Innovation

How to become a Green Innovation expert by Breaking Fixedness

Published date: August 11, 2021 в 2:07 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Sustainable Innovation

Green innovation is an everlasting challenge, where many companies are looking for innovative ways to win this eco-marathon. Some industries are more active than others, affected by regulations and natural resources constraints. Sustainability goals provide many benefits to organizations. In addition to a company’s reputation, executives can enjoy an array of other benefits. But what are the best ways of achieving it? Read on to learn about how to achieve green innovation through breaking fixedness:

Cognitive Fixedness, first defined by psychologist Karl Duncker, prevents individuals and companies from creating new configurations in the systems they manage. This often blocks us from seeing potential efficiencies and material reduction, and breakthrough solutions to problems.

Check out these 3 main barriers to sustainable innovation:

1. Structural – The tendency to view products and systems as a complete gestalt. Many SIT’s tools help break this particular fixedness to achieve sustainable innovation. For instance, a water saving toilet was developed by Villeroy-Boch in an SIT workshop. Multiplying the water streams resulted in more pressure in each stream, therefore requiring less water. This product won the ISH Innovation Prize and was chosen by Deutsche Bank in its transformation of its HQ to become one of the most environmentally friendly high-rises in Europe.

2.  Functional – Seeing objects as capable only of fulfilling their original function. SIT uses the Task Unification tool to help innovators find new uses for existing resources, thus forcing them to find new functions for available objects and tackle functional fixedness.

 

3. Relational – The tendency to view relationships and dependencies between variables of a situation as static and permanent. Assif Strategies, our partners in a Greener by Design Conference, described the following case study during the event:

A bus company’s emissions were well above expectations.

They had 100 old buses and 50 new ones, and 400 drivers. Assif discovered that drivers were allowed to select both their buses and their routes based on seniority. Naturally, drivers chose the easier routes (that had fewer stops and shifts) and the newer buses. The relationship that resulted was that the older buses drove the “stop and go” routes on three shifts, while the new ones drove more continuously and were parked at night, obviously resulting in much higher emissions than necessary.

Breaking this relational fixedness required a

major cultural change in the company, and by

creating a new relationship within existing

available resources, the bus company was able

to reduce over 10 percent of its emissions.

Along with some other simple changes,

it achieved a total reduction of 50 percent.

How to overcome fixedness and break innovation barriers?

The challenge of breaking fixedness is threefold.

First, recognize you could be suffering from cognitive fixedness, and not seeing the entire potential “playing field”.

Second, identify underlying assumptions in the system in question and accept that even though “this is how we always did it” or “this is how it must be done” they can still be changed.

Lastly, be flexible about the structure, functions and relationships between the system’s elements in order to generate new forms that can lead to new thinking and new solutions.

 

This concept ties in well with the message of the keynotes in the Greener By Design conference; they all essentially break a critical underlying assumption about our industry or society: from William McDonough (Cradle to Cradle, MDBC) who questions why can’t a building be as smart as a tree, creating oxygen, food and shelter, to Tom Szaky (TerraCycle) who challenges the entire concept of garbage, to the point that he “no longer sees trash, only cash”, and to David de Rothschild, who endeavors to cross the Pacific Ocean on the Plastiki (homage to the Kon Tiki, of course) using the ocean’s most prevalent waste as means of transportation.

The green line

So what is the key takeaway? Breaking fixedness is a milestone for generating green innovation. Our innovation message for companies working on going greener is to focus on finding and tackling their fixedness.

On Indicators and Measuring Innovation – Part 2

Published date: August 8, 2021 в 2:00 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

In Part 1 of this micro-series we mentioned 6 observations about indicators and measurements in general, with a focus on some common difficulties. In this installment, we will look at several points relating specifically to the measurement of innovation. This is in no way intended to be a comprehensive treatment of the subject, but I will try to cover some useful points.

Let’s start with the question of the necessity and viability of measuring innovation. When we worked with Tal Givoly, at the time Chief Scientist of the Israeli software company Amdocs, he used to say: “Management is so interested in innovation, that it plants a seed and then pulls it out of the ground every day to see how its roots are growing.” I like to quote him to managers as a call to caution, not only in meddling with innovation but also on trying to monitor it too closely. Still, the opposite approach is no less misleading. According to this, innovation is a magical phenomenon, a spark that one cannot ignite at will, let alone measure, and any attempt at doing so will result in extinguishing the fire. This is obviously misguided since, without measuring the results of your innovation efforts there is a slim chance that you will receive the funding and support to sustain them beyond the initial burst of enthusiasm that started the drive.

Contrary to the “mystical” attitude, we tend to say, with only a bit of simplification, that innovation is like any other business process and therefore should be measured just as you would, say, your sales or efficiency efforts. So, assuming that innovation must be monitored and measured, there are two basic intuitions as to how this should be conducted. The first stems from the following logic: one’s motivation to be innovative is the wish to achieve the organization’s goals (see our post on the definition of innovation) and therefore these very goals, as expressed by their corresponding indicators, can adequately assess the value of our efforts to innovate. If we launch an innovation drive which does not result in an impact on our regular business indicators, then we are wasting our time and money. Therefore, the only indicators that an organization requires in order to monitor and evaluate its innovation efforts are those that are used to measure its performance anyway.

 

 

The appeal of this approach is that it both simplifies the measurement process and ties the innovation efforts inextricably to the company’s goals. Unfortunately, it has two grave shortcomings: 1) it is very hard to isolate the influence of your innovation efforts from the myriad factors that influence business results (factors both external – a pandemic, say, or internal – flaws in a product, or unwise allocation of resources); 2) even when you can isolate the contribution of your innovation activities, their influence on business goals will be evident only after several months, or even years. So how do you monitor your activities and make decisions as you go along, if their effects will appear only, say, within 6 months?

These difficulties often lead innovation leaders to adopt the opposite approach: since it is virtually impossible to isolate, especially in real time, the output of innovation efforts, it is seen as wiser to simply measure inputs. You hatch your plans for innovation, define specific activities, and closely monitor their delivery and implementation.

 

This is indeed a much more practical approach, which lends itself easily to project management and real time decision making. The only trouble is that you may find yourself beautifully and efficiently implementing a useless plan, that does not translate into any important benefit.

 

Our suggestion is, therefore, to create a dynamic “sliding scale” approach to measuring innovation activities, which I will demonstrate in the following scenario (derived, with some generalizations and simplifications, from our work with various companies and organizations).

