BusinessWeek 20 Great Summer Reads

InForum: Connecting you with thought leaders for insight on innovative ideas that work: Insight Magazine, May 2009

Obstacles to business success are everywhere today. Nobody has all the answers – but successful leaders in the New North have found innovative ways to profit and thrive.

To share the best advice with out business-to-business readers, Insight magazine has teamed up with Innovationedge to launch InForum: A conversation on a provocative topic designed to connect you with thought leaders for insight on innovative ideas that work.

A champion of “disruptive innovation” for Fortune 500 companies worldwide, Cheryl Perkins, founder and president of Neenah-based Innovationedge, led our first InForum on March 30 at Insight magazine’s offices in Appleton. Excerpts of her conversation with four regional business leaders appear on these pages and online.

My brain, your brawn: The Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2008

Big companies are on the prowl for small businesses that will hand over their best ideas in exchange for a piece of the action

“…Compensation for the entrepreneurs in these kinds of deals varies widely, depending on the idea and the company. Technologically advanced ideas that are hard to duplicate typically command more. In some industries, such as housewares, inventors might expect to earn 5% to 7% of sales, says Cheryl Perkins, founder and president of Innovationedge, a Neenah, Wis., consulting company that helps entrepreneurs and start-ups work with big businesses. Other industries may offer lots of different structures depending on whether the invention is a new product, a product enhancement or a new technology tool, and depending on how developed the idea is.”

Patent Protection

Entrepreneurs who approach a big company with an idea should tread carefully and protect themselves, says Innovationedge’s Ms. Perkins. If an idea is patentable, she says, get the patent. If not, something as simple as a trademark or even buying an applicable domain name can help persuade a big company that you have an intellectual asset that’s worth buying from you.

“Once you own it, it’s yours. It’s very intriguing for a company to acquire a bundle of assets, rather than just a patent,” Ms. Perkins says.

Entrepreneurs should agree to work with a big company only if they’re sure the company has a clear goal for their product or idea. If executives seem uncertain, or not very committed, “it’s better to go where you have some pull,” she says. In most cases, it’s best to go with a company that has made a concerted effort to look outside for new ideas.

How to speak the language of alphamoms: Marketplace Magazine, September 2, 2008

Wet wipe dispenser wins WOW award: Corporate Report Wisconsin, August 2008

About a billion people in emerging countries have cell coverage, and those people could communicate via mobile phone very inexpensively in the near future—without the need for electricity.

A new device called the H3 charger is promising on-the-go charging even when you are away from a wall outlet. You can read about the H3 here and here.

Innovators at Stockholm-based myFC, came up with the H3 charger, which relies on portable fuel cells. I checked out their web site, and was impressed to learn the company was awarded as one of the top ten fastest growing clean tech companies in Europe at the Cleantech Connect Awards in November. (Cleantech Connect brings together Europe’s’ leaders in the clean and green technology space, recognizing growth and innovation in the sector.)

The H3 charger is nearing commercial release in Scandinavia this year and will eventually make its way to the U.S. next year. The price tag is around $40 to $50, and is about the size of a sandwich.

So if you are planning a wilderness trek next year, you’ll need some water, the charger and a few small tea bag-sized fuel packets containing hydrogen fuel.  Then simply pour water into the reaction chamber, add the packet and wait for the chemical reaction between the water and the fuel pellets.

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.

Green Innovation: Do You Have a G-Rated Business™?

The many pressures for businesses and products to become green offer numerous opportunities for true innovation, not just in products and services but in entire business models and in the web of relationships (the “value network”) around a business. But in spite of the rich opportunities for innovation, many companies boast of being green after doing little more than adding a little recycled material to a product or package, or adding some “earth friendly” furniture to their offices.

How can a business pursue the changes and innovations needed to become really green? And what does it mean to be green?

Let’s discuss what green is, and then we’ll address approaches to green innovation.

