The Process of Innovation - Recently Updated Pages

Inovo News

srschwartz — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:04:01 CST

Although Inovo has been around for nine years now, news about what Inovo has been doing has been scarce. We are changing that situation by providing regular updates on the goings on at Inovo. These announcements may not rise to the level of Business Week headlines, but they are important nonetheless in keeping our community informed about the latest undertakings that affect not just Inovo, but our partners, associates, clients and community. Please take a look and send us your thoughts if you like.

Also, feel free to connect on LinkedIn, Facebook or follow our occasional Twitterings. We are becoming more active in all of these places.

Inovo Research Helps Ford Identify What Customers Want from Future Super Duty Truck Powertrains

laschmitt — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:13:14 CST

In the current environment of high gas prices, pressure to reduce carbon emissions, and rapidly developing new technologies, the need for automotive companies to determine which fuel, energy and powertrain technologies to pursue is critical. A key factor in making decisions about future powertrain alternatives is what will appeal most to customers. Any new powertrain technology involves complex trade-offs that affect a driver’s experience with the vehicle, and hence its acceptance in the market. In the case of heavy duty pick-up trucks, the problem of determining future customer preferences is especially important due to interrelated factors that involve performance, utility, cost, image, ‘feel’, and a number of other effects that drivers need and desire.
Inovo Technologies, Inc. has completed a detailed study for Ford Motor Company that provides insight into the Mind of the Customer™ for heavy duty pickup trucks. Ford has a history of offering class-leading powertrain technology in their Super Duty truck line. They recognized the value in applying Inovo’s unique tools to help guide future powertrain efforts. Ford learned how their customers, and other drivers of heavy duty pick-up trucks, would respond to certain new powertrain technologies if they were to be introduced. To deliver this insight, Inovo applied their leading innovation process and tools to create a set of software ‘persona’ models that captured the needs and desires of the different heavy duty pick-up customers.
Among other insights, these models let Ford:

See customer’s responses to new powertrain solutions
Compare alternatives to find the optimal tradeoffs
Evaluate competitive offerings and see the differences
Test pricing alternatives

Inovo’s innovation process offers a new approach to understanding future customer’s unmet needs and desires that enables companies to identify and test new product possibilities. Inovo’s process goes beyond traditional “voice of the customer” research and yields greater understanding of and insight into the motivations of the various types of future customers. Inovo captures the Mind of the Customer™ in software models that can test future customer responses to new ideas and concepts. This ability to test demand creation gives companies such as Ford insights that have previously been impossible to obtain, and allows them to make informed decisions about investing in potential new technology innovations.

June 2008

New Release of Inovo's Mind of the Customer Tool

laschmitt — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:10:02 CST

February 2009. Inovo releases a new version of its Mind-of-the-Customer(TM) (MoC) tool that lets companies simulate customer response to new products or services before the product or service exists. With the MoC tool, companies can test new concepts when they are in the idea stage and test them with different types of future customers. The MoC tool is the first of its kind to capture qualitative customer motivations and behavior in a software model of the customer that can be used to simulate and predict customer responses to new, yet to be built, products and services.

The following lists some of the areas where Inovo's MoC tool has been recently used to predict customer response to specific new product, service, promotion, business model and other concepts:

Automotive safety
Operating room
Sanitization and cleanliness
Home networks
Agriculture
Industrial Coatings
Cell phones
Personal mobility
Pickup truck powertrain

These examples, among many others, demonstrate the way the MoC tool can be used to predict customer response for any business, industry, market or product and service area. Whether it is B2B, B2C, C2C or another business model, anywhere there is a customer who will adopt and use something new, the MoC tool can be used to gain insight into the customer's future behavior.

Inovo’s Mind of the Customer (MoC) method and tools allow an organization to gain insight into the behaviors of future customers by understanding their underlying perceptions and motivations. The MoC uses primary customer research, consisting of in-depth, structured engagements with targeted individuals in the relevant community, and captures both the explicit and tacit information from these interviews to construct a detailed set of models of customer ‘personas’ that represent the motivational segments of future demand.

The persona models are captured using software that allows the testing of new concepts to see the customer's response. In this way, new ideas for products, services, promotion, business models and virtually any other aspect of a new offering and its promotion can be tested in a common, structured, reliable and systematic way before it is rolled out. Competitive and existing offerings can also be tested against the same software persona models to see how new concepts stack up.

The advantage of the MoC over ‘Voice of the Customer’ and other methods is that it captures the essential, qualitative elements of what drives customer demand in a way that allows consistent, repeat, and rigorous relative comparisons of alternatives. Because the personas are coded as inputs to the MoC software, they cannot be incomplete or inconsistent. The same structure and inputs are used consistently to evaluate all alternatives. This is the first tool available that enables the traditionally qualitative and interpretive aspects of customer motivation to be treated in a structured and rigorous manner.

For more information on Inovo's Mind of the Customer method and tool, please contact Inovo technologies.

February 2009

Inovo Develops Innovation Course for the new University of Michigan Medical Innovation Center

laschmitt — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:08:35 CST

Inovo, working in conjunction with its non-profit affiliate, The Inovo Institute, has created a unique course on innovation for the newly formed Medical Innovation Center (MIC) at the University of Michigan. This course, the first of its kind for such an institution, is an intensive eight weeks of innovation training for a select team of five MIC Fellows. The training is in preparation for a yearlong effort to create breakthrough innovations focusing on the specific medical domain of Surgery.

