Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business – delivered to your e-mail box on the first and third Tuesday of every month.

Tuesday, 7 July 2009
Issue 152

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your fortnightly newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

As always, if you have news about creativity, imagination, ideas, or innovation please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103. Your comments and feedback are also always welcome.

Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.

TURNING PROBLEMS INTO INNOVATION CHALLENGES

Corporate innovation – and indeed any kind of innovation – is never the result of spontaneous ideas appearing for no reason. Rather it is a process that begins with a problem or a goal and ends with the implementation of one or more ideas deemed to offer value to the organisation. On those rare occasions when a researcher makes an unexpected discovery, she still needs to turn that discovery into an innovation – and that means she has to start with a goal: turning the discovery into a product, for example.

As noted, the innovation process starts with a problem or a goal. In this article, we will look at problems. In a future edition of Report 103, we will look into goal oriented innovation

Most people, when confronted with a problem will look for a solution and apply the first solution that comes to mind. Often, they will follow past examples, ask a senior colleague or do some research, such as on Google. The result is a solution, but it is rarely an innovative solution.

Turning Problems into Creative Challenges

Creative thinkers – and bear in mind that business innovation is the result of implementing creative ideas in order to generate value – turn problems into creative challenges (also sometimes called “innovation challenges”). The creative challenge is then posed to a group (or in some cases to the lone creative thinker herself) who generate ideas to solve it. In the innovation process, this is followed by an evaluation phase to identify the ideas which offer the most value and finally by the implementation of the selected idea or ideas.

In order to turn a problem into a creative challenge, you need to deconstruct the problem so that you can identify its causes and consequences. In the corporate environment, it can be extremely effective to perform the deconstruction exercise as a team in order to exploit the creative thinking of the group.

We'll imagine a typical problem these days: Acme Co, Ltd is not selling enough of its products to cover operational costs.

Incidentally, many managers put little or no thought into formulating effective creative challenges. Indeed, many would simply turn the above problem into a non-challenge such as: “We need to sell more products”. Others might quickly rephrase the problem as: “How might we sell more products?” The non-challenge is so unclear that many employees would be reluctant to suggest ideas. The quick challenge is so broad that while it might generate a lot of ideas, few of them will actually address the underlying problem.

The more innovative manager, however, will spend some time deconstructing the problem. Let's see how it works.

Step 1: Why Is This a Problem? x 5

The first thing to do with any problem is ask “Why is this a problem?” five times. This will enable us to identify the negative consequences of the problem. Using the example, we can ask “Why is it a problem that we are not selling enough of our products?”

Acme answers:

1. We are not generating sufficient income to cover operational costs.

That's definitely a problem! But, we need to ask this question five times. So let's ask “Why else?”

Acme answers:

2. We cannot finance the growth of our company.
3. We are losing market share to the competition
4. Our sales people are becoming demotivated, making it even harder for them to sell.
5. We are in danger of losing our existing customers to the competition.

Now we have a clear view of the consequences of insufficient sales. Clearly the most worrying is the first why: insufficient income. But all of these are relevant and indicate a clear need to generate more income.

Step 2: Why Has This Occurred? x 5

We now need to try and understand how the problem has occurred. Again, we ask the question, “why has this occurred?” five times. This ensures that we think about the problem in detail. Very often the first reason we give for a problem is not the primary reason. By digging deeper, we can get to the root causes of a problem and devise a creative challenge that addresses them.

So, we ask the management team at Acme, “Why has it occurred that you are not selling enough of your products?” The initial reaction might be to blame the sales people:

1. Sales people are not performing well enough.

But if we dig deeper and, ideally include a sales person on the problem deconstruction team, we are likely to learn more about the causes of Acme's poor sales. They respond:

2. Ever since we cut back on our marketing budget, we've been getting far fewer leads.
3. Sales people are not generating enough good leads to get sales.
4. New sales people are not getting any training at Acme.
5. Clients are cutting their budgets.

Step 3: How Urgent Is the Problem?

We need to determine the urgency of the problem. This is unlikely to affect the challenge itself, but it can speed up the innovation process and is highly valuable during the evaluation phase of the process. If the problem is urgent, solutions need to be quickly implementable. In this case, it would seem the problem is indeed urgent.

Step 4: What Are Your Competitors Doing About This Problem?

It's always a good idea to see how your competitors are dealing with the situation. Do they seem also to be having trouble selling? This information can be difficult to glean. But by listening to clients, watching for tell-tale signs (such as deep discounting and laying-off staff) you can often get an idea of your competitors' situations.

