Archive for Innovation Fatigue
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.
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!
The Circuit of Innovation™
The Circuit of Innovation™ from Innovationedge
This image from Innovationedge is used in our book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue, to describe the relationship that needs to exist between intellectual assets and the marketing plan to complete the circuit that connects the power of the market to inventors. Leave out either a sound IA strategy (holistic or 360 IA™) or the marketing plan, and you’ve short-circuited your chances for success. Ideally, your intellectual assets are in synch with your marketing plan, meaning they reinforce the marketing story and tell a marketable story of their own, in harmony with the marketing plan. The strengths you sell to the market had better be reflected in some way in the intellectual assets (think more broadly than patents alone, of course). This will be part of our conversation tonight on Brian Fried’s hit radio show, GotInvention radio at GotInvention.com, broadcast at 7 pm Central Time.
Be sure to tune in next week on March 25 to hear Cheryl Perkins, CEO of Innovationedge, share more about what it takes to achieve innovation success.
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.
Smart Signs and Smart Innovation: Are You Preparing Now? Let Us Help
One of the most exciting opportunity areas for targeted innovation is in the display of digital information.
The information-rich world of the film Minority Report is becoming closer to reality each day, with some practical twists. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to provide smart digital displays in retail stores that can look back at the viewer, identify gender and other information using cameras and image processing, and then automatically offer information about products that may be of interest to the viewer, including instant coupons, directions to the product in the store, etc. The article, “Intel, Microsoft Offer Smart-Sign technology” by Don Clark and Nick Wingfield (p. B6, Jan. 12, 2010), describes smart-signs as a way for retailers to fight back against online sellers. The technology builds upon the embedded computing capabilities that Microsoft and Intel have applied to point-of-sale systems, office equipment, car entertainment, and other systems. They are now collaborating to specify hardware and software components that could become a standard platform for other developers. They will seek to offer features similar to those provided by Amazon.com, which can identify returning customers and tailor promotions to them based on their history. It’s all about personalizing the shopping experience–but doing that without infringing upon consumer privacy may be a complex issue. A spokesman stated that the current technology does not identify individuals, only gender. Perhaps the future may involve an opt-in system for those who want to be identified and receive discounts or other benefits in return.
Meanwhile, a variety of companies are developing flexible thin-film displays. One interesting technology space is electronic paper, which reflects light like ordinary printed paper to create images or text. Rigid versions of electronic paper are in use in some popular portable readers, while flexible versions are being developed by companies like E-Ink. A variety of technologies that have been used for electronic paper are summarized at Wikipedia, including electrophoresis, electrowetting, and electrofluidic displays.
What could your business model do with flexible smart displays, if they become inexpensive and easy to program or control? What could you do by adding sensors (perhaps sensors that respond to pressure, temperature, or capacitance to detect touch, or micro-electronic devices such as accelerometers or level indicators)? If you could track and interpret the actions a customer takes with a smart tag, for example, could that help you? What could you do if your smart tags or smart panels could communicate with each other and a network?
Will flexible displays become integrated with smart-sign technology to provide, say, magazines that can read you?
There is a growing body of publications and patents addressing creative aspects of what can be done with these emerging technologies. What will it mean for you–or for your competitors? What will these technologies mean for your supply chain? What do they mean for packaging, for shelf management, for inventor management, for market research, or for product safety? Are you aware of the future and how it might impact the business? At Innovationedge, we’re ready to work with you to find these answers for your company and to generate the intellectual assets that you will need to be prepared for a smarter, information-rich future. We’re ready to help you develop strategies and tools to reduce the impact of competitive disruptive innovation, while increasing your own opportunities to create intellectual assets and benefit from the emerging capabilities of the future.
In fact, there is one other very cool technology from Asia that you ought to be thinking about when you start exploring a world with smart, flexible display technology. If that doesn’t ring a bell, maybe you should give us a ring and let us show you how to do targeted innovation to help you go beyond mere brainstorming by generating the intellectual assets you need for the future. We tailor our approaches to each client, but in this case, we are likely to apply some of the insights from our recent book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue: Overcoming the Barriers to Personal and Corporate Success, a John Wiley & Sons book by Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins, and Mukund Karanjikar. Call us at 920-967-0470.
May your innovations be flexible and smart!
Innovation: Getting the energy flowing again
I’ve worked with a lot of companies big and small that have been struggling. They’re stymied by the challenges of this economy, and are looking for new ways to achieve growth and customer satisfaction.
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.
The word is out about Conquering Innovation Fatigue
The innovation process isn’t something that is widely understood outside of the corporate realm, which is why I have a passion for writing about it and inspiring others. It’s always exciting to me when the people in the media take notice and are truly enthusiastic about inventors.
Check out this nice feature article published last week about our book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue, which I co-wrote with my colleague Jeff Lindsay and collaborator Mukund Karanjikar. I believe we are starting to see new doors open to fresh new ideas as more inventors and business start understanding what innovation fatigue is about.
There’s no reason to let “innovation fatigue” get in your way!
We’re incredibly excited about the response to our new book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue: Overcoming Barriers to Personal and Corporate Success.
My colleagues and co-authors Jeff Lindsay of Innovationedge and Mukund Karanjikar PHD of Technology Holding wrote the book for inventors, entrepreneurs, researchers and leaders seeking success through innovation.
We set out to reveal the sometimes hidden “innovation fatigue factors” (there are nine of these barriers we’ve identified), that can block the path to innovation success. Not only do we identify them for the reader, we explain practical ways to overcome them.
We also wanted to personalize this journey by taking a unique look from each of our own perspectives at the challenges innovators face. We draw upon case studies of success and advances in innovation theory and practice to show how innovation can be energized to conquer innovation fatigue.
Check out the book reviews and order a copy for yourself here! Our hope is that the book will show you that understanding and overcoming these barriers is vital not only to you, as an inventor, entrepreneur, or researcher, but also to business leaders, licensing professionals, IP professionals, corporations, and even leaders of nations!
