For those creative individuals that are submitting new cost cutting or product ideas, the incentive may not be strictly financial. That may be a portion of it, but the overall thrill of creating something may be from getting an opportunity to participate in bringing the idea or product to fruition. Money and schwag are great but can be a fleeting experience. I contend that people will get a greater sense of satisfaction, will last longer and spread further through the organization if you reward them with the ability to contribute to the project. If you haven’t done so already, poll your organization to see what they consider to be the best rewards. You’ll probably find that it’s more money and more time off. However, there is an alternative – not everybody is in it for strictly monetary rewards. There are many who want to participate in creating something new and exciting so give people the opportunity to say “I built that” and you may be surprised at how engaged your most creative people become.

In reality, the 80/20 rule is 90/10 when it comes to innovation. Only 10% of “ideas” that are generated could be considered in the “good” category. However, of the entire population of ideas, 1% would be considered “great.” The difficult part to begin to grapple with is that of all ideas that a team comes up with, only .001% will be in the “fantastic” category. That’s it, 1 in 1000. For some, just coming up with that 1/1000 is enough of a thrill. All too often that’s the extent of it. There is no follow through, no attempt to build a consensus of opinion, and no attempt to prioritize and take the “idea” all the way to the “product” stage. For some, “I thought of that” is enough. But that doesn’t create sustainable business and it doesn’t create effective people and teams. What does create a business is follow through. After reading Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky, it’s clear that a process is needed to move things from the innovation stage to the execution phase.

As Scott puts it…

Only through organization can we seize the benefits from bursts of creativity.

So how do you move repeatedly from idea to launch? In my experience the easiest way to make this happen is to create a simple project plan and set milestone dates and stick to them. For example…

1. Brainstorm, conceptualize and refine the idea for 30 days.
2. For the following 3 days we will review objectives and prioritize.
3. In 15 days we’ll have a working prototype.
4. For 10 days following that we’ll review results and have a working solution.
5. In 5 days we’ll launch in specific pilot areas.

Keep going from there. Put a process together that you can follow. Not too detailed just a general sense of what everybody is doing. If it’s more complicated than a football play then you need to stop and rethink because nobody can follow it. Pick a project manager to oversee the process. No Gantt charts, just clear and simple markers to show where you are as opposed to where you should be. When dates slip, ask “why” not “who?” If the “why” is associated to the same person every time then the “who” will answer itself. It also polices your process. You should also let the people following the process police it as well. In my opinion, anyone that is a part of a process should have the responsibility of calling “bullshit” on any portion of the process that impacts them directly. They should also be required to offer a workable solution, not just complain that the process is broken or too difficult. Once the issue and a potential solution are voiced, the rest of the team following the process needs to have a say in changing the process. Whatever you do, don’t wait to make the change if everybody approves. Make it now. Test it. Do a dry run and see what happens.

Once you’ve got one team up and running with this, split off a smaller team and move new people into the original team. Add people slowly so they can get their feet under them and get accustomed to the culture. Have the teams work on different cycles, one conceptualizing and the other executing. Create a pool of the top 10% of ideas to draw on and see if they can be enhanced. The two teams should get together at regular intervals to discuss what they’ve learned about each other and about the process. Have ONE process. Not one for EACH team. Shuffle people around from time to time to avoid group think. Mix things up again by having a different person lead the initiative. That gives people experience at leadership and making decisions without all the facts available. That type of experience will prove to be invaluable to your people, your teams, and your company.

If you’re setting out to brainstorm new ideas and concepts, here’s some things I’ve experienced over the past few years that may help.

1) Get a great facilitator. Someone that’s open minded, will keep people on track and will get people to contribute.

2) Put a great question together and figure out how to answer it. It helps if you can define what you’re trying to do as much as possible. Free form brainstorming rarely turns into anything of value and usually leads to something that you probably can’t execute anyway. Make the question as specific and restrictive as possible. “How do we solve problem (x) with (y) dollars, (z) time, and existing skill sets?” You may be surprised at how many ideas you can come up with. You may get a lot of resistance at first like “You’re limiting us” but to get really creative you usually need to deal with the realities of the situation. [I forgot to include a very important point here - if somebody is telling you that your approach to the problem is wrong or suggests a different way of approaching it, listen to them. It's possible that they're lateral thinkers, these people make all the difference in innovation. Lateral thinkers are game changers.]

