Archive for Culture of Innovation
Team culture
I came across a Harvard Business Review article this week about how large corporations can better foster innovation by helping their dedicated innovation team members partner with other performance and core process teams, rather than struggle with conflict. (Culture is one of the key ingredients of a healthy company of any size!)
I was drawn to a particular example in my own back yard of how GE Healthcare’s R&D center in Milwaukee helped its innovation team in India innovate a portable ECG machine last year.
Innovation teams in your core business can optimize knowledge as long as your leaders inspire that culture throughout the organization. It can be accomplished by articulating and motivating a vision of victory, communicating that your teams are mutually dependent on each other for success, and by creating a common enemy: the competition!
There are ten tips in total. Check them out!
Lessons from Tyler Heights: Beware the Unintended Consequences of Metrics and Incentives
One can find many interesting lessons for business and innovation in case studies from ongoing experiments in public education. For example, the Summer 2010 edition of American Educator illustrates a lesson we teach in Conquering Innovation Fatigue: metrics to drive performance can have unintended consequences that may hurt rather than help. Indeed, unintended consequences are a major theme of the book, as we consider the problems arising from metrics, corporate and government policies, innovation initiatives, laws, taxation policies, and other factors, all of which can contribute to what we call innovation fatigue.
In terms of education and the danger of improper metrics, Linda Perlstein’s article, “Unintended Consequences; High Stakes Can Result in Low Standards,” examines a highly celebrated school in Annapolis, Maryland that received media attention and praise for seemingly miraculous success in education. The new principal arrived in 2000 to find Tyler Heights Elementary School in a dismal state with only 17% of its students getting satisfactory scores on the state test. She began redirecting efforts in the school to address this problem. Eventually her laser-focus efforts paid off, delivering the stunning success of 90% of third-graders performing well on the Maryland State Assessment, when only 35% of third-graders did so two years before. Several newspapers recognized the amazing turn-around and people at the school celebrated the success. But was it real success?
To achieve good performance on the Maryland State Assessment, education for the children was largely focused on how to do well on the test. Students learned how to write BCR’s (“Brief Constructed Response”) to deal with expected questions about poems and plays, and practiced writing these short answers for many hours, without actually studying poems or plays. “What gets tested is what gets taught,” the principal told the teachers, even if that meant leaving behind the material that was supposed to be taught according to state standards. Bins of equipment for studying science were largely unused.
Tyler Heights’ third-graders got only the most cursory introduction to economics and Native Americans, and much of the curriculum was skipped altogether. The students were geographically ignorant. . . . The third-graders had heard Africa mentioned a lot but were not sure if it was a city, country, or state. (They never suggested “continent.”) At the end of the year, the children in Johnson’s class were asked to name all the states they could. Cyrus knew the most: three. He couldn’t name any countries, though, and when asked about cities, he thrust his finger in the air triumphantly. “Howard County!”
The state standards required a broad curriculum, but the metrics for assessing that were based on one particular test and all the incentives were for helping students pass that test. In spite of the praise for the miracle at Tyler Heights, had the children really been helped?
The Campbell Effect
The problem with unintended consequences from metrics such as tests is hardly unique to Tyler Heights. Daniel Koretz, also writing in the same issue of American Educator (see page 3 of the PDF file on unintended consequences), explains that in education and other fields, score inflation is a common and well known but widely overlooked problem. In the social sciences, a phenomenon that leads to score inflation is known as Campbell’s Law. While widely applied to education, it was developed while looking at business. Donald Campbell, a prominent social scientist, examined the role of corporate incentives on the performance of employees. His research led to this general formulation: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” (Donald T. Campbell, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change,” in Social Research and Public Policies: The Dartmouth/OECD Conference, ed. Gene M. Lyons, Hanover, NH: Public Affairs Center, Dartmouth College, 1975, p. 35. See also Can New York Clean Up the Testing Mess? by Sol Stern.)
