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Innovation is about the implementation of a new idea for the purpose of creating value: value for the firm and value for the consumer. Just as the definition implies, innovation:

• can be large or small;
• is not absolute, but multidimensional;
• can include anything that the firm and its customers find useful and valuable;
• can be evolutionary, but not duplicative;

Innovation as the ‘implementation of a new idea’ has multidimensional qualities that distinguish the newness in its innovativeness: degree of change in its originality, value and impact. The value of the innovation is certainly in the eye of the beholder, such as in the case where the innovation can be a significant value for the firm, while delivering marginal (if any) improvement for the users.

As mentioned before, innovation occurs across a list of varying dimensions: technology, process, product, service, business model, value-delivery, brand, design, quality, market, customer/segment, … The newness aspect of the innovation can be seen as incremental (continuous, evolutionary, sustaining), radical (discontinuous, revolutionary, breakthrough, disruptive), or anything in between. By utilizing applicable innovation attributes one can measure the perceived innovativeness of the innovation: cost, adoptability, novelty, quality, risk, profitability, usability, viral-ness, image, originality, usefulness, …

Radar charts (spider diagrams) can be quite useful in mapping out your innovativeness in the dimensions that are relevant to you, to your innovation, and to your market. Furthermore, they can help you analyze how you compare against your competitors, your market and your industry. Although there is no standard methodology for determining the degree of innovativeness of your innovations, the process itself can be quite valuable.

• Measure your competitiveness: the more dimensions you are innovating, the more difficult for your competitors to copy you, and more competitive you are.
• Benchmark and measure your innovativeness: the process enables benchmarking against your previous innovations, your competitors, markets and industry. Process can provides insights and new opportunities for innovation.
• Manage according to innovation newness: radical innovations requires a different innovation management style than incremental ones. Utilizing supportive management tactics will improve the success rates of your innovation.
• Improve your portfolio: understanding where you are innovating helps boost your innovation portfolio ensuring better balance and comprehensive coverage.

Further, this innovativeness can be collectively assessed as to its overall impact on the business unit, the firm, the market or the industry. As an example, the Fast Company article “Expand Your Innovation Horizons” highlights this portfolio exercise for your products and services utilizing the ‘horizon’ concept.

• horizon 1 innovations: incrementally extend existing business;
• horizon 2 innovations: aim to create new categories in existing markets;
• horizon 3 innovations: aim to disrupt existing markets via new business models, processes or technology;

Technorati Tags: innovation, innovation management, innovation portfolio

The authors of The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You decided to tackle the ever growing problem of handling email overload. As part of this, they also created an eLearning course on improving your email efficiency and etiquette. You can check-out their website at: hamsterrevolution.com.

The impact of the increased email overload is astonishing! It is quite possible that your teams are spending 40-50% of their valuable time processing email and sitting in meetings (very likely processing email while they do so). Although email is a great tool for asynchronous communication, it is not always the most appropriate method. In this quick and easy to read book, authors tackle the question of how to start reclaiming your life by reducing your email load and organizing your information.

Here are my key takeaways from The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You for dealing with your email:

• Reduce the number of emails you receive — send less to get less;
• Reduce the time spent in processing your email — improve the email quality;

The authors have more suggestions and ideas in the book, including how to manage Reply All effectively, utilizing instant messaging tools for reducing and improving communication, becoming an effective coach to your teams, as well as organizing your documents and files with COTA (Client, Output, Team, Admin).

Increasing the productivity of our day-to-day administrative tasks will certainly help improve our creativity and increase the time spent innovating. So, start today by reducing your email load and the time you spend in email!

Technorati Tags: email overload

Continuing to test client blog tools… Testing posting with Bleezer.

This is a test post with ecto. After loosing my draft post changes, I learned a good lesson on using offline editing tools for blogging

Recent announcements from Nokia and Motorola on their latest earnings and new found focus for 2007 left me wondering… Granted the handset market is quite competitive, driven by short product lifecycles, design and technology innovations and price pressures, but I can’t help but wonder if the firms had a dose of single minded focus when it came to their business strategy.

Nokia dominated the mobile phone market with their focus on design, ease of use, branding the phone as a personal statement as well as a technology innovation. However, somewhere along the way, they dropped into the shadows. They completely missed the demand for thinner/slimmer mobile phones, and allowed competitors to enter the market. For 2007, they plan to mitigate that mistake by offering a new sleeker portfolio of phones and refocusing on their design.