In any event, you probably do not want to take the same action against the problem as one or more of your competitors has done. Leaders do not become leaders by following other firms. They lead! And innovators do not copy their competitors. They are copied by their competitors!

Of course if your competitors appear to be suffering the same problem you are – and in the current climate, low sales is indeed a wide-spread problem – your swift, innovative solution is likely to maintain your leadership in the market or propel you to leadership if your firm is not already there. That leaves your competitors to follow in your footsteps or find an alternative innovative solution.

In our example, we'll assume Acme's competitors are also seeing reduced sales and suffering for it.

Step 5: Putting It All Together

At this stage, we have quite a lot information. We have a problem, a list of consequences resulting from the problem, a list of reasons the problem has occurred, a sense of urgency and the knowledge that our competitors are similarly suffering, indicating that there is a real opportunity to take the innovative lead in this situation.

The key factors in the example are clear:

1. The firm needs to generate more income. This would normally be done by selling more of the product.
2. Sales people are not getting the leads they need to generate sales, nor are new ones being sufficiently trained to generate those leads themselves
3. Customers have lower budgets and so are unable to spend as much on Acme's products as you would like.

Each factor represents an underlying problem and so deserves a challenge of its own. The first factor is that the firm needs to generate more income. Although this normally comes through sales of the product, there may be other ways of generating income. Hence we can formulate a challenge like this:

1. In what new ways (ie. Other than selling our products) might we generate income?

The second factor actually includes two problems: the sales people are not generating leads and new people are not being sufficiently trained. The latter problem does not require creativity to solve. Acme can provide them with more training. Nevertheless, we would hope the training itself will be creative! However, the first problem clearly suggests a challenge.

2. How might the sales people generate more leads?

The third factor would at first seem to be the customers' problems. They do not have enough money to buy Acme's products. But with a little thought, this problem actually suggests a wonderful challenge for Acme:

3. In what ways might we make it financially easier for our customers to buy our products?

Each of these challenges deserves a separate ideation event – such as an ideas campaign, brainstorm or other activity – assigned to it. However, the order in which you tackle each challenge is important. Challenge 1 should certainly go first. Alternative income generation models may include leasing your products rather than selling them or offering products as a part of a service package or not making products at all and rather licensing the right to make the products to others.

Next, Acme should tackle the challenge 3 and identify ways to make it easier for customers to buy their products. Very likely this ideas campaign will generate similar ideas to the first! That's not surprising. Both challenges are addressing a very similar issue, but from different perspectives.

Once ideas from these two campaigns have been clustered and evaluated in order to identify those ideas that offer the most value, it is time to tackle challenge 2: how to generate more leads. This challenge is last because the innovations in income generation will affect they way the product is sold and, indeed, may suggest some suitable lead generation approaches. For instance if Acme decides to sell their product as a service in exchange for a low monthly fee, sales people can use this information in their lead generation methods.

The Challenge of Challenges

This last step of transforming the key factors into challenges is something of an art form and it takes practice. There are no clear cut rules. However, potential challenges should meet a few key criteria.

A challenge should be a short, concise question.
A challenge typically begins with “In what ways might we..?” or “How might we...?” or “What new...might we...?”
A challenge addresses only a single issue. If there are two issues involved, the challenge should be split into two separate ones.
A challenge should neither be so broad as to invite irrelevant solutions nor be so narrow as to prevent any potential solutions from fitting it.

As you become accustomed to deconstructing problems into challenges, you will find it becomes more and more natural. And once this happens, the process becomes easier and that, in turn, makes it easier for you and your colleagues to innovate on behalf of your firm.

GUEST WRITER

Jack Hipple has kindly contributed a thought provoking article on when not to innovate.

I always like to include articles by others in Report 103. It gives you a more rounded look at organisational innovation and introduces you to people active in the field. If you would like to contribute to Report 103, please contact me with a brief description of your article idea.

WHEN NOT TO INNOVATE

By Jack Hipple

In the US, there is a new advertising sequence running for Post Shredded Wheat™. This ad brags about the fact that the tried and true recipe for their cereal was not going to change and they were putting the “NO” in innovation. With all the hype over the past few years about innovation being the savior of the business world, this gave me pause for thought. Here was a company bragging about how they were not going to innovate! And they were proud of it. Then I remembered the great fiasco of the first “new” Coke™. Someone in Atlanta headquarters decided that a decades old success story needed to be changed. This decision was either made by an internal marketing group or at least with minimum market research based only on taste. The new coke sold dismally. Millions of dollars were lost and much humble pie was eaten when the “old” Coke™ reappeared.

Though innovation may be a business imperative in a general sense, there are some areas and situations where we should tread lightly and seriously ask if our innovation thoughts make sense.