Campbell’s Law is at work when schools game tests to get better scores, at the expense of education. It is at work when cardiologists choose not to operate on patients who might need surgery rather than risk hurting their own published statistics on mortality rates among their patients (Koretz refers to a 2005 story from the New York Times reporting the shocking results of a survey of cardiologists). It is at work when a company tries to boost innovation with metrics or incentives that result in game playing, while leaving the real problems from culture, systems, and vision unaddressed.
In our experience, metrics and incentives can play a valuable role in driving innovation, but only when the corporation has a culture that genuinely encourages innovation, when there is a shared vision of innovation and success, and when sound systems are in place to advance innovation. Without those, you can not only waste a lot of resources in attempting to drive innovation with metrics and incentives, you can actually make a weak culture become pathological and lethal, sometimes exacerbating fatigue factors like the Not Invented Here syndrome, theft of credit for innovation, and breaking the will to share. Adding incentives linked to metrics without the right culture and systems can be sort of like throwing raw meat into a school of sharks or piranhas. You can generate a lot of activity, a lot of exciting thrashing and splashing, but in the end there will just be a lot of blood in the water and fewer thinkers and producers in your school.
As always, innovation success requires that you carefully monitor for harmful unintended consequences from the policies, programs, and incentives you have in place. Innovation metrics, incentives of all kinds, and employee performance evaluation systems and other tools associated with metrics can backfire. Unless you are tuned to the voice of the innovator and understand the impact of unintended consequences, you can be like the company we treat in Chapter 8 of our book that felt like it was a rock star of innovation while they were actually squelching it. Don’t let the unintended consequences of well-intended policies and metrics crush your innovation success.
Let Innovationedge Strengthen Your Approach to Innovation
With our experience at Innovationedge, we are prepared to evaluate your culture and innovation-related systems to help you strengthen your innovation capabilities and create greater ROI. Not happy with the innovation performance you’ve seen? Not sure you are measuring it correctly? Worried about the unintended consequences that your incentives might have? Give us a call and let us help you diagnose your state and provide a roadmap for future innovation success.
Are you an authentic leader?
As we’re seeing in the job placement industry, finding and keeping top-notch employees takes far more than the promise of a nice paycheck even in a down economy. (Don’t take my word for it; this video is a must-see for anyone looking to retain talented workers.)
If you want to create a strategy around hiring people who mesh with your organization’s culture and values, keep it real and keep it clear.
How your people come to know your culture and values depends on your authenticity–the way that you communicate. If you are a leader with any role in retaining employees, you absolutely must be able to clearly articulate a your company’s culture, business strategy and goals not only to your people but to your shareholders and the marketplace. (I’ve got more to say on this here.)
We all need employees who have the energy, passion and creativity to bring innovative new ideas to the table. And what they need to keep that spark going is authentic leadership from you. Have you created an environment that inspires or detracts from innovation? Are you providing ample and exciting opportunities to be a part of the team?
Employees will continually weigh and consider these elements along with the monetary and psychological rewards.
Changing culture takes time and patience
One of the innovation principles I’ve written about here (as well as in my regular Post-Crescent column this week) is about the idea of corporate culture. It’s not as easy to describe a good (or bad) corporate culture as it is to simply experience it–and let’s face it, we all have.
We’ve all heard bosses say, “That’s just how we do it here,” and we often wonder why. Most likely it is because leaders base their beliefs and corporate philosophies on what has been successful in the past, rather than evaluating policies to determine whether they are helping or hindering your company’s success. If it worked ten years ago but isn’t working now, it’s time to let outdated ideas die and try something different.
One of the biggest components of culture is top-down communication. It’s important for leaders at the top to share goals and vision with employees clearly and consistently. Employees want more than just communications about mundane procedures and financial results; they want to hear why the leader’s vision is important to him or her. And that helps build trust and employee loyalty.
If your company is in the process of trying to change its corporate culture, be patient. If you were hoping for a silver bullet to fix a broken culture, know that real and lasting change may take several years. But if you’re willing to wait and “suffer through” the setbacks that are sure to come, it will be well worth your time.
