Report 103
Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.
Tuesday, 20 June 2006
Issue 84
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. E-mail me at jeffreyb@jpb.com.
Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.
CONTINUOUS INNOVATION CHALLENGES
Imagine you are an employee in a firm where management has decided to promote innovation across the enterprise. One day, your boss comes to your desk and says: “I want 10 innovative ideas by lunch time tomorrow, please.” Even for a creative person like yourself, that would not be an easy task. Not only is it difficult to come up with idea when there is no challenge to focus on, but also, in any corporate setting, you will most likely be worried about what kind of ideas your boss really wants, what hidden agenda might she have and what could be the consequences of proposing ideas which are not of the sort your boss wants.
Compare the above situation to one where your boss stops by your desk and says, “In what ways could we improve the quality of our customer service? Give me 10 ideas by lunch time tomorrow, please.” By giving you a clearly defined innovation challenge, your boss has helped you focus your thinking on a specific problem. This gives your mind various strategies to use in order to come up with ideas, for example...
1) You might review known problems with your customer service and generate ideas about how those problems might be solved.
2) You might think about good customer service experiences you have had with other organisations and generate ideas about implementing such services in your firm.
3) You might think about bad customer service experiences you have had with other organisations, what elements were missing to make those experiences bad and generate ideas that would avoid such problems.
4) You might think about technology and generate ideas on how it could be applied to your customer service.
5) And so on...
Meanwhile, other good things are happening in your mind. The fact that your boss has confided in you by asking you to respond to a specific work related challenge demonstrates confidence in your mental prowess, trust in your abilities and empowerment. And, ironically, the further down the corporate hierarchy you are, the stronger these feelings will be.
Your boss has not only made it easy for you to have innovative ideas that help the firm, but she has also made you feel a little better about yourself as an employee.
Better still, your boss has focused your creativity on a specific business problem that affects your organisation now, thus making more efficient use of your creative thinking skills. As a result, your ideas are more likely to be implemented than would be the case with random ideas. This benefits both the organisation, in terms of innovation, and you, in terms of motivation.
Innovation challenges should not be used exclusively at the start of the innovation process – as a lot of innovation managers mistakenly assume. Rather, innovation challenges should be used throughout the innovation process, from beginning to end.
Let us return to the example above where you were asked for customer service ideas. One of your ideas might be: “we could install in our product a diagnostic chip to monitor our product's performance. When a customer has problems, she could connect it to a USB port on her computer. The chip could connect via the Internet to our customer support system which could analyse the problem making it easy for us to respond to customer complaints correctly.
Your boss could respond with. “That would be very expensive to implement. I am sure we could never convince management to accept a solution with such a high production cost. Also, I believe that such a system would be too complicated for non-technical users who comprise more than half of our customer base. Let's look for other ideas” Such feedback would be fatal to a new and fragile idea with tremendous potential.
On the other hand, your boss could reply, “That's an excellent idea. I really like the idea of automatic diagnostics. But, I have two concerns. Firstly, a diagnostic chip could be prohibitively expensive. In what ways might we offer such a solution while keeping costs to two dollars per unit?
“I am also concerned that non-technical users might have trouble connecting their product to their computer and accessing the Internet. In what ways might we ensure that using the Internet diagnostics system is easy, even for completely non-technical people?”
Rather than killing the idea, your boss has challenged you to improve your idea. As a result, a good idea with drawbacks can be evolved into a better idea without drawbacks. At the same time, you feel good about your creative thinking skills, which is highly motivating. And that ensures you continue to be creative on your organisation's behalf.
If the idea does not work out, perhaps because costs cannot be brought down to a reasonable level, the idea need not be killed completely. Rather your boss might say, “it's clear that we cannot bring costs down to a reasonable level. But we like the idea of automating the diagnostic process. In what other ways might we do this?”
As employees become used to being given regular innovation challenges from management, they will soon get into the habit of challenging themselves and their colleagues when they run into problems or have to accomplish tasks. Instead of saying to herself, “our invoicing process is so complex it drives me – and our customers - crazy!”, an accountant might say, “In what ways might I make our invoicing process less confusing?”
This is important. Most people's worst critics are themselves. For every idea squelched by a manager, any employee has probably squelched dozens herself. Particularly in companies which do not promote innovation or challenge employees creatively.
Of course not all employee ideas are the result of challenges. Moreover, as a company gives employees more and more challenges, the company also pushes employees to think more creatively and solve problems more creatively. As a result, employees will actually generate more spontaneous ideas which do not respond to a particular challenge or problem, but which are worth evaluation and often implementation.
And when employees present such spontaneous ideas, the best thing management can do is to challenge them: “that's a fantastic idea for a new product and it would be relatively easy to manufacture it using our existing resources. But it is not an obvious fit with our current line-up. In what ways might we integrate your product idea with our existing line of products?”
In summary, by giving employees continuous challenges, managers do some very good things for the innovativeness of their firms. They...
1. Focus innovative thinking on key business issues.
2. Help employees think more creatively.
3. Motivate employees to be more innovative
4. Develop promising ideas rather than kill them.
5. Teach employees to challenge themselves.
6. Continuously improve their companies.
For more information on framing creative challenges, read “The care and framing of strategic innovation challenges by Dr. Arthur Van Gundy” (PDF document, 537kb: http://www.creativejeffrey.com/creative/VanGundyFrameInnov.pdf).
If you want to implement the Continuous Innovation Challenges approach in your
firm, the first big challenge you have to ask yourself is “In what ways
might we encourage our managers to understand and use Continuous Innovation
Challenges with their teams?” This is not an easy task. Managers have
often been trained to use critical thinking in business. Hence they need to
be taught to look not only for weaknesses, but also for opportunities. And they
need to learn to turn those weaknesses into challenges for improvement.