The training program that The Inovo Institute has developed is based on Inovo's proven innovation process, methods and tools that have been used by many Fortune 500 companies, as well as small to mid-size organizations, to improve their front-end innovation capabilities. This innovation program is also the basis for the popular MBA course "Driving the Innovation Process" taught at the Zell-Lurie Institute of Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

The MIC training program is called the Innovator's Foundation Backbone or IFB and consists of 40 hours of in-class learning, discussions and practice, accompanied by hands-on projects and activities to develop the knowledge and skills required of an innovator.The course consists of sixteen (16), 2.5 hour long sessions shown below.
The new Medical Innovation Center was recently created by The University of Michigan to "foster innovation and enable new medical technologies .." . The yearlong program offered by the MIC is designed as a post-graduate experience for a small team of MIC Fellows who study both the process and the methods and tools required to create new medical innovation.The team consists of post-graduates with backgrounds in business, medicine and engineering.Individuals who go through this program will have a thorough understanding of what it takes to create breakthrough innovations in the medical field and the skills necessary to make them a reality.

Inovo, and its non-profit affiliate, The Inovo Institute, are dedicated to advancing the process of innovation through understanding the innovation process, creating the methods and tools required by today's innovator and sharing them with others through education and training programs. By working with the Medical Innovation Center to provide the core foundation of innovation training program, The Inovo Institute is fulfilling its mission to advance economic prosperity and social well-being through education, research, development and the promotion of innovation in all endeavors - for individuals, organizations and the greater community.

July 2008

The New Age of Innovation

laschmitt — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:17:47 CST

The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks
C.K. Prahalad, M.S. Krishnan
McGraw-Hill; April 8, 2008

Summary

This is not a book about innovation. It is a book about operational excellence.

Rating and Opinion

(out of 5)

A few years ago there was a commercial that created quite a controversy in the advertising world. The commercial was for a product called ‘Head-on’, a headache relief substance. The entire commercial consisted of the repetition of the phrase ‘Head-on, apply directly to the forehead’ about a zillion times (at least it seemed that many). It was advertising distilled to its essence – repeat something often enough and people will believe it. You get the same feeling reading this book. Repeat the phrase N=1 R=G, and the term ‘co-creation’ often enough, then it must be true and it must be important. In the first 4 chapters (as much as I could tolerate counting) the terms N=1 or R=G occurred on average 4 times per page! Surely the editor must have been either asleep or intimidated by 'the name - Prahalad'.

Quotes

Notable quotes you may want to remember or reference.

What to Read as Well:

What to Read Instead:

Footprint

Number of pages
Thought Level: X%
(100% = above-average pop business book; 50% = typical pop business - skimmable; 150% = a fair slog - a textbook; etc.)
Time to Read: in Hours (= # words * Conceptual Difficulty / 12,000 words/hour)
(Note: 200 words/min is an average person's reading rate. Adjust up or down if you read faster or slower.)
Content Density: Y% (Poor, Fair, Good, Excellent)
Interest Factor: (Low, Med, High, Very High)

Outliers

laschmitt — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:15:14 CST

Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown and Company; November 18, 2008

Summary

Gladwell phoned it in! Compared to 'The Tipping Point' or 'Blink' it is clear that the level of effort for 'Outliers' was a lot less.

Rating and Opinion

(out of 5)

Opinion on what is good and bad about the book and why.

Quotes

Notable quotes you may want to remember or reference.

What to Read as Well:

What to Read Instead:

Footprint

Number of pages
Thought Level: X%
(100% = above-average pop business book; 50% = typical pop business - skimmable; 150% = a fair slog - a textbook; etc.)
Time to Read: in Hours (= # words * Conceptual Difficulty / 12,000 words/hour)
(Note: 200 words/min is an average person's reading rate. Adjust up or down if you read faster or slower.)
Content Density: Y% (Poor, Fair, Good, Excellent)
Interest Factor: (Low, Med, High, Very High)

The Origin of Wealth

laschmitt — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:38:57 CST

The Origin of Wealth
By Eric BeinHocker
Harvard Business School Press
September 14, 2007

Summary

Don't let the cover quotes fool you, this is not a 'a brilliant piece of intellectual history'. It is, instead, a complete, comprehensive and reasoned re-framing of the entire economic domain. If one only reads the first half of the book, you will miss out on the most interesting aspects of Beinhocker's new ideas about 'Complexity Economics'.

Rating and Opinion

(out of 5)

Opinion on what is good and bad about the book and why.

Quotes

Notable quotes you may want to remember or reference.

What to Read as Well:

What to Read Instead:

Footprint

Number of pages
Thought Level: X%
(100% = above-average pop business book; 50% = typical pop business - skimmable; 150% = a fair slog - a textbook; etc.)
Time to Read: in Hours (= # words * Conceptual Difficulty / 12,000 words/hour)
(Note: 200 words/min is an average person's reading rate. Adjust up or down if you read faster or slower.)
Content Density: Y% (Poor, Fair, Good, Excellent)
Interest Factor: (Low, Med, High, Very High)

Kindle

laschmitt — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:20:48 CST

The Amazon Kindle has been extensively discussed on Blogs, Forums, the MSM (Main Stream Media) and various video interviews. The discussion almost always revolves around how the reading of books is affected. The discussions typically revolve around what, how and why people read books. To those who love and read books (an increasingly small percentage of the population), the Kindle can not replace the experience of reading a physical book, with the turning of pages, the ability to take notes, leaf backwards and forwards, and to 'feel' the paper. A striking observation about the book lovers who comment on the Kindle is that they almost universally mention how it would be attractive for 'some people' if not for them.

