Gijs van Wulfen www.gijsvanwulfen.com
Frederik de Wal (1963) graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, a Dutch academy for fine arts and design in Amsterdam, after which he started his own design studio. He specialized in (editorial) concepts, book design, corporate design and exhibition typography. He works for clients inland and abroad and has been a (guest) teacher at several art schools. Moreover he is a conceiver of special projects and book productions. studio frederik de wal www.frederikdewal.nl
Do you want to be innovative? ‘Inspiration for Innovation’ offers you practical insights, tips, and tools to become a great innovator. It teaches you how to innovate: pick the right moment, break your patterns, understand customers, come up with great ideas, find new business models, get to market fast, and get your colleagues, partners, and bosses on board. This book inspires, confronts and surprises you with more than 100 lessons to be learnt. Inspiration for Innovation is written for anyone who wants to be an innovator: students, start-up founders, inventors, managers, engineers, marketers, entrepreneurs, consultants, change agents, members of the board, and, of course, you. Innovation is learning by doing. Start the right way with these 101 lessons learned.
INSPIRATION FOR INNOVATION
Gijs van Wulfen (1960) is a worldwide authority on innovation. He is the founder of the FORTH innovation method, a scientifically proven methodology for the start of innovation, which is implemented on six continents. His fourth book on innovation, ‘The Innovation Maze’, was crowned recently as Management Book of the Year 2017. As a LinkedIn Influencer he has 310,000+ followers and travels all over the world as a speaker on innovation and design thinking to inspire people in a practical way to be great innovators. Reach out to him at gijs@gijsvanwulfen.com.
GIJS VAN WULFEN
INSPIRATION FOR INNOVATION GIJS VAN WULFEN BIS PUBLISHERS
101 LESSONS FOR INNOVATORS
YOU CAN INVENT ALONE BUT YOU CAN’T INNOVATE ALONE. IT SHOULD BE CALLED WE-NNOVATION NOT I-NNOVATION.
WHA
INNOVATE LIKE AN EXPLORER
01
WHAT IS INNOVATION?
AT? Let’s clarify what I mean by innovation as the term has been defined in so many ways. Be aware I like to oversimplify it to make it clear for anyone — and not only for business professionals. In my view, innovation is ‘doing new things or doing things in a new way’. Let me exemplify the three keywords in this definition. New: Innovation comes from the Latin word innovat, which means to renew or alter. The combination of in and novare suggests, ‘to come up with something entirely new’.1 The question is, new for whom? In my view, a product or service is only new when the (internal) customer perceives it as new.
of organizing yourself, etcetera. In this way, the meaning of innovation applies to companies, healthcare institutions, non-profit organizations, and even governmental organisations.
Doing: Innovation has a concrete outcome and it is only successful when it is adopted by customers, (internal) users, clients, or whatever you may call them. Effective innovators, therefore, have a process in place to transform ideas into concrete outcomes. Be sure to use one. My own favourite definition of innovation comes from Lewis Duncan: ‘Innovation is the ability to convert ideas into invoices.’
Things: Innovation can appear in many forms. People associate innovation with new technological inventions. But it can also be services, business models, markets, processes, customer experiences, ways
Max McKeown, The Innovation Book, Pearson, Harlow, United Kingdom, 2014, p. xxix. 1
INNOVATION MINDSET
14
BEING BORED MAKES YOU INNOVATIVE
You associate slack time with tediousness and boredom. In practice though, having periods with nothing to do actually stimulates innovation. Being bored makes you innovative in more than one way. First, it’s scientifically proven that slack time sparks creativity. Let me ask you, At which moments of the day do you get your best ideas? Probably outside of work, right? You get them for example when you wake up, when you’re under the shower, driving, or jogging. Now, there is a second reason how innovation benefits from slack time: you have time to take real action. A recent study analysing activity on Kickstarter.com, shows that ‘mundane, execution-oriented tasks, such as those associated with launching a crowdfunding campaign, are an important input to innovation that may benefit significantly from slack time.’
