The Framework for Innovation

A Guide to the Body of Innovation Knowledge

Frank Voehl, H. James Harrington, Rick Fernandez, Brett Trusko

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351645287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The innovation infrastructure and master plan described in this book offers a detailed and comprehensive approach to one of the most difficult and challenging problems facing entrepreneurs involved in innovation at any scale enterprise: the problem of how to govern your organization's innovation initiatives in the middle of turbulent change. Progress in any field requires the development of a framework, a structure that organizes the accumulating knowledge, enables people to master it, and unifies the key discoveries into a set of principles that

makes them understandable and actionable.

For starters, successful innovation requires an integrated design process, beginning with integration in the design of the enterprise, the design of the product, along with the design and implementation of new technologies. Such an integrated design effort requires good collaboration and management of the design framework, and should be supported by efficient knowledge management techniques and tools; If innovation is to help a business grow and improve its competitiveness, it is also important to plan the innovation carefully.

This book provides a holistic, multidisciplinary framework that will enable your organization and its leaders to take a strategic approach to innovation. The framework combines non-traditional,

creative approaches to business innovation with conventional strategy development models. The framework model brings together perspectives from many complementary disciplines: the non-traditional approaches to innovation found in the business creativity movement; multiple-source strategy consulting; the new product development perspective of many leading industrial design firms; qualitative consumer/customer research; future-based research found in think tanks and traditional scenario planning; and organizational development (OD) practices that examine the effectiveness of an organization's culture, processes, and structure.

Though some ideas may just "fall from the sky" or "come out of the blue", an organization should also have a strategic vision of how the business and the enterprise will successfully develop. It should not just wait for the innovation to arrive arbitrarily, but rather proactively plan for innovation incorporating market trends, the competitive landscape, new technology availability, and changes in customer preferences and trends in order to create a flexible in-house innovation process. Such an enterprise will also pro-actively manage the knowledge supply chain that supports innovation, as outlined in this book #7 of Management Handbook for Results series.

The framework outlined in this handbook consists of a well-integrated cohesive set of practices that inspires imaginative innovation teams to look beyond the obvious and explore a broad range of possibilities to identify significant opportunities and make informed decisions about the most promising paths to pursue. The goal is to create a shared vision for growth, along with defining pragmatic action plans that bridge from the future back to the present, while attempting to align the organization around the requirements for success.

1

Preparing Your Organization
for Innovation

A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows what people cannot do, but never sees what they can do, will undermine the spirit of the organization. Of course, a manager should have a clear grasp of the limitations of his people, but he should see these as limitations on what they can do, and as a challenge to them to do better. The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity using minimal effort in a lean manner.

Peter Drucker

The Practice of Management

In a nutshell: Every idea that is created is usually created for a particular purpose, in order to deliver some sort of value to the entrepreneur/creator. And, for that value to be enjoyed, that “thing” must be utilized by someone or something else. This is obvious enough. And this is what happens, but with an important caveat that is not commonly recognized: there is always some value left over that is not utilized. Only if the resource is utilized completely, at the right time and for the right time, absolutely properly, and at the right rate (in other words, perfectly) is all the potential value realized. But, because usually such perfection does not exist, there is always residual value remaining that can be retrieved from that resource. This makes everything around us an undervalued resource, a resource that contains untapped, residual value. On the other hand, many people believe that innovation is accidental. Innovation must be something that happens while you are taking a shower, riding your bike, or eating lunch. Of course, innovation can happen in those places, but the chances are that these are just great ideas and the finer points haven’t been fleshed out in the shower. This also holds true for organizations, and this chapter deals with getting the enterprise ready in a Lean manner, in order to effectively extract the waiting new ideas fully. ^*

Introduction

Think back to when you were in school, lounging around with your friends and solving the world’s problems. The problem is that most ideas died before they were fully born. There are many reasons why great ideas never got implemented, but perhaps the most important reason (and something that is changing in the world today) is that there was no infrastructure in place to take a concept and turn it into a marketable product or service.

To a company, this means several things:

1. The enterprise must have a funnel to intake ideas (all ideas, not just the executives’). ^†

2. The enterprise must have the ability to prioritize the ideas that is seen by the employees as fair and impartial.

3. The enterprise must have the funding in place to support individuals in the development of the ideas.

4. The enterprise must have a system that incentivizes individuals to develop the idea inside the company and not feel forced to leave.

Consider for a moment university systems; granted, many have been enlightened and have “changed” the way they deal with inventions, most still have not. In most cases, professors who invent new products have to deal with an organization that makes it difficult to get others attention, does not supply much funding for those inventors and then insists on a disproportionate share of the ownership, citing ownership because property was invented during the course of their employment.

To compound the issue, academics tend to be exempt employees, and employers might claim that all of the employees’ time is the property of the institution. It is no wonder then, that in the course of our business, one of the most frequent questions asked of us is how to invent; at the same time, how to protect the intellectual property (IP) from the claims of the educational institution for whom they work. In fact, we have many colleagues who have given up and would rather keep an invention to themselves than “give” the majority ownership to their employer. In this case, no one wins – the inventor gets nothing and the institution gets nothing, and worse than that, society loses because many great ideas are never or are underdeveloped. This is the so-called untapped value.

