My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 062609

June 27, 2009 by Leave a comment

From the home office in Buenos Aires…

#1: Early criticism of veracity of MJ story was that it came from TMZ. Does TMZ misreport or lie? Or do people just not like what they cover?

#2: Reading – How to approach open innovation: With lessons from P&G http://bit.ly/EjcSp by @lindegaard #innovation

#3: “As strongly as you & a few like-minded people feel the impacts of info overload, a lot more people just don’t care.” http://bit.ly/9OnX4

#4: CLEAR, the service that used biometrics to fast-track you thru airport security, is no more http://bit.ly/cAxSY Another biometrics firm dies

#5: Reading these Dachis posts today http://bit.ly/13RFri I get the sense the firm is consultancy, not technology @peterkim @armano @jevon

#6: RT @VMaryAbraham McAfee/Lockheed: Top-down mandate needs to be done carefully. Otherwise it can hamper e20 rollout. #e2conf {How?}

#7: Reading: The secret sauce to successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption http://bit.ly/7oLP5 by @oscarberg

#8: Self-spam? Colleague CC’d himself on an Outlook email. Outlook put his email into its spam folder.

#9: Blind? :-p RT @hottweeters @bhc3 Are your legs tired? Cuz you’ve been running through someone’s mind at http://www.hottweeters.com/bhc3

#10: My 5 y.o. son asks: Is there infinite of anything. My answer? No, everything is finite. Right?

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FriendFeed adds file attachments. Next up, Google Wave?

June 25, 2009 by 4 Comments

FriendFeed just took a fairly significant step forward. And in doing so, I wonder if they have an ultimate destiny as some sort of business platform.

FriendFeed now supports file attachments. When you post a new entry directly to FriendFeed, there is now an option to Add: Files. Here’s a test post I did:

FriendFeed entry with file attachment

You can see the PDF attachment, along with the file size. From an extended conversation by the community with the FriendFeed team about this release, here are some other details:

  • Documents are virus-scanned
  • The amount you upload will be governed by undisclosed limits per file, and in aggregate over a rolling 24-hour period, but most people won’t hit the limits
  • Videos aren’t supported with this release
  • Audio files are limited to 3 per day

Last December, I wrote If You Had to Choose One Form of Digital Communication, What Would It Be? In that post, I assessed six different technologies: email, IM, SMS text, Twitter, social networks, FriendFeed. At that time, I picked Twitter, because I could send directed messages to people. I also added this:

A word about FriendFeed. If they ever decide to support direct messaging and something similar to the @reply tab of Twitter, then they would become my communication mode of choice. There is so much more that can be done there via different media types, along with Rooms and Lists.

Communication Mode Poll 121608

Poll from the December 2008 blog post

Meanwhile, in response to that post many said ’email’. Here are some who provided some explanation, on the blog and on FriendFeed:

For now, I had to choose e-mail, especially for exchange of attachments.

I hope and pray when FF becomes the one and all platform. It is so well thought out. But for now, I wouldn’t be able to function without email. That is my number one choice!

email – still the most versatile, and durable

Email. Free wins. Other things are free but not as full featured.

Email – for better or worse, literally everyone has an email account. Plus it’s essential in the workplace.

Since I wrote that post, FriendFeed has rolled out these three major advances:

  1. Direct messaging
  2. Real-time comments, added to the thread for an entry
  3. File attachments

You see those developments, and you start to realize that, “Hey! They’re building a communication and collaboration platform over there!” They’ve basically answered whatever shortfalls people expressed.

Now social networks are all fun and games, right? So what does this latest release say about FriendFeed’s direction? From their blog post:

We’ve certainly been using this feature internally and have found it extremely useful. We hope it’ll help make you and your collaborators even more productive, and a little more attached to FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is certainly touching on activities that define the work day. I mean, if you look at what Yammer or Socialcast does (e.g. microblogging, direct messages, file attachments, groups), you’ll see FriendFeed is overlapping much of that. FriendFeed, the business application? Certainly it has plenty of revenue opportunities there if the advertising model is not of interest. Well, maybe there are revenue opportunities in the small- to mid-sized business segment.

And a final point. Google Wave is an outstanding technology, with its real-time sharing and communication, server-based access and federated protocol. As I said in my post about Wave, it will be the young guns that incorporate it and advance it inside the enterprise. Since FriendFeed is pushing forward strongly on being a leading company in communication and collaboration, adoption of Google Wave seems like a natural. The federated protocol is a terrific opportunity to create collaborative ecosystems.

I’m sure the FriendFeed team is experimenting with Google Wave right now. We’ll see what they come up with.

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Does Self-Censorship Help Innovation? The Enterprise 2.0 Approach

June 18, 2009 by 4 Comments

Credit: gerriet

Credit: gerriet

Came across this interesting perspective on the blog of Mark Turrell, CEO of idea management software company Imaginatik, in his post Myth #3: “We need lots of ideas”:

The next time someone tells you that you need lots of ideas, stop, think and work out the outcomes you want before you go collecting thousands, and thousands, and potentially more thousands of fluffy, non-relevant ideas that go nowhere.

The next time someone tells you that you need lots of ideas, stop, think and work out the outcomes you want before you go collecting thousands, and thousands, and potentially more thousands of fluffy, non-relevant ideas that go nowhere.

The gist of Mark’s post is that encouraging the contribution of ideas from all quarters is actually counterproductive. He prescribes the concept of an “appropriate” number of ideas.

Wow. Really?

