Point: Innovation may be less about technical specs and more about emotional connections.

Story:
When we think of innovation, we often think of intelligence, brilliance, and genius. Yet two speakers at the World Innovation Forum highlighted the large and less-rational depths of the human mind. Inside us all is an inner animal that significantly influences the path of innovation.

First, Seth Godin (author of Purple Cow, Tribes and, most recently, Linchpin) referred to the “lizard brain” — the primitive beast that lurks deep inside our heads. Humans may have evolved a nice primate brain full of intelligence, rational analysis, and dispassionate logic, but when the lizard feels threatened, s/he takes over. Second, Chip Health (author of Made to Stick and, most recently, Switch) introduced Jonathan Haidt’s notion of the rider and the elephant. The rider represents the rational, logical mind of humans. The elephant represents the more primitive, lumbering forces of emotion. In essence, the elephant is just a larger metaphor for the lizard. Godin and Heath are not the first to have noticed the inner animal. Even Plato talked of the steady charioteer vs. the surging war horse when explaining the perpetual tussle we experience between our rational and emotional sides.

What does this inner animal have to do with innovation? The inner animal explains some of the patterns of failure and success of innovations. Godin spoke of the “resistance” — that overwhelming force of fear that makes the lizard react to changes as threats. Moreover, the threatened lizard actually co-opts the more rational rider into making rationalizations — all the “yes, buts” that impede innovation. This resistance gives us the inertia of the elephant and forestalls innovation.

Yet the inner animal isn’t only about resistance to change. Heath noted that people do willingly make massive changes in their lives, such as when they get married or have kids. Clearly, affairs of the heart can bypass change resistance. This gives an avenue of advancement for innovation. Robert Brunner (former director of Industrial Design at Apple) spoke of brand as being a gut feeling and of products being more that just physical objects. Innovation and design can and should connect to people’s hearts.

Certainly our world needs innovations that deliver quantitative performance improvements, such as 20% more fuel economy or 50% less cycle time. Yet it’s the innovations that deliver oodles of more fun, excitement, and inspiration that grab public consciousness. Innovation may be less about the world of PowerPoint slides, feature checklists, and action-items. Instead, innovation that overcomes change resistance and gains large market share may be much more about the world of emotional resonance, heart, and social connection.

Action:

• Motivate the elephant with visceral/emotional stories and images — make change exciting and compelling rather than merely rational
• Direct the rider by using the emotion of the elephant to avoid paralysis by analysis
• Shape the path to make it easier for both rider and elephant (for example, Amazon’s 1-click makes purchasing efficient for the rider as well as impulsive for the elephant).

Tags: change management, emotion, Innovation, resistance, World Innovation Forum

Point:
Monetize non-core innovation rather than pruning it.

Story:
Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox, discussed innovation at her company in an interview at the World Innovation Forum June 9, 2010. She described initiatives to improve the return on innovation at Xerox’s  research centers such as PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). PARC’s ground-breaking inventions like the graphical user interface, ethernet, and postscript as inventions  had a large impact on the world but didn’t contribute enough to Xerox’s bottom line.  Let’s look at why that happened and what Xerox is doing now.

Unpredictability lies at the core of the innovation process.  Not only do innovators not know if an early-stage innovation will succeed or fail, they also can’t know all the possible applications or value latent in that innovation.  Thus, it’s far too easy for an exciting innovation to stray outside the bounds of the company’s core competence.

At some level, reaping the greatest value from a research organization means allowing researchers the freedom to explore.  Burns noted that innovators love working on interesting projects — it’s hard to stop them from doing it.  Rather than fetter its folk, Xerox found three ways to give them freedom while still reaping the value of innovations that fall outside the company’s core.

First, Xerox expanded its definition of what is core to the company.  Previously, Xerox defined itself as a copier company, looking for innovations in how to “reproduce images on paper.” That narrow definition meant that many of the early PARC inventions were not pursued. Since then, Xerox expanded to document management and is moving toward being a more general office information process company.  Rather than fear the paperless office, Xerox wants to help customers implement the paperless office.  Xerox’s recent acquisition of ACS positions Xerox in business process outsourcing — managing the non-paperless back office functions of customers and clients.  The expanding vision of Xerox brings more innovations within the scope of the company’s core. For example, the company now has a use for its smart document innovations that can automate some of the labor-intensive discovery process in legal proceedings.

