Technology and Organizations

This is a continued response to my infrastructure audit: What activities does an innovation infrastructure for open innovation need to support? My prior short answer was that “innovation infrastructure must keep the project’s top goals… top of mind…” Here I provide the promised longer answer and point to both team and organizational activities. For the organizational activities, I focus on the new book, Robert’s Rules of Innovation.

Team Activities:

Gibson and Gibbs give us a summary of the innovation activities needed by innovation teams. They note:

The ability of teams to innovate depends on how well they generate, import, share, interpret, and apply technological and market knowledge, particularly of local markets, economies, and customers. That knowledge is a combination of information, experience, context, interpretation, and reflection (Davenport, De Long, and Beers, 1998). It must be openly shared across contexts through relationships and networks, and there must be confidence in the value of that knowledge for achieving the objectives of the collaboration (Kanter, 1988). Once these requirements have been met, innovation involves dissemination and application of the knowledge, including combining and integrating it to develop novel insights, solutions, processes, or products (Obstfeld, 2005).

Applying the above to an innovation infrastructure suggests that we need to apply systems savvy and weave together the technology, organizational practice, and human motivations. We need systems that allow for the wide part of the innovation funnel: a wide and diverse set of information ideas. At the same time, we need systems that then allow the innovation project to be effectively and efficiently managed. I suspect that a project dashboard (next post) that shows both current project status and has a variety of news and discussion streams is one way to both keep project goals in mind and support the wider ideation activities.

Organizational Activities:

Robert Brands (with Martin Kleinman) recently released Robert’s Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival. I’ve been following Robert (here and here) for a while. Now I have a one-stop opportunity for his insights. Speaking at the organization level (with specifics also related to teams), he notes the following as “the imperatives to deliver profitable growth through innovation”:

Robert’s Rules of Innovation helps you develop both energy and structure around organizational innovation activities. The presentation provides a broad set of examples: from how to create an innovation culture to a clear discussion of intellectual property issues. I was especially happy to see a discussion around the evidenced based management of innovation:

Observation, measurement, and tracking of NPD results are essential to optimal ROI. Create your baselines first, with initial observations and measurements. Then capture the time to each gate, the time spent inside each gate, and so on. (p. 36)

Building on the idea of a dashboard within our innovation infrastructure, we need ways to track our experiments. Brands asks, “Do you have a set of metrics to serve as an innovation dashboard and track your innovation activities?” (p. 43). These metrics may be general (applicable to all innovation efforts — participate in the Innovation Coach survey here), or they may be specific to the particular effort. We also have to be aware that how we expect an innovation to play out may not be what happens in the wild — thus our observations need to be openended.

Have you had success, or even surprise, in tracking an innovation? What did you do that put you in a position for effective tracking? Do you know of any summaries of surprising innovation outcomes? Comments and links appreciated below.

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What critical innovation activities must be supported by an innovation infrastructure? Short answer is that innovation infrastructure must keep the project’s top goals… top of mind, through…. TOP Management. Whether you’re working with a group of enthusiasts or a formal network of company partners, keeping the team moving in the same direction is key. (I’ll take on the longer answer in Part 2.)

Wednesday I have the privilege of speaking at a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The workshop’s goal is to develop projects related to reducing time and cost overruns in large innovation systems (space, aviation, etc.). The audience includes engineers, systems designers, and academics from across engineering, economics, and organization science. My 15 minutes of fame will be focused on the role of innovation infrastructure — built with technology support and organizational practice — to help make large efforts feel small. This post is my trial run.

I went into the project thinking about how, whether, the needs of community-based innovations were different than those of large formal projects. My conclusion is that even though the community/enthusiast-based projects may be smaller in terms of investment, they are likely to be larger in terms of perspective. This breadth is both a benefit and a burden.

Breadth is a benefit in that innovation needs breadth to help us find new ways to put together solutions. Breadth is a burden in that our focus must be narrow to succeed. Informal communities of enthusiasts are likely to have more varied goals and less oversight to keep them on a particular path.

