In late May I presented as part of a panel at The Conference Board's Conference on Growth and Innovation. (link to my presentation)

In
listening to the many other presentations on how large companies
including Whirlpool, OSRAM Sylvania, IBM, Cargill, DDB, Avaya and Dow
Corning are encouraging and managing innovation, it became very clear
that there are a core set of best practices

• visible senior executive sponsorship
• diversity within teams and across the initiative
• cross-business participation
• latitude granted to the innovators – acceptance of failure
• adequate time and resources provided to innovators
• idea sharing.

Here are some quotes:

Customers are
clueless about what they don’t have so the customer should be the
sounding board, not who you ask first. You observe their workarounds. –
Whirlpool’s Director of Advanced Concepts and Technologies

Procter
and Gamble (IBM’s client) now wants innovation to come from outside the
company – a radical change. Others will follow their
leadership. – IBM’s VP of Intellectual Property and Standards

We
are changing our service business from people/time to asset based, i.e,
build something for a customer and then sell it to others – IBM’s VP of Intellectual Property and Standards

OSRAM Sylvania’s Director of Corp. Innovation Management

This
was most interesting for what I learned about OSRAM Sylvania’s efforts
in solid state lighting. Lightbulbs will be replaced with electronic
devices. LEDs are already more efficient than all incandescent and some
fluorescent lamps and by 2010 will be more efficient than all
fluorescent lamps. Sylvania has big internal problems with this since
it directly threatens their existing lighting businesses.

How to make innovation work:

• Manage the flow of ideas to evaluation to execution (especially the first step)
• Give credibility to idea solicitation
• Don’t discourage people with bad ideas
• Senior executive support
• Failure must be an option
• Beware of Christensen’s “tyranny of the customer” else you’ll improve but not innovate

Dana Anderson, President and CEO of DDB Chicago read 40 books on innovation and distilled them down to:

• Creativity is self-initiated and therefore unanticipated by management
• Hire the best people
• Give them the resources and space they need
• Create a culture that shares ideas
• Make sure people are rewarded

She also quoted from Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, and, of course, Guy Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries (“eat like a bird, poop like an elephant”).

Frans Johansson, Author of The Medici Effect

• The
  most profitable innovation comes from the intersection of fields and
  unlikely combinations. People at the intersection come up with more and
  better ideas. 
• Only 14% of new business launches were
  based on this kind of innovation but they accounted for 61% of the
  profit from all new business launches
• The more unlikely the combination, the more likely the idea is groundbreaking.
• Richard Branson lost money on every artist signed to Virgin
  records except for Mike Oldfield whose album Tubular Bells combined
  rock and classical music
• Implanting a gene from the Golden Orb Weaver spider into a
  goat resulted in goat milk with fibers that can be used to make
  extremely strong and flexible materials
• MTV is now looking for a way to combine Latin and Country music
  because they discovered that so many people, especially in Texas,
  listen to both.
• Diversity in team composition is necessary for innovation.
• Diverse teams take longer to start producing so you need to be patient.
• Evaluate ideas based on their merits, not based on who generated them

When it came to application of these innovation best practices there was conflicting advice. For example, Margot Morrell, author of Shackleton’s Way
said “A sharply clashing personality or someone who thrived in a
different corporate culture may hinder your work” but Dana Anderson,
President and CEO of DDB Chicago said “Hire an oddball.” Lots of people
said, “it’s okay to fail, you have to have lots of failures to get some
successes but it will be worth it.” But just as many said “kill
the unprofitable ideas as early as you can.”

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“I came to the Reframing Conflict course with some hesitation and questions concerning
it's value. I can honestly say that I have enjoyed each session and
will now look at conflict situations in a different frame of mind.

Thank you for your time and the excellent presentations.”

- Jack Keaney

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“As a
parent of one of the Willauer students, I would like to thank you for
allowing them space for their project. Because our kids go to school on
an island, much of what they do there can be somewhat
mysterious……especially when they're at that communicative teen
stage ( “what did you do today?”….”stuff”).  Having the blog to
read was a wonderful way for us parents to watch this exctiting project
unfold. I have saved every word of the blog so my daughter will have
the memory of this wonderful experience forever.
 

Thank you so much!”