Second, rather than discarding innovations that don’t fit inside the company, Xerox now looks for partners or buyers for whom the innovation does provide value.  For example, some of Xerox’s innovations in precision printing can apply to the low-cost manufacturing of solar panels.  Xerox isn’t going to become a solar panel manufacturer — that’s too far outside its core. But rather than dismissing the innovation, Xerox partnered with a West Coast firm to incubate a new company that can leverage the value of those innovations.

Third, outside companies can now hire PARC and its portfolio of specialists to tackle tough R&D problems.  CEO Burns said that most PARC’s activities remain focused on Xerox, but the option to sell non-core innovations lets the company maintain the innovative culture of PARC while monetizing its researchers’ outputs.  In short, Xerox is expanding how it leverages the fruits of innovation rather than pruning the innovation funnel.

Action

• When evaluating innovation projects, don’t immediately rule out ideas outside the company’s current strategies, customers, or core
• Instead, also ask if an innovation might be more valuable to a non-competing outsider
• Find complementary partners who can license or buy non-core innovations or innovation expertise to reap the greatest total value from the innovation process.
• Allow innovators enough freedom to enable breakthroughs.
• Expand or reenvision the core of the company to leverage innovation.

Tags: Case study, Innovation, Intellectual Property, partnering, R&D, World Innovation Forum

Point: Take the customer’s perspective when designing a new service model.

Story: Some of the best innovations are brilliant in their after-the-fact simplicity. Take MinuteClinic.  We all know “an ounce of prevention…” yet most of us still don’t go to the doctor for preventative care because of the cumbersome process of a office visit: scheduling an appointment, taking time off work, waiting in the doctor’s office for unknown amounts of time, sitting in the midst of other hacking/sneezing people, and being unsure how much the visit will cost.  Worse, the doctor’s advice is often the standard nostrums of “take two aspirin, eat right, drink plenty of fluids, get some rest” that didn’t require the costs and hassles of the office visit.

Michael Howe, former CEO of MinuteClinic, became known as one of the top 10 innovators of the last decade by tackling those problems and designing a straightforward solution.  Howe applied the retail concept to healthcare, putting a mini medical clinic inside a pharmacy.  All the elements of his new service model focused on the customer:

• Pharmacy locations are easy to get to and are easily integrated into the customer’s day
• The clinics are open nights and weekends, expanding convenience for time-pressed customers
• Customer wait time is no more than 15 minutes, and no appointments are necessary.
• MinuteClinic posts all its services on a “menu” with the prices listed for each service

The key behind Howe’s innovation is realizing that the old model of healthcare delivery focused on delivering healthcare to people born 1925-44. But the values of this “Greatest Generation” aren’t the same as the Boomer generation. Boomers don’t want to be directed — they want to be engaged in the healthcare process.  Likewise, Gen-X’ers (born 1965-1984) want self-sufficiency, convenience and immediate access. They, along with Boomers, constitute MinuteClinic’s target customers.
MinuteClinic focuses on providing a standardized set of services that can be provided by nurse practitioners, thus lowering the overall costs of the services.  The company doesn’t claim to compete with the expertise of Mayo Clinic. Rather, it focuses on minor illness exams, minor injury exams, skin condition exams, wellness & prevention, vaccinations, and health condition monitoring. If customers have a serious or unusual ailment, MinuteClinic will recommend that they seek more in-depth medical attention.

In 2006, CVS acquired MinuteClinic. I asked Howe if the acquisition meant there could be more data integration between the two merged companies. His answer was that although the regulatory statutes prevent the sharing of information like prescriptions without patient approval, it was possible to educate patients. “We can use the retail environment to inform patients of alternatives to use for preventative medicine,” Howe said. For example, during the cold and flu season, MinuteClinic could help patients by producing a list of suggested treatments to make it through flu season.

What will be the next healthcare delivery innovation? Using Howe’s model of generations and the different values which each generation has, Howe sees that Millennials (born 1985-2004) are just beginning to understand their needs and that they want technology-based connections. In that future, the mantra will move from the Boomers’ “Engage Me” to the Millennials’ “Connect Me” demand for technology-based connections to their cell phones, laptops and the digitized world of social networks.

