INNOVATORS PRACTISE 5 SKILLS THE REST OF US DON'T

Here's the link to a belated news release pertaining to the results of a six-year study by three prominent business scholars, Jeffrey Dyer, lead author on the study & a professor at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management, Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, & Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School.

In a nut shell, & according to the findings, the most innovative CEOs spend 50 percent more time practicing the following five specific innovation skills the rest of us don’t:

1) Questioning

2) Observing

3) Experimenting

4) Networking

5) Associating

10 TRUTHS ABOUT THE FUTURE

The following are my take-aways from an expert advisory by futurist, trends & innovation strategist Jim Carroll, whose two wonderful books have been reviewed in my weblog as well as on Amazon.com:

1) It’s incredibly fast, with collapsing product life cycles;

2) It involves a huge adaptability gap, due to accelerating change;

3) It has a huge instantaneity, as we live in a rapid idea cycle era;

4) It hits you most when you don’t expect it - understand hype cycles;

5) It's being defined by renegades & insurgents;

6) It involves partnership with customers, suppliers, facilitators & other stakeholders;

7) It involves intensity, like playing video-games;

8) It’s bigger than you think - there's danger in the comfort zone;

9) It involves innovation intensity from everyone in the organisation;

10) It comes from experiential capital - learning, unlearning & relearning;

[Jim Carroll wrote 'What I Learned from Frogs in Texas: Saving Your Skin with Forward-Thinking Innovation' & 'Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast'.]

BUILDING A BETTER MOUSETRAP

I have stumbled upon the following fascinating short sci-fi story, while surfing the wild wild web. I believe that there is a valuable lesson for all of us, especially from the standpoint of innovation:

Men have always talked about building a better mousetrap, just the way they talk about a car that runs on water rather than gasoline, or nuclear fission that doesn’t have any harmful by-products. But it wasn’t until they reopened the Heisenberg Space Station out between Europa and Callisto that they realized they really needed a better mousetrap.

The first team of scientists — four men and two women — docked their ship there on 2 November 3014 ad, at exactly 7:43 p.m. H.T. (Heisenberg time). They buttressed the hatch up against the entrance to the station, sealed it, then opened both doors and stepped into the station, the first humans to do so in more than 900 years.

Exactly 43 seconds later, one of the women screamed, and the other jumped onto a chair that was bolted into the floor. Three of the men started cursing, and the fourth, a wimpy little fellow,fainted dead away.

It seemed that some of the station’s inhabitants were waiting for them. They’d been there nine long centuries, and were glad to have some company. Having just eaten the last of the huge stores of preserved food that prior crews had laid in, they were even happier to have a new source of protein.

“What are they?” asked the wimpy scientist when they woke him up.

“Mice,” said the nuclear physicist. “Or maybe rats.”

“I don’t care what they are!” said the roboticist from atop her chair. “Get them away from me!”

“No problem,” said the biochemist. “I’ll whip up a fast-acting poison and lay it out for them.”

At which point the wimpy scientist fainted again.

So the biochemist mixed up the poison, and left it out for the mice, and the crew went about setting up their workstations, ate dinner and went to bed, expecting to find a few hundred dead mice in the morning.

What they found were some plump mice, happily licking their chops and looking for more poisoned bait.

“They’ve evolved,” said the biochemist.

“They’ve obviously developed an immunity to poison. I suppose we’ll just have to find some other way to kill them.”

“I know just the thing,” said the nanotechnologist.

“I’ll design a mechanical microbe that will invade their systems and attack them from the inside, and I’ll slip it in some cheese.”

The mice came, and they saw, and they ate — and they came back the next morning looking for more.

“I don’t understand it,” said the nanotechnologist.

“Those microbes would kill any one of us. Why didn’t they kill the mice?”

No one knew, so they captured one of the mice, drew blood samples, stomach samples, gene samples and still had no answer. The best suggestion came from the biochemist, who theorized that their forced evolution had created an internal environment so hospitable to microbes, even engineered ones, that the microbes ignored their programming and set up shop in the mice’s intestines.

The roboticist tried next. She created an army of tiny metal warriors and sent them forth to do battle under chairs and beds, inside bulkheads, wherever the mice were hiding.