On the other hand, Motorola became an overnight hit in the market with their introduction of the RAZR — great combination of style, technology and price performance. Interestingly enough, as an outside observer it is hard to tell if Motorola has a portfolio of mobile phones (try to find a Motorola PEBL in the stores), and it is getting hard to differentiate the various RAZR product lines. Basically, they got stuck in incremental improvement mode for the RAZR: itunes, thinner/longer, slider, hip colors, … Motorola’s CEO also indicated that their sole focus on market share, pricing strategy utilized, and quality of their product mix greatly impacted their profit margins.

It seems to easy to fall into these traps where single minded focus (that might have helped before) becomes a hinderance, especially in fast moving and highly competitive markets. Here are some thoughts that can keep an objective perspective from becoming a horse with blinders on:

• Focus on market leadership both your product mix and your financial returns;
• Continously enhance and innovate your products and scan for opportunities to extend into new markets;
• Product innovation will only carry you so far. As your products and the market grow and mature, utilize the innovation lifecycle model to incorporate needed process, logistics and customer relationship management related innovations.
• Establish regular portfolio reviews to ensure you have the right projects, the right level of investment and the right innovation initiatives to support your business goals and financial objectives.
• As humans, we seem to be overly optimistic and confident of our estimations. Unfortunately this can be a dangerous combination for strategy development. Utilizing scenarios during the strategic planning process, with the err on the pessimistic side can compensate.
• As economics dictate, a sunk cost is a sunk cost. Establish milestones, do regular reviews and don’t be afraid to switch gears. The more quickly you learn and rebalance your portfolio of projects, the lower the sunk costs will be.
• Keep constant tabs on your customers (old, new, lost and future) and market trends. Continuous changes in customer tastes, new technologies, low-switching costs makes it quite easy for you to lose existing customers.

Technorati Tags: business strategy, leadership, innovation lifecycle, management

A recent post at Business Performance Coaching on success inspired this blog. Greg pointed out Richard St. John’s 3-minute show from TedTalks on what leads to success. In summary, these eight elements are: Passion, Work, Focus, Persist, Ideas, Good, Push, and Serve.

In simple terms, innovation is the introduction of something new, and a new way of doing things. Innovation is about the successful adoption and application of new ideas, approaches and processes. Innovation is not about managing the status quo — it is about change, and managing the change. It is about failing, learning from failure and persisting.

Given all the challenges of innovation and innovating, we are encouraged to celebrate the successes as well as the failures. We know the eight elements that lead to success, but how do you define success so you know that you have achieved it? I like the Wikipedia entry: “Success: Has no meaning in the world we live in.” (I would be curious to see when/if that entry gets updated…) However, I most resonated with Jim Canterucci’s definition (Personal Brilliance: Mastering The Everyday Habits That Create A Lifetime Of Success): “Success is the choices that are available, and the opportunities that can be created.”

Unfortunately many firms fail at innovation before they even start, mainly due to the aggressive goals and expectations set for the innovation. We seem to forget that innovation is a marathon.. A journey. Yes, the end result does matter, but the end does not justify the means. Utilizing the innovation lifecycle, and understanding where you are within it, can help calibrate your definition of success.

I have been investigating ways to best define the innovation lifecycle. I stumbled across the InnovationPoint’s whitepaper on innovation lifecycle as a combination of technology S-curve and Market Adoption Curve based on Jeffrey M.’s model from Crossing the Chasm. Though it is product and technology focused, I believe the concept supports other types of innovations. Please comment on any innovation lifecycle models that work for you.

I can pick up some immediate success goals by looking at this model:

• Early adopters are technology enthusiasts continuously looking for better perceived performance. However, the focus is not just on developing the technology but also moving it towards the inflection point where the basic needs would be met by the good enough technology. So, how do you find those customers that will dig the trenches with you on this journey, and how do you work closely with them?
• As the technology continues to emerge, others will enter the space. Potentially there will be a race to become the dominant design. How do you set your baseline comparisons, and ensure you attain the dominant design in the market place?
• Growth is wonderful, but are you ready for it? Can you scale your technology and your organization to support the needs of your ever growing customer base? How are you doing on your process innovation initiatives to support you as you start to slow down, and your technology matures?
• Eventually maturity hits… And customer demands change: low cost, better quality and reliability is now the focus. Incremental innovations (such as process innovations) can lengthen the innovation’s life before the inevitable decline is observed. However, this is also where new disruptive technology candidates will start to emerge. Are you ready for it?
• With the decline of the market did you already retire your product, or still flogging it for diminishing returns? It is OK to cannibalize your products — better you than your competitor…

Overall, I think the most important point about success is not falling in love with your own ideas and plans, but to continually re-analyze and question your assumptions. With that, and the eight elements that leads to success (Passion, Work, Focus, Persist, Ideas, Good, Push, and Serve), be sure to celebrate both your successes and failures.

