in variety of ways. For example, band managers can use the data to pinpoint the demographics of fans, scout new concert locations, and improve online ad placement. They can even suggest that a band mention people or events in the local area or give a shout-out to high-profile fans at a concert.

Third, Mailana is a company that uses communications analytics to help people leverage their social connections. These days, people are inundated by connections to other people. It’s not hard to have hundreds or thousands of connections in the form of entries in e-mail address books, friends on Facebook, colleagues on LinkedIn, and followers on Twitter. But who among the hoard of connections are the true trusted friends that one can really count on Mailana uses data on frequency and patterns of communication to automatically identify a person’s inner circle of most-trusted friends. Furthermore, Mailana helps people merge inner circles — a good trusted friend or a good trusted friend is far more valuable than a casual forgotten connection to another causal forgotten connection. Mailana helps people build and use the high-value core of their social graph.

In each of the three companies, innovative use of data provides new value.

Action:

• Inventory the data sources around you, your company, and industry
• Consider the potential analytic value of the data — what you might learn from that data? (or what might you learn more quickly?)
• Leverage low-cost computing and workflow technologies to extract new and actionable knowledge

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