Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business – delivered to your e-mail box on the first and third Tuesday of every month.

Tuesday, 2 June 2009
Issue 150

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your fortnightly newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

As always, if you have news about creativity, imagination, ideas, or innovation please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103. Your comments and feedback are also always welcome.

Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.

WHEN THE BEST IS NOT THE BEST

Scenario A

Jane, a manager in a large organisation, needs innovative new product improvement ideas for the company's electronic widget. After thoroughly reviewing customer feedback, competitors' products and a number of other issues, Jane carefully crafts an excellent innovation challenge. She posts the challenge on her firm's innovation process management web application, inviting all of her colleagues to participate by collaboratively developing ideas on-line. To encourage participation, she also offers several rewards of holidays for two in Paris for the best ideas.

What's wrong with Scenario A? For the most part, it is very good. But, it is likely to produce ideas which are not very creative and which, at best, will result in incremental innovation. To understand why, consider scenario B.

Scenario B

I, Jeffrey Baumgartner, launch a Creative Vegetarian Cooking Competition. I offer several rewards of holidays for two in Paris for the best main course dishes submitted to the competition. I am the only judge.

If you know me or ask my children or friends, you will quickly learn that I am a pasta fiend and, in particular, I often make and thoroughly enjoy spaghetti with a spicy tomato and vegetable sauce flavoured with fresh basil or oregano.

With this information, you get busy in your kitchen, experimenting with various kinds of tomato and vegetable sauce combinations until you come up with something you feel is rather creative. You then submit your dish to the competition.

Most likely, you and most of the participants will have made me a spaghetti with tomato and vegetable sauce or something broadly similar such as linguine with tofu sauce. Submissions may be very good. Indeed, if you've cooked your dish, I am sure it will be absolutely excellent. But as foods go, it probably won't be particularly innovative or creative. But that's not surprising. After all, you followed the instructions to win: make the best dish according to my tastes. So, it is not at all your fault that your dish is not innovative. It is mine.

Now let's consider another similar scenario.

Scenario C

Scenario C is the same as Scenario B, except that instead of offering a reward for the best dish, I offer a reward for the most creative dish; or the most innovative dish.

In Scenario C, you might still want to research my tastes, but you will not be aiming to produce my favourite dinner, you will aim to surprise me with your creative culinary skills. After all that is the stated goal of the competition and you are very creative, as we both know! As a result, your submission for the contest will doubtless be something new, original and delicious!

Best Ideas Are Based on Existing Concepts

The same thing (as Scenario B) happens when employees are told that there will be rewards for the best ideas. They tend to submit ideas that they feel management will like and their judgement is based on their understanding of their managers.

In the case of scenario A, if Jane is known to be keen on the appearance of the company's widgets, most ideas will focus on the visual appearance of the product. Such changes may well improve upon the existing product, but they are highly unlikely to be breakthrough innovations. That's because colleagues are following Jane's rules, just as you followed mine in Scenario B.

However, if Jane wants to have truly innovative ideas submitted to her ideas campaign, she should offer rewards for the most creative ideas or even the most outlandish or crazy or wild ideas. And she must reward accordingly, even if she does not implement the most creative ideas. This, as you can doubtless see, encourages creativity. And it has been confirmed in the laboratory.

Confirmed by Research

In a set of experiments performed in the early 1960s, Researchers set up a series of ideation activities and informed one group of participants that they would get higher scores for more imaginative or creative ideas. Participants were further told that their ideas would be scored on two criteria: (1) how unique or different their ideas were and (2) how valuable their ideas were. The researchers found that this group had fewer ideas than the control group; but – more importantly – they had significantly more good ideas. *

This is very significant indeed. If Jane were to change her rewards method in scenario A just slightly, she could expect to get better ideas with the added benefit of reducing her workload as there would be fewer ideas to evaluate.

It is also an important lesson to bear in mind when launching ideation initiatives in your organisation. Be sure to base rewards on creativity, imaginativeness, uniqueness and/or value add; rather than rewarding for the “best ideas”. You'll get fewer, but better ideas!

* Reference:
V S Gerlach, Schutz, Baker, Mazer, (1964) "Effects of Variations in Test Directions on Originality Test Response", Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 55 No 2, pp 79-84.