The post makes some good points, but I’m not in agreement with its overall tone. As I read the post, it struck me that there are really only two ways to reduce the number of ideas:

  • Limit who gets to contribute ideas
  • Have everyone self-censor ideas that they “know” will be noise

This perspective is quite different from the tenets that are driving the Enterprise 2.0 movement. There are three elements of Enterprise 2.0 that are relevant here:

  1. Emergence
  2. Filters
  3. Culture

One disclaimer. My company is Spigit, which provides an enterprise innovation platform. We integrate social software heavily into our application, so naturally my take on Mark’s post will differ. But readers of this blog know I’ve been part of the Enterprise 2.0 field for a while. Perhaps my perspective isn’t so surprising.

On to it then!

Emergence

Credit: Dion Hinchcliffe

Credit: Dion Hinchcliffe

Are ideas the province of a privileged few?

Emergence is a cornerstone of Enterprise 2.0. The principle says that ideas and knowledge are found throughout an organization, not just in the executive suite. In the daily rhythms of their work, employees everywhere build up an immense trove of experience and learnings. They encounter the “why don’t we?” questions every day. It’s tapping these ideas and knowledge that drives the value proposition of Enterprise 2.0, and is reshaping the corporate workplace.

In the graphic to the right, Dion Hinchcliffe provides a basis for considering traditional software versus social software. There is, obviously, a need for both inside companies. For instance, financial accounting is not an emergent activity. The SEC and FASB have very specific standards for companies to follow. Auditors have a series of criteria they use to confirm the integrity of a company’s financial statements. Centralized control and access are important here.

Innovation, on the other hand, does not have similar constraints. There are really two limits for business innovation:

  1. Do ideas meet the strategic direction of the company?
  2. Does the company have the resources to turn an idea into an innovation?

The nature of innovation – what’s next? – means that tapping the full power of an organization is important. That doesn’t mean that everyone is constantly ideating. Things do need to be done. But as Stefan Lindegaard writes in his post Should everyone work with innovation?

On the other hand, every employee should be given the opportunity to work with innovation even at a certain radical level through a variety of initiatives setup by your innovation leaders. This could be idea generating campaigns, internal business plan competitions and innovation camps.

That strikes me as the right answer. No limits on employees’ opportunities to contribute ideas.

Filters

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” Clay Shirky, Web 2.0 Expo.

The issue of how to handle an avalanche of contributions – ideas, requests, information – has emerged as an acute issue with the proliferation of online media. You’ll find people discussing issues of noise vs. signal, “email bankruptcy” and the need to pare down their social networks.

Clay Shirky gets it right in his philosophical positioning. The capacity of every individual to generate contributions is significant. That’s not going away, and as we’ve seen with the use of Twitter in the Iranian election protests, it shouldn’t.

Rather, the focus needs to be in refining the ways people manage information. Instinctively, you know when a piece of information is valuable. Have you stopped to consider why it was valuable? What were the contextual variables that made it so?

The application of filters is an ongoing effort by the industry, made more pertinent by the “roll-your-own” approach of many social media sites. But think about this: Google has been employing filters for a decade. The Google PageRank is an important filter for displaying search results. PageRank is a form of authority, based on a website’s inbound links.

Here in 2009, an array of tools are available for filtering contributions. A key tool is leveraging what a community finds valuable. Distributing the work of defining value to thousands of different people is proving to be a powerful way to identify signal. Take for example, the My Starbucks Idea site, there are currently 9,500 ideas there. Sure, it’s a lot. But the community has done a tremendous job of filtering those ideas. You can see that when you compare the top 20 to the bottom 20.

What are some other filters? For idea management, here are just a few:

  • Minimum community approval level
  • Tags and key words
  • Latest ideas
  • Ideas within specific categories
  • Ideas with minimum number of votes
  • Ideas with minimum number of views
  • Ideas with minimum number of comments
  • Ideas in a specified stage of evaluation

You get the gist of this. Social software is evolving to provide better and better ways to filter through contributions.

One other issue with following a hard-coded view of what’s signal and what’s noise: Your noise might be my signal. It depends on what you’re working on. As the graphic below shows, it’s really about stuff you’re seeking. And even the stuff you’re not seeking can be classified as discovery, fuel for innovation.

a-definition-of-noise

This is the value of a rich quantity of ideas. Signal and discovery can come from anywhere.

Culture

If you treat everyone like sheep, you’ll end up with employees who are sheep.

My view here is informed by working in several different companies, both large and small. I’ve been exposed to cultures where employees are assumed and expected to contribute fully and meaningfully, and to cultures where the attitude is “when I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.”

Changing the latter mindset is what Enterprise 2.0 is about. It taps a rich vein of contributions that have value in their own right. It also creates a work environment that most employee surveys show is highly desired and sought after.

Talk of there being an “appropriate” amount of ideas, and that most employee contributions constitute “noise” is antithetical to the direction companies are heading. For example, AT&T published a white paper several months ago, The Business Aspects of Social Networking. The paper looks at the opportunities that the rise of social networks is bringing, both externally with customers and internally with employees. Included in that paper is this table:

AT&T white paper - leadership styles

AT&T has 300,000 employees and a long history in the United States. The fact that they’re talking this way is a good indicator that the market is moving towards a more collaborative, participatory environment, away from the same old controls that have marked work for centuries.

If employees are expected to self-censor their noisy ideas, that will have a chilling effect on participation. After all, you might risk embarrassing yourself, and incurring the wrath of people who monitor for noise. Why bother?

Bring the Noise

Innovation is built on the contributions of many people, and many experiences. This is something stressed in both Scott Berkun’s Myths of Innovation and William Duggan’s Strategic Intuition. Incorporating these three elements of Enterprise 2.0 – emergence, filters, culture – are powerful drivers of innovation for companies.

So let a thousand ideas bloom!

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Google Wave and the Enterprise: Beautiful Potential, Faraway Dream

June 11, 2009 by 14 Comments

google_wave_logoGoogle Wave…Google Wave…

Google Wave.