3) Put a time constraint in place. Give yourself a limited amount of time to generate ideas and the ideas you generate MUST address the question asked in #2. Don’t go over, stop on time and move on. However, people may go home and think about it a little longer. They may also have an epiphany. Make certain that you account for this as answers to problems are rarely straightforward. The subconscious may chew on it for a while and come up with something spectacular.

4) Isolate yourselves. Set aside a time and place where nobody knows where you are or what you’re working on. Turn off cell phones and focus on what you’re doing.

5) If it’s not coming together, say so. You can’t force people to come up with ideas to solve a problem. But you can create an environment where people feel comfortable and willing to participate. If it’s just not working for whatever reason then reschedule. Or move to a different location. Or get different people.

6) Create follow-up tasks, delegate those tasks to individuals and put dates and times in place to get them resolved. The task may be to do market research, speak to your target audience or get a patent attorney. Set concrete and measurable tasks that have a specific owner. Leave no latitude as to who should be running with which item.

That’s it at it’s most basic implementation. Before you get started on any session make sure you’ve got the essentials. Whiteboard, pizza, cokes, etc. The facilitator should set and enforce the ground rules and only let people deviate when it’s in the teams best interest.

If you have other experiences, things that worked in the past, things that didn’t, don’t hesitate to comment here.

What problem are you fixing, and who’s problem is it? If you’re fixing your own problem and then pushing it at your customers, step away from the keyboard. A better question to start asking yourself is this, who approves the purchase of the solution I’m creating? If you’re not fixing an explicit problem for that individual then you’re wasting your time. If you’re making it easier to order your products then ask yourself if the decision maker that you’re pitching to sees order entry as a problem. Call the decision maker, make it a point to understand where this individual is experiencing pain – then create a solution to address that pain point. That’s a product which is sale-able and in demand by at least one person. Hopefully they’re not the only ones experiencing this same pain point and you’ll actually have a market for your solution. Unless you are a complete visionary and see a demand for a product that nobody is asking for yet, then stick to the basics. Do your research and talk to people.

There are certain events that occur in everyone’s life that (should) make you stop and think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Every once in a while you may come to the decision to chuck it all and start over. If we’re really innovators then we’ve been pushing change at others for a long time and trying to make them comfortable with it. How comfortable are we when change gets pushed at us? To be honest, it’s un-nerving. To be equally honest, it’s something I can use when talking people through making dramatic changes.

Updated:

I just caught Seth’s post from this morning about needing a permit to make a dent and it got me thinking a little more. The number of people who truly support and encourage people to make and stick with a change is only slightly higher than the number of people who are comfortable with making a change in/for themselves. So I think as innovators, as change-agents, we have a responsibility not just to point out where and why to make changes, but how to deal with the emotional tumult as well. Maybe we should inflict more change on ourselves to break us out of our comfort zone in order to support others as they go through it.

One major challenge to any innovation effort, especially one where people from different parts of the organization are involved, is that of conveying ideas clearly and consistently. Although communication skill sets may vary widely across an organization the results can be reached more effectively with some straightforward  strategies. One of my favorite books in this area is The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam. He describes how conveying complex thoughts and abstract ideas can be accomplished by just about anyone, artist or otherwise, through the systematic use of pictures. I’m a huge fan of white boards, the bigger the better. Multiple people can contribute – erase, change, rename, or start over completely with very little effort.  White boarding is of course nothing new, but the way in which Dan Roam approaches it is. He presents new ways of looking at problems and new ways of describing ideas. However, I also think that he’s tapped into a more efficient way of cross-functional teams to hit the ground running and quickly get their arms around a problem. It makes things much easier if everyone understands what the others are trying to represent and becomes a major advantage the more people you have collaborating. With just two people on a team the communication is easy to control, if something isn’t clear then it’s simple to ask a couple of questions and get some clarity. Becoming more and more common (I hope) is the situation where you have larger innovation teams working together – some of which may never have met each other. The problem of communicating ideas through pictures becomes ever more important then.

