Innovation Science

Countdown to Innovation

Jeffrey Pheffer, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, recently wrote a short column in Business 2.0 magazine on the usefulness of deadlines. He gives a couple examples of their usefulness demonstrating how they can be effective at forcing decisions, actions, and agreements.

Pheffer notes that when Steve Jobs set a June release date for the iPhone back in January, he gave a useful deadline to the iPhone development team in finishing the product that forced them to finalize the product—but of course, anyone who works in development knows that product launch deadlines have this effect, Pheffer doesn’t need to summon an iExample to make this case.

An interesting question for this blog, of course, is whether deadlines can apply to innovation. Well…yes and no.

A process and therefore a deadline can be applied to innovation, as has been frequently mentioned with respect to design innovation. A practical example to shed light on this is the application of deadlines to research, to the extent that research represents innovation (a topic for a future post).

Deadlines can and should be applied to research projects. People with no experience with research think that researchers must work in a timeless vacuum, a limbo of thinking and investigating until the researchers discover something brilliant. The reality is that professional researchers—in academia and in industry—base their work around the investigation of hypotheses. Researchers usually have considerable expertise in the area that they are investigating and have a very good idea of the process that they are going to conduct to test their hypotheses. In fact, research grants that fund the majority of university research require a timeline for the research project, with anticipated milestones and deliverables explicitly stated. Any responsible company conducting research will require the same.

There is a difference between research project plans/deadlines and ones for product development, however, and that is that research plans are organic. Due to the nature of research, new information is often discovered that leads to further investigation. This unanticipated addition to the project plan is consistent with the stated goals at the outset of the project and is therefore both valid and valuable to execute, but it is a significant change to the plan that is usually not experienced in product development. Predicting task durations and milestone dates with research is more difficult when the outcomes of the tasks are unknown (the nature of research), but experienced researchers can still estimate them with reasonable accuracy because they have confidence that they know how to get answers to their hypotheses.

So, deadlines can be applied to research and, by association, to innovation.

There are aspects of innovation, however, that cannot given deadlines. The act of creativity cannot be given a deadline to those who are not creative. One cannot be told to have an innovative idea by Friday. Finding connections between seemingly incongruous technologies and concepts, one specific embodiment of innovation, is something that creative people live with and think about on a constant basis—they do not schedule flashes of genius.

Innovation has many embodiments: process oriented ones that make up the majority of innovative breakthrough, but also those “aha” moments where an opportunity is simply discovered. The former represents the majority of corporate innovation and should be executed by every company interested in creative product development, with schedules and deadlines in place. The latter represents key innovations that are not scheduled but result from creating of supporting culture thinking and having the type of employees to who are able to produce such creative acts.

TED Talks, We Listen

There have been lots of links to the recently posted videos of TED talks from the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, a yearly meeting where 1000 influential (board-of-director-level) people are invited to Monterey to think and talk big thoughts. There are currently six 18–minute presentations posted, including one by Al Gore. More are promised.

I wanted to comment on several talks, beginning with one by Sir Ken Robinson who speaks about the need to rework our education system to preserve the creative spirit in people. He suggests that the curricula at public school programs are designed to produce university scholars and that this is too narrow a definition for what schools should produce. Sir Ken says that children are boundlessly creative because “they’re not frightened of being wrong,” and goes on to say that we learn to be frightened as we grow older and that most people are indeed terrified of being wrong by the time they start working at companies, with their creative spirit dissipated. Sir Ken blames our school systems for not nurturing creativity, stating that

We are educating people out of their creative capacities…we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather, we get educated out of it.

Sir Ken is a charismatic speaker and engaging to the audience but unfortunately, to my taste, he spends too much time on jokes and stories and not building his case towards revising our public school goals. This is a particularly resonant topic given the work that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing. With only eighteen minutes to influence some of the top leaders in the US, I would have liked to have seen a more direct focus on his very important thesis.

Al Gore discusses the global warming presentation that he gave earlier in the TED conference and which forms the backbone of the movie An Inconvenient Truth. He also spends several minutes on jokes, at the beginning of his talk and of the self-deprecating kind, but he eventually gets down to business and he is indeed all business at addressing the issue of spreading the word about global warming. Not only is his presentation compelling, but he is clearly reaching out to the attendees and trying to make a difference.