I’ve spent some time the past few days reading up on Google Wave. The Google I/O 2009 presentation by the Wave team was a smashing success. Quickly summarizing what it is, borrowing from Google’s own categorizations:

Product: Free-form page onto which multiple people can contribute and interact. Every wave in which you are a participant shows up in an inbox. The modes of communication are both email and IM. Email, because you can write something anywhere in a wave, and all wave participants see that the wave is updated in their inbox. Like Gmail.  IM, because updates post instantly, and anyone on the wave at the same time can see them. There’s more there, watch the I/O presentation demo to see it all.

Platform: Wave is to be an API playland. APIs to leverage the functionality of Wave, and embedding functions in Waves. The I/O demo includes functions for maps embedded easily into a Wave, and the ability to create a simple event tracker where Wave participants simply click whether they are attending or not (Evite for dummies). Very cool stuff. Another use of APIs…Wave as your Twitter client. With real-time search results served up into your Wave inbox.

Protocol: Waves are to follow an open federation, which means they all can interact with one another. Wave servers can be set up behind the firewall.

As they said in the demo, they though in terms of “what would email look like if we invented it today?” How long before Gmail converts over to Google Wave? Maybe in a year or two.

It’s quite early, and we have limited information so far on Wave. But I thought it’d be interesting to consider Wave from the perspective of an enterprise software company. It’s a starting point for me to get a handle on Wave and where it might have an impact. A few notes:

  • I’ll make educated assumptions about what Google Wave can do
  • I may be re-hashing old concepts here, such as portals
  • Google Wave would need significant penetration of the enterprise market, potentially displacing Outlook email

Enterprise software is a broad area, too broad to analyze well in a post. Rather, I’m going to focus on the enterprise software I know well (my company’s), and make some points that will apply to all enterprise applications.

OK, with that out of the way, and Dion Hinchcliffe’s post about the enterprise and Google Wave as inspiration, let’s dive in. I’m going to lay out some initial thoughts of how enterprise software could integrate Google Wave. And then I’ll explain why I think it’s going to be a long time coming before it impacts the enterprise.

What Job Does Your Software Do?

Clayton Christensen talked about the “job” your product does. In other words, think less about your product’s features, and more on what needs your product fills for customers. From that perspective, innovations are more likely to emerge.

This notion struck me as a good way for enterprise software companies to think about how Wave might relate to their products. In other words, less focus on features, more focus on specific use cases.

Spigit provides enterprise idea management software. Its “job” is as follows:

  • Easy place to enter your ideas
  • Interact with people over your idea or ideas of others
  • Help identify the best ideas
  • Make it easy to track ideas during their progression into full-blown initiatives

I’m going to use these four tasks as the basis for thinking about Google Wave. Where will Google Wave have an impact?

Easy place to enter your ideas

With Spigit, we have a simple basis for entering your idea – a basic web form. And Google Wave supports forms, as shown below:

Example of a web form in Google Wave

Example of a web form in Google Wave

The ability to use forms makes me think there’s an even better way for employees to enter ideas. A principle that I really like is that information and activities need to be in-the-flow of daily work. The more you can put things at the finger tips of where someone is engaged, the better it is for awareness.

In the demo, different types of waves were available via the New Wave dropdown menu to allow access to separate apps. Here’s what I can see happening:

  • A menu option for New Idea is displayed inside an employee’s work Google Wave UI
  • Selecting it launches a new Wave, with the idea template displayed
  • Enter the info, click submit
  • It’s now on the employee’s personal Wave page, as well as becoming a new Idea in the Spigit platform

The Idea is now part of the Wave inbox. It’s also accessible on the Spigit platform, for others to see. That would be great. It’s a level of interconnectedness that is difficult to put in place today. It wouldn’t just apply to ideas either. Why not do this for expense forms? Wiki pages?

Key here is leveraging the open federation protocol. A person’s individual Wave becomes a new object in another Wave-based application. The Idea would be considered a Wavelet in Spigit. From the demo, here’s an example of two separate Wave servers (i.e. two separate apps), where a Wave is shared between them:

Wave created on one server displays on a second server

Wave created on one server displays on a second server

Interact with people over your idea or ideas of others

The parallels between Google Wave and Gmail make Google Wave great for knowing when there are changes to a Wave. In Gmail, when a reply to a message hits your inbox, the original message becomes bold, and moves to the top. It’s a clear, easy way to see when someone has responded, while keeping the entire thread intact.

Google Wave applies this characteristic even more broadly. If someone replies to your wave, it returns to the top of your inbox, bolded. If someone edits your wave, same thing happens. Basically, any updated to a Wave will display as a changed item in the Wave inbox. The screen shot below shows this functionality:

Google Wave inbox - changed items at top, bolded

Google Wave inbox - changed items at top, bolded

On the Spigit platform, a number of actions can be performed with regard to an idea: vote it up or down, comments on it, review it, post/edit a wiki page for it, become a team member. Now all of these actions are supported with email notifications currently.

Any of these actions will cause your Idea to return to the top of your inbox, bolded. Where an email notification is good, a Wave notification would be great. Everything can be seen in context, and you can respond right from your Wave inbox. Comment, IM or just see the latest changes to your idea.

Another great innovation is the ability to easily add others to a Wave. With this functionality, you can let others know about your idea, and they can see changes as they occur as well. If the idea isn’t interesting to someone, they just remove themselves from the Wave.

Really, really powerful feature.

These easy interaction hooks for objects and activities are something that many enterprise applications would benefit from.

Help identify the best ideas

The Spigit platform tracks many activities and included unique features to help surface the best ideas. And this where Google Wave doesn’t change things really. A lot of that is the secret sauce of the Spigit platform.

Which brings me to an important point: Google Wave won’t replace enterprise software applications. The logic and features of the individual apps – ERP, CRM, wikis, HR, etc. – continue to be the primary reason companies buy them.

