Innovation Starts With Disruptive Hypotheses. Here's How To Create One
Luke Williams
The process hinges on three steps: Defining the situation, searching for cliches, and twisting those cliches around, according to Luke Williams. A disruptive hypothesis is an intentionally unreasonable statement that gets your thinking flowing in a different direction. It’s kind of like the evolutionary biology theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” which states that evolution proceeds slowly and every once in a while is interrupted by sudden change. Disruptive hypotheses are designed to upset your comfortable business equilibrium and bring about an accelerated change in your own thinking.
The ability to ask, “What if?” is an essential part of every executive’s skill set.
Contrast this with the more traditional definition of “hypothesis,” which is a best-guess explanation that’s based on a set of facts and can be tested by further investigation. With a disruptive hypothesis, however, you don’t make a reasonable prediction (if I charge the battery, the phone will work). Instead, you make an unreasonable provocation (what if a cell phone didn’t need a battery at all?). The difference between prediction and provocation, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw’s famous line, is the difference between “seeing things as they are and asking, ‘Why?,’ or dreaming things as they never were and asking, ‘What if?’” In our fast-changing world, when business certainties are no longer certain, the ability to imagine things as they never were and ask, “What if?,” is an essential part of every executive’s skill set.
What Do You Want to Disrupt?
To meaningfully differentiate yourself from everyone else in the same space, you have to define the situation in the industry, segment, or category that you want to challenge. Here’s what a list of what you want to challenge might look like:
This is an area in which everyone seems to be stuck in the same predicament and nothing has changed in a very long time.
This is an area where profit performance is average—it really should be more successful than it is.
This is a category where growth is slow and everything seems the same.
Once you have a situation to focus on, describe it in one sentence: “How can we disrupt the competitive landscape in [insert your situation] by delivering an unexpected solution?”
Whether you choose to think about an industry, segment, or category is up to you and your business needs. For example, if you owned a boutique hotel in San Francisco, you might describe your situation in one or more of the following ways:
How can we disrupt the competitive landscape of the Travel & Leisure industry by delivering an unexpected solution?
How can we disrupt the competitive landscape of the Hotel segment by delivering an unexpected solution?
How can we disrupt the competitive landscape of the Luxury Hotel category by delivering an unexpected solution?
That’s it. The important thing is that the high-level situation you choose is just that—high-level. It’s essential that you resist the natural urge to start thinking in terms of specific “problems.”
What Are the Clichés?
Now that you’ve defined your situation, what are the clichés—the widespread, hackneyed beliefs that govern the way people think about and do business in a particular space? If you pay attention, you’ll notice that clichés are everywhere.
Consider the multi-billion dollar video gaming industry. Video consoles were driven by several clichés. First, that the world is split into “gamers” and “nongamers.” Second, that gamers mostly care about faster chips and more realistic graphics. Third, game consoles are expensive. And fourth, that people play video games sitting down, barely moving anything but their fingers. With the Wii, Nintendo turned the gaming industry’s clichés on their head.
Searching for Clichés
Just being told, “Okay, get out there and find those clichés,” can be extremely daunting. So, here are a few tips that will help you jump-start the process. Start by getting online and identifying a handful of direct competitors in the industry, segment, or category you’re focused on. Group together those with similar characteristics (such as size and resources), strengths (such as brand name, distribution), and strategies (such as high quality). Select one or two competitors in each group that are pretty representative of the group as a whole. A total of three to six competitors are the ideal number to work with.
With the Wii, Nintendo turned the gaming industry’s clichés on their head.
Now, do a little research on each competitor and make a list of the clichés that keep everyone doing the same thing, competing the same way, or operating with the same set of assumptions. Keep your research activities quick and informal, intuitive and qualitative. To keep you from drowning in a sea of information, consider using the following three filters:
Product clichés: What are the cliché features and benefits? What are the cliché product attributes that are advertised (convenience and reliability, for example)? Where are the cliché areas where the product competes (typical customers, typical geographies, and typical market size?).
Interaction clichés: What are the cliché steps a customer experiences when buying and consuming their products and services? Is the interaction face-to-face? How frequently do customers purchase or use? In the rental car business, for instance, the prevailing interaction clichés include the following: face-to-face interaction with a service agent, completing a lot of paperwork, and renting vehicles by the day.
Pricing clichés: What are the typical ways companies price their products and services and charge customers? Are they packaging products and services together or pricing them individually? Are they charging the customer directly or through a retail partner? Are they offering discounts or other incentives?
What Are Your Disruptive Hypotheses?
Now that you have a list of the clichés that are influencing the business situation you’re focused on, your next goal is to start provoking the status quo. To do that, you’ll take those clichés and twist them like a Rubik’s cube. You’re trying to find a way to rearrange the pieces, which in turn will provoke a different way of looking at the situation.
What Can You Invert?
If there’s an action, look at the opposite action. If something is happening over time, run the time scale backward. Whenever there’s a one-way relationship between two parties, try changing the direction 180 degrees.
What Can You Deny?
The denial method works by completely dumping key aspects of a cliché. Back to our rental car example for a minute, where the prevailing industry clichés include: See the customer. Complete a lot of paperwork. Rent by the day.
What would happen if you no longer needed to see the customer, you got rid of the paperwork, and you started renting by the hour? Well, you’d end up with something very much like Zipcar. The disruption? Don’t see the customer. No paperwork. Rent by the hour.
What Can You Scale?
What is scarce that could be made abundant? What is abundant that could be made scarce? What is expensive that could be free?
After going through these steps, you should be able to generate several hypotheses that will challenge your established way of looking at an industry and help you imagine radically new scenarios, ask unconventional questions, and discover unexpected advantages. The general rule is that the bolder your “What Ifs,” the fresher the perspective they offer.
Now, while that’s a huge accomplishment, hypotheses aren’t really worth much all by themselves. In the next post, we look at the process process of taking hypotheses and gaining the customer insight necessary to turn them into business opportunities.
Monday, November 21, 2011
A 5-Step Process for Seeding an Innovation Culture
Innovation Jump Start! A 5-Step Process for Seeding an Innovation Culture
Published on 18 November 2011 by Mike Brown in Brainzooming - All Posts, Innovation, Market Research
3 Too often organizations think innovation is simply about generating a lot of creative or “out-of-the-box” ideas. But in organizations where innovation has truly become central to their culture, ideation is simply one step – and not necessarily the first – in an innovation process. Don’t confuse innovation with ideation. Ideation is a tool, but innovation is a process. Don’t let the word “process” intimidate you. Instead, focus on these five guidelines to jump start your innovation process.
1. Inclusion
Innovation isn’t an independent exercise. It takes the collective knowledge and, just as importantly buy-in, of the organization to be successful. Create an innovation team and get key stakeholders involved early and often. First, inform them of the process you want to use to jump start innovation, and then consistently include them in the steps and key outputs of that process. In other words, keep key stakeholders informed and involved. If you’re thinking that there are a million stakeholders in the organization, focus initially on those that have the power to impact whether the concepts defined as a result of the process will live or die on the vine. You can and should expand/modify the team as appropriate for different phases of the process.
2. Insights
Mine the knowledge that already exists within the organization and the market to inform the innovation process. Don’t let yourself get hung up on having every possible question answered before moving into Ideation. While you may find a need to fill some knowledge gaps to successfully implement the products, services or processes you are innovating, more than likely you already have access to what you need to create a solid frame of reference for the Ideation step.
3. Ideation
Consider bringing in a bipartisan facilitator experienced in navigating the nuances of building innovation teams and outcomes. Not only will they neutralize the emotions or power plays that can sometimes derail the process when led internally, but good facilitators go beyond the tools they use to help generate lots and lots of ideas to the synthesis and prioritization of those ideas with an objective eye on the outcome needed to succeed.
Photo by: Saimen. | Source: photocase.com
4. Initiation
Don’t stop at ideation. It’s at this point when your core innovation team is likely to require some additive players. Initiation is about creating an action plan that will ultimately allow you to test or roll out the new concept – whether it’s a product, service, channel, brand, or customer experience. The action plan should clearly define goals, strategies, tactics, roles, resources and responsibilities to ensure that innovation moves beyond an idea into measurable benefits for the organization.