So here’s what I propose… The book focuses primarily on problem solving with others based on the concept of “visual thinking” or solving problems with pictures, so pick up four or five copies and hand them out to people you routinely ‘ideate‘ with. Then find a nice big wall and paint it with IdeaPaint or RustOleum’s Dry Erase paint. I’ve used RustOleum on a 13′x9′ textured wall, with a minimum of sanding and 2-3 coats [and] it worked pretty well. Next, have everyone read the book, pick a previous problem that some or all of you had worked on and go through it again after learning the concepts from Back of the Napkin. The first couple of passes through will be rough as you get your feed feet under you but it will start to make more sense as you go. You may even find a couple of different solutions that you hadn’t thought of along the way. Whatever. Once you and your team is comfortable, start teaching it to others. Slowly. Pick one or two people to try it out on. See what happens. Obviously you really can’t test it until your heads down trying to solve a problem or generating new ideas.

If you try this, tell me what happens. I’m interested to see how others deal with cross team communications through abstract mediums.

ideate – I despise this word. It sounds like something we just made up along the way to make it sound like we were working. But since it’s been around since 1610 I guess I just need to accept it. I promise to use it as infrequently as possible.

I learned this trick a few years ago and I believe it was a tip that Brian Tracy suggested, however I can’t find it and over time I’ve refined it a little bit. The first step is to clearly define the “problem” and I find most people don’t take the time to do this. A well defined problem creates a focus that helps ensure that you’re fixing the right problem. I hear many people say “this doesn’t work” but they don’t take the time to really understand what “this” is and can’t really describe what “doesn’t work” means. There’s a big difference between “People just don’t buy from us online.” and “People are finding the online purchasing process convoluted and has too many steps, therefore they’re not buying from us.”

Now here’s where things get interesting. Restate the problem along with some assumptions like “we only have $5,000 to commit to this effort” or “we need to be launched in four weeks.”  I tend to keep people resources out of the equation as you can usually figure out how to get people to pitch in on a really interesting problem. I also tend to keep most process oriented assumptions out of the restatement of the problem. I’ve experienced that existing processes were sometimes the root cause of the problem anyway and assuming that you can’t change the process is like chewing tinfoil. It hurts and in the end you can’t digest it anyway. Now, with the problem restated, set aside about 2-3 hours that you will not be disturbed. Go off-site, disappear, turn the phone off and book your calendar because you’re going to need this time to focus. If you know yourself well enough then you should know at what time of the day you’re most creative and imaginative. For me it’s usually around 10-11AM and from 2-4PM. With your time blocked out and your phone off come up with 20 answers to the problem. If it’s truly a difficult problem you’ll start to stumble after about five answers, struggle at ten, and come to a complete stop at fifteen answers. Your true breakthroughs are going to occur in the last five answers so keep pushing. This should cause true brain-pain and if you’ve got any connection with the outside world you’ll be tempted to stop and just go with answers 1-15. If you do that then you’re truly going to miss an original thought – a true innovation that begins to solve your most difficult problem. Once you’ve got 20 you should know what to do by now. Pick the ones that seem most likely to succeed and run with them.

If you try this then let me know what your results were. If there’s any suggestions you can add to this then by all means leave a comment.

The July-August 2010 edition of Harvard Business Review has an article called “How to Stop the Innovation Wars” which discusses a common misunderstanding that the ‘innovation’ side of the house must be separate from the ‘operations’ side largely because innovation is something done by a few people and without accountability or a solid process. In my opinion, if you’re a part of an on-going business then you simply cannot innovate in a vacuum, you must involve the people responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company, involve them early on and solicit their feedback. If you want to make progress with your concepts then you’ll need to come up with a rough, repeatable process that shows how things move through your innovation pipeline. For example, how do you know where and when to innovate? A simple response of “We field suggestions from the rest of the organization through a standardized process…” is fine. So is “When we sit in meetings we listen for unspoken problems, that’s where we start to look.” You might get some funny looks, be prepared to explain what you’re listening for. Specific phrases like “We spend a lot of time/money…” are excellent ways to see bottlenecks in the organization and begin to innovate new business processes or product improvements.

Once you’ve dealt with the “Where to look” question, you must next deal with the “What’s the impact…” question. “When we heard it took a lot of time and people to accomplish X, we looked into the process and found it could be streamlined without impact to other areas of the organization. There are many questions still open but based on a very simple cost/benefit analysis we’ve discovered that we could potentially save $50,000 per year for three years.” Now, if you’re on the creative side of the thought process, PLEASE get someone from the accounting side to help you with the cost/benefit. This is where cross functional teams really come into play, you probably don’t want to get near the financials and accounting probably doesn’t want to sit and listen to other people’s problems. That’s fine as both groups have their strengths. Make full use of them.