Assuming Google successfully brings Wave into the enterprise, either replacing Outlook or standing beside it, I’m sure there will be companies that create Wave-based apps to compete with the big enterprise systems. But such competition happens today anyway.

Make it easy to track ideas during their progression into full-blown initiatives

In Spigit, ideas that make it go through a series of stages. Each stage has different criteria for evaluating whther it’s ready to be prototyped and operationalized. Along the way, aspects of the idea will be addressed in other enterprise applications:

  • Company wiki
  • Product development software
  • Engineering issue tracker
  • Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
  • Accounting
  • Project management
  • Blogs
  • etc.

This is where a couple of features might make sense. Google Wave includes robots. Robots are “automated elements” that perform tasks as part of a Google Wave. Let’s assume the original Idea wave is copied to other enterprise apps. Now, there is a connection from the original idea to these objects in other systems.

The robot can look for updates on those other Waves which tie back to my Idea. When there’s a change in status, My Idea wave gets the update. I’m now on top of what’s happening with my initiative, from anywhere in the company.

Yes, that would cool.

The Impossible Dream?

You may have heard the phrase “working the wiki way“. Well I’d like to work the “wave way”. The possibilities with Google Wave are tantalizing. A much more seamless experience for using software. A common protocol around which applications communicate.

Not likely to happen for a while, if ever.

For companies like Spigit, with a web 2.0 orientation and SaaS delivery, Google Wave is something we can do, and as an enterprise social software company, it makes sense. But to fully realize the benefit of Google Wave inside the enterprise, a lot of applications will need to leverage the Google Wave platform. It’s hard to imagine SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and the like doing much with Google Wave.

As Dion Hinchcliffe notes:

New protocols, servers, data formats, and client applications are required to use wave. Unfortunately, Google Wave brings a lot of baggage with it, though it’s mostly straightforward. You will require new software, though not on the client since that all runs in a zero-footprint browser client. This means more integration code, management, and monitoring.

You look at that, and contemplate all the installed software already in place. And I don’t imagine MISO thinks of Google Wave as being in their interests. Google Wave directly overlaps Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, for instance.

So it will be up to the young bucks to push for the new way to deliver end-user simplicity and in-the-flow accessibility to employees. It will take time.

I’ll be watching developments around Google Wave. How about you?

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 060509

June 6, 2009 by Leave a comment

From the home office in Cairo, Egypt…

#1: Could Google Wave be the holy grail for internal integration of enterprise apps, with two-way real-time updating?

#2: @calmo Yes, that’s a great way to frame it! Yes, Google Wave as an enterprise collaboration SOA protocol.

#3: The enterprise implications of Google Wave http://bit.ly/53tvI by @dhinchcliffe #e20

#4: ReadWriteWeb: Drinking From The Firehose With InnovationSpigit 2.0 http://bit.ly/103rZX #innovation

#5: The Atlantic magazine: Mitt Romney Should Run GM http://bit.ly/BkagH

#6: @jmcdermott2 A pared-down GM, that can cut the cord with its past legacy of dominance, would be an interesting opportunity for a CEO.

#7: BusinessWeek bloggers are being evaluated by how many comments they elicit: http://bit.ly/ee5UU

#8: RT @futurescape The Essential DNA of a Chief Marketing Officer http://tinyurl.com/dzeucu

#9: Just executed my first-ever “reply-DM” to an auto-DM from someone I just followed. As I said I would: http://bit.ly/d6Tn1

#10: Getting ready to head down to Maker Faire with my 5 y.o. boy. http://bit.ly/110Pwc An HP CTO, @philmckinney is speaking there.

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 052909

May 30, 2009 by 1 Comment

From the home office in Pyongyang, North Korea…

#1: Twitter may add some FriendFeed features to the service, is what @scobleizer heard today at #140tc http://bit.ly/d87Av

#2: Business Week includes the Cisco fatty story in its article about managing corporate reputations online: http://bit.ly/3ZCG9

#3: @justinmwhitaker I take a broader view on innovation. The perception is that it’s all Clay Christensen disruptive. Most will be incremental.

#4: You know what I like about working at Spigit? Plenty of competition out there. Fun to see them laying the smack down on us. Love it.

#5: Four of the most damaging words to corporate innovation an employee can say: “Aww, forget about it” #innovation

#6: Great post on critical distinctions in #e20 use cases, and ‘collaboration’ vs. ‘participation’ by @johnt http://bit.ly/12umLp

#7:  @dhinchcliffe Very keen to hear enterprise perspectives on Google Wave. Will it compete w/ SocialText, Socialcast, CubeTree, Yammer?

#8: When does a company need a dedicated product mgt function? $1.5-$3.0 mm in revenue and/or 20-25 employees: http://bit.ly/C2CTr

#9: Dara Torres sets a new record in 50 meter butterfly http://bit.ly/lsRER And sadly, I find myself wondering how a 42 y.o. is setting records.

#10: Just looked at my E*Trade account for the first time in months. Less bad than I thought.

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What is Innovation Management?

May 28, 2009 by 13 Comments

Innovation “Management” as a term, doesn’t sit well w/ me. Just like Knowledge “Mgmt”. KM failed in part b/c of the inherent controls

Sameer Patel, April 22, 2009

I thought this was a good comment by Sameer, as it reflects a couple things:

  • Nascent field of technology tools that specifically facilitate and improve corporate innovation is just becoming understood
  • Concern that the unpredictable and rough-edged aspects of idea generation will be smothered by ham-handed managerial controls

Seeing what’s happening with customers at Spigit, I can safely say that the field of innovation management is much richer and collaborative than the term might connote. It’s not so much “control” management as it is “optimization” management. It’s a recognition that companies have significant margin for improvement in their innovation processes and outcomes.

