How do I start innovating?

Most entrepreneurs or senior managers I have spoken to all agree that innovation is both required and worth the effort but a common question is – How do we start or more importantly how do we identify the areas to focus on?

They have had many experiences in the past where they have sponsored many “innovation” project but they have nothing to show for it. So they are confused and have decided to stay away from it.

Fair point. So thought I will discuss more about this. At the outset, let me confess that there is no magic formula for this. Innovation by definition means that we are going to encounter failure. However the areas to innovate on should be defined pretty clearly and there is no scope for failure on those.

The worst thing that you can do is to initiate a innovation project based on a few journal articles you read or based on generic analysts reports. These will need further refining and unless you define the path properly, you are never going to achieve success with your innovation agenda.

The next best thing is to do it based on what your team believes. They do have a good knowledge of the product space but the risk is that they could be biased based on the existing product offering.

The best way to do this is to listen to your customers and derive the innovation requirements from them. Only one word of caution here – Don’t expect solutions from your customers but listen carefully to the requirements and their current pain areas.

Once you have defined the areas where you want to focus your innovation efforts on, next make a plan on the status quo in that area and identify the main challenges – even at this stage – stay away from getting into complete solutioning mode – the aim is just to scratch the surface and identify areas to delve deeper into.

Finally identify different areas where you need to formulate task groups or teams to dig deeper and look for solutions.

During solutioning mode, please ensure that you get your best people to look at it. The more diverse the interests of the people who look at it, the better the chances of getting creative ideas, which has been proven to increase the success ratio. Ideally (unless you have confidentiality and proprietary reasons), try to get some outside solutions also either through partners, customers or even the outside world in general. Outside people bring in a freshness and unbiased thinking which is difficult to substitute internally. Obviously you need to define some incentives which makes this interesting and appealing to outside folks.

That is it!!! When done systematically, you should get responses unless you have not defined your problem statement clearly enough. Persevere based on feedback and you will get the responses that you expect.

Remember that it is equally important to have a good way of judging solutions when they start to come in. If you are exposing this to the outside world, you can get overwhelmed with solutions. So ensure that you define a process for rating the solutions and taking this forward appropriately.

Hope this helps companies get started with their innovation efforts. Remember the name of the game is perseverance and patience. Success will come but only to those who persevere (like most things in life!!!)

Enjoy the journey!!!

Open Innovation - Is that the missing piece of your puzzle?

I was watching my son do a jigsaw puzzle over the weekend. One by one, he placed all the pieces together and was visibly delighted when he could see the final image emerging. However as he was down to the last 5 pieces, suddenly he seemed to freeze. Though he tried different combinations, he somehow could not get it right. While I was debating whether I should step in and help him, in walked his friend. Soon both of them started discussing and doing this together and magically within a short time, were able to get it right!

A very ordinary or day to day experience but I thought there was a profound or deep message for all businesses. Think about it. How many times in the past have you thought you were making good progress with your innovation project or your cutting edge research project before suddenly hitting a wall and ultimately giving up? Isn’t that a shame? All the hard work and the struggle to get it down to the last wire just wasted away? See where I am going with this…......

Most of our solution approaches works by making assumptions and we sometimes struggle to progress because it is quite difficult to change our assumptions so easily. So in these scenarios, the best option is to get somebody outside the area to have a look at this problem. They come in with no bias or assumptions and usually are able to solve it much quicker.

Open Innovation is built upon this simple premise and the best part is that you can define the areas you want to get outside help from and the ones where you are better off doing things on your own.

So the next time you get stuck on a problem and are about to give up – stop and think. Is it possible to selectively get outside help or support and still take this to a successful completion?

Try it. You don’t lose anything and the results may surprise you.

In summary – open innovation in simplistic terms is just a way of getting outside help in certain areas and as defined by your terms and conditions.

Myths of Open Innovation

While there is lots of curiosity and discussion around this topic, there are also some major myths which need to be shattered before this is adopted fully by all organisations. The topic of this post is to discuss these myths and show how they are wrong.

1. Myth: Open Innovation is difficult to start and the organisation needs to implement many changes before it can be taken up.