Lessons from a Grocer on the Unintended Consequences of Poor Metrics
One of the lessons of our recent book from John Wiley and Sons, Conquering Innovation Fatigue, is that the choice of metrics that business leaders use to track and drive innovation can actually contribute to innovation fatigue. Unfortunately, one’s choice of metrics can have unintended consequences that drive bad decisions and poor behavior. A recent example of how metrics can actually achieve the opposite of the intended results comes from a Wisconsin grocery chain, where a friend employed there explained the unintended consequences of management’s good intentions. Management is now pushing for higher levels of IPM, items per minute, as a metric for the performance of cashiers. This is a measure of how many items per minute the cashier processes. IPM looks like a valuable metric for productivity. Faster checkout means happier customers and shorter lines, so of course we want IPM to be high, right?
However, as with all metrics, the details of how IPM is calculated come into play and may bring unintended consequences. For IPM, the clock doesn’t tick when a lane is closed or, more specifically, when the cashier’s terminal is in “secure” mode. Shut down the terminal to the “terminal secure” state and the clock stops, something that some cashiers use to their advantage while checking out a customer.
A new manager at one store is pushing for IPM scores of at least 30 for all cashiers, but as one cashier explained, the only way that you can achieve that high of a score is to routinely go to “terminal secure.” If the cashier has to help with the bagging or do other tasks that reduce IPM, they can secure the terminal and then reactivate it before they continue scanning goods. That gives a higher IPM score, but the back and forth of securing and reactivating the terminals actually SLOWS DOWN the real work because it involves extra steps that eat up valuable time. By focusing on IPM as a proxy for productivity, productivity can actually decline. Lines can get longer, not shorter.
A further consequence of securing a terminal is that the customer may need to swipe his or her credit card a second time. The card readers in each checkout lane allow customers to swipe their credit card during the scanning of goods, but when the cashier switches to terminal secure mode, the swiped credit card information is discarded and the customer will have the annoyance of having to swipe a second time. By focusing on IPM as a proxy for customer satisfaction, the annoyances to the customer and the time to check out actually increase.
Unintended consequences of metrics can easily follow similar patterns when it comes to innovation, intellectual assets, and new product development. Leaders need to step back and observe the impact of their metrics on those in the ranks and on the actual performance of the company. A carefully selected basket of metrics with frequent reality checks are needed to avoid hindering real productivity and innovation with your good intentions.
Innovationedge can help your organization explore the impact of its metrics and find a better bundle to help you deliver on your business plan. Metrics are one of the factors we can help you explore as we work with you on your technology roadmap or your Ascent to Collaboration™ (your strategic plan to realize your open innovation potential). Give us a call today! We’re at 920-967-0470.
Seven Degrees of Separation: Innovation Lessons from Airline Disasters
For connecting one human to another, it’s been said that any two people can be connected by acquaintances in six steps, hence the concept of “six degrees of separation.” The term “seven degrees of separation” occurred to me when reading Malcolm Gladwell’s discussion of airliner accidents in his outstanding book, Outliers: The Story of Success. He observes that extensive studies of airliner crashes show that the fatal tragedies often require a combination of seven things going wrong, any one of which might just be an inconvenience or minor problem by itself, but in combination with the others can lead to disaster. When it comes to connecting skilled humans to the very disasters that they have been carefully trained to avoid, there are seven degrees of separation to disaster.
While mechanical defects, fatigue, and bad weather are often involved in the seven degrees of separation, these airliner disasters almost always involve flaws in interpersonal communication. For example, there may be a copilot who is afraid to speak up and challenge the pilot when an obvious mistake is being made, or there is a lack of clarity in communicating a problem to the air traffic controllers. When trouble is brewing, success often requires extensive communication between the flight crew, other crew members, ATC staff, and sometimes others. Plans must be made, checked, implemented, revised, clarified, conveyed, and so forth, at many levels to handle an emergency properly. When crew members keep their mouths shut and don’t share what they know or sense, when courtesy or fear stops urgent information from being shared, or when there are cultural or linguistic barriers to effective communication, multiple mistakes and miscues can accumulate, whittling away at the separation between survival and disaster. It’s that way in the world of innovation as well.
