Point: Good communication skills drive open innovation and collaboration

Story: At the World Research Group’s 2010 Open Innovation Summit, many presenters stressed the role of communication for both innovation leaders and in promoting open innovation initiatives.  Top-notch communication skills with senior executives, peers, partners help drive open innovation success.

Stefan Lindegaard, author of the The Open Innovation Revolution, and Greg Fox, Senior Director & CMO – Strategic Alliances at Cisco, held an invitation-only Think Tank group at the Summit to identify and discuss the key qualities of leaders of open innovation.  The group ranked communications in the top three characteristics (vision and adaptability were also key).  The Think Tank group emphasized the importance of leaders using a deliberate communications strategy with holistic internal and external communication.  Good open innovation leaders have the confidence to share what they know but also maintain proper disclosure limits with open innovation partners.

Nona Minnifield Cheeks, Chief, Innovative Partnerships Program Office, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center noted that consistent messages and behavior (i.e., walking the talk) improve trust and outcomes. It’s vital to establish clear sense of why the organization is doing open innovation, set context, and create sense of urgency, Cheeks said.

In addition to Think Tank members, other presenters at the conference concurred about the crucial role of communications in innovation.  For example, Dr. Gail Martino, Principal Scientist in the Open Innovation Group at Unilever, described seven soft skills communicators need to persuade, inspire and garner support for open innovation efforts. Communication involves being a good listener, she said, to build trust and feel empathy for others’ situations. At Unilever, top-notch communication skills include a balance of being convincing but also being an advocate for the partner.  Balanced communications also include conveying both the rewards and risks of innovation, not just mindless cheerleading.

Moises Norena, Director of Global Innovation and PMR at Whirlpool Corporation, described how Whirlpool aligned innovation to strategy through Whirlpool Foundations, which communicated to all employees and helped transcend silos. Whirlpool develop training programs for all levels of employees, including a mandatory half-hour web course that taught all employees about Whirlpool’s innovation strategy and created common language for innovation at the appliance maker.  Cisco‘s Sharon Wong recommended that open innovation platform operators communicate simply and often to maintain excitement and interest in the open innovation effort.

Jeff Boehm, Chief Marketing Officer of Invention Machine, focused his presentation on the role of communications as driver for innovation, collaboration and revenue.  He explained why and how marketing or internal communications supports the use of a good innovation platform and satisfaction of top-management mandates.

Boehm suggested that three key elements are necessary — but not individually sufficient — for creating successful, ongoing innovation programs. First, offering a powerful platform for innovation helps but doesn’t guarantee that innovation occurs.  A “build-it-and-they-will come” approach doesn’t work because too many people are too busy to take the time to find and participate in even the most exciting innovation initiative.

Second, top-down mandates may be necessary for engaging busy people, but mandates alone aren’t sufficient to ensure innovation participation, either.  Employees typically assume that daily operational pressures trump innovation mandates, so it’s easy for them to short-change innovation or allow it to slip out of awareness over time.  That implies using a third element — marketing or internal communications — to reach users, communicate the value of the program, remind them of mandates, and convey the excitement and accomplishments of the effort. For example, putting an innovation icon onto employee badges creates a natural reminder and talking point about the effort.

Boehm, who has extensive experience leading these communication efforts, listed the following four actions as the critical steps for internal communications the drive participation in innovation initiatives:
Action:

1. Make innovation relevant. Ask different users (executives, peers, functional silos, external partners, etc.) about their struggles and challenges and show how the innovation initiative can help them.
2. Promote innovation. Create a roadmapped stream of communications that spans time and multiple channels (e.g., lunchroom posters, emails, newsletters, tent cards, tchotchkes, badges) to reach, inform, and encourage people to participate.
3. Provide easy calls to action for innovation.  Avoid obstacles such as convoluted registrations, approvals processes, and delays.
4. Sustain the momentum of innovation with ongoing communications.  Continuously relay successes, platform improvements, ongoing activities, training, and new information to avoid attenuation of attention to innovation.

Open Innovation Summit Think Tank Members:

• Greg Fox, Senior Director & CMO – Strategic Alliances, Cisco
• Dr. Andrew G. Gilicinski, Director, R&D – Innovation Networks, Clorox
• Jeff Boehm, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Invention Machine
• Dr. Jan M.K. Jaferian, VP Intellectual Property Manitowoc Foodservice
• Stefan Lindegaard, Founder & Chief Facilitator, 15inno.com
• Nona Minnifield Cheeks, MBA, Chief – Innovation Partnerships Program Office, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Andrea Meyer, MLIS, President, Working Knowledge

To join the 2nd Annual Open Innovation Summit LinkedIn group, click here.

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).

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.