“What time do you want me to start work?” That’s the question a new hire recently asked me. She looked a little startled by my reply.

“I don’t care.”

But it was the truth. I didn’t care—and I never have—what hours are kept by the people who work for me. You could say I’m the opposite of a control freak, in the sense that I have always resisted rules, for myself and for others. Why? Because once you have rules, you have to enforce them—and there’s no more tedious task in life.

I’m relaxed about timekeeping in part because I had great bosses early in my broadcasting career. They didn’t care about hours either. They trusted that, with a broadcast date in the schedule, any producer would work their socks off to make the best program on time—because that’s how you advanced your career. Nobody ever said, “Wonderful timekeeping, shame about the show!”

And so that’s how I’ve always managed people who worked for me. I’ve trusted them to get the work done on time and on budget—and they have. Treating employees like grown-ups made it more likely that they would behave the same way. Of course, this also implies that no one person’s schedule should mess up anyone else’s: we all work collaboratively and to do that, it’s helpful to be in the same place at the same time occasionally. But I’ve rarely had to spell this out.

I have also always taken the same approach to maternity leave. No woman knows exactly what she will want once her baby has arrived: some mothers can’t wait to get back to work while others decide that they want to stop for awhile. Their partners’ attitudes too are unpredictable too. So I’ve always taken the line: figure out what works for you and let me know. I have never yet had anyone come to me with an unreasonable proposal. Nor have I ever seen two proposals alike. People are different and so are families and I’ve always assumed that I was the last person to dictate how anyone should feel or behave.

I cannot remember a single instance of being disappointed by this approach. Of course I’ve had poor or under-performing employees and not a few staffers who were simply in the wrong job. But in none of those cases were hours the problem. Instead, I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of dedicated, committed, energetic individuals whose stamina was hugely enhanced by the freedom to work as they saw fit. They more often exceeded expectations than under-delivered.

‘But weren’t you afraid of being ripped off?’ I’m often asked. Strangely enough, no. I wasn’t ripped off, I wasn’t disappointed and, perhaps best of all, I didn’t have to walk around ostentatiously staring at my watch. There are much better ways to spend precious time.

Why Flexible Hours Inspire Performance | Inc.com

Related articles

• Should business insurance customers do more to provide flexible working? (premierlinedirect.co.uk)
• What does flexible working really mean? (career-advice.monster.co.uk)
• Flexible Schedules (sellinginnovation.wordpress.com)
• With Flexible Work Location, High Productivity (socyberty.com)
• Why Sleep is so Important for Freelancers (freelanceswitch.com)

Most of us look back from a December perspective and take stock of how we did in the past 12 months. Did we meet the goals we set for ourselves last December? Did we do something to make a positive difference? What are those things we planned to do but didn’t or couldn’t in this economically-challenging climate?

From my point of view, I wrap up 2011 with excitement for the many ways my colleagues and clients creatively told their stories of success and innovation, even when budgets were tightened. I’ve helped facilitate and lead conference events around the world to see how other companies are finding creative ways to tap into new ideas and products this past year, and I’ll be doing even more of that in 2012.

How about you? What are you doing in your innovation endeavors this coming year? I’m especially excited and inspired to see the many corporations and entrepreneurs coming together to find ways to solve tough problems in our world, like hunger, clean drinking water, lack of educational resources in developing nations and health issues that stem from a basic lack of hygiene.

I hope you’ve enjoyed skimming this blog and have found some inspirational and informative news that you can use to unleash your own innovation plans.

May you, your families and your colleagues and friends enjoy the New Year!

We all know that leaders who aren’t on top of their game will be beaten. This conference was designed to help innovation professionals verify their confidence and validate their competencies in innovation.

Whether an early adopter — or part of the late majority — it was good to see a diverse group of researchers and innovation practitioners have the opportunity to share knowledge and gain new insights into product development.

Participant interaction was a key component of the daytime events with workshops and labs in addition to expert presentations.

Steven Fahrenholtz, a strategy and innovation director from General Mills, delivered the opening keynote on “Empathy in Innovation.” His interesting perspective is that to launch great products you not only need great ideas, tools and process, but also emotion. The role of emotion is often overlooked or even ignored, but his company actively looks to build consumer empathy into its business teams to help create products that not only deliver on needs, but that try to strike an emotional connection with customers.

