Nov 16, 2010 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Peter Drucker once said that innovation is the only sustainable competitive advantage, and most who have thought about it would agree.
However, in most situations, this commitment to innovation tends to result in more and more potential products and technical solutions, adding complication and cost to every business process.
By contrast, Apple does the opposite, led by Steve Jobs, Apple ruthlessly eliminates all but a very few, and then ensures that the products left on the list are done remarkably well, and remarkably differently.
In 1998 Jobs reduced the products in Apples inventory from 350 to 10, tough love that has resulted in the resources to redevelop the iPod, iPad, and iPhone, rather than spreading themselves thinly across the many products that they already had, and that beckoned.
To be remarkable, (remarkable is Seth Godin’s term, it works!) Apple has removed features, no buttons on a phone, no dials on an iPod, taking seriously the designers mantra that perfection in design is achieved when there is nothing superfluous to the functionality left to remove, rather than all that can be added has been.
Nov 14, 2010 | Innovation, Strategy
Innovation breakthroughs are rare, but the innovation that rewrites the rules of an industry is the focus of most management attention.
Most innovation activity, and the source of most value from innovation, comes in small steps, one day at a time, along a path whose outcome is improvement.
Toytota’s continuous improvement DNA is an enterprise wide innovation effort, now partially understood and codified as the TPS is the best known example, and concentrates on taking small steps, every day, that add up to a huge change over a period of time.
And as we can now see from the quality stumbles of Toyota over the last couple of years, if you take your eye off the long term, and take the short term prize, it can ruin the hard-won momentum.
Look for the trends in your industry, make them visible to the entire enterprise, and tie every activity (not just of employees, but importantly suppliers as well) to the target of achieving an improvement
Nov 11, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Strategy
When all the verbiage is removed, there seems to be four great challenges to effective collaboration, irrespective in my experience of the specific environment in which the collaboration takes place.
- The need to be cross functional, which cuts across all the traditional management and control structures, and can be a threatening prospect to many individuals and existing structures, i.e., the status quo is under threat, and reacts predictably.
- The openness and transparency required for collaboration to contribute demands a culture of personal and group responsibility directed by data, not by personality.
- A recognition that Intellectual Property is leveraged by spreading and usage, anathema to the old model of filing a patent, and defending it in the courts. IP has been replaced in collaborative systems by the Intellectual Capital of the group, which is not static, but evolves with use.
- Any individual involved in a collaborative system needs to engage with, and be committed to the above three factors, failure to do so by any individual can wreck havoc on the effectiveness of the collaboration.
Get the above right, and your enterprise will flourish, but whilst it may sound easy, in reality figuring out how to make collaborative initiatives work in this increasingly connected world is the challenge of the 21st century.
Nov 11, 2010 | Innovation
By definition, Innovation exists in situations where there is little information available to make an objective assessment of risk, rather than one where you can assemble a range of data to make that risk assessment.
Submitting innovation ideas to a data driven test defeats the purpose, as there will not be appropriate data available, so the effort encourages useless activity, procrastination, and hubris, even though it may satisfy the bean counters.
Innovation requires a joining of seemingly unrelated dots to come up with something genuinely new, and usually the only “data” available is instinct tempered by some qualitative feedback.
Nov 9, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“Skunk works” is a term most are familiar with, indeed, so familiar that the pros and cons, and the do’s and don’ts are debated endlessly. Weather a Skunk team separated from the main operations of an enterprise “delivers” or not is generally a function of the leadership, culture and resource allocation processes of the parent, not just of the excitement and freedom of the works.
Sometimes it is useful to go back to the original. The term “skunk works” emerged when the Allied war effort needed a very quick response to the threat posed by the German development of jet fighters in the latter stages of the second war, and Lockheed Martin won a contract to do the work against what was considered an impossible timetable.
To meet the demands, LM created a separate development unit, rapidly taking on the now familiar nomenclature, originally an in-joke where members of the team considered themselves as popular as a skunk in the halls of the existing parent company.
Creating skunk works is only one of many strategies that can be employed to rev up the innovation effort, and it is no more or less successful than others, it is all a matter of the context.
Nov 8, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Social Media
A community of practice used to mean a small group of specialists who engaged in face to face consideration of issues of mutual interest, resulting in innovative solutions to issues concerning their area of speciaisation.
Interaction between “connectors” with similar interests who inhabited other communities occurred in a limited manner, often at gatherings such as industry conferences.
The application of the term now has been substantially widened by the use of social networking tools in ways that are completely new, to the point where we now have communities of interest in areas that would never have supported a community of practice.
Sites like Flikr are a great example, ranging from broad communities of interest to very narrow communities of practice in highly specific techniques where the chance of a pre-net community of practice forming would have been virtually zero.