That was when they learned that the mice had evolved mentally as well as physically, and that their commanders were far superior at warfare to the roboticist, who had programmed her metal army. The robots were outflanked and outmanoeuvred, and finally surrendered only 17 hours into the battle.

The nuclear physicist didn’t do much better with his jerrybuilt disintegrator ray.

The mice were impervious to it, and the only harm it did was to two bathrooms and the coffee-maker in the galley.

“Well, I’m all out of ideas,” said the biochemist.

“The dirty little swine have beaten us at every turn,” muttered the nuclear scientist.

“Idiots!” said the wimpy little scientist disgustedly.

“The mice?”

“No,” he said. “I was referring to my colleagues.”

“You should talk!” snapped the roboticist.

“All you ever do is faint.”

“I have never denied my limitations,” said the scientist, “though it is thoughtless of you to refer to them. Just for that, I’ve a good mind not to solve your problem.”

“So you think you’re the one who can build a better mousetrap?” she said sardonically.

“Most certainly.”

“Even though they’ve withstood poison, microbes, military robots and disintegrator rays?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, hot-shot. What will you need?”

“Just a little help from our geneticist.”

“And nothing else?”

“Not at the moment,” said the scientist.

So they left him and the geneticist alone for a month and tried not to notice all the damage the mice were doing. And then one day the scientist announced that the better mousetrap had been created and was ready to perform its function.

The others all snickered at him.

“That’s it?” asked the nanotechnologist when he displayed it. “That’s the better mousetrap that we’ve been waiting for all month?”

“You don’t really think something this primitive is going to work, do you?” demanded the biochemist.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” muttered the wimpy scientist.

They all laughed. (Well, they laughed at Newton and Einstein too.)

Within a week every mouse on the station had been eliminated, including three that had somehow migrated onto the docked ship. It had been swift, efficient and devastating.

“Who’d have believed it?” said the roboticist as they all gathered around the better mousetrap.

“Where did you ever hear about something like this?” asked the nanotechnologist.

“Sometimes you have to read books that aren’t exclusive to your field of study,” answered the scientist.

“Meow,” agreed the better mousetrap.

[This sci-fi story is attributed to Mike Resnick, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short science fiction, according to Locus, the trade journal of the science-fiction field.

The foregoing story somehow reminds me of a fascinating anecdote from Edward de bono in one of his early creativity books.

In the early years of competitive space exploration, the Americans were struggling to design & develop a writing instrument which their astronauts could use to write their reports, while floating upside down in weightlessness.

The Russian cosmonauts used the pencil.]

DO YOU WANT TO BE A CHAMPION OF INNOVATION?

Here's the weblink to an interesting article by executive coach, Kevin Conroy.

I really enjoy reading what he wrote, & here's a quick snapshot:

"... Future prospering depends on three outcomes:

• Improving the customer’s quality of life with new products and services that deliver unexpected benefits and meet latent needs;

• Having employees contribute personally in ongoing, viable,meaningful ways;

• Inventing and then taking over new competitive space.

It is not just about out-running competitors – it’s about imagining and insight.

Strategy is not only a positioning game, it is a quest for reconfiguring existing business or early adopting business. This creates the future..."

21 WAYS TO INNOVATE!

Here's the link to an interesting article by Paul Sloane, author of 'The Innovative Leader', on the Innovation Tools website. He is also the head of the BQF Innovation Unit.

The 21 ways are not ground-breaking, to say the least, but I reckon they can serve as useful daily reminders to build our innovation adeptness.

[Paul Sloane has his own corporate website.]

INNOVATION DEFINED

I got this fabulous definition of innovation from innovation strategist Stephen Shapiro, writing in his '24/7 Innovation' weblog:

"Although much has been written about innovation, there is little agreement on what it is or why it is necessary. Is innovation the same as creativity? Is it synonymous with product development? Or is innovation just radical change?

I like to describe innovation through an old, yet relevant, joke. The joke begins with two men who are hiking in the mountains of Canada when they stumble upon a hungry 600-pound grizzly bear.

Immediately, one of the hikers takes off his backpack and hiking boots and proceeds to put on his running shoes.

