Networking & Business

Innovation is not a lonely activity.
Praise everyone who helps innovate in your company.
They can be found in unexpected departments.

In the case of philosophy innovation, Collin Randall, in one of his greatest books, tells us about the need of a great network:
“In all of world history there are only three significant philosophers who will fill this description [being intellectually isolated]: Wang Ch’ung in China; Bassui Tokusho in Japan; and Ibn Khaldun in Islam. All are secondary figures in the influence they have exerted in the history (…)”

The same would apply to innovation in the corporate world. Innovation is not a lonely activity. However, when reading that paragraph, it made me think about the praise that happens after any successful innovative project, quite far from the philosophy world, in the corporate world.

Often, the most visible individual in an innovation project gets all the congratulations. We all know that it is good leadership practice to include, when giving praise, everyone that worked in the project.
Most people that were involved in the prototyping stage can be identified easily. It is often a very clearly defined team.
However, it’s not so for the ones that could spark the creativity stage.

Take your time to investigate what was the trigger of that innovation. It was probably well before the project started. For instance, it might have come from something that the receptionist told one morning to the Chief Engineer. In such a case, praise the receptionist. On one side, it’s fair. On the other, you might encourage the same process to happen again.

Take your time to discover those “spark initiators”. It is not easy, but it’s worth the effort.

Almost no innovation is the work of just one individual. When praising some innovation that has happened in your corporation or enterprise, compliment everyone that had some input into it.

Related links:

• The sociology of philosophies. Randall Collins (2000). Harvard University Press.
• “iinnovation”, Begins With Two Eyes
• What Type Of Professional Network Fosters Innovation?
• The Click Moment That Helped Windows To Survive
• Diversity Of People Propels Your Innovation

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Will megacities enable great innovation?
Or will it happen at small towns?

“By 2020 80% of Europeans will live in cities.” This sentence in a recent newspaper article by Jordi Bosch i Garcia sparked some questions in my head about its impact to innovation. The author questions wether it’s a non-stop process, a “road of no return”. He suggests that it might be more effective to bring the population close to the resources instead of having to transport the resources to the cities.

Anyway, you know I’ve written about how cities might become too big for innovation (see “Be Proactive With Your City Network” and “Too Big To Be Innovative?”). That recent article made me think that the impact on innovation is often not taken into account. And this is despite that most politicians argue that innovation is the growth engine for the 21st century.

Add to the argument the following passage from “Creating Minds”:
“Metropolises and megatropolises seem as seductive as ever. However, I have no trouble envisioning a future where the proverbial isolated creator (…) seated at her computer could come to the forefront of her field though she’d never met any of the leaders firsthand.”

As you might have read (“Find Another Brain To Get Into Creative Mode” and “Network To Be Better Innovators”), I don’t fully agree with the argument that great creativity happens when you are isolated. However, taking both above arguments together we might envision that some of the innovation steps thrive in cities while some others blossom in towns (or small cities). Thus:

1. idea generation, in towns;
2. idea development, in cities (with labs and production units); and
3. diffusion of developed concepts, in cities (due to the critical mass and the easiness of contact or intersection).

To sum up, there is no one-size-fits all. Each innovation step needs different relationships and different infrastructure.

Related links:

• Be Proactive With Your City Network, previous post.
• Find Another Brain To Get Into Creative Mode, previous post.
• Too Big To Be Innovative?, previous post.
• Network To Be Better Innovators, previous post.
• Creating Minds, by Howard Gardner (1993).

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Your job search strategy can be very similar to the innovation strategy of a company.

Last week I run an “experiential conference” for an alumni group at a leading Business School in Madrid. Most of the attendees were in a job search or career change process.

One way of approaching such a process is sending lots of CVs and posting it to as many job-search web sites as possible. Your chances of success will not be very high.

Another way is doing the steps a company would do for an innovation project.

Let’s consider the three phases described by Hansen and Birkinshaw in their article “The Innovation Value Chain”:

• idea generation,
• idea development, and
• diffusion of developed concepts.

The idea generation is the equivalent of defining your priorities and finding your “transferable skills”.

The idea development equals to meeting people from different industries to investigate how you can apply your skills in those sectors.

The diffusion corresponds to meeting executives (potential employers) and let them know about your skills and availability.

A breakthrough innovation is often very different from what you expected.
In the current economic climate, you might find a job in a sector where you weren’t initially looking into.

You can apply an innovation strategy methodology to your job search.

