Stanford Business School Study Cautions Innovators to Beware the Ties that Bind Wow, who would've thought that press releases would contain so much actually useful information?? This one focuses on a study by Martin Ruef, a faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, into how to enhance individual creativity and innovation adoption (Actual title : "What leads people to establish organizations that employ radically new routines?"). His overall recommendation is nothing groundbreaking - "Broaden your social horizons, and you might come up with the next crazy idea that sparks an industry" - in other words, expose yourself to more outside influences to inspire more "dynamic moments" (see Imaginatik Research White Paper on Dynamic Knowledge Systems for more).

What is far more interesting however - is the difference that Ruef found in the effects of different depths of relationships. Using data from 766 entrepreneurs and Stanford Alumni, Ruef concluded that the most creative entrepreneurs spend less time than average networking with business colleagues who are friends and more time networking with a diverse group that includes acquaintances and strangers.

Reuf explains: "Weak ties -- of acquaintanceship, of colleagues who are not friends -- provide non-redundant information and contribute to innovation because they tend to serve as bridges between disconnected social groups," he says. "Weak ties allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources and impose fewer demands for social conformity than do strong ties."

This is of particular interest when you take into account the amount of interest currently being focused on Communities of Practice as an Innovation enabler by the Knowledge Management industry - the crux of which is to strengthen ties between people with similar interests to the point where they become a regularly communicating community of professionals. Ruef's study would seem to suggest that there might not be as much benefit (in terms of innovational ability) in this activity as previously thought - and any benefit that might be had, will be short lived as the longer the relationship continues, the ties will strengthen.

Another interesting finding was that people tended to be more creative and innovative when they were new to an industry - a great argument for increasing idea capture events to as wide a net as possible. However he also points out that " Career tenure is not a bad thing necessarily, because extensive experience can contribute to more profitable business in other ways. "Veterans just don't come up with wacky or creative ideas that can really spark a new industry. " "

Increased Innovation Spending - Boston Consulting Group Study This press release from the Boston Consulting Group discloses the result of yet another study that supports the trend towards a greater concentration on Corporate Innovation activities worldwide.

According to the study, more than 60% of global companies will increase spending on innovation activities in 2004. Other interesting statistics included that almost 69% of executives ranked innovation as a top-three business priority and 57% of them say they are unhappy with the return on innovation investments made to date.

This discrepency would presumably suggest that a lot of spending so far has been misdirected in the wrong places, and BCG follows it up with the statement that "Ultimately, in order to turn ideas into economic returns, organizations and their executives need to shift their perception of
innovation from one driven largely by creativity to goal oriented, coordinated projects directed toward developing new ideas that boost the bottom line."

The study surveyed 236 senior executives in 30 countries across all industries.

Innovation - Where to look for it The CSSP's Denise Harrison looks at several broad ways in which to search for new ways to innovate your products and services such as:

- Assessing customers' unmet needs and preferences for new items
- Assessing your own strategic competencies to examine if lessons you learned in one industry/market segment could be applied to another
- Analyzing emerging trends to look for those that might be complementary to your company's goals
- Analyzing technology in other industries to try and capitalize on developments that could be tailored to your needs

She illustrates her poits nicely with an interesting case study on the history of Water Pik Technologies from their start making oral irrigators to the invention of "Original Shower Massage". An interesting case worth a read.

Notes on Innovation Convergence Conference 2003 - Corante BlogThe Corante blog, maintained by Renee Hopkins, covers the September 2003 Convergence conference, including a description of Mark Turrell's keynote on the Financial Impact of Innovation, known as the IOI.

A Tech Analyst's View of Innovation - "Innovation Management Is Real, But It's Not an Application"AMR Research recently weighed in on the debate about how IT can help drive innovation. As can be expected, they have taken a hard-nosed, skeptics view on innovation: "... most people subscribe to one of two beliefs: Innovation is a black box... or Innovation can be scientifically delivered". The real focus of the article is not on innovation, but an area AMR has termed the Product Development and Introduction (NPDI) process. The article goes on to describe the areas of the NPDI process that IT can support, such as capturing ideas in a coordinated structure (using a tool such as Idea Central).

The mistake in this article, if there is one, is to think about innovation solely as new product introduction. This one-sided view of innovation would exclude innovative companies like Dell who have historically not innovated around product, but around business model and customer experience.

Still the article highlights several interesting areas - and we think it will be the first of many 'IT and Innovation' articles.

SellingPower.com - The Value of Ideas author Michael Michalko has some interesting suggestions in this short article for those of you looking for ever more creative ways to reward employees for submitting ideas - although this article focusses on getting small quantities of ideas from salespeople - and thus some of these ideas stray far from the instrinsic/extrinsic balance necessary to get quantity, quality, and collaboration (remember - cash rewards breed competition not collaboration - and collaborative ideas are 75-80% more likely to be top ideas) - there are some very good ones in here too. For example:

- Design your own "Thank You For Your Suggestion" cards. Have them printed and distributed to your more frequent contributors. Ask the CEO to sign each card with a personal message. Stock up on instant lottery cards and include one or two in each card to show your appreciation.

- Offer "a penny for your thoughts." Buy a gumball machine and place it in your office filled with colored gumballs. For every suggestion (or every five or ten suggestions) award the contributor a penny to use in the gumball machine. Award a cash prize according to the color of the gumball that comes out ($2 for green, $5 for yellow, $25 for red, etc.). - Although this is cash based - the numbers are small and trivial enough not to have too deep an effect of collaboration - especially if you also allow everyone who worked on that idea a go ad the gumball machine too.

worth a quick glance