You’re going to have to deal with the “How do you come up with new ideas to solve for…” at some point. I’ve worked with IDEO Method Cards but frankly, that’s overkill for a lot of what I’m doing. An appropriate answer might be “We followed the team around all week and found…” or “We conducted interviews with the entire staff, confirmed our original assumptions and are coming up with a detailed plan to address it. We also found two more potential time savers but we will address those after this project is completed.” Either response should work but be prepared for someone else to ask the same people what you did. Their answers and yours had better not differ by much. By the way, we all know that once you find someone who says “That’s how we’ve always done it” you’ve found a gold mine.

If you’ve done your homework and were convincing you’ll probably be asked to proceed. From here on you need a plan. If you can prevent it, don’t give up ownership – you saw the problem, you potentially see the solution, so you run with it. This might be a great time to enlist a project manager. Try to find one that leans toward the creative side if you can. Good luck, I’ve met just one in twenty years. You will need someone on your team that can lay out all the steps and put a general time line together. If you keep ownership then YOU need to report on where you are in terms of that schedule. Be prepared to explain what progress you’ve made, what your next steps are and what is still left to be resolved. Be prepared for the infinitely inept question of “When will you figure out how to…”  If you knew the answer to that you’d already have the answer and you wouldn’t be reporting that it was still a problem, right? A tactful response to this might be “It’s a complex problem, we’ve made headway, we’re confident we’ll figure it out.” If you’re really stuck on a problem, now’s a great time to ask to borrow someone for a few days. Do not get bogged down trying to fix one serious problem – get as many people across the organization involved trying to fix it as possible. Do not make it look like you put the project at risk because you didn’t ask for help early enough. Also, if it looks like you can’t fix it, then friggin’ say so.

If you generally follow these suggestions then you should be making some progress easing people’s tension with innovation teams. And that’s all you’re really trying to do at this point, especially if you’re just getting things off the ground. In my opinion an innovation team that is just starting shouldn’t have a complete methodology. You can develop that as you grow. But what you need to avoid is the perception that you work without accountability and structure. Hopefully this gets you started, if there’s things I’ve missed (definitely) or you can add something you’ve learned, by all means please leave  a comment.

Critical to any organization that is attempting to grow is a flow of ideas through that organization. This first hit me when I was reading “One Up on Wall Street” by Peter Lynch several years ago. Somewhere in there he describes that if he made 1000 investments, ten would break even. Of that ten, only one would perform well, so well in fact that it would pay for all of his other investments. It’s a similar situation for innovation, you generate thousands of ideas but only a few will pan out. Of those few an even smaller percentage will perform above expectations and pay for everything else. The problem is that you can’t predict where these ideas will come from. Flashes of brilliance can come from anyone and at anytime, you just can’t predict either. Therefore you need a process to enable these ideas to progress through the organization while along the way they are supported and enhanced by other disciplines such as Finance, Marketing, Sales and IT.

If today you don’t currently have a systematic process (having a suggestion box doesn’t count) to allow ideas or suggestions to move through your organization, here’s how to start roughing one out. First, what objectives do you want to accomplish; process improvements, new products, cost cutting measures, or all of the above? Second, what are these ideas worth to you and the organization? If you can’t put a dollar figure on them then the chances are your employees won’t value their own suggestions either. If however you’ll cough up $1,000 or more for each idea that gets to production you might be getting somewhere, especially if that idea becomes a new line of business worth several million in annual revenue. Place your highest rewards on what you considered to be the most important objectives you wanted to accomplish.

The suggestion process – this is where things can get bogged down. If it’s made too complicated then the level of effort will be to great for people to take the time to submit the idea. If it’s too simple you’ll get ideas like “let’s start making beer” which is fine if you’re a brewery, a bad idea if you’re an insurance company. In my opinion the submission should be two sections:

• What’s the general description of the product, product enhancement, cost cutting process, etc.
• How does it benefit our business or is it a potential new business

Keep the financial data out of it for now. Yes it’s important but for reasons I’ll cover in future posts, you don’t want to start there.