 

– Trish Byrne, mother of Alana

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Here is a link to a sweet story
in the Cambridge chronicle about the bird that imprinted itself on me
last week. I posted this story on my weblog and it was picked up by a
few bloggers who found it amusing. One of them forwarded it to the
editors at the Cambridge Chronicle. It just goes to show how blogging
can lead to exposure.

This bird makes a cheep date

By Sarah Andrews/ Chronicle Staff

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Last week, Kathleen Gilroy had a bird on her head.

It all began while Gilroy stood chatting with a neighbor on
Chestnut Street. At some point during the conversation, a small, black
bird flew down to the sidewalk. After hopping around for a bit, it
glided up in the air and, in the words of Gilroy, “imprinted itself” on
her head.

On Monday, Gilroy recalled the dialogue that followed the bizarre
incident: “My neighbor said, 'I wish I had a camera.' And I said, 'Why
do you think this is happening?' And he said, 'I don't know, maybe [the
bird] likes you.'”

“So I walked around the corner to my house [on Magazine Street]
and the bird stayed on my head the whole time. I was just walking and
there it was, on my head,” Gilroy said.

While Gilroy admits she hasn't seen the bird in a few days, the
relationship did extend past the initial encounter. For three days and
four nights, the juvenile bird lingered in a tree in Gilroy's front
yard. And despite protests from Gilroy's English cocker spaniels,
Stanley and Dusty, whenever Gilroy would go outside to garden, the bird
would appear and perch on her head.

Figuring out how to get back inside the house was a task because
she didn't want to frighten or hurt the bird. Gilroy demonstrated her
removal method to a reporter.
She would start by putting her hand near her head to coerce the
bird onto her finger. Then she would place her finger near a patio
umbrella, at which point the bird would step off her digit onto that.
Then Gilroy would make a dash for the back door. 
“At one point, it became kind of a problem,” Gilroy said. “It
wouldn't let me go back in the house … It really wanted to be with
me, but I didn't want it in the house. Again, the dogs were insane.”

At a loss for how to deal with her new friend, Gilroy turned to
cyberspace. As CEO of the Otter Group, a company that builds online
learning programs and information “blogging” networks, Gilroy is no
stranger to the “blogosphere” and keeps a blog of her own. To solicit
advice on the bird  situation, she posted an entry aptly titled,
“There's a bird on my head.”

While at least three people have seen the entry and linked their
blogs to the page, Gilroy got only one practical suggestion. 
“I would call the National Audubon Society,” an anonymous writer
wrote. “They have several rehabilitation centers that can care for a
bird that has imprinted itself on a person.”

Linda Cocca, the coordinator of the Massachusetts Audubon wildlife
information line, said Tuesday that she's heard of similar incidences
before and that typically birds that imprint themselves on people have
been caged or raised by humans.

But after viewing a photo of the bird, neither Cocca nor the
society's ornithologist, Simon Perkins, could identify the species of
bird, due to the poor picture quality.

But Cocca said she suspected it was a caged bird that had escaped.
The bird was too small to be a fly-ready crow and its beak was not
yellow, ruling out the starling option.

“It doesn't look like anything wild,” said Cocca. “[Caged birds]
are very used to people … they and wild birds raised by humans have
been known to imprint themselves on humans” though they can be trained
not to do it.

Contact Sarah Andrews at sandrews@cnc.com.

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I presented at the Icohere conference on collaborative learning this
week, and during the follow-up question and answer session, I received
this interesting question from Adrian Ward. Shimon Rura has provided an
excellent answer which I thought I would also reference here:

Adrian's question: Thanks for
opening my eyes to the possibilities of enterprise knowledge and
learning applications for blogging.  I haven't been that impressed
with the possibilities until now because of the difficulty in changing
peoples' behavior, including the need for many managers to think
they're still in control (as mentioned by several others here). 
That kind of control culture needs to change and most enterprises
realize it, but it's taking an unbelievably long time to make this
evolution because of how deeply embedded these emotional needs are for
us intellectually strong but emotionally weak humans that drive our
innate need for control. 

So the only way to bring about these changes in behavior, as I see it,
is to make it so easy for them that the change happens naturally,
without a focused change management effort (which rarely works
anyway).  But with enterprise RSS, I can see greater possibilities
for knowledge sharing and collaborative learning because of how much
easier this can make it for people.  They don't even have to give
up their precious email if they don't want to.  They can blog just
like they write email and read others blogs just like they read email,
without any great change in behavior. 