Superior IQ and innovative genius is often far less important than the ability to communicate. Disasters in innovation and new product development are often due not to lack of intelligence among the innovators and corporate leaders, but gaps in communication. Launching a product and safely navigating it through the storms of the market can be much trickier than flying an airplane. The flight of a new product always involves malfunctions and emergencies that require communication skills above all. Information from the market must be effectively shared with the developers. Plans must be shared and communicated with external partners and internal teams. Benefits and features must be effectively communicated to end-users. Expectations must be clearly conveyed to suppliers and service providers. A plethora of data must be handled and shared in ways that inspire, motivate, drive action, and keep all parties aligned.
As in an airplane emergency, “yes men” are not the people you need around to help. You don’t want devil’s advocates either or professional naysayers–you need people willing to share what they know and challenge directions and assumptions that may mislead the project or the company. You need people who can help you confront and conquer the brutal facts of your present reality, as Admiral James Stockdale has famously said.
More than words alone are involved in the communication relays that are essential for a successful new product flight. Intangibles related to trust, loyalty, and common agendas must be in place. It’s all about relationships, and these take time and effort to build and maintain. Unreliable or misleading communication can break those relationships and jam navigation systems, as can abusing or taking advantage of partners and employees. Bonds of trust and mutual respect inside and outside the corporation are essential to maintaining effective communication and bringing about the alignment and common purpose needed for innovation to succeed.
As Gladwell notes, the seven errors that tend to accumulate in major airline disasters “are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. . . . The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.” Ditto for the risky, high-flying adventure of innovation, where crashes are the rule rather than the exception. It’s not that the team wasn’t skilled or clever, but fundamental gaps in teamwork and communication resulted in the product launch smashing at full speed into barriers they failed to notice or attempting landings on runways that weren’t there. These disasters are always going to be far more likely than airplane disasters, but improved communication and teamwork across your innovation ecosystem can do much to bring you safely home.
In Conquering Innovation Fatigue, our chapter on the Horn of Innovation is devoted to illustrating the importance of including the innovation team in feedback loops that bring data from the marketplace to the innovators to allow them to make rapid on-the-fly adjustments for iterative innovation. Cut off that communication, and your innovators are flying blind. Blind innovation is what fills the convention “innovation funnel” with numerous abortive attempts that need to be weeded out. Keeping innovators inside the loop with clear and instant communication gives them a more clear map and helps them work with your team to develop the right flight plan for success.
Innovation success is all about abundant communication and teamwork, not hand-offs that isolate those with the vision from those at the helm. Innovation is disaster prone enough when everything is running well–no need wiping our a half-dozen of your degrees of separation from disaster by your own communication and relationship mistakes from the beginning.
At Innovationedge, we are committed to helping your team build the processes, systems, and culture that can translate outstanding skills into outstanding success. We are ready to work with you to review your internal and external ecosystems, strengthen your innovation flight plans (or your innovation roadmap), and help your build healthier approaches to new products and innovation systems that are far more likely to succeed. Give us a call today!
Getting a Grip on Innovation: Lessons from the Bionic Glove
The Bionic Glove
The most recent issue of Consumer Goods Technology has a cover story that indirectly reveals some secrets of successful innovation. Alarice Padilla’s “Game-Changing Innovation: The maker of Louisville Slugger Revolutionizes the Sporting Good Market with Bionic Glove Technology” describes the rise of a new sports glove that gives athletes better control. The glove has a unique padding system that fills recesses in the fingers and palm for better contact with whatever the hand is holding. This results in a better, more relaxed grip.
What I’d like to emphasize is that this innovation was the result of successful open innovation that began with a random encounter. Bill Clark of Hillerich and Bradsby Company, the company behind the Louisville Slugger and Powerbuilt Golf, was visiting the Louisville Slugger Museum when he met James Kleinert, a famous orthopedic hand surgeon. They began talking, and this would later lead to collaboration and the successful introduction of the only sports glove on the market designed by an orthopedic surgeon.