The other hiker looks at him and asks, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!”

The first hiker responds, “I know, but I only need to outrun you!”

This is innovation. It is not simply about new products, new processes, new services or new ideas. It is about staying one step ahead of your competition..."

In reality, he has defined innovation more as an “organization’s ability to adapt and evolve repeatedly and rapidly to stay one step ahead of the competition.”

According to him, a culture of innovation, when done right, gives you a competitive edge because it makes you more nimble with an increased ability to sense and respond to change.

So, how to create a culture of innovation?

Readers can go to this link to read more about the strategist's insights.

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP VI

[continued from the Last Post.]

The Changing Values and Characteristics Strategy has a different focus to that of the other strategies.

Whereas the other strategies attempt to satisfy existing customers by creating new products or services, the Changing Values and Characteristics Strategy attempts to find new customers for existing products or services.

Drucker provides four ways of exploiting the Changing Values and Characteristics strategy:

· creating utility from an existing product

· pricing the product differently

· adapting the product to the customer’s social and economic reality, and

· delivering what represents true value to the customer.

An example of creating utility from an existing product is Rowland Hills’s re-engineering of the British postal system with the introduction of fixed postal rates and the creation of the postage stamp, in 1836.

By changing variable postal rates to fixed sums, evidenced by the use of a postage stamp, Hill made it possible for consumers of postal services to serve their own purposes: namely, sending a letter quickly and easily.

Previously, postage depended on the distance the package or letter had to travel; and the consumer was required to visit a postal center where the rate was calculated.

Standard postage rates improved the utility of the postal services through the use of collection boxes, and by substantially discounting the price of mail.

Classic examples of pricing the product differently are provided by the The Gillette Safety Razor and the introduction of the copier by the Haloid Company, later Xerox.

In both cases, the product, as razor or as copier, was sold at a steep discount. The supplies, razor blades in the case of the razor, or the paper copy itself in the case of the copier, were priced to make a profit.

Adapting the product to the customer’s social and economic reality usually means providing a system whose heart is the product and then selling the entire system.

Examples would be:

• General Electric’s packaging of GE consulting expertise with replacement turbine blades for its steam turbine products. GE’s competitors adopted the same practice but by then GE had market dominance.

• The financing that Cyrus McCormick provided to American farmers who purchased his harvesting machines.

Banks considered farmers a poor risk in the 1840’s; farmers, under-capitalized and with cyclic cash flows that depended on crop harvests, could not afford to purchase outright a McCormick reaper despite the obvious advantages of the machine.

McCormick provided farmers with an installment plan that spread payments over several years; the payments were due only when the farmers had cash, at harvest time.

Delivering value to the customer means using the product to deliver to the customer, values well beyond the retail value of the product itself.

An example would be a lubrication company that sells a special lubricant, indispensable to the machinery, as part of a maintenance programme for heavy equipment.

The company essentially sells the maintenance program, providing in-built peace of mind. This is because the lubricants ensure the continued operation of the heavy equipment, thereby minimizing down time.

[Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP V

[continued from the Last Post.]

(3) The Ecological Niche Strategy aims at controlling a market and comes in three flavors:

· The Toll-Gate Strategy

· The Specialty Skill Strategy, and

· The Specialty Market Strategy.

The Toll-Gate Strategy aims at market control through providing an indispensable product or service, based on patented or otherwise protected intellectual property; this enables the existence of some essential product or service.

The problem with the toll-gate strategy is that market conditions may render the product superfluous through substitution of either the product itself or the products or processes the toll-gate product complements or enables.

The growth toll-gate product is also dependent on the products or services the toll-gate product enables.

The example that Drucker provides is an enzyme developed by a company called Alcon, which is used during cataract surgery to dissolve a ligament. Sales of the enzyme depend on the number of cataract operations performed.

The Specialty Skill Strategy within the Ecological Niche depends on developing a high degree of competence in a formidable field so that entry barriers into the market are high enough to keep out competitors.

The difference between the toll-gate strategy and the specialty skill strategy is that the specialty skill is not necessarily based on protected intellectual property. It just isn’t economically feasible for a competitor to enter the market.