Imagine that you have decided to train 400 of what we call “Innovation Coaches” (in a forthcoming post, we will describe the design, deployment and management of such a coach community. Click here to receive a notification when the post comes out). Their goal is to promote innovation throughout the organization through the facilitation of innovation sessions. The first indicator will therefore be: number of coaches trained. Since you had reached the conclusion that there was a need for 400 coaches, you want to make sure that they are trained as planned. Not a trivial task, given both the logistic requirements and the HR challenges.

 

But, of course, training a large and increasing number of coaches can end up being a huge waste of time and resources, unless they are delivering results, so, upon completion of the training of your first batch of, say, 16 coaches, you must immediately start measuring the next indicator: number of sessions delivered per coach. This helps assess the cumulative effect of the coaches on the organization, and along the way gives you some insight on the percentage of active coaches out of those who have undertaken the training (if less than 80% are somehow active, we recommend you review either the quality of the training or the trainees’ selection process, or both).

Obviously, as you celebrate a hopefully growing number of sessions, you may only be causing an even greater waste of people’s time and therefore your company’s resources. All depends on what they are actually achieving in their sessions, which is extremely difficult to assess, given that the impact of the participation in a session on a participant’s brain and behavior is extremely difficult to measure. You can therefore resort to a simplified proxy, the most practical and direct you can measure, which is the number of ideas produced in a session, to assess its productivity.

 

These are only the first three steps in an ongoing process. But how should this process be timed? How soon should one move from one indicator to the next? The proper answer to these questions is crucial to the success of the entire enterprise, not only of the measurement itself, but also the actual results, since the mere act of measurement exerts, as we all know, a strong influence on the measured activities. Say that a coach has graduated from her training. She is keen on trying out her new skills, but, on the other hand, she is a bit hesitant about having to stand up and lead her peers, or maybe even her superiors, through an exercise that has less than a 100% probability of success. She may also have to contend with a lack of support from her boss who is complaining that she is behind schedule in her regular work. The knowledge that someone is counting the number of sessions she runs can nudge her in the right direction, together with, perhaps, an extra carrot, such as the promise that any coach who facilitates, say, 6 sessions in the first two months is eligible for participation in an advanced training. So, counting the number of delivered sessions is probably a good idea immediately after coaches’ graduation from their training. But caution! In this fragile stage, counting the number of ideas produced in the session is nearly always premature, and most likely will significantly decrease the number of sessions and lower the percentage of active coaches! “Now, I don’t only need to add to my workload, argue with my boss, stand in front of not-always-collaborative colleagues and risk the embarrassment of wasting everyone’s time in what could turn out to be a useless session, they also want to monitor the number of ideas that came out? I’ll need to spend time documenting and reporting, and then find myself being scolded because they came to the conclusion that my session hadn’t been productive enough?”. Time and again we see that when management pushes to measure session results too early, coaches react either by lowering the number of sessions they facilitate, or by conducting them without reporting, which, in terms of organizational evaluation, amounts to the same thing. This phenomenon emphasizes two key dilemmas in measuring innovation activities:

  1. What you measure doesn’t only affect what you know but also what happens to those you are measuring;
  2. The more data you collect about an activity, and the more you tend to impose reporting efforts on the actors, the less time, energy and motivation they will have to do the actual work.

We strongly recommend, therefore, that you allow coaches to feel confident with conducting sessions, hopefully even enjoying the process, before you start monitoring the sessions’ outcomes. But, at some point, this must happen, and as you start counting the number of ideas produced per session, the next question arises. As we have all painfully learned, mainly thanks to the inefficacy of Brainstorming, quantity of ideas is not only not a guarantee of quality but can also become a burden and an energy drain. Which is why the next indicator is required: % of ideas from a session that made it into the company’s idea-development pipeline. Subsequently, you can select one or more stages of your development process and count the ideas that achieve each one or jump to the next important milestone: number of ideas launched into the market (or, if your output is not products into market, the equivalent measure such as processes changed, services offered, social programs launched, etc.).

 

Using this same logic, the sliding scale for measuring the results of your innovation efforts can be extended according to your organization’s process of product development, or project management. Common additional stages that can be added to the scale are revenues, profits, savings or market share obtained through the launch of a product or initiative, thus converging what started out in one extreme pole as a measurement of pure inputs into the opposite pole of relying on those indicators that monitor your organization’s goals and objectives.

 

Note that the approach described here attempts to address some of the pitfalls and follow some of the guidelines mentioned in my former post on the subject:

  1. Be practical by starting superficially, but do not be daunted by the difficulties and insist on going further and deeper;
  2. Consider the needs both of those who are doing the measuring and those who are being measured;
  3. Remember that measuring is an invasive process that affects the measured for good and bad, and timing can crucially determine which one it is;
  4. Consider carefully what you decide to measure, and be prepared to defend the rationale of its importance;
  5. Be transparent about the results, whatever they end up demonstrating.

In a future post, we will describe how this same approach can be expanded to apply to organizational innovation, rather than to a specific activity, by breaking up the large organizational effort into what we call The 7 Elements of Organizational Innovation. Meanwhile, we recommend that you try to apply the sliding scale approach to one or several of your innovation activities. And we would love to hear how it goes and what you learn.

How to Embrace Failure Without Falling on Your Face

Published date: August 4, 2021 в 3:30 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Strategy

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Many years ago, I presented what I considered to be a very cool project to an extremely smart VP of Marketing in a large B2C company on the East Coast of the US. Fortunately, she shared my enthusiasm, and the process of engaging us for the project was running along nicely. It was an ambitious and somewhat risky project in the sense that it required the involvement of about 20 high-level managers who were very skeptical about its chances of success. This put “my” VP in the stressful position of either ending up as the initiator of notable success or being forever remembered as the perpetrator of a huge mistake (could she embrace failure?).

At some point, she asked me: “Can we make absolutely sure this will succeed?”And, silly me, I answered with a big smile: “Of course not. Don’t you remember? One of our key messages in this project is that if you innovate you must embrace the risk of failure. So since we are designing such an innovative project, of course, there is a risk that it will fail.” Obviously, we didn’t get the project, because, regardless of the oft-quoted cliché, nobody really wants to “celebrate failures”. People want successes. And if there is one thing they will avoid at all costs, it is failure.

 

Embracing Failure, the Contradiction

 

There seems to be a contradiction: We want to think ahead. We want to try new things. We want to innovate and embrace failure as part of the inventive process. At the same time, we want to be in control of our outcomes. We cannot afford to make mistakes.

This leads to a dilemma: Companies encourage their employees to fail and learn. But they expect them not to fail.

Failures are at best unwanted – at worst systematically concealed, to avoid blame or punishment. Pressure is a means of control. The result: a fear of failure.

The prevalence of fear of failure in companies is alarming considering how paralyzing it can be for the companies’ development.