The real secrets for success behind this story, in my opinion, involve efforts to build and maintain relationships. First, Bill Clark wasn’t sitting at his desk. He got out into an environment where he could meet outsiders that might share some interest in the kind of products his company made. Then he took the initiative to talk with others and learn from them. When he found someone interesting through a chance encounter, he obviously took the initiative to follow up and keep that relationship alive long enough to explore the possibility of learning from or working with the new contact. I wish more had been reported on these steps, but it’s clear that it began with a seemingly random encounter enhanced with follow-up and and a willingness to collaborate for innovation.
Maybe Hillerich and Bradsby Company just got very lucky, or maybe they actively encourage open innovation approaches that motivate innovation leaders to get out and meet people, follow up, and collaborate when it makes sense. I hope the latter is the case. Whether it is or not, all of us can learn from this success. Creating an open innovation culture in your company and in your life will greatly increase the chances of random meetings leading to non-random success in innovation.
Want to add the power of successful open innovation and enhanced relationship building to your company? Our experience, tools, and training methodology may be exactly what you need. Innovationedge is a leader in open innovation and in building a culture of innovation within companies. We also have some remarkable diagnostic tools for understanding where you are today and what gaps you have in your internal and external relationships. Give us a call today and let us help you get a more advanced grip on innovation.
The Social Component of Innovation
In this Pixetell video presentation, Jeff briefly discusses the social side of innovation and gives a plug for one of our favorite books, Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, a resource that can help corporations and individuals better “feed innovation.” Keith’s book, coupled with the insights we provide in Conquering Innovation Fatigue, can help you build the right relationships you need for innovation success.
When you understand that innovation requires social adoption, you’ll understand why we work so hard to help our clients understand the relationships involved in their ecosystem, whether its internal relationships between teams in a corporation, or the ecosystem of partners, customers, and others outside the corporation.
Creating an Ecosystem for Business and Innovation Success: Brasilia's Success Story
When it comes to innovation and business growth, there are exciting success stories all over the globe. For example, in Brasilia, a small state in Brazil with 2.6 million people, a recent experiment has resulted in astounding economic advances and record low unemployment, even as much of the rest of the world struggles with recession and rising unemployment. The Federal District of Brasilia embarked on a revolutionary program in 2006 aimed at reducing bureaucracy and creating an environment for success. This required dramatic steps to advance education, infrastructure, and the rule of law. Improving financial resources (debt financing) for business is one of the next big priorities.
Here is a 14-minute Pixetell presentation describing some of the good news coming from Brasilia, focusing on efforts to create an ecosystem for success. It follows an earlier presentation from Jeff Lindsay. Click on the enlarge-screen icon to view this in full-screen mode.
Prize4Life Illustrates Collaborative Innovation at Its Best in the Quest to Cure ALS
In Conquering Innovation Fatigue, we emphasize that many innovators are motivated by the desire to make a difference in the world rather than merely obtain personal profit. We also discuss the concept of innovation competitions as a great way to fuel innovation success and access new talent. We also emphasize the importance of collaboration across disciplines and organizational boundaries as the future of innovation success. All these concepts are nicely illustrated by an organization seeking to cure ALS, Lou Gherig’s disease. Prize4Life, Inc. (Prize4Life.org) makes an interesting case study of what can be achieved in the realm of altruistic innovation using collaborative models and innovation competitions.
Meghan Kallman, Marketing & Communications Manager of Prize4Life, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, kindly shared some information with me about their inspiring innovation efforts. Here is the information she provided:
I would like to share with you the case of Avichai Kremer, co-founder and CEO of Prize4Life, Inc. Then a student at Harvard Business School, Kremer discovered in 2004 that he had ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
A computer-science engineer and ex-captain in the Israeli army, he had planned to graduate, work as a manager in a hi-tech company, and raise a family. Those plans changed drastically when he was told he would have 2-5 years to live, and that the medical establishment could do nothing for him. Kremer’s business perspective sparked his interest in the economics of ALS therapies, and inspired him to use his Harvard training to work for a cure.