The specialty skill strategy usually requires the innovator to be first into the market, so that it can establish sufficient market penetration and branding before any competitor can step in, thereby dominating the market.

Like the toll-gate strategy, the specialty skill will live or die on the products or services it enables.

The Specialty Market Strategy of the Ecological Niche depends on the innovator spotting a market that is being ignored by other businesses.

The death of the specialty market is when it becomes a mass market. An example is the modern perfume market, first created by the French perfumery Coty after World War I, and originally targeted at the upper middle class sector; today, it has become a mass market with perfumes being sold at grocery stores.

[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP IV

[continued from the Last Post.]

(2) The next strategy, “Hit Them Where They Ain’t”, is a case of the follower of a market leader successfully exploiting the market leader’s innovation, to the detriment of the original innovator.

This strategy hits home as one of the major weaknesses of the “Fastest with the Mostest” strategy: the most innovative product without a market is a cost center, not a profit center.

Drucker cites as examples:

• IBM was a market follower within the Personal Computer market. The IBM PC was neither the first nor the most innovative, but the market that IBM pursued was the business market; meanwhile, Apple sought to dominate the educational market. IBM established itself with enduring prominence.

• The Hattori Company in Japan took a Swiss innovation, the quartz watch, and created a market winner with the Seiko brand. This was enabled by the Swiss shelving their new idea after demonstrating its feasibility.

• Sony, not in consumer electronics at the time, purchased a license for transistor technology from Bell Labs. Starting with cheap portable radios, she became a major player in the home electronics market.

Drucker lists five “fairly common bad habits that enable newcomers to use entrepreneurial judo and to catapult themselves into a leadership position in an industry.” These five habits, allowing competitors to use the “Hit Them Where They Ain’t” strategy, are:

• The Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome (the arrogance that leads a business or profession to believe that something new cannot be any good unless they themselves thought of it).

• The tendency to “cream” a market by staying in the high profit zone, with a concomitant tendency to keep costs high. This led to US automobile manufacturers permitting entry by Japanese auto makers into the low end of the auto market in the 1970’s, thereby providing the vital foothold the Japanese needed to become competitive throughout all segments of the US automobile market.

• Believing that quality is something a supplier puts into a product rather than understanding that quality is something that the consumer gets out of the product.

• The belief that the consumer will pay a premium price thereby keeping prices high, which in turn lures competitors into the market if the market entry barriers are sufficiently low.

• Maximizing rather than optimizing, a habit that contributed to the destruction of Burgmaster.

[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP III

[continued from the Last Post.]

The entrepreneurial strategies that Drucker identifies are:

• “Fastest with the Mostest”;

• “Hit Them Where They Ain’t”;

• Ecological Niches; and

• Changing Values and Characteristics;

Each of these strategies has advantages and disadvantages; they may also be combined to form hybrid strategies. Some of them are riskier than others. Market structures such as demographics, and economic conditions within the market, will certainly influence the potential for success with a particular strategy.

(1) As examples of “Fastest with the Mostest,” Drucker cites:

• the growth of the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-LaRoche, from its beginnings as a small chemical firm in the 1920’s, and

• the decision at DuPont to grow its plastics industry after the discovery of Nylon.

This strategy is also one of the riskiest because it appears so much like a gamble; insufficient resources may cause the strategy to fail.

Nylon was a commercial success, according to Drucker, because the negative impact of World War II on the Japanese silk industry protected the fledgling plastic fibre industry; it could thus become cost competitive by the time the silk industry rebuilt itself in the late 1940’s.

DuPont was able to follow up a technology innovation with the process innovations necessary to reduce costs, and thereby to keep the market built during the absence of silk from Japan.

[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP II

[continued from the Last Post.]

In the practice of entrepreneurship, Drucker embeds the innovating agency within an organization and tries to answer the question: “what kind of organization encourages and exploits innovation?”

Drucker looks at three types of organizations:

• the established private sector business;

• the established public sector service institution; and

• the new start up business;

The established private sector business, despite the prevailing idea of innovation only happening in new ventures, is the major wellspring of innovation.

The reasons for an established company spewing out innovation are:

• the established company usually has the financial resources as well as

• the knowledge base to innovate.