G-Rated Business™

We recommend that companies think about green issues and sustainability in terms of becoming a “G-Rated Business™.” This concept from Innovationedge draws upon an analogy to movie ratings. For a movie to be G-rated, it needs to be free of gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity. A two-hour movie with 119-minutes of mild content can lose its G-rating for just a few seconds of material. It’s not enough to avoid graphic violence of nudity for 99% of the movie – it generally needs to be clean throughout. While we recognize that there are abundant imperfections in movie ratings, we expect a movie to be substantially free of certain content for the entire movie, not just most of it, to be G-Rated. Now if we let “G” stand for “green”, what is a “G-Rated Business™”? It’s one that seeks to be green throughout its operations, consistently, not just in selected scenes. It is one with sustainability integrated into its operations and business model at many levels.

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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.

A growing culprit will be the complex computer software and hardware systems that run the machines that we depend upon. And it won’t necessarily be due to negligent software design, but due to the many possibilities and environmental scenarios that can’t be tested for or anticipated.

The problem with electronic system errors may also be that it is extremely difficult to recognize the specific causes and therefore how to correct them. They often can’t be easily replicated. The conditions that came together to create the problem could be extremely rare or even unique. Without being seen firsthand, the possibility is dismissed too easily.

I suspect this is part of the reason why the first reports of unintended acceleration of Toyotas happened more than 10 years ago and we still don’t have all the answers. We are hearing of many different possibilities including floor mats, sticking accelerators, and now there are even hints of the more shadowy culprit, i.e. complex software systems whose operation can’t ever be completely understood.

After 10 years of reported problems, the death last year of off-duty highway patrol officer Mark Saylor and his family in a fiery crash in San Diego finally brought the issue of unintended vehicle acceleration into the public consciousness. How was it that a 20-year CHP patrolman couldn’t halt his 100 mph out-of-control Lexus? You can be sure that he tried all the possibilities in the minutes he had available to him and his passengers: unsticking the gas pedal, trying to turn off the engine, shifting the vehicle into neutral, even calling 911. It is reported that this was a case of an improper floor mat jamming under the pedal, but it is illuminating other issues in modern design and safety. Right now Toyota is taking their turn under the microscope; there will be others.

I don’t think you can create the perfect engineering design or software program. Even if we could it would no longer be that way after the first update to add new features. What needs to be done is to minimize the possibility of harm when something does go wrong, build redundancy and fail-safe mechanisms into the design.

One example of this that is being built into vehicles now is that if someone steps on the gas and the brake simultaneously, the system takes the safe route and assumes you want to stop. Fuel flow is cut to the engine. This is good contingency design.

On a vehicle with a push button start/stop, if there was runaway acceleration one of the first things you might try is to shut off the vehicle by pressing on the button, repeatedly pressing it harder and faster if it didn’t work the first time.

You wouldn’t think that you might have to hold the button for several seconds to shut it down — just like you sometimes have to do to reboot an unresponsive computer.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and corporate blogs are all ways to have a media presence with your customers and other stakeholders. I’ve been blogging since 2006, and Tweeting for over a year.

Not surprisingly, Twitter is the most popular network . The average Fortune 100 company has four different Twitter accounts! This is according to a study done by PR firm Burson-Marsteller, and the study breaks down the findings by region. The firm found that Twitter and Facebook are mostly West-oriented, while Asia-Pacific companies favor corporate blogs.

Check out the embedded slideshow below. I think you’ll find the stats pretty interesting. I noticed that more than half of the Fortune 100 companies have more than one Facebook fan page, and half of those companies also have at least one YouTube channel. A third of these companies have at least one corporate blog, and a fourth use all four social media networks.   So why are companies so keen on having a multi-channel media presence? My guess–and I think the slides confirm this–is because customers enjoy using these platforms to interact with companies and with each other.

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.

Courtesy of Camosun College in British Columbia.

Last week I wrote about the 2010 Winter Olympics going green by offsetting carbon credits, a trend that will continue for many Olympic Games to come. The lesser-known 2010 British Columbia Games has taken energy savings to the next level with a new Olympic torch that draws less power than a household toaster!

For over 30 years the government-funded BC Summer and BC Winter Games have been promoting healthier lifestyles in Canada, and today they are one of British Columbia’s largest sporting events.