Action:

• Look for products and services that have become costly and underutilized due to years of accumulated complexities
• Look for generational differences in expectations, tolerances, and preferences
• Create a solution that increases convenience and certainty
• Create a solution that reduces complexity and cost
• Address 80% of the problem with something simple rather than 100% of the problem with something complex

Sources:
Michael Howe spoke at the World Innovation Forum, held June 8-9, 2010 at the Nokia Theater in New York City. He also presented an online seminar in the HSMAmericas series, which can be accessed here.
See also  http://minuteclinic.com/

Tags: service design, World Innovation Forum

Point: Crowdsourcing is maturing beyond its amateur-content and open innovation origins toward core business processes.

Story:

In the beginning, companies used crowdsourcing as part of their open innovation efforts to get new ideas from lead users, customers, and the world at large.  But now, entrepreneurial companies such as Trada and CloudCrowd are moving beyond one-off design efforts and contests (e.g., the Netflix Prize) to encompass routine everyday business processes.  As CloudCrowd CEO Alex Edelstein sees it, “similar to the way Henry Ford’s early assembly lines created a new, more efficient way to complete work, we’ve designed an online process that delivers accurate finished work for even complex projects at a significant savings.”  Let’s look at these two examples.

First, Trada Inc., which recently emerged from stealth mode private beta, offers crowds of pay-per-click experts who create paid-search marketing campaigns.  Each vetted crowd member generates his/her own keywords, ad copy, and deep links to attract prospective pay-per-click customers to the client site.  The result is a much broader span of keywords with less chance of overpaying for over-used common keywords.  By giving access to the long tail of keywords, Trada executes campaigns at lower cost and with greater success than do traditional agencies with in-house employees.

Second, CloudCrowd has 18,000 registered workers who participate in its Labor-as-a-Service business. CloudCrowd’s project managers begin by breaking down a complex task into hundreds or thousands of smaller tasks. These tasks are then passed on to Cloudcrowd’s registered workers. CloudCrowd speeds delivery time and lowers costs in a wide range of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) applications.  Tasks that CloudCrowd has deconstructed include tracking the University of Southern California’s “lost alumni” and a wide range of web content creation tasks.

Both Trada and CloudCrowd eschew the winner-take-all model of contest-oriented crowdsourcing projects.  Instead, they offer well-defined incremental pay for incremental results.  In the case of Trada, an expert gets paid for each click-through of the ad that the expert created (Trada also offers pay-per-sale crowdsourced campaigns).  CloudCrowd gives its workers a pre-agreed payment for each unit of work they successfully complete.  In CloudCrowd’s case, a worker’s “success” is measured using a system of escalating peer reviews that are also crowdsourced.

Both Trada and CloudCrowd create carefully-cultivated crowds — more like reliable workforces than mobs of transient volunteers of dubious quality.  Trada uses online testing and verified identities to ensure that its experts are really experts.  CloudCrowd assesses each worker’s percentage of correctly-completed tasks to compute a Credibility Rating.  Highly-rated workers gain access to higher-level, higher-paying tasks.

Action

• Evaluate which business processes might benefit from on-going outside expertise or labor
• Create clear tasks and clear rewards
• Create processes to vet or rate prospective crowd members on expertise or quality
• Use the crowd to monitor the crowd

Sources:

Personal interviews with Niel Robertson, CEO, Trada http://trada.com/

and Cloudcrowd (via email) http://www.CloudCrowd.com/

Tags: business process, Cloudcrowd, crowdsourcing, Trada

Point: Business model innovation can take a company to the white space that lies beyond its core business.

Story: Mark Johnson, chairman of Innosight, wrote Seizing the White Space to help companies understand whether they have the opportunity (or the necessity) to innovate their business model.  Johnson defines white space as “the range of potential activities not defined or addressed by the company’s current business model.”  In Johnson’s model, white space resides beyond product extensions, lateral growth in the customer base, or incremental product innovation.  Instead, he focuses on innovations that really change the way a company does business.

Because Johnson’s book focuses on business models, he starts with a framework for analyzing and creating business models. The framework is composed of four boxes: the customer value proposition, the profit model, the processes, and resources of the business.

The customer value proposition delineates why the customer values the product or what the customer hires the product to do.  (Click here for more on “hiring a product to do a job.”)

