Today, the topic is about redefining innovation – Hint: You’re not starting from Ground Zero.

Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Architected, Inc. (IAI).

Today IAM Talking with Ken Tencer, the CEO of Spyder Works Inc. and co-author of the book “The 90% Rule” which we’ll be discussing in this episode.

Ken’s company, Spyder Works, is a branding + innovation firm that enables clients to look at themselves more strategically… to imagine themselves differently in the marketplace. Find out more about Spyder Works at spyderworksdesign.com, and more about the book at 90percentrule.com.

Thanks goes out to Tom Martin of Tom Martin Media, Ken’s PR guy (and a common friend between Ken and I), for making the introduction, and arranging for a soft copy of the book to arrive at my office in advance of the interview.

Key Concepts of the 90% Rule

There is so much attention given to the 80/20 rule (Pareto’s Rule) – which is typically phrased that 80% of returns come from 20% of the appropriately targeted efforts – that immediately the 90% Rule caught my eye.
The core concept of the 90% Rule aligns perfectly with what I’ve been promoting for several years – stop thinking of innovation as THE NEXT BIG THING! (what I call “BIG I INNOVATION”) and focus more time on leveraging what you’ve already done – that 90% of the repeatable core of your business/products/services that you can use to pivot to your next piece of business.

It’s continuous improvement (or what I call “small i innovation”) and offers far more bang for the resource buck than people seem to give credit for.

Ken has some great examples of these pivots or extensions in the interview (listen below) and of course in the book, directly.

As you’re listening to the interview, we briefly discuss the Six Steps to Creating a Culture of Continuous Innovation, and which Ken was kind enough to provide the infographic we discuss, as eye candy to go with the discussion.

Six Steps to Creating a Culture of Continuous Innovation

The end-to-end process and infographic from the book:

Breaking down the six steps, we have:

Step One:  

Revisiting your company’s origins and identify where you want to take it long-term

Step Two: 

Exploring what you *can* be, not just what you are (Note from Dan: We hone in on this step in the interview)

Step Three: 

Building a relevant brand rooted in customer-centric thinking.

Step Four: 

Maximizing leverage by outlining your best opportunities and the criteria upon which to assess them (Note from Dan: decision making and critical thinking lags in almost every organization I run across – ideas are only part of the battle, folks)

Step Five: 

Building an opportunity matrix to determine the human and financial resources required for moving ahead.

Step Six: 

“Speaking” to be heard clearly by all your audiences. (Note from Dan: If you’ve done your work up front in this Design Thinking approach to Innovation, you already know your audience quite well – and now it’s time to reflect that knowledge right back)

Comments or Questions?

How are you defining innovation? How do you target? Are you building on your 90% base, or going for disruptive innovation opportunities? Comment below, and we’ll answer and discuss together.

Listen now!

More details on our practices related to Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

Credit: Herzschlag / photocase.com

Stop the Innovation Wars is the attention-getting title of a Harvard Business Review article published last year, attempting to generate controversy in the business world. The article is written by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, both on the faculty at Dartmouth, and co-authors of a new book on innovation titled “The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge,” which was published in late 2010. (See original article at the Harvard Business Review)

What is the Innovation War?

It is the battle between corporate operations groups, responsible for ongoing operations and support of existing products and services, and the teams formed for new initiatives, usually given names like innovation team.

The authors’ description of the powerful, extremely negative reactions to the idea of creating an innovation team with special responsibility for a new strategy and how it gave rise to their research is fascinating, but familiar to practitioners of Innovation Management of all stripes, and especially to the deep research background of TRIZ (Editor note: What is TRIZ? One of the most powerful innovation toolkits you’ve never heard of… until now).

What’s in a name?

The authors rename the operations groups the Performance Engine of the company, and prescribe a partnership modality, in which the Performance Engine partners with dedicated project teams tasked with innovation projects.

They present an interesting series of case studies:

1. BMW’s regenerative braking team,
2. West’s (the legal publishing branch of Thomas Reuters) creation of database products,
3. Lucent’s service businesses, and
4. WD-40′s new dispenser to demonstrate the universality of their proposed method as applied in a product, a service, and a component part.

Step one of the partnership process involves dividing the work between the Performance Engine and the dedicated project team.

One insight that I found quite useful was that it is not just the work to be done and the skills of the people that should be assessed, but also the past working relationships of those people.

If they have always worked in a hierarchical relationship, they may not be able to work in a flat organization (Editor note: Enterprise 2.0 issues – can’t flatten an organization with lumps of non-collaborative employees and managers in the mix).

If they have always worked on projects that have well-defined deliverables, they may not be able to work in an exploratory environment (Editor note: Agile anyone? [outside of software development, it's a mindset I see in successful Enterprise 2.0 work]).

And, of course, vice versa: one example showed how people who had typically worked very independently, or with a small technical support staff, were not well-suited to working in a large, structured team with complex, interdependent roles (Editor note: Organizations that are immune to the innovation virus – all too common).

The new organization will also need new metrics of success, new compensation/reward systems, and its own unique culture.

Organizational Change – Who Owns It?

Trimble and Govindarajan task management with creating these elements, but I’ve seen management fail more often than it succeeds as creating a specific culture – - it seems that the best that management can do is be sure that the metrics and reward systems are not contrary to the desired cultural elements. (Editor note: Organizational Network Analysis and Knowledge Management provide both targeting and change management tools to find the best/worst areas of culture to explore or avoid, for the time being)

For a short article, they did a good job at illustrating the kinds of problems that will occur in this partnership.