Until now the traditional torch has been burning natural gas, just like the International Olympic Torch. But this year the newly-redesigned BC Games torch is kinder to the environment, thanks to the efforts of BC’s Camosun College.

The BC Games Society asked Camosun College to design a high-tech torch with a reduced environmental impact. The Camosun School of Trades and Technology came up with a novel torch that uses LED lights to create the illusion of a flickering flame.

For the 100 days of the games the torch “burned” about  2,000 kWh of electricity and costing less than $2 a day to operate.  This compares with the old natural gas torch that cost about $50 a day!

What’s more, the college and the committee used an open innovation model to make it happen. The design project required a multidisciplinary effort that included participation from many diverse design teams in electrical, mechanical and manufacturing technology .

Here are some cool facts:

• Number of LED lights used: 303
• Height and weight: 544 kg and 4.5 m tall (1200 lbs and 15 ft.)
• Green House Gasses removed from the environment:  1.5 tons

I’m sure with only 300 LED’s, the spectacle isn’t as grand as an actual flame, but who knows what may be in store for the “torch” years from now as technology continues to develop.

The International Home & Housewares Show is the world’s premier housewares marketplace, and it features more than 2,000 exhibitors and more than 20,000 buyers from over 100 countries around the world! It’s the one place you can go to see first-hand consumer lifestyle and product trends for all areas of the home, both inside and out, under one roof.

For my part I will be sharing best practices for taking innovation to the next step and discusses how to create a strategy, structure and culture to successfully drive innovation efforts. I am going to share insights on how to engage internal stakeholders, address innovation fatigue and overcome barriers to personal and corporate success, as discussed in our book Conquering Innovation Fatigue.

While I’m at the Inventors Corner I’m looking forward to meeting those inventors and seeing how are the most creative minds are solving the problems that consumers face each day.

The IBM STM story is behind this passage from Richard Poynder’s 2001 article, “On the Defensive about Invention“:

As patenting strategies become more sophisticated, so the value of defensive publishing increases. It can, for instance, protect against picket-fencing – where competitors patent small incremental improvements in your patent in order to erode its value and enable them to license your technology on preferential terms.

In 1982, for instance, International Business Machines was granted a US patent for the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) capable of imaging atomic details as small as 1/25th the diameter of a typical atom.

At first IBM dominated the STM field. By 1989, however, it had been picket-fenced by competitors.

“If IBM had published disclosures of all of the incremental innovation around their pioneering technology, they could have prevented others from picket-fencing them,” says Tom Colson at IP.com. “They would, in effect, have taken full control of the technology without putting patent resources at risk.”

Such blocking tactics can also be achieved by patenting the incremental improvements, but defensive publishing is significantly cheaper. “It costs $109 ( £75) per document to publish on IP.com,” says Mr Colson. “This compares very favourably with the $20,000 it costs per patent application to file in key locations worldwide.”

The price at IP.com has come up since then, but it’s still an incredible bargain. For a very small fee, your document is almost instantly published and time stamped, archived, and made searchable by the PTO and other patent offices, providing a lasting and secure record that the information disclosed was part of the public domain at that time.

Some of you with corporate R&D or IP experience have faced the pain of seeing competitors get patents on things you had considered long ago but thought were too “obvious” or minor to be worth a patent. An important lesson from IP litigation is that even an invalid patent can still be a major headache, one that can cost millions. Much better to reduce the odds of such nuisance patents by creating a strong body of prior art that discloses bells and whistles as they come up and also discloses various combinations that competitors might be working on to reduce what they can patent in the fields important to you.

Publications need to be crafted for strategic purposes. There are quite a few issues to consider, such as how to get the internal review needed to avoid harmful disclosure, how to get them written, what kind of incentives to provide for inventors/authors, whether to publish anonymously or not, and what venues to use (IP.com is one of my favorite), etc. I’ll be discussing some of these issues in the future, but feel free to give me a call if you’d like to learn more.

