Stop solving the problem if you want to solve it

Interesting read by Matthew E. May on how taking a "break" can help us achieve a "breakthrough". Here you have one of the highlights of the article:

"Neuroscientists now believe that the ability to engineer creative breakthroughs hinges on the capacity to synthesize and make connections between seemingly disparate things, and a key ingredient is time away from the problem."

The post starts with another enticing reference to the "less is more" principle: great ideas have something missing.

Measuring innovation and design

Interesting article in the McKinsey Quarterly on innovation metrics. You can't improve what you are not measuring. In a nutshell McKinsey's research shows that companies that measure innovation are satisfied carrying this activity. It provides a useful understanding of their innovation performance although there is room for improvement, for instance, developing incentives that are aligned with metrics or communicating this information to investors. There is also this podcast + post in Killer Innovations with an introduction on how to prove the value of innovation.

Another interesting connected topic is the value of design. Does design have value? How can it be measured? Sara Beckman, my New Product Development professor at Haas, talks about it in an interview with Adaptive Path. In this presentation...

Applying design thinking principles in product management

View more documents from whatidiscover.

...she mentions three examples of organizations taking a stab at those questions:

• Corporate Design Foundation. "BusinessWeek IDEA Design Award winners outperform those who didn’t win in stock performance"

• The California College of the Arts has compiled a Design Strategy Market Index. "The index shows that for companies who invest in design and use it as part of their strategic management, on average, they’ve gained 274% of their value. This considerably beats all market averages and indexes for the same time period."

• The UK Design Council has developed the Value of Desing Factfinder
  

There is always subjectivity in defining what constitutes good design and what does not, but this is a good point to get the dialogue started.

Quick reminder to self: think creatively

Simple presentation on creative thinking by Joanna Maxwell. Bumped into it in slideshare. Too many stock pictures for my taste, although some of them do a great job conveying the idea. I also liked the "play" recommendation and the quote on the power of connecting the seemingly unconnected :)

Creative Thinking: Your Edge

View more presentations from Joanna Maxwell.

A thought on innovation by Arun Sarin

On April 16th, Arun Sarin, ex-CEO of Vodafone delivered a keynote at Haas. He shared with the audience his views on the new state of the world, leadership and innovation.

Regarding the latter he noted how innovation this days can arise anywhere in the world and presented an interesting concept: boomerang innovation. Boomerang innovation consists on sending ideas and being prepared to receive them back.

Mr. Sarin illustrated the concept with an example regarding deployment of telecom infrastructure. Vodafone's HQ made a proposal to their subsidiary in India. The Indian team could not implement the recommendations due to lack of resources. Nevertheless, leveraging on the power of scarcity they came up with an improved solution that eventually became the company's benchmark for that particular process.

Constraints are a powerful way to come up with creative solutions. We tend to do our best when resources are scarce and we are forced to work around problems.

The Most Innovative Companies 2009

I have been flipping through Businessweek's Most Innovative Companies top 50 for 2009. Apart from the expected technology-related companies (Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel...) there are retailers (Target, WalMart), several telephone carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone) and surprisingly auto and financial services companies.

Well, regarding the two latter categories, if they have not been innovative they'd better get their innovation mojo working. The main problem for me is that they have so much at stake that it would be complicated for them to reinvent (=destroy) themselves.

• They could potentially do it from the product side if they think wildly enough. In one of my first posts I mentioned a lecture by Mr. Tetsuya Kaida from Toyota Motor Corporation. One of his aspirational principles was being able to produce cars that not only do not pollute but also have a positive impact in the environment.
• Ditching their current business models is a very different thing. This is probably the critical issue. I cannot think of companies "disrupting" their own business models before they are in dire need. Any examples?

In the top 50 list there is another interesting finding, particularly for me as a Spaniard.

España is in the Businessweek Innovation Top 50!

There are three Spanish companies in the top 50:

• #28 Telefonica, the leading telecommunications operator in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world.
  
• #39 Iberdrola, the world's biggest wind-power company.
• #42 Banco Santander, pioneer in applying consumer-marketing techniques to the financial services industry in Spain, worldwide top 3 bank in terms of profits.
  

All three are large companies that have been around for a long while. In fact most of the companies in the list are large and relatively old firms. It can be a bias in the methodology employed to select the candidates, but why aren't there smaller, crazier companies? The study is based on a research by a major management consulting firm, does that play a role in the final selection of companies?

Business Model Innovation and Design

Yesterday, as part of my Managing Innovation and Change course with Prof. Chesbrough, I attended a lecture on Business Model Innovation and Design by Alex Osterwalder.

Alex started by providing a definition of business model, "how an organization makes (or intends to make) money", which he maps around a simple yet powerful visual tool, the business model canvas:

The business model canvas by Alex Osterwalder

In the center we have the value proposition of whatever business model we are looking at. To the right we have the customer, segments and relationships, and how the revenue is generated. To the left we have the company resources, activities and partners and its cost structure.

This unified framework captures a lot of information in a snapshot. Alex successfully used it to describe existing business models and to compare them to those of competing companies. Such a simple tool helped the audience generate insights "on the fly". Visual representation, a design tool, does a great job helping describing and applying a business concept.

Alex went on explaining how design thinking can be applied to design new business models providing examples of design tools for observation, ideation, prototyping and visual thinking. You can find more in his blog, Business Model Design and Innovation.