The Kindle is a perfect example of how people have a hard time figuring out how they will react to a new experience. For those of us (most of us) who have grown up with physical books, we 'like' the intimate interaction with the physical object - the feel of the pages and heft of the volume. It is hard for us to think about all of our accommodation to the fact that the book, as it has been ever since Guttenburg, has some serious deficiencies.

In point of fact, reading a physical paper book is a hassle. Here are some of my own negative experiences.

It's heavy - holding a book for reading, especially when laying down, requires stamina and frequent hand-offs.
It's awkward - hard to hold in one hand and, when using two hands, how do you eat the potato chips?
It is difficult to search - of course you can page forward and back, but trying to find a specific character, situation, quote or phrase that you 'remember' reading 100 pages previously is difficult
It has a crease in the middle - the binding causes the pages to warp! Does this make reading (not to mention copying) easier"
It is difficult to mark your place - How many times have you 'bent the spine' to get the book to stay open at the place you want? Where is that bookmark anyway?
Speaking of bookmarks - what a hassle. I need many. Where have I put them, how do I arrange and use them? I've dropped the book, where was I? Physical bookmarks are a hassle!
It is awkward to make notes. You'd like to take a pen and write on the pages, but you are hesitant to 'damage' the book. Besides, how do you search your notes? Having to go back and leaf through every page? Plus, how do you hold with one hand and write with the other? It's not that easy.

Now why aren't these 'deficiencies' of the traditional book recognized? It turns out that we have had almost 400 years of accommodating to the form of the current paper book. It is comfortable and familiar. To those book lovers who control the conversation about the book ecosystem, the familiar and traditional is comfortable.Because of their accommodation, they do not recognize the 'problems' listed above and they tend to dismiss and counter any suggestion of a better way of reading.

Now this is not to say that early technologies haven't been without their difficulties. Indeed, one of the most attractive aspects of books, that they can be read anywhere, in any (reasonable) lighting, with no power required, have been hard to duplicate with new technologies. But these issues are being addressed and solved.

In the forseeable future, there will be no more paper-based books.

Technology Effects

Community Needs and Desires

Possible Personas

URU Assessment

Opinion and Outlook

Overall prognosis

Home

laschmitt — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:27:50 CST

The Inovo Innovation Wiki is to discover, create, gather and disseminate knowledge about the innovation process. The innovation process consists of those activities, methods and practices, along with their associated tools, that result in new-to-the-world things that people desire and value. The Innovation Process occurs every day, whether we realize it or not. It can be an ad hoc, unstructured, unplanned and random process, or it can be one that is structured, planned, and organized. This Wiki is concerned with the latter type of innovation process.

Wiki Sections

There are several sections of this wiki that cover various topics and areas of innovation.

Inovo's ADOPTS™ Innovation Process

The Inovo ADOPTS™ process is a methodology and a set of tools and techniques that increases the ability of an organization or individual to innovate. Innovation is about adoption. Something new can be inventive, creative, unique and interesting, but unless it it adopted and valued, it is not an innovation. The ADOPTS process recognizes this and focuses on understanding the forces of demand creation and adoption.

ADOPTS stands for Active Discovery of Opportunities and Predictive Testing of Solutions. The methodology and tools that comprise ADOPTS identify unmet needs and desires that are the source of opportunities and and create solutions that satisfy those needs and desires - the solutions.. Details about the process are available from Inovo.

Rules of Engagement

This Wiki is intended to be a forum for a broad and deep dialog on innovation with a decidedly Inovo flavor. We are using a Wiki because it is the most useful, flexible and appropriate form of communication and interaction. We encourage interesting and insightful contributions and especially appreciate the skeptical and contrartian perspective. There are a few rules and guidelines:

Anyone is welcome to make comments on anything
We strongly discourage superficial, mean, and personal comments and will eliminate them
If you wish to contribute - contact us. Contributors are welcome but vetted
We strongly encourage an additive approach - don't delete, add - if you disagree, say why
Distinguish between opinion and fact, know the difference between knowledge and truth
Certain pages will be locked when they represent the 'Inovo Way'. Constructive criticism is appreciated.

Please contact us at wiki@inovotech.com with comments, ideas or a desire to contribute.

FitBit

laschmitt — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:49:25 CDT

FitBit is a small, wearable device that monitors and tracks your activity and wirelessly syncs to a computer so that you can see how active you have been throughout the day or even when sleeping. According to their website, FitBit lets you ask, and answer, questions such as:

Did I get enough exercise today?
How many calories did I burn?
Am I getting good quality sleep?
How many steps and miles did I walk today?

An image of it is shown below.

FitBit was one of the companies that presented at the TechCrunch 50 conference held in Sepotember '08. The following is the conference blurb about FitBit:

Fitbit inspires people to exercise more, eat better and live a healthier lifestyle. The company is developing an ultra-compact wireless wearable sensor, called the Fitbit Tracker, that automatically tracks data about a person's activities, such as calories burned, sleep quality, steps and distance.