Three reasons for this troublesome effect:

1. Risk Aversion

Here is one cliché that is absolutely true: Failure is an essential part of innovation. When prototyping a new product, expect failure. That’s what prototypes are for, and that is why you will work on several consecutively, or even in parallel. Therefore, the maxim fails fast and try again.

But, if every failure is considered a mini-disaster, who wants to even consider risking it? Rather, the ultimate goal is to achieve full control of the process. Hence, any change or novel idea is treated as a potential threat.

 

2. Loser-phobia

If one strives to overcome one’s Cognitive Fixedness, a fundamental tool is the ability to reflect on one’s actions and to engage in metacognition (a reflection on one’s thinking processes). Every failure thus becomes a source of learning and a driver of change.

But, when your failures are perceived as a sign of being a “loser,” what are the chances that you will actually take the time to confront your failures, reflect on them, and draw useful conclusions?

 

3. Who? Me?

In cultures that do not truly accept failures, there is a strong incentive to underreport them and to avoid any public reference to them, let alone an open analysis.  This greatly increases, obviously, the probability that the same mistakes will be repeated. A good litmus test: Ask anyone who tells you that you should “embrace failure”, if they are willing to share a recent one of their own. Most chances are they won’t, and that tells you what you will be risking if you share yours.

You probably agree that it can be very beneficial to embrace failure in certain areas – in an honest and consistent manner. But in other areas, we cannot allow for mistakes. The point is, to make this distinction explicit and communicate it to everyone involved. Clarity is key.

 

Instead of pretending to universally embrace failure, you map out areas in which failing is acceptable. Then, you commit yourself to this map.

Here are some actions you may consider to embrace failure:

Mark your “control towers”

Imagine working in a control tower. There is obviously no way to embrace failures here. Imagine an airport with 5000 landings and take-offs per month. a mistake rate of 0.01% would imply 5 crashes per month. There are such “control towers” in every company. In some areas, even if a leader doesn’t care to admit it, failure is not an option. Being explicit about your “control towers” is crucial, if you want people to avoid these specific mistakes at all costs. Only then, everyone is on the same page: We give our best to prevent failure and if it happens, we report it. In other areas, the expectation might not be as clear. 

We suggest three mechanisms: define roles, draw lines and install safety nets.

When defining roles, you assign to a specific group of employees the role of innovators. It is then clear to everyone that this group will generate ideas, try new things – and occasionally fail. Your “innovators” will enjoy the freedom to explore and develop new ideas. At the same time, they will be accountable for their failures as part of the process.

Drawing lines means, defining which parts of a project are open to experimentation and those that are not. Within the defined lines, failure is acceptable. Innovation is welcome.

Safety nets are a similar idea, on a different level. To limit the impact of failures, you innovate in specific areas, e.g. those that are not part of your core business.

In defining roles, drawing lines and installing safety nets, we map out areas in which failures are acceptable. Only then we can truly claim: We embrace failure. Feel free to innovate.

In addition to the above actions, you can also utilize some advice from experts on the subject. 

Have a backup plan

Leon Ho says that it never hurts to have a back-up plan. The last thing you want to do is scramble for a solution when the worst has happened. “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” This old adage holds solid wisdom. Having a backup plan gives you more confidence to move forward and take calculated risks.

Perhaps you’ve applied for a grant to fund an initiative at work. In the worst-case scenario, if you don’t get the grant, are there other ways you could secure the funds? There are usually multiple ways to tackle a problem, so having a back-up plan is a great way to reduce anxiety about possible failure.

Leon Ho (https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-fear-of-failure-destroys-success.html)

Identify the consequences

Theo Tsaousides says that in order to attenuate fear of failure, first identify the consequences of failing that scare you the most and evaluate your ability to deal with these consequences. Instead of talking yourself out of the fear by hoping that nothing negative will happen, focus on building confidence to deal with the consequences.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

  1. Which of these consequences scare you the most?
  2. How much impact will they have on you? Are they merely unpleasant or life-threatening? Will they just make you feel uncomfortable, or will they hurt you deeply and irreparably?
  3. How quickly will you move on? Are the consequences permanent or reversible? Are they short-lived, or will they linger forever?
  4. How well can you handle them? Can you exercise damage control, or will you hide and disappear?

Theo Tsaousides (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/smashing-the-brainblocks/201801/how-conquer-fear-failure)

Now that you’re equipped with the knowledge, it’s your turn: Tell us about YOUR experience in dealing with a Fear of Failure and check out one of our latest article on how to manage airtime!

On Indicators and Measuring Innovation – Part 1

Published date: August 1, 2021 в 2:00 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

On June 30th, I posted about the meaning of the term “innovation”. These were the post’s opening sentences:

When I typed “definition of innovation” into Google the other day, I came up with 1,710,000,000 replies, which means absolutely nothing, of course, raising the question why the arguably most influential company on earth has been consistently feeding us with this useless piece of data for so many years. So, I promise to use this very same opening sentence in a future post (repurposing, saving on first-sentence-emissions) about some common popular fallacies around indicators and measurement.

Keeping my promise here, I reiterate my bewilderment and will attempt to use this example to shed some light on the oft-asked question: how should innovation be measured? This question came up yet again last week in a conversation with an Innovation Manager in a medium-sized financial company. “They [management] are demanding that we boost innovation throughout the company when I don’t even know what innovation is nor have any idea how to measure it.” The former question was addressed by the post mentioned above. In this post (both parts) we will address the latter.

Here, in Part 1, we will start by using the example of Google’s indicators to share some observations on what should or shouldn’t be done when measuring performance in general. In Part 2, we will analyze some specifics of measuring in the context of innovation.

As I write this, I repeat my search for “definition of innovation”. Why does Google choose to share with me that my search took 0.60 to complete and that it came up with 1,860,000,000 results? Why would I care? What can I do with these two pieces of information? One can imagine that in the late 1990’s this pair of indicators served to signal both “look how fast our engine is”, and “see how many results we can provide you with”. Even then, there was a glaring discrepancy between the search engine’s stated differentiator and the indicators communicated. Google claimed the superiority of its algorithm based on the quality of its results, not their quantity nor the speed of their delivery, so why were they boasting characteristic #1 while measuring #2 and #3?  This is the result of my repeated search today:

 

Keen readers will have noticed that the number that appears above constitutes an increase of 150,000 finds over my former search, quoted in the opening paragraph. Say that Google has indeed found 150,000 additional hits in less than a month. So what? Have I gained anything from this increase? Obviously not. Clearly, then, these indicators have not been selected to cater to my needs as seeker of information. Why were they selected then? One suspects that a possible reason is that they are simply easy to measure. So, the first observation on the misleading use of indicators is:

Observation #1: People and organizations tend to skew towards indicators that are easy to measure.