[tweetmeme source =”bhc3″]

With that in mind, I wanted to put forth eight elements that help describe “innovation management”. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it should give you a feel for what the field is about today.

#1: Innovation benefits from a range of perspectives

For most of our industrial history, innovation has been the province of an internal R&D team. Those smart geeky types who labored to create the next generation of products for big concerns. Fast forward to where we are today. With the rise of the Information Age, more people have a knowledge-based relationship with their employers.

Contributing what you know has become the dominant part of work in Fortune 2000 companies. Leveraging this trend into the innovation realm is a natural extension of employees’ work. And indeed, once done, it becomes apparent that so-called “line workers” have a lot of valuable knowledge, experience and ideas as well. You don’t need an advanced degree to understand a glaring customer issue or a better way to manage field operations.

Studies show that exposing ideas to a wider range of perspectives significantly improves them. In terms of management, the change for companies is elevating the importance of sourcing ideas from throughout the enterprise, as well as outside of it. One example: in this video on how it approaches innovation, Pfizer notes that “Ideas aren’t just sitting at headquarters. There are fantastic ideas all over the company.”

#2: Four of the most damaging words an employee can say: “Aww, forget about it”

What If I Fail cartoonIdeas come in various forms: disruptive, product and operational. And they hit employees at varying times as they do their work. Sure, a lot of these ideas won’t be feasible. But a lot will.

The problem for companies is that employees self-censor, either because (i) culturally they’re not encouraged to post ideas, even potentially bad ones; or (ii) there’s no way to easily capture these.

The recognition that there is valuable intellectual capital in the ideas that emerge from employees’ knowledge and activities is core to improving corporate innovation. Changing organizational focus to foster more ideas from all quarters, and providing the resources to capture these are core to what innovation management means.

#3: Create a culture of constant choices

Jim Collins spoke recently at the Front End of Innovation conference. A key theme from his speech was that great companies enable constant choices. By this, he means that external markets are constantly changing. Companies that are maintaining a good velocity of ideas are the ones that succeed long-term in industries.

This is actually a pretty significant cultural dynamic. Companies can be quite adept at execution, and throwing choices in front of everyone can disrupt that strength. So figuring out “their way” to create a culture of constant choices is really the hard work.

This is part of what is meant by innovation management.

#4: Looking at innovation as a discipline

Innovation is a Top 3 priority for companies, reports Boston Consulting Group. Indeed, BCG notes that innovation leaders generate 430 basis points more in shareholder returns than do average companies. So how does a company systematically address innovation as a discipline?

Companies apply resources and attention to a number of other disciplines: sales, customer relationship management, supply chain management, managerial accounting, etc. Looking at innovation from a similar perspective is emerging as an important strategy.

A number of large corporates have established internal innovation-focused executives. These aren’t employees who are supposed to dream up all the ideas. Their work is on establishing innovation as a discipline. Their charge is wide-ranging, including HR, executive attention, focus areas for innovation, internal communication, processes and selection of technology to facilitate. While I wasn’t around in the rise of the CRM era, presumably there was similar work by earlier generations of employees.

The work of making innovation a discipline is part of innovation management.

#5: Focus employees’ innovation priorities

Each of us knows a lot. From a variety of activities and interests. Work. Hobbies. Family. Locale. Life. I’ll bet you come up with ideas and encounter problems to be solved for a wide variety of things.

For corporations, this wealth of experience is an asset, but it does require some tuning. For ideas, you never know when someone’s personal church activities might have relevance to a product idea for the company. You want that variety of perspectives to inform and improve ideas.

At the same time, there needs to be a channeling of where employees’ ideas are focused. If executives don’t lay down directional areas for innovation, employees’ time on innovation will not be as valuable as it could be. Of course they’re going to have a range of ideas. But which ones are most pertinent to the company’s success in the market?

Channeling employees’ innovation focus is part of innovation management.

#6: Recognizing innovation as a funnel with valuable leaks

When one views innovation as not just game-changing disruptive ideas, but including incremental ideas, it becomes clear that innovation is fundamentally a funnel. Start with a large, ongoing quantity of ideas drawn from employees, customers and partners. As discussed in #2 above, you really want to get as many of these ideas as you can.

Ideas must then go through a winnowing process. Some will get stronger, and advance to projects. Some will fall away as not feasible.

And from all this intellectual activity around ideas, new ideas will emerge. It’s natural. Once employees are in the mode of generating and assessing ideas, it nwill be natural for new ones to emerge. Really, this arguably is the case for a lot activities that foster interaction among employees. But in this case, the social object around which they’re interacting is an idea. In terms of instilling a culture of constant choices, interaction around ideas promises to be a key part of achieving that.

Managing the funnel is part of innovation management.

#7: Establishing a common platform for innovation is a revolutionary step forward

Consider how employees innovate today. You have an idea, what are you going to do with it? Certainly you’ll sound it out with peers, which is illustrative of the fact that innovation is a social activity. Then what? Tell your boss. Email it. Enter it into a customer service database. Put it in a PowerPoint. Try to schdule meetings.

When you consider what employees must do today to move an idea forward, it’s really pretty daunting. Under this system, corporate innovation requires phenomenal acts of heroism to get anything done. Ad hoc, siloed applications make companies the poorer for the ideas they’re missing. Existing idea management processes don’t allow cross-enterprise visibility, which means collaboration among interested parties is limited. An unfortunate outcome is that the pace of innovation falters as ideas lose share of mind.

Creating the common community space for innovation is a dramatic leap forward in how companies foster innovation. The same mechanisms of departmental outreach and email are certainly still available. But now, ideas can get an audience of thousands, allowing them tap different reservoirs of experience and perspective. Senior executives csn see ideas that previously would languish in lower levels of the organization.