The profit model encompasses all the crucial financial dimensions that determine viability, including the revenue model, cost structure, target margins, and velocity (i.e., cycle times).

The resources and processes boxes consist of what the business needs (people, technology, information, partnerships, etc.) and how the business delivers the CVP within the bounds of financial viability.  Johnson uses this four-box definition of business models throughout the book to analyze different case examples and to illustrate a repeatable process of building new business models.

Next, Johnson presents a three-chapter section on three conditions that call for new business models.  The conditions occur when 1) a company wants to transform an existing market, often due to changing competition 2) a company wishes to create new markets, such as in emerging market countries 3)  industry or economic discontinuities appear.  Johnson refers to these three situations as white space within, white space beyond, and whites pace between, respectively.

Finally, Johnson devotes a three-chapter section on the process of creating and implementing new business models.  First, he delves into the process of designing a new business, emphasizing the customer value proposition.  Second, he covers the implementation of a new business model and the process of incubation, acceleration, and reintegration of the new model back into the organization (if there is one).  Third, Johnson addresses a crucial issue of business model innovation within existing organizations — the challenge of innovation in the face of a dominant incumbent (see also this post for related material on corporate antibodies).

Johnson’s overall point is that business models aren’t arcane or serendipitous magic — they can be intentionally developed and implemented as a repeatable process.

Throughout the book, Johnson uses dozens of interwoven case studies of varying lengths to illustrate his points.  These examples include well-known management-book favorites (Amazon, iPod/iTunes, Dell, Southwest Airlines) as well as less-known examples (Lockheed-Martin, Better World, Hindustan Lever, Tata Motors, Hilti).  His point in using these examples isn’t to provide new business histories or reveal previously-untold best practices but to show how a wide range of businesses fit into his framework of the four-box business model and illustrate his process of seizing the white space.

Figures in the book also provide quick brainstorming fodder:  19 business model analogies, 14 levers on the customer value proposition, and 19 common dimensions of interference between incumbent and new business models.

Overall, the book will be most useful for executives thinking about changing their company’s business model or expanding in radical new directions  The in-depth discussions of business models can also aid entrepreneurs looking to build a business model.  Finally, product innovators should consider this book if they think their innovations involve significant changes in customer value proposition, the profit formula, key resource, key processes.  These changes, by definition, call for a new business model and the potential that the innovative product may need to be treated differently than the company’s previous products.

Action

• Know your current business model
• Look beyond adjacencies to consider how business model innovation can open new horizons
• Watch for opportunities, threats, and economic discontinuities that may call for new business models
• Build and implement new coherently-designed business models as needed

For the next stop on the virtual book tour, see: Braden Kelley, Blogging Innovation and Jeffrey Phillips, Innovate on Purpose

Tags: book review, business model, Innovation, Mark Johnson

Point: Good word-of-mouth can be made even better

Story: The Mayo Clinic is known around the world for reputable, high-quality health care. How can the company extend and expand this good word of mouth? Seth Godin provided an insightful answer during his Online Marketing Innovation Q&A, April 15, 2010 hosted by HSMAmericas.

“When people talk about the Mayo Clinic, they know it’s a good place. But does their conversation lead to an action? Is it specific enough?” People clearly do turn to the Mayo Clinic in a last-ditch attempt to survive rare or hard-to-treat diseases.  But do they also think of the Clinic for more routine (and more common) health treatments such as diagnostics?

Godin contrasted Mayo Clinic’s situation with that of the Pritikin Centers of the 1980s. The Pritikin diet taught people a way to eat that could reduce high blood pressure and cholesterol (leading edge in its time.)  Godin’s own father went on the diet and improved his health. When people commented, “Wow, you look great!” Godin’s father would reply, “I was on the Pritikin Diet. You can read the book or visit their clinics to find out more about it.” Hundreds of other customers were as enthusiastic about the results as Godin’s father was, and word of mouth quickly spread.

The key for the Mayo Clinic, Godin advised, is to emphasize some of the proactive diagnostics that the clinic offers, to give people a reason to go there before having a specific disease. The people who go there and receive the Clinic’s lauded good care and service will be naturally motivated to spread the word.