5. Integration
An innovative culture isn’t built by witnessing a lot of new ideas come to life. In fact, a constant state of change without context can easily turn into frustration. Instead, when impactful innovation occurs, tell your organization the story – don’t just show them the result. Answer the questions on their minds. Why do we need this? How will it impact the company? How will it impact me and my day-to-day world? How can I make it more successful? Integration is about engaging the organization and turning each employee into a stakeholder.
Let’s face it, “innovation” can be a daunting word, but building your own custom approach around these five steps will make it much less intimidating for you and your organization. – Barb Murphy
Published on 18 November 2011 by Mike Brown in Brainzooming - All Posts, Innovation, Market Research
3 Too often organizations think innovation is simply about generating a lot of creative or “out-of-the-box” ideas. But in organizations where innovation has truly become central to their culture, ideation is simply one step – and not necessarily the first – in an innovation process. Don’t confuse innovation with ideation. Ideation is a tool, but innovation is a process. Don’t let the word “process” intimidate you. Instead, focus on these five guidelines to jump start your innovation process.
1. Inclusion
Innovation isn’t an independent exercise. It takes the collective knowledge and, just as importantly buy-in, of the organization to be successful. Create an innovation team and get key stakeholders involved early and often. First, inform them of the process you want to use to jump start innovation, and then consistently include them in the steps and key outputs of that process. In other words, keep key stakeholders informed and involved. If you’re thinking that there are a million stakeholders in the organization, focus initially on those that have the power to impact whether the concepts defined as a result of the process will live or die on the vine. You can and should expand/modify the team as appropriate for different phases of the process.
2. Insights
Mine the knowledge that already exists within the organization and the market to inform the innovation process. Don’t let yourself get hung up on having every possible question answered before moving into Ideation. While you may find a need to fill some knowledge gaps to successfully implement the products, services or processes you are innovating, more than likely you already have access to what you need to create a solid frame of reference for the Ideation step.
3. Ideation
Consider bringing in a bipartisan facilitator experienced in navigating the nuances of building innovation teams and outcomes. Not only will they neutralize the emotions or power plays that can sometimes derail the process when led internally, but good facilitators go beyond the tools they use to help generate lots and lots of ideas to the synthesis and prioritization of those ideas with an objective eye on the outcome needed to succeed.
Photo by: Saimen. | Source: photocase.com
4. Initiation
Don’t stop at ideation. It’s at this point when your core innovation team is likely to require some additive players. Initiation is about creating an action plan that will ultimately allow you to test or roll out the new concept – whether it’s a product, service, channel, brand, or customer experience. The action plan should clearly define goals, strategies, tactics, roles, resources and responsibilities to ensure that innovation moves beyond an idea into measurable benefits for the organization.
5. Integration
An innovative culture isn’t built by witnessing a lot of new ideas come to life. In fact, a constant state of change without context can easily turn into frustration. Instead, when impactful innovation occurs, tell your organization the story – don’t just show them the result. Answer the questions on their minds. Why do we need this? How will it impact the company? How will it impact me and my day-to-day world? How can I make it more successful? Integration is about engaging the organization and turning each employee into a stakeholder.
Let’s face it, “innovation” can be a daunting word, but building your own custom approach around these five steps will make it much less intimidating for you and your organization. – Barb Murphy
Innovation’s Limiting Factor
Posted on November 17, 2011 by Jeffrey Phillips
Ask anyone what limits innovation and they’ll have a hundred different answers – unsupportive management, uncertain goals, unrealistic resource allocation, and many, many more. What’s more, each of these, in their own way, are obstacles to innovation. But what ultimately sets the speed and capability of your organization when it comes to innovation is your ability to experiment, prototype and introduce the learning from experimenting and prototyping back into idea development quickly.
Even if you have all the resources you need, all the support you need and all the management support you can stand, your innovation pace will still be dictated by how rapidly you can experiment and prototype new ideas, and how quickly you can react to what you’ve learned. Plenty of firms have plenty of support for innovation, but are unable or simply don’t have the experience to conduct short, rapid experiments with less than perfect prototypes.
Why is experimenting and prototyping so important? No idea is perfect from its first documentation and capture. Ideas must develop and must be exposed to real world situations in order to hone the value proposition and correct unseen flaws that often aren’t exposed until the idea is presented to potential customers. Most organizations skip this step, or conversely, take far too long to conduct the experimentation, substituting more market research for simply placing a prototype in front of the customer.
Rapid experimentation leads to a lot of learning and new insights, but it also means that some experiments and prototypes will be crash-test dummies – that is, they were developed for learning and proved a point. Their success is based on the fact we validated a problem or discovered, like Edison, how not to do something. This isn’t failure, it’s learning and validation. Perhaps if we framed it that way, more organizations would spend more time experimenting and prototyping. because these two functions dictate a significant amount of the speed with which your firm can innovate.
Most firms need to learn that rapid, messy, inexact experimenting, iterating to get it just right, is far more valuable than slow, careful, perfect experiments that only validate what we expected. Innovation should solve unmet or unexpected needs and opportunities, therefore the results of the experiment should also be uncertain and unexpected. And as fast as is possible, because ultimately this sets the drumbeat for innovation in your business.
Ask anyone what limits innovation and they’ll have a hundred different answers – unsupportive management, uncertain goals, unrealistic resource allocation, and many, many more. What’s more, each of these, in their own way, are obstacles to innovation. But what ultimately sets the speed and capability of your organization when it comes to innovation is your ability to experiment, prototype and introduce the learning from experimenting and prototyping back into idea development quickly.
Even if you have all the resources you need, all the support you need and all the management support you can stand, your innovation pace will still be dictated by how rapidly you can experiment and prototype new ideas, and how quickly you can react to what you’ve learned. Plenty of firms have plenty of support for innovation, but are unable or simply don’t have the experience to conduct short, rapid experiments with less than perfect prototypes.
Why is experimenting and prototyping so important? No idea is perfect from its first documentation and capture. Ideas must develop and must be exposed to real world situations in order to hone the value proposition and correct unseen flaws that often aren’t exposed until the idea is presented to potential customers. Most organizations skip this step, or conversely, take far too long to conduct the experimentation, substituting more market research for simply placing a prototype in front of the customer.
Rapid experimentation leads to a lot of learning and new insights, but it also means that some experiments and prototypes will be crash-test dummies – that is, they were developed for learning and proved a point. Their success is based on the fact we validated a problem or discovered, like Edison, how not to do something. This isn’t failure, it’s learning and validation. Perhaps if we framed it that way, more organizations would spend more time experimenting and prototyping. because these two functions dictate a significant amount of the speed with which your firm can innovate.
Most firms need to learn that rapid, messy, inexact experimenting, iterating to get it just right, is far more valuable than slow, careful, perfect experiments that only validate what we expected. Innovation should solve unmet or unexpected needs and opportunities, therefore the results of the experiment should also be uncertain and unexpected. And as fast as is possible, because ultimately this sets the drumbeat for innovation in your business.
The 3 Biggest Barriers To Innovation, And How To Smash Them
Luke Williams, a fellow at Frog, argues that coming up with breakthrough innovation isn't just a matter of being brilliant. Rather, he lays out a systematic method for overcoming the usual barriers that hem in great ideas.[This is the third post in a series of excerpts adapted from Luke Williams's Disrupt: Think The Unthinkable To Spark Transformation In Your Business. The first excerpt is here and the second is here.]
How do you transform an opportunity into an idea? Well, the first thing is to get comfortable with the belief that any old ideas won’t do. What we’re interested in are disruptive ideas; that is, ideas with the power for great impact and influence. Ideas that challenge assumed boundaries and inspire a sense of what’s possible. In my experience, however, most ideas never get anywhere near this level. There are three major stumbling blocks:
1: Feeling overwhelmed, directionless, and without focus
In my experience, this is the direct result of relying on traditional brainstorming approaches, which, by the way, have been around since the 1930s, when ad-man Alex Faickney Osborn first popularized them in his book, Applied Imagination. But the problem is that traditional brainstorming has ignored the huge difference between generating lots of ideas and capturing quality ideas. As a result, brainstorming sessions often leave organizations and teams feeling overwhelmed and directionless—a state Beth Comstock at GE insightfully calls, “paralyzed by possibility.” Simply put, if your ideas are going to have any disruptive impact, you need to move beyond a shotgun approach to brainstorming and start pursuing creative effort with a laser-sharp focus.