Reality: Definitely a myth or an excuse. Actually an open innovation project can be started on any project initiative. If privacy is a huge concern, suggest you start with your less secretive projects. Ideally select projects which have been attempted before internally with limited success. You will be surprised by the responses. Changes are inevitable in any innovation initiative but open innovation needs more a change in mindset rather than any major organisational change.


2. Myth: I have a large internal R&D team and they will be jobless if I go with open innovation initiatives.


Reality: This could qualify as one of the biggest myths. Open Innovation initiatives do not totally eliminate internal R&D staff. Your internal R&D staffs are invaluable since they understand your internal environment the best. However they will be able to get some important perspectives and directions from the external world through open innovation. Open Innovation is NOT outsourcing.


3. Myth: All my innovation projects are very private and should not be visible to the outside world. Also I don’t want to run into patenting issues.


Reality: Definitely a myth. While some innovation projects are truly dealing with trademark and copyrighted information which cannot be disclosed to the outside world, the vast majority of them do not fall into this category and so can benefit from the experience of the outside world. Also it is possible to remove the confidential information from most of the secretive projects and present in such a way that the outside world will not be aware of the true application of this. This is additional work but well worth the effort. Patenting issues are a concern but am sure your company lawyer will be able to handle this by Non Disclosure Agreement and other patent agreements. As long as you involve the right legal experts from the beginning, this is definitely not a show stopper.


4. Myth: The suggestions/ideas from the outside world are not really applicable in our scenario since our company requirements are unique.


Reality: A myth again. Even though not all the ideas from outside will be always applicable, it is indeed surprising if all the ideas/suggestions from the outside world are not applicable especially on a repeated basis. This only means that maybe they are not being considered seriously enough or the people evaluating them are not “open” enough to consider the outside ideas/suggestions seriously.


5. Myth: Open Innovation initiatives are only applicable to very large organisations. Most of the small or medium organisations cannot benefit from this.


Reality: This is a myth. It is definitely true that large organisations, by the nature of their size and problems, can benefit more from open innovation initiatives. But that does not mean that the small or medium organisations need to be left out. All it requires is that the small and medium organisations choose the niche area they want to focus on and then work on innovating in that space. Of course, they would need to make it worthwhile by investing both money and resources. In fact due to their agility and with prudent use of Open Innovation, small and medium firms will be able to spring a good surprise on large organisations through open innovation.

This is by no means exhaustive but covers some of the top reasons I believe why organisations do not progress open innovation initiatives. The main difference or catalyst required, which will make a difference, is the buy-in of the top management team. All open innovation needs is a few members of the leadership team to embrace this whole-heartedly and believe in this completely. Once organisations discover the true strength of the external teams, they will be transformed forever.

Are you ready to tap the potential of the outside world and work out win-win relationships? So what are you waiting for? Go forth and break all barriers and boundaries. The world truly deserves innovative products and this will not happen until the best minds collaborate together.

Together, we can do it!!!! We owe it to our tomorrow!!!

Open Innovation

So what we have seen so far is how innovation happens within the closed four walls of an organisation. This is known as “closed” innovation. This has how traditionally innovation has happened in most organisations in the 1990s and has been fairly successful so far.

But the topic of today’s post is a slightly different and definitely more radical way of doing innovation called “open innovation”. In an open innovation model, innovation is done by involving talent without any boundaries. So this means both talent inside and also outside the organisation. Now before you jump to any conclusions, let me clarify that I am not talking about outsourcing the R&D department. Far from it. I really believe that innovations and R&D are the main pillars of any organisation. But having said that, we also need the pillars to be as strong as possible.

Still not sure? OK. Let us go back to our previous case study example; typically any R&D or innovation project will have the following three categories:

1. Areas that you have worked on
2. Areas that you have not worked on and so are new
3. Areas that somebody in the organisation have worked on but needs digging to get to the right person.

Now the first category is the simplest of your worries and so let us not go into that. However categories 2 and 3 need your attention. Let us consider Category 2 in greater detail. In our previous example, you attacked this problem by getting your team to research and “google” around so as to get knowledgeable in this area. But is this the best way to approach this? A more intuitive method is to get the experts in this area to give you solutions in this area leaving you to focus on the other areas. I am sure you are wondering “What about Intellectual Property and how do I ensure that any patents are not being infringed upon etc”? Agreed there are some challenges around this but I am sure it is