Ravi Arora, vice president of Tata Quality Management Services, spoke of how Tata has made a commitment to grow from an India-based organization into a global force in many business sectors, and the role that fostering a culture of innovation has played. Part of the success that Tata have recently achieved is attributed to a formal group of senior managers that are specifically responsible for inspiring, enabling and encouraging innovation across the company.

You may not think of innovation when you think of the toy industry, but it was just a few years ago that LEGO was facing serious financial difficulties. David Robertson of The Wharton School delivered a keynote on how innovation helped reinvent LEGO and make it such a powerhouse today in the toy industry. LEGO used innovation, not just in products, but also in pricing, business processes and market channels to fuel the turnaround.

These were just a few of the keynote talks that helped set the tone. Beyond that I found that the unique, hands-on Discovery Labs were quite valuable. These unconventional labs consisted of interactive sessions covering topics like driving consumer impact, portfolio management, the “Voice of the Consumer,” and business model innovation.

Other interested attendees had the opportunity to hone their product development skills through an intensive full-day New Product Development Professional certification preparation session. Experts in new product development guided the class through key strategies and best practices that have worked for them. To me there is no substitute for learning from real practitioners with hands-on experience.

I’ll certainly look forward to attending next year’s conference to see what new approaches are being explored and how they are being put into practice in the ever-evolving world of product innovation.

It’s called the Food & Beverage 2011: Sustainable Innovation Summit, and it’s happening in Chicago August 9 and 10. This invitation-only event will bring together the top 100 innovation leaders from a multi-national audience of Chief’s, VP’s, Directors, Heads, Senior Directors and Managers of Innovation, R&D, Product Development, Open Innovation, Customer Management, and Manufacturing. My company, Innovationege, is proud to team up once again with the outstanding leaders at the Management Roundtable for this exclusive event.

We’re going to talk about everything from our changing regulatory landscape to the search for new market channels. We’re going to hear from leaders about those amazing innovation journeys, like how H.J. Heinz developed an interesting approach to honing their capability to deliver growth by identifying, developing and acquiring a continuum of incremental and disruptive technologies! Or how the J.M. Smucker Company quadrupled in size via a strategy of growth through acquisitions, and the choices they needed to make as a result.

And we’re going to challenge current thinking and approaches, set the stage for new trends in sustainable innovation and create a senior level networking community for ongoing support and dialogue. There are 100 spots open, and if you’d like to be a part just let me know. You’ll find all of the information about our keynotes, candid case studies, facilitated Q&A, networking sessions and a post-conference workshops on our Sustainable Innovation Summit site, where you can register and check out the facilities at Chicago’s Allerton Hotel.

I’ll see you in Chicago!

The Botox® approach to skin beauty is being enhanced with Juvederm® hyaluronic acid (HA) dermal filler formulation, a material that can be injected into the skin to fill some wrinkles. They are also dealing with the challenge of obesity with their laproscopic band, a less invasive approach to bariatric treatment. In ophthalmology, one of their most profitable segments, a host of products treat eye conditions such as glaucoma or dry eye.

Allergan’s products are well adapted for the needs of the aging baby boomer population and appear to be riding a wave of technical success well matched to a demographic wave. Many growth opportunities still exist, and with the heavy investment in innovation and research, Allergan appears poised to continue growing, something that is unusual for many large pharmaceutical companies these days.

The company began in 1950 when chemist Chemist Stanley Bly developed anti-allergy nose drops and got the help of his friend, Gavin S. Herbert Sr., who owned a pharmacy. Two years later, after listening to advice from a pharmacist about patient needs, they developed an eye drop with anti-histamine, the first such eye drop in the United State. Sales skyrocketed and Allergan became a major player in ophthalmology, which today makes up almost half of their business still.

Listening to market feedback and acting on clues and suggestions from knowledgeable people like a pharmacist allowed Allergan to quickly shift its focus and its product array in the early days to address an important unmet need. This led to eye products, not just nose drops, and the opportunity in ophthalmology that will continue to be huge for Allergan, now at nearly 50% of sales, if they keep an eye on innovation. Taking outside advice and reacting nimbly to new market opportunities is what put Allergan on the path to success. It’s the kind of thing that outside eyes and minds here at Innovationedge can help you do in your company as well.

Preparation has been the key for success. A big part of the preparation is ours as we dig into the literature, patents, and competitive intelligence. Sometimes we conduct pre-workshop interviews to get a landscape of what the client already knows so that we can better begin with that starting point as we help them create and document more.

