Archive for Open Innovation
Silk’s natural quality stands test of time
As I reported in my weekly newspaper column, I recently went to China and got a first-hand look at a nation of innovation. Steeped in rich history, I learned many things about China’s softest commodity: silk! Silk is an innovation that has been around for thousands of years, but interestingly is pretty much in the same form that it was when it was first discovered. Today’s methods for harvesting of the threads would be quite familiar to anyone that was around when it was first discovered.
On my recent visit to China I had the opportunity to visit a silk factory with my team and learn a little bit about this interesting ancient discovery and industry.
Commercially it all starts of course with the silkworm. Engorging itself night and day on a diet of fresh picked leaves, it grows for about a month until it is time for it to spin its cocoon and rest. Then working tirelessly for days spinning thousands of feet of a continuous silk thread, the worm creates it protective envelope for its transformation into a moth.
At this point the natural process is interrupted and the puffy white cocoons are picked by hand. The silk harvesting effort is still today very much a manual process. One by one cocoons are inspected for defects and segregated by size, specifically whether they are “double cocoons,” where two caterpillars have joined their shelters, or whether they are solo.
Single cocoons are examined one by one by hand for defects, heated in warm water to loosen the fibers slightly, and the starting end of the thread is found. This is where some limited automation takes over. It is surprising that the whole process seems fairly trouble-free, without tangling or frequent fiber breakage.
In the silk industry, all of this is done in a simple, but controlled, environment. Thousands of caterpillars are fed in stacks of shallow tray baskets at controlled temperatures.
Textiles and garments made of silk were considered a luxury item for many centuries and were the basis of a lucrative trade across Europe and Asia. Because of its value as a principal element of the Oriental economy, the Chinese tried to maintain their monopoly as long as they could. The secret of high quality silk production was closely guarded for hundreds of years. However like any secret, if valuable enough, it eventually gets out.
Even with today’s advanced polymer technologies, silk is still a wondrous standout material. Commercial textile silk fibers are three to 10 times thinner and finer than a human hair, but are very strong, on the order of the strength of steel. Silk from some species of insects is as strong as Kevlar. It is attractive, shimmering in the light due to its rounded triangular fiber shape, and is comfortable to wear because of its absorbency and lightness.
Although because of the abundance of synthetic polymers, the uses of silk are on the decline. However it still has many commercial and industrial applications — from parachutes, to bedding to surgical sutures.
It has taken us thousands of years to produce materials that can compete with silk, but silk, along with other natural fibers, are still preferable for many applications and are still produced basically much as they were when they were first discovered.
We pushed the innovation envelope!
I spent this past week in beautiful La Jolla, Calif., chairing the Co-Dev 2012 Conference. Here top innovation leaders from all over the country joined me in addressing open innovation’s critical role in achieving higher returns while managing risk, costs and uncertainty.
I have been attending the conference for many years, and every year there are always new faces and perspectives. This year was no different. It was especially exciting with inspiring keynote presentations, case studies, panels and workshops with innovation visionaries presenting from an impressive global cross section of industry.
Clorox, Corning, PepsiCo, Avery Dennison, Mars, Nestle Purina Petcare, United Healthcare, Allergan, GOJO Industries, ConocoPhillips, Kraft, Philips, the Hershey Co., Siemens, General Mills, Nokia Siemens, MeadWestVaco and Unilever all sent representatives to make it a memorable event. It was also a special treat this year in the preconference workshops to have the participation of executives from the world-class San Diego Zoo.
At the conference there was a focus on several factors that all organizations, regardless of size, can take advantage of. One consistent theme of the conference is open innovation, an area that I always enthusiastically support. We worked together to discuss ways to better identify and implement open business models to achieve faster results, including how to consider external innovation solutions sooner. New engagement platforms were also introduced to help companies better “co-innovate” with customers, partners and suppliers.
In addition there were general discussions of how to accelerate the pace at which a company can adapt to changing marketplace conditions and how to develop complex deal structures to effectively manage IP rights. All of these areas are especially relevant to business today, and I’m sure they will make good topics for exploring in future columns.