And management can still maintain a semblance of control by inserting
their “rules” into the system that determine the behavior of the
system.  In fact, there are some rules they should be inserting
into the system even in a complex/self organizing system-based
organization.  Even complex systems are based on sets of rules or
principles that drive the behavior of the system.  Leaders need to
co-create these rules with the other players in the system in order to
ensure that the whole system is focused on the strategic intent of the
enterprise.  So this architecture could enable either a control
culture or a self-organizing, participative, or collaborative culture,
at least as far as I can see it now, given my limited knowledge of
enterprise RSS.

So the prospects definitely look brighter to me.  I answered “no”
to your question about who has an enterprise RSS at your keynote this
morning, but you're probably right that I will have one within a year,
just like you predicted. 

I am also helping a client develop a knowledge sharing system (system
in the largest “whole systems” nature of that word, not just an
automated tool).  Blogging and wiki's are going to be part of that
system, but now I can see how they can be a more important part of it,
and help enable some of the behavioral changes needed.

But I am still trying to figure out how blogs and wiki's best
complement and interface with each other, and how an enterprise RSS
would work with both of them if they were all part of a whole systems
architecture.  My initial thoughts on them are that blogs are more
for recording ongoing individual streams of thoughts while wiki's
enable collaborative development of a core body of knowledge that gets
continually enhanced as people think of new twists to a given subject
or theme, have new experiences with it, or see the subject differently
than it has been presented so far in the wiki.  I can see how
blogs could act as a means of enhancing this core BoK wiki, at least
conceptually, but right now I can't envision how the technology would
support this..  Any further thoughts on the relationship between
blogs, wiki's, and enterprise RSS, both technology and process-wise?

Shimon's Answer:
Adrian seems to have a very accurate understanding of the distinction
between blogs and wikis.  Blogs are ideal for news and development
of relationships between people and teams.  Wikis are best for
developing a shared body of knowledge.

One difference between wikis and blogs that affects Enterprise RSS is
the degree to which content modifications stand on their own. 
With a blog, each post is separate, and while you might understand a
post better if you've been following the blog for a while, you can
usually just subscribe and develop your understanding
incrementally.  With a wiki, on the other hand, a new participant
will typically start on overview pages that link to other pages in the
Wiki, eventually getting more involved in discussions around highly
specific topics.  Good wikis encourage “gardening”, where people
who are deeply familar with the wiki organize it and write
introductions that help newbies find their ways.

These different goals imply that the meaning of news is different
between blogs and wikis.  News in a blog means a brand new content
item.  News in a wiki can mean a new page, but it can also mean
edits to an existing page, discussion about those edits, or something
semantically insignificant like a renaming.  A long-term wiki
participant will have a stake in watching all edits around her area of
focus, but see no value in improved newbie-introduction pages.  A
newbie will find the detailed recent-changes list incomprehensible, and
seek the introduction pages.

One straighforward way to connect a blog and a wiki is to let people
build a shared, organized “greatest hits” directory on a wiki, linking
different categories to blog posts.  In a knowledge sharing
system, this is one approach to facilitating the social process whereby
ideas originating in individuals' minds become part of the collective
culture, enabling others to spread and refine the ideas.

Back to enterprise RSS.  Enterprise RSS is an engine for filtering
news items and delivering them to people for whom they are
relevant.  Because the nature of a news item in a blog is
different from in a wiki, they will both have different audiences and
different delivery/reading styles.  A blog reader might use her
aggregator to read all posts, never viewing the blog website.  But
someone who sees that paragraph three of SomeCustomerStrategy has been
replaced will probably need to see that page in context in order to
understand what has changed.  On the other hand, some wikis might
evolve in increments that are more free-standing.  It really
depends on the particular wiki.

Here is a blog post I wrote that can be mostly summed up as if it's not something that people will review and edit over a long period of time, don't put it on the wiki. 
That post was mostly born of my own frustration about a workplace wiki
that became the place to post everything, because the only alternative
was email.  And here's another (slightly more technical) post comparing blogs and wikis.

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Dr. Josh Weiss points out that, as negotiators, we make assumptions all the time. These assumptions can
quickly derail a process unless they are clarified and tested with the
other negotiator as the process unfolds.

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