INNOVATION ACCIDENTS ARE NOT ENTIRELY ACCIDENTAL

Some Famous Accidental Innovations

Accidents seem to play a big role in major innovations. Perhaps most famously, penicillin was discovered by the Scottish scientist Alexander Flemming as the result of an accident. In 1928 while performing unrelated research, Flemming noted that he had accidentally left uncovered a petri dish containing a staphylococcus culture. The culture had become contaminated with a blue-green mould. Upon examination, he noted that there was a halo of inhibited bacterial growth around the mould. He grew a pure culture and found that it was a penicillium mould. Through correspondence and passing on his observations, penicillin was developed into the first antibiotic and has saved countless lives since then.

The Daguerreotype, one of the earliest methods of developing photographic images, and the first that allowed relatively short exposure times during the photographing stage, was also the result of an accident. Louis Daguerre had been working with diorama maker Nicephore Niépce on a method of freezing images.

One day, he put a copper photographic plate, which had been exposed to an image, in his chemical cupboard. Some days later, he removed it to find that the image had developed. Through examination, he attributed the development of the photographic image to mercury vapours in the cupboard, where he had apparently also recently left a broken thermometer.

Through trial and error, he was able to verify his deduction that mercury vapours were responsible for the image development and could subsequently find the best approach for using mercury to develop images.

Charles Goodyear apparently threw gum rubber on a hot skillet. When he scraped it off, he observed changes in the rubber which led in part to his discovery of vulcanised rubber. At the time, he had been working for years to find a method of preventing rubber products from melting and becoming disfigured in even moderately high temperatures.

More recently, Alec Jeffreys, a geneticist, was performing a study to determine how inherited illnesses pass through families. The experiment failed. But, as the result of an accident during the experiment, he observed that everyone has a unique genetic fingerprint that also reveals familial relationships. The result of this accident eventually became DNA fingerprinting that has enabled police around the world to indict criminals as well as enabled judges to release people falsely accused of crimes.

And so on. Indeed, it seems a huge number of scientific discoveries, inventions and innovations are the result of accidents. As a result, if your firm is at all involved in scientific research, you might be tempted to replace your scientists with clumsy kids and see what great innovations their accidents lead to. But that would be a bad idea for two reasons. Firstly, not all scientific accidents result in innovation. Indeed, some result in injury and even death. Secondly, there are three factors which link the above and most other accidental innovations.

1. The Scientists Were Actively Problem Solving

In all of the scenarios I've described above, the scientists in question were actively problem solving. In some cases, such as with penicillin and DNA fingerprinting, the scientist in question was not actually working on the problem he eventually solved. But even in these cases he was systematically trying to solve a related problem. This systematic problem solving approach is critical to innovation. This is why we incorporate it in our innovation process management web application and consulting work.

Nevertheless it is important for those who are actively problem solving to keep their eyes and minds open to new possibilities that might present themselves in the problem solving process – even if those possibilities are not directly related to the problem at hand.

2. The Scientist Knew What They Were Looking at

If I were to hand you, right now, a petri dish containing penicillium mould which had developed in a staphylococcus culture, would you have any idea what you were looking at? Unless you have the proper training, probably not. I am sure I would not. If my maternal great grandfather had made the same mistake as Alexander Flemming, he would not have discovered penicillin. He would have noted a mouldy little dish and probably would have thrown it away. Nevertheless, he knew a thing or two about motorcycle engineering: he was an early employee at Harley Davidson and family legend has it he devised the modern motorcycle saddle (but, I have no idea whether or not this is actually true!) So, in order to exploit accidents, the observer must have appropriate knowledge.

3. The Discoveries Still Needed Work

Also important, all of the discoveries described here have not come gift-wrapped and ready to deliver as a final product. Flemming himself never even developed an anti-biotic for humans. But through sharing his knowledge and encouraging further study, he paved the way for Howard Walter Florey to do so.

Daguerre and Goodyear both spent time following their accidental discoveries in order to develop viable processes for making the daguerreotype and vulcanised rubber respectively.

Learning From Expert Accidents

What can be learned from these accidents is that the best method for innovation is through creative problem solving. That is the process of starting with a problem or goal, what we call an “innovation challenge” (such as how to develop a camera obscura image in the case of Daguerre) and devising and testing solutions in order to find one or more that work.

Nevertheless, because experiments do not always deliver the results expected, it is important to investigate all accidents not only to determine what went wrong, but also to see whether anything of value might be derived from the results. That, of course, requires that the people who are developing solutions to a problem have the expertise to identify what has happened, what went wrong and what went right in unexpected ways.