Creating this common platform is part of innovation management.

#8: Innovation must be more than  purely emergent, disorganized and viral

Innovation management today draws heavily from the themes of Enterprise 2.0. Key to the power of social computing is letting employees’ activities and knowledge apply itself naturally where it’s needed throughout an organization. For purists, this means get rid of oversight and managerial prerogatives.

To create ongoing, sustainable innovation, there needs to be a programmatic approach. Riding the pure emergent form of Enterprise 2.0, or continuing the current ad hoc, siloed approaches to idea management, is insufficient. Employees will be busy with projects and tasks they need to execute. Perhaps culturally, innovation hasn’t been a focus. There will need to be a push to raise the awareness of innovation. And some organization to channel it where it’s needed.

There will also be ideas that are valuable, but which may not resonate with a broader section of the employee base. Leaving the emergence of these ideas purely to viral dissemination means leaving some of them buried at the departmental level. Companies need ways to ensure valuable ideas are caught and surfaced systematically.

Combining bottom-up emergence with top-down priorities and organization is part of innovation management.

Wrap-Up

As I said above, innovation is a multi-faceted activity, with many moving parts and ways of approaching it. What I’ve listed here represent my way of clarifying what the field of “innovation management” is about. If you think I’m off or missed something, let me know in the comments below.

Thanks.

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Under this system, corporate innovation requires phenomenal acts of heroism to get anything done

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Tapping Communities to Accelerate Corporate Innovation

May 18, 2009 by 4 Comments

Jim Collins related a story back in 1999 that well-describes the problems with and opportunities for innovation inside organizations. In a Harvard Business Review article, he wrote about Phil Archuleta, a materials manager at a U.S Marines recruiting depot in San Diego.

The Marines would issue new enlistees a uniform on their first day in the service. After two weeks of intensive training, these recruits needed a new uniform because the initial ones no longer fit. Marine policy was that the recruits original uniforms were to be destroyed. That’s right, thrown away.

Archuleta thought that policy was daft, and that the uniforms could simply be washed and used for the next class of recruits. He asked his superior, and was told, “No. It’s against regulations. Forget about it.” Eventually, Archuleta got a new supervisor who thought he had a good idea, and promoted it up the military chain. The idea was well-received at the higher levels, and implemented across the Marines. It resulted in annual cost savings of half a million dollars.

How many ideas by the likes of a Phil Archuleta are buried inside organizations?

Tapping Communities to Accelerate Corporate Innovation

The presentation below is one that I gave for recent webinar with Oliver Young of Forrester. The webinar focused on deriving ideas from organizations’ communities: employees, customers, partners.

The presentation is built around four themes:

  1. Strategic importance of innovation
  2. Email <> community
  3. Corporate innovation is more than a popularity contest
  4. You can’t manage what you can’t measure

Strategic value of innovation

Certainly this qualifies as an obvious notion. Innovation is important to companies. It’s the source of organic growth. But in many ways, companies are not treating it as important as other processes, such as supply chain management and cost accounting. Thus, it is important to reiterate the obvious.

Boston Consulting Group analyzed the shareholder returns for companies in its Top 50 innovators list. It compared these returns to markets averages, and found that best-in-class innovators generated 430 basis points more in returns than did the market. Aberdeen Group surveyed 280 manufacturers, and characterized their innovation capabilities as best-in-class, average and laggard. Best-in-class innovators, who far more consistently hit new product revenue targets and launch dates, were 4.7 times more likely to create specific processes for idea generation.

No surprise then that senior executives rank innovation as a top 3 priority.  Accenture well-describes the goals and aspirations of companies: create repeatable and ongoing improvements in business performance.

Key, of course, is to consider innovation among the disciplines in which a company should excel. And create a program for it accordingly.

Email <> community

I’ve worked for large companies. I know how it goes when you have an idea. Jot it down somewhere. Talk it out with someone. Then email someone else about it. If you’re lucky, someone in that email will pick it up. Maybe.

More often than not, interesting ideas just sort of lie there, buried in the minutiae of the daily grind or not catching the interest of a particular individual. Which is what happened to Phil Arhuleta’s idea about the Marines’ uniforms.

Rather than rely on ad hoc, siloed forms of communicating ideas (like email), social networks provide a new way to tap communities. The diagram below shows the process by which innovation is fostered with a social innovation platform:

Ideas are the social objects for community interaction

Ideas are the social objects for community interaction

On the top left, it’s important that companies understand: ideas can come at any time, in any form. They’re rarely subject to scheduling. Once you have an idea, there’s needs to be an easily accessible, and easily usable,  site for the posting of those ideas. No more silos!

Creating a common site is critical aspect #1 of creating an innovation program. Employees, customers and partners should have a single place where each community can go to post the ideas that occur to them.

Critical aspect #2 is the ability of the community to provide feedback on an idea. Separating the good from the bad, and refining ideas to help them take shape are the heavy lifting of emergent, social systems.

In the upper right, the refinement of good ideas takes shape. This includes the feedback from the community, as well as offline activities around the idea, such as design work, marketing plans and financial analysis. Finally, in the lower right, the company selects an idea based on community feedback and refinement.

Aside from the benefit of actually knowing about a lot more valuable ideas, there’s another benefit to community-driven innovation management: ideas get better when they’re subject to diverse points of view and knowledge. See the earlier post What Enterprise Social Networks Do Well: Produce Higher Quality Ideas to understand that effect.

Finally, the graphic below describes the community innovation cycle:

Bottom-up innovation requires top-down support

Bottom-up innovation requires top-down support

I think the concepts of expand community and pipeline of ideas are relatively self-explanatory. And I just discussed the engage, access, refine, select part of the cycle. The other two are the top-down support needed to ensure the community feels their efforts matter.