TRIZ and Business Management

TRIZ practitioners will recognize the physical contradictions in the situations of loose vs. tight management, team vs. individual metrics, and the technical (trade-off) contradictions in the schedule vs. completeness and new technology vs. traditional methods and new suppliers’ creativity vs. traditional suppliers’ reliability, etc.

Disappointingly, the authors did not use any of the insights available from business applications of TRIZ to propose solutions to these contradictions.

Their solutions to the problems of innovation are remarkably un-innovative.

Equally disappointing, they do not present any data or case studies showing that their proposed method works.

Case studies from which the method was derived are interesting, but obviously are available because they were successful for those companies in those circumstances.

The test should be to apply the method to new situations and evaluate its effectiveness, and iterated the method based on both failures and successes. I am particularly dubious about the effectiveness of changing the names of the operations and innovation teams as a key success factor!

Readers are invited to contribute their case studies and observations, and particularly any methods they have found effective in companies that use TRIZ in their innovation toolkit.

- end article -

Where are you in your TRIZ Education?

• Is your innovation toolkit non-existent?
• Have you struggled with how to connect the theory of TRIZ, to the application of TRIZ in your organization?
• Do you need a “language of innovation” to unify your employees – allowing both incremental and radical innovation?

Take advantage of our 5-Hour Online (+ 60 minutes of instructor feedback) and On-demand eLearning course, “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ created in partnership with Ellen Domb from the PQR Group and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

“Ellen is one of the world leading teachers in TRIZ. Her teachings will not only educate, but also entertain you. She is the first of all the TRIZ teachers who really researches in how to teach TRIZ the best way. But what I appreciate the most, are here really quick responses whenever I have a TRIZ-related question. And this is independent from the place she is staying at around the world.” - Robert Adunka, Innovation Coach, Siemens AG

The “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ course has five modules and includes approximately 60 minutes of class/homework feedback from Dr. Domb, to discuss the course and the application of TRIZ to your own work.

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

Module 1: Introduction to TRIZ, Ideality and the Ideal Final Result

• History and Development of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
• History of TRIZ
• Defining Ideality
• Ideality and IFR
• Ideal Final Results: Examples
• Applying Ideality
• Using Resources

Module 2: Using Resources

• Using Resources
• Accelerating Innovation by Using Resources
• Example of Real-Time Traffic Information
• Examples of Using Customers as Resources
• Recognizing Energy Sources
• Checking Your Understanding – Using Resources

Module 3: Eliminating Trade-offs

• Eliminating Trade-offs
• How to Recognize a Trade-off
• How to Look for Assumptions That Cause Trade-offs
• How to Use the Contradiction Matrix and the 40 Principles to Eliminate Trade-offs

Module 4: Examples of the 40 Principles From Many Disciplines

• The 40 Principles
• How to Use the 40 Principles
• Examples from Business, Technology, Services and Society

Module 5: Eliminating Inherent Contradictions and Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

• Identifying Inherent Contradictions
• Resolving Inherent Contradictions
• Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

Photo credit: Bastografie / photocase.com

Recently, Robin Bew, Chief Economist in the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research division of The Economist magazine, posted the results of an EIU survey of large businesses.

With such a complex system as the world economy, I always have my doubts as to how useful research like this is, but an interesting statistic called out was:

Companies today earn a third of their revenues from overseas. In two years time that figure will have grown to 60%.

This information impacts the way I’m currently advising clients in at least two ways:

• If digital media is the primary marketing/communication vehicle world wide, and 33-60% of your revenue is likely to come from sources other than your own country, and therefore that media is likely to be consumed (in the case of US-based companies) in some other language than English… do you have a strategy to support multi-lingual content? At all? Without excessive costs and time delays for translation and localization? If not, what revenue, cost, and competitive opportunities are you missing?
  • Due to crowdsourcing techniques, and better, faster, cheaper and more directly integrated translation technology/workflow, it has never been easier to address this opportunity – but it does require the existing technical infrastructure and business-savvy to put together an intelligent content pipeline. If you have not looked into this in the last few years, you will be astonished by what is possible and at what price tag.
• Consumer and business behavior is not the same, worldwide. With an innovation hat on, do you really understand the needs of your ultimate customers, wherever they may live? Are your “innovations” user and need focused? (rather than product/company-focused, or “purely” demographics-focused)
  • Adoption of mobile technology, for example, and “smartphones” specifically, tends to lead in the United States, even though the cellular networks of the US lag behind other countries that have significantly greater (and cheaper) internet speeds. (This according to contacts I have in telecom – non-publishable/citeable stats).
  • Serving mobile customers (or employees, partners, suppliers) is still a dramatically underserved area – whether a smartphone or a “dumb” phone. There are many opportunities to think out of the retail store “box” (quite literally the “big box” stores), and traditional non-interactive media. Customer engagement, service, satisfaction, price-checking, order checking, etc., is still quite disconnected from the online vs. offline experience – even 15 years after the rise of the web. There is a real opportunity to leap beyond ignorance of the full power of the web on the desktop, and straight into the much faster growing world of mobile content and applications.

Have you looked far enough to see and act on these opportunities?

Whether you believe the rest of the macroeconomic and microeconomic predictions/analysis of The Economist or any other source – I don’t see any easy way to ignore the two above trends. Almost every inquiry which has come in to us in the last few months has been explicitly focused on these two areas – and the convergence/integration of these trends into the siloed infrastructure that most organizations have in place.

