Helping others see the light...

When someone is stuck in the status quo / old-thinking, how do you rescue them? What have you found are the best ways to break through and get them to see that a new, more creative approach is needed?

As an example, just had a chat with a colleague who "owns" a brochure we produce for one of our products. After a bunch of research they found that our customers didn't even know they had the brochure (in fact, several of them came to a focus group carrying the brochure with them and still didn't know they had it).

The solution? Pack even more information into this year's brochure. The (implied / cynical) thinking being that if it's heavier and denser, people will think it's more important and be more likely to read it.

It's funny, when I heard that none of our customers knew they had the brochure... my thought was, maybe we should scrap the brochure. But, when someone has been so close to the creation of something (my colleague), how do you open their eyes? Shcok therapy? Smelling salts? How have you sounded the alarm that more creativity is needed - offending as few people in the process as possible?

Springwise for cool trends

(Scott) Hey there - here's another cool trend / new biz idea newsletter that I always find entertaining - Springwise: http://www.springwise.com/weekly/2006-12-15.htm

Check it out and sign up for their regular updates... they usually have some pretty thought-provoking stuff.

What other great sources of online inspiration (websites, newsletters, etc) are you tapped into? Let's create a list.

Internal Marketing

(Scott) I'm working on a new program that I need to market internally to my colleagues across the organization. I need to get them excited, engaged... sitting on the edge of their seats begging for more program info.

The challenge is not so much the message, as the medium (or media). My teammates want to produce brochures and posters to promote our program; but, these will just blend in with the plethora of other brochures and posters throughout the office. We need to do something different (and set an example in the process).

So, the question is: What are the most innovative ways that you or your colleagues have run internal marketing? How has your company gotten its people excited about a specific initiative? What media were used and how did they stand out?

good site for innovation articles

http://www.businessinnovationinsider.com

the downside of innovation

Hi all

This was a very funny presentation at the Fortune Innovation conference on the downside of innovation by Stanley Bing; summarised by someone who attended:

Consider the basic equation: Innovation = Constant Change = Pain. There are various sources of this pain -- meetings where nothing gets done, the constant demand for ideas, the competition for mental shelf space, creativity ("this is a pain"), initiative, the obnoxious pressure for gratuitous change and... consultants. Innovative organizations are over-run by consultants, but consultants always come with body bags.

Innovation takes an emotional toll -- anxiety/depression; feelings of inadequacy; triumph of shallow change agents; disrespect for process; idiotic disregard for tradition; promotion of wrong people; marginalization of true experts. "If don't buy the flavor of the day, you're a Luddite." "If you don't adopt the newest innovation, you're all going to die!" According to the media, all innovation is going to kill the existing business model.

Take a look at the great innovators throughout history... Hannibal, Gutenberg, Galileo, George Washington ("invented guerilla warfare, which led to the Vietnam War"), Louis Pasteur ("invented germs"), Albert Einstein ("invented the theory of relativity, which led to the atomic bomb"), and Bill Gates.

What is the true value of innovation? Like any new toy, the value, both real and perceived, declines over time. With innovation, there are benefits as well as liabilities. The liabilities include creativity, dysfunction and stupidity, and change for change's sake. There are alternatives to harmful and pointless innovation: pleasant stasis, gradual change, periodic invention of helpful things, knowing where everything is located all the time; a business plan that is comprehensible to everybody and... a corned beef sandwich.

The conclusion: Innovation has its place (i.e. "around San Francisco"). "Innovation leads to organizations run by children and idiotic crazies." Any questions?

A new twist on search

(adam) Managed to work out how to post now, which is exciting.

This is an interesting site http://www.chacha.com/ basically it is user assisted search, turning the traditional search model on its head and getting experts to recommend places.

Interesting yes, not sure how they are going to make money out of this has they have to pay the experts.

Depends on your view as to whether or not 1 view is better than scrolling through loads of search results. But then they are probably using google anyway.....