Ben Gomes, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering, has been quoted as saying, “…our goal is to get you the exact answer you’re searching for faster.” He goes on to explain: “Our research shows that if search results are slowed by even a fraction of a second, people search less (seriously: A 400ms delay leads to a 0.44 percent drop in search volume, data fans).”

Note that although the professed goal is to provide an “exact answer” there is no indicator to measure to what extent this important measure has been attained. This lacuna may be attributed either to a harsher variant of Observation #1 (above):

Observation #1*: If you haven’t figured out how to measure something, disregard it (even if you know it is crucially important).

Or, in more unfortunate cases:

Observation #2: If you’ve figured out how to measure it, but you’re not happy with the results, hide them.

For obvious reasons, we don’t expect Google to show us a search result that looks like this:

 

But wait, you may say, the Google VP did explain the huge importance of speed, so that is a crucial factor that should be measured. Yes, it may be crucial, but for them, rather than for you. This, then, is a prime example of:

Observation #3: Technologists and bureaucrats will tend to measure and communicate indicators that are important for them, rather than for their users/clients.

It is, no doubt, of the utmost importance for Google’s techies to measure and monitor the precise duration of each and every one of the 5.4 billion(!) daily searches (2020) on their awe-inspiring platform. But that does not at all mean that this specific piece of data about my search is of any interest to me. Ask yourself: Have you ever noticed this number? If I tell you that your search x took 0.36 seconds or your search y an agonizing 0.72, would these numbers mean anything to you? It is a stretch to imagine that Google, with its 135,301 employees and 182,527 billion US$ revenue (both numbers refer to Alphabet, end of 2020) can’t figure out that these two indicators are respectively useless and meaningless to their users. Why then, do they appear so prominently? Another possible explanation could be:

Observation #4: If you prefer to avoid sharing certain indicators, direct the spotlight to others.

This may be the most sensible explanation of the Google indicator puzzle: speed and quantity may actually be playing the role of what I propose to name “decoy indicators”. The function of this class of indicators is to enable a company to offer a semblance of transparency, while in fact obfuscating all those indicators that its audience could really be interested to monitor but is not even aware of. The Google-search-indicator-set of our dreams would maybe include some or all of these:

 

A majority of these indicators would probably be as useless to most of us as the two original ones, but would at least supply a welcome variation on the theme, or perhaps could be rotated throughout searches so that the user would either select those she wished to see or would be served a random selection of 2-3 each time. The other indicators could, say, be accessed by clicking on an icon. Does it really matter which indicators are selected? It could, very much.

Nine years ago, when we took our 3-week old youngest daughter to our favorite pediatrician for a small check-up, he noticed a minor irregularity and prepared to perform a small but invasive test on her. I stopped him and asked why he was planning to do so. He answered that it was “the protocol” and would supply him with a piece of important data which he would register in her newly created computer file. When I asked whether the value of this data would determine any specific action to be taken, he admitted that it would not. I therefore asked him not to perform the test to which he immediately agreed. This incident re-confirmed a rule I strictly follow in all my dealings with medical staff to the chagrin of many of them: always politely request that they provide a simple rationale for whatever action they are about to perform. Surprisingly, very often they are not able to do so, apart from quoting “the protocol”. The corollary of this rule for medical tests or examinations, as for measurements in general is:

Observation #5 When you select or design an indicator, make sure you know precisely what you want to know and why.

Even if the price of measuring and communicating a useless indicator is low (even lower than the minimal invasion of my daughter), you would do best to avoid it, as indicators tend to take on a life of their own by bestowing undue importance on the measured quantity.

Observation #6: Indicators, even if selected for the wrong reasons, and therefore useless, will appear important because they’re there.

And, once the indicators are there, you will find yourself playing the corporate-Edmund-Hilary and inevitably climbing the management-imposed-Himalaya, diverting energies from other, more constructive endeavors. This is one of the reasons that we all at times experience a certain unease even as we are exceling according to some set of indicators or other. Deeply, intuitively, beneath our superficial satisfaction at hitting our numbers, some voice is asking: but what for?

In the next post (Part 2) we will discuss how these phenomena play out in organizations’ attempts to measure their level of innovation, as they use indicators such as number of ideas submitted to idea-boxes, number of patents, % of revenues spent on R&D, % of sales derived from new products and other commonly used indicators. We will see that many such standard indicators can be applied usefully, depending on timing and context, and will review several examples, exploring how they can be constructively put to good use.

 

Fly High – The Fosbury Flop

Published date: July 28, 2021 в 2:22 pm

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Category: Innovation

Whenever the Summer Olympics come along, I think about the many times I have heard my good friend and colleague, Dr. Jacob Goldenberg, so eloquently tell the story of (one of) the greatest sports innovations in history: the Fosbury Flop.

Common wisdom dictates that evolution does not result in revolutions – this is the difference between incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation. At SIT, we’ve been challenging this fallacy for decades. That’s why I love the true story behind the Fosbury Flop, which proves, once again, that common wisdom is a highly unreliable source for practical conclusions.

The Fosbury Flop? Never heard of it…

In 1968, a young high jumper by the name of Dick Fosbury revolutionized his field by winning the Olympic gold medal with a back-first flop that he himself had invented.

Why do we claim that this was revolutionary? There are several indications…

1)    The Official Web Site of the Olympic Movement states: “An athlete will never again invent such a revolutionary style. Since this high jump approach, all specialists have adopted the “Fosbury flop” and the world record of the time, held by Soviet Valery Brumel (2.29 m) was quickly broken.”

2)    Jacob and his colleagues asked 6 sports experts (sports historians, broadcasters, commentators) to each name the 5 most influential innovations in the history of sports. 5 of the 6 mentioned the Fosbury flop.

3)    They also asked two dozen judges to rate the innovativeness of 9 sports innovations (including: the game of soccer, swimming techniques, the synthetic track, running shoes, and participation of women) along a list of parameters. The Fosbury flop rated highest overall and first place on its impact on sports, its originality, and its revolutionary nature.

 

Now that we’ve established that, what’s the story?

At the age of 10, Fosbury learned a high jump technique called the Scissors, which he had copied from some children in his school. At the age of 11, in the fifth grade, Fosbury’s Phys Ed teacher and coach taught all the kids trying out for track to use the Straddle or “western roll” style. After switching to the straddle and beginning all over, Fosbury fell behind the other jumpers competitively. He was very frustrated and asked his coach if he could revert to the old scissors style to get a better result and maybe boost his confidence a bit. His coach conceded.