Converging and integrating to set the stage for rapid growth opportunities seems to finally be a consensus opportunity to power out of the economic troubles of the last 1-2 years (depending on industry and location). Both the cutting edge adopters and the laggards are running as fast as they can to take advantage of these opportunities… is your organization?

No Strategy = Less (No?) Opportunity

Are you ready? What have you done to prepare? Seen compelling reasons *not* to look at multi-lingual or mobile implications for your organization?

TRIZ and QFD (Quality Function Deployment) usually focus on understanding a customer, and either improving a product or service to make it better for that customer, or keeping it the same for the customer while improving the production and delivery system.

In terms of the TRIZ ideality equation:

Ideality = Σ Benefits / (Σ Costs + Σ Harm)

…you can improve the ideality by increasing benefits or by decreasing cost or decreasing harm. The definition of “benefits” as the useful functions of the system is what ties TRIZ and QFD together, since both have methods for modeling the system by means of useful and harmful functions.

But people frequently show up for TRIZ seminars with a very different kind of innovative situation, usually described as follows: We have developed this really creative unique product/service/technology. But we don’t know who would be interested in it. We need a creative way to find out who should be our customer. Can TRIZ help?

The definition of the functions that the new system performs is the key—first define the functions, then remove the jargon, then look for people who need to do those functions. To make the definition even less technical (try Clayton Christensen’s method from his book Innovator’s Dilemma ) in which he talks about “hiring a product to do a job.” TRIZ might say that the function of a water bottle is to contain the water, or to change its shape from a puddle to a cylinder, while Christensen might say that the person hires the bottle to keep the water confined. Use whatever method works for you.

Once you have the useful functions defined, how can you find out who needs it? A very simple method is to go look. There are many data-based search functions, but human search is still much more efficient for making multi-dimensional connections. One method that works for many of my clients is the trade show survey. (This is also very inexpensive if you live in a city that gets a lot of conventions, since tickets to the trade show are usually a very small fraction of the cost of tickets to the conference.)

One short story:

A company makes bilge pumps for boats. They are very successful, and have a giant share of the market for bilge pumps and are looking for new markets. They commit to going to the next three trade shows at the local convention center.

They dutifully change the function description from “bilge pump” to “mechanism for moving liquid from a place where you don’t want it to a place where you do want it.”

Then they get lucky: The first trade show is for the food and beverage industry. They see that moving liquids around is a big business for the food and beverage industry. And they get lucky again—only two O-rings have to be changed in their pump to make it meet the requirements for use in a food system.

They are now selling lots of pumps to move beer around bars and stadiums, and pretty soon they’ll go to the next trade show.

Did TRIZ find the customer? Certainly a heightened awareness of function plays a big role in finding customers who need what you’ve got.

- end article -

Where are you in your TRIZ Education?

• Is your innovation toolkit non-existent?
• Have you struggled with how to connect the theory of TRIZ, to the application of TRIZ in your organization?
• Do you need a “language of innovation” to unify your employees – allowing both incremental and radical innovation?

Take advantage of our 5-Hour Online (+ 60 minutes of instructor feedback) and On-demand eLearning course, “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ created in partnership with Ellen Domb from the PQR Group and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

“Ellen is one of the world leading teachers in TRIZ. Her teachings will not only educate, but also entertain you. She is the first of all the TRIZ teachers who really researches in how to teach TRIZ the best way. But what I appreciate the most, are here really quick responses whenever I have a TRIZ-related question. And this is independent from the place she is staying at around the world.” - Robert Adunka, Innovation Coach, Siemens AG

The “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ course has five modules and includes approximately 60 minutes of class/homework feedback from Dr. Domb, to discuss the course and the application of TRIZ to your own work.

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

Module 1: Introduction to TRIZ, Ideality and the Ideal Final Result

• History and Development of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
• History of TRIZ
• Defining Ideality
• Ideality and IFR
• Ideal Final Results: Examples
• Applying Ideality
• Using Resources

Module 2: Using Resources

• Using Resources
• Accelerating Innovation by Using Resources
• Example of Real-Time Traffic Information
• Examples of Using Customers as Resources
• Recognizing Energy Sources
• Checking Your Understanding – Using Resources

Module 3: Eliminating Trade-offs

• Eliminating Trade-offs
• How to Recognize a Trade-off
• How to Look for Assumptions That Cause Trade-offs
• How to Use the Contradiction Matrix and the 40 Principles to Eliminate Trade-offs

Module 4: Examples of the 40 Principles From Many Disciplines

• The 40 Principles
• How to Use the 40 Principles
• Examples from Business, Technology, Services and Society

Module 5: Eliminating Inherent Contradictions and Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

• Identifying Inherent Contradictions
• Resolving Inherent Contradictions
• Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

What Is TRIZ?

Projects of all kinds frequently reach a point where all the analysis is done, and the next step is unclear. The project team must be creative, to figure out what to do.

TRIZ is a problem solving method based on logic and data, not intuition, which accelerates the project team’s ability to solve these problems creatively.

TRIZ also provides repeatability, predictability, and reliability due to its structure and algorithmic approach.

“TRIZ” is the (Russian) acronym for the “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.” G.S. Altshuller and his colleagues in the former U.S.S.R. developed the method between 1946 and 1985. TRIZ is an international science of creativity that relies on the study of the patterns of problems and solutions, not on the spontaneous and intuitive creativity of individuals or groups. More than three million patents have been analyzed to discover the patterns that predict breakthrough solutions to problems.