Related links:

• The Innovation Value Chain, Harvard Business Review, June 2007, Hansen & Birkinshaw.
• Find a Job Using Disruptive Innovation, Harvard Business Review, March 2012, Dyer & Gregersen.

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You cannot just attend conferences. You must participate in them.

To attend a conference is just a matter of sitting through the sessions and listening to the speakers. To participate in a conference requires being active.

Ask a question
Most participants will attend the first session of a conference, often a plenary with one or more keynote speakers. What is more important than listening to the speakers? It’s asking a question that everyone will listen to!

And even better, they will listen to your single-sentence self-introduction at the beginning of the question. The idea is to make yourself visible to the rest of the attendees and even to the star speaker. This is extremely useful when you are new to the industry.

Attend the breaks
Your preferred session should be the coffee break.

At breaks, meals and cocktails you will be able to talk to people in a more relaxed environment than in the workplace. Susan RoAne authored a book about this called How to Work a Room.

A good starting point will be to approach people who are standing alone, probably because they are intimidated by the thought of approaching other people. You first tell them your self-introduction, you ask them about the conference, and then the dialogue starts.

Schedule the follow-up
Most likely, on the first day back at the office you’ll be swamped by the many tasks that are waiting for you. So you might decide to postpone the follow-up with all those new contacts. Tomorrow will surely be easier. However, tomorrow arrives and you’re back into the office routine and urgent matters arise.

A proven way out of this spiral is never to get into it. When you plan a conference in your diary, you should include some time for follow-ups during the subsequent days.
If it’s not in your diary, it might not happen!

Excerpt from the book Connecting Forward.
You can buy the book or take complementary tests.

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Innovation success requires much more than creativity. It needs great execution.

Two articles I read last week made the point. One is about a corporation and the other about a country.

On one side, one article is about how a worldwide leader of automobile-infotainment systems achieved reverse innovation (bringing innovation from emerging countries into western markets). It is the case of Harman International.

It shows clearly that the hardest part to achieve that innovation was not the creativity but the implementation of the new platforms. The implementation goes well beyond the “selling into the market”.

One of the Harman’s challenges was the internal buy-in from different (established) divisions. Leadership involvement and personal bridges across divisions were crucial to the success.

On the other side, the second article (which is in fact composed by three blog posts) is about the proposal by Louis Gallois (French Commissionaire to Investment) to improve innovation in France.

It shows that France has excellent capabilities for creativity. They include great engineering schools.
However, the country seems to lag behind when it comes to bring the innovation to the market.

When thinking innovation, think beyond “just” creativity. Think building bridges.

Related links:

• A Reverse-Innovation Playbook, by Vijay Govindarajan (Harvard Business Review, April 2012)
• Les convictions de Louis Gallois pour réussir l’innovation en France (in French), post by uillaume Villon de Benveniste

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Executive involvement is a must in any innovation program that you launch.

Swisslog improved the participation of employees in innovation activities (mainly gathering creative ideas) when senior executives, who were “non-innovation professionals”, became involved in the programs. Colin Nelson writes: “Participation rose dramatically. Campaigns were attracting less than 20 ideas each before the change in approach, yet the most open campaigns were attracting nearly 180 ideas” (read article).

This clearly shows that innovation responsibilities shouldn’t be only in innovation departments, as a recent survey by McKinsey shows too.

Along the same lines, we can read: “Innovation rarely occurs in organizations without the commitment and visible support of their leaders, although those leaders may have little idea of the specific nature of new developments” (from “Innovation, A Very Short Introduction”)

Some studies have found that staff generating innovative ideas often seek one executive to validate the idea. In the Swisslog case, having executives’ official involvement in the programs might have, in the eyes of the staff, “given permission to approach executives for idea validation”.

If you have an executive role, get involved in innovation programs.
If you’re not an executive, get executive involvement for your innovation programs.

Related links:

• Understanding your Innovation Culture – A Case-Study from Swisslog. Post by Colin Nelson.
• Making innovation structures work. McKinsey Global Survey results (2012).
• Networks for generating and for validating ideas: The social side of creativity (Ohly, Kase, Škerlavaj). Innovation: management, policy & practice (2010) 12: 41–52.
• Innovation. A very short introduction. M. Dodgson & D. Gann. Oxford University Press, 2010.

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The diversity in your network will help you, not only generating innovative ideas, but also executing them.

Your new baby is born.
Low weight.
Doctors running.
The baby ends up in an incubator for a few days.

You won’t be able to touch the baby, to feel its skin, or to give a loving kiss. The good news is… that you will be able to do this in a few days time.