For this year’s attendees, it wasn’t hard to quickly realize that the “what” of the innovative solution is more important than “where” and “who” it comes from. The companies presenting demonstrated that by leveraging the capabilities, new ideas, technologies, products and services of others they were able to conduct strategic experiments at lower levels of risk and resources. Over time, they also were able to evolve to a more innovative culture, from the outside in.
These companies also discussed some of the challenges they still face within their organizations. It is especially hard for them during these economically challenged times to find the required amount of funds and resources to do what they feel they need to do.
Defining the “right” comprehensive business model and gaining alignment from the top-down were cited as critical to the ultimate success of a project. In addition, they believe that investing enough time to build collaborative relationships and manage the key “touch points” of strategic relationships was also very important.
Above all, I found that the conference offered the attendees an unparalleled opportunity to continue to build on their professional network. Spending a few days with such a large group of innovation leaders from top-performing companies always gets me enthused to see the current trends, new insights and how the best companies are successfully leveraging their open innovation efforts into business success.
Free podcast to whet your appetite for CoDev 2012!
I’m now on the exciting two-week countdown to the February CoDev2012: Achieving Higher OI Returns while Managing Risk, Cost and Uncertainty. There’s still time to join me, as I team up once again with Management Roundtable and PDMA for the upcoming 11th annual event.
If you need a little convincing, check out this FREE PODCAST of the one-hour session I did last week with conference faculty members representing Nestle Purina Petcare, Unilever, and Duane Morris, LLP as they candidly discuss some of the critical elements necessary to build a solid foundation for successful Co-Development and Open Innovation initiatives.
The panel of faculty members address:
- The impact of organizational structure, culture, business model evolution, platform engagement models, staff development and IP management on open innovation success.
- Lessons learned as well as what obstacles and pitfalls they have experienced in advancing their open innovation efforts.
- Key learnings garnered from their attendance at prior CoDev conferences and how this enhanced their open innovation journeys.
Related articles
- CoDev 2012 is coming Feb. 13 (dev.innovationedge.com)
- Communication is Key to Successful Open Innovation (customerthink.com)
- Social Media and Open Innovation: The One True Constant (socialmediatoday.com)
- Harnessing Open Innovation for high performance innovation clusters (open-government.net)
CoDev 2012 is coming Feb. 13
We can’t ignore the fact that Open Innovation has become a critical component within the innovation framework of top companies. The challenge you now face is fueling your innovation engine in this less-than-optimal climate!
That’s why I’m inviting you to join me, as I team up once again with Management Roundtable and PDMA for the upcoming 11th annual CoDev2012: Achieving Higher OI Returns while Managing Risk, Cost and Uncertainty.
This premiere open innovation forum takes place February 13 – 15, 2012 in La Jolla, Calif. For a limited time, we are offering a special flexible team discount so that you can bring your internal teams and partners to the table.
Register by November 18th and save $300! Call 1.800.338.2223, or reserve your place online!
This year’s program will include even more inspiring keynote presentations, how-to case studies, facilitated Q&A and group learning sessions as well as multiple venues to network and assemble your own open innovation network for future learning and collaboration.
Check out these open innovation ambassadors presenting at CoDev2012.
In addition, we’ll be offering 4 brand new half-day workshops on the topics of Evolving New OI Business Models, Innovation Talent Management, Open Innovation Metrics and Implementing Complex Deal Structures for OI Success.
Don’t forget you’ll also network with several hundred top leaders of open innovation, continuous improvement, R&D and product development from a cross section of industries including aerospace, medical devices, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, biotech, oil & gas, electronics, hi-tech, defense and more.
If you are looking for the most up-to-date practitioner based content on open innovation, CoDev2012 promises to once again deliver on all fronts. I am looking forward to meeting you personally as we discuss current and future trends in open innovation and how you can capitalize on them to gain more value from your open innovation investments.
See you in La Jolla,
Cheryl
Collaboration is the key to innovation and growth
If you want to truly grow your business, you need to invite people and companies to move forward. I recently wrote about why it is so important to reach out beyond our own four walls of our organizations to embrace open innovation in my weekly newspaper column. There are a lot of different approaches that companies take to explore and implement partnerships with those innovators who can bring a fresh new technology, product, service or skillset to the table:
Today, as many companies create their growth strategies and look for new opportunities for their products, services and even business models, they often require partnerships and alliances.
