A642.9.3.RB - The Innovation Experience

A642.9.3.RB - The Innovation Experience

Reflect on the entirety of this learning experience.

Identify the three elements that had the largest influence on your perspective on innovation.

            I think that innovating and the ideation process are much harder than I had initially thought. Having been part of process improvements and new process implementations I knew that innovation and change in general are not easy things but the whole creative thinking process that I’ve been accustomed to is just so much more within the innovation process. To narrow it down to three elements that had the largest influence on my perspective, I’d go with: building a bigger brain, Christensen’s disruptive innovation, and ideation skills.

Define the elements and why they are important.

            The first element is building a bigger brain. McKeown describes this as [e]ven a creative genius cannot have all the best solutions to all of the world’s problems. Everyone has something to offer to the process of innovation. (2014). I love this idea. It gives what has always made sense to me a name and a process within itself. Bringing a room full of the right people together to solve a problem collectively just makes the most sense. One person doesn’t build an airplane, it takes many people with many different backgrounds and skill sets to design, program, finance, support, and construct one single airplane. All of these people coming together to solve problems around this airplane just makes sense. Building a better brain isn’t just about involving more people. It can also be about developing the creative skills of people who become involved. (2014). I love that the innovation isn’t limited to just the product but can also be a part of the development of the product.

            The second element is Christensen’s disruptive innovation and how it actually has a place in the improvement of processes and products. Understanding the room for disruption is useful whether you are trying to disrupt an existing situation (to your advantage) or defending an existing situation (to your advantage) (McKeown, 2014). I relate to this by comparing it to the idea of Devil’s Advocate in a problem solving collaboration. By bringing productive dissent into a problem solving situation, we make sure that the entire room isn’t just agreeing to get out of the room. By bringing in the disruptor role, we check our ideas against realities and regulations; zooming out to make sure that we’re solving the right problems and not just building something cool because it’s…well…cool. Disruptive innovation makes sure that our resources and support is going to the right project and that the subsequent innovation is effective and meaningful to the organization for which it was created.

            The third element is ideation skills. Idea generating skills are crucial to an organization’s success. They are the stepping stones to decisions and support. Implemented well, these ideas are transformed into improved business performance (Canfield & Smith, 2011). The basis of any good innovation – or organizational change is the thought that goes into it. Generating ideas; brainstorming with colleagues helps to narrow the thoughts into ideas that will spawn the next new thing. This also flows into effective creative thinking skills. Effective process improvement is all about generating lots of good ideas about possible solutions, choosing and confirming the best, and implementing decisions that improve the target processes. Effective creative thinking skills are all about generating lots of good ideas about possible new products and services to add to the company revenues and profit. (2011).

Discuss how you will use them in the future.

            I will have an opportunity to use all of the above elements in the very near future. I was traveling for business this week as part of the newly formed supply chain culture council. We are a group of about 15 people from all levels: executive leadership, management, salary employee, and hourly employee. We are working toward coming up with and marketing our council to help educate and train our co-workers on the different cultures and tolerance at work and in life. We are in the process of building that bigger brain by bringing in all different people to develop a charter and structure for our council. In our meeting this week, I tried to implement productive disruptive innovation by asking questions and asking validation on some of the charter elements. We are all going to be constantly using our ideation and creative thinking skills to make this council effective, meaningful, productive, and different than other groups who have tried something similar. Culture takes generations to evolve and it’s not something we can just break down and infiltrate with new ideas overnight. Our ability to generate ideas is going to help us get our message out in a way that will be effective to as many people as possible.

References

Canfield. J. & Smith, G. (2011). Imagine: Ideation skills for improvement and innovation today. Holland, MI: Black Lake Press.

McKeown, M. (2014). The innovation book: How to manage ideas and execution for outstanding results. Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, United Kingdom. Pearson Education Limited.

A642.8.3.RB - How dangerous are Lean Start-ups?

A642.8.3.RB - How dangerous are Lean Start-ups?

The implications of lean startups and why they can be so disruptive to well-established, older, industry giants.

            Traditional start-ups generally include coming up with a business plan and pitching it to a bank or sponsor for financial backing. The life-span of a start-up is usually not very long, the exception are those start-ups that succeed. Recently, new “lean” start-ups have become more and more common. Blank describes these lean start-ups as a methodology [that] favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development (2013). When I look at this and how it could impact my organization, I think about a mouse (lean start-up) and an elephant (big companies like Boeing). The mouse is small and agile, it can get into spaces that an elephant can’t. It takes the elephant more time to move and maneuver. However, once the elephant gets moving, it can go fast and will trample the mouse that happens to get in the elephant’s path.