Unfortunately, established companies have a track record of not exploiting innovation; this situation is taken advantage of by disenfranchised employees opting to start their own enterprise around the spurned innovation.

Several organizations started by entrepreneurial founders have languished once the founders have left their companies; the innovative drive emerged solely from the efforts of those founders rather than from the existence of an organization-wide entrepreneurial culture.

Large established companies such as 3M and Procter & Gamble have built entrepreneurial management into their organizations. In both cases, innovation is expected and encouraged throughout the organization.

Both companies have established processes that encourage innovation and provide methods for employees to fund innovative efforts.

In an interesting sidebar, Drucker warns:

ACTION:

A non-innovative company, acquiring an innovative one, in the hope that the newly acquired company will inject it with a strong dose of innovation.

RESULT:

Usually results in failure of the objective, as well as the destruction of the acquired company.

EXAMPLE:

The acquisition of Burgmaster machine tools by Houdaille Industries in 1964 followed by a slow decline of Burgmaster until the liquidation of the its assets in 1986, as described in 'When the Machine Stopped: A Cautionary Tale from Industrial America' by Max Holland (1989).

[to be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

According to management guru Peter Drucker, writing in his now classic, 'Innovation & Entrepreneurship: [Published in the mid-80's, this is the first book to present innovation & entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline.]

• innovation & entrepreneurship are not limited to high technology industries.

Most innovation & entrepreneurship happens in low technology industries just as most job creation also comes from low technology industries.

• entrepreneurship is doing something differently so as to better use resources & expand markets for the product &/or service.

Ray Kroc took a hamburger stand in a single city and turned it into an international business, McDonalds, by applying innovation to his products, services, & marketing.

Ray Kroc was an entrepreneur. Someone else running that hamburger stand without Kroc’s entrepreneur spirit may have had a thriving hamburger business but it wouldn’t have been McDonalds & that person wouldn’t have been an entrepreneur, just another hamburger stand owner.

• entrepreneurship & innovation are not inborn characteristics. They are behaviors that most anyone who is willing to apply themselves can learn.

• innovation is “a bright idea” and maintains that dependable innovative ideas come from systematic exploration of the seven sources of innovative opportunity as follows:

- The Unexpected - composed of three areas of unexpected events: unexpected success, unexpected failure, unexpected outside event;

- Incongruities - a discrepancy or dissonance between what is and what ought to be or is assumed to be which is composed of four areas: economic realities of an industry (marketplace), other realities of an industry (optimization of local, non-essential areas rather than system optimization), customer expectations versus the industry perception of customer expectations, internal incongruity with a process;

- Process Need - a weak or missing link in a process that makes the process cheaper, easier, or possible (technologically possible or economically possible);

- Industry and Market Structures - changes in industry or market such as new competitors, new customers, more differentiated products, new manufacturing or marketing processes, new substitute or complementary products or services;

- Demographics - changes in population structure such as size, age structure, cultural composition, employment, education, & income;

- Changes in Perception - a change in the way that facts are perceived such as “the glass is half full” versus “the glass is half empty”;

- New Knowledge - the discovery of new knowledge which can be exploited such as a new technology or materials;

• entrepreneurs innovate.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a resource until man finds a use for something in nature & then endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.

• The Do’s:

- Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis of the opportunities;

- Innovation is both conceptual & perceptual, analysis must be followed by testing of the analysis against reality;

- An innovation must be simple and focused because everything new runs into trouble;

- Effective innovations start small providing incremental changes which provide leverage for larger change;

- Effective innovations aim at leadership in a market or industry;

• The Don’ts:

- Don’t try to be clever;

- Don’t try to do too many things at once;

- Don’t try to innovate for the future even if the innovation lead time is long;

• The Conditions:

- Innovation is hard, focused, purposeful work requiring knowledge, experience, & ingenuity;

- Innovators must build on their strengths because of the risks of innovation & the costs of allocating knowledge & performance capacity to the innovative effort;

- Innovation affects the economy & society, requiring a change in the behavior of customers, so it has be close to the market, focused on the market, & market driven;

[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

EXPLOITING CHAOS & SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES

The strategy of exploiting chaos in order to seize opportunities in today's crazy times is obviously the rousing battle cry of innovation expert Jeremy Gutsche's new book, 'Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change'.