The preparation by the client is also critical. One key part of their preparation is the selection of team members. Groups of about 5 to 25 people work well, with maybe 7 to 15 being the preferred range. The group works well if there is sufficient diversity in experience and background. For example, even in dealing with highly technical problems, I like to have at least one marketer in the team, someone with great hands-on experience dealing with consumer insights or other sources of marketing information. The perspective a good marketing person can bring is often vital for the success of an IP-generation project.

Teams also can be more effective when the prepare by reading the materials we provide on the prior art, competitive efforts, etc. We recognize, though, that many times team members won’t have had adequate time or motivation to prepare other than showing up. We can still squeeze good information from the unprepared, for much of what they have to contribute creatively is already in their heads. It just may take a little more effort to get it out and documented,

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technology transfer offices are charged with this task in many universities, and legal departments or patent review boards have this duty in many companies, but both can miss huge opportunities unless there is someone who goes out to mine the organization for inventions. That involves reaching out to groups and individuals, educating them (often in presentations or group meetings) about intellectual property, being available for one-on-one discussions, asking questions, looking for signs of exciting developments, being an advocate and mentor, and constantly mining for IP gold. These are activities that we at Innovationedge have done for some of our clients, with exciting results. Let us help you develop a plan to capture more of the inventions that are in your midst, and to generate new intellectual assets (including low-cost assets) to build a powerful portfolio.

One of the many exciting experiences I had at Kimberly-Clark came after recognizing that a particular remote mill had developed some clever solutions to a few problems they were facing. After further inquiries, I learned that the mill had some very bright engineers who were solving lots of problems in clever ways. I suggested that there may be some patent opportunities coming out of that mill, and arranged a trip where a couple of us would spend a couple days there giving presentations and doing interviews of team members to see what they might have. I found many exciting and potentially patentable advances from their work, and ended up working with them to generate nearly a dozen invention disclosures, several of which were filed as patents. This created a lot of excitement for the mill and helped them pay more attention to the IP potential of what they were doing.

As with that mill experience, part of successful mining involves helping people write up the initial invention disclosure. When people are very busy and writing disclosures doesn’t fit their job description, someone needs to be the assistant/mentor who basically writes it for them, taking away the pain of the IP process. It requires resources, but it can lead to substantial returns.

We would be happy to work with you to examine your organization and determine what you could achieve by applying some additional resources to help generate IP through proactive mining. Mining and generating intellectual assets for clients are among our favorite services that we offer. We consider it an important step toward overcoming innovation fatigue in some organizations.

Who’s mining the shop? Great question. Give us a call today and let us help you strengthen your mining efforts.

But there is hope. Their challenge is to change what the world needs rather than letting the world change them.

That takes innovation.

Whether you work for a large manufacturer or are making it on your own, getting your great idea to customers in the marketplace is not easy. It’s like connecting an electrical circuit with multiple components that all need to be in place and in the right order. Furthermore even if you have the right components, that circuit isn’t very useful unless the energy is flowing.

Many executives wrongly believe that innovation is a formula or a program they need to follow. I like to use the circuit analogy to show them that there is no one-size-fits-all innovation plan. I call it “Connecting the Circuit of Innovation,” an approach that yields a customized roadmap that binds together a strategy for marketing with an encompassing intellectual asset (IA) strategy that goes beyond simply getting a patent. And what’s really interesting about innovation is that no two circuits are alike.

In fact, the more of your company’s unique personality you can deliver to your colleagues and customers, the better-suited you’ll be for delivering successful results and growth.

Every company has its own unique design — its DNA if you will — that when used in the right context can propel that company toward success. Disruptive, true innovation looks at the whole package, from your insights, your mission statement and your corporate culture, to even the trends that will impact your company and your customers in the next three to five years.

I’ve met with a lot of executives to show them how to use their DNA to build a comprehensive roadmap for their innovation plan, and it’s like watching the energy begin to flow and the lightbulbs turn on. Once they allow their corporate DNA to shape their plan, they can plainly see the best pathway to pursue, the segments of the market and distribution channels to follow, the companies to partner with and so forth.

This approach doesn’t have to be expensive. There are low-cost intellectual assets you can use to your advantage right away, such as publications, Internet domain names and even YouTube channels that can create a compelling story for your innovative idea.

Once the energy in your circuit is flowing, with a little luck and plenty of hard work you’ll begin to see growth over time that is sustainable.