[How are you gonna find the needle in there?! Better to break up the hay stack before you start searching...]
The chaos of a creative process is overwhelming. Better to break it up and blend later.2: Thinking in terms of isolated products, services, and information
It’s getting harder and harder to compete if you don’t view the world in terms of holistic product-service-information hybrids. The real advantage comes when your disruptive idea is blended in such a way that the product, service, and information components can’t be broken apart. To get a better sense of what I’m talking about, consider this quote from Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things: “...this Sangiovese may be a ‘classic’ wine from the Mediterranean basin, but this bottle is no longer a classic artifact. It has been gizmo-ized.”
Gizmo-ized is another way of saying that even a product as ancient as a bottle of wine no longer stands alone as a static object; it’s dynamic. “It is offering me more functionality than I will ever be able to explore,” Sterling writes, “This wine bottle aims to educate me—it is luring me to become more knowledgeable about the people and processes that made the bottle and its contents. It wants to recruit me to become an unpaid promotional agent, a wine critic, an opinion maker—it wants me to throw wine-tasting parties and tell all my friends about my purchase.”
In Sterling’s view, there is nothing frivolous or extraneous about this sudden explosion of informational intimacy between himself (with his laptop), and a bottle of wine (with its website). Clearly, we need a new mindset when it comes to generating ideas: The relationship between a product, a service, and the information they provide is more important than the details of any one particular feature alone.
3: Getting stuck at the water-cooler
As a result, they rarely escape people’s heads and instead remain there, unformed. The view from inside the company, however, is different. One of the most common phrases I hear from clients is, “We don’t need any more ideas; we have too many.” But, when I ask to see the documented ideas they have, they start back- pedaling: “Well, we don’t have them written down or anything. But, we discuss them a lot.”
That’s the problem in a nutshell. You can talk about ideas in general terms, at least for a while. But, abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and remember it. So, to increase the potential, you have to stop talking about it and explain it in sensory terms. “Sketch it out!,” as Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design, used to say. (He wouldn’t listen to an idea if you hadn’t done so.) Ambiguity disappears when you describe your ideas in visual or written form.
[Nothing buries a good idea faster than idle talk.]
Getting past these three stumbling blocks is a challenge. The chaos of a creative process is overwhelming. It’s easier to think in terms of isolated products, services, and information, rather than blended hybrids.
Breaking Stumbling Block 1: Focusing Your Efforts
So you've identified and described an opportunity. Now, it’s time to develop the ideas to support it. You’ll start by breaking down your opportunity into a number of parts and examining each one in a new way. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to all of them. The main point is to focus your creativity.
An opportunity has three distinct parts: There’s an opportunity to provide [who?] with [what advantage?] that [fills what gap?]. In a project for one of the big three automakers, we learned that, in the words of project lead, Mike LaVigne, “There’s much more happening than just going for a drive.” Mike and his team discovered that a lot of people check email, make phone calls, and use their laptop while they’re in their cars, even though the in-car experience wasn’t designed to support those activities. So in our car example, it might look like this:
“There’s an opportunity to provide drivers [who] with ways of being more productive [advantage] that are safe and optimized for driving [gap].”
Start by focusing on one area of an opportunity statement: the advantage. The advantage, in this case, is “productivity.” Then, ask yourself when drivers could make use of their vehicles for productivity. You might come up with something like this:
When running errands
When making phone calls
When dealing with inspiration (taking notes, for example)
After you have the advantage part of the opportunity broken down, you can start asking yourself all sorts of questions about how to deliver on the gap part of the opportunity. So, some of the questions might be:
How can we safely optimize the way people make phone calls in their car?
Idea: Integrated hands-free phone calls.
How can we safely optimize the way people take notes in their car?
Idea: Hazard avoidance systems.
How can we safely optimize the way people entertain their kids in their car?
Idea: Integrated DVD players.
After you have the opportunity broken down into questions like these, try to answer them with as many new ideas as you can think of—from the obvious to the ridiculous. And be sure not to reject any ideas too quickly. You’ll have plenty of time to evaluate your ideas later.
Forcing Connections
Inspiration for break-through ideas often happens in the periphery, in analogous but not necessarily traditionally competitive categories. As New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman puts it, “The further we push out the boundaries of knowledge and innovation, the more the next great value breakthroughs—that is, the next new hot-selling products and services—will come from putting together disparate things that you would never think of as going together.”
Think back to the Nintendo Wii. The inspiration for the motion controller idea didn’t come from looking at what other video consoles were doing; it came from a completely unrelated source: the accelerometer chip that regulates the airbag in your car.
Here’s another example of how bringing two seemingly unrelated thoughts together. One morning, a designer sprang into the frog studio. “I know why everyone says the iPod looks clean!” he exclaimed. Ask anyone what’s so appealing about the design of the iPod, and, almost without exception, they answer, “I like it because it looks clean.”
Of course, there are obvious clues, such as the minimalist design, the simple, intuitive interface, and the neutral colors. But, these attributes alone don’t fully explain this seemingly universal perception of graceful hygiene. There had to be something deeper. We were all ears.
[An ancient example of a forced connection: The head of an eagle, the wings of a bird, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion. And yet it just works!]
“So,” the visiting designer said, “as I was sitting on the toilet this morning, I noticed the shiny white porcelain of the bathtub and the reflective chrome of the faucet on the wash basin, and then it hit me! The iPod is ‘clean’ because it references bathroom materials.”
There were a few seconds of silence, followed quickly by laughter. We were laughing because we knew that Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod, came to Apple from a London- based design consultancy where he worked on a lot of lavatory basins.
Coincidence? Perhaps. But, at the very least, it’s an example of how anything, no matter how unconnected, can spark new perceptions. Often, the more incompatible the connection, the more useful it may be.
Breaking Stumbling Block 2: What Can You Blend Together?
Not all the ideas you’ve generated will be worth pursuing, so pick the three that you think are the most promising. In other words, the three offering the greatest differentiation and the largest number of benefits to either your customers or your company. Why three? Because three gives you a good range to experiment, challenge assumptions, and gather feedback in the next stage. A word of caution: Don’t worry about trying to select the most practical ideas; focus on the most disruptive ones.
Your offering has to benefit three key customers: partners, buyers, and users.Refine Three Ideas
After you select your three ideas, start the process of refining them into a more holistic and powerful form.
The stumbling block here is that many organizations still think of their offerings to customers as isolated products, services, and information. But real value comes when an offering is blended in such a way that the product, service, and information components can’t succeed independently. For example, the iPhone blends product (e.g., iPhone with iPhone OS), service (iTunes+App Store), and information from the network (which includes wireless providers, Google, Yahoo!, iPhone developers, related iPhone social networks and communities, and the manufacturers). Two blending techniques are especially helpful (they’re the two I use when working with clients):
Blend the Bits: Start thinking about the product, service, and information bits simultaneously. So, if one of your ideas is for a new product, what are the services and networked information that would be essential in supporting that product?
Blend the benefits: Always remember that, with few exceptions, whatever you’re offering has to benefit three key customers: partners, buyers, and users. If only one or two of those customer groups actually reaps the benefits, try to even things out. Otherwise, your offer may end up too lopsided to be successful.
Write down every possible benefit you can come up with—not just the obvious ones. And be prepared to make some changes to make those benefits more obvious.
Breaking Stumbling Block 3: What Are Your Disruptive Ideas?
Talking about ideas—as opposed to documenting them—keeps them general and abstract. Showing ideas, on the other hand, makes them specific and concrete, which in turn, makes them easy to share, understand, and remember. So, after you refine your three ideas by blending the bits and the benefits, you need to create a one-page or slide overview of each idea, accurately describing it in words and pictures––with a name, description of who it's for and why they’ll care, key points of difference, and a visual (no matter how crude). If you decide you want to further develop an idea into a solution for the market, having documented your ideas in this way will make it easier to get critical feedback from consumers. [For more detail about this process, buy the book!--Ed.]