Keep in mind that when people suggest ideas to companies, these aren’t just conversation starters with their fellow community members. People want to know that companies listen to good ideas and take action. That’s quite clear to a community when its ideas are actually implemented, and there is a reward and recognitions for its members.

Executives go a long way, particularly with employees, when they make the company innovation program a focus point. Employees will take their priorities from senior management, and executive sponsorship is an important factor for creating an ongoing, sustainable innovation program.

Corporate innovation is more than a popularity contest

The most common notion of community innovation is the principle of: one person = one vote. An idea that receives a lot of votes clearly is more useful and valuable than an idea receiving fewer votes. This “rule” works well with products that exhibit these characteristics:

  • End buyer requests
  • Lower complexity features
  • No concentration of buying power

That last bullet needs a little explaining. Dispersed buying power means that basically you can consider each vote to be the equivalent of one product purchase. If you have a few customers that generate a significant amount of your sales, their votes should carry more weight.

There are going to be plenty of ideas that require stronger stuff than basic popularity. I like the way Microsoft’s Haddow Wilson put it:

There are times when the collective wisdom is what we need. But what about those times when we need to make a strategic decision and only a few in the crowd have the necessary background and insight to help? How do we separate the knowledge from the noise? How do we know to whom to listen? How do we find them?

Innovation communities need a way to identify those whose opinions should carry greater weight. They essentially need reputation systems to identify members with greater standing among the community. This stature can be assigned or earned.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure

The ethos and value of Enterprise 2.0 focuses on the emergent, authentic nature of employee contributions. It’s historically been hard for employees to apply knowledge in a timely fashion. In this culture, “management” is often a loaded word, with connotations of over-processing and controlling the ways in which employees collaborate.

But that should not stand in the way of measurement. You can have measurement of outcomes, and inputs, and use that to guide the community generally in the direction you’d want to take an innovation program. On the flip side, if a community continues to generate ideas that aren’t squaring with the company’s vision of where it wants to go, it’s porbably wise to listen to them.

Either way, measurement provides a view into the health of the community (posts, comments, views, etc.), the sources of the ideas (groups, categories, product lines, etc.) and the traction that ideas put on the platform are getting (stages, implementations).

Measurement is also the basis for analytics used to surface the best ideas from the rest. One other thing measurement does is this: it positively affects the culture of companies.

Performance and Culture

Breed performance, change culture

The transparency that measurement on an innovation management platform provides is healthy. Everyone can see the bases by which ideas advance. Everyone knows how their own ideas are faring, and can do something about it. This happens because of measurement.

It’s about creating ongoing, sustainable innovation

Companies will benefit greatly once they establish an ongoing program of innovation. It’s too often takes phenomenal acts of heroism to get an idea through the ad hoc channels and processes that dominate corporate innovation today.

Time to treat innovation as a discipline worthy of its own resources and focus.

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 050809

May 9, 2009 by Leave a comment

From the home office in the Nokia Theater, Times Square…

#1: Twitter is working on a reputation ranking for users, to be part of how search results are returned: http://bit.ly/hu3yX

#2: Seeing a number of enterprise 2.0 vendors moving hard into the idea/innovation management realm. Good place to be.

#3: CapGemini – companies that batten down the hatches & stop innovation during the recession will find themselves behind on the upswing #wif09

#4: Christensen – Intel did $18 billion in revenue from ideas generated by employees in breakout groups organized by Andy Grove #wif09

#5: Christensen – Strategy problem for companies. A business model hijacks an idea and forces it to change to conform. #wif09

#6: Christensen – Expensive failure always results when disruption is framed as technological rather than business model terms. #wif09

#7: Saffo – a Stanford colleague says that by 2030, half of all miles driven will be by robots. #wif09

#8: Saffo – you can always tell when a new tech is hot. Single males in that field can actually get a date. #wif09

#9: Nice article in the @latimes about the iconic California fast food chain – In-N-Out: Can perfection survive? http://bit.ly/sZUfb

#10: iPhone effect: my 5 y.o. son was pressing his finger on my laptop screen to navigate on a web page.

——-

You can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bhc3

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 050109

May 2, 2009 by Leave a comment

From the home office in La Gloria, Mexico…

#1: Not sure if it’s good or bad that I just learned that David Souter is retiring from the Supreme Court via Twitter Trending Topics.

#2: Had to do it, subscribed to @whitehouse

#3: The #TCOT grass roots conservative movement on Twitter is riven by feuding at the top: http://bit.ly/nwr1m

#4: Interested in corporate innovation? Join Forrester’s @oliveryoung & me for a webinar to learn practical ways to improve  http://bit.ly/cGI4W

#5: Reading: How to Get the Most From Your Best Ideas http://bit.ly/kuWci by @Accenture

#6: Looking at BW’s 50 most innovative companies http://bit.ly/18nBe7 How much of what #1 Apple & #2 Google do really applies to most companies?

#7: Reading – Enterprise 2.0 marketing score card: solid ‘C’ http://bit.ly/T1yJi by @sameerpatel Great Google Trends charts

#8: Joined foursquare, which asks you to add/rate stuff for cities. Hard to be hip as a parent, here’s my playground entry http://bit.ly/MBsE4

#9: Really interesting study and hypothesis about how our brains forget/rewrite memories just by recalling them http://bit.ly/1941k8

#10: Today is apparently a big day 4 college acceptance letters. Here’s a post that describes harshest/nicest reject letters http://bit.ly/1anN7p

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What Enterprise Social Networks Do Well: Produce Higher Quality Ideas

April 29, 2009 by 26 Comments

Idea generation at some point involves someone moving knowledge from this group to that, or combining bits of knowledge across groups. Where brokerage is social capital, there should be evidence of brokerage associated with good ideas, and vice versa.