TRIZ is spreading into corporate use across several parallel paths – it is increasingly common in Six Sigma processes, in project management and risk management systems, and in organizational innovation initiatives.

TRIZ research began with the hypothesis that there are universal principles of creativity that are the basis for creative innovations that advance technology. If these principles could be identified and codified, they could be taught to people to make the process of creativity more predictable. The short version of this is:

Somebody someplace has already solved this problem (or one very similar to it.)
Creativity is now finding that solution and adapting it to this particular problem.

The research has proceeded in several stages during the last sixty years. The three primary findings of this research are as follows:

1. Problems and solutions are repeated across industries and sciences. The classification of the contradictions in each problem predicts the creative solutions to that problem.
2. Patterns of technical evolution are repeated across industries and sciences.
3. Creative innovations use scientific effects outside the field where they were developed.

Much of the practice of TRIZ consists of learning these repeating patterns of problems-solutions, patterns of technical evolution and methods of using scientific effects, and then applying the general TRIZ patterns to the specific situation that confronts the developer.

Exhibit 1 (below) describes this process graphically.

In Exhibit 1, the arrows represent transformation from one formulation of the problem or solution to another.

The arrows from the specific problem to the general problem, and the general problem to the general solution represent analysis of the problems and analytic use of the TRIZ databases. The arrow from general solution to specific solution represents thinking by analogy to develop the specific solution.

This four-step problem solving approach forces the user to overcome inherent psychological bias that is typically the foundation of psychological ideation techniques.

For example, a powerful demonstration of this method comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Following the flow of Exhibit 1, the specific problem is as follows: Tailored bacteria are used to cultivate human hormones, producing a superior product to those refined from animal sources. To produce the product, very large quantities of tailored bacteria cells are cultured, the cells must be broken open and the cell wall material removed so that the useful hormones can be processed. A mechanical method for breaking the cells had been in use at a moderate scale for some time, but the yield was 80 percent, and was variable. A current crisis was a reduction in yield to 65 percent, and a long-term problem was anticipated in trying to scale production up to high rates, with yield much better than 80 percent.

The TRIZ general problem at the highest level is to find a way to produce the product with no waste, at 100 percent yield, with no added complexity. A TRIZ general solution formula is “The problem should solve itself.” One of the patterns of evolution of technology is that energy (fields) replaces objects (mechanical devices). For example, consider using a laser instead of a scalpel for eye surgery. In this case, ultrasound can be used to break the cell walls or using an enzyme to “eat” the cell wall (chemical energy) instead of hitting them. This may seem very general, but it led the pharmaceutical researchers to analyze all the resources available in the problem (the cells, the cell walls, the fluid they are in, the motion of the fluid, the processing facility, etc.) and to conclude that three specific solutions had high potential for their problem:

1. The cell walls should be broken by sound waves (from the pattern of evolution of replacing mechanical means by fields).
2. The cell walls should be broken by shearing, as they pass through the processing facility (using the resources of the existing system in a different way).
3. An enzyme in the fluid should “eat” the cell walls and release the contents at the desired time.

All three methods have been tested successfully. The least expensive, highest yield method was soon put in production.

The “General TRIZ Solutions” referred to in Exhibit 1 have been developed over the course of the 60 years of TRIZ research, and have been organized in many different ways. Some of these are analytic methods such as:

• The Ideal Final Result and Ideality,
• Functional Modeling, Analysis and Trimming and
• Locating the Zones of Conflict. (This is more familiar to Six Sigma problem solvers as “Root Cause Analysis.”)

Some are more prescriptive such as:

• The 40 Inventive Principles of Problem Solving,
• The Separation Principles,
• Laws of Technical Evolution and Technology Forecasting and
• 76 Standard Solutions.

In the course of solving any one technical problem, one tool or many can be used. The 40 Principles of Problem Solving are the most accessible “tool” of TRIZ. These are the principles that were found to repeat across many fields, as solutions to many general contradictions, which are at the heart of many problems.

A fundamental concept of TRIZ is that contradictions should be eliminated. TRIZ recognizes two categories of contradictions:

1. Technical contradictions are the classical engineering “trade-offs.” The desired state can’t be reached because something else in the system prevents it. In other words, when something gets better, something else gets worse. Classical examples include:
   The product gets stronger (good), but the weight increases (bad).
   • The bandwidth for a communication system increases (good), but requires more power (bad).
   • Service is customized to each customer (good), but the service delivery system gets complicated (bad).
   • Training is comprehensive (good), but keeps employees away from their assignments (bad).
2. Physical contradictions, also called “inherent” contradictions, are situations in which one object or system has contradictory, opposite requirements. Everyday examples abound:
   • Surveillance aircraft should fly fast (to get to the destination), but should fly slowly to collect data directly over the target for long time periods.
   • Software should be complex (to have many features), but should be simple (to be easy to learn).
   • Coffee should be hot for enjoyable drinking, but cold to prevent burning the customer
   • Training should take a long time (to be thorough), but not take any time.

Two personal examples offered by recent TRIZ classes:

• I want my boss at the meeting, but I don’t want my boss at the meeting.
• I want to know everything my seventeen year-old child is doing, but I don’t want to know everything she is doing.

