A Baker’s Dozen of Insights From the Front End of Innovation Conference

These learnings are brought to you by Anne Orban Director of Discovery and Innovation, who listened and learned from Jim Collins, John Kao, Peter Erickson, Max von Zedtwitz, Dev Patnaik, Katie Kraus 7 Geoff Zoeckler, Kathie Thomas, Alan Schrob, Verena Kloos, Russ Meyer, Andrés Jordan, Rich Duncombe and many others who presented at the 2009 PDMA/IIR Front End of Innovation Conference.

  1. Make wide-spread in your company a sense of empathy with the consumer. Knowing the consumer up close and personal always trumps knowing the consumer from power point reports.  This is the seed for organic growth – empathy plus creativity and execution. (See how LIFEbytes OnlineTM could work for you in this regard.)
  2. “Hard times expose our strength and make us stronger.” Jim Collins. What if innovation will not save us in tough times?  If you have been successful – be very afraid. Discipline and focus are the keys – slow and steady wins the race. Remember Packard’s Law: You are more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity rather than starvation from lack of opportunity. So, get the right people on the bus and the wrong ones off the bus; get level 5 leadership behaviors that combine humility and ferocious will for when luck runs out; never confuse optimism with what really matters and that is creativity and faith – faith that you will prevail in the end and the discipline to confront brutal facts (productive paranoia).
  3. Be interested – not interesting. Create pockets of quietude. Do something useful!
  4. Globalization has changed the innovation value chain.  Nation states are developing national innovation strategies. Countries are positioning themselves to become drivers of innovation by creating relevant attractors of internet capacity, cultural quality of life, higher education, to become talent magnets.  Companies and countries that don’t invest now will fall further behind.
  5. The real front end is clarity.  A problem well defined is a problem half solved. Finding the big idea involves communication for alignment, customer intimacy and experience, enabling what is emerging, providing the right platform, strategy and stewardship.
  6. Social media creates dramatic magnification. Use social media to put others brains to work for you. Experiment with Second Life avatars, twitter, wiki’s etc. Culture creeps constantly.  We need to move social media in the direction that we want it to go. In the end, age matters for less than attitude and culture matters most Experiment more!!
  7. Metrics that track digital engagement must never lose sight of the human factor i.e. they must measure outcomes that can prompt useful actions.  What is hard to measure and what really matters is attitude to (or culture for) innovation. Organizations that experience innovation take more on faith than proof at the front end.
  8. “Sell a little, learn a lot.” Peter Erikson, General Mills. Find great ideas regularly; expand available talent, get smarter sooner, save to grow. The 3 “I’s” strategy works for General Mills – Immersion – understand the problem, Interaction – build intuition by getting close to the consumer, Idea creation – informed ideations. (See the Innovation Focus Slingshot Group Process as a tool for this.)
  9. ‘Millennials’ – that is, those Gen Y’s who came of age at the turn of the 21st century - matter and demand to be taken seriously.  They are digital natives and it’s important to learn how to connect with them and how to engage them on behalf of enterprises and causes.
  10. China is creative – it just takes on a different perspective – we have to learn to see it.
  11. Wonderful new ways of saying what we recognize as true from Verena C. Kloos -“Progress reveals itself sometimes as failure which is to be learned from.” “Visual thinking leads to intuitive thinking.” “Design is a mediator, connector, extractor, breathes life into needs.” “Design sets the tone to break the rules.” “True innovation is where creativity meets risk-taking.” “Design helps you get beyond the babushka strategy.” “You get meaningful innovation by employing three types of creativity—diverse creativity, intelligent & informed creativity, and innovative creativity – all combined.”
  12. At the front end of innovation, be sure to instill innovation language for new product development before you use process language such as the language of DFSS or Stage/GateTM.  Such process language should be silent in the front end of innovation.
  13. Serial innovators take more risks and experience more failures. They don’t expect credit for major successes because they allow credit to go to those who must scale-up the new business, they truly love doing what they do, they have a “healing factor” – the stubborn instinct to look failure squarely in the face and carry on.

    14. Posted by Greg Park on 06/07 at 11:01 PM in Articles