The Innovator’s Blindspot: Even Your Best Ideas Will Fail If Your Partners Don’t Innovate Too. The following is an excerpt from The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation. There is a blind spot that undermines great managers in great organizations even when they identify real customer needs, deliver great products, and beat their competition to market. Philips Electronics fell victim to this blind spot when it spent a fortune to pioneer high-definition television (HDTV) sets in the mid-1980s. The company’s executives drove a development effort that succeeded in creating numerous breakthroughs in television technology, offering picture quality that customers loved and that the competition, at the time, could not match. Yet, despite sterling execution and rave reviews, Philips’s high-definition TV flopped. Sony suffered from a similar blind spot, winning a pyrrhic victory as it raced to bring its e-reader to market before its rivals, only to discover that even a great e-reader cannot succeed in a market where customers have no easy access to e-books.
Buy The Wide Lens here. Wanna Manage The Innovation Process? Focus On Planning Scenarios, Not Fighting Fires. The following is an excerpt from Relentless Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t--and What That Means for Your Business by Jeffrey Phillips. Perhaps one of the biggest myths about innovation is the idea of the “lone” innovator, who works on ideas in the lab or office, without assistance or support. In this myth the innovator or inventor has a flash of insight, generates and manages ideas completely on his or her own, and fights the bureaucracy to overcome all odds to produce a commercially viable product. While these stories about individual innovators overcoming all odds are enjoyable, they are rarely true. In fact, most, if not all, ideas that become new products or services require the involvement of a significant number of people from a wide array of business functions--sales, marketing, legal, manufacturing, and distribution, to name a few.
The complexity inherent in developing, testing, and commercializing a new product demands a broad perspective and a diverse set of skills. 3 Ways To Predict What Consumers Want Before They Know It. The insight that sparks innovation appears to occur randomly. After all, the iconic shorthand for innovation is a light bulb, implying that ideas come from sudden flashes of inspiration. While such flashes are surely good things, it is hard to depend on them, particularly if you are at a company that needs to introduce a steady stream of innovative ideas. Steve Jobs once said, “It is not the customer’s job to know what they want.”
That’s absolutely right. The quest to identify opportunities for innovation starts with pinpointing problems customers can’t adequately solve today. To discover your quarter-inch holes, obsessively search for the job that is important but poorly satisfied (for more on the underlying theory of jobs to be done, see The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton M. 1. In 2000, when A.G. Lafley is gifted at communicating complicated ideas in simple ways. Lafley urged P&G to understand their boss as never before. 2. Consider jeans shopping. 3. Innovation secrets of Steve Jobs. Learning and the Pursuit of Shibumi. Introducing a Japanese aesthetic that seems to have all the answers. How being connected, balanced and finding beauty in simplicity translates to a powerful organizational learning method. Imagine you’ve been laid off. Forget rage, betrayal, fright and frustration. Just relax. Don’t do anything. Don’t blame yourself or your company; see this unforeseen test as a life-changing breakthrough.
According to Matthew E. “There’s a word for crisis in Japanese, ‘kiki,’ which is comprised of two sets of characters,” May said. Shibumi is a Zen concept without direct translation in Japanese or definition in English; it is the height of personal excellence and total clarity. There are five key steps to reach shibumi: commitment, preparation, struggle, breakthrough and transformation.
The Shibumi Strategy : The World. Internet Values Change Org Design. Method: Eight Things Stand-Up Comedy Teaches Us About Innovation | Co.Design. This is the ninth piece in the 10x10 series by innovation firm Method. Read more from the series here. Comedy, especially stand-up, is widely regarded as the most difficult gig in show business.
Similarly, successful product innovation is so difficult, it could be regarded as the stand-up comedy of the business world. E.B. White once said that analyzing comedy is like dissecting a frog: Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. However, a sacrifice must be made to help more great ideas see the light of day, and studying how good comedians work can reveal insights into how innovation can benefit from the same advice. 1.
When it comes to innovation, the customer is rarely right. A comedian doesn't ask the audience what the next joke should be about, he has the skill to tell them. 2. Don't just collect data about your audience, study them. Why did it take so long for Heinz and its competitors to introduce the "upside down" ketchup bottle? 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Speed: Revised, Reinforced, and Reiterated. The primary factor in a successful attack is speed. –Lord Mountbattan Jason Warner has been thinking a lot about speed lately. Since reading his terrific article, so have I. If we indeed might be at the beginning stages of a frenzy that relates to hiring, then speed will quickly go from a luxury to a biological imperative — an urgent component to success that has to be encoded into the DNA of every recruiter who needs to get the job done.
As such we will have to look at speed in a whole different light: not as a means to cut corners but as a tool and a mindset recruiters must adopt if we are to be successful in generating the hires necessary to support organizational objectives. First things first. What is quality? Now we can move on. Clients who do not return phone calls. Clients who do not respond to submitted candidates. Clients who change the requirements every 20 minutes.
Clients who “have no time.” Sadly, corporate recruiters can’t fire a hiring manager. Need more info? Leadership Innovation. As we start a new year during a slow recovery, innovation will be at a premium as organizations strive to uncover new opportunities for growth. Yet many leaders have trouble thinking about (let alone driving) innovation when they're focused on managing through the still-challenging present. Five years ago, GE (GE) launched a leadership development program called "Leadership, Innovation and Growth" (LIG) to stimulate growth and innovation from within the organization. The program created new ways to think and talk about innovation simply and practically, so it would grow into part of how leaders operated their business. Leadership teams from across GE's top 60 businesses have since participated in the program, and have learned how to translate innovative ideas and opportunities into initiatives with real results.
As GE prepares to launch the next iteration of LIG (focused on global growth), we've spent some time reflecting on what's worked and what needs improvement. Innovation as Crossroads. Donald Merlin, author of ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND, felt that it is cultural innovation which sets our species apart from the rest. In his words (p10): In fact, the uniqueness of humanity could be said to rest not so much in language as in our capacity for rapid cultural change. To that, I would add that innovation is a great intersection for seeing similarities between institutions and individual consciousness. (Beyond this, we can extrapolate connections between institutional functioning and cultural functioning--an emphasis in direct opposition to identity politics.)
In some ways, it is easier to understand the agentic aspects of an entity than the universe of circumstances that any entity inhabits. By beginning at this point, we can compare design processes with emergent processes along with intention as compared to activity (which involves both intentional choices and behaviors along with behaviors and influences that are not necessarily chosen or even noticed). Group dynamics can stifle a great idea. For most companies, conventional wisdom says that collaborative teams offer the best path to generating compelling innovation.
Behind this notion is that high-performance and diverse groups are best suited to cope with technology complexity, commercialization challenges and as well as stick handle through management gates such as securing buy-in and resources. In fact, I have argued this point in my blog on a number of occasions. A recent Wharton research paper suggests that other innovation strategies could be more effective.
Professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich contend that common group dynamics are anathema to developing breakthrough products, unique ways to save money or revolutionary business models. Instead, they believe the next Facebook, Twitter or iPad could best be germinated by an inspired innovator with plenty of time to ponder and experiment. The study concluded that the hybrid process resulted in three times more ideas than the team-based process.