Little is known about what causes ALS and only a few companies develop ALS drugs, so Kremer and two of his Harvard colleagues queried scientists and industry executives about the gaps that have prevented researchers from finding a cure. Companies said that they needed some basic research tools to reduce the cost of the development, like a biomarker – a better way to track disease progression. So Kremer and his classmates began Prize4Life, Inc., a non-profit organization employing business theories to stimulate research, which announced in 2006 that they would give $1 million to anyone who could come up with such a biomarker. The ALS Biomarker Prize program recently awarded $100,000 in progress prizes, and the organization’s second prize, the Avi Kremer ALS Treatment Prize, hits its one-year anniversary in October 2009.
While prizes are the visible core of our results-oriented model, we are also conscious of the need to create a vibrant and supportive arena in which our participating teams can effectively compete. Prize4Life has thus created a series of innovative projects and partnerships, piggybacking on its groundbreaking prize model, to ensure that all competing teams equal opportunity to be successful.
As one example of such partnership: in June 2009, Prize4Life and the Alzheimer Research Forum announced the launch of a new ALS-focused internet portal known as the ALS Forum (http://www.researchALS.org). Initial reaction to the new web portal has been swift and positive. The site offers ALS researchers around the world a one-stop access point for cutting edge research news and unique web-based resources. We also have designed and developed a manual to help researchers design their animal trials, and are currently designing and developing a database of genes associated with ALS that we intend to make available to researchers.
About Prize4Life
Prize4Life was founded by a group of Harvard Business School students when one of them, Avi Kremer, was diagnosed with ALS at the age of 29. Prize4Life works to accelerate the discovery of a treatment and a cure for ALS by using powerful incentives to attract new people and ideas, and to leverage existing efforts and expertise in the ALS field. Among other program initiatives, the organization currently administers the ALS Biomarker Prize Challenge, the Avi Kremer ALS Treatment Prize, and the ALS Forum.THE NEXT ALS BREAKTHROUGH COULD BE YOURS
Meghan also shared with me an example of a successful outreach effort using the competition model. “We actually awarded $50,000 to a dermatologist who had never studied ALS before, and who was intrigued by the prize model, and who submitted a winning entry, which is a testament to the potential of the prize model itself.” For the complete press release with much additional information, see the press release, “Prize4Life Awards Prizes for ALS Biomarker Challenge to InnoCentive Solvers: Extends $1Million Challenge Seeking ALS Biomarker” (PDF).
Further examples of great collaboration can be seen in their press release, “Prize4Life and The Jackson Laboratory partner in fight against ALS
Non-profits join forces to provide researchers with new preclinical resources” (PDF). This describes a partnership with The Jackson Laboratory (JAX®), the world’s leading provider of mouse models, to provide preclinical resources for ALS research. Together, Prize4Life and JAX® have prepared a comprehensive training manual to enable researchers to more effectively use the SOD1 mouse model in the fight against ALS.
Their website is http://www.prize4life.org.
Want to Help?
If you would like to help, Meghan told me that there are many opportunities. “We always need donations and fundraisers (this is the link), but we also have folks who host events for us, who blog on our behalf (on their blogs or on ours), who reach out to scientists who may want to compete for our prizes, to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, to link to us on their sites, the list goes on! We have an exciting event coming up here in Boston, for those who are local–Boston’s pro lacrosse team will be featuring us at ‘Heroes Awareness Night’ at the Boston TD Garden on February 6, and donating a percentage of the proceeds to our efforts. If anyone is on the east coast and wants to attend, they should click here:http://bit.ly/512shV. Anyone interested can contact me directly, mkallman at prize4life dot org.
A great example of collaborative innovation in action, with bonus points for using innovation competitions and having altruistic goals. ALS is a terrible disease and needs more attention in the quest for cure.