One final word of advice: Don’t worry about getting your visualization perfect or let yourself get locked-in to whatever details you’ve included. The details you give when you visualize your ideas aren’t necessarily in their final form. In the next stage of the process, you’ll run your idea through all sorts of refinements and changes. But at this stage, any visualization—no matter how rough or approximate—is better than none.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665442/the-3-biggest-barriers-to-innovation-and-how-to-smash-them
How do you transform an opportunity into an idea? Well, the first thing is to get comfortable with the belief that any old ideas won’t do. What we’re interested in are disruptive ideas; that is, ideas with the power for great impact and influence. Ideas that challenge assumed boundaries and inspire a sense of what’s possible. In my experience, however, most ideas never get anywhere near this level. There are three major stumbling blocks:
1: Feeling overwhelmed, directionless, and without focus
In my experience, this is the direct result of relying on traditional brainstorming approaches, which, by the way, have been around since the 1930s, when ad-man Alex Faickney Osborn first popularized them in his book, Applied Imagination. But the problem is that traditional brainstorming has ignored the huge difference between generating lots of ideas and capturing quality ideas. As a result, brainstorming sessions often leave organizations and teams feeling overwhelmed and directionless—a state Beth Comstock at GE insightfully calls, “paralyzed by possibility.” Simply put, if your ideas are going to have any disruptive impact, you need to move beyond a shotgun approach to brainstorming and start pursuing creative effort with a laser-sharp focus.
[How are you gonna find the needle in there?! Better to break up the hay stack before you start searching...]
The chaos of a creative process is overwhelming. Better to break it up and blend later.2: Thinking in terms of isolated products, services, and information
It’s getting harder and harder to compete if you don’t view the world in terms of holistic product-service-information hybrids. The real advantage comes when your disruptive idea is blended in such a way that the product, service, and information components can’t be broken apart. To get a better sense of what I’m talking about, consider this quote from Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things: “...this Sangiovese may be a ‘classic’ wine from the Mediterranean basin, but this bottle is no longer a classic artifact. It has been gizmo-ized.”
Gizmo-ized is another way of saying that even a product as ancient as a bottle of wine no longer stands alone as a static object; it’s dynamic. “It is offering me more functionality than I will ever be able to explore,” Sterling writes, “This wine bottle aims to educate me—it is luring me to become more knowledgeable about the people and processes that made the bottle and its contents. It wants to recruit me to become an unpaid promotional agent, a wine critic, an opinion maker—it wants me to throw wine-tasting parties and tell all my friends about my purchase.”
In Sterling’s view, there is nothing frivolous or extraneous about this sudden explosion of informational intimacy between himself (with his laptop), and a bottle of wine (with its website). Clearly, we need a new mindset when it comes to generating ideas: The relationship between a product, a service, and the information they provide is more important than the details of any one particular feature alone.
3: Getting stuck at the water-cooler
As a result, they rarely escape people’s heads and instead remain there, unformed. The view from inside the company, however, is different. One of the most common phrases I hear from clients is, “We don’t need any more ideas; we have too many.” But, when I ask to see the documented ideas they have, they start back- pedaling: “Well, we don’t have them written down or anything. But, we discuss them a lot.”
That’s the problem in a nutshell. You can talk about ideas in general terms, at least for a while. But, abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and remember it. So, to increase the potential, you have to stop talking about it and explain it in sensory terms. “Sketch it out!,” as Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design, used to say. (He wouldn’t listen to an idea if you hadn’t done so.) Ambiguity disappears when you describe your ideas in visual or written form.
[Nothing buries a good idea faster than idle talk.]
Getting past these three stumbling blocks is a challenge. The chaos of a creative process is overwhelming. It’s easier to think in terms of isolated products, services, and information, rather than blended hybrids.
Breaking Stumbling Block 1: Focusing Your Efforts
So you've identified and described an opportunity. Now, it’s time to develop the ideas to support it. You’ll start by breaking down your opportunity into a number of parts and examining each one in a new way. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to all of them. The main point is to focus your creativity.
An opportunity has three distinct parts: There’s an opportunity to provide [who?] with [what advantage?] that [fills what gap?]. In a project for one of the big three automakers, we learned that, in the words of project lead, Mike LaVigne, “There’s much more happening than just going for a drive.” Mike and his team discovered that a lot of people check email, make phone calls, and use their laptop while they’re in their cars, even though the in-car experience wasn’t designed to support those activities. So in our car example, it might look like this:
“There’s an opportunity to provide drivers [who] with ways of being more productive [advantage] that are safe and optimized for driving [gap].”
Start by focusing on one area of an opportunity statement: the advantage. The advantage, in this case, is “productivity.” Then, ask yourself when drivers could make use of their vehicles for productivity. You might come up with something like this:
When running errands
When making phone calls
When dealing with inspiration (taking notes, for example)
After you have the advantage part of the opportunity broken down, you can start asking yourself all sorts of questions about how to deliver on the gap part of the opportunity. So, some of the questions might be:
How can we safely optimize the way people make phone calls in their car?
Idea: Integrated hands-free phone calls.
How can we safely optimize the way people take notes in their car?
Idea: Hazard avoidance systems.
How can we safely optimize the way people entertain their kids in their car?
Idea: Integrated DVD players.
After you have the opportunity broken down into questions like these, try to answer them with as many new ideas as you can think of—from the obvious to the ridiculous. And be sure not to reject any ideas too quickly. You’ll have plenty of time to evaluate your ideas later.
Forcing Connections
Inspiration for break-through ideas often happens in the periphery, in analogous but not necessarily traditionally competitive categories. As New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman puts it, “The further we push out the boundaries of knowledge and innovation, the more the next great value breakthroughs—that is, the next new hot-selling products and services—will come from putting together disparate things that you would never think of as going together.”
Think back to the Nintendo Wii. The inspiration for the motion controller idea didn’t come from looking at what other video consoles were doing; it came from a completely unrelated source: the accelerometer chip that regulates the airbag in your car.
Here’s another example of how bringing two seemingly unrelated thoughts together. One morning, a designer sprang into the frog studio. “I know why everyone says the iPod looks clean!” he exclaimed. Ask anyone what’s so appealing about the design of the iPod, and, almost without exception, they answer, “I like it because it looks clean.”
Of course, there are obvious clues, such as the minimalist design, the simple, intuitive interface, and the neutral colors. But, these attributes alone don’t fully explain this seemingly universal perception of graceful hygiene. There had to be something deeper. We were all ears.
[An ancient example of a forced connection: The head of an eagle, the wings of a bird, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion. And yet it just works!]
“So,” the visiting designer said, “as I was sitting on the toilet this morning, I noticed the shiny white porcelain of the bathtub and the reflective chrome of the faucet on the wash basin, and then it hit me! The iPod is ‘clean’ because it references bathroom materials.”
There were a few seconds of silence, followed quickly by laughter. We were laughing because we knew that Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod, came to Apple from a London- based design consultancy where he worked on a lot of lavatory basins.
Coincidence? Perhaps. But, at the very least, it’s an example of how anything, no matter how unconnected, can spark new perceptions. Often, the more incompatible the connection, the more useful it may be.
Breaking Stumbling Block 2: What Can You Blend Together?
Not all the ideas you’ve generated will be worth pursuing, so pick the three that you think are the most promising. In other words, the three offering the greatest differentiation and the largest number of benefits to either your customers or your company. Why three? Because three gives you a good range to experiment, challenge assumptions, and gather feedback in the next stage. A word of caution: Don’t worry about trying to select the most practical ideas; focus on the most disruptive ones.
Your offering has to benefit three key customers: partners, buyers, and users.Refine Three Ideas
After you select your three ideas, start the process of refining them into a more holistic and powerful form.
The stumbling block here is that many organizations still think of their offerings to customers as isolated products, services, and information. But real value comes when an offering is blended in such a way that the product, service, and information components can’t succeed independently. For example, the iPhone blends product (e.g., iPhone with iPhone OS), service (iTunes+App Store), and information from the network (which includes wireless providers, Google, Yahoo!, iPhone developers, related iPhone social networks and communities, and the manufacturers). Two blending techniques are especially helpful (they’re the two I use when working with clients):
Blend the Bits: Start thinking about the product, service, and information bits simultaneously. So, if one of your ideas is for a new product, what are the services and networked information that would be essential in supporting that product?