Looks like Kodak started 2007 on the right foot: they won three CES Innovations Awards and received prestigious honors from Popular Science and PC Magazine.

Kodak EasyShare V610 Dual Lens Digital Camera was named Best Innovations 2007 in the Digital Imaging category. It is the world’s smallest (at least for now) 10X optical zoom digital camera, and it includes BlueTooth technology for sharing pictures. It has several other features, including in-camera panorama stitching, KODAK Color Science image processing and KODAK PERFECT TOUCH Technology. Their camera includes built-in, video-specific image stabilization technology, and enables a “storyboard” compiled from individual video frames. Certainly stands-out from the rest of the crowd.

Technorati Tags: Kodak

For a while now, I have been in the market for a smartphone, something that will not only simply manage my life, but also be a cool toy :). Unfortunately, these days trying to buy a smartphone is like searching for a new PC: they all look, feel and smell the same. To be fair, I did notice the MotoMing, most notably different than others. Unfortunately many of its features are targeted for the Asian community, as it was designed with Hong Kong executives in mind. But, that all changed today, with Apple’s announcement of iPhone!

Apple has grown tremendously in the last 5 years, mainly thanks to its iPod and iTunes. Today, iPod dominates the mp3 player market owning about 62% of the market as of Dec 2006. However, the introduction of rival music players, as well as music cell phones, have been slowly eating away iPod’s market share.

Their focus on product innovation as an end-to-end integrator has enabled Apple to control the complete user experience, resulting in a product line that works well together and looks great! The challenge with product innovations is that it is possible for fast followers to catch up and leave the innovator in the dust. Looks like Apple has learned from its history, and is staying at the top of its innovation game.

As I was looking at the innovation ingredients that make Apple a great innovator, I found this 2004 BusinessWeek interview with Steve Jobs. I believe it succinctly highlights the attributes that contribute to Apple’s success in Steve’s words. However, it is also important to note Steve Jobs’ contribution to Apple’s success. Innovation alone does not generate growth — strong leadership is required. Apple is certainly flourishing under Steve Jobs.

• Stay centered
  

  “You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe.”

• Know yourself
  

  “When I got back here, Apple had forgotten who we were. Remember that “Think Different” ad campaign we ran [featuring great innovators from Einstein to Muhammad Ali to Gandhi]. It was certainly for customers to some degree, but it was even more for Apple itself.”

• Know your business, your customer and your market
  

  “And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”

• Know your purpose
  

  “… And our primary goal here is to make the world’s best PCs — not to be the biggest or the richest. We have a second goal, which is to always make a profit — both to make some money but also so we can keep making those great products.”

• Stay committed
  

  “We hire people who want to make the best things in the world. You’d be surprised how hard people work around here. They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be. People care so much, and it shows.”

  Fortune also announced Apple as the most admired company for innovation in 2006, with Google coming in second. Looking through their timeline, it is obvious that Apple has had periods of intense technical and stylistic innovation, as it is embedded in their culture. However, in times without focused leadership, products, such as the Newton, haven’t always thrived. I for one, will be adding iPhone to my Christmas wish list.

  Technorati Tags: Apple, innovation

Kodak has apparently released an internal video for external viewing, which currently has over 100,000 views on the YouTube site. It is quite invigorating, and I hope you will enjoy the video as well. Plus, I figured this is a good opportunity to test incorporating video to my blog

Though the commercial is impressive, and purposeful with their intent to recapture the “Kodak Moment”, I do question their ability to be successful. They are quite an innovative company. And, one cannot forget their memorable slogans, starting with the slogan for their first simple camera introduced in 1888 you press the button, we do the rest.

Kodak also has been struggling for the past several years, especially when it came to digital technologies. They have been acquiring companies, selling them, outsourcing their manufacturing of digital cameras, and overall restructuring the company to regain the market. I hope they will be able to live up to this advertisement.

Technorati Tags: Kodak