            The agility and flexibility of the lean start-up companies can be a benefit because it allows for the company to change the focus of a project. One of the critical differences is that while existing companies execute a business model, start-ups look for one. This distinction is at the heart of the lean start-up approach. It shapes the lean definition of a start-up: a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model (Blank, 2013). Instead of telling the public what it needs, a lean start-up looks for solutions they can come up with for problems they’ve found. If a lean start-up wants to get into the basket-weaving industry but upon talking to potential users of these baskets find out that what’s actually needed is wire baskets because they are less susceptible to rodents and mold issues – then they figure out how to manufacture the wire baskets instead. A traditional start-up would have already come up with a supplier of materials, a five-year business plan, and secured orders for their baskets. If the consumer changed their minds and wanted a wire basket at that point, the traditional start-up would have to scrap their plan and start over – or find new consumers. Although the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts—such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting”—have quickly taken root in the start-up world, and business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to teach them (2013).

Identify in detail, the elements that provide a unique competitive position and how to combat such an adversary.

            One of the elements of a unique competitive position is timing. Being ahead of the main players allows you to shape the market for your idea…timing cannot be so early that it will not work... [o]r too late to capture attention (McKeown, 2014). Another element is effective creative thinking. These skills are all about generating good ideas about possible new products and services that add to company revenues and profit (Canfield & Smith, 2011).  Another element is to have solid funding for a product. In order to do that, a start-up needs to remove as much risk and the known unknowns of the investment. It’s also important that a start-up be aware of and have a plan for disrupters. [This plan] often requires an industry-defying approach to doing business and an extraordinary commitment to ensuring that customers gain the benefits they’re seeking (Mount, 2013).

            It’s impossible to plan for every single disrupter or challenge to each start-up but creative thinking, being flexible, and understanding the consumer’s true needs go a long way in paving the way to a promising future for a business.

References

Blank, S. (2013). Why lean start-ups change everything. Harvard Business Review.91.5.65-72

Canfield. J. & Smith, G. (2011). Imagine: Ideation skills for improvement and innovation today. Holland, MI: Black Lake Press.

McKeown, M. (2014). The innovation book: How to manage ideas and execution for outstanding results. Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, United Kingdom. Pearson Education Limited.

Mount, M. (2013). Kiva the Disruptor. Harvard Business Revies.90.12.74-80.

A642.7.3.RB - Leading through Disruptive Times

A642.7.3.RB - Leading through Disruptive Times

Reflect on the relationship between innovation and disruptive innovation from the perspective of leadership.

What would you do to help navigate your organization through each of these situations?

            Innovation and disruptive innovation can almost be synonymous. Innovation itself is a disruption of the status quo. Disruptive innovation is less a single event than a process that plays out over time, sometimes quickly and completely, but other times slowly and incompletely (Wessel, 2012). Either way, something changes. Something about how we do business today will change. Innovation and disruptive innovation are ways that we try to control the changes so that we can see what’s coming.

            Navigating through either one, innovation or disruptive innovation, would be complex and take well thought out strategies. For innovation, something that came out of a controlled environment like a workshop, I would navigate the changes by using creative thinking strategies such as Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. As I discussed last week, the six hats are: White Hat (Neutral/objective), Yellow Hat (Optimism/values/benefits), Black Hat (Judgement/Devil’s advocate), Green Hat (Possibilities/alternatives/new ideas), Red Hat (Feelings/hunches/intuition), and Blue Hat (Managing the thinking process/the control hat) (Canfield & Smith, 2011). This thinking strategy would allow the group to see the idea through the different lenses of the thinking hats. It enables discussion and collaboration. For disruptive innovation, which seems almost more aggressive, the thinking strategy would be just as important because when organizations look to disrupt their own products in an effort to beat the competition. According to Wessel, there are three things to do: identify the strengths of your disrupter’s business model; identify your own relative advantages; evaluate the conditions that would help or hinder the disrupter from co-opting your current advantages in the future (2012).

Now, consider the likelihood of both occurring at the same time; would this change the way you navigated or lead the organization through these scenarios?

            The likelihood of both innovation and disruptive innovation happening at the same time are actually more likely in my organization than not. This would change some of the ways I navigated or lead the organization through the scenarios. With the many organizations working their own innovation projects, we are all impacted when a disrupter hits. For example, in the tooling organization I worked in, our main innovation project was based on alloys and finding better ways to make tooling to build airplanes. We were all working and focused on our own projects when the lithium ion battery fires happened in the 787 program. We were all suddenly on the task of finding a way to fix this issue. Granted, that is more of a safety innovation but it changed the way we built the 787 and especially how we install and contain the batteries. The necessity for innovation in this case was the disrupter – as will all safety concerns. This makes me think that disrupter innovations aren’t always about new business but sometimes about saving an existing business. If we weren’t able to find a solution to the 787 battery issue, that program would have been a huge and costly aerospace failure for Boeing. [S]ome radical innovations have very little impact on the success of the people who made them work. It is also often the case that relatively small innovations have a hugely disruptive impact (McKeown, 2014).

References

Canfield. J. & Smith, G. (2011). Imagine: Ideation skills for improvement and innovation today. Holland, MI: Black Lake Press.

McKeown, M. (2014). The innovation book: How to manage ideas and execution for outstanding results. Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, United Kingdom. Pearson Education Limited.

Wessel, M. & Christenson, C.M. (2012) Surviving disruption, Harvard Business Review.12.10. 56-64.