Nurturing A Culture Of Innovation
April 4, 2011, Storage Network World, Santa Clara, CA—Tom Kelly, gm of IDEO offered the concept that organizations must strive for continuous innovation. There is a need for creativity in organizations, as one part of the solution to the increasing complexity of technology, business, and the organizations.
Companies must out innovate their competitors to stay in the game. They must avoid the “Red Queen effect” as noted by Lewis Carroll in “Through the Looking Glass”.
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
To make matters worse, people in the United States have a distorted worldview and consider domestic accomplishments as always being “world class”, like the World Series of baseball, which only invites teams from North America to play.
In another example, Akron Ohio at one time had 100 percent of the United States tire manufacturing business. This all changed when radial tires were introduced to the market from a company in France. Over an 18 year period, their market share declined from 100 percent to zero. Radial tires change the entire market because the slow pace of innovation in the tire industry allowed the entry of a competitor. The fallout from these changes not only affected the manufacturing people, but also had impacts on white-collar workers, suppliers, and the commercial and social infrastructure in the area.
In 2000, Sony was considered to be much, much better at electronics than Samsung. In 2005, the roles were reversed. Samsung made an effort to change the internal culture, from knowledge they gain from surveys, and started a series of innovation programs. Sony is still a great innovator, they just slow down enough to allow a hungry competitor to exceed them. This example illustrates the concept of a well defined competitor; your world is defined by your prime competitor.
Dinosaurs ruled the world for 160 million years. They became extinct because the world changed under them. It wasn’t little mammals running around under their feet, or the appearance of a new dominant species. The dinosaurs did not change as fast as the rest of the environment did, a prime example of the Red Queen effect.
At IDEO, they have dissipated over 5000 programs with technology types of companies. Rather than trying to distinguish between correlation and causality, instead they focus on the roles of innovators. There are three important components in design thinking when facing a new project. The technology people evaluate the feasibility and afford ability, the business people evaluate liability leaving someone with the task of defining desirable characteristics.
Successful programs have started with human factors and needs. These factors apply to all companies, small companies may need to have people with multiple roles. The 10 important roles for innovation are: anthropologist, experimenter, cross pollinator, hurdler, collaborator, tractor, set designer, caregiver, storyteller, and Experience architect. The first three categories fit into the learning environment, and help the company learns from others’ mistakes. The second three are organizing roles, and unfortunately places where ideas get lost. The last four roles are building roles. In addition to people, consider using space as a tool to increase creativity.
One of the most important functions in innovation is that of the anthropologist. These people started to contribute to innovation in the early 90s. They helped to define what problem to solve, because the experience and expertise of the other categories screens out anomalies in people’s experiences. Some examples of this lack of anthropologist analysis include the oxygen masks in an airplane, the train gateway at Charles de Gaulle airport, and a woman with mismatched shoes in a Tokyo train station.
The oxygen masks in airplanes have no user interface as the bags may not inflate even though they might be supplying oxygen. In an emergency, the airbags are supposed to automatically drop from their holders in the ceiling, and the passenger must pull on the bag to start the flow of oxygen. Without some type of visual indication, the passenger has no idea if they pulled hard enough, or not, and there may be too much noise and confusion to hear the oxygen coming through the mask.
The easiest and least expensive way to get from Charles de Gaulle airport to Paris is to take the RER. The problem is that the train station provides no easy way to get bags through the turnstile. The turnstiles of the same design as those in the city and do not accommodate passengers with one or two bags. Everyone struggles with their bags in the narrow turnstiles. In a case like this, the job of the anthropologist is to look around and learn from individuals then apply that information to the mass.
The woman with mismatched shoes indicates a potential business opportunity. People may consider unmatched shoes as a fashion statement, possibly creating a market for single shoes. A similar market is for mismatched socks. One online company sells socks in sets of three and not in pairs. This forces consumers to buy two sets of socks to get three pairs of unmatched socks, but also allows people to create multiple combinations of unmatched socks. Here, an anthropologist would work to find a customer in the world and identify some unique characteristic of that customer, then apply those unique characteristics to an entire market.
Oral-B, the toothbrush company, held with the common assumption that children just needed smaller handles on the toothbrushes until they observed children under six years old holding their toothbrush in their fist and not between their fingers. Because of these findings, they developed toothbrushes for children with large squishy handles, since size was not the controlling factor. As a result of this change they became the number one supplier of in the world for children’s toothbrushes for a period of 18 months. This was one of those rare instances where a US company actually did get a market share of significance in the world.
Anthropologists at Bank of America looked at the users of checks and found that many younger people often would round up the amount to the nearest dollar. This happened most often in repeatable transactions like utility bills. When questioned the writers responded that it was simple and in the small cost was much less than the time needed to write the exact amount and balance the checkbook later. This led to the error very successful campaign called keep the change. The anthropologist discovered a human need which allowed the company to attract new customers.
At the other end of the spectrum is the experience architect, the person who figures out how to implement a solution. This person needs to have design experience to know how to look beyond the specifications and consider customer experience. These considerations are important when looking at the spectrum of product solutions. One in our commodities which can be transformed into products which can attract the use of services to become an experience. The amount of money available increases at every stage.
Las Vegas is an example of an engineered experience instead of being a single line item for a vacation. Along the same lines, for most people the experience is the bed when staying at a hotel. By applying technology and marketing to a bed the Starwood chain increase the yield of the rooms when they introduced their heavenly beds and created marketing around the bed experience.
Innovation and creativity require many experienced people, but they all need to aspire to “the wet nap interface” even on technologically sophisticated products. The wet nap interface is inspired by the ability of babies to be happy or go to sleep independent of environmental conditions. This concept was applied to a heart defibrillator. The original design required an engineer or an experienced medical technician to operate. With the included intelligence in the device, all the settings were determined by the defibrillator so the only controls and operations required were too attach the disposable paddles to the chest and push the start button. This differently later model has been proven to be easily used by a six-year-old child.
Bayer pharmaceuticals designed a glucosimeter with a USB interface the whole device looks like a typical memory stick and auto loads software to the PC when inserted into a USB port. This approach makes tracking and reporting tasks very simple and therefore leads to increased use.
Therefore, the two key roles in innovation are the anthropologist and the experience architect together these people turn insights into great ideas that can take over a market. Adding these two types of people to a development group leads to increased innovation.
Deals result from insights from quirky behaviors so it’s important to not decide final requirements in advance of detailed observations. Adding anthropologists on top of technology changes the nature of innovation and R&D. Good ideas and innovation result from a combination of idea and implementation.