In their quest to change the basis of competition and deliver differentiated and meaningful innovation, companies have come to the realization that they need to leverage the capabilities and expertise of others.
Internally, companies have core competencies such as key technologies and skills, core brands and access to distribution channels. Partners can offer the complementary skills and capabilities that don’t exist internally in large part because they aren’t needed by the company on a regular basis.
Companies usually know what they need to execute their strategy. For example, they know they need to define the marketplace opportunities and gaps in unserved (or underserved) segments and expand into new geographies, markets, channels and categories. However, without the right partners to help, it often will not happen according to plan.
Successfully finding and engaging the right partners is not easy, but time and time again we see benefits from reaching out and creating outside relationships to deliver growth. If the relationships are appropriately structured and nurtured, they can often extend the capabilities of the company into new-to-the-company or new-to-the-world areas, increase speed to market with new technologies, products, services and business processes, and lower overall levels of risk.
Often when employees know that they have the flexibility to tap outside skills as necessary, a company that turns to open partnerships has the opportunity to create a more innovative culture — from the “outside in.” Good ideas may not be as easily discounted just because the internal knowledge or expertise doesn’t exist.
Companies just starting with this approach often need to enhance their capabilities to search and find business solutions defined in the context of their innovation efforts. It all begins with exploration. Exploration is the attempt to develop an initial, rough understanding of some phenomenon or some new opportunity areas where customers’ or consumers’ unmet or underserved needs may exist.
Outside explorers or scouts take a systematic approach to facilitate gathering information in the field. They may be either directed at a specific technological area or undirected, identifying relevant developments in technological “white spaces.”
Often, these explorers rely on formal and informal information sources, including the personal networks of the scouts themselves. They physically search for information, technologies, resources, etc. — looking for new opportunities and technologies to bring back to the organization.
Scouting is only one part of collaborative innovation, but it is an important first step to undertake. Leveraging the capabilities and expertise of others is very important opportunity today and a challenge that you will continue to hear more about in the future.
Leading Game-Changing Open Innovation
I’m in Amsterdam, wrapping up a two-day Masterclass Collaboration Frameworks for Innovation workshop showing innovators a hands-on approach to leveraging internal and external networks to extend their capabilities. It’s been a fantastic experience both for me as a teacher/speaker and for those who are now going to apply all they’ve learned about the tools and strategies needed to deliver new growth.
I’ve long enjoyed my partnership with Pure Insight in bringing these new tools and processes to those who can put into practice insights and case studies to find immediate results.
We’re going beyond a typical conference or classroom-style environment to roll up our sleeves together to define not only the level of openness that you want to employ when dealing with partners, but the structure you need in your company and teams to accelerate and enable collaboration. These leaders already know that innovating outside of their organizational boundaries through collaboration is absolutely critical to growing their businesses. We’re upping the ante in how those deals and arrangements are structured, by setting a robust before, during and after collaboration framework for making the partnerships successful for all parties.
How customers drive co-creation
I’ve just come back from hosting an incredible conference in Phoenix, where I met some of the leading innovators who have broken down walls to collaborate with other companies to deliver innovation and customer satisfaction. Here’s my newspaper column this week on how co-creation can work in organizations of any size:
This week I had the pleasure of participating in and moderating aspects of the first Social Product Development and Co-Creation Conference in Phoenix Arizona. The conference was focused on exploring new “co-creative” approaches to product development and innovation.
The way value is being created is changing dramatically. It isn’t just about new products and services delivered in isolation, but can also come about from new business models where companies partner, or “co-create”, with customers, suppliers, employees, and the communities or networks they operate within.
For the conference we were able to bring together a diverse group of organizations to explore how companies of all sizes and types are approaching innovation and creating value. The program featured representatives from companies such as American Express, Quirky, Threadless, Harvard Business School, Intuit Labs, Make Magazine, Kimberly-Clark, Microsoft Design Studios, Hallmark Cards and Wired Magazine, to name a few.
Local Motors and Hallmark for example are embracing social product development to get their customers involved. They are leveraging their target users to redefine traditional business models and even redesign many aspects of their business – not just product design. This is not to say that these companies do not still have internal resources focused on innovation and design, but the lines between the producer and user are blurring.