Majora Carter gives an emotional and inspiring talk about bringing green space to the Bronx and the need to consider urban development as a way of moving our society forward.

My favorite talk is from Hans Rosling, director of Sweden’s top university, the Karolinska Institute. Hans gives a tour de force data-driven overview of world development that uses data displays that would make Edward Tufte weep with envy. His presentation was fascinating: compelling and rich with information. Anyone who watches this video and does not finish with an intense desire to do similar data mining in their own fields is a poster child for Sir Ken Robinson’s thesis that schooling eradicates creativity—see above.

Inspiring Creativity at Ferrari

The latest Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a story on innovation processes at Ferrari. I previously posted on an HBR story about Porsche's innovative use of students within their R&D process--I guess Ferrari is making sure that Porsche doesn't steal all of the innovation limelight!

Mario Almondo, head of Ferrari's HR, tells how Ferrari has on-site creativity classes outside of business hours that are open to its 3000 employees. These classes are on a variety of topics, but they all relate to creativity: sculpting, photography, writing. The classes usually involve an artist describing their craft and talking how they create and obtain inspiration, with questions from the Ferrari attendees. Sometimes a moderator leads the discussion (Almondo mentions once using a local TV talk show host), and the classes are purposefully kept small to allow interaction between the artist and Ferrari employees.

How does this help Ferrari? Well, that is unclear, but the intent is to nurture creative thinking in their employees and hope that it flows into their work--classes are in Ferrari buildings and not at local schools to create an association between creativity and their jobs. Almondo states that

We want to let the creativity metaphor work at the level of their unconscious.

I'd like to hear from an executive within Ferrari's R&D department about whether this initiative has increased employees' creativity in their job performance and generated useful ideas.

Navigating to New Worlds of Innovation

Guy Kawasaki, the former Chief Evangelist at Apple and startup guru, has a great blog dishing advice to entrepreneurs. You can read about what to ask a startup if you are being recruited, how to run a board meeting, how to be a great moderator at a conference, how to raise angel capital for your start-up, the list goes on. I highly recommend subscribing to his feed.

Kawasaki recently posted, surprisingly, on a book called What Would Jackie Do?, a self-help book with lessons from the life and style of Jackie Onassis. Not the kind of book that you expect a technology and business expert to post about. The point that Kawasaki really wanted to make (I think) is at the very end of his post:

One of my recommendations for innovators is that they eat information like a bird eats food. (If you had the metabolic rate of a hummingbird, you would ingest approximately 155,000 calories per day.) This means reading voraciously--and not just HTML for Bozos and Encryption for Lovers--but books like these that are seemingly unrelated to “business.”

Looking for new ideas and new opportunities from new sources is an important tactic to finding innovation. If you stick to the usual sources of information for your industry/ technology, you may be inspired to develop incremental innovations, but you will be unlikely to develop a radically innovative idea. By exposing creative people to fields of expertise different than their own, revolutionary ideas can be developed in a lateral-thinking way. What's not required is a whack to the head, however--what's required is exposure to ideas, procedures, techniques, approaches, and technology that are incremental innovations in other fields but would be radical ones in yours.

The key to the success of this tactic--harvesting ideas from other fields--is in identifying which areas have the greatest potential for opportunity. Sending your key R&D engineers to Fashion Week in NYC may get you some excited high-fives, but be will unlikely to produce value for your company. Fields outside of your own but with overlapping technologies or areas of interest need to be identified--areas that may be  producing new concepts that could be translated to your own products and services. In my field of auditory science, there are many examples of established techniques and theories from vision science that have been adapted to hearing to develop innovative new concepts in audition. The research center that I run is looking outside our field of hearing impairment to concepts in cognitive science to inform technology development in hearing aids.

Is it enough to send R&D people to new and different conferences? No. Every potential new concept from another field has to be examined from the perspective of a technical expert from your own field with knowledge of:

• you industry's current and past technology
• your industry's market definition
• your industry's customer needs
• your industry's open research issues.

If your opportunity explorer doesn't have this knowledge of your industry, opportunities for plundering will not be identified because your representative won't have the expertise to identify one when it is revealed, and irrelevant concepts will be recruited by your representative because they are unable to provide on-site analysis, synthesis and filtering of the new approaches to which they are exposed.

Each potential opportunity from the other field that you are exploring has to be viewed through your own lens, from the perspective of the needs of your own industry. When you see an idea that is new to you, ask yourself

Is there an opportunity to apply this in my field?