Action:

1. Expand your product’s or service’s functionality to include common uses, not just rare applications
2. Look at brands as verbs, not adjectives — a brand should be about doing something, not just being “good” or “high-quality”
3. Create word-of-mouth that sparks action, like investigation or emulation — make the people who see the results of your service also want those results for themselves.

Update: Seth Godin also spoke at the World Innovation Forum on June 9, 2010

Tags: Case study, example, marketing

Point: Creating new products & services for developing countries requires radical innovation and opens new opportunities in developed world markets as well

Story: GE Healthcare sells sophisticated medical imaging devices around the world. Historically, they have sold these high-end machines in emerging economies like India. But only 10% of Indian hospitals can afford a $10,000 ECG machine. Reaching the other 90% of the market takes more than simply cutting a few costs. It requires radical innovation and an in-depth understanding of local conditions.

For example, most Indians live in rural areas. That means they don’t have a local hospital to go to. Rather, the machine needs to go to them, and no rural healthcare clinic is going to lug a $10,000 machine into the field even if it could afford the device. Achieving the goal of a lightweight, reliable, simple-to-use ECG machine took radical re-thinking. GE built a device, called the MAC i, that could fit in a shoulder bag, has a built-in replaceable printer, and cost only $500. In addition, because the device would be used in rural locations with scant access to electricity, GE designed a battery that could do 500 ECGs on one charge.  To make it easy to use, GE designed the machine to have only three buttons. Finally, just because the device is inexpensive doesn’t mean it’s dumb.  Because the cost of a copy of software is zero, GE installed professional-level analysis software to aid rural doctors.

With its new MAC i, GE has unlocked a whole new market in developing countries.  Beyond that, GE has also opened up new opportunities back home — and that’s the reverse innovation side of the story.  How? The portable ECG machine with a $500 price tag is ideal for use in ambulances, saving lives of accident victims in rich countries as well.  Cheap, portable, and easy-to-use devices are desirable in any country.

Action:
Reverse innovation means designing a product for a developing country and bringing that innovation back home.

• Make the product extremely low in cost so that it is price-acceptable in developing markets and opens up new sales opportunities in developed markets
• Start from the ground up with a radical rethinking. (See also the Tata Nano example.)
• Plan for intermittent electricity
• Make the product modular to facilitate remote repair
• Make the product easy to use, like GE’s three-button ECG machine

Sources:

Vijay Govindarajan, “Reverse Innovation: A New Strategy for Creating the Future” HSM webinar March 18, 2010

Prof. Govindarajan will be speaking more on this topic at the World Business Forum in NYC October 5-6, 2009

India Tech Online

Tags: emerging markets, How-to, Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan, World Business Forum

Point: Ted Turner’s tips for seeing over the horizon

Story: Many leaders are described as “visionary” — I’m always curious as to how they got that way. Is it something they’re born with, or something we can we all learn?  I had a chance to participate in a Silicon Flatirons Q&A with media mogul Ted Turner as we probed this question with Ted.

Before CNN, people didn’t think that a 24-hour-a-day news channel was viable.  How did Ted prove them wrong? “It helps to see over the horizon,” Ted said.  ‘Most people can’t do it, but I think your brain is like a muscle. And just like any other muscle, you can use it and your brain will improve.”

Ted elaborated: “I have a 128 IQ, but 140 is genius.  I was in the 97th percentile, so that means 3 percent of people were smarter than me. I knew I was going to have to work hard if I wanted to accomplish something in life. So I read a lot — classics, warfare, Alexander the Great — I used my brain all the time. Everything I did was education.  Others just shot the breeze, wasted time — nothing wrong with that, but you can’t get to the top doing that.”

Ted’s answer points to a combination of aptitude and hard work. (I think it’s interesting that Ted thought being in the 97th percentile meant he’d have to work hard if he wanted to accomplish something — it reminded me of Andy Grove’s “only the paranoid survive” philosophy.)

What did Ted see over the horizon? As Ted described it, the idea for CNN was born of his own desire to stay on top of the news but, as a busy executive, not having time to watch the news during the two times a day it was on during the 1970s. “I knew I was gambling with CNN, but I knew it would work,” Ted said. “At the time, the news came on at 6:30 and again at 11pm. I never saw the news — it was inconvenient. I knew that having news on 24 hours a day so you could check in anytime was something that people would want.”