This recognition of the existence of untapped value – the notion of the undervalued resource – is fundamental to the creation of an innovation for the entrepreneur. Because there is unused, residual value inherent in any particular resource in the first place – effort that has been previously invested in that resource and that does not need to be replicated for that value to be enjoyed – its value is lying there just waiting for you to take advantage of it; provided that you extract that value “cheaply,” i.e. with minimal effort concerning the intake of the new ideas.

On the Intake of Ideas

I once knew a chap who had a system of just hanging a baby on the clothes line to dry and he was greatly admired by his fellow citizens for having discovered a wonderful innovation on changing a diaper.

Damon Runyon 1880–1946, Newspaperman/Author

How many of us really look at the world around us? Over the many years that I have been in the business world, I am constantly amazed at what you find out by talking to the rank-and-file employee. In fact, in my consulting practice, I make it a point to get out of the executive suite and spend time in the lunchrooms, break rooms, and other venues in which the “average” employee spends their time. As a consultant, it is amazing the kinds of solutions to corporate problems that you can get straight from the employee. The problem is that when you search for stories such as these on the web, you will have a very difficult time finding any. ^*

This lack of stories is not because of a lack of ideas, or a nefarious attempt by management to take all the credit (although this scenario isn’t out of the realm of possibility). Instead, it is the general inability to capture ideas from the organization and then do something with those ideas. One organization I worked with held a town hall meeting and informed the employees that the only way the organization would survive into the future would be for each and every employee to think out of the box, be innovative, and communicate their great ideas to management. It was a wonderful speech, and it seemed as though the employees left the theater ready to save the company.

In the days following the speech, I approached employees and asked them about whether they had attended the town hall, and what they thought of the chance to submit their ideas to management. First, I found that many of the employees did not bother to attend at all. Seems that once you have heard the propaganda from management, you’ve heard the propaganda; it doesn’t change much. Second, I found that many of the employees who were there, were busy playing with their smartphones and expressed the same concerns as the group that didn’t attend. The third group is where I found gold. It seems that this group heard what the executive said and was energized by the whole concept. They asked where they could go to submit their suggestions, and they had a lot of suggestions. This is when I went back to management.

The executive was thrilled that a third of the employees were excited to be a part of the future of the organization. He couldn’t wait to see the ideas that came in, and was genuinely enthusiastic about the possibilities that were about to present themselves. Then came the killer … how were they going to collect and analyze these ideas? We suggested that they build a system that would allow not only employees to submit ideas, but also customers. We suggested a system that would allow employees to track their ideas and comment on others ideas – an idea management system. We went so far as to recommend a couple of web-based systems that we felt were very good, and would require very little change in the way they did business. So what did they do?

With good intent, he suggested that he already had the solution and that it was already in place throughout the organization. Intrigued, I asked what this solution was and he responded that the company had had suggestion boxes for decades.

Best I can tell, suggestion boxes were introduced at the turn of the 20th century. ^* As a little piece of history, one of the authors spent his youth as a janitor in a hospital. A common cleanup call was to remove trash, food, liquids, and all other manner of waste from suggestion boxes. Whether the suggestion box was used as a trash receptacle by accident or as a statement to management, we have been struck by the fact that over an entire career (we have better than 100 years of management experience between us), neither of us can ever remember a good idea coming in through a suggestion box.

When I informed the executive that (not the same words I used) his idea was one of the dumbest things I had ever heard, he thanked me, paid my consulting bill, and as far as I can tell to this day hasn’t received a single valuable suggestion from any of his 7000 employees.

Ideally, an idea management system requires several important things to be effective:

•Accessibility

• Flexibility

• Graphically appealing

• Crowd based

• Team based

• Ease of use

• Algorithms for weighting

• A Lean approach supporting it

• Adaptability

• Reflection on the future of the business

• Consideration of some rewards

Getting Organized for Innovation

There are two or three basic things that an entrepreneur can use to get the organization ready for innovation: absorb data better and encourage innovation pathways at all levels.

The following advice is from Charles Duhigg’s book Smarter, Faster, Better (Random House, New York, 2016). In this book are eight key concepts that can be used to ready your organization for innovation: motivation, teams, focus, goal setting, managing others, decision-making, innovation mind-set, and absorbing data.

1. Get smarter. Create an “association-type” database using tools such as SEBIRS or TRIZ.

2. Get quicker with Lean.

3. Get better.

The key to getting an organization ready for innovation is – in today’s world – managing how you think, rather than what you think. This shift can transform your life. At the core of getting ready are eight concepts – from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision-making – that explain why some people and companies get so much done more innovatively, while others do not.

The way we frame our daily decisions; the big ambitions we embrace and the easy goals we ignore; the cultures we establish as leaders to drive innovation; and the way we interact with data – these are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely innovative entrepreneurs. ^*

Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics – as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, airplane pilots, and songwriters – this well-researched handbook explains that the most innovative people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently; they view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways. They know that inno...