Here are some:

The marker has an emotional attachment to a product or service that is not easily quantifiable. Shredded Wheat™ and Coke™ are two examples. What might be some others?

Standards. I just returned from doing TRIZ and innovation workshops for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ annual meeting and they were celebrating 125 years of standards. How exciting was that?? What kind of standards, you ask? Well, how about thread screw angle? Research a long time ago figured out that the “optimum” (at the time) was a particular angle. What if every time you went down to the hardware store you had to specify which screw angle you wanted? And the corresponding nut screw angle as well? We should celebrate that we don’t have to do this! What we should be innovating is how to connect and join things without screws. Building codes are another example. Now there are differences in this area, but not in nearby geographic areas. How could a contractor do business if someone was “innovating” building codes every few months? What about the color of safety cones and clothing that we see? It’s bright orange. If someone had some hard data that said chartreuse was a much better color, how long would it take to change? How easy would it be to change octane rating standards in gasoline? There are many ASTM (American Society of Testing and Measurement) standards about how to measure things. Some of these actual lab procedures are very archaic, but that’s how it’s been done for a long time and if you want your product to be accepted by a new customer, they are going to ask you whether your new product passes that standard. If you say, “we have a better test”, you’re going to spend a lot of money proving this and doing both tests. Better to invest your efforts in getting on an ASTM testing committee and see what you can do about changing the test or creating an alternative one.
“Tradition Standards”. By this I mean standards that exist for no particularly good reason now (the ones above had and still have good reasons). Take the QWERETY keyboard on typewriters. This was standardized decades ago to minimize (not eliminate) the occasions when the metal connectors between the key and paper might bump into each other and jam the typewriter. When was the last time you saw connecting rods between your keypad keys and your screen? There are many more efficient ways to arrange keys on a key pad, but I would suggest that if there’s someone out there filing patents and inventing money in this that they’re wasting their time. Have you ever thought about why railroad rails are set apart the distance that they are? This governs the design and construction of railways, railroad cars, and the civil engineering that supports the rails. The distance is 4 feet, 8 ½ inches (143.5 cm). Why isn’t it 5 feet? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English ex-patriots. Why did the English use this dimension? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways and that's the gage they used. Why did "they" use that gage then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jig and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Why? If they used any other spacing, the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. Who built these? The Romans! And this distance was for their war chariots. So the answer is that this specification derives from imperial Roman war chariot. Now this may seem like nonsense in hindsight, but can you imagine the practical reality of trying to “innovate” a new RR construction design, no matter how good it might be?

Now these cases of when not to innovate are rare, but we ignore them at our peril.

About the Author

Jack Hipple is Principal in Innovation-TRIZ, Inc., a consulting company specializing in unique approaches to TRIZ training, the application of TRIZ to non-technical and organizational problems, and the integration of TRIZ with other innovation and creativity tools. Jack is the TRIZ instructor for the American Insitute of Chemical Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and does workshops for ASTD and PDMA chapters. He For more information about Jack and his firm, please visit http://www.innovation-triz.com/

DARE TO BE DIFFERENT

This morning, I took my car to the Autokeuring, an annual inspection required of every car, that is more than five years old, in Belgium. Since my trusty Subaru is twice that age, I have been to the Autokeuring more often than I would like.

As it happened, there was a single long queue stretching out of the garage, where the cars are inspected, and winding on to the road. However, I know from experience that there are three lanes leading into the garage – not just the one with the long queue. So, I entered the third lane which was empty, drove to the end, found myself waiting immediately in front of the garage and was waved in a moment later. Within minutes of my arrival, the car was certified good for another year and I was on my way back to the office. The people who opted to wait in the one long queue must have waited at least 30-45 minutes just to get to the garage.

Following the Crowds

Why was this? Surely I was not the only person there whose car had been inspected before and who knew there were multiple lanes leading to the garage. Most likely, people arriving at the test centre saw the single long queue and the two empty lanes and were apprehensive about not following the example of others. Presumably they assumed that those in front of them had information they did not. But of course the people at the end of the queue would have eventually moved forwards and others would have entered the single queue – until such time as people like me broke demonstrated that there was a better way. So it is unlikely that anyone had more information than anyone else.

No Consequences

And for me, there were no consequences to entering the empty lane. At worst, I would have been told to back up and get into the single long queue. But in terms of time, this would have taken no longer than if I had simply put my car at the end of the long queue to begin with. So, logically it made sense to trust my knowledge rather than the crowd. Interestingly, my behaviour in this scenario is not normal.