Shouldn’t we have incubators, most probably your baby would not survive. In the 19th Century there was a meagre 32% survival rate of low-weight newborns.
Steven Johnson explains how in the late 19th Century one day a Paris obstetrician (Stephane Tarnier) saw a zoo exhibit on chicken incubators.

He met Odile Martin, the person in charge of the exhibit. They chatted and she pointed to the heating that was placed underneath the bed. Stephane convinced Odile to work for a week at his clinic so that they could do a prototype for babies.

That prototype increased survival rate up to 66%.

Had Stephane not be open to diverse people, he wouldn’t have found someone to prototype the incubator.
Be open, diversify your network.

Related links:

• Where good ideas comes from. Book by Steven Johnson.

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Different relationships will help you achieve different types of innovation.

Radical innovation is quite different from incremental innovation. The former creates a new product or service that completely replaces an existing one while the later improves existing products or services. The relationships (or networks) that will you achieve them are also different.

Diverse network for radical innovation
A very diverse network will help you with your radical innovation. You will be able to get very different perspectives than yours. You will be at the intersection, where innovation happens as Frans Johansson often writes.

To validate your new idea, those people with different perspectives will help you too. If you only validate it with people very similar to each other, you take the risk of getting only negative responses. If you had asked diverse people, the responses would have been more varied.

Dense network for incremental innovation
A very dense network, one with lots of “strong ties” between people, will help you with your incremental innovation.

You are not trying to get big breakthroughs but improving “by an increment” your product or technology. A dense network will bring speed into the execution of your changes.

Remember…
When you are innovating, remember that your relationships (your professional network) will help you innovate.
And you will need different types of relationships for different types of innovation.

Related links:

• Eureka or Cafeteria, previous post.
• The Medici Effect, by Frans Johansson.

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Guest blogger: Brent Trainer

The Internet and social media are among the least-trusted industries for privacy, according to the annual privacy study conducted by the Ponemon Institute. The study tracks consumers’ rankings of organizations that collect and manage their personal information.

The top five industries for privacy trust are: healthcare, consumer products, banking, communications and technology and software. The bottom five are: Internet and social media, nonprofit, toys and games, airlines and conglomerates.

Top five most trusted companies of 2012 are: American Express, Hewlett Packard, Amazon, IBM and the U.S. Postal Service. Making the list for the first time are: Microsoft, United Healthcare and Mozilla, said the Ponemon press release.

Fifty-nine percent of the respondents said privacy rights are diminished or undermined by social media, smart mobile devices and geotracking tools. Forty-nine percent of respondents received one or more data-breach notifications in the past 24 months. Seventy percent of these individuals said this notification caused a loss of trust issues in the privacy practices of the organization reporting the incident.

Some companies were effected by the concerns. Apple failed to make the list for the first time in four years, according to CNET, while Google, Best Buy, Facebook, Yahoo, Dell and AOL also are gone.

While protecting personal information from identity theft is important, 63 percent of respondents shared sensitive personal information with an organization they didn’t know or trust. Sixty percent did this solely for convenience.

Identity theft education helps after finding out which companies are and aren’t trusted.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse suggests companies implement a written identity privacy protection program to detect “red flags” of identity theft. Companies should restrict data access to employees with a legitimate need to know. Sensitive personal data should be kept in a secure encrypted computer system. Personal data could be limited to only the essential-needed details.

By taking a few proactive steps, businesses and organizations can make consumers feel more secure.

Guest blog by Brent Trainer
Brent is a tweeting fiend. He loves finding new ways to build on his networking capabilities through apps and new developments in technology.

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Does face-to-face contact bring any benefit to technological innovations?
The answer is: YES!

Open-source 3D printing is one of the cutting edge innovation domains these days. Its fans share, and exchange, 3D designs in an open community.

We would assume that, in such a technological environment, face-to-face contact is not necessary or, at least, it doesn’t bring any benefit.
However, the opposite is true.

Erik de Bruijn and J.P. de Jong found that members of the 3D printing design community are more likely to innovate when “they maintain face-to-face contact with other community members” (see article).

What can this mean for your company?
You might want to design spaces that allow for such face-to-face contact to happen.

For instance, you might want to locate the relevant staff members in offices that are less than 50 meters apart. You can read my previous post on “The 50 meter innovation zone”.

All in all, even in our era full of high technology, face-to-face remains a great medium not only to build trustful relationships but also to uncover new ideas and opportunities.

Related links:

• Innovation Lessons From 3-D Printing, by Jeroen P.J. de Jong and Erik de Bruijn.
• The 50 Meters Innovation Zone, previous post.

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