Blend the benefits: Always remember that, with few exceptions, whatever you’re offering has to benefit three key customers: partners, buyers, and users. If only one or two of those customer groups actually reaps the benefits, try to even things out. Otherwise, your offer may end up too lopsided to be successful.
Write down every possible benefit you can come up with—not just the obvious ones. And be prepared to make some changes to make those benefits more obvious.
Breaking Stumbling Block 3: What Are Your Disruptive Ideas?
Talking about ideas—as opposed to documenting them—keeps them general and abstract. Showing ideas, on the other hand, makes them specific and concrete, which in turn, makes them easy to share, understand, and remember. So, after you refine your three ideas by blending the bits and the benefits, you need to create a one-page or slide overview of each idea, accurately describing it in words and pictures––with a name, description of who it's for and why they’ll care, key points of difference, and a visual (no matter how crude). If you decide you want to further develop an idea into a solution for the market, having documented your ideas in this way will make it easier to get critical feedback from consumers. [For more detail about this process, buy the book!--Ed.]
One final word of advice: Don’t worry about getting your visualization perfect or let yourself get locked-in to whatever details you’ve included. The details you give when you visualize your ideas aren’t necessarily in their final form. In the next stage of the process, you’ll run your idea through all sorts of refinements and changes. But at this stage, any visualization—no matter how rough or approximate—is better than none.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665442/the-3-biggest-barriers-to-innovation-and-how-to-smash-them
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Inside Walmart Labs - How the World's Largest Retailer Hopes to Sell More By Getting Social
Interesting story about Wal-Mart Labs. This is the division that purchased Grabble. Also interesting in that they are thinking of looking at social media tweets and facebook posts to determine users interests both individually to do targeted marketing and collectively in a geography to do merchandise planning for a store.
Inside Walmart Labs - How the World's Largest Retailer Hopes to Sell More By Getting Social
A Q&A with founder of Kosmix - Walmart reportedly acquired it for $300 Million
By WADE ROUSH, XCONOMY on August 1, 2011 - 10:02 a.m. PDT
http://www.baycitizen.org/technology/story/inside-walmart-labs/\
One of the most head-scratching tech headlines of April 2011 was the news that Kosmix, a Mountain View, CA-based startup best known for building a Twitter filtering tool called TweetBeat, had been acquired by Walmart. Yes, that Walmart—the one with 9,000 big-box stores spread across the American heartland.
For one thing, Walmart already has a large technology presence right here in the Bay Area: you can see the big “Walmart.com” sign on the e-commerce division’s building from Highway 101 in Brisbane. So it wasn’t clear why the company needed a second Silicon Valley redoubt. Even more puzzling, Kosmix’s so-called “social genome” platform, which the company had been applying in areas like news aggregation and categorization, didn’t seem to have much to do with Walmart’s business problems—such as narrowing the gap with e-commerce market leader Amazon, for example.
There was speculation that Walmart’s real interest was in Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who have unbeatable pedigrees in the world of e-commerce technology. The pioneering comparison shopping site they co-founded in 1996, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million; inside Amazon, the pair helped to create the e-retailer’s huge marketplace of third-party retailers and came up with the technology behind Amazon Mechanical Turk. Perhaps Walmart—which paid $300 million for Kosmix, according to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher—wanted Harinarayan and Rajaraman to work similar miracles for Walmart.com?
Those were the questions on my mind when I drove down to the former Kosmix headquarters, now WalmartLabs, in Mountain View a couple of weeks ago. I talked for about hour with Rajaraman, who now shares the title of senior vice president of Walmart Global eCommerce with Harinarayan; he’s also an active Silicon Valley investor and writes about his big technology passion, data mining, at a blog called Datawocky. It turned out to be the most extensive interview that either Kosmix founder has given since the acquisition, and I learned a lot about why Walmart thought Kosmix was interesting, and what kinds of capabilities Rajaraman thinks his 70-person team can bring to their new employer.
A lot of it has to do with unsurprising things like improving the product recommendations that Internet users get when they go to Walmart.com, and tapping shoppers’ smartphones as a marketing channel. But Rajaraman also pointed to some more interesting applications for Kosmix’s social genome technology—like monitoring social media conversations in the vicinity of a physical Walmart store for signals about what goods that store should stock.
But we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what concrete products, features, or campaigns emerge from the Kosmix acquisition. Rajaraman said his team is hard at work on some features that will likely make their debut before the 2011 holidays. He dropped heavy hints that smartphone apps and an enhanced presence for Walmart on Facebook will figure in the changes somehow, but stayed largely mum about the specifics. “In six to eight months the impact is going to be visible, for sure,” he said.
Here’s the interview transcript, edited for length.
Xconomy: What’s the big picture behind Walmart Labs—why would Walmart want a bigger presence in Silicon Valley?
Anand Rajaraman: Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world, but they are not the number-one player in e-commerce—Amazon is. About a year ago, Walmart decided that e-commerce is a strategic priority. It’s not like they had not been investing in e-commerce, but they said, ‘It’s time to go to the next level.’
When you do that, what’s important is to look at how the world has changed. Are there some assumptions that can be challenged, or some trends that can be used, to leapfrog the 800-pound gorilla in e-commerce?
If you think about the way the world has changed in the last two years, there are two big, disruptive changes that have happened, and one of them is social networking. People are spending more time on Twitter and Facebook and the like. And the other is smartphones. For the first time this year, more smartphones were sold in the US than feature phones.
If you put these two things together, they will be as disruptive to retailing as the advent of e-commerce was 15 years ago. The biggest disruptive change in the last century was the development of the highway system, which led to big-box retailing. Then came the invention of the Web. And the third disruption is social and mobile. In each case, the way people shop was changed. The goal of Walmart Labs is to make sure that Walmart is at the forefront of “e-commerce 2.0,” so that we help define it rather than playing catch-up.
X: Why do you think Walmart was attracted to acquiring Kosmix, specifically, as the nucleus for WalmartLabs?
AR: It’s a combination of things. The first is the platform we are building. The fundamental technology we were building at Kosmix is called semantic analysis. We understand the meaning of things. If somebody tweeted “I enjoyed Salt,” we would know that it was a movie with Angelina Jolie and not a food. We are applying semantic analysis to social media and trying to understand the connections between people, topics, places, and products.
We map that space, and we call it the “social genome.” We were using it to operate the Tweetbeat site, where you could find out the pulse of what was going on in social media. But if you look at the founders and management team of Kosmix, we have significant e-commerce experience, and it was pretty obvious to us that the social genome we were building had serious applications to e-commerce.
If you think about the evolution of e-commerce, Amazon did a lot of things right, but the key was using the data they gathered about customers to improve the customer experience. Telling you “People who bought this product also bought these other products”—things like that. Still, there are two significant limitations. One is that Amazon learns about users only by what they do on-site. The products I purchase are a very small window into me, and sometimes a misleading window. Whereas social media gives a much broader window. If you can, with the user’s permission, understand more about what people are passionate about, you can market to them much more accurately.
The second insight is that we can do this anytime if we put an app on their smartphone. When they walk into a Walmart store, we could tell them, ‘Hey, here is a product that we think you will be interested in.” It’s the combination of social and mobile with the Kosmix semantic analysis technology that was the attractive thing for Walmart.
X: Okay, now let me turn the question around. Why would Kosmix want to be part of Walmart? Why would a relatively small, nimble team of Silicon Valley innovators want to work for one of the largest companies in the world?
AR: What really motivates any technologist is the opportunity to build products that are used by hundreds of millions of people and make a big impact. The thing about Walmart is that we get that opportunity. We have this really big canvas to paint on. Any product we build will instantaneously be used by tens of millions of people.
X: But in a way, it still surprises me that a bunch of startup guys like yourselves would want to be part of Walmart, which, just by virtue of its size, has got to be a pretty bureaucratic place.
AR: You’d be surprised. Walmart has been one of the most innovative companies—they practically invented big box retailing, after all. They’ve made huge innovations around the supply chain and merchandising. I teach a class on data mining at Stanford, and interestingly, one of the examples we talk about is from Walmart, which was a pioneer in that space. Perhaps the one place where they didn’t innovate as fast as other companies was e-commerce where they clearly were not the leaders. But it would be wrong to say they do not innovate.