NASA’s Mark Moore helped me understand the innovation importance of focus on top goals. I had contacted Mark (thanks Bob!) as he was the lead on NASA’s Puffin single-person vertical take-off and landing project. The Puffin project is a great innovation example as it moved quickly and so far is tracking on its design goals. Contrast this with the many delays we see in larger space and aviation projects.

Mark’s says it is critical to keep the top goals on the table throughout the project. The tension here is that an innovation project is likely to be made up of experts from a variety of different areas. (Recall that breadth is good for innovation… but also recall that breadth means people may bring differing goals to the project.) Each area of engineering wants to do its best, though what the project may need is trade-offs across the best possible outcomes. Mark’s phrase: “Every optimal aircraft is filled with non-optimal tradeoffs.”

Both formal and informal innovation projects need to focus on their top goals:

..don’t confuse collaborative innovation with a headless organization. Leadership still plays a critical role in mobilizing and aligning any organization. But the role of the leader is not to create the innovation but to create the environment in which it will thrive (p. 17, The Innovation Zone).

People need to understand the ultimate design goals and how the innovation as a whole must support those goals.

How can TOP Management support our ability to keep top goals, top of mind? TOP Management is the intertwining of technology, organizational practice, and people. In the Puffin case there was an understanding of the human desire to optimize around one’s area of expertise -- and how to manage that tendency via particular practices and simple technologies:

We did not use any advanced collaboration tools, but simply email and WebEx conferencing. The key to our successful collaboration was to keep a small core team that had very clear objectives, with the detailed discipline efforts tied together by a top-down systems analysis understanding of the design problem.

Technology played a supporting role, using tech to support the focus on the top goal. Email served to document decisions and keep track of the trade-offs. (Value of documentation, even in face-to-face meetings.)

While the O and the P of TOP management were highlights of Puffin’s success, I expect that technology could play a stronger role, especially in larger projects. Project communications and workspaces can be designed to highlight the top goals both formally and informally (for no clear reason I keep thinking of Google’s changing logos). Technology could also support the organizational practice of evaluating trade-offs vis a vis the top goals. As ideas role in, the “crowd” can give electronic thumbs up or down similar to the voting possible in some innovation platforms (e.g., Spigit), “liking” on Facebook, or Digg. Puffin was a small project and so I doubt if hardwiring practice would have added much, but for larger projects hardwiring the systems focus on the top goals may be necessary to keep goals from diffusing as you move away from top leadership.

Key to innovation infrastructure is the development, focus, and support of overarching system goals.

“First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” (John F. Kennedy). This was a clear goal statement and ran counter to what many of his advisers thought was prudent (audio track from a meeting where the issues are debated). Many of the advisers wanted to take a building block approach. They wanted to know more about things like the the surface of the moon (would the lander sink) and the implications of weightlessness. Kennedy, however, had a better understanding of political and human needs. You need a clear goal and a clear metric of success. We went to the moon, on time.

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What’s the best support system for open, collaborative innovation? There are sites to help you find collaborators (e.g., Build It with Me) and there are sites focused on collaboration around specific areas of interest (e.g., DIY Drones, Local Motors, & AeroInnovate). Should you add collaboration to community of interest pages or should projects build their own collaboration spaces (perhaps with Google Sites, Huddle, or within the enterprise, Brainstorm)? These are the questions my Managing Technology & Innovation students will be addressing in their Spring term (focusing on Electric Aircraft collaborations). But first, I’m going to spend some posts following my own advice: doing an audit.

First audit question: Who are the participants? Ans: Companies, individuals, and teams.

Henry Chesbrough, David Teece, Eric von Hippel and others have drilled holes in the traditional innovation funnel. “With knowledge now widely distributed, companies cannot rely entirely on their own research, but should acquire inventions or intellectual property from other companies when it advances the business model.” Instead of companies having closed R&D processes where ideas are generated and developed within the walls of the company, we now see ideas coming from non-research focused employees, customers & users; collaborations across past competitors; alliances; and acquisitions as being the dynamics of R&D.

