Technology and Organizations

Neeraj of the ideas-innovation blog and I seem to be coming to the same conclusion — this is an exciting and vocal time in terms how individuals are seen to interact with innovation.

We’re in good company. As Neeraj notes “I feel there is a similarity between the Idea proposed by Seth Godin of people joining Tribes/communities for a meaning & being relevant & in Tim Brown’s Idea of Consumers becoming participants.”

I agree. Over the last week I’ve shown Tim Brown’s IdeasProject interview and Seth Godin’s TED talk in my Technology and Innovation Management class. My last post also focused on the Brown interview. Neeraj gives me the opportunity to continue the discussion here.

Here are the parallels:

Tim Brown:

On one level, you could argue that we all have to become design thinkers. It’s one of those social skills that we all need, that we all have to be able to figure out how to solve problems creatively and to participate, in order to be able to participate.

Seth Godin:

What exactly do the people who are watching this do every day? And I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything…. we try to find something that’s itching to be changed, and we change it.

That’s what we do for a living now, all of us I think, is find something worth changing and then assemble tribes, that assemble tribes, that spread the idea and spread the idea…

Neeraj and I come to the idea from slightly different directions, but the key point is the same: technologies are giving people, all of us, the ability to innovate and participate in systems not broadly possible before. We all have to become systems designers to effectively engage with our work and social environments.

My plan is to keep this discussion going. We’re asking a lot of people to become systems designers on the fly. Not everyone has systems savvy. What are the capabilities we all need, and how can we get them?

The WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz asks, The Science Prize: Innovation or Stealth Advertising? The subtitle continues, Rewards for Advancing Knowledge Have Blossomed Recently, but Some Say They Don’t Help Solve Big Problems.

Prizes and competitions are not new, though interest is growing according to a McKinsey report (3.5 MB pdf) that Hotz cites. McKinsey assessed 219 large prizes ($100K or more) and a commercial database of more than 30,000 awards. Hotz’ article describes the vast breadth of current approaches, but in my Managing Technology and Innovation class I like to give even more perspective by going back to England’s 1714 “.. act for providing a publick reward for such person or persons as shall discover longitude at Sea.” The reward was £20,000. I also show clips from the Nova’s Battle of the X-Planes. This documentary outlines the competition between Boeing and Lockheed-Martin for the then (and now?) largest military contract: a possible $200 Billion. Lockheed-Martin won on a “best-value” basis.

Why the growing focus on prizes? From Hotz:

In growing numbers, corporate sponsors are embracing the prize challenge as a safe, inexpensive way to farm out product research, at a time when tight credit and business cutbacks have slowed innovation. Venture-capital investments have dropped by almost half since last year, reaching the lowest level since 1997, the National Venture Capital Association recently reported. “Here is a mechanism for off-balance-sheet risk-taking,” says Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation. “A corporation can put up a prize that is bold and audacious with very little downside. You only pay the winner. It is a fixed-price innovation.”

Prizes can be specific outcomes (like a method for finding longitude at sea after a six week voyage) or more general. Cisco has used their i-Prize to uncover new business ideas. However, they built that prize based on their internal success with the I-Zone,

Cisco’s internal innovation Wiki…. Any one of Cisco’s 65,000 employees can post business ideas, work collaboratively with other Cisco employees to develop an idea, and, if lucky, be a part of launching a new business. I-Zone was working so well, Cisco wanted to open the concept to the public. “Why not at least give it a try, we thought,” Jouret says.

Prizes, like other management actions, fit in a system. Motivation to take part will exist to the extent that the prize offered has value to the participants (either extrinsic or intrinsic), to the extent that the participants believe that success is possible, and to the extent that participants trust that the prize will be awarded. This is basic motivation theory (expectancy theory — Vroom).

Perhaps the belief that success is possible is the key to using prizes for innovation — especially internal innovation prizes. By highlighting an issue you’re signaling that at least someone thinks this is possible (though some unsolved math problems have stood for over 100 years). You are also signaling organizational support for effort spent on the project. This may reduce perceived barriers: employees may see that the organization is serious about innovation, serious about innovation on the particular topic, and that there is some roadmap for using the innovative ideas.

Hotz and McKinsey have done a wonderful job on the external prizes. What can we contribute to the understanding around internal prizes? What has worked or not worked in your organization? Have you participated in internal innovation competitions? Links especially appreciated.