The Fitbit Tracker collects activity data automatically while it is worn by the user all day. The collected data is wirelessly uploaded to a website where the wearer can see their data and track their progress toward personal goals. The website provides a motivational interface where users can share their progress, compare themselves against similar people and compete against their friends, family and co-workers. At the website, users can also manually log nutrition, weight and other health information in order to gain a complete picture of their health.

Fitbit makes it easy to achieve a healthy lifestyle by automating the collection of health data and providing a motivating and entertaining user interface.

Technology Effects

Some of the possible technology effects of this system are:

Presence - when is the device present on a person and active
Location - where is the device active? how mobile is it?
Sensitivity - what can/does the device record as activity
Selectivity - can the device distinguish between different types of activity?
Universality - does the device cover all activity situations? what is the 'level' of the data
Continuity - does the device cover all time spans? what is the time granularity?
Data Access - how can the data be accessed? when, where?
Visibility - what does the data show you? how visible and clear are the various activities?
Connection - who can the data be shared with? what connections can be created and maintained?
Integration - how difficult is it to switch between and/or manage the different 'modes' of device and data activity?

This preliminary set of effects are what people respond to with regards to personal activity. It is interesting to consider whether each one of us has our own personal 'activity meter' and what may be the nature of that meter. Many, if not most, people, if asked, could give an account of their daily or weekly activity level. Knowing what we do about human nature, the accuracy of such accounts would be suspect.

Community Personas

What are the different personas that are relevant to personal activity, health and wellness. The first thing to note is that by expanding the context from 'exercise' to 'activity' the universe of 'relevance' goes up by at least an order of magnitude. Exercise is an episodic (and for most people a problematic) event whereas activity is universal. Here are some possible activity personas:

Fitness Conscious - focused on exercise and overall fitness
Slacker - not interested in fitness, minimally motivated by health and wellness issues
Health Concerned - knows there are issues related to activity and health but exercise and diet are too difficult
Health Guardian - oversees someone elses activity and how it relates to health (e.g. parent)
Casual Participant - activity and health not a top concern. has an interest if it's not too much work
Active Ignorer - doesn't want to be bothered with any health or wellness issues. actively seeks non-healthy activities
Health Confident - few activity or health concerns. feels confident in own fitness and health levels

These postulated activity personas represent the various motivations, both positive and negative, people have with regards to knowing and understanding personal activity and its relevance to health and/or other aspects of peoples lives.

URU Assessment

The uniqueness, relevance and ubiquity levels of the FitBit can be speculated for each of the hypothetical personas listed above.

For the Fitness Conscious who already has and uses a number of hi-tech monitoring devices, the uniqueness would be relatively low. The relevance is high (this is a top concern)and the ubiquity would also be high since these personas would be motivated to use the device on a regular and continuous basis
For the Slacker, the uniqueness could be relatively high (hey, no effort) whereas the relevance and ubiquity would be low
The Health Concerned would find the FitBit to have high uniqueness, medium relevance (it only covers one aspect of health) and relatively high ubiquity.
The Health Guardian will see high uniqueness (can now see the activity of your children) high relevance, and high ubiquity
The Casual Participant will see Fitbit as having moderate uniqueness (alternatives require to omuch effort)), moderate relevance (casual curiosity) and moderate ubiquity.
The Active Ignorer will be low in all three of Uniqueness, Relevance and Ubiquity
Health Confident personas will have high uniqueness, high relevance and high ubiquity due to their desire to confirm their health belief

As can be seen from this brief analysis, the Fitbit satisfies many of the unmet needs and desires people have with respect to their health, but even more, with respect to their activitly levels. Many people believe, rightly or wrongly, that even if they do not specifically exercise, their daily (and nightly) activity does count and the FitBit gives them an opportunity to see where they are.

Opinion and Outlook

The FitBit will be a highly successful product. Its key innovation is to change health attention from exercise to activity. With the capability of 24/7 monitoring, even during sleep, the FitBit provides a capability that has previously not been available - being able to see what and when you are active and, potentially, changing your behavior in the small, incremental ways that are easier to implement and maintain. With the additionally capability to easily see and share this information, plus the social aspects of sharing and competing with freinds, the FitBit presents the possibility of really changing people's behaviors in the ways that has been shown to be effective - incremental, continuous and cognitively committed.

Overall prognosis

Financial Innovation?

laschmitt — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:06:18 CDT

The current financial crisis has brought to the forefront the question of innovations gone bad. Were these new, creative, financial instruments, the ones that have caused the current financial crisis, innovations? If so, why? If not, what makes these different from true innovations. In a recent podcast from Business Week their innovation editor Bruce Nussbaum addresses this issue.

In this podcast, Bruce captures a few of the main issues behind the type of financial 'innovation' that created the complex investment instruments that ultimately destroyed value and about what companies should do in their innovation efforts in a time of 'crisis'.

Innovation Issues

Some of the key points Bruce makes about what makes an innovative 'product' are:

The creation of these 'products' was the result of a flawed innovation process. There was no iteration in their creation and they were not stress tested. The first actual test showed that they were flawed.
There was no transparency in either the product creation process or in the products themselves. No one know how they were created and no one knew exactly what they were.
The 'independent' parties whose job it was to assess the products, the rating agencies, did a terrible job.