When Innovationedge helps a company strengthen their innovation strategy or IP strategy, defensive publications are usually one of the key topics we address. We find very few companies do anything serious in this effort, and many Legal Departments seem inherently geared to overlook the benefits that can be obtained with creative publications. That’s understandable. The IP attorneys are all about IP, and publications don’t fall into the “P” area of property. They are intellectual assets, however, that must not be neglected for cost-effective IP strategy.

Those games are projected to put about 268,000 toes of carbon emissions (118,000 tons from direct emissions and 150,000 from indirect emissions), resulting from Olympic travel by participants and spectators. (These projections come from the Center for Sustainability and Social Innovation at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.)

Corporate sponsors, governments and broadcasters are volunteering to offset some of their own carbon emissions by investing in a portfolio of British Columbia clean energy technology projects, as well as international Gold Standard offset projects. It’s called the 2010 Legacy Portfolio.

What’s more, even the Olympic Torch Relay presenting partners Coca-Cola and RBC have joined the partners in offsetting all their emissions arising from the long journey across Canada.

And if you happen to be headed for Vancouver and want to join in this green movement, you can go carbon neutral by offsetting emissions from your travel to and from the games by clicking www.offsetters.ca to calculate your carbon footprint and purchase carbon credits immediately online.

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.

The personal computer and the Internet were the defining technology the 90’s, but there is a collection of devices and technologies that have defined the decade of the 2000’s. These technologies had a common theme: on-demand information and entertainment.

Broadband technology was born out of necessity to deliver the rich internet content that was emerging to quench a new entertainment and information appetite. The internet text and images of the 90’s expanded into audio and video content.  A dial-up modem connection was not longer sufficient for the masses.  If you wanted to watch a video, play a game online, or download music you needed speed.  Broadband internet provided that speed and became a necessity.

At the same time, the explosion of online information led to the requirement for  fast, efficient search engines to find it.  If you couldn’t find what you were looking for, then it didn’t matter whether it was available or not.

The early Alta Vista of the 90’s led to the powerful Google of the 2000’s.  I don’t think there is any argument that there is still plenty of room for improvement in these tools and they will continue to evolve.  As essential as a search engine is for our everyday online life, a search for information is still far too often an exercise in a separation of the wheat from the chaff.

Along the lines of entertainment, a slew of products came of age in the 2000’s including: the DVD that replaced the VHS tape; the DVR (digital video recorder) that is revolutionizing the way (and when) we watch TV; the iPod and other MP3 audio players that took the place of the Walkman; and of course HDTV and the big screen.

Before my family goes on a trip we frequently go to Google Maps and familiarize ourselves with the route, even to the point of being able to preview parts of our trip with a visual street view of our destination or route.  Once we are on the road, we no longer need a glove box full of maps to navigate, as many of us now depend upon our now commonplace GPS devices.

The list of influential developments of the last decade would not be complete without mentioning the evolution of cell phones into small computers that provide not just voice, but email, text and photo and even video recording capabilities.  Information can be captured and communicated now wherever we may be.  Networking sites MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook (from 0 to over 300 million users) and Twitter keep us in touch and updated with each other like never before.

This is just a small sampling of the visionary technology from the 2000’s that we have come to enjoy, and frequently rely on, for our everyday lives.  I can’t wait to see what amazing developments the 2010’s will bring!

So what is Inventables and why are so many designers and engineers excited about this company?  Inventables is a no-frills website that was launched this month where vendors of raw materials and technologies can create online profiles for their products in order to generate qualified sales leads worth their time.  Inventables makes it very easy for vendors of materials and technologies to get an initial introduction to potential buyers.

Microsoft X-Box, PING Golf Clubs, and Kraft Foods are examples of buyer companies using the marketplace. Dupont, 3M, and Eastman are examples of companies participating as vendors.

I’ve been serving as an advisor to Inventables, and couldn’t be more pleased and excited for its future.

Says Zach:

“We founded Inventables to help companies innovate by sharing our excitement for what technology makes possible with the world’s innovators. We’ve opened up our once proprietary research for free to the world so that information and access to new materials that was once only available to the largest companies in the world is now available to anyone with an internet connection.”