Beyond CNN, Ted was also working to build a multichannel universe. CNN fit into this universe perfectly.  In the 1970s, three broadcast networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — controlled the programming people could see.  For example, sports games across the country were televized, but they couldn’t be seen outside the local area because the broadcasters had a monopoly.  “The broadcasters had carved up the games,” Ted said, dividing the NFL, AFL and Monday Night Football between them. “Everyone paid the same prices and made the same profit. All three networks were happy, but I wasn’t happy” — customers weren’t being served, and incumbents had no incentive to change.

This is where Ted’s reading and habit of learning came into play again. “It was in early 1975 that I saw an article about communications satellites in Broadcasting magazine,” Ted recalled. Reading the article, Ted realized that he could use one satellite “antenna” in space to cover all of North America.  He’d found a way to compete with the established networks.

There’d be more hard work along the way — “We sweated payroll for ten years,” Ted said — but Ted relished the challenges. “The way to lead is with infectious enthusiasm, get everyone enthusiastic about what we’re doing.”

Action:
* Fit your current strategy into the larger picture: Ted’s vision for CNN was part of his overall goal to build a multi-channel universe
* Lead with infectious enthusiasm

Sources:
Silicon Flatirons Q&A November 13, 2009

Call Me Ted, by Ted Turner

Tags: leadership, profile, Ted Turner

Point: You may not be able to predict the future, but you can prepare for it by tracking early trends and staying open to disruptions.

Story: What will the web look like in 20 years? Stuart Miniman of the Office of the CTO at EMC Corporation asked me to contribute my thoughts on this, as part of EMC’s ON magazine celebration of the web’s 20th anniversary.

My predictions for 2030? I know that I don’t know, but I do follow some heuristics that are helpful regardless of which future materializes.

“You can’t predict the future,” said Google’s Eric Schmidt back in 1993 when he was president of Sun Technology Enterprises (a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems). “But you can estimate it.  Your estimations are based on understanding the model of technology.”  Schmidt’s mental model of technology involves looking at underlying drivers and expecting innovation from anywhere. “Don’t think your company is the best and will be the first to come with an innovation in your area.  That attitude will lead you to become blindsided.”

With that in mind, here are two trends I’ll be watching closely for emerging innovations:
* Geo-Spatial Data and Semantic Smarts

Consider these facts by Jeff Jonas, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist, Entity Analytic Solutions, IBM Software Group:

Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate, whether you have GPS or not. Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not.

The implications? Companies can use data analytics to learn unprecedented amounts of information on their customers (how far they travel, locations where they hang out, the people they hang out with). It may sound like big brother, but some consumers are already turning this into a big game and social lifestyle with the help of companies like Foursquare, Loopt, Brightkite, etc. There’ll be opportunities for companies to use this data combined with web-based data to serve their customers better.

With every device and service gathering more and more data and becoming more connected, systems will begin to “understand” the meaning of the data to give people what they want.  I don’t know if real AI will ever happen, but with all the available data, social tools, and clever people building clever companies, it seems that devices are going to act like they know the meaning behind the data and and take or suggestion actions to help you. For example, if your cellphone knows your calendar’s next appointment, your location, and gets the Tweets about the traffic jam on the highway, it can alert you to leave a little earlier or alert whomever you’re meeting that you’ll be late.

* Social/Distributed Decision-Making

Knowledge-intensive tasks such new product and service development will be aided by enterprise-wide collaboration systems with built-in voting, reputation systems, and predictive markets.  These concepts were envisioned by MIT Prof. Thomas W. Malone before the Web as we know it even existed. His publications, such as Computers, Networks and the Corporation, describe the organizational changes that networked computers would bring.

Tom Malone now heads the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT. The center’s basic research question is:  How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?

I think one of the most powerful uses of the web in the future is for crowdsourcing and open innovation to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems.  Take, for example, that Innocentive just announced a GlobalGiveback Innovation Challenge Set to help solve some of the world’s water problems through open innovation. Other crowdsourcing platforms like ideas4all.com are enabling entrepreneurs to suggest product, service and business ideas to win funding.  The web will enable collaboration on a global scale that will let us marshal our creative energies to tackle global issues.

What do you think?

And, yes, whatever the future brings, there’ll be an app for that.

