Feb 8, 2011 | Change, Innovation, Management, Strategy
When one of the giants of industry, in this case, General Electric, takes a position on a topic, and supports that position not just with money and commitment, but sets out to persuade anyone who will listen to adjust their own perspective for everyone’s good, we should all listen.
GE undertook a business transformation driven by the 6 sigma developments of Motorola, and made 6 sigma the management fad of the 90’s, and more recently has embraced an enterprise wide search for “eco-friendly” products and services, termed “ecomagination” which has spawned new business that turned over $US 5 Billion in 2010. They have now turned their attention to the innovation process, publicly embracing an open model across their business units, and have just published a credible survey they have termed the “Innovation Barometer” , which sets out to interpret the views of 1000 very senior executives across 12 countries about the way they see the innovation process evolving. There are some standout conclusions.
- Successful innovation will come from a whole of society benefit, not just a bottom line benefit for the innovator.
- The role of SME’s will increase substantially
- So called “green” innovation will play a pivotal role
- Collaboration across enterprise, geographic, scientific and cultural barriers will become pre-eminent.
Our Prime Minister prattled on last week picking up some of these themes, but failed in my view to provide what every innovation thinker knows is fundamental to success, an objective, (perhaps a BHAG) best exampled by JFK’s 1961 national BHAG of reaching the moon by 1969, providing a driving vision of the end point.
Jan 20, 2011 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Often these two terms are used interchangeably, as synonyms, but that are not.
Creativity is a part of the process of innovation, an integral and key part, but nevertheless, just a part. It is, as Sir Ken Robinson so memorably said in his great TED talk, “Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value” .
By contrast, innovation is to my mind the process of taking the output of the creative process and putting in place the steps to extract and leverage the implicit value of the creativity, making it explicit. Thomas Edison, perhaps the most celebrated inventor of all time, certainly the individual with more patents to his name than anyone else, before or since, famously said “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” recognising the distinction between the creative spark, and the hard work necessary to turn the idea into a product, service, or process.
For enterprises to flourish in today’s competitive world, they need to encourage a culture of creativity, again as stated by Sir Ken in the TED presentation “If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original” and back that creativity with a management culture that gives the creativity life.
Jan 13, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Pixar is amongst the great “innovation factories” of recent decades, along with PARC, 3M, Apple, and a very few others. Part of what makes Pixar so effective is a question answered in this McKinsey interview with Brad Bird, the director who won two Oscars with “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” after joining when Pixar had achieved enormous breakthroughs with “Toy Story”, “Finding Nemo”, and other smash hits.
The core of his success has not been just the great people, but the environment created for them to work in, the processes evolved to manage the execution of creativity, and the restless curiosity and determination to be better, every time.
Jan 11, 2011 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
If I were managing a business in financial services, I would be asking myself if I had missed the second wave of the “net-boat” that is rapidly becoming a force in financial services.
Banks and other financial institutions have reduced their costs enormously by leveraging the capabilities of the net to receive and process payments electronically in developed countries, but even there, PayPal has carved a growing share of transactions, but more importantly, opened relationships with millions of customers who use the web for shopping. Just as the retailers missed the potential of consumers to use the web to seek the best prices, banks have allowed PayPal to build a customer base to pay for them.
In the developing world, millions are not serviced by the financial infrastructure of the developed world. predictably, alternatives are emerging, powered again by the web, and businesses that have no existing financial services infrastructure to protect, are able to move quickly to provide a cost effective and easy to use service to customers and potential customers not serviced by banks.
It is unlikely in my view that banks will become the recording companies of the early 2000’s and ignore the competitive threat until it is almost too late, but their influence, particularly in the developing world will be substantially diminished from what it could have been.
Jan 9, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership, Social Media
Ideo is an ideas factory, its stock in trade is ideas and the resulting products, that others commercialise. As such, it has been a lab or case study in how to innovate as they have grown. As a small business, they all knew each other, collaboration happened as a part of the DNA of the place, but growth and geographic spread made it increasingly difficult, so they set out to use themselves as the lab for themselves, evolving what they have called the “Tube” in which they mash up all the collaboration tools enabled by web 2.0 into a form that works for them.
Then, god bless them, they put it out there in the spirit of transparency and the collaborative energy that can be created, for us all to learn from.
Jan 5, 2011 | Change, Innovation
The “green revolution” may be denied by many, failing in the Parliament, and not engaging consumers as their utilities bills increase, but it is happening around us anyway.
The world is greening, despite the best efforts of many to avoid the issues. Because there is a dollar in it, businesses are recognising that the future will be different to the past, and are looking for ways to innovate and find opportunities to build new business models.
This list of the green initiatives of 2010 should make us all think, and perhaps conclude that in the challenges the planet faces in managing our consumption of non recurring resources, there are enormous opportunities for innovation, and change that will enhance the quality of life of those who follow us.
To this list we could easily add the impact of the current floods in Queensland on the world price of coal, and the knock-on impacts of that on utility bills of consumers and business. Given the role QLD plays in world coal supply, there will be some re-evaluation of scenarios in many boardrooms, and I would be surprised if the attraction of alternative energy sources, including nuclear was not considerably enhanced.