Proven by Research

In fact, decades of research on social psychology has demonstrated that individuals prefer to follow the crowd, even when they hold a view or have knowledge that contradicts the behaviour of the crowd. Indeed, research performed at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands reveals that “deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment,” according to lead researcher Vasily Klucharev. And his team is not alone. More than 50 years of research has shown that people prefer to trust the crowd rather than their own knowledge.

Consequences

This behavioural trait of humans has two consequences when it comes to innovation. Firstly, in a larger group, if one person has an idea that is wildly divergent from the thinking of the group, she is more likely to keep the idea to herself rather than to share it with the group. Indeed, she is likely to simply assume there is something wrong with her idea and reject it. Of course the idea might indeed not be viable. On the other hand it might be incredibly creative and might form the basis of a breakthrough innovation.

This means that when working with large teams, you need to get people to share ideas and thoughts individually as well as in front of team itself. In ideation activities, this can be done using on-line tools such as an innovation process management application or even a simple suggestion scheme.

Secondly, freelancers and owner-operators of tiny firms need to overcome the feeling that deviating from the crowd is bad if they want to innovate. Small firms that follow the crowd will never lead. But when managers can overcome the instinct to follow the crowd and dare to implement innovative new business approaches, they can and do lead!

Thirdly, if you live in Belgium and need to take your car for the Autokeuring, don't be afraid to follow take the empty lane. You'll be finished in no time!

INNOVATION IN YOUR LANGUAGE

We are delighted to announce that Jenni innovation process management web application now is now available with a multilingual interface. This means that Jenni can now communicate to your employees in any language on Earth. And, thanks to our streamlined localisation tool, we can deliver Jenni in your language, or choice of languages, very quickly.

As a result, if your firm is a multinational one and you want an innovation process management application that everyone can use irrespective of their language skills, Jenni is your best choice – if not your only choice!

About Jenni

Jenni is a service that provides your firm with an innovation process and a web based platform for managing it. Jenni comprises an application your employees access over the web and a human innovation coach you can access by telephone or e-mail.

The result is a turn-key innovation process management (IPM) system that you can have operating in your firm in no time and for a low, predictable monthly subscription fee. And the more you use Jenni, the more you profit through the implementation of innovative product, service and process ideas that increase income, reduce costs and make your clients happier.

Global in Scope

Our clients include financial institutes, chemical manufacturers, food manufacturers, utilities and media companies in the USA, Europe, Australia, Brazil and Africa. They have used Jenni to develop new products, repackage existing products and reduce operational costs through improved efficiency. The result is cost savings far in excess of the cost of Jenni.

Our Guarantee

We are so sure that Jenni can enable your firm to generate new income opportunities and cost savings through innovation that we offer a unique guarantee: if Jenni does not pay for itself several times over in your firm, you can cancel your contract at any time and without penalty!

Want to Know More?

If you would like to know more about Jenni, its multilingual options and how it can help streamline your innovation process, visit http://www.jpb.com/jenni/ today.

ARE YOU AN INNOVATION CONSULTANT?

If you are providing innovation services such as consulting, training or coaching and want to add a great idea management software solution to your portfolio of products and services, contact me here (or ring +32 2 305 65 91 or Skype Eurojeffrey) and let's talk about how Jenni can help your clients innovate better – and help you gain new clients.

You benefit from our generous commission programme, marketing on the popular www.jpb.com web site (over 150,000 page hits/month) and collaborating with a fantastic global team of innovation, marketing and sales experts (http://www.jpb.com/about/index.php). In addition, by packaging your services with Jenni, you can provide your clients with value added innovation services that help them increase profitability.

It's a fantastic win-win-win scenario for your, your client and jpb.com!

LATEST IN BUSINESS INNOVATION

If you want to keep up with the latest news in business innovation, I recommend Chuck Frey's INNOVATIONweek (http://www.innovationtools.com/News/subscribe.asp). It's the only e-newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on all of the latest innovation news, research, trends, case histories of leading companies and more. And it's the perfect complement to Report 103!

Innovation Process Management Software from JPB.COM

Jenni innovation process management software -- your key to idea management success through creativity!

The same expertise that has gone into writing the popular Report 103 ejournal has also gone into the design of Jenni Innovation Process Management (IPM) software.

Unlike other idea management software products that do little more than collect ideas, most of them irrelevant to your needs, Jenni aligns idea generation with strategy and provides your managers with evaluation tools that enable them to make intelligent business decisions about which ideas to implement.

If your firm is serious about innovation and needs tools to deliver viable, innovative business ideas consistently and over the long term, we suggest that you learn more about Jenni.

jpb.com

Report 103