I have mentioned about this book briefly in an earlier post.

Backed by excellent credentials - host of TrendHunter TV, founder of TrendHunter.com, reportedlythe world's largest network of trend-spotting & cool-hunting pros, & now a widely-sought keynote speaker in North America - the author & his book are seemingly getting raving reviews.

In the first place, the book is quite unique in itself: visually engaging, with a fancy mix of large format, bold letters, coloured texts, oversized fonts, long & short sentences, wide spacing, & interspersed with wise quotes, jumpy lists & large portraits or photographs. All these features make reading a breeze!

In fact, I get the impression that the author may have been heavily influenced by the published thoughtwares of corporate skunk Tom Peters.

In reality, the author writes exactly like Tom Peters with his short, staccato bursts of energetic prescriptions, occasionally outrageous & yet written succinctly, with enchanting anecdotes & provocative examples from real-world events, in contrast to the staid academic texts of the time.

So much so that reading his book on my part reminds me of reading Tom Peters' 'Reinventing Work' series of small pocket-sized hard-backs, namely, 'The Brand You 50', 'The Project 50' & 'The Professional Service Firm 50' (combined, they also give a total of 150 ways to spark innovation, many of which are still relevant for today) during the late 90's.

I don't mean to throw a wet blanket on 'Exploiting Chaos', but it is obvious to me that the many ideas in the book are not ground-breaking or revolutionary, but the author certainly has given them a new & refreshing spin with his so-called 'Crowd Sourced Insights'.

The latter is definitely a cool innovation on the part of the author, even though, with the luxury of today's Internet & Web 2.0 technologies, he has apparently extended the content analysis intelligence methodologies of futurist John Naisbitt, whose resultant book, 'Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives', rocked the world during the early 80's.

Instead of running probably a large team of media analysts to scan some 6,000 local & regional newspapers, trade journals, etc., within the United States during the 80's as in the case with John Naisbitt, TrendHunter intelligently uses a small project team of dedicated staff to sift & resift the constant flow of disparate spotted ideas (known as micro-trends) from some 28,000+ global trend hunters.

They are then posted on the TrendHunter website - just imagine they garnered 40 million page views in 2008 - & then, measured & filtered down to 360+ clusters of inspirations, which in turn are reconfigured into their popular Trend Reports, which are sought after by big boys, like The Economist & Financial Times.

In a nut shell, the book's selling point, besides promoting the company's lucrative Trend Reports, is how to ride & leverage on the current recession & emerging trends - through the adept use of some of the 150 ways offered in the book as fuel to spark innovation - to make a quantum leap.

The 'Exploiting Chaos' framework, comprising 'Culture of Revolution', 'Trend Hunting', 'Adaptive Innovation' & 'Infectious Messaging', is interesting too, but one needs to work diligently to get it to work.


The author's principal argument about the giants of business - Disney, CNN, HP, GE, Apple, Sun, to name just a few - having started & prospered during time of crises, certainly makes good reading. Encouraging, too.

There is only one point in the book that sort of annoys me: 'Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast', even though his checklist of parameters, 'Perspective', Experimental Failure', 'Customer Obsession' & 'Intentional Destruction', is reasonably valid.

I hold the view that strategy formulation or thinking strategically must always comes first & be sustained throughout, so that one can really do something about the culture.

On the whole, this book is still worth reading. To paraphrase the marketing maverick Seth Godin, "with the ideas from the book, you might catch an ideavirus!".

Nonetheless, I also like to recommend two books to go as companion reading:

Jim Carroll's 'What I Learned from Frogs in Texas: Saving Your Skin with Forward-Thinking Innovation', & 'Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast', which I had already reviewed in the 'Optimum Performance Technologies' weblog.

[Readers can go to the TrendHunter website to download a 25 page preview of the book. Here's the link.

Alternatively, the Business Week online magazine has singled out 24 of the 150 ways to spark innovation in a slide presentation. Here's the link to view it.]