Professor Ronald Burt, University of Chicago, Structural Holes and Good Ideas

Allow me to note a top-down benefit for companies that excel at innovation. Boston Consulting Group (pdf) calculated that leading innovators generate 430 basis points more in shareholder return than do average companies. Put another webinar-051309-registrationway, if an average company were to return 7.7% on your investment, leading innovators would return 12.0%. As an investor, that’s pretty attractive.

And  as an employee, being part of an innovation culture must be immensely satisfying.

On Wednesday, May 13, Oliver Young of Forrester Research and I will host a one-hour webinar, Tapping Communities to Accelerate Corporate Innovation. The session will cover strategies, practices and findings with regard to what leading companies are doing today to accelerate innovation. You can register by clicking the graphic to the right.

A topic we will address is the role and value of communities in increasing the number of good ideas generated for companies.

Which brings me back to Professor Burt, whom I quoted above. In his article, he discusses in-depth research he conducted on the Supply Chain Group for a major American electronics company. The results are eye-opening, and are compelling evidence for creating a common way for employees across a company to share ideas, knowledge and perspectives with one another.

Before discussing his findings, let’s go right to one of Professor Burt’s conclusions:

Thus, value accumulates as an idea moves through the social structure, each transmission from one group to another having the potential to add value. In this light, there is an incentive to define work situations such that people are forced to engage diverse ideas.

Brokerage Across Structural Holes

Professor Burt speaks in terms of “brokerage” and “structural holes”. The sociogram below depicts a typical social network structure:

burt-sociogram

There are essentially three nodes in this social network: A, B, C (+D). The structural holes exist between A and B, B and C & A and C. Notice the two actors. James is relatively “network constrained”. His social world really revolves around a tight core that all know one another. Robert is not constrained. He has ties into different groups, allowing him to tap non-redundant sources of information. Reaching across these social nodes is known as brokerage.

Professor Burt describes for levels of brokerage for which a person could create (increasing) value:

  1. Make each side aware of the other’s interests and difficulties
  2. Transfer best practices
  3. Draw analogies between groups ostensibly irrelevant to one another
  4. Synthesize beliefs and behaviors that combine elements of both groups

From simple to complex brokerage, there is value in making connections. Specifically, value in terms of the quality of ideas produced.

The High Correlation Between Idea Quality and Brokerage

The study of the supply chain group involved 673 managers. Professor Burt was given detailed access to the employees’ backgrounds, job titles, salaries, and performance reviews. He constructed the sociogram for the workers through online surveys, giving him information on which workers were network constrained, and which ones spanned structural holes.  Basically, he had a wealth of variables to test.

And what did he test? The quality of the ideas submitted by these 673 workers. He asked each of them to answer this question:

From your perspective, what is the one thing that you would change to improve [the company’s] supply chain management?

Let each employee provide their idea for how things could be approved. These ideas were then evaluated by two senior-level executives who had gained prominence for running the respective supply chains of their business units.

These rated ideas were then statistically analyzed against all those variables. What Professor Burt found was that there were general patterns to idea quality:

  • More senior managers provided better ideas
  • More educated managers provided better ideas
  • Managers in urban centers had better ideas

Yet within these variables that correlated to idea value, there was an overall trend that held true across the board. Those managers who were network constrained consistently scored lower in the idea evaluations. So even though the more educated employees had better ideas on average, within their ranks, there was clear difference between those who span the structural holes, and those who do not.

Bottom line: Connecting with those outside one’s closed network results in higher average quality of ideas.

Wrapping Up

I wrote earlier about the revenue advantage accruing to employees with more diverse internal social connections. That study looked at the revenue per employee generated, and was fundamentally a productivity measurement. This field research by Professor Burt introduces a new benefit for creating an enterprise-wide view of ideas proposed by employees. The ability for others to know about an idea, and to see the value and the application of that idea in their own realm.

By enabling communities to post, critique, collaborate on and refine ideas, companies are certain to reap the benefits of accelerated innovation. As Professor Burt puts it:

People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of genius. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be valuable insight in another.

There’s a lot more where that came from. Oliver Young and I look forward to seeing you at the webinar (registration link) on May 13 at 1:00 pm Eastern.

I’m @bhc3 on Twitter.

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 042409

April 25, 2009 by 2 Comments

From the home office in Detroit, Michigan…

#1: CNN.com poll asks, “Do you use Twitter?” 331k respondents. 7% yes. 63% no. 30% “what’s Twitter?”

#2: Hey bloggers – make sure your twitter handle is somewhere on your blogs. I like to tweet a link with your Twitter handle. Easy visibility.

#3: My Twitter personality: renowned spamming cautious My style: garrulous academic ROBOT http://twanalyst.com/bhc3 {ROBOT? Say what?}

#4: Great tips about social media releases for companies on @mediaphyter‘s blog by @serena http://bit.ly/s3wQy

#5: Reading: “Don’t cut back on innovation” in Fortune by Anne Mulcahy, Xerox CEO http://bit.ly/OZWHn

#6: Interested in using enterprise 2.0 for innovation? Read this wonderful post by @ITSinsider “Putting 2.0 to Work: Spigit” http://bit.ly/N53bN

#7: With Oracle’s acq of Sun and MySQL, does PostgreSQL now merit a closer look? http://bit.ly/2B8u3q

#8: Fascinating study of high performance work teams. They equally mix advocacy w/ asking & external/internal focus http://bit.ly/qNDtH

#9: Congrats to Ryan Hall, 3rd place in today’s Boston Marathon (2:09:40). Gutsy race he ran today. http://bit.ly/1ay6BF

#10: It was 91 degrees today in San Francisco, & we felt every one of those degrees at my 5 y.o. son’s birthday party. Fun, but smokin’.

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