Innovator’s dilemmas: are organizational antibodies good or bad?
“Why can’t companies kill projects that are clearly doomed? (…) the failures I’ve examined resulted, ironically, from a fervent and widespread belief among managers in the inevitability of their projects’ ultimate success. This sentiment typically originates, naturally enough, with a project’s champion; it then spreads throughout the organization, often to the highest levels, reinforcing itself each step of the way. The result is what I call collective belief, and it can lead an otherwise rational organization into some very irrational behavior.”
Read Isabelle Royer’s article, “When Bad Ideas Won’t Die“, on Harvard’s Working Knowledge.
“Exert strong leadership on the innovation strategy and portfolio decisions; integrate innovation into the company’s basic business mentality; align the amount and type of innovation to the company’s business; manage the natural tension between creativity and value capture; neutralize organizational “antibodies”; recognize that the basic unit of innovation is a network that includes people and knowledge both inside and outside the organization; and create the right metrics and rewards for innovation.”
Read Sean Silverthorne’s review of “Making Innovation Work.”
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I just finished reading a couple of articles talking about the negative impact of “organizational antibodies”. This term relates to people as well as corporate behaviors and policies hampering innovation. However, I’m not sure this medical metaphor works. Antibodies happen to be key to our immune system by helping us tackle bacteria and viruses. Based on that fact, metaphorically speaking, one would think that organizational antibodies might not be such a bad thing.
I would suggest reading the above two quotes one more time. It seems to me that the first one questions the role of yespeople and the lack of organizational antibodies. The second one makes a point about neutralizing naysayers to be able to make progress. This shows two extremes of a continuum. Innovators need to aware of the reality of their projects and organizations to drive a project to completion. The same applies to figuring out when to exit a project and to move to the next thing.
| J. de Francisco |  |
|
| Chicago, IL. 30 June 08 |  |
 |
|
Innovator’s dilemmas: vaporware vs. innovation?
“After being in the mobile phone market for more than a decade, now we would like to divert our attention on innovation. In the near future, one can expect some innovative mobile phones from Samsung (…) “We would like to incorporate the word innovation in our brand value.”
Youngcho Chi, Senior VP, Strategic Planning Team, Samsung Electronics as quoted by Business Standard.
“It’s important to understand how innovation can effect the perceived value of your brand. Done right, innovations can keep your brand fresh and relevant to those people who already know and understand it. Innovation can also open your brand to new market opportunities.”
Mike Bawden’s post “A Little Innovation Goes A Long Way” on Brand Central Station.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
When a company shifts gears to use innovation to build brand value the first set of questions that come to mind happen to be about the specific things that are going to change. In the high-tech market, establishing the innovative quality of a given brand requires an unequivocal commitment to new product and market development leading to serial innovations (unless the company already had innovative products and just didn’t do a good job at marketing them.)
Often times, the word “innovation” is being purposely misused as part of vaporware. That eventually translates into unfulfilled promises and lack of brand credibility. Nonetheless, the fact is that vaporware continues to be leveraged as a short term tactic aimed to either prevent or delay customer decisions on competing products and vendors.
The above issue should not be confused with the kind of thought leadership driven by well intentioned visionaries and market creation efforts involving next generation technologies. In any case, most would agree that an innovation qualifies as such when the concept has been productized and user adoption validates it, thus effectively building brand value.
| J. de Francisco | |
|
| Chicago, IL. 26 June 08 | |
| |
|
Philips’ InnoHub
“The InnoHub aims to create an environment in which breakthrough innovations can occur in an open innovation setting. At the InnoHub, end-users, product developers, and various business partners come together to actively develop new ideas for products and services in an inspiring, real-life setting.”
“The concept is combining three aspects: a physical environment designed to inspire breakthrough ideas, innovation methodology and the knowledge of the stakeholders involved in the process.”
http://www.vtt.fi/liitetiedostot/uutiset/FactSheetPhilipsInnoHub15062008.pdf
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Later this year Philips and VTT will launch a new InnoHub in Finland which is aimed to deliver a physical environment facilitating research on new product concepts, usability testing and technology demonstrations.
This lab will also work with partners and universities on projects ranging from ideation to product design by involving experts in cross-functional teams. This kind of consulting and research services can be subcontracted by external companies.
InnoHub allows for recreating different environments such as a full-sized apartment, a fashion store and a hospital ward as seen in the below pictures. These rooms deliver a test-bed enabling researchers to study users’ experiences in advance to conducting more costly field trials.