TRIZ research has identified 40 principles that solve the Technical/tradeoff contradictions and four principles of separation that solve the Physical/inherent contradictions. Additional examples include:

• Entertainment: Singapore needs to find a way to manage automobile traffic on the Sentosa, its entertainment island (aquarium, bird sanctuary, dolphin show, restaurants, music, etc.). Applications of TRIZ developed eight families of solutions.
• IT Product development: A manufacturing company doubled the value to the customer of their patient interview system for opticians offices by applying the feedback and self-service principles of TRIZ to the overall product development, and applying the principles of segmentation, taking out and composite construction to the training and support.
• School administrators: Creativity has been greatly enhanced in situations ranging from allocation of the budget for special education to building five schools with funding only for four, to improving racial harmony in the schools.
• Waste processing: Dairy farm operators could no longer dry the cow manure due to increased cost of energy. TRIZ led the operators to a method used for the concentration of fruit juice, which requires no heat.
• Warranty cost reduction: Ford used TRIZ to solve a persistent problem with squeaky windshields that was costing several million dollars each year. Previously, they had used TRIZ to reduce idle vibration in a small car by 165 percent, from one of the worst in its class to 30 percent better than the best in class.

A recent case study presented from the Dow Chemical Company showed the combined effect of TRIZ with Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) most dramatically.

A Dow Plastics business found itself responding to meet the ever more rigorous needs of a cost-driven marketplace, for a technology tuned over decades.  It convened a group of technical experts to redesign its “most effective” standard process technology for manufacturing facilities for this family of products. To stay competitive in costs, they needed to drastically reduce the capital needed to build future plants. Requirements seemed ever-tightening, calling for lower energy use, better ergonomics for operating personnel, and lower monomer residuals in product. The process, being decades old, had technology and equipment systems considered highly optimized – oh, the psychological inertia!

An overall Ideal Final Result helped outline the zones of conflict / pathways to innovation so that sub-groups could divide and attack each opportunity with the most appropriate tools. Substantial use of technical contradictions and inventive principles helped address trade-offs. The group assembled a dozen alternative systems by using a morphological box at the high, conceptual level.  A Pugh concept selection matrix helped narrow the candidates to four for which the intermediate level of detail enabled cost estimations. Elements of IFR contributed to the evaluation criteria.

Breakthrough was achieved in control of monomer residuals, handling of raw materials, and reactor design. The reduction amazed even the project team, when the capital cost of a plant built to the new standard dropped by more than 25 percent, from nearly $110 million to < $80 million.

The best way to learn and explore TRIZ is to begin a problem that you haven’t solved satisfactorily and try it!

- end article -

Where are you in your TRIZ Education?

• Unsure how to best proceed with an eDiscovery strategy?
• Find the wide variety of tools and platforms available throughout the eDiscovery process to be a bewildering mish-mash of “marketing speak” from the vendor community?
• Looking for a sanity check on how you are approaching eDiscovery, and where you can cut time, money and resources out of the equation?

Take advantage of our 5-Hour Online (+ 60 minutes of instructor feedback) and On-demand eLearning course, “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ created in partnership with Ellen Domb from the PQR Group and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

“Ellen is one of the world leading teachers in TRIZ. Her teachings will not only educate, but also entertain you. She is the first of all the TRIZ teachers who really researches in how to teach TRIZ the best way. But what I appreciate the most, are here really quick responses whenever I have a TRIZ-related question. And this is independent from the place she is staying at around the world.” - Robert Adunka, Innovation Coach, Siemens AG

The “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ course has five modules and includes approximately 60 minutes of class/homework feedback from Dr. Domb, to discuss the course and the application of TRIZ to your own work.

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

Module 1: Introduction to TRIZ, Ideality and the Ideal Final Result

• History and Development of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
• History of TRIZ
• Defining Ideality
• Ideality and IFR
• Ideal Final Results: Examples
• Applying Ideality
• Using Resources

Module 2: Using Resources

• Using Resources
• Accelerating Innovation by Using Resources
• Example of Real-Time Traffic Information
• Examples of Using Customers as Resources
• Recognizing Energy Sources
• Checking Your Understanding – Using Resources

Module 3: Eliminating Trade-offs

• Eliminating Trade-offs
• How to Recognize a Trade-off
• How to Look for Assumptions That Cause Trade-offs
• How to Use the Contradiction Matrix and the 40 Principles to Eliminate Trade-offs

Module 4: Examples of the 40 Principles From Many Disciplines

• The 40 Principles
• How to Use the 40 Principles
• Examples from Business, Technology, Services and Society

Module 5: Eliminating Inherent Contradictions and Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

• Identifying Inherent Contradictions
• Resolving Inherent Contradictions
• Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

The Past, Present and Future of Adobe

With the acquisition of Day Software (highly scalable, standards and open source-oriented [not as deployment/sales model, but as underpinnings]), along with the late 2009 acquisition of Omniture (enterprise-class, quite high-end web analytics), Adobe clearly has their eyes beyond the deskop, with arguably the first major moves into server/cloud territory that they’ve executed on in many years.

Of course the question is… even if they have “best of breed” solutions in what they’re calling “customer experience management” (or CEM) – a decidely “big company/large enterprise” vision of customer engagement (or “marketing” as those who haven’t yet crested the new meme will still call it), can they actually pull it off?

Can they legitimately compete with the other “big (ol’) boys” of ECM/WCM such as ECM/Documentum, Oracle/Stellent, Autonomy/Interwoven, Open Text/Vignette, and the like?