So, time-off from your regular duties is a great enabler for getting all the operational and organizational work on innovation done. A lot of companies struggle with becoming more innovative. They put on extra pressure, making people work harder to innovate in overtime. From practice, I know that when pressure gets too high no original ideas materialize. That’s why well-known companies like Google, 3M, and Wella have special slack time policies to spark innovative ideas and actions among their employees. So, if you want to be innovative, give yourself and your employees some slack time.
ORGANISING INNOVATION
35
NINE INNOVATION SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL CREATIVE TEAMS
Scientific research reveals secrets about how some of the world’s greatest video games were created. They collected data on 12,422 video games that were produced from the inception of the industry in 1979 to 2009, and on the teams that developed them. Here’s a collection of nine secrets of teams creating new successful video games: 1. Innovators are likely to be developed by teams that include cognitively different groups who tolerate and exploit overlapping membership amongst them. 2. Tensions within teams allow for the development of products that stand out. 3. A game is more distinctive if the developer team accommodates larger cohesive groups; but this effect declines as the size of groups grows. 4. A team including newcomers is a significant positive predictor of distinctiveness.
5. Teams with a few absolute standouts (and some that performed poorly in the past) are more likely to produce creative outliers. 6. Games developed and published by one firm are more likely to be distinctive than games produced by multiple firms because less negotiation is necessary to reach a consensus. 7. Older firms are less likely to provide the context in which distinctive games can be developed. 8. Teams with high cohesion, but with cognitively close developers, lead to a narrow focus. 9. Creative success is facilitated when cognitively distant groups interacted socially. This creates a workable space where some misunderstanding is tolerated. In summary, the most successful new video games were created because the creative teams behind them had the ideal mix of career backgrounds and working relationships.
ORGANISING INNOVATION
39
BE AN INNOVATOR IN SIX STEPS
Starting innovation raises questions. What do we want out of it? What are we going to do? Therefore, organise innovation in a structured way, so you do things in the right order. In addition, a pragmatic process lends certainty and encourages the discipline to do the necessary activities. ‘Be an innovator in six steps’ is one of the models I developed, suited for individuals, start-up teams, and corporate innovation teams. First of all, consider whether it’s the right time for you, your team, and your organisation to innovate. If it isn’t, just postpone your journey. Later, choose your direction by making an innovation assignment that sets a concrete, ambitious goal for your project. In step three, you open your mind and start discovering trends, new technologies, and customer needs and frictions, because you have to get new insights before you get new ideas.
A lot of ideas will pop up and you will share them in step four: Ideate in a structured way, when you diverge and converge, ending up with the best three to five worked out ideas. In step five, Experiment and Learn, you experiment with, and improve upon, rough versions of your ideas, to check if they are attractive. When they are, you work out a convincing business case. After approval from your board or financers you start to implement and to scale up in step six. Be sure to persist. Why is the model a person? Innovation starts with you. Be ready to innovate yourself, too.
Y ROUTE
THE INNOVATION MAZE
THE CUSTOMER ISSUE ROUTE
Lack of resources
SELECT
CREATE No time
NOLOGY
CONDI TIONS
DIS COVER
Too slow
PERIMENT strategy
FO CUS
No market need
Unclear
fit
Fear of failure
Not feasible
EX
No insights or
CREATE NEW
BUSINESS
CASE
Not original
CHECK FREEDOM TO OPERATE
IDEATE
inspiration
Politics
No business model
TECH
CREATE
BUSINESS
MODEL
E STARTING INNOVATION
53
TEN ACTIVITIES TO GUIDE YOU THROUGH THE INNOVATION MAZE
Before making a final decision to implement an innovative idea, your board, your partners, or your financers will demand tangible proof of its potential. I learned in practice that it takes the following ten activities to produce a structured business case for innovation. 1. Ideate: Generate and choose original relevant ideas for a product, service, process, or experience. 2. Focus: Define your innovation centre-of-interest, including all the boundary conditions. 3. Check Fit: Check if your idea, technology, customer issue, or business challenge fits your personal and corporate priorities. 4. Create Conditions: Organize the right moment, the right team, the right pace, and the right funding for your innovation initiative.