In other words, there was a failure in the creative process itself that resulted in fundamentally flawed products. It is similar to a car company introducing a brand new car platform without testing the powertrain and having 1,000,000 engines all fail in the same week. Except in this case, neither the auto manufacturer, the dealer and the driver,NHTSA, Consumer Reports, or Car and Driver magazine editors could lift the hood of the car to even look at the engine. It is invalid to call what the financial engineers did innovative. Inventive yes, innovative no. They took a bunch of 'quants', the mathematicians and analytic scientists, and asked them to come up with a model of human behavior that would allow them to understand risk. This led them down the path of using arcane approaches such as 'Archimemedean Copulas' detailed in books such as 'Measuring and Managing Credit Risk' that no one, except themselves, could understand and, as it turns out, they didn't really understand either.

The point is that innovation is about more than just being creative, inventive and coming up with something new. Innovation is about creating value. It is about those things that are adopted and used because they have real value for the adopter, not things that will blow up in their face after a short trial period. The mistake made by the 'engineers' who created the products, and by the managers, marketers and executives who sponsored (and encouraged) the engineers, was in thinking that value could be created out of thin air. There is a question that is used by scientists and engineers who look at new ideas. They ask themselves first if the thing that is being contemplated violates the laws of physics. If so, you can stop. Clearly, the engineers, and the executives directing the creation of these financial instruments didn't ask themselves the equivalent 'first principle' question. If they did, then they would have known that the outcome would have been the equivalent of betting on a perpetual motion machine.

What to do in a Crisis?

Another main theme of the podcast is the behavior of companies in a time of crisis and the nature of risk. The points that Bruce makes are:

There is a temptation on the part of companies to cut back on their innovation efforts in times of economic slowdown and tightening budgets. This is a mistake.
Companies that 'double down' on their innovation efforts during a downturn are much more prepared for significant growth when the downturn ends
Crisis often releases the forces of creative destruction. Companies that survive will be those that truly innovate during this time
Innovation is not about risk taking. It is about risk management. Risk taking is fundamental to all business. If you are not taking risks, then you might as well just get out of business.
Innovation, and its process, increase your future options and allow you to manage them to efficiently make choices. By increasing future possibilities and choices, and there fore your options, you can manage future risks.

This last point is especially noteworthy. Instead of viewing innovation as risk taking, one should view it, when properly implemented, as risk management. Innovation doesn't create risks, it creates options that allow you to manage risks. The reason is that innovation creates new possibilities. Choosing to move forward with a new possibility is like an option that you can exercise or not. If you didn't have that possibility, them you would have no options and risk would increase.

Of course this concept of options portfolios is not new. Most everyone recognizes the value of a portfolio of options. Where companies go astray is in the composition of the portfolio and in the way of making option decisions. An effective portfolio requires volume. Not just volume of items in the portfolio itself, but in the things that were considered to become portfolio items. Clearly, if your portfolio has only one option, and that option was the only thing that was looked at or considered, then that is a highly risky portfolio.

Only slightly less problematic are two other scenarios that happen quite often. The first is the creation of a diverse and plentiful portfolio where everything in the portfolio was 'pre-ordained'. In other words, the things that make it into the portfolio are the things that get worked on and virtually everything that gets worked on eventually makes it into the portfolio. You have what looks like a diverse and plentiful portfolio, but it is 'fragile' in the sense that the elements of the portfolio did not come from a broad pool of opportunities and they typically all have the same risk profile.

The second scenario is the inverse. You look at a broad pool of opportunities, but the weeding and vetting process results in only one or two things making it into the portfolio. Such a situation exists in many companies that use a filtering process to 'weed-out' new opportunities that don't meet various criteria.

An ideal portfolio of options would be one in which the individual items in the portfolio came from a process in which many, many different opportunities were examined and each opportunity went through a focusing and shaping process (rather than a filtering process) to create a number of options that have diverse risk profiles. Such a portfolio is one in which risk really can be managed.

Getting to the 'Meta' Level

laschmitt — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:53:41 CDT

Let's face it, people have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. We all tend to focus on the particulars and have difficulty taking a step back and looking at the 'big picture'. Even more difficult is keeping both the particulars and the whole in mind at the same time. The inability to take a step back and see the big picture often gets us into trouble.

Take, for example, the debate over free vs. regulated markets. To hear the pundits talk, this is an either or proposition. You either have totally free markets or have 'paternalistic' regulation of behavior. The two (exaggerated) sides of the argument are 'Free markets create the most good for the most people therefore anything goes' vs. 'Free markets result in inequities and cheating therefore all behaviors must be vetted and either explicitly allowed or proscribed'.

This is an example of a false choice that comes about through the failure to take a step back and look at the big picture. What is this 'Meta' view of markets that could inform both sides? It is that, for markets to work properly, there are some very specific things that need to be in place (read Reinventing the Bazaar by John McMillan). These very specific things have to do with the system, not individual behaviors. These are things such as transparency of information and independence of actors. If these things are in place, then individual people, both buyers and sellers, can engage in the wide variety of behaviors that we are all expect of a diverse population.