So Dick decided to try his old style during his next competition. Feeling awkward yet persistent, Fosbury managed to clear his previous best jump of 1.63 meters, and then, facing a new height, knew he had to adjust something. With the scissors style, the jumper typically knocks the bar off with his/her behind, and sometimes with the movement of the legs. To avoid this, Fosbury tried to lift his hips up higher, which dropped his shoulders simultaneously. Fosbury cleared the height. He continued raising his hips until he eventually cleared 15cm higher for a new personal record, and even placed fourth to score points for his team. No one knew what Fosbury was doing as he transformed this old technique into something new, as each attempt was a little different. The opposing coaches checked the rulebook for legality since Fosbury had unexpectedly begun to beat their jumpers.

The next two years, 1964-1965, involved a slow evolution in the technique. Using his curved approach to the bar, Fosbury intuitively began to turn his inside shoulder away from the bar, to get his head over the bar sooner. Thus, the following year, pictures show Fosbury clearing the bar with his body at a 45-degree angle to the bar, no longer parallel to it. By the second year, Fosbury had fully evolved to clearing the bar with his back to it, arching his hips over, then un-arching to kick his heels over and land on his back in the foam pit. In other words, two years of small incremental changes were required for Fosbury to come up with the final, apparently radical, version of his jump.

Dick Fosbury had never envisioned being an Olympic athlete, even up until the 1968 Games. He maintains that he did not set out to change anything — in his own words, “I just wanted to play the game”.

And he did. As the story shows, his is an example that Radical innovations can be the result of a sequence of incremental steps (and oftentimes are – we just don’t notice them due to the perspective of time).

Thanks, Jacob, for sharing this story with me!

How One Man Changed the High Jump Forever | The Olympics on the Record

Errors of Exclusion: Two Blind Spots when Planning your Innovation Initiative

Published date: July 25, 2021 в 5:27 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

We’ve written plenty and posted some in the past about common myths and misapprehensions around innovation. “Not again!”, you say to yourself. For what’s more annoying than some self-important consultant(s) telling everyone how wrong they are. True. On the other hand, as we work in multiple organizations, we just see, and commit(!), so many mistakes that it seems a pity not to share what we’ve experienced, in the hopes of saving this learning-the-hard-way from as many of you as possible. But will reading through lists of mistakes really save one from repeating them? To a certain extent this is so, as alluded to in the famous saying by George Santanaya: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. But note that, logically speaking, even if Santanaya was right, this doesn’t necessarily imply that those who do remember the past are immune from repeating it. As anyone who has raised a child will readily attest, some mistakes need to be committed and experienced in the flesh so that one can learn from them. Still, it is my belief that even if you are destined to step with eyes wide open into some traps anyway, being forewarned will help you pay a lower price, learn from the event, and maybe even adjust your course in real time. That is is why we will continue to share with you, from time to time, small collections of mistakes that we witness during our work with organizations.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

 

This time we will focus on two misconceptions that have to do with the way those in charge of launching an innovation initiative assess their colleagues – their target audience, when designing an innovation program and its execution. Both can be seen as blind spots leading to an exclusive, rather than inclusive approach, often with dire consequences, but both can be overcome with awareness and care, perhaps aided by these practical conclusions and recommendations:

 

1. Black/White Vision:

 

Champions of innovation (and their consultants) often tend to perceive their colleagues through a divisive lens: the cool, positive, usually younger allies-in-innovation, versus the stubborn, probably older, laggards who are getting in the way of innovation with their “resistance”. As is the case with other stereotypes, this one, too, has some obvious basis in reality. But more often than not, those who “resist innovation” are, in their exasperating way, performing one of several useful roles:

  • They may be pointing out to important aspects that should be maintained and safeguarded when the change-tsunami sweeps through the organization;
  • They may be faithfully representing a voice of the customer, who might also find it challenging to adapt to some changes;
  •  They can inadvertently play the role of the proverbial canary in the mine, thus pointing out flaws in your innovation initiative or sensitive areas where you should pay more attention;
  • In many cases they are simply right in their resistance to a specific change, either because in this specific case it makes more sense to maintain the status quo or because it would be wiser to keep searching for a better alternative.

Given these not-so-improbable possibilities, here are a few recommendations:

a.    Listen. Listen, listen. Not fake listening, just to give the laggards the feeling that they are being heard, but sincerely consider the possibility that they may be saving you from yourself. Even if their true motivation is fear of change, they may still be right.

b.    Don’t assume that veterans and older associates will necessarily be harder to convert or less able to contribute to an innovation initiative. On the contrary, they will often be its anchors, supplying the knowledge and experience to make it work. (Disclosure: the youngster writing this post has chugged by his 60th anniversary a few months ago.)

c.    Don’t waste energies convincing recalcitrant managers or units. Learn from them what you can, invite them to join, and if they are still resistant, give them the time and space to join in at their own pace. Time may not yet be ripe for them, or they may be adopting a cautious strategy of first making sure that what you are offering actually works. In the worst case, they will jump on the bandwagon when it reaches cruising altitude (sorry, mixing a few metaphors here).

 

2. Disregarding the Middle:

 

To the perennial debate whether an innovation initiative is best conducted top-down or bottom-up I offer two responses, both frustrating:

  • Both are necessary, to such an extent that you will probably fail unless your plan integrates both approaches. I’ve personally seen each of the two approaches being carried out disregarding the other, always with dismal results. The more common mistake in my experience is the exclusively top-down execution, whereby most of the energy and attention of a corporate unit and its external providers is dedicated to pleasing top management and enlisting their support as expressed in bombastic declarations and budget approvals. I, personally, have tended to err more in the opposite direction, advocating for a predominantly bottom-up course of action, and found to my disappointment, that even though you can achieve wonderful results by empowering the rank and file, if you fail to align with and receive substantial support from top management the entire initiative will sooner or later run out of steam, probably sooner. A combined bi-directional effort is a necessary condition for success. I recommend this as a non-negotiable condition, even if it results in a more complex, and costly, program.
  • The combination of TD and BU, although a necessary condition, is not sufficient. In a typical corporation, or large organization of any kind, it is a third layer, middle management, the company’s backbone, that determines the success of an innovation initiative. Imagine a Marketing/Business/Product Director, say, in an FMCG multinational. Her team is all fired up about an upcoming innovation training, the President of the company is being interviewed in Forbes as an inspiring example of a leader who understands that “now, more than ever, the only constant is change”. So, she is sandwiched between both a BU and a TD innovation-promoting buzz. But while all this exciting discourse is buzzing around her from below and above, who will guarantee that her business unit hits the numbers this quarter? And where will the extra head count come from, if she is made to send her people to yet another course and waste others’ time on innovation forums and conferences? And, as the President halks those futuristic, exciting G3 products that will (hopefully) hit the market in 2024, after sucking up the entire R&D budget, who will fund the tweaks and adaptations that clients are clamoring for in their G2 product orders, without which there is no chance to sell the 500 million USD of the much maligned (in comparison with glorious G3) G2 wares? Middle managers, for the most part, are smart and savvy: they will figure out myriad ways to maintain the balancing act of subtly subduing their reports’ innovation-energies while posing to their superiors as innovation champions, all this whilst squeezing out the business results that everyone’s bonuses depend on. Middle managers are therefore the killers of most innovation initiatives, unless, that is, they are tasked with leading them.
 