Ashley Vance’s BITS (Business * Innovation * Technology * Society) post in today’s New York Times describes how HP uses data for business value.  Both human innovation efforts and business functions are assessed to find value. On the research front:  “They analyze data like patents, published papers and customer interactions to find out where each researcher ranks in the organization.”  These same researchers have created business value by creating a tool that assesses Revenue Cost Optimization (RCO).  The tool takes into account supply chain and sales data.   Decisions based on this data change how inventories are managed.  Vance notes, “By using R.C.O. on a regular basis, H.P has cut the number of days it takes to ship computers by about one-third and has saved $300 million over the past three years.” We don’t know how much it cost to design RCO, or how much it costs to run it — but I suspect they are in the green.

This may be “medium data” (versus big data), but the same thinking applies.  There is value in an overall focus on Evidence Based Management.

One of the benefits of living in the Silicon Valley is the ability to interact with the world’s great innovation experts.  Early in the week it was Vint Cerf at Stanford, and today, at my own Santa Clara University, Sarah Miller Caldicott.

Ms. Caldicott is founder of Power Patterns of Innovation, co-author of Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of Americas Greatest Inventor — and a great grand niece of Thomas Edison – holder of 1093 patents.

We need some perspective to understand Edison’s innovation contributions. Edison created the first R&D laboratory (Menlo Park) with a “systematic approach to innovation.”  Evidence that his methods work: A 1919 New York Times article reported:

It has been estimated that there are a thousand million dollars invested in the industries which he has either created or for which he has laid part of the foundation; and a million employees are in these industries.

He established 6 industries (in 40 years):

• Document duplication (1873)
• Telecommunications (1876)
• Recorded sound (1877)
• Electrical power (1879)
• Motion pictures (1893)
• Portable power (1905)

Working with the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University, Sarah Miller Caldicott has identified the organizational processes Edison developed to support his innovation.  Key is how organizations today (e.g., Google, Apple, Target, Starbucks, Pixar) use these same processes with great success.  She did a wonderful job of bringing the issues down to a personal level: The Five Competencies of Innovation.

1. Solution-centered Mindset: (she says most important) Imagine the solution, then get ahead of it, and use experiments to nail it down.  Edison conducted over 10,000 experiments in the first year of working on the storage battery.
2. Kleidoscopic thinking: went beyond brainstorming – whole brain thinking. “To have a great idea, have a lot of them.”  Once he invented the light bulb, he had to invent the system to run them.  He looked to telegraphy and electricity (multiple streams of knowledge).  He drew six pictures and one became the first electric circuit.  Use fantastical storytelling (dropping self censorship by getting your brain to think in fiction form).
3. Full-spectrum Engagement: Important to work in solitude, and also important to work in teams.  Opposites — important to be intense, but also to relax.  Sharing and protection.
4. Master-mind collaboration:  Cross functional teams, organizational design (org and physical structure) that enabled ad hoc interaction across expertise areas — in the late 1800s!
5. Super-value creation:  Ethnographic research to understand the market. “A believer in going and looking.”  Creation of a brand.

Again, my professional interest is in how he was able to systematize the innovation process.  The answer is hard work and innovating around process as well as products. The above five competencies are known, if not applied widely, today. But in the 1800s these were unique approaches.

In the question session, one of the participants asked about Edison’s friendship with Henry Ford. Ford was 20 years younger, but worked at the Edison Illuminating Company and eventually became friends with Edison.  Both industrialists were organizational design innovators, as well as great innovators of products.  It also came out that Edison hated people calling him the Wizard of Menlo Park as it made it seem like what he did was easy — rather than 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. We can all keep this last point in mind: Innovation doesn’t fall from the sky.  Even process innovation must be carefully managed — but the results are well worth it — even in 1919 dollars!

I really wanted to entitle this “Land of the Free and Unsupported,” and a techie friend added “and Brave.” There must be a song in there somewhere.

The point is that serendipitous discovery is alive and well in Google Docs land. Danielle Camardo, Nicole Yee, and I were having a face to face meeting, and every now and then would practice what we preach (taking shared notes). I had opened a Google Doc and was typing an outline, but then got tied up in the conversation. It occurred to me that I hadn’t typed in the last five minutes (of brilliant material no less). I turned back around to my computer, and there was all the brilliant material! Danielle had opened the same Google Doc and just kept up with the flow. Given the 30 second save/refresh rate, Danielle was using Google Docs like the live, shared, meeting notes I mentioned here and here.

Yes, there are enterprise appropriate tools that are purpose built for group meetings, but those seem to cost money, and/or have set up costs. In my world, and that of most of my contacts, we are looking for free tools that easily get us the same outcomes. Google Docs just moved up my list of collaboration tools. Yes, these free tools are largely unsupported — and as another colleague noted yesterday, may not stay free — but we are often brave enough to give it a go.

Now there is no reason not to take live, shared, notes. Take up the charge!

More tricks for those of us on a budget.