Finally, we should bear in mind that the innovative products that resulted from these accidents were seldom developed solely by the scientists responsible for the accidents. They were the result of collaborative development of the ideas that were derived from observations of the accidents.

GETTING OVER RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

One of the biggest problems in implementing highly innovative ideas, particularly when they apply to operational processes, is that they involve change. And we all know that people are resistant to change. Or are they?

Peter Begman, CEO of Bregman Partners, claims that this is not the case. Writing in the Harvard Business Publish Blog, Bergman points out that we all opt to make changes all of the time. We get married, get divorced, have children, change jobs, get new hairstyles and more. For many people, a radical new hairstyle is probably a more dramatic change that a change in how they work.

Bergman argues that what people do not like is loss of control. “For the employee it's the difference between being micromanaged and being self-motivated.”

When a secretary opts to get married and start a family, this is normally the result of a collaborative decision between her and her partner. When she is told that the company is going to adopt an Enterprise Resource Management software application which will substantially improve the efficiency of administration and that she will have to start taking a class in how to use the software, she has no choice in the matter. She has no control and she does not like that.

Bergman states that when companies must implement change, they should not aim to micromanage employees. Rather they should dictate the expected outcomes and suggest a method of achieving that outcome. If an employee would rather follow another path, this should be discussed and if the path does indeed lead to the same outcome, the employee should be allowed to follow it.

In this way, the employee feels in control of her corporate destiny and is far more likely to implement the change. I would further argue that the employee will be motivated to prove her approach is a better one than the company dictated approach, hence it is in the employee's best interests to achieve, if not exceed, expectations in implementing the change. However, Bergman does not explore this notion in the blog entry.

I recommend reading Bergman's blog entry if you are implementing change in your organisation. At the very least, it is food for thought.

* Bergman, Peter (28 April 2009) “How to Counter Resistance to Change”, http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/04/how-to-counter-resistance-to-c.html

THE INNOVATION PROCESS MANAGEMENT WEB APPLICATION: JENNI

Jenni is an innovation process management web application designed to provide medium to large firms like yours with an innovation process structure and a system for managing it.

Jenni is not simply a suggestion tool, rather it covers the entire innovation process, from setting up ideas campaigns based on specific business needs, to providing a collaborative idea development space to providing a suite of evaluation tools that enable you to identify which ideas offer the greatest potential value – and much more.

Jenni is provided as a comprehensive service that includes Jenni, regular upgrades, support and a dedicated innovation coach with the mandate to ensure your innovation process is a success!

For more information about Jenni, to arrange a demo or to talk to an expert near you, visit www.jpb.com/jenni.

We look forward to helping you manage your innovation process efficiently and effectively.

ARE YOU AN INNOVATION CONSULTANT?

If you are providing innovation services such as consulting, training or coaching and want to add a great idea management software solution to your portfolio of products and services, contact me and let's talk about how Jenni can help your clients innovate better – and help you gain new clients.

You benefit from our generous commission programme, marketing on the popular www.jpb.com web site (over 150,000 page hits/month) and collaborating with a fantastic global team of innovation, marketing and sales experts (http://www.jpb.com/about/index.php). In addition, by packaging your services with Jenni, you can provide your clients with value added innovation services that help them increase profitability.

It's a fantastic win-win-win scenario for your, your client and jpb.com!

LATEST IN BUSINESS INNOVATION

If you want to keep up with the latest news in business innovation, I recommend Chuck Frey's INNOVATIONweek (http://www.innovationtools.com/News/subscribe.asp). It's the only e-newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on all of the latest innovation news, research, trends, case histories of leading companies and more. And it's the perfect complement to Report 103!

Innovation Process Management Software from JPB.COM

Jenni innovation process management software -- your key to idea management success through creativity!

The same expertise that has gone into writing the popular Report 103 ejournal has also gone into the design of Jenni Innovation Process Management (IPM) software.

Unlike other idea management software products that do little more than collect ideas, most of them irrelevant to your needs, Jenni aligns idea generation with strategy and provides your managers with evaluation tools that enable them to make intelligent business decisions about which ideas to implement.

If your firm is serious about innovation and needs tools to deliver viable, innovative business ideas consistently and over the long term, we suggest that you learn more about Jenni.

jpb.com

Report 103