To sum up this post’s message about an innovation leader’s two blind spots: no, all those old timers and other innovation-resisters are not your enemy, they should be listened to attentively and brought on board gradually according to their respective timelines and needs, and yes, you do need a Bottom-Up approach and you must combine it with serious Top-Down support, but the mix will only work if your innovation initiative is built around and under the responsibility of your organization’s backbone, its middle management.

3 SIT Case Studies to Inspire Your Company’s New Product Development

Published date: July 21, 2021 в 4:19 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,New Product Development,Strategy

Companies are constantly trying to create something fresh and original, but where do they even start? A common go-to is good ole brainstorming, but as we have repeatedly stressed, this is not an effective way to ideate. That’s when SIT steps in – making ideation more efficient and creative through proven, structured strategies and methods. SIT’s project outcomes are commonly true revolutions in the sector, even though they are based on your existing products or services. Here are some NPD case studies that we are proud to have led, which exemplify SIT’s methodology in practice.

Not Just a Summer Drink

On a scorching summer day, nothing is more refreshing than a nice, cold bottle of iced tea. But what about the wintertime? How can a Business Unit that sells such summer staples like Nestea® also boost sales during the colder months and gain an edge on competing companies such as Lipton, the leader in the industry? 

Nestea’s traditional approach of identifying market trends to develop new products was not generating enough revenue. Moreover, non-compete restrictions from a joint venture of their parent company, Coca-Cola/Nestle, put further pressure on Nestea® to steer clear of soft drinks and hot beverages. Thus, the Nestea® brand team needed to develop a new product that was unique in their own domain. They called in SIT to help innovate under these constraints.

During the process, we applied our attribute dependency tool, which creates and dissolves dependencies between variables of a product, SIT was able to help Nestea reevaluate the relationship between changing seasons and beverages offered. Nestea’s® team challenged the expectation that iced tea is only for the summer and launched a line of iced tea for the winter. Applying their existing strength in flavor innovation to ensure the development of a unique and unexpected product, they landed on a concept that would accompany consumers’ winter drinking habits: a bottled tea that would be even more appealing when consumed at room temperature or when heated (as opposed to being cooled). Here, the industry’s fixedness, i.e. bottled tea is served cold (and is called “iced tea!”) was shattered and replaced with a dynamic, interesting alternative that created a whole new “ready-to-drink tea” product line. The pilot product, Snowy Orange, sold-out within the first week of launch in Germany. The following winter, the product was introduced into additional markets and this expanded “limited edition” sold out before the end of January. 

 It is now an annual staple in their product range throughout Europe, accounting for 10% growth in annual sales.

Achieve Naturally Soft & Radiant Skin

As any beauty consumer will tell you, diligent skincare is the key to radiant confidence and glowing skin. AHAVA Laboratories is a world leader in mineral-based cosmetics: their unique formulas, made of elements found only in the Dead Sea, are the foundation of millions of skincare routines. In a two-year partnership with SIT, AHAVA sought to further their enterprise by developing new products. Even though AHAVA had the power of the Dead Sea on their side, in a market saturated with hundreds of different creams and washes—all claiming one secret ingredient or another—AHAVA needed to create products with a different “wow” factor. 

One product concept came from our task unification tool —a way to assign an additional task to an existing resource. Together, we discovered a way to use the body’s own moisture to dissolve active ingredients in the product upon application to the skin. Usually, this process is achieved by adding water during the manufacturing process. However, using SIT’s creative process led to the invention of the Gentle Body Exfoliator, which requires only the body’s natural moisture. Because the Gentle Body Exfoliator is untreated, it has the additional benefit of a rough texture when applied, which removes dead skin cells. As the product interacts with the body’s own moisture, it dissolves into the skin, nourishing it with Dead Sea minerals. Naturally soft, smooth, and radiant skin has never been achieved like this before.

Which Scents Define Your Home?

We’re all familiar with the Febreze brand, providing a “Breath of Fresh Air” in our homes. But until the work with SIT, Febreze existed only in P&G’s Fabric Care category, removing odors from couches, armchairs, and carpets. Air Care was dominated by strong competitors: Glade (SC Johnson) with a whopping 55% market share, Wizard (Reckitt-Benckiser), and Renuzit (Dial). However, with category profit margins high, and clear right-of-entry into this adjacency, Procter & Gamble had to find a way in. They knew that only a truly different product would stand a chance of stealing any significant market share.

SIT was called in to help leverage P&G’s unparalleled expertise in scent-development (perfumery), while borrowing from Febreze’s brand equity, to identify a concept for a game-changer in the Air Care space. Applying our Multiplication tool, which adds an additional component of a product and then alters it in some way, we imagined a wall plug-in with 2 vials: one with Febreze technology + scent A; the other with Febreze technology + scent B. A novel idea emerged; if there were two separate tanks to hold the perfume, the device could alternate pulsing between scents. This would answer a consumer need that everyone had been aware of, but no competitor could figure out a solution for. The technical term is “habituation”, but we all know it as the experience when you enter a room with a distinct scent (or, more commonly, odor) and several minutes later you no longer notice it until you leave and reenter. The market had been unhappy (but forgiving) of the fact that they were wasting their money on a room freshener that evaporated perfume all the time, but they only benefited from for a couple of minutes each time they entered the room. P&G had solved this through the multiplication concept – every few minutes, the scent changed from one vial to the next – alternating between two pleasant scents and avoiding the customer’s sensory habituation. In classic P&G marketing genius, they sub-branded this disruptive innovation Febreze “NOTICEables” and in less than 4 years after launch, had garnished more than 25% market share. NOTICEables has become the standard for plug-ins, so P&G rebranded it in 2020 as simply Febreze Plugs. 

Turning Constraints into Advantages

 

Through the stories of Nestea, AHAVA, and Febreze, we see three examples of successful innovation that not only changed the game but disrupted their sectors. Instead of brainstorming or following market trends, the SIT methodology converted the companies’ constraints into advantages, innovating new solutions, and unlocking latent consumer needs in the process.

SIT: Israel’s Answer To Design Thinking?