X: What was your company culture like at Kosmix, and how do you think you will fit within Walmart? What place will you have?
AR: My belief is that one of the best environments for innovation is graduate school. So that is the culture we have at Walmart Labs—it’s freewheeling and somewhat informal, with people yelling at each other, coming up with ideas all the time, having hallway discussions.
Within Walmart, it’s not like we will be the only people coming up with ideas. Walmart has 2.2 million associates, and there are many bright, talented, and committed people that I have had the pleasure of meeting, and they all have many ideas. But we can at least be a way to channel those ideas and bring some of them to reality. We are a place where if somebody has a great idea, they can come tell us.
X: Are there things you feel you can do to improve the way Walmart functions as a business?
AR: We talked about [using the social genome and semantic analysis for] building traffic at Walmart.com. Another kind of project we are doing will explain to you some of the scope of WalmartLabs. If you take any specific Walmart store, it lives in a community, and each one is different, and therefore the assortment of products at that store should reflect the needs of that community. So far, it has been a lot of guesswork to make the assortment reflect the community. But one of the things we can do is use semantic analysis to analyze the area around the store and find out what people’s interests are, and use that to influence the store. Image the impact of that across 9,000 stories with a billion visitors every month.
One of the [other] possibilities is to figure out if there is a new venue for e-commerce outside of Walmart.com. At the end of the day, retail is all about location. People put stores in downtown areas for a good reason. Where are people online these days? They are on Facebook So stay tuned.
X: I wrote about Shopkick recently—they have a technology for detecting whether customers are inside a bricks-and-mortar store and delivering digital reward points to their smartphones. Can you imagine bringing that kind of mobile interactivity into Walmart?
AR: Absolutely. When somebody walks into a store with their mobile, how can we inform them about things that are relevant to them? We have a Walmart mobile app already, and you could imagine simply connecting that with their Facebook account or their Twitter handle and effectively checking them into the store. It could be anything.
At a high level, we are asking what are the best and most innovative ways of connecting customers with products. Can we improve product search using social signals? Can we improve product recommendations? It’s been just two months [since the acquisition] and it takes longer than two months to launch something new. But we are making rapid progress, and I’m sure we’ll be talking very soon about some of the new things that we are working on. We’ll have something interesting for the holidays.
X: This may be my own chauvinism, but I don’t think of people who shop at Walmart as the most technology-savvy consumers. Are they really an interesting test audience for the social and mobile technologies you’re talking about?
AR: I had the same thought at first. But if you look at smartphone ownership, Walmart trends roughly with the U.S. population. The same fraction of Walmart shoppers have smartphones as the U.S. population in general. Also, roughly the same number of Walmart shoppers have Facebook accounts as in the U.S. population. So in some sense, it’s the ideal test audience. If owning a smartphone or having a Facebook account were limited to early adopters in Silicon Valley, then Walmart shoppers would not be the right demographic—but these things are mainstream now.
Inside Walmart Labs - How the World's Largest Retailer Hopes to Sell More By Getting Social
A Q&A with founder of Kosmix - Walmart reportedly acquired it for $300 Million
By WADE ROUSH, XCONOMY on August 1, 2011 - 10:02 a.m. PDT
http://www.baycitizen.org/technology/story/inside-walmart-labs/\
One of the most head-scratching tech headlines of April 2011 was the news that Kosmix, a Mountain View, CA-based startup best known for building a Twitter filtering tool called TweetBeat, had been acquired by Walmart. Yes, that Walmart—the one with 9,000 big-box stores spread across the American heartland.
For one thing, Walmart already has a large technology presence right here in the Bay Area: you can see the big “Walmart.com” sign on the e-commerce division’s building from Highway 101 in Brisbane. So it wasn’t clear why the company needed a second Silicon Valley redoubt. Even more puzzling, Kosmix’s so-called “social genome” platform, which the company had been applying in areas like news aggregation and categorization, didn’t seem to have much to do with Walmart’s business problems—such as narrowing the gap with e-commerce market leader Amazon, for example.
There was speculation that Walmart’s real interest was in Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who have unbeatable pedigrees in the world of e-commerce technology. The pioneering comparison shopping site they co-founded in 1996, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million; inside Amazon, the pair helped to create the e-retailer’s huge marketplace of third-party retailers and came up with the technology behind Amazon Mechanical Turk. Perhaps Walmart—which paid $300 million for Kosmix, according to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher—wanted Harinarayan and Rajaraman to work similar miracles for Walmart.com?
Those were the questions on my mind when I drove down to the former Kosmix headquarters, now WalmartLabs, in Mountain View a couple of weeks ago. I talked for about hour with Rajaraman, who now shares the title of senior vice president of Walmart Global eCommerce with Harinarayan; he’s also an active Silicon Valley investor and writes about his big technology passion, data mining, at a blog called Datawocky. It turned out to be the most extensive interview that either Kosmix founder has given since the acquisition, and I learned a lot about why Walmart thought Kosmix was interesting, and what kinds of capabilities Rajaraman thinks his 70-person team can bring to their new employer.
A lot of it has to do with unsurprising things like improving the product recommendations that Internet users get when they go to Walmart.com, and tapping shoppers’ smartphones as a marketing channel. But Rajaraman also pointed to some more interesting applications for Kosmix’s social genome technology—like monitoring social media conversations in the vicinity of a physical Walmart store for signals about what goods that store should stock.
But we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what concrete products, features, or campaigns emerge from the Kosmix acquisition. Rajaraman said his team is hard at work on some features that will likely make their debut before the 2011 holidays. He dropped heavy hints that smartphone apps and an enhanced presence for Walmart on Facebook will figure in the changes somehow, but stayed largely mum about the specifics. “In six to eight months the impact is going to be visible, for sure,” he said.
Here’s the interview transcript, edited for length.
Xconomy: What’s the big picture behind Walmart Labs—why would Walmart want a bigger presence in Silicon Valley?
Anand Rajaraman: Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world, but they are not the number-one player in e-commerce—Amazon is. About a year ago, Walmart decided that e-commerce is a strategic priority. It’s not like they had not been investing in e-commerce, but they said, ‘It’s time to go to the next level.’
When you do that, what’s important is to look at how the world has changed. Are there some assumptions that can be challenged, or some trends that can be used, to leapfrog the 800-pound gorilla in e-commerce?
If you think about the way the world has changed in the last two years, there are two big, disruptive changes that have happened, and one of them is social networking. People are spending more time on Twitter and Facebook and the like. And the other is smartphones. For the first time this year, more smartphones were sold in the US than feature phones.
If you put these two things together, they will be as disruptive to retailing as the advent of e-commerce was 15 years ago. The biggest disruptive change in the last century was the development of the highway system, which led to big-box retailing. Then came the invention of the Web. And the third disruption is social and mobile. In each case, the way people shop was changed. The goal of Walmart Labs is to make sure that Walmart is at the forefront of “e-commerce 2.0,” so that we help define it rather than playing catch-up.
X: Why do you think Walmart was attracted to acquiring Kosmix, specifically, as the nucleus for WalmartLabs?
AR: It’s a combination of things. The first is the platform we are building. The fundamental technology we were building at Kosmix is called semantic analysis. We understand the meaning of things. If somebody tweeted “I enjoyed Salt,” we would know that it was a movie with Angelina Jolie and not a food. We are applying semantic analysis to social media and trying to understand the connections between people, topics, places, and products.
We map that space, and we call it the “social genome.” We were using it to operate the Tweetbeat site, where you could find out the pulse of what was going on in social media. But if you look at the founders and management team of Kosmix, we have significant e-commerce experience, and it was pretty obvious to us that the social genome we were building had serious applications to e-commerce.
If you think about the evolution of e-commerce, Amazon did a lot of things right, but the key was using the data they gathered about customers to improve the customer experience. Telling you “People who bought this product also bought these other products”—things like that. Still, there are two significant limitations. One is that Amazon learns about users only by what they do on-site. The products I purchase are a very small window into me, and sometimes a misleading window. Whereas social media gives a much broader window. If you can, with the user’s permission, understand more about what people are passionate about, you can market to them much more accurately.