This 'meta' understanding of the system leads to a natural solution of proscribed systems but not proscribed behaviors. In other words, to have a 'free' market, there needs to be strict regulation at the system level and freedom at the individual level. The strict regulation would actually result in markets that are more free than those that now exist. What would some of this strict regulation look like? How about strict regulation on clarity of contracts? No more fine print, legalese language and onerous terms buried on the bottom of page 5 of a contract - illegal! How about forcing electronic disclosure of ALL costs associated with a contract so that third party, independent comparisons could be made between alternatives (see Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein). No more hidden fees and obtuse claims - illegal! These strict regulations would, in fact, make markets freer, more competitive and much much fairer than the existing system of loose or no regulations. It is interesting that it is precisely these types of regulations that the large market forces (read mortgage lenders, credit card companies, etc.) lobby so intensely against. One must realize that no large, established market entity is going to argue for more transparency and freer exchange of information. They are inherently against competition, It just makes their lives harder.

This ability to step back and see the system, to abstract from detailed specifics to general principles, is in short supply. If we had more of this capability, both in ourselves and in the people who lead and make decisions, we would be better off. Instead of our politicians being pressed to give finer and finer levels of detail on their proposals to 'fix the housing crisis' or 'end the war in Iraq', wouldn't it be better if they could tell us the principles they will use to make decisions in an ever evolving and changing environment? Wouldn't it be better if we could understand their 'meta' view of the situation instead of being boxed in by detailed specifics that could be inappropriate if the circumstances change?

In watching an interview with Barak Obama on television, the interviewer was asking him questions about the mortgage crisis and what he would do. Now to Barak's credit, he did try to state some of his principles, but the interview, at the direction of the interviewer, quickly delved into very specific details. How much money will you provide homeowners who are about to loose their homes? Will you or will you not bail-out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? And on and on. Instead of setting up a framework for dealing with the situation, all we get are specific actions that may or may not be valid one week, one month or one year form now. Everyone would be better served if both the interviewer and Barak took a step back and said 'let's look at this situation at a high level and try and understand the 'whys' behind the 'whats' that are happening.

Next time you get bogged down in a situation you are struggling with, try taking a step up to the 'meta' level and think about the system and the principles behind possible actions. You will find that this is a very valuable skill to develop, one that is in short supply but nevertheless one that is sorely needed in today's complex environment.

Identifying Project Participants

laschmitt — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:20:55 CDT

One early task in starting a new project is to identify the internal (discovery team) and client participants. The vitality of the process is a function of strong group dynamics, awareness of member strengths, ongoing communications, and an understanding of the steps, strengths, and pitfalls of opportunity discovery.

Project Participants

Project team members are chosen jointly by the mavens and the client project leader and senior management. The project team includes the following sub-teams:

Discovery Team—the mavens and scouts who handle the day-to-day activities of the discovery process
Core Team—the discovery team and client staff who represent varied interests and backgrounds within the client company
Extended Team—the core team and additional people who participate in the pairwise voting during the Opportunity Statement process
Observers—client executives who oversee, and may or may not participate in the discovery process

Discovery Team

The day-to-day activities of the discovery process are handled internally by specific roles on the discovery team.

Scouts—explore the domain, create OHs, OSs, and OPs
Project Maven—manages the project schedule, deliverables, and internal resources
Process Maven—manages process details (including improvements) and oversees the discovery and assessment processes
Domain Maven—manages the project owner relationship and oversees the accumulated knowledge content including the generator pool and the opportunity canvas

Discovery Team Skills

Innovation is at heart a human endeavor. It requires a deep understanding of diverse human values and motivation, but, perhaps more importantly, it demands certain aptitudes and talents on the part of the innovator (or the team). The most essentials skills, the ones called on again and again, include:

Community Building—The skill to find who holds the most valuable knowledge and how you can find them within existing social networks.
Elicitation—The ability to meet or talk with knowledgeable individuals and to internalize their motivations - as well as the motivations of those they themselves understand well.
Discovery—Using knowledge of technologies and communities as well as that of both existing and potential solutions to conceive of new ideas. This is one face of creativity and includes the ability to seek new ideas though 'active curiosity'.
Generalization and Specialization—Composing new knowledge of how needs and desires can be categorized, and how groups of people cluster in their shared motivations. This includes generalizing how technology specifications ('specs') can be elevated into the 'effects' that they produce - and which inform value judgments.
Business Analysis—The traditional skills of modeling underlying economics, competition, and strategy to paint a picture of the living, breathing enterprise in its relevant ecosystem.
Knowledge Transfer and Communications—The ability to craft new insight into a message that can live independent of the messenger. This includes the talent of crafting a compelling narrative and conveying in short what matters in deciding among alternatives and in taking action.

Core Team

The core team is comprised of the discovery team plus key client staff. The number of project participants is a joint decision between the project mavens and the client project leader. Client project core team members make a time commitment of two hours each week for the Opportunity Hypothesis (OH) Meeting, two hours each month for the Opportunity Statement (OS) Meeting and mini-auction, and four hours each month for the Opportunity Profile (OP) Meeting. The client project leader is committing to additional time for planning and review meetings, questions and information dissemination from/to client team members, and in-house client senior management communication.

Extended Team

When an opportunity has reached the Opportunity Statement (OS) phase, the client project leader often chooses to add people to the project. The extended team consists of the core team plus carefully selected members with business acumen, scientific understanding, technological skills and backgrounds, corporate culture and business planning experience, or other attributes that are important to the shaping and refining activities included in OS meetings.