Boundaries to Break, Skills to Sink Deep

The sales model is entirely different in enterprise/server-sales from the desktop and team-oriented, more consumer-oriented sales of most Adobe solutions, and although Adobe has some experience in the enterprise sales area, given their (long past) acquisition of Allaire (Cold Fusion), LiveCycle (born of various internal components of Adobe and one-off acqusitions of various parts, stretching back to 2001, and launching as a suite in 2005), and with the high-end web marketing folks of the enterprise via Omniture (a $1.8 Billion USD acquisition). Underestimating the sales cycle and re-aligning marketing/outreach to “sell” the new Adobe are classic traps that are not as easily avoided as they would seem – and all too many mergers/acquisitions that cross boundaries of sales mentality and market positioning #fail miserably in this regard, and the early focus of Adobe and the Macromedia acquisition from years past, with a focus on graphic/design tools for individuals and small teams, the core DNA is, in my opinion, anti-large enterprise. Time will tell how this shift works out – do they lose on the low-end and win on the high-end, or learn to juggle the spectrum?

The development model that Adobe has historically undertaken has been… sluggish, to say the least. Their cycle times make Microsoft’s 3 year cycles look swift, and with a desktop-centric view, their cross-platform (Mac vs. Windows) product roll-outs can and have been unsynchronized for years at a time – ironic given that PDF, Flash and AIR are all designed to be entirely platform neutral. As they embrace server-based solutions more completely, perhaps they will be able to apply more focus into a single lens (J2EE-based solutions), and tighten the development cycle.

Agile or Fragile?

Can Adobe continue to leverage the more agile developer talent from their recent acquisitions? Day’s mantra for the last year or so (aligned larger with Kevin Cochrane’s entree to the management team at Day) has been in agile development and agile marketing – can they successfully infect the parent company? Or will the Adobe waterfall drown them out? As a long time proponent of Agile (everything), I certainly hope so, but this is a massive cultural change issue – and large companies, in my experience, struggle mightily to change the development mindset to Agile from traditional “waterfall” development. Let’s hope the one-two punch of Day’s agile discipline and open source participation wins the (ahem) day at Adobe.

What’s in Their Wallet?

From a size/scale/staying power perspective, Adobe’s current market cap is at $15.5 Billion USD (NASDAQ:ADBE) as compared to Autonomy at $4.01 Billion USD (LON:AU), EMC at $42.01 Billion USD (NYSE:EMC), Open Text at $2.25 Billion USD (NASDAQ:OTEX) and Oracle at $121.94 Billion USD (ASDASD). In the grand scheme of most of their competition, they are on the small- to medium-marketsize.

Adobe is certainly well out of the world of the startup (fraught with peril and struggling for mere existence), and are operating in worlds that have mostly (or damn close) “crossed the chasm” into the mainstream.

There is still plenty of growth in the world of content, and they continue to have the ability to invest in making that future happen, not only monetarily (the benefits of a war chest), and with huge “mindshare” in digital content (server/enterprise credibility not withstanding).

Assuming a majority of the talent that comes with and stays at Adobe from their acquistions, they should continue to have fresh/modern skills and experience that bridge the gap from the origins of Adobe (desktop/small teams, and individual tools) to the new Adobe (focused on seamless experience, mobile, server, and customer/employee engagement).

Closed to Open

And while the Adobe of the past was primarily about proprietary formats (Photoshop, Pagemaker, InDesign, Framemaker, Allaire Cold Fusion, etc.), Day’s focus has been heavy on the open source world, as well as in involvement in Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) – a specification for improving interoperability between Enterprise Content Management systems -which is one of the convergence trends that is (finally!) gaining traction, as the buyers in the market of the last two years have finally begun to get it in their heads, and consequently into the seller/solution providers’ heads, that while they will continue to have silos (inadvertently or purposefully) of content… if the goal of an organization in 2010 and beyond is to provide customer or employee experiences, you absolutely MUST find some way to unify access to content – whether via CMIS, Federated Search, modern portals, or the like. Multi-platform access, seamless access, personalized – these are all areas where the combination of Adobe and Day holds the promise of serving people, rather than serving the acquistion of more raw technology (the typical buying organization’s approach).

Most of the grumblings I’ve seen about this acquisition thus far is in concerns that Adobe will kill Day’s involvement in open source and open standards. While both Day and Adobe deny this, again, it’s not really up to the stated goals of the acquisition – it’s in what happens when cultures collide, and if the support and uptake of a new mindset truly takes root, well after the acquisition has closed.

Wherefore Art Alfresco?

Another reverberation in the open source world, is the wonder as to what happened to the Alfresco and Adobe relationship? Up until this point, Alfresco had seemed a likely acquisition, given their partnership with Alfresco as the back-end and Adobe as the front-end in the 2008 OEM agreement relating to Adobe’s LiveCycle and Adobe’s Content Services offerings. Where will that relationship go from here? It’s anyone’s guess – as you can read over at an Alfresco blog post, the belief is that Day has been oriented more directly at Adobe’s customer engagement/customer experience model world, while Alfresco has been more about infrastructure and tools to support developers.

That’s a fair analogy, although at this point, while I’m a fan of developers having the tools and toolkits to do the job, I trust 21st century marketers and customer service managers to be far more oriented towards user success than I do anyone wearing a “pure” IT hat (and I used to be one of the IT purists – mea culpa). Thus far, no official word from Adobe on where the Alfresco relationship will go – and as a publicly traded company, it’s unlikely that we’ll hear why Alfresco or any other number of remaining independents did not make the acquisition list… at least not YET.