At the same time, individuals and teams are seeing the value of small batch entrepreneurship, hackerspaces, and the Do It Ourselves (DIO) economy. Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson presents this shift as “The Next Industrial Revolution:”

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

In the case of electric aircraft the list of participants is long, and diverse: Enthusiast organizations, foundations, and government agencies (e.g., EAA, NASA, CAFE Foundation, FAA); companies like Boeing and Yuneec; and component firms and inventors (see the preliminary program for Cafe Foundation’s 2010 symposium for a flavor).

Next up: What activities does an open innovation infrastructure need to support? Hint: I’ll be building from Gibson & Gibb’s discussion around innovation teams. Thanks in advance for comments that suggest sources outlining the activities that companies, individuals, and teams need to be supported by an innovation infrastructure and/or tools that support these activities. Personal favorites or ones to avoid especially appreciated. For some background, check out Open Innovators and their list of platforms.

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In August 2009 Stewart Mader wrote a blog post focused on expanding our thinking of enterprise wikis beyond wikipedia-style documents. As I think about many of the E2.0 projects my organizational design students are taking on this quarter, I’d like to share Stewart’s 8 ideas here and see if we can’t add a couple.

Here are Stewart’s 8 (please see his full post for his explanations. Comments and links here are my own):

• 1. Meeting Agendas
• 2. Meeting Minutes & Action Items
• 3. Project Management

These top three are my top three as well. A wiki is “a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser….” They are my top three partially because the use is so straight-forward. We all know what the task is; this is just expansion of how the task gets done. They are also my top three because they are so important — and yet often overlooked in organizational practice. No agenda means that it’s impossible to come prepared to the meeting, yet agendas are left out every day. A wiki approach is emergent and social (and thus at the heart of Enterprise 2.0) and intertwines a simple technology into the critical organizational practices of good project management. Please see an earlier post for some basic examples.

• 4. Gather Input — Keep in mind that wikis are all editable websites/documents. This means Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets are in the mix (as well as other web-based document tools provided by other companies). I see at least two dimensions here: gathering input from a group of people (Stewart’s focus) and gathering information from yourself. Regarding the latter, I recently avoiding paying over $100 for an iPhone/on-line logbook capability by building it myself using Google Forms. Any basic survey can be built in Forms and then the form tool deposits the information directly into the on-line spreadsheet (also available off-line if you are using Google Gears.) The iPhone/smartphone capability comes from saving the survey’s web address as an icon on the screen.
• 5. Build Documentation -- I see this one as being useful both in terms of meeting output and in terms of all written work-products. I have moved from being an evangelist of wikis as how to run group writing efforts to being not so passively aggressive about wiki-based group writing as my only approach. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that you often eventually have to move the document into a real word processor for final formatting -- but I bet this won’t always be the case (and I suspect isn’t the case for purpose-built tools like ZOHO Writer -- hmmm. I’ll have to check out the Microsoft Word support…). I’ll also be first to acknowledge that you and your co-authoring team have to become comfortable with sharing “alpha drafts.”
• 6. Assemble and Reuse Information -- Link away! Not only can you cut and paste easily if you have access to all of your organization’s documents — but you can also help your documents live through links. Linking (rather than cutting and pasting) means that the material stays in sync.
• 7. Employee Handbook -- I was in a waiting room for a while Sunday night and happened to sit by a TV playing Undercover Boss — Waste Management. In the episode, the President & COO of Waste Management, Larry O’Donnell, anonymously takes on a variety of entry-level jobs within his company. This is an eye-opening experience for him and he seeks ways to reduce some of the frustrations he finds in the field. What if he opened the Employee Handbook up as a wiki, at least for comments (and maybe they do…)? Is there risk for misuse? Sure there is a risk, but according to Andrew McAfee (Chapter 6), the incidence of bad behavior on wikis and blogs seems to be inconsequential — these are typically not anonymous.
• 8. Knowledge Base — Stewart distinguishes this use from Documentation in that he faces it externally. He gives an example of a moderated (the company checks changes before they are added) wiki that allows customers to see the help wiki and make contributions.