Observers

Observers are highly placed executives or alliance partners of the client. The may oversee all or part of the discovery project, although they are not always participants.

Innovations of Interest (IOI)

laschmitt — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:04:44 CDT

Innovations of Interest (IOI's) are newly introduced, discovered, or invented products, services, organizations, technologies or anything else that has the potential to change the world. These IOI's provide an opportunity to analyze, discuss and speculate about these interesting new things from the Inovo perspective on innovation. Each IOI analysis will dissect the innovation from the technology, community and solution perspectives with emphasis on the technology effects and constraints and the community needs and desires that the IOI intersects with.

New IOI's will be created on a regular basis so keep coming back for the latest take.

IOI Index

Community Contact

srschwartz — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:42:04 CDT

Outreach Tactics

Community outreach is an effort to find the right people in the Community of Practice.

There are several tools to help span this network. These include:

Company and personal 'rolodexes', whether paper, electronic, or in your head
Team brainstorming
The community itself

The last point has two aspects. First, those you contact, even if they are surely not the right individuals for an engagement can help direct you. Use their good will, their rolodex, and their tacit knowledge of who is in the community or who can help navigate the community.

At the first contact be sure to ask for help in finding the right people. At the last contact, at the end of the engagement, be sure to ask who else we should connect with. Now that they've seen the types of questions we are asking, they will have a better idea of who can help.

Coordination

Since the Community Map is a shared resource, and all team members will be in and out of it often (to claim ownership of branches and individuals, or to add content back), here are a few things to do to avoid stepping on each other.

(1) Don't leave the community map file open for long on your computer. When you do this you ensure than anyone who opens and saves it after you did will create a duplicate.

(2) If you need to make an edit, open the file, make your change, then save and close it right away.

(3) Be sure to push your changes back in to Groove after your saves. You do this by inducing the Groove "Editing File - Save" dialog box, where you need to click the "yes" button. One way to induce this dialog is by bringing the Groove Launchbar window to the foreground.

(4) Make a personal fragment of the community map with your initials added in the filename. This file you can leave open and edit all day long without fear of collisions. When you're ready to copy back to the main map just follow the precautions above.

Assessment Outreach Activities

srschwartz — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:29:27 CDT

Whether practicing alone or in teams, there are several activities required for community outreach. These include:

What is Innovation?

laschmitt — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 07:48:27 CDT

The word 'innovation', and the corresponding words 'innovative' and 'to innovate', are among the overused, words in the business lexicon. Everyone wants innovation and wants to be innovative, but few can really define it. Ask 10 people for their definitions and they will give you 10 different answers. One thing is certain, however, innovation, whatever it is, is good. There are no bad connotations!

This situation is not helped by all of the noise in the marketplace. Virtually every consulting or services company touts their wares as innovative or as a way to become innovative. Everything from PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) to TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) is so touted.

To understand what innovation truly is, it is necessary to understand the fundamental process of how new things are introduced into the world and become adopted every day by real people who, in turn, change what they do, how they behave, what they feel and and how they collaborate withothers.

This section presents several perspectives on this to convey an the innovation process and how it can be adapted and adopted for exceptional personal and organization results.

OH Meetings

jsansone — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:58:33 CDT

Internal Pre-Meetings:

An internal Opportunity Hypothesis (OH) review and preparation meeting should be held at least one day in advance of the scheduled OH meeting with the client. Participants are all the scouts contributing OHs and the designated Inovo OH meeting leader or domain maven.

During the internal meeting, a short summary of each OH is presented by the authoring scout and discussed by the team. Participants are reviewing for completeness, relevance, clarity, suitability (scope), similarity to or overlap with OHs in the previous or current round, and gaps. This is also an opportunity for scouts to get the advice and insights of others. Sometimes OHs may be combined, or new OHs may be generated. At the conclusion of the OH review, any additional information deemed necessary by the team is sought, and if available, added by the originating scout prior to the OH meeting. All finalized OHs, i.e. from all scouts, are moved into the work-in-progress (WIP) map at least two hours prior (one day prior is preferable) to the scheduled OH meeting and are available to the client at this time.

If the whole scouting team will not be participating in the OH meeting with the client, it must also be determined during the internal meeting who can travel (if necessary) an who will present OHs. At least two participants from the Inovo side and four from the client side are needed to conduct an OH meeting. OHs of those not attending the meeting with the client must be assigned to those who are attending. As attending scouts will have to speak to others' OHs, they should be given the opportunity to review these OHs with enough time available so that they can meet with the originating scout to ask questions and “get up to speed” on the OH content.

The internal meeting is also the venue to determine the order of presentation of the OHs (they are discussed “top to bottom”) by the designated OH meeting leader. In determining order, start and end with a “strong” OH in terms of scope, evidence of need, and comfort of the client. The last OH may be “novel,” but always strive to end on a high note. More “experimental” OHs should be mixed in to the middle. The final order of OHs should also take into consideration the presenters for each OH; do not have the same person presenting three or more OHs in a row. It is preferable to alternate speakers for each OH in order to avoid “monotony,” and it is also easier and more effective for both the speaker and listeners.