Embracing Managed Content

Last thought – I’ve seen some zings directed at Adobe and Day regarding the world of Digital Asset Management (DAM), specifically that the integration of Adobe and Day’s DAM solution is weaker than their competition, such as integrated DAM in Open Text’s suite of offerings.

To this comment I will say, stop trying to silo content in your enterprise – if you have to debate internally which silo to drop your content, DM, ECM, WCM, DAM, etc., then you have already so badly missed the point of any “content management” system of any kind, that you should take the time to back up and re-think your strategy. The more respositories/technologies that are thrown into the mix, the more likely you are to kill the purposes of manging content in the first place – decreased time to create/re-use content, faster processes, more consistent branding, etc.. For every ONE organization I’ve seen who has executed this well (as a buyer), I’ve seen FIFTY who have botched it.

DAM is DM (Document Management) on storage steroids, driven by metadata (the universal glue of ALL managed content) – with perhaps (if you’ve spent many millions), the ability to auto-transcribe or semantically identify the audio and/or video content above and beyond raw metadata (makes for great demos from Autonomy, but you probably can’t afford it, and really don’t need it).

The divide between DM, ECM, WCM and DAM is all in your mind until you start getting into fairly sophisticated and esoteric deployments where you are doing true, large-scale content re-use, with complex interdependencies in the final output/delivery of content.

In short, if you feel that the combined Adobe/Day DAM solution is not up to snuff – I’d be willing to bet that you are overcomplicating your perceived needs and resulting solution, or you are in the 1% of the world that really needs incredibly sophisticated DAM. If you happen to be in that camp, please contact me at 617-933-9655 – I’d love to understand what factors have impacted what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. We can all learn from those both on the leading and trailing edges – so if I am missing something that truly makes DAM a differentiator for your managed business content, let’s surface some use cases to show what “real” DAM can do.

Alternative Takes on the News

Find other takes from analysts (official and otherwise – aka Bloggers) via:

• VentureBeat (an investment perspective – fairly lightweight)
• Jon On Tech (an integrator’s perspective – Jon’s a pragmatic guy)
• CMS Watch (via Apoorv Durga – one of the newer CMS Watch analysts – expressing similar doubts about the enterprise mindset of Adobe vs. it’s boxed software roots)
• Tim Anderson’s ITWriting (expressing hope for Day’s openness and REST strengths to penetrate Adobe’s proprietary nature)

Your Thoughts?

If you are a current or prospective user of Day Software’s solutions, please weigh in with your feedback. Are current offerings serving your needs? Running ahead of where your organization is? Where your budget is? Just right? If you’re not using Day for WCM/DAM and/or collaboration, but are solving similar problems, what solution are you using?

How Information Architected Can Help

These trends, and solutions such as Day and Adobe’s content offerings, are the explicit focus of our business practices and expertise -  which is in creating strategies to provide for flexible information architectures and applications (technologies) that support the business architecture (roles, goals, people, processes, skills and culture) that, when combined, can deliver significantly greater value than a single business problem and isolated tool by itself. We are vendor neutral, and more often that not, can help you find ways to make whatever technology investments you have already made, greatly outperform the end results you are currently experiencing.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, contact us now to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together to solve your needs, whether customer, employee, partner or supplier-facing. It’s all content – manage it effectively, and get the technology out of your way.

Schedule a private executive briefing now

Today, the topic is Taking Open Innovation to a Global Organization.

In this episode, I am interviewing Jon Bidwell, the Chief Innovation Officer for Chubb & Son.

Mr. Bidwell is currently responsible for the development and deployment of Chubb’s global innovation platform, designed to engage employees and distribution in the collaborative development of new products, services and process improvements and has been with Chubb since 1983.

Jon and I had first met in Boston at an Imaginatik User Conference – where the sheer speed and completeness of both Jon (and Chubb’s) vision and execution truly stunned me. There is always room for innovation improvement, but as you will hear in this interview, building a strong innovation foundation has given them confidence that the future seeds of innovation have already been planted, sowing both short-term and long-term innovation success.

Key Concepts in Scaling Open Innovation

Scalability is a relative term, and the speed with which you can scale out, in this case to employees on a global scale, is not something that the vast majority of organizations have any experience with. If tapping more than the R&D or marketing departments for innovative ideas is of interest to you, then stay tuned…

Listen now!

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for Open Innovation? to engage employees, partners, and ultimately, the world?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can put in place systematic tools, techniques and yes, technology to make the most of the strengths of the people within AND outside of your organization.

More details on our practices related to Collaboration and Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

Today, the topic is Business Model Innovation – White Space and You.

In this episode, I am interviewing Mark Johnson, the author of a new book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal.

Mark is chairman of Innosight, a strategic innovation consulting and investing company with offices in Massachusetts, Singapore, and India, which he cofounded with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen. He has consulted to Global 1000 and start-up companies in a wide range of industries—including health care, aerospace/defense, enterprise IT, energy, automotive, and consumer packaged goods—and has advised Singapore’s government on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Mark’s most recent work has focused on helping companies envision and create new growth, manage transformation, and achieve renewal through business model innovation.

Find copies of his new book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, at your favorite online or brick and mortar book store. The official website for the book is www.seizingthewhitespace.com.