Innovation Survey - Lowering the Bar

This survey is fuel for my last post: http://reveries.com/reverb/research/innovation_engine/

It covers businesspeople's (200 responses) views of their company's success with innovation. Based on the number of truly innovative products I see in the marketplace, either the respondents work for an elite set of companies, or our bar for innovation "success" is falling.

Gosh - I feel so pessimistic today. Would love if someone could help me see this through rosy glasses. I'm certain I'm missing something. I'm just worried that if companies keep putting so much faith in innovation, when that innovation is far from ground-breaking, it won't produce bottom-line growth and firms will eventually say, "Innovation? Yeah, we invested in it, but there was no return. We've decided to stick to driving the status quo."

Does the word "Innovation" mean anything?

(Scott) This is something that has been eating at me for a while... is there value left in the term "innovation"? You can find the word innovation in just about every Fortune 500 mission statement, website, CEO interview, etc out there these days. Companies and people tout their breakthrough innovations... but often these "innovations" involve squeezing an extra cup-holder into a minivan or adding a "cheeseburger" flavor to a line of potato chips. I'm sorry, but my own bar for innovation is higher than that. To me, an innovation is something that fundamentally changes human behavior. Cupholders and cheeseburger chips fall short of that line.

And because "innovation" is used to describe products and services and processes with such little incremental value... does the term even mean anything anymore? Should we start talking about degrees of innovation in order to ascribe proper merit to the ideas that are truly innovative? Like Darwinnovation... a new product or service that is the "fittest" and sure to change the evolution of a category, vs. Spinnovation... a crappy new product with a huge marketing push that is spun as revolutionary?

How do you define innovation? How do we as a society misuse the word? How should it be used?

Why post-it notes work - I knew there was a reason!

(Pam) at the conference this week I also saw a great presentation by this guy called Tom Wujec on the importance of using the visual medium in innovation. He's an author on several books on innovation, and works in the graphic field producing graphic images for movies like Spiderman, Lord of the Rings, etc.

He explained how the brain processes verbal messages and aural messages very differently from spatial and visual ones - where spatial/visual messages go through the brain in a much deeper way. An example is you can remember where your salt is kept in the kitchen you lived in a year ago much more easily than you can remember a conversation from a year ago. So for the brain to truly engage in and integrate an argument or idea into action, we should ensure that it is spatially represented.

Which is why when we use post-it notes, big flipcharts, and wall space to stick up separate thoughts, group them together, transfer them onto new pages, visualise them in pictures, create collages, attach them to each other - it's actually helping people to think a whole lot more clearly and a whole lot more deeply. so much so that we really remember and understand those thoughts and ideas much more than if we just talk about them or write them in a note book in a linear fashion.

Tom's company have centres now which visually record a discussion or a meeting all over the walls (electronically), which you can move around and link to each other (like on Minority Report), and store them for later meetings in the same fashion. It helps teams to recall not just the facts but the situation and emotion of the meeting that they attended even months or years later.

Innovation of management

(Pam) I was at the Fortune Innovation conference this week in New York. Gary Hamel was the best speaker by far. He talked about the need for us to focus innovation around how we run companies, not just on creating new prducts and services. In the heirarchy of what is truly going to transform companies, the innovation of ideas and services can only go so far - it's the innovation of how you manage, and eventually the innovation around your entire business model or new industry paradigm that will yield the biggest growth.

This links so much with this book I'm reading at the moment by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on creativity - where he argues that creativity is not just an idea coming from an individual person - it's a fine balance between 3 things - the person who comes up with an original idea, a domain or culture to bring that idea into, and an environment or field that is receptive to that idea and will help it grow.

I'm starting to realise we over-value idea gen around small business issues, and don't value enough how receptive the environment or company itself is in whether an idea lives or dies. Which is why I feel sorry for General Mills (see the previous post by Scott).