5. Discover: Discover trends, markets, technologies, and customer insights. 6. Create a Business Model: Create a viable way your earn your money. 7. Select Technology: Identify and select the right technology to deliver your new product, service, process, or experience. 8. Check Freedom to Operate: Check if you do not infringe upon the intellectual property rights of others. 9. Experiment: Carry out a systematic research or test that validates the adoption and attractiveness of your innovation. 10. Create a New Business Case: Create a well-founded, convincing business case for your offering.
IDEATING
62
TWENTY-EIGHT IDEA KILLERS Every one of us knows how creativity and innovation is killed our organizations. It happens every day, everywhere in the world. Do you recognise these idea killers?
1. Yes, but… 2. It already exists! 3. Our customers won’t like that! 4. We don’t have time. 5. NO! 6. It’s not possible. 7. It’s too expensive! 8. Let’s be realistic. 9. That’s not logical. 10. We need to do more research. 11. There’s no budget. 12. I’m not creative. 13. We don’t want to make mistakes. 14. The management won’t agree.
15. Get real. 16. It’s not my responsibility. 17. It’s too difficult to master. 18. That’s too big a change. 19. The market is not ready yet. 20. Let’s keep it under consideration. 21. It is just like... 22. The older generation will not use it. 23. We are too small for that. 24. It might work in other places but not here. 25. Since when are you the expert? 26. That’s for the future. 27. There are no staff members available. 28. It is not suitable for our clients.
Source: Creativity Today, Igor Byttebier & Ramon Vullings, Bis Publishers, 2007, p 29. Download a poster at: www.ideakillers.net.
IMPLEMENTING INNOVATION
79
HOW INSIDE-THE-BOX INNOVATIONS SAVED LEGO
The origin of LEGO began in a carpenter’s workshop in the town of Billund, Denmark in 1916. In the nineties, LEGO had hoped to keep growing by tripling the number of new products to its line, which only increased costs. Thus, resulting in 1998 in the first loss in the company’s history. LEGO needed to innovate. It created its own children’s clothing line and put a division of the LEGO Group in charge of pitching new ideas for books, movies, and TV shows — all completely new territory. It soon became apparent that the company’s growing complexity was becoming a problem. It only led to increasing risks and costs. By 2003, LEGO was virtually out of cash.
The new CEO, Jørgen Knudstorp, realized that more innovation was still needed. The consensus was that the same outside-thebox-thinking that had driven them was responsible for nearly driving them into the ground. LEGO’s management gave everyone within the company room to create new growth-initiatives. This time though, all the ideas contributed needed to comply with the LEGO mission to be universally recognized as the best company for family products. In essence, everything LEGO did from 2003 onwards evolved from the choice to innovate closer to the company’s core. They went back to the original LEGO brick. LEGO Friends, the new line developed for girls, for example, turned out to be one of the biggest successes in LEGO’s history. Nowadays, LEGO has fully embraced the principles of open innovation. Its strategy of innovating close-to-the-core really paid off.
INNOVATION PIONEERS
100
TEN TRAITS OF INNOVATIVE LEADERS
What makes innovative leaders effective? Harvard Business Review published research from Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman on what made a group of innovative leaders stand out in a big corporation in telecommunications. Ten distinctive behaviours emerged that set this group apart as innovation leaders. They are listed here in descending order of importance. Innovative leaders 1. Display excellent strategic vision. 2. Have a strong customer focus. 3. Create a climate of reciprocal trust. 4. Display fearless loyalty to doing what’s right for the organization and customer. 5. Put their faith in a culture that magnifies upward communication. 6. Are persuasive. 7. Excel at setting stretch goals. 8. Emphasize speed. 9. Are candid in their communication. 10. Inspire and motivate through action.
The researchers state that ‘these behaviors are consistent with our analysis of highly innovative leaders in hundreds of other organizations in industries as varied as automotive, pharmaceuticals, and consumer products and from all parts of the globe. This suggests to us that these conclusions describe highly innovative individuals in all industries, as well as from different cultures throughout the world.’ How do you rate yourself on each of these behaviours? Work on it when you want to become a more innovative leader yourself.
Source: https://hbr.org/2014/12/research-10-traits-ofinnovative-leaders.