Mobilizing Minds

The latest in innovating management from McKinsey & Co. is the book Mobilizing Minds, which tries to prepare people and companies for a 21st century model of success.

Forget 'work smarter, not harder' -- this book suggests that profit-per-employee yardsticks to measure effective use of knowledge is a far better barometer than ROI or capital spending.

In his book review that explains the book's thesis, FT columnist Stefan Stern appears to sing a chorus from the Imaginatik songbook: "the great majority of businesses are underperforming precisely because their most important intangible assets -- the ideas and creativity of their knowledge workers -- are unwittingly suppressed by the way in which these businesses are set up to operate."

At issue is a complexity that mirrors the traffic and congestion on overfilled highways. You can do business using a 20th century model (just as you CAN travel from LA to Long Beach on a roadway at rush hour) but never before has it taken more time, wasted more resources and involved more people in the futile attempt.

Imaginatik/Pfizer innovation webinar

You're invited to a webinar spotlighting idea management innovation solutions from Imaginatik and the world's most advanced companies.

Tuesday - June 26 - 10am EDT "Near Shore Innovation" will be presented by Dr. Rob Spencer of Pfizer, recently profiled in BioIT World magazine (and the BBGM blog)

Please e-mailresearch@imaginatik.com for registration. And, yes, spaces are limited so we need an RSVP.

Spencer explains how 'open innovation' provides an advance view of where your market or industry is heading, while minimizing security concerns and creating new partnerships for growth. Pfizer has done all three and expanded idea management to a widely used tool serving thousands of people around the world.

Excessive Innovation?

This WSJ story outlines the difficulties of being Avery Dennison, which had an over-abundance of "good ideas" that overloaded its innovation program. Sounds like time for an 'idea management' solution. . . . And thanks to the George Group for suggestions on creating a more efficient new product pipeline. These include radical concepts such as building in slack time to help manage for delays or cross-training workers among different functions to solve staff shortages.

Seems Avery Dennison couldn't cope having too many good ideas. With too many activities at the end of the pipeline, it's easy to chase diverse projects that may all seem worthwhile. Each company needs methods for evaluating, reviewing and queueing up ideas for action and implementation -- much like an air traffic control operator -- to ensure smooth flow, appropriate resources and ongoing "management" of the innovation process.

This story echoes a blog/item in CIO magazine about comments from Disney CIO Tony Scott who said "In some respects there's too much innovation, or not enough scale out of the innovation we have."

A mind is a terrible thing to waste . . .

Job Security for Innovators

This brief, bloggy history lesson by Don Dodge of Microsoft provides details on how first movers DON'T always capture the castle by innovating. His advice is that companies need to look farther ahead -- though his ever-accelerating version of "Innovator's Dilemma" means that instead of 10-to-20 years for a challenger to overtake established players, it can be done in only a few years. Even new stars can burn out quickly.

His advice: Keep running hard because you never know who's gaining on you or how the market will change. Maybe he's a student of Satchel Paige. . .

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/10/innovate_or_imi.html

Moving Ideas To Action

Thanks to the nice folks at the BBGM blog for recapping a BioIT World presentation where Pfizer (an Imaginatik client) gave 'idea management' another nudge into the common vernacular. They get it. Just having an idea isn't enough -- ideas have to be merged with existing knowledge and then move to action to test or implement to see how the audience responds.

Having a shared language is key to bringing new concepts alive -- defining concepts and goals, removing uncertainties and setting out clear expectations (even if that means keeping an open mind for the unexpected -- remember, Viagra research began as a heart disease remedy). At Imaginatik Research, we're reminded of this daily.

We tackle the challenge daily of joining clients, co-workers and partners around the world and asking them to share technical jargon about rapidly changing corporate concepts. And without the entertaining, IT double-speak of "mission-critical innovation" or "Web 2.0 solution provider."



Send two boxtops and an e-mail if you need a decoder ring. . . .

Yesterday's Failure = Tomorrow's Breakthrough

A recent PBS show on the challenges of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable contained a historical factoid that shows how long it can take good ideas to germinate.

One challenge was having a boat large enough to carry such a huge coil of cable that would span the thousands of miles from the Irish coast to Newfoundland in Canada. After a massive ship, the Great Eastern, failed as a British tourist vessel designed for luxury travel to Australia, it was chartered 'for 2 percent of its construction cost' to unspool the trans-Atlantic cable in 1865.

Now for the payoff: The ship was the largest in the world -- six times larger than any rival -- when initially built and had a double-hull construction that would be "rediscovered" a century later as a way to make ships safer against hull damage (from, say, icebergs. . . .) and to make oil tankers more secure against leaks.

Talk about your lemons into lemonades.

Get to Know CECOR

General Electric could do for innovation what Ford did for factory production or Motorola did for process in developing Six Sigma.

Patia McGrath, marketing director at GE detailed specific tools, techniques and approaches to continuous corporate-level innovation. When CEO Jeffrey Immelt challenged GE to deliver 8 percent annual growth, it meant producing a $10-12 billion in value – roughly the size of Nike or British Airways. That doesn’t happen with a single Eureka!

You’ll be hearing more about CECOR, acronym for the process Calibrate, Explore, Create, Organize, Realize. CEC is strategy and OR is commercialization. Not an easy match when creativity has to play nicely with strategy and commercial development.

CEC can be repeated to refine learning and approaches. The entire spectrum is question-based: asking for information instead of listing assumptions and to-do lists. It’s important to recognize how much you don’t know and can’t predict.

“We take the opposite view when people say a giant company can’t be nimble,” McGrath told the Front End conference. GE uses a toolkit – including Idea Central – that combines idea markets, processes and events to support “Imagination Breakthroughs” or IBs.

With more than 100 IBs in the works, GE has also gotten comfortable with the idea that some initiatives fail – a very different approach than during the Jack Welch era.

TRIVIA ALERT – GE is the only company continuously listed in the Dow Jones Index since the index began in 1896.