Innovation Weblog

The enemies of innovation

Why do so many innovation initiatives fail? Geoffrey Moore, author of the new book Dealing With Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, has some fresh insights into this ongoing challenge.

For innovation to be successful, according to Moore, it must achieve breakthrough differentiation from competing products or services. What often prevents this from happening is lack of corporate alignment. To make his point, he uses the example of vector addition - where arrows are used to represent the direction and magnitude of a given force. When all the arrows are aligned the same direction, the force is magnified.  On the other hand, when the arrows point in different directions, the force is dissipated. The same thing holds true in corporate innovation initiatives.

"To achieve breakaway differentiation requires a highly coordinated effort across the entire enterprise… At the end of the day, every function in the corporation has to realign its priorities in order to amplify the innovation to breakaway status. Anything less is simply too easy for competitors to neutralize."

"The failure - and this is a failure of the leadership, not of the rank and file - lies in the failure to prioritize one line of innovation above all others. If management does not take a position on innovation strategy, the company's innovations will continue to bubble up but they will not be aligned. If all are brought to market… none will achieve breakaway status."

Unfortunately, we see this scenario unfold all too often, across nearly every industry. Achieving this type of corporate alignment is easy to talk about, but incredibly hard to put into practice. The problem is exacerbated by several factors, including the diminishing tenures of corporate CEOs, who aren't in the corner office long enough to mobilize the troops to achieve this type of alignment. Also, the large number of people in big companies makes achieving corporate alignment the equivalent of turning an oil tanker – it takes a long time!

Moore’s theory may help to explain why breakaway innovations often come out of small, entrepreneurial companies. Achieving corporate alignment when you have a staff of 10 is much easier to do than when you have 10,000 or 100,000 employees. Also, small companies are usually focused around bringing one breakthrough product to market, where large companies tend to have many innovation initiatives, which are often out of alignment with each other. In addition, Moore points out that reengineering, continuous improvement and other such efforts often free up an enormous amount of cash which, in an ideal world, could be invested in the organization’s innovation initiatives. But this seldom happens. Instead, it’s used to make the bottom line look good for the next quarterly report.

New customized innovation search engine available

Google recently launched a new customizable version of its powerful search engine. So I decided to experiment a bit. I have created an Innovation Resources engine that searches the full content of 13 popular innovation websites, including this one.

My goal is to help you to find the key innovation resources and information you need, faster. If you've done many web searches, then you know what it's like - searches are, more often than not, full of irrelevant results. Trying to find that one key bit of information is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I'm glad that Google has launched this innovation, and am excited to have an opportunity to put it to work for you.

Why not give it a try today?

Harvesting intellectual property: A key innovation strategy, says Geoffrey Moore

What separates innovative companies like Apple, Cisco, GE Medical and Caterpillar from their would-be competitors? According to best-selling author Geoffrey Moore, it's their approach to intellectual property.

"What differentiates them is their ability to mine a broad base of experience to discover insights and best practices, capture them as intellectual property, and then exploit them either by distinguishing their own operations or by licensing them to partners or customers... Most companies with established positions in mature markets have the wherewithal to pursue one or more of these types of innovation, but tragically very few actually capitalize on the opportunity.  Instead of harvesting their insights and institutionalizing them, they take a 'catch and release' approach to IP.  They do not take the time or exert the discipline to capture and scale their best practices.  Instead they reinvent and rediscover these insights over and over, or worse, lose them entirely.  In short, anecdotally they know much; programmatically they leverage little."

What Geoffrey is talking about here isn't some sort of unreachable pinnacle of breakthrough innovation, some game-changing idea. Rather, he's talking about something that literally every company already has: knowledge, and the intellect, imagination and will to leverage it profitably. In short, most companies are so busy building and selling widgets that they never step back to ask themselves questions like:

• How can we leverage this world-class expertise in other areas of our business?
• Who else would be willing to pay for the knowledge that we have in our area of expertise?
• How can we use what we know to increase the value added to our products and services?

Geoffrey characterizes this problem as a tragedy, but one that's not terribly hard to remedy. So what's your company's approach to its unique, valuable intellectual property? Do you need to rethink your IP strategy?

Creating an innovative user experience

What do Google, Apple and Harley Davidson have in common? As Daniel Scocco points out in his Innovation Zen blog, these stellar performers have created compelling experiences for their users - and in the process, have differentiated themselves from numerous competitors. Read on to take a closer look at how they have accomplished this.

Innovation 101

After attending a number of innovation conferences in a short period of time, Jeffrey Phillips has become convinced that many of the attendees could use an introductory program to help them learn about the various concepts and strategies of innovation. He bases his observations on talking with a number of people at these conferences:

"I'd guess about 30% of the people at most of these events are literally drinking from the firehose and are overwhelmed by what they see and hear, and don't have a good sense of how to implement any of the stuff they hear at these events... I think a good number of the people are simply overwhelmed at these events, and could stand a breakout session targeted to people and firms that are just getting started."

Jeffrey points out that it's hard for conference attendees to take what they've learned from corporate case history presentations and apply them to their organizations. These real-world examples tend to distill years of trial and error, false starts and challenges into a sanitized summary. As Jeffrey points out, "This innovation stuff - while it seems straightforward - takes time, focus and energy to implement successfully." I would suggest that it takes FAR MORE time, focus, energy - and commitment - than most people realize. It also needs to be highly customized to a particular organization's culture, structure, processes and numerous other factors. You can't just take an innovation strategy that another company has successfully implemented, and "bolt it on" to your company. Chances are good that this type of "outside in" solution won't work.

This post isn't meant to be negative about innovation conferences. They serve a very important role in terms of sharing of strategies and best practices. Jeffrey's point, which I agree with, is that in order for new innovation professionals to understand and realistically apply what they're learning at these conferences, they need to have a good foundational understanding of the types of innovation, the cultural changes, process and tools required.

As innovation grows in importance, more and more managers are being asked to take on the role of leading innovation in their companies. Seasoned innovation managers are in short supply. How can these "newbies" learn about innovation? Some sort of an introductory program would help.

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