What nugget of new information here can be applied to solving problems that currently exist in my field?

Once you broaden your field of scope to absorb information from outside of your normal sources of information (although Jackie O may be a little too far outside), you will be surprised to find out how much useful information there is out there. The key is being able to navigate your way to the new worlds of ideas, and have the creativity to identify potential opportunities when you see them.

The Art of Innovation, Invention, and Creativity

I spent an enjoyable evening today at dinner with friends talking about innovation: specifically, what differentiates the characteristic of innovative from creative from inventive.

Answer the following questions:

       A. e e cummings’ poetry is:

1. creative
2. innovative
3. inventive

        B. Name a painter who was creative but not innovative.

        C. Can an artist be innovative but not creative?

        D. Name an invention that was neither creative nor innovative.

These were some of the questions that we discussed, and I’d be curious to hear answers from those reading this and their reasons for giving them.

You’ll notice that our discussion tended away from technology and more towards artistic fields. This was intended as a way to shed new light on how we innately think of these concepts, what representations of these concepts have been built up in our lives. Thinking about which artists you consider creative, or innovative, or inventive, and why you make that distinction can illuminate our application of these terms to business, science and technology--fields where these terms get applied so often that their differentiation has become obscured.

With respect to the arts, the term creative seemed to require that the observer have a visceral response to the artwork, some level of appreciation or aesthetic response. The mere act of creating something does not demand that the act be denoted “creative” in this context. A work could be different and inventive while not inducing in the viewer/reader a response that creates the reaction “creative”. We can understand this in technology through Edison’s quote, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This quote from our greatest inventor can also apply to the act of invention. Developing something new can result simply from hard work and does not necessarily require any creativity at all.

Creativity also requires the context of history—a piece of art is judged creative when considering what has been done previously by that artist and by other artists. Context helps define what is creative and what is derivative.

Innovation, however, requires the contexts of both the past and the future. Innovation must be creative (the past, see above), but must also cause a change in the creations of others (the future). If someone creates a piece of art that incorporates a new technique, the piece would only be innovative if it inspired other artists to change how they create art, perhaps by creating a movement based around a new technique or approach. Innovation thus demands a social context of some sort that creativity does not.

So when is something an invention? Obviously it must be new, but if I throw paint at a piece of paper , then I’ve created something new while not something inventive. It must be new in the sense that it has novelty and utility. Unlike creativity, inventiveness seems to require the creation of a tool of some sort that others can use. Invention can somehow be disassociated from creativity in the sense that one can slog one’s way to an invention (or utility creation) without the flash of inspiration and imagination that is associated with creativity. One can create an invention simply by trying something over and over again until something works. This would not be a creative process. Nor would it be an innovation.

Or is this all wrong? I have a suspicion—no, I’m sure—that there are inconsistencies in these arguments and some of the statements are outright wrong. Which ones, I’m not sure. But it certainly is worth thinking about, and it definitely makes for a great dinner discussion.

Morals for Management

I just read this post over at The Innovation Insider, Fortune Magazine's blog on innovation. It summarizes a Wall Street Journal interview with Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons. They list "5 Tips From Richard Parsons for Managing in Times of Rapid Change."

Tip #2 is

Don't burn down the house to cash out.

I put this right up there with "Don't kill," "Don't steal" and "Don't lie." I guess I'm surprised that this is one of the top tips for managing by the CEO of Time Warner. Perhaps the Enron attitude detailed in The Smartest Guys in the Room is more pervasive that I previously thought.

Tip #3 is

Don't treat creative people like they are just cogs in a machine.

This is true, but I think it falls in my more general category of "understand what motivates your employees." If you follow my axiom, then you will find that creative employees have quite different expectations of what they want from work than non-creative employees. Creative employees don't want to be cogs and they don't want to just do what they're told, they want to contribute to the company in new ways in order to get satisfaction with from their job. If they don't, you risk them leaving for a job where they can be contribute creatively. The worst thing that you can say to a creative employee is to "keep your head down and just do your assigned job." The same holds for every other employee: understand what their motive for being at work is, and figure out how to optimally satisfy their motivation while satisfying the needs of their company.

To be fair to Richard Parsons, the 5 tips from Richard Parsons were probably inferred and extracted from his interview by some WSJ writer/editor without Parsons actually naming the tips himself.