One of the most critical components (probably the most critical!) is the team reviewing the ideas. If you staff it fully with operationally oriented people, any new ideas you get will be met with ‘what about…?’ questions. This will kill new ideas. If you staff it with ‘what if…’ people then you’ll get some very off the wall stuff.  Instead staff it with a mixture of ‘what if…’ people and ‘what about…’ people to balance each other out. This will be covered in future posts here as well but the important part is that ideas (aside from “let’s make beer”) do not get killed off. They are put ‘in the parking lot’ for future review, they are re-submitted with more information, they are placed into the queue with the rest of the business changes, or they are fast tracked. For any of those, let the submitter know immediately, preferably along with a small cash reward, or time off, or whatever you’re using to compensate people.

Next is the actual process to get vetted ideas moving. This is another critical juncture and one where you may start to see the ‘not invented here’ syndrome preventing things from moving forward. It’s where ideas and suggestions start getting some structure and where financial models are applied, product development plans are impacted and infrastructure changes start being recognized. Weekly status reports should help the ideas continue to progress through the organization, I’d recommend them highly.

Let’s try this with an example.

Say someone in your organization had the idea to stop buying paper towels for all the bathrooms and replace them with Dyson Airblades, where would that person start?

First, answer two questions

• What: The Dyson Airblade dries hands in 8 seconds, is faster than our current air driven hand driers, and is more sanitary.
• How: The Dyson Airblade is 50% more energy efficient than what we have today, it’s more sanitary because we don’t touch anything, and is probably cheaper than all the paper towels we go through every year.

Next, this idea goes to the Review Team. For this example the team should actually assign it to someone to figure out how much is spent every year in paper towels. At that point you can’t reject the idea, compensate the employee based on how you rank cost savings suggestions. It’s probably not feasible to figure out how much power is used by regular air driers but Dyson does state that they’re 80% more energy efficient and gives you a quick web interface to estimate your cost savings. Each Airblade is about $1,200 so if you need six that’s $7,200 without installation. If you’re spending $6,000 a year on paper towels then you’re looking at a two year ROI. Sounds like there’s something here so put it in someone’s hands to oversee, demand weekly reports and push it through the organization. Once it’s installed I recommend additional, and larger compensation for the employee that suggested it. Don’t kill your ROI (unless you’re trying to make an example!) but If you’re saving $4,000 in your second year you can probably afford $200-$300 this year.

That’s it. Although this is a simple example you can probably extrapolate to larger efforts and larger benefits. Future posts will cover compensation options, refining the submission and review process, recognition for your best idea people, as well as teaching the rest of the organization to look at everyday things with a more critical eye.

Often overlooked when putting people together, the ability of individuals to communicate and cooperate often times determines the success of a venture more than  their work experience. In many environments ‘teams’ of people are assembled with the assumption that ‘team work’ will carry the day and something useful will come out the other end. My own experience has show that this produces random results, you need to hand-pick a small cross-functional team from a cadre of volunteers to increase your potential for success. Not everyone gets to participate but one disengaged or confrontational personality in the team will be disastrous. An entire chapter, ‘The Chemistry of the Creative Team’ was dedicated to this subject in  ‘Making Ideas Happen‘ by Scott Belsky. In that chapter is a particularly important sentence “…strike a balance between flexibility expectations, idea generation and execution, and helpful disagreements and consensus.” The team needs to be composed of equals – each has their own specialty but must be comfortable expressing themselves and their own opinions without being in a position where they feel they need to support the boss.

In my opinion, ‘how’ people interact is often a better predictor of outcomes than ‘what’ they have worked on as individuals in the past. For innovation teams this can be even more of an issue as you’re often times working in ambiguous circumstances with tight deadlines. In these times an individuals character will show it’s flaws and it’s brilliance. Teams like this do not just fall together, you need someone that understands the relationships between the team members, as well as how to get the best of them when the shit hits the fan. If you end up with a bunch of individuals or an overbearing ass, results will be poor and the innovation projects and team will come off the track.

How do you start building these teams? Within almost any organization there are usually clumps of people who are involved in outside projects. Some may be working with non-profits or some may be working on the next great thing. You may also have stealth groups working within your organization that were formed to bypass the bureaucracy and just want to get things moving.  Don’t kill these! Put a fence around them, protect them, fund them and put ‘em on the spot to deliver a proof of concept or a full blown model. Most will be more than willing to produce results, that’s why they went underground in the first place.