We can help your firm implement the Continuous Innovation Challenges approach to innovation by providing a half day or full day interactive workshop for your management team. This workshop is designed to help them understand the importance of using continuous innovation challenges, how to frame innovation challenges, when to use innovation challenges and more. Call (+32 2 305 6591) or e-mail me to arrange a Continuous Innovation Challenges workshop for your management team.
TAKE AN IDEAS TOUR OF YOUR WORKPLACE
The longer you work in an organisation, the more familiar you become with it and the harder it can be to see opportunities to innovate. That's why it can be a good idea to take the occasional ideas tour of your workplace.
An ideas tour is a simple yet powerful exercise. Put together a small team of diverse people, give them all notebooks and take a tour of your firm. Look at every division, every room, every process and every activity. At every stop, pose an innovation challenge (see above article) to the tourers, such as “in what ways might we improve the process in this room?”. In the web development team's space, for example, you might ask: “In what ways could we generate more business from our web site?” or “In what ways could we reduce costs using our on-line tools?” In the warehouse, you might ask: “In what ways could we reduce the amount of time products sit in the warehouse?” and so on.
Share ideas and challenge each other to improve your ideas. Note of your ideas in the notebooks.
At the end of the ideas tour, draw a map of your firm and append to the appropriate areas the ideas you generated there. Look at the overall idea map and determine how ideas might be combined and integrated to work better. As you might have guessed, the best way to do this is to challenge yourself: “How might we integrate your logistics idea with my accounting idea?”
The result should be a map of your firm complete with innovative ideas about improving processes. In many cases, you will find that there is a running theme that connects the ideas and facilitates their implementation.
While an idea tour is most effective with a small group, who can challenge each other to improve their ideas, it is also possible and effective to take an ideas tour on your own.
If you want an outsider to facilitate an ideas tour in your organisation, give me a call (+32 2 305 6591) or e-mail me to make arrangements. A good facilitator can present you and your management team with inspirational challenges that generate great ideas.
SENDING MANAGERS OVERSEAS
When a company opens a new office in a developing country, such as China, India, Thailand, Mexico, etc, they usually start by sending a seasoned manager to the developing country in order to oversee the opening of the new office, hiring of staff and implementing the company's way of doing business in the new office. While sending a knowledgeable and experienced manager to the new office is important in ensuring the new office operates according to the mother company's way of doing business, many companies take it too far. As a result, they lose out on a lot of innovative ideas.
American companies, in particular, often assume that the American way is the only way to do business – even outside of America. Worse, companies opening offices in developing countries often assume that natives in developing countries do not have the sophistication to run offices. So they tell local managers what to do, but do not take the time to listen to those managers.
Fortunately, such attitudes are changing as companies realise that a successful new office usually requires a marriage of the mother company's culture with the culture of the location of the new office.
Sadly, precious few companies bring developing country managers and experts to headquarters in order to learn from those managers. That is a shame, because those managers and experts can bring many innovative new ideas to the mother company.
Managers in developing countries often have to overcome obstacles unimaginable by Western managers. Different laws, corrupt governments, lack of infrastructure and other issues make doing business in Chiang Mai very different to doing business in Chicago.
And while Chicago may not present the obstacles Chiang Mai does, developing country managers' experience overcoming developing country obstacles can be applied as new business ideas in developed countries.
For example, Mary Kay Cosmetics normally sells their products door-to-door. However, not long after they set up an office in China, the Chinese government made door-to-door selling by foreign firms illegal. As a result, the Chinese manager had to develop an alternative distribution system for her country.
Although America has not made illegal door-to-door selling, top managers at Mary Kay realised that they had a lot to learn from this Chinese manager. So they brought her to the USA headquarters in order to oversee the implementation of a distribution system similar to the one she implemented in China. In other words, to implement a very innovative idea – at least from the American business perspective.
The lesson to be learned here is: when you open offices in new countries, do not just send your local managers overseas to run those new offices. Also bring foreign managers home to your main office, learn from them and innovate.
YOUR INNOVATION MENTOR
If you have learned a thing or three from Report 103, then why not tap into my knowledge – and my colleagues' knowledge - to the benefit of your company? If your firm subscribes to Jenni idea management software service, you and your colleagues can tap into my knowledge, experience and advice at any time and without cost. Every implementation of Jenni software service includes our Innovation Mentor service. This allows you to telephone or e-mail me (and/or my colleagues) with your questions on using Jenni, running ideas campaigns, idea management issues, continuous innovation challenges and anything to do with innovation in your firm – at no additional cost.
Jenni idea management software service is not a software. Rather it is a comprehensive, turn-key idea management solution designed to get your firm on the road of sustainable corporate innovation in no time. For more information on Jenni, visit http://www.creativejeffrey.com/jenni/.
Better yet, call (+32 2 305 6591) or e-mail me to find out what Jenni – and I – can do for your firm.
If you are not ready for a full scale idea management solution, but are ready for an innovation coach who can advise you on innovatising your firm, call or e-mail me to see what I can do for you.
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!
Happy thinking!
Jeffrey Baumgartner
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Report 103 is a complimentary weekly electronic newsletter from Bwiti bvba of Belgium (a jpb.com company: http://www.creativejeffrey.com). Archives and subscription information can be found at http://www.creativejeffrey.com/report103/
Report 103 is edited by Jeffrey Baumgartner and is published on the first and third Tuesday of every month.
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