Alex's work is an example of how meaningful the dialogue between business and design can be. There are many interesting things going on around this subject and I am currently working on a project along these lines so I will be blogging about it soon.

Storytelling and technology

My favorite feature of many many web 2.0 sites is the status update feature. Such a tiny thing is a crazy mix of personal news update, ego-exhibitionism, gossip and who knows what else (probably this is the reason why it appeals to so many people). Such a simple feature can serve many different purposes as casual or as transcendent as you can imagine. Actually there is a debate going on regarding uses of microblogging, Twitter in this case, beyond its traditional purpose.

twitter tweets...

I want to bring here the case of Twitter as an example of how users can find innovative use cases for existing technologies. Recently, going through Frog Design's blog I found this interesting post on how Twitter has been used for a real-time reenactment of the 23 feb 1981 coup d’etat in Spain. In a country that was struggling to consolidate a budding democracy those were uncertain days. I was too young to recall anything but my parents have told me how we were driving home, close to a military cantonment, not knowing if tanks would be out blocking the roads. The whole country held on to their radios and TV sets listening to the pieces of news that kept on dripping every other minute.

...also en español

Twenty eight years later, Twitter users have revisited, minute by minute, this historical event for my country. Isn't it a wonderful way of telling a story with today’s latest technical tools and language?. I am shocked with what people can come up with when given the adequate resources...

Inovalatino. Innovation "en español"

I am currently collaborating with inovalatino, a Spanish-speaking blog on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology. The blog brings together the perspectives of a core group of MBA students (MIT and Haas) from Mexico and Spain. Our idea is to promote innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit amongst Spanish-speakers and specifically in our communities of origin, Latin America and Spain.


If you hablas español and you want to participate, let me know. We would love to have you on board.

Same stones. Different cathedrals

The transition from Renaissance to the Baroque period was a time of crisis. Art went through a deep transformation, let alone spirituality and culture in general. Mannerism, one step beyond Renaissance but not Baroque yet, questioned the function of the main ingredients of architecture. For example, columns and arches, traditionally utilized to support other elements, were used as mere decorative components in the grand scheme of a facade. Nevertheless architects used the same old stones, combined differently to produce a completely innovative result.

Nothing new under the sun. Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google and my Technology Strategy professor, in an interview for McKinsey Quarterly refers to “combinatorial innovation”. Nowadays innovators can combine different and unlimited components made of bits - Internet, software, etc - to achieve stunning results. In his opinion this flexible innovation will keep on providing significant productivity gains in the coming years.

Hal Varian, Professor at Haas and Google's Chief Economist

Interestingly, in the interview he also points at what he considers the future of education. In a world with unlimited information the most valuable skills will be those related with extracting value from data. Understanding information, drawing conclusions and being able to present them in a compelling way so knowledge can be successfully applied.

Innovation in online social networks

The innovation consulting firm Doblin has a powerful framework that identifies the Ten Types of Innovation by breaking business structure into four categories: Finance, Processes, Offerings and Delivery. It is quite interesting looking at different industries to see where in their business structure innovation is taking place.

Online social networks have brought significant product innovation: thanks to the power of the Internet they primarily enhance offline activities: connecting and sharing with friends or members of a community (facebook, myspace...pets included -dogster-), building and maintaining career-related relationships (linkedIn)... To a great extent they have enabled new behaviors, expanding and creating markets along the way. Think of the implications of "befriending" 1.000 people in myspace, or the fact that teenagers spend way more time checking their facebook than actually "living offline". Beyond the numerous product system innovations (for example Facebook offering IM messaging), in the last months we are witnessing network and alliances innovations. Online social networking sites are becoming platforms for other entities to provide their services. LinkedIn has recently launched applications a la Facebook.

All of this innovation revolves around strengthening the offering, but I think we still need to see more advancements regarding relevance and differentiation. Relevance is a big theme I will touch on in another post. Regarding differentiation, more than in a feature creep, I believe in the intangible: services, customer experience, brand image.

Innovation communities

OK, this post is going to be "drafty-ish" but a bad post is better than no post at all, right? Today, I attended a lecture in the Open Innovation Speaker Series at UC Berkeley. Stephen Benson from Innovation Exchange explained, amongst many other interesting things, how innovation can happen around platforms and software, events and communities. He quoted Chris Townsend (Forrester) regarding these three innovation archetypes.

Innovation Exchange and Innocentive are examples of innovation communities. Companies post their innovation challenges in these online innovators' meeting places hoping for someone to "crack" their problem. Alpheus Bingham, from Innocentive, also in this speaker series two weeks ago, gave some clues on why there is a high level of user engagement regardless of the low probability of actually "cracking" the problem. He compared it to a lottery ticket: just a couple of bucks for, yes, only a remote dream, but...we all love to dream if it is that cheap.


Salesforce Ideas, and other providers of software solutions for ideas / innovation, works under the platform archetype although there is something cool about the event you can generate with it (see the myStarbucksIdea execution. Given the strategic turnaround that the company is facing, this initiative received interesting coverage in the media)

I have just bumped into a piece of news about one innovation event, the 2008 IdeaFestival in Louisville, Ky. The festival "brings together creative thinkers from different disciplines to connect ideas in science, the arts, design, business, film, technology and education."

Cross-fertilization seems to be a key ingredient in the innovation magic potion and mixing is one of the premises of this blog. Hopefully I will bring in the diversity of my readers' comments to spice up the mix.