The second insight is that we can do this anytime if we put an app on their smartphone. When they walk into a Walmart store, we could tell them, ‘Hey, here is a product that we think you will be interested in.” It’s the combination of social and mobile with the Kosmix semantic analysis technology that was the attractive thing for Walmart.
X: Okay, now let me turn the question around. Why would Kosmix want to be part of Walmart? Why would a relatively small, nimble team of Silicon Valley innovators want to work for one of the largest companies in the world?
AR: What really motivates any technologist is the opportunity to build products that are used by hundreds of millions of people and make a big impact. The thing about Walmart is that we get that opportunity. We have this really big canvas to paint on. Any product we build will instantaneously be used by tens of millions of people.
X: But in a way, it still surprises me that a bunch of startup guys like yourselves would want to be part of Walmart, which, just by virtue of its size, has got to be a pretty bureaucratic place.
AR: You’d be surprised. Walmart has been one of the most innovative companies—they practically invented big box retailing, after all. They’ve made huge innovations around the supply chain and merchandising. I teach a class on data mining at Stanford, and interestingly, one of the examples we talk about is from Walmart, which was a pioneer in that space. Perhaps the one place where they didn’t innovate as fast as other companies was e-commerce where they clearly were not the leaders. But it would be wrong to say they do not innovate.
X: What was your company culture like at Kosmix, and how do you think you will fit within Walmart? What place will you have?
AR: My belief is that one of the best environments for innovation is graduate school. So that is the culture we have at Walmart Labs—it’s freewheeling and somewhat informal, with people yelling at each other, coming up with ideas all the time, having hallway discussions.
Within Walmart, it’s not like we will be the only people coming up with ideas. Walmart has 2.2 million associates, and there are many bright, talented, and committed people that I have had the pleasure of meeting, and they all have many ideas. But we can at least be a way to channel those ideas and bring some of them to reality. We are a place where if somebody has a great idea, they can come tell us.
X: Are there things you feel you can do to improve the way Walmart functions as a business?
AR: We talked about [using the social genome and semantic analysis for] building traffic at Walmart.com. Another kind of project we are doing will explain to you some of the scope of WalmartLabs. If you take any specific Walmart store, it lives in a community, and each one is different, and therefore the assortment of products at that store should reflect the needs of that community. So far, it has been a lot of guesswork to make the assortment reflect the community. But one of the things we can do is use semantic analysis to analyze the area around the store and find out what people’s interests are, and use that to influence the store. Image the impact of that across 9,000 stories with a billion visitors every month.
One of the [other] possibilities is to figure out if there is a new venue for e-commerce outside of Walmart.com. At the end of the day, retail is all about location. People put stores in downtown areas for a good reason. Where are people online these days? They are on Facebook So stay tuned.
X: I wrote about Shopkick recently—they have a technology for detecting whether customers are inside a bricks-and-mortar store and delivering digital reward points to their smartphones. Can you imagine bringing that kind of mobile interactivity into Walmart?
AR: Absolutely. When somebody walks into a store with their mobile, how can we inform them about things that are relevant to them? We have a Walmart mobile app already, and you could imagine simply connecting that with their Facebook account or their Twitter handle and effectively checking them into the store. It could be anything.
At a high level, we are asking what are the best and most innovative ways of connecting customers with products. Can we improve product search using social signals? Can we improve product recommendations? It’s been just two months [since the acquisition] and it takes longer than two months to launch something new. But we are making rapid progress, and I’m sure we’ll be talking very soon about some of the new things that we are working on. We’ll have something interesting for the holidays.
X: This may be my own chauvinism, but I don’t think of people who shop at Walmart as the most technology-savvy consumers. Are they really an interesting test audience for the social and mobile technologies you’re talking about?
AR: I had the same thought at first. But if you look at smartphone ownership, Walmart trends roughly with the U.S. population. The same fraction of Walmart shoppers have smartphones as the U.S. population in general. Also, roughly the same number of Walmart shoppers have Facebook accounts as in the U.S. population. So in some sense, it’s the ideal test audience. If owning a smartphone or having a Facebook account were limited to early adopters in Silicon Valley, then Walmart shoppers would not be the right demographic—but these things are mainstream now.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Is Your Innovation Rooted in Strategy?
Posted on November 15, 2011 by Kevin McFarthing
I’m sure you’ve heard the statement – “we’re doing this innovation for strategic reasons”. Quite often “strategic” used in this context as a euphemism for “it’s not going to make any money but we need a reason to justify it”. Strategy should rarely be used as the sole reason or even excuse for innovation. It should always be strategic and make money.
So what is strategic innovation? The short answer is that anything you do in innovation should be rooted in strategy. This applies whether that strategy is total corporate, divisional or functional. Any sensible company should have a view of the markets in which it will compete, where it will source new business e.g. market expansion, share gain, recruiting new users etc. It should reflect on internal competencies and define the battles you can and must win. Once you know that, you can put your innovation priorities into context.
In many companies innovation is seen as something special, over and above routine operations. In those circumstances it is even more important to ask the “why?” question. Anything that disturbs “business as usual” will be greeted with more challenge and skepticism than a simple addition to the manufacturing schedule or another sales promotion. You will need a very clear reason, and that should primarily come from a reason to support the achievement of your strategic goals.
The status of innovation in strategy may be driven by a stated but non-specific need to innovate, and then activities put in place to deliver it. This is wrong. It must be informed by the stated strategic goals of the company. Of course the strategy does not define the detailed rationale and specification for every single project, but each project should make strategic sense. Innovation that is ad hoc is both ineffective and inefficient – meaning you do the wrong things and probably do them wrong as well.
You should also beware of innovation solutions seeking a problem. It is highly unlikely that you would find a strategic match for such a project, so make sure it doesn’t suck valuable resource away from a project that is strategically aligned.
In an ideal world you will have an innovation strategy and plan as a cascade from the overall strategy. Even better, you will include Open Innovation within your innovation strategy, having decided what will be developed inside and what sourced inside.
Very occasionally an innovation opportunity comes along which is so spectacularly attractive that it can influence the strategy. It can provide upside potential beyond most of the options currently under development. In that instance there should be no hesitation on behalf of the project team. They should ensure that agreement is gained to alter the strategy appropriately. Then, once the correct priority is given, the whole company needs to be aligned behind the new initiative, such that the whole “go to market” machine is not only prepared but also motivated.
Last but certainly not least, the people doing the innovation work must be aware of the strategy. Increasingly companies also understand that close external partners, for example core suppliers, also need to know the strategies. If they know, they will be able to bring new ideas aligned with the strategy, as well as being more motivated to work with you to achieve your strategic goals.
This sensible approach ensures that all noses are pointed in the same direction, resources are applied where they will have the biggest impact and the company has the best chance of meeting the objectives of its strategic plan.
http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2011/11/15/is-your-innovation-rooted-in-strategy/
I’m sure you’ve heard the statement – “we’re doing this innovation for strategic reasons”. Quite often “strategic” used in this context as a euphemism for “it’s not going to make any money but we need a reason to justify it”. Strategy should rarely be used as the sole reason or even excuse for innovation. It should always be strategic and make money.
So what is strategic innovation? The short answer is that anything you do in innovation should be rooted in strategy. This applies whether that strategy is total corporate, divisional or functional. Any sensible company should have a view of the markets in which it will compete, where it will source new business e.g. market expansion, share gain, recruiting new users etc. It should reflect on internal competencies and define the battles you can and must win. Once you know that, you can put your innovation priorities into context.
In many companies innovation is seen as something special, over and above routine operations. In those circumstances it is even more important to ask the “why?” question. Anything that disturbs “business as usual” will be greeted with more challenge and skepticism than a simple addition to the manufacturing schedule or another sales promotion. You will need a very clear reason, and that should primarily come from a reason to support the achievement of your strategic goals.
The status of innovation in strategy may be driven by a stated but non-specific need to innovate, and then activities put in place to deliver it. This is wrong. It must be informed by the stated strategic goals of the company. Of course the strategy does not define the detailed rationale and specification for every single project, but each project should make strategic sense. Innovation that is ad hoc is both ineffective and inefficient – meaning you do the wrong things and probably do them wrong as well.