During the internal meeting, the OH meeting leader should designate one of the scouts who will participating in the OH meeting with the client to take notes during that meeting. The note taker should have access to a computer. Their responsibilities include updating the Work in Progress (WIP) map as comments are made by adding to the “Notes” branch of each OH and recording scores in the WIP for each OH as voting takes place.

The date and time of the OH meeting with the client should be confirmed by the project maven during the internal meeting. If the OH meeting with the client is via teleconference, the project maven should provide participants with dial-in information. If the OH meeting with the client is off site, then the project maven should provide directions to the meeting location (including directions to the specific building, facility, etc. where the meeting is taking place), confirm car pooling plans (e.g. who and number of participants per car), departure time, and time for the Inovo team to reconvene at the meeting location. The project maven should also ensure the client has a list of attendees at least one day prior to the meeting, or more if needed for security purposes.

Meetings with the Client:

The Opportunity Hypothesis (OH) Meeting is where the freshly minted OHs get evaluated. The objective of the meeting is to decide which OHs should be added to the auction, and from there, move on to become an Opportunity Statement (OS). The meeting serves both to share knowledge about nascent opportunity ideas and to let team members select from among those presented. The focus is on indications of need and desire. Evaluation of potential solutions is avoided (this is really hard to do but will come later). The first few OH meetings should be face-to-face to promote team building and group dynamics. After that, OH meetings can be tele-conferences.

Presentation of each OH should take no more than five minutes. The OH meeting leader should ask the group if there are questions at the end of each OH presentation, however, “debatable” questions and other, more in-depth discussion should be held until after voting. Any comments made are recorded by the designated note taker. The OH meeting leader is responsible for keeping the team on track and ending the meeting on time.

The following diagram shows the structure of the meeting from the perspective of what happens to the OHs.

OH meetings are generally held once per week. A minimum of three work days between OH meetings is needed to allow scouts time for OH exploration and generation. Therefore, meeting dates should be set as far in advance as possible to allow scouts, and other participants in the process, to plan accordingly.

Managing and Documenting OH Materials

jsansone — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:24:52 CDT

OH information is stored in individual scout mind maps. The highest order map is the project management map. Other maps are used to organize diverse information and to provide a manageable structure. Maps are the repository of knowledge gained during the opportunity exploration process. Maps are updated on an ongoing basis as more knowledge is available.

A more extensive understanding of the domain of interest uncovers rich veins to mine for opportunities. Scout area exploration maps are the foundation maps. Scout area maps hold valuable information on communities, technologies, and ecosystems that is especially useful later in the engagement phase. The weekly OH Work in Progress (WIP) map allows scouts to collectively share what they have learned and gain insights from other scouts' experiences. The WIP map also allows for proper resource allocation among the scouts.

Although the maven is most responsible for creating and updating the generator maps, valuable kernels and insights accumulate in OH maps.

Overview of Map Structures

Preparing OH Materials

jsansone — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:08:03 CDT

OH meeting materials include a series of slides that provide talking points and take-aways for each of the OHs being presented at the OH meeting. Scouts prepare the slides for the OHs they developed. Each OH usually requires two slides to present. The header of each slide is the Theme and Domain Name that is guiding the exploration process. Each slide should remain similar to the others. A common format is less distracting and participants should be directed to the opportunity and not the visual.

The top of the slide is the heading. It contains the the theme and domain name, a two to five word name for the OH, a two or three sentence description of the OH that emphasizes the need being addressed, and an image that visually links to the message of the OH and will quickly identify the OH to the team.

The next section lists the sources of the opportunity, i.e., who cares and why they care. Try to group people by a common need or concern. List as many groups as is sensible.

The next section lists the desired effects, the outcomes and experiences that people want and do not currently receive. What needs and desires are being addressed by this opportunity?

Any remaining sections are optional and are devised by the scout to more fully express the outlines of the OH that he has discovered.

Sample Slide 1 for OH Material

Sample Slide 2 for OH Material

OH Checklist

When you think your OH is ready for the OH meeting, be sure to review the following:

Did you use the right template? Be sure to use the latest.
Is your OH a need (i.e. an "Opportunity") rather than a possible solution?
Do you have a two- to five- word title that captured the essence of the need? (Being catchy is a plus)
Is the Concept line clear enough to stand on its own in the OH mini-auction?
Did you under-do it? Do you have at least two to three points of evidence? Does it fit on half a screen?
Did you over-do it? Do you have far more content than would "fit on a screen"? Paraphrase verbatims to make them more salient and skimmable.
Did you include hyperlinks to your verbatims and evidence sources?
Did you add one or two "Possible Solution" entries? This can often make your OH much more compelling.
Is it organized coherently? Are parent topics reasonably titled? Do entries at the same level belong together?
Did you perform a cosmetic check?

Have you removed dangling (empty) branches? ("Subtopic" entries, unfilled template branches, etc.)
Have you made sure the font, etc. are consistent?
Have you corrected your typos?
Did you stretch out tall/narrow mind map entries to fit your OH better onto a 4:3 aspect ratio screen?
Are your OH's comparable in form to the prevailing practice of others?

Are you ready? Are you (or someone you have assigned to represent you and present your OH) ready to paraphrase it at the OH meeting? Be ready to tell the story of the need.

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What is Innovation?

OH Meetings

Managing and Documenting OH Materials

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OH Checklist