Last week I attended and spoke at an interesting conference in Stavanger, Norway (www.innotown.com). The last session I
listened to before I left was, for me, the most thought provoking. The session’s title was “Innovation is not what innovators do… it is what customers adopt”, and it was delivered by Michael Schrage, of MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business.
First, I was happy to discover that the catchy title reflected only a small part of the content that Michael chose to share with us, and second, that contrary to what the title might suggest, we were not submitted to yet another “listen to your customers” sermon. To learn about Michael’s ideas, you are invited to his website. But meanwhile, for a very imprecise (non-authorized), partial, quick and subjective list of some points I found insightful and helpful:
1) “Good ideas” are not the valuable currency in the innovation market, nor what you should focus on. Instead, invest your energy in “expressions of ideas”. Whenever possible (pace Michael, apparently always) refer to and communicate through prototypes, models and simulations.
Our (SIT’s) comment: “good ideas” are an inflated currency. Any brainstormed thought gets to be termed “an idea”, and often, for “motivational” reasons, gets promoted to “good idea”. This leads to the common and erroneous “we have lots of great ideas, just need help in implementing them”. Expressing ideas in models, simulations and mainly in pilots promotes early filtering, and helps in concretizing mere thoughts into real ideas. These “expressed” ideas have a higher probability of getting implemented, if they are discovered to have real substance.
2) Iterate, iTerate, itErate, iteratE . Trying out options in different variations is the best way of knowing what will work, and working out what you know. The best way of achieving innovation is to experiment. Create testable hypotheses and test them. Would-be innovators are often afraid that iterations will result in “merely incremental” change. There is no reason whatsoever, says Michael Schrage, that a cheap experiment will not lead to important innovation.
Our comment: fear of the “merely incremental” is a mistake, and a major barrier to innovation, for several reasons. First, because it is very hard to know how far an idea can go when it is still in early stages of development. Very often, only the market can gauge the potential reach of an idea. Second. What is natural evolution if not a combination of multiple series of incremental changes? Working in a systematic way, you can create an accelerated evolutionary process, generating a large number of mutations/iterations and rapidly testing them, feeding back results to generate next generations. Third, “incremental” changes can result in excellent business.
3) A quick test for assessing the innovation culture of an organization: Listen carefully to people who say “We can’t do X because Y.” Y is their innovation culture.
Our comment: so true. Probably valid on a personal level as well.
As mentioned above, this is not the official, and definitely not a full, version. To read more, go to Michael’s website.
I also participated at Innotown. Thanks for your summary of the very interesting session made by Michael Schrage - and by the way - for your own session about problem solving which was a new approach I had not heard before and which I surely will use in my work as an industrial designer.
One comment/addition on your summary above - pt.2: Iterate…
Fear of the “merely incremental” was one side of the story. Schrage introduced the term plesting, meaning “playful testing” as a positive approach and a good way to innovate by making prototypes and testing hypotheses. He pointed out that prototypes engage interaction, and I remember his words at the end of his session: “Never go into an innovation meeting without a prototype”
Thanks Hans, for the comment and feedback. “Plesting” was definitely another useful term introduced by Michael, one of several. I too thought that his comment about comming to meetings with prototypes was insightful. One thought i started playing around with following this comment of his was how i can come to meetings with “prototypes” in all those cases were the issue is not a concrete product, and sometimes not a product at all. For example, if i come into a management discussion about accepting a new employee in a nele defined role, what would be the “prototype”? What i tried out, inspired by Michael’s comment, was to put on the table as concrete as possible a description of what the person’s specific new proposed role would be. If the discussion is about some ethical matter or value of the company the “prototype” could be a letter communicating it to the employees, or a slogan or tag line. I hope that i am managing to communicate something with these examples. In short, my recommended experiment: ask yourself before every meeting what could serve as “prototype” for whatever subject is being discussed.
I strongly agree with Amnon:
Narratives, storytelling, rich pictures, influence/causal diagrams and other visual expression tools could for sure function as prototypes of intangible value proposals.
Examples from the latter could be seen in
http://www.senteco.com/storymap/example.htm
Cheers,
Fabian.
I absolutely agree with you about the strength of ideas visualization, enabling people to play with ideas in order to better grasp the full potential of an idea.
As another listener in Innotown, I want to add another point I took from Michael’s talk. My feeling was that he emphasized the point that once we have ideas we should check them very carefuly from different perspectives before we are trying to raise new ideas.
In many cases we already have “jewels” in our hands, but we will realize it only if we take a very close look at them and play with the various options for developing them. So the playfullness with the visualization is meant not only for better understanding and selling of the idea but also for realizing additional options rising from the same idea.