You should also beware of innovation solutions seeking a problem. It is highly unlikely that you would find a strategic match for such a project, so make sure it doesn’t suck valuable resource away from a project that is strategically aligned.
In an ideal world you will have an innovation strategy and plan as a cascade from the overall strategy. Even better, you will include Open Innovation within your innovation strategy, having decided what will be developed inside and what sourced inside.
Very occasionally an innovation opportunity comes along which is so spectacularly attractive that it can influence the strategy. It can provide upside potential beyond most of the options currently under development. In that instance there should be no hesitation on behalf of the project team. They should ensure that agreement is gained to alter the strategy appropriately. Then, once the correct priority is given, the whole company needs to be aligned behind the new initiative, such that the whole “go to market” machine is not only prepared but also motivated.
Last but certainly not least, the people doing the innovation work must be aware of the strategy. Increasingly companies also understand that close external partners, for example core suppliers, also need to know the strategies. If they know, they will be able to bring new ideas aligned with the strategy, as well as being more motivated to work with you to achieve your strategic goals.
This sensible approach ensures that all noses are pointed in the same direction, resources are applied where they will have the biggest impact and the company has the best chance of meeting the objectives of its strategic plan.
http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2011/11/15/is-your-innovation-rooted-in-strategy/
Devising a Communications Plan for Collaborative Innovation
November 15, 2011, Doug Collins:
Members of a community engaged in the practice of collaborative innovation gain tremendous insights as they pursue that practice through the phases of an enquiry-led campaign. What ideas and insights do we contribute to the question at hand? What have we learned about the practice itself? One commitment that campaign teams make to the community is to create forums and provide the resources to share these insights. In this article Doug Collins suggests an approach by which the campaign team can build a basic communications plan to meet their commitment for sharing relevant information at each phase.
Don’t Change that Channel
I worked in the media industry earlier in my career. The business fascinated me. It enjoyed a rich overabundance of characters and disruptive forces, leavened by a revolving door of thoroughly disruptive characters, who reveled in continually resetting the rules of the game.
One particular fact—or driver—about the business intrigued me. The major broadcast television networks in the U.S. reserve the bulk of their “air” time to promote their own shows (e.g., “Coming up next: Gluten-Free Cooking with Earl Tidmore”). They defer ad revenue to build audiences for their shows. The fact that ubiquitous media brands make this sacrifice signified to me the need for promotion.
I reflect on this fact as I work with people pursuing the practice of collaborative innovation. They often do not come from the world of marketing. As a result, while they accept that promotion plays a role in introducing people to the activity, the questions of how and when and on what basis remain a mystery to start. Likewise, inviting someone with strong marketing and communications skills to join the campaign team can seem like a novel idea in its own right. (I recommend doing so.)
In this article, I share my perspectives on the elements that comprise a basic communications plan for building awareness amongst the people one typically wants to engage during a collaborative innovation campaign. The context is the internal form of enquiry led innovation.
Tooting One’s Horn
The people who promote collaborative innovation within their organization sometimes hesitate to go too far down the path of promoting the activity, choosing instead to issue the occasional status report. Everyone fears becoming the resident spammer. Yet, as our friends in the land of American broadcast learned, it’s wise to assume that people will not instinctively know that the opportunity to participate in the practice is open to them or, if they do have this awareness, on what basis can they engage.
And, if the major networks now compete with thousands of cable and internet channels, you compete for the attention of your community members with a proliferating number of internal initiatives. Many of us walk amongst the weedy walled gardens of proliferating SharePoint portals, for example, which grow like the IT equivalent of kudzu.
Assume that, if you have not spoken in person to a community member about the practice, then they remain unaware. Ultimately, the less people who engage in the critical question facing the organization, the less likely the practice will convene a diverse group that can together build compellingly novel ideas.
Crowd sourcing demands a crowd.
To this end, developing a basic plan requires two insights: insight on your audience and insights on when to engage them. Figure 1 summarizes the following discussion on this front. The responses to the questions shown in the figure would comprise the content of the communications.
Your communications plan—and the engagement it engenders with community members—will deepen with each campaign.
Figure 1: the critical questions that drive communications by campaign phase
The Who
The audience one targets in a campaign consists of the following people:
The executive sponsor: the person who convenes the community and commits to engaging in developing and sponsoring the ideas that resonate.
The campaign team members: the people who commit to engaging with the community and working with the executive sponsor to realize the potential of the members’ ideas.
The contributors: the people within the community who share their insights.
The community members: the people who the executive sponsor convenes to share their perspective on the critical question.
The campaign itself typically ebbs and flows through the following phases over weeks to months.
The enquiry: the question is posed to the community; the people are invited to share their insights on it.
The exploration: the community as a whole reflects and builds one another’s ideas, some of which resonate more than others.
The resolution: the community, the campaign team, and the sponsor come to an understanding about which ideas to pursue beyond the bounds of the fuzzy front end of innovation.
A Day in the Life of a Campaign
With the above definitions in mind, let’s look at the essential elements that comprise the communications plan.
The Enquiry
During the enquiry phase, the primary communication is from the sponsor to the community at large. The community members seek perspective on the nature of the enquiry (i.e., What question do we explore?), the nature of the engagement (i.e., What opportunities do we have to pursue the question?), along with guidance on timing and logistics (e.g., When can we participate and do we convene at certain times?).
Often, the sponsor communicates this insight to signal both their approval and commitment to pursue the enquiry within the community. The sponsor signals that, yes, community members can embrace the practice of collaborative innovation as their day job.
The Exploration
This phase of the campaign offers incredible opportunities for the members to share their perspective on both the activity itself and the insights they have contributed, relative to the question at hand. Campaign teams will at times focus their energy on communicating logistical or statistical information (e.g., “12 ideas were contributed this week: keep up the good work”). Doing so represents an opportunity lost. Instead, the campaign team should do some exploration by engaging with and interviewing the members who have contributed. What did they find compelling about the enquiry? What reservations did they have about contributing? What commitment do they make to pursue their idea further?
In this sense, your communications plan offers a powerful opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the thinking that motivates people to contribute. Share that perspective with your community, first and foremost. This form of engagement also serves as an intrinsic reward for contributors.
The Resolution
During the resolution phase the communication turns to the members of the community whose ideas have resonated. Specifically, the campaign team engages in dialogue with the contributors to explore the possibilities of pursuing the idea either to the next, concept phase or, at times, to implementation in the near term. Here, the critical task for the campaign team is to continue the dialogue with their individual contributors while keeping the community at large up to date on the resolution process.
What next steps, under the guidance of the sponsor, will the contributors take? Have some contributors decided to pursue their ideas, regardless? If so, do they seek further input or help from the community?
Keep in mind for your communications and for your campaign overall that one sure sign that the organization is embracing the practice of collaborative innovation is when members decide to pursue their ideas, regardless of whether they secured formal sponsorship. Highlight these occurrences, as they represent authentic forms of innovation and personal expressions of leadership.
Final Food for Thought
Your communications plan should mirror the cycle of the enquiry led form of collaborative innovation. In the early days—the enquiry—focus on awareness in order to engage fully as diverse a community as possible. Build the crowd.
During the exploration phase focus your communications on exploring the insights and ideas those community members contribute. Frame your own set of questions to them on how they, in turn, approached the critical question, or enquiry, facing the organization. Share the sponsor’s perspective on which ideas resonate, as well. The practice of collaborative innovation invites all parties to engage.
In the past, people whose organizations have pursued wholesale change initiatives have found themselves on the receiving end of an enormous amount of top-down communications. Experience showed that the initiatives—and the associated approach to communications—were largely failures. The practice of collaborative innovation turns the tables on this timeworn approach. Here the campaign team’s communications serve as a forum for the members to share their perspectives.
Lastly, in the resolution phase, help the contributors whose ideas resonate, along with the community at large, make meaning of next steps and application areas.
Develop a communications plan that allows the campaign team to share enquiries that relate to each phase of the campaign. Reject the easy route of sharing the occasional logistical tidbit, only. The commitment you make to the community requires more.
http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2011/11/15/devising-a-communications-plan-for-collaborative-innovation/
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