Key Concepts Covered on White Space Innovation

We cover several of the key concepts, including a deep dive into the Customer Value Proposition (CVP) and the “job to be done” mindset that Innosight typically uses in their work, which is part of an overall trend in innovation management that focuses on the outcomes that customers are searching for, rather than the products, services, or solutions-based approach, which is rapidly becoming a dated and dangerous approach.

We also discuss several aspects of innovation maturity – both from the standpoint of innovation practices, product innovation vs. process innovation vs. white space or business model innovation, as well as maturity in skillsets and personnel to execute on a variety of innovation initiatives.

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking with Mark Johnson – Business Model Innovation – White Space and You

Reference Materials for White Space Innovation

For reference, two of the figures or graphics referenced from the book, can be found below.

The Four-Box Business Innovation Model

And the Stages of Business Model Implementation

Closing Review

Whether you are just getting started with innovation management, or are already a seasoned innovator, I would readily recommend Seizing the White Space as a worthy addition to your innovation toolkit. Business Model Innovation may be the latest flavor of innovation to get air time, but not without good reason. By re-thinking the fundamentals of at least SOME aspect of your innovation portfolio, to make way for White Space Innovation opportunities, you will be in far better shape than your “head in the sand” competitors.

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for White Space discovery?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can put in place systematic tools, techniques and yes, technology to make the most of the strengths of the people within your organization

More details on our practices related to Collaboration and Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

Quick – what is Henry Ford known for? Most of you are likely thinking the automobile and/or the moving assembly line. But, how many of you thought “charcoal briquettes”.  That’s right, Henry Ford invented charcoal briquettes. When Ford noticed the amount of scrap wood and saw dust that came at the end of his car assembly line, his creative mind and business acumen could not tolerate the waste. He wondered if there wasn’t a market for the waste. Voila – he created the charcoal briquette, which he eventually sold off to a man by the name of Kingsford (name ring any BBQ bells?)

Today, I read an article that made me recall this part of Ford’s life. Artist Matthew Mazzotta is turning waste into both art and fuel. In this case the waste is the ultimate form of waste – animal waste – known to many as “poop.” Apparently Mazzotta is not the first one to think this way – tough he is the most artistically creative. There are farms, and entire communities in the Netherlands that are powered from the waste of herds of cows, horses and chickens, and projects underway in several countries to turn many forms of farm waste into energy. Brilliant.

While the article made me think about Ford’s briquettes, it also made me think about innovation management as a process, and how far too many companies fail to use it. Eureka moments  like those experienced by Ford and Mazzotta can be instigated in your organization. You just need to discipline yourself and your co-workers to think outside the box systematically, to look at something like waste as an opportunity, not a cost of doing business. Its not serendipity. It is disciplilne, a way of thinking about and viewing different situations. Tools such as SCAMPER and Morph Matrix, for example help to expose these opportunities. These tools, among others, as well, as related team building and process disciplines are the focus of IAI’s innovation workshops.

So again, I ask you, look around, what waste do you have? Is it crap – or an untapped resource? Let us show you how to change the way you look at that. Will have you saying – holy crap that’s innovation.

Last Saturday Dan Keldsen and I attended the New Hampshire State Tournament for Destination ImagiNation (DI).  I love and am inspired by this organization, but I have to say I do not like their name. There is far more than “imagination” going on. This is not just dreaming and imagining – its real problem solving and engineering. (Note the picture to the right – taken at the event.) What is most amazing is that the people behind all this “imagination,” problem solving and engineering are children, affectionately known as “DI kids”, in grades K – 5 (and beyond in some cases).

Its inspiring to watch the kids solve complex problems, building any number of contraptions and solutions using amazing levels of perseverance, ingenuity and problem solving. My favorite part was watching teams set up their “solutions” only to find something had gone wrong. The agility with which they came up with “fixes” was inspiring to say the least.

But, while inspiring, it is also frustrating.

Why? Because you cannot help but wonder why this level of creative problem solving, ingenuity, and innovation (right – not imagination) is lacking in many business settings.

I have to admit that I attended the NH tournament for a selfish reason.

The DI program is the foundation and genesis of the DICor corporate innovation training that I took, and that IAI is certified to provide.

I was there to promote the corporate innovation workshop to the parents of these brilliant innovators. I am always amazed how adults, business people, even those that are raising brilliant innovators, are often hesitant to embrace innovation – especially being trained to be a better innovator.

Before I took the DiCOR worshop, I too was a skeptic.

Innovation – that is a skill set you are either born with or not. Right?

You cannot really practice it and fine tune the talents you have – the way you would a musical instrument, a sport, or a foreign language.

Boy was I wrong.

We have had some great successes in training other adults on how to be as “smart as a 5th grader.”

The workshop includes many hands-on challenges. I have yet to see an adult team beat the records held by the DI crowd (of kids), but they come close.  More importantly, the “adult challenges” set in business issues always clearly illustrate that the application of some simple tools and a mental discipline can radically improve practical creative problem solving.

So come on – I challenge you and your co-workers. It’s the year 2010… Are you smarter than a 5th grader?  The innovation workshop is guaranteed to improve your problem solving skills and meeting productivity by a minimum of 25% – what have you got to lose except maybe a bit of pride?

(BTW – an average of 20% of the cost of the Innovation Workshop is given to DI to support the kids program of the non-profit organization – any way you look at it, it’s win-win for the current generation *and* the next generation)

Take the Innovation Workshop Challenge…
and Join Over 200 Companies and 5,000 Business Professionals that Have Radically Increased Their Innovation Capabilities.