So, how many items can we add to Stewart’s list? I suspect the number will become quite large as more and more of our work moves to the web, but for a start:

• 9. Make Decisions -- Not only can we gather input, but we can make the decision via the wiki as well. The result is that we can always go back and track how we got to the decision we made.

You knew I’d get to ten…

• 10. Work — Over the last year, my bias has become wiki unless proven otherwise. My documents are in the cloud and I share files or full folders as default. As a result I am pushed to practice TOP Management (weaving together technology, organizations, people) as I think about the tools I have available, the practices the working group should focus on, and the skill set of the people in the group (see discussion of how to do a team audit here). Ideally our transfer of material to the cloud/wiki/team portal occurs passively — as part of just doing the task — rather than as a separate action. For example, if we are communicating via email with attachments of our working document, we have to actively save and sync our work. If we instead just work via the cloud/wiki/team portal the work and conversation are already there — passively with no extra effort.

What I missed?

Common Craft’s Explanation of Cloud Computing:

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Andrew McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

Piazzza provides E2.0 for interaction between fellow students and faculty. Interaction and emergence are at the heart of modern business, and ideally, modern teaching. I have used a threaded discussion approach for “course questions and comments” since 2000. Since 2001 I have been adamant that email is for health and personal grading issues only (for more on my thoughts on email, please see Kill Email). Questions and comments should be made where all can see, provide support, and gain value. My approach is an application of transparency for learning. Piazzza takes a big E2.0 step forward from a threaded-discussion list by being responsive to student needs and taking emergence to the next level.

Pooja Nath (ex-Facebook developer, current Stanford Graduate School of Business student) approached me this Summer about being a beta site for Piazzza. Immediately I could see the value Piazzza provides to the students both from its base design and via the control it provides the students in terms of how they each individually experience the tool and the contributed information.

In the threaded discussion approach (old form), students had one level of control — they could either subscribe to the posts, or not. No option for digests. No option to only follow a particular thread. The result could be 20+ fragmented emails, and then a search through the website to find the full stream. Even the full streams were disorganized as students didn’t always follow best practice in terms of sticking to a thread’s topic. This was a nightmare and drove some students to ignore the material, which likely cost them some points and connections to useful information.

Piazzza realizes that not all questions/discussion have the same value to each student. Piazzza allows students to make the subscription choice — but at a more granular level. Once you’ve opted in, you see just the initial question/comment via email. At that point you get to choose whether or not to “bookmark” the question/comment. Only if bookmarked do you receive notification of the rest of the stream. (Piazzza.com is always available to see/search the full set of comments/questions.)

All of us must be systems designers to be effective in our current environment. We must make our own choices about how to weave together technology, organization, and people dimensions of our work. I feel that Piazzza is giving my students greater opportunity to make the best design decisions for themselves. Neither the technology or our practices are silver bullets and Piazzza allows us to use the technology to design practice at the class level (how we promote particular uses in class) and at the level of the individual (how individuals choose to interact with the material). We are integrating the technology and the practice.

Designed by a student, for students. Clean interface. Anonymity when needed, credit for providing answers to question. Engagement through tracking speed to answer. Ability to give thanks for answers. I’m a fan and the feedback from the students is that they are fans as well. We are still working on the organization/people intersection (anonymity means that not all the questions are well considered; students forget to search to see if the answer is already available).

The students are also quick to add suggestions around the technical feature set — recall that we are beta testers. For example, they wanted, and received, more control over the email flow and the ability to answer a question anonymously (I’m not sure how I feel about that — but so far so good). They also wanted, and received, greater clarity around new items.

Pooja and her team are right on the mark with their product. They ask for feedback, follow the use patterns, and are quick to make improvements. I’m looking forward to using Piazzza in all my classes!

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