We have talked about Local Motors a few months ago – a company based in Chandler, Arizona that allows customers to design and build their own vehicles and passionately share the designs with other designers, engineers and automobile enthusiasts from all over the world. Local Motors is one example where co-creation is creating rich customer interactions through the growth of user-generated communities and networks.
Leveraging social media vehicles like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are just a few examples of ways to ignite collaboration among customers, suppliers and communities. These avenues can permanently change the relationship between an organization and its stakeholders. It allows organizations to engage end users much earlier in their processes and contribute in novel unexpected ways.
You can capitalize on this change in how to innovate by using co-creation to transform traditional product development into new mutually valuable experiences. Companies of many sizes are reaching out to consumers to empower them to create and build products and help them take their niche products mainstream.
If you what to explore how companies are designing platforms for connecting with customers and other stakeholders, look at company websites and search for where they are inviting people to contribute to their development efforts.
Hallmark recently had a great example at hallmarkcontests.com, a place where anyone could meet and interact online with the company and participate in card contests to win cash prizes. Visit it and check out the section where the cards created by consumers themselves are sold.
Customers have always had the final say on what gets bought, now thanks to co-creation they are getting to more directly participate in the process of deciding what gets sold!
Calling all Innovators: Don’t miss this event
This June I’ll be in Phoenix to moderate this year’s Conference on Social Product Development & Co-Creation. I’m partnering once again with PDMA, and this year co-creation pioneer, Local Motors, is helping us raise the bar for this exciting, ground-breaking event. Social Product Development is making a major impact on the way companies are innovating now and into the future.
I think you’ll find this conference features the best-of-best elements and people, and we’ve designed it so you’ll be able to exchange ideas, forge new connections and fuel sustainable innovation within your organization that drives growth. Among the highlights is a how-to guide to build a co-creative enterprise from the co-author of leading business book “The Power of Co-creation.”
Social product development is key, and you’ll discover how communities can be used to solve some of your toughest innovation problems, as well as how to build your business around an existing crowd of passionate people. In other words–crowdsourcing for real results.
It all happens on June 27 & 28, and I hope you can join us as we bring together an unprecedented group of thinkers, makers and doers to help you understand and apply co-creative approaches to your work. This event is for anyone who wants to drive breakthrough results in product development and innovation.
We’re featuring more than 20 keynote speakers across a variety of industries representing companies like LEGO Group, InnoCentive, Harvard Business School, Wired Magazine, American Express, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Hallmark Cards, Intuit Labs and Microsoft Design Studio, plus many more.
Be sure to register by May 20th for a huge savings. See you in June!
Super Computer could save billions on fuel-saving truck
Imagine if every one of the nation’s 1.3 million semi trucks in the U.S. could each save $5 billion in diesel fuel at the pump and cut CO2 emissions by 16 million tons. It’s an idea that’s catching on, thanks to a computer that is 100,000 times more powerful that your laptop.
The Department of Energy is using a unique open innovation model to potentially save billions of gallons of fuel on the highway. The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is working with BMI Corporation to use the department’s Jaguar supercomputer–known as the fastest supercomputer in the United States–to develop a technology that will revolutionize the fuel usage for semi trucks.
This supercomputer is more than 100,000 times more powerful than your laptop. The new design features a SmartTruck UnderTray System to improve the aerodynamics of 18-wheeler trucks.
FastCompany explains how the DOE was able to go from concept to manufacture-ready design in 18 months, a process that would normally take at least three years. Check out the article here.
Crowdsourcing, video games and open innovation make boring job fun!
Crowdsourcing is something I believe businesses need to weave into their social media strategy, and here’s a great example of how it can work. The National Library of Finland has put together an effort to digitize all of its archives—no easy task—by using crowdsourcing and videogames!
The project is called, Digitalkoot, which when translated means Digital Volunteers. Now normally digitizing archives is a dull, tedious job as you could imagine. With millions of pages of historical and cultural magazines, newspapers and journals, it would be easy for mistakes to hamper this process.
So the library partnered with Microtask, a company that designed two video games to make this work more entertaining. ‘
Here’s one of them, called “Mole Hunt.”
Mole Hunt actually shows players how to spot erroneous words in archived material. Not only that, but the game helps make sure digitized materials are accurate and searchable. The hope is that teachers and children will find the volunteer project appealing enough to sign up.