Usability testing often involves specific use cases (tasks) and a cross-section of target users to determine whether a product meets its purpose in the context it was designed for. Innovation springs from trial & error coupled with a continuous improvement mindset. This means iterating designs (i.e. from mockups to final products) drawing from test results, the observation and understanding of specific behaviors as well as users’ feedback. Designers also get a first hand experience by undertaking these tests themselves. But it should be noted that their intimate knowledge of the product makes them expert power users whose experiences could be very different from those of end users.
If interested in how Philips addresses innovation I would suggest reading “Foresight by Design“. Other company’s practices can be found on this blog’s innovation recipes page.
Picture credits: Philips.
| J. de Francisco | |
|
| Naperville, IL. 18 June 08 | |
| |
|
New book: "Tuned In"
“We had independent research telling us that market-driven companies were 31% more profitable, spent twice as much on research as they did on development, and had 20% higher customer satisfaction rates.”
“Tuned in companies know exactly who they are—they’ve discovered what their market values most and they operate in a world of clarity. They spend time on things that really matter and ignore those that don’t. Surprisingly, tuned in companies spend very little time worrying about competition.”
Read the interview with C. Stull, P. Myers and D. Meerman Scott, the authors of Tuned In.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
This book will be released later this month. In the meantime, you can visit the author’s blog. As far as I can tell, the author’s talk about a 6 step process for business success, which I think translates into marketing fundamentals such as crafting a robust value proposition around a current customer problem and executing on the basis of delivering a superior experience. This is how I would portray that:
Value proposition:
- Identify and focus on unsolved pressing problems.
- Articulate and quantify the incremental benefit.
- Assess the value to your customer and the willingness to spend and pay.
- Articulate memorable concepts that motivate buyers to take action.
Customer focus:
- Communicate in a language and medium your customers can easily understand and relate to.
- Create and support quality experiences as a source of competitive advantage.
- Understand the purchasing process, buyer personas and change agents.
| J. de Francisco | |
|
| Naperville, IL. 17 June 08 | |
| |
|
Innovator’s Dilemmas: today or tomorrow?
“Building the future is really about building the present. Yes, you must be able to see where you want to go, but you will never get there if you spend too much time only looking toward it.”
Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Group, the world’s fourth largest advertising group, based in Paris.
“For five years in a row, companies in the IRI study have cited “growing the business through innovation” as their biggest problem (…) other top concerns have included “accelerating innovation” and “balancing long-term/short-term R&D objectives/focus” (…) Although U.S. companies are spending more on R&D overall than they have in recent years, they’re putting that money mainly into new project development and neglecting other areas that are important to long-term innovation efforts.”
“Where More R&D Dollars Should Go”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2007. Jim Scinta is Chair of the Industrial Research Institute’s Research on Research Committee and manager of the heavy oil division in R&D at ConocoPhilips.
I just recalled having seen some commercial aimed to business people which talked about fish with a memory span of less than three seconds. The advertiser is implying that many organizations don’t learn from past actions and do not happen to invest time and efforts to look at what’s next and plan accordingly. Speaking of fish, as far as science is concerned, it appears that even gold fish can actually remember things for a few months instead of just a few seconds. Nonetheless, I think the point made by that commercial about just focusing on short term deliverables and missing the larger picture would be well taken by many.
About ten years ago, when working on one of my early strategy jobs my boss asked me to address the following questions:
- what do we need to do today to deliver on current business objectives?
- what do we need to start doing today to remain in business in the future?
- what is that path between 1 and 2? what are the moving targets?
So one of my projects first involved mapping out current business and technology trends as well as identifying early signals pointing to emerging trends. The outcome of this 3 month exercise came down to scenario planning delivering insights and supporting data on the state of our market and new opportunities followed by specific recommendations and action items. Drawing from that analysis, I eventually took a product management job to launch a new software product. This helped me better understand not only the links between strategy and implementation but also the pressing business needs driving the short term focus of those working on revenue generating products.
Striking the right balance between work that needs to be done today for both the present and the future of the business is not piece of cake. This is a dilemma even when conducting research for innovative projects. For instance, do you focus your research budget on understanding and addressing today’s unmet customer needs or do you focus on engineering a solution based on how those needs and problem statements might evolve, let’s say a year or two from today, or on new ones likely to see the light when your product is scheduled to hit the market?
My take is that by the time I launch a new product I wouldn’t like to base the first release on old news, which might no longer apply to a new market reality. Nonetheless, forecasting and prioritizing what product features are worth first developing is like taking an ride on a roller coaster. So teams either embrace calculated risk taking and/or place their trust on a visionary leader, which is another dilemma I’ll discuss in a future post.
Picture credits: Digital image content © 1997-2007 Hemera Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Jupiter Images Corp. All Rights Reserved.
| J. de Francisco | |
|
| Chicago, 26 May 08 | |
| |
|