Action

• Look for things that are becoming ubiquitous but aren’t being used as much as they could be.
• Avoid self-centered attitudes about the future. Just because you don’t want to be tracked doesn’t mean others don’t want to be tracked or that someone won’t create a fun and rewarding reason to change your mind about tracking.
• Look for chocolate+peanut-butter combinations like geo-spatial data + semantics.
• Test out some crowdsourcing platforms (ideas4all.com is public and ongoing) to get a feel for how they work. Consider how you could apply them.

Sources:

EMC’s ON magazine: The Web at Twenty

Jeff Jonas: Your Movements Speak for Themselves

Eric Schmidt at the University of Colorado-Boulder, February 9, 1993

Tags: crowdsourcing, decision-making, future, geo-spatial, open innovation, planning, predictions, semantic web, trends

Point:  Accelerate innovation by finding an analogous solution from a different industry.

Story:
Henry Ford’s assembly line is often touted as a breakthrough innovation. What’s less known is that Ford got the idea by seeing the “disassembly line” process of butchering hogs at the Philip Armour meatpacking company in Chicago. Similar techniques were also already being used by Campbell’s to automate canned food production.

Adopting ideas from other industries and applying them to your own industry is a powerful and proven source of innovation. But what if you don’t know which industry to examine, or where to look for that potentially breakthrough idea? Solutions may arrive serendipitously as you visit companies and read widely, but how do you accelerate the process and make it systematic?

One exciting solution I came across was described by Jim Todhunter, CTO of Invention Machine at the Open Innovation Summit last month. Invention Machine’s Goldfire software uses semantic technology to access a vast collection of scientific principles, patents, articles and Deep Web technical websites (meaning you can’t find them via standard search engines like Google). Simply put, Goldfire automates searching for analogous solutions in different industries.  I talked with Todhunter to learn more about how Goldfire, an innovation platform, can help a company innovate systematically.

Todhunter described how a manufacturer of plumbing fixtures used adjacencies to remove lead from their plumbing fixtures.  Companies have long known the dangers of lead and have substituted copper pipes for lead ones and stopped using lead-based solders for plumbing. But most of us don’t realize that fixtures like brass faucets also contain lead in the brass alloys. The reason faucets contain lead is because lead makes the brass machinable. A couple percent of lead mixed into the copper and zinc of the brass makes it easier to mill attractive surfaces, drill clean holes, and create smooth pipe threads on the brass.  In short, the lead helps a faucet manufacturer create attractive, high-quality faucets. But over time, some of the lead in the brass leaches out into the water that flows through the faucet, which poses some health risks.

The faucet maker realized they needed help to solve the problem and turned to Invention Machine’s Goldfire software to find feasible external innovations. “Goldfire helped them in two ways,” Todhunter said, “in terms of what are called adjacencies and proof points.”

Adjacencies involve finding potentially analogous innovations found in other industries. For example, faucet makers aren’t the only companies worried about producing quality products from hard-to-machine materials.  “On the adjacency side, when the company started to examine the problem with Goldfire, they were able to discover that there were technologies and methods used in other industries that could obviate the need for lead in brass,” Todhunter said. In particular, the manufacturer discovered that woodworkers have clever techniques for milling wood.  These techniques could be adapted to machining lead-free brass.

The second help to accelerate the innovative solution is called proof points — tangible examples that prove a solution is commercially feasible.  In terms of proof points (i.e., “are there ways to do this?”), the manufacturer was able to discover a very clear proof point through Goldfire: someone had already discovered a way to make millable lead-free brass.  “The client didn’t even have to go invent this material — they were able to find a supplier,” Todhunter said.  “As a result, the faucet maker accelerated their time to market for delivery on this kind of concept tremendously because this discovery created a partnering opportunity.”

Action:

• Clearly define the problem at hand (e.g., lead-free brass AND attractive, high-quality machined features)
• Survey adjacent industries or applications for ideas that overcome the problem (e.g., tricks for milling a hard-to-mill material)
• Survey external innovations and suppliers for proof points (e.g., a commercially available, lead-free brass alloy that is machinable)
• Combine externally-found adjacencies and proof points (i.e., use the best adjacent methods on the best proof point solutions)

For Additional Information:

Computer power yields radical ideas, by Stuart F. Brown, Fortune

Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates by Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson

Tags: Innovation, Open Innovation Summit, software