Published date: July 14, 2021 в 2:38 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Methodology

Written by: Giovanni Rodriguez. This article was originally published in Forbes.

Back in college, there was a little button — a collectible — that was popular among the more progressive folks on campus, and it would have been a meme if the age were not pre-digital. It was about the size of a quarter, black type on yellow, with the following words: “Question Authority.” Simple enough, right? But the joke among my friends – a young but already linguistically sensitive crowd, always looking for nuance and/or irony – was that the button could be read in two ways. Either the wearer was claiming to be a question authority – an authority on questions — or the wearer was advocating that everyone should join him or her on the mission of questioning people in power. In the end, we learned that the button worked like a Rorschach test. If you were prone to question authority, that’s the message you received.

I was reminded of the little button last month during a visit to Israel. I was part of a delegation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that spent a week there learning about how a typical – if not stereotypical – Israeli trait is to question everyone and everything. According to the authors of Start-up Nation – the unquestionably authoritative book on the rise of Israelis in the global tech market – questioning authority is one of the secrets to Israeli success. So it was no surprise when we met with the leaders of an Israeli consultancy that is challenging – though not overtly – the status quo in product development and innovation.

I’m talking about a methodology called Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) that was not quite invented in Israel, but has taken root here and is spreading worldwide. It is different – though perhaps complementary – to design thinking, but it’s what they have in common that, from my perspective, makes SIT worth watching.

Patterns

Inspired by the work of Russian engineer Genrich Altshuller, at the core of the SIT methodology is that there are known patterns behind all invention. SIT focuses on five principles based on these patterns. Perhaps the most instructive is the principle of subtraction. The idea here is to take a look at a product or service and ask what might be gained if a component of a product or service were removed? Remove the store from retail, and you get Amazon. Remove the display and most of navigation from an iPod, and you get the iPod Shuffle. These are obvious examples, but there are many others where the SIT methodology has actually been used to spark similar innovation.

Pedagogy

My delegation sat for about an hour with Amnon Levav at SIT’s home office in Tel Aviv. Levav is co-founder and (former ) managing director of the firm (now Chief Innovation Officer) and is also co-developer of the method. One thing that was striking about the meeting was the set-up, unlike any other on our tour thus far. We sat in chairs lined against the four walls of the room, theater-style. The SIT people provide us with nice looking pads and pens. It felt like we where getting ready to do an exercise based on design-thinking, a popular approach to ideation that encourages the inventor to co-create with the user. Instead, we got a great debrief on the principles. The fact that the principles for SIT and design thinking have both been codified is interesting. So is the fact that both have been grounded and supported in academia. More interesting is that they can both be taught, and are being taught, to a broad universe of laypeople – leaders in business, government, and the NGO world. That they are teachable, and are designed to be teachable, helps to expand their global footprints.

POV

But most interesting, I think, is that each feels like an expression of the culture from which it advanced. Even though you see it everywhere today, the design thinking brand feels like IDEO, and Stanford University, and Silicon Valley, a place that quickly comes to mind when you think about the genius of the user (the customer is king). Systematic Inventive Thinking got its big start in Israel, a place that quickly comes to mind when you think about the genius of the inventor, a person trained to question everyone and everything.

Truth is, the genius of both are everywhere, and there’s no shortage of genius inventors in the Valley. And the two methods are not mutually exclusive. But at a time when Israel is becoming known as the second most vibrant start-up economy, it’s refreshing to see a new take on thinking rise with so much authority. Message received.

A musical perspective on the origins of S.I.T.

Published date: July 7, 2021 в 2:58 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Methodology

Written by Drew Boyd and Prof. Jacob Goldenberg, co-authors of Inside The Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results (Simon & Schuster, 2013). An except from the book:

The most highly creative humans use

templates to produce extraordinary results.

Once they discover a pattern that is successful,

they stick with it.

Consider one of the most successful musicians in history, Paul McCartney, and his songwriting partner in the Beatles, John Lennon. In one of his biographies, Paul confided how he and John wrote music early in their careers: “As usual, for these co-written things, John often had just the first verse, which was always enough: it was the direction, it was the signpost, and it was the inspiration for the whole song. I hate the word, but it was the template”.

Paul and John discovered successful patterns in music and created a sophisticated set of reusable music-making templates that allowed them to generate one hit song after another. Guinness World Records calls McCartney the “most successful composer and recording artist of all time”. He has recorded gold records, with sales of more than one hundred million albums and one hundred million singles.

McCartney was not alone in using templates for music. The composer Igor Stravinsky used them. Writers and poets use them, only they call them forms – sonnets, for example. Poet Robert Frost, the artist Salvador Dali and Michelangelo – they all learned that templates boosted their creativity output. Mystery author Agatha Christie used them too: a dead body is discovered, a detective examines the crime scene, collects clues, interviews suspects, and only at the very end reveals the killer – the person you least suspected!

 

Once she had a plot, she filled in information and facts from the world around her – places, character names, and so on – all fitted within the same template. One would think that sixty-six murder-mystery novels using the same template would be dull and lose their appeal. On the contrary, Christie’s template constrained her in a way that made her more creative, not less. She is the best selling novelist of all time.

None of these achievements was an accident. Templates “limit” us in a way that boosts our creative output. Agatha Christie confined her stories to a similar sequence. Paul McCartney worked within his self-defined musical structure. Why don’t most other people know about templates? Perhaps because creative people didn’t realize they were using one. Perhaps they kept it a secret, worried others might steal it. Using a template, after all, might seem to lessen one’s creative genius. Either way, those templates exist, and there is nothing to stop others from using them. Imagine using the best and most productive creativity templates through the ages to invent something new!

This concept of templates is the foundation of the Systematic Inventive Thinking method, providing both the framework and clear instructions for how to work within the framework to create truly innovative ideas for just about any topic using resources close at hand.

Can you identify patterns or templates that work for you?

What do we talk about when we talk about innovation?

Published date: June 30, 2021 в 11:00 am

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Methodology

When I typed “definition of innovation” into Google the other day, it returned 1,710,000,000 replies, which means absolutely nothing, of course, raising the question why the arguably most influential company on earth has been consistently feeding us with this useless piece of data for so many years. So, I promise to use this very same opening sentence in a future post (repurposing, saving on first-sentence-emissions) about some common popular fallacies around indicators and measurement. But, for the sake of our current topic, the billions mentioned above do give something of an indication of the fact that a lot of words have been spent in attempts to define innovation, and indeed, a quick glance at Wikipedia’s contribution to the subject brings up mentions of various researchers who have compiled lists of 40, 60 or many dozen definitions.

