Innovation Tools - How to make an impact as an innovation champion Innovation and Triz expert Jack Hipple writes this short, but excellent article based on his extensive study of failed innovation programs. He lists 6 suggestions for those Corporate Innovation Champions who want to succeed where others have failed:

1) Recognize that your social style (Myers-Briggs assessment) is most likely to be "N" (intuitive) vs. The "S" (sensing) which characterizes over 80% of corporate management

2) Recognize that your problem solving style (Kirton KAI score) is likely to be much more unstructured and not obvious to those around you, especially those in corporate management.

3) Be flexible in evaluating possibilities and options and help those around you do this as well.

4) Use both inside-out and outside-in thinking and help those around you see the value in both.

5) Look outside for technology, not only within universities and start-up companies, but also within parallel universes of technology which may be facing the same kind of general problems but are not direct competitors.

6) Use state of the art tools for problem solving and communication.

Definitely an article to read for innovation champions everywhere.

HBS Working Knowledge... Sometimes success begins at failure
In this article, Henry Chesbrough discusses how apparent failures in inventions and new product development, have become astonishing successes. The history of Innovation is full of examples like Viagra. "It is time that companies anticipate the need to manage false negatives in their innovation processes and respond accordingly." The measures proposed by this article to cope with false negatives are:

- Review cancelled projects
- Expose projects to outsiders
- Seek external licenses
- Spin technologies off
- Seek external VC partners

I would add another measure which I think is very relevant:
- Channel diverse insight from the corporate social network to identify non evident applications for products and innovations.

Corporations can substantially improve their capacity to identify these opportunities when people across different functions contribute with their insight from different perspectives. Often, powerful concepts are discarded before they even get a chance of becoming a project. Leveraging the diversity of ideas and perceptions in the corporation, through open participation mechanisms as Idea Management, should be one of the first measures to consider.

Boston Globe Online - November 30 2003 - Out-of-the-box, out of style: Globe correspondent Robert Johnson wrote this interesting article that looks at the demise of creative out of the box ideas in preference for safe secure, and less risky ideas that have predominated the economic downturn. A couple of choice quotes from this article:

''Everybody in business is looking for a brilliant idea, but in a lot of strategy sessions it's easier for people to sound smart when they're shooting something down than adding ideas on how to make it work,'' said Linda Kaplan Thaler, co-owner of a New York advertising agency and author of the best-selling book ''Bang: Getting Your Message Heard in a Noisy World.''"

and

"Consider what passes for major out-of-the-box thinking by academia and major media. Clayton Christensen is being hailed by Newsweek magazine as the ''Master of Innovation.'' But his ideas are of the relatively modest ''Build a Better Mousetrap'' variety, such as fostering an improved refrigerator storage bag, rather than anything that would create a whole new aisle of products at the supermarket."

Cheskin & Fitch Worldwide Innovation Study - Who's responsible for innovation? - DallasNews.com this interesting report shows the result of a survey of 544 executives on who's responsible for various aspects of innovation in their company - some interesting results:


Influential Trends per Team

Trend Person or team responsible for
finding innovation opportunities

(Trends listed
in order
of importance
for total Executive Cross-discipline Product
sample) Management teams development Marketing


Sustainability 31% 27% 47% 41%
Authenticity 39% 24% 18% 28%
Trust/Safety/Security 25% 25% 29% 28%
Convenience 19% 25% 21% 30%
Knowledge society 25% 22% 20% 17%
Mass customization 23% 19% 18% 15%
Connectivity/wireless 16% 25% 29% 11%
Cultural blending 15% 22% 16% 17%
Mobility 13% 15% 14% 20%
Simplicity 13% 15% 18% 13%
Time compression 11% 9% 14% 13%
Search for vivid experience 9% 12% 6% 13%
Wellness 8% 12% 6% 13%
Meaning of life 8% 7% 4% 7%
Social responsibility 8% 9% 8% 2%

Drucker on Innovation This is a nice little overview of Peter Drucker's view on Innovation Flow as written by Dave Pollard. The bit I found most interesting is the "7 Innovation Sources" which Drucker has identified as the places where opportunities to Innovate are to be found. They are:

1. Unexpected Occurrences
2. Perception-Reality incongruities
3. Product weakness or needs
4. Industry and Market Changes
5. Demographic Changes
6. Buyers' attitude and priority changes
7. New scientific and business knowledge

Business Standard .. Championing innovation in your organisation Noted author Robert Tucker writes this short piece that gives tips to would be Innovation champions on how to sell innovation within the organisation. Amongst the various points he makes are:

- Promote the benefits (growth, transformation, talent retention, etc) - not the features (it works like this, isn’t this clever and so on) - of innovation systems
- innovation is the only way to unlock organic growth, and the only way to sustain it is with an innovation strategy that has metrics, is comprehensive, and involves the whole enterprise
- Innovation initiatives require patienceand commitment
- Build a winning case for innovation by keeping current on this ever evolving field, by constant benchmarking of what other innovation adept companies are doing