BECOMING MORE OF AN INNOVATOR IN YOUR DAILY LIFE

As far as I know, the whole idea of what I like to call "role-playing learning personas" has apparently been first broached by creativity guru Roger von Oech, when he outlined four specific roles as follows [in his book, 'A Kick in the Seat of the Pants', published in the mid-eighties;], which one can assume in the process of expanding one's mental horizons, &/or generating multiple viewpoints, while looking at a problem situation, or business issue:

- explorer;

- artist;

- judge;

- warrior;

I have already talked about this in an earlier post.

To recap, from Roger von Oech's book:

- When it's time to seek out new information, adopt the mindset of an Explorer. Get off the beaten path, poke around in outside areas, & pay attention to unusual patterns.

- When you need to create a new idea, let the Artist in you come out. Ask 'what-if' questions & look for hidden analogies. Break the rules & look at things backwards. Add something & take something away. Ultimately, you'll come up with an original idea.

- When it's time to decide if your idea is worth implementing, see yourself as a Judge. Ask what's wrong & if the timing's right. Question your assumptions & make a decision.

- When you carry your idea into action, be a Warrior. Put a fire in your belly, eliminate your excuses, & do what's necessary to reach your objective.

Then, more or less around the same time, came creativity guru Michael Hewitt-Gleeson from Down Under, with his 'Six Thinking Caps', followed by creativity guru Edward de bono, with his 'Six Thinking Hats', culminating specifically as follows:

- white (rational, logical, objective);

- red (emotional);

- black (negative);

- yellow (positive, hopeful, optimistic);

- green (creative & innovative);

- blue (ordered, controlled, structured);

[Readers can read more about them in their respective corporate websites.]

Last, but not least, came the world-known IDEO design people with their book, written by Tom Kelley, entitled 'The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate & Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization'.

Here's their battle-tested methodology of the 'role-playing learning personas', from their book:

1. The Anthropologist:

He observes human behavior & developes a deep understanding of how people interact physically & emotionally with products, services, & spaces;

2. The Experimenter:

He prototypes new ideas continuously, learning by a process of enlightened trial & error; also, takes calculated risks to achieve success through a state of "experimentation as implementation."

3. The Cross-Pollinator:

He explores other industries & cultures, & then translates those findings & revelations - via mixing & matching ideas, people & technology - to fit the unique needs of the customer;

4. The Hurdler:

He knows that the path to innovation is strewn with obstacles & develops a knack for overcoming or outsmarting those limits, challenges & roadblocks;

5. The Collaborator:

He helps bring eclectic groups together, & often leads from the middle of the pack to create new combinations & multi-disciplinary solutions; more importantly, to get things done;

6. The Director:

He not only gathers together a talented cast & crew but also helps to spark their creative talents, by marshalling all available resources;

7. The Experience Architect:

He designs compelling experiences that go beyond mere functionality to connect at a deeper level with customers' latent or expressed needs;

8. The Set Designer:

He creates a stage on which innovation team members can do their best work, transforming physical environments into powerful tools to influence behavior & attitude;

9. The Caregiver:

He builds on the metaphor of a health-care professional to deliver customer care in a manner that goes beyond mere service;

10. The Storyteller or Tale Blazer [to borrow the term from my good friend, Dilip Mukerjea], :

He builds both internal morale & external awareness through compelling narratives that communicate a fundamental human value or reinforce a specific cultural trait;

According to IDEO, people who adopt the "role-playing learning roles" are humble enough to question their own worldview, & in doing so, they remain open to new insights every day.

In a nut shell, the personas are about "being innovation", rather than merely "doing innovation."

Take on one or more of these roles, as outlined in the foregoing, & you'll be taking a conscious step toward becoming more of an innovator in your daily life.

Come to think of it, one can also adopt the 'Problem Walkabout' approach, apparently drawing parallels from the four-quadrant brain profile of Ned Herrmann, as conceived by John Kruithof [in his book, 'Thinking Quality, Quality Thinking'], as follows:

- look at it analytically & rationally, taking a bottom-line view;

- look at it conservatively, taking a detailed procedural view;

- look at it emotionally, taking a people-oriented view;

- look at it intuitively & conceptually, taking a big picture view;

I have already talked about this approach in an earlier post [in the 'Optimum Performance Technologies' weblog].