I am going to go out on a limb here and claim that all the definitions that I have seen very much miss the mark, and that we at SIT have been using a simple definition that doesn’t, which I will present to you below. To assess the usefulness of a definition we should start by asking ourselves what we actually expect from one, assuming that “we” are not theoreticians who simply wish to publish a paper on the subject. A useful definition of innovation would allow us to, among other objectives:

  1. Decide if an activity or its result should be considered innovative;
  2. Measure our organization’s “innovation pulse”;
  3. Assess the success of our efforts to become more innovative, or drive our organization in this direction;
  4. Re-direct efforts invested in innovation that seem not to be achieving the desired results.

These are some of the first definitions you will find by googling:

  • Wikipedia: Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services.
  • ISO TC 279 on innovation management proposes in the standards, ISO 56000:2020 [2] to define innovation as “a new or changed entity creating or redistributing value”.
  • Based on their survey, Baragheh et al. attempted to formulate a multidisciplinary definition and arrived at the following: “Innovation is the multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, service or processes, in order to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace”
  • Peter Drucker (yes, even the great PD can get things wrong, apparently – A.L.) wrote: Innovation is the specific function of entrepreneurship, whether in an existing business, a public service institution, or a new venture started by a lone individual in the family kitchen. It is the means by which the entrepreneur either creates new wealth-producing resources or endows existing resources with enhanced potential for creating wealth.

Why are all these definitions inadequate? Each has its particular deficiencies, but they also share a common defect. They all suffer, to a varying extent, from a series of nested biases:

A bias in favor of organizations —————> rather than human endeavors in general, individuals, families

Within organizations, a bias in favor of businesses ————–> versus communities, governments, criminal, educational

Within businesses ———————> in favor of products, rather than services

Within products ——————–> in favor of technological products

Within technological products ——————–> in favor of hi-tech

Within hi-tech ————————-> in favor of R&D

 

So, if you are an engineer in a hi-tech startup developing a product with the goal of entering the market and making money – plenty of these definitions can plausibly describe what you are doing or aiming to do. On the other hand, none of them is adequate for capturing or evaluating, for example, the following activities, in descending order of relevance (all of them based on personal experience in my role as innovation consultant and facilitator):

  1. A marketer in the same startup, rethinking their go-to-market strategy;
  2. The startup’s CFO, planning her presentation to a potential investor;
  3. The CEO, dealing with her difficulty in communicating a pivot in strategy to the company’s employees;
  4. All the above-mentioned functions in a traditional industry, manufacturing wooden furniture, for example;
  5. A project manager in an NGO, searching for a new way to effectively distribute contraceptives in rural India;
  6. An ad-hoc collective of activists figuring out their next steps in an equal-rights campaign on the streets of a large city;
  7. An ex-con trying to crack the code of a safe (this one I refused to collaborate on);
  8. A father trying not to repeat his regular response, that has obviously not been working too well, to his teenage daughter (this one was pro-bono, auto-pro-bono).

Try any of the definitions from the googled results on any of the items on this list and you will immediately note how increasingly inadequate they sound as you advance through the examples. Applying the same logic, you can easily imagine myriad additional examples excluded by the standard definitions, rendering the definitions useless for what are probably 90% of human activities that could, in principle, be innovative. Consider, however, the following definition, formulated by us at SIT and refined through years of use:

To innovate is to think and act differently to achieve your goals.

Let’s zoom into each of the four key elements of the definition, in turn.

  1. Innovation is first and foremost the fruit of a cognitive, thinking process. It requires conditions, both emotional and material, but the first and often-overlooked condition is supplying people with time to think. “Think”, not as in “how and what do I quickly answer to my boss’s complaint?” or “what 15 things do I need to do today and how the hell will I make time for them all?”, but “think” as in taking time off from one’s incessant race to reflect on it from above or from the side.
  2. Whatever you are doing, you’re not innovating if it doesn’t translate into action. Beware the shiny PPT presentation of elaborate organizational flowcharts describing “our new innovation process”: seek concrete actions leading to implementation.
  3. One of our key rallying cries is: Don’t do innovation – rather, innovate in what you do. Innovation is a means and not an end in itself, and therefore, an action can be considered to be innovation only inasmuch as it supports or accelerates your efforts to achieve one or more of your goals. Innovation leaders, units and consultants often flip this causal relationship and act as if innovating is the goal. This is only natural since it actually is the goal – for them. But an organization needs to remember that actions and initiatives can only count as innovations when they promote the organization’s objectives. This is true also of individuals or teams. Note that there is nothing in this definition that favors “value for the market” or the role of customers or any of the corporate-speak business-oriented language. If your goals pertain to the realm of business, then innovation should lead to business results. If your goal is, say, happiness then, for you, an action is innovative if – in addition to the other three characteristics mentioned in the definition – it increases happiness.
  4. Many actions require thinking and promote the goals of an individual or organization and yet it would not be useful or productive to consider them to be examples of innovation. In fact, most of what members of an organization routinely do falls into this category. Doing your job properly, improving your processes, using Quality tools, all these important and commendable activities can contribute much to an organization, and yet we would still not wish to define them as innovative. The last and crucial ingredient in our definition, therefore, is that your thinking-based and goal-promoting action must stem from thinking differently. This, of course, begs the question of what will be considered as different enough to count. We offer a simple and powerful answer: thinking differently means breaking one or more of your Cognitive Fixednesses.

So, introducing this concept into our definition we get:

You innovate when you think and act in a way that breaks your fixedness leading you to achieve your goals.

This working definition lends itself to numerous practical applications. It can, for example, be immediately translated into a useful pair of criteria when you are asked to approve submissions of ideas or achievements to an internal innovation competition in an organization. Those who submit an entry are asked to demonstrate:

  1. The impact of their project (potential impact if the competition is among ideas; measured impact if, as we prefer, prizes go to implemented projects rather than ideas);
  2. Which fixedness(es) had to be broken in order to come up with and/or implement their idea.

These two criteria, when applied jointly, easily filter out hairbrained schemes without demonstrable results (or the potential thereof) and on the other hand embrace candidates from any type of activity in the organization that supports its strategy and goals, without bestowing preference to R&D or other usual suspects. Our definition is not perfect, of course: definitions are notoriously elusive and slippery, and tend to circularity. One way of assessing a definition’s value is by evaluating to what extent it captures all phenomena one wishes to include under a term and how effectively it excludes those one doesn’t. The definition presented here performs well on both counts, I believe, including a very wide range of activities versus the organization-business-product-technologically biased alternatives. It also helps filter out useful but non-innovative activities and even points to a practical direction for those who wish to nudge their current activities towards a more innovative path.

A crucial element in making this definition operational is obviously a clear and communicable understanding of the concept of FIXEDNESS. In future posts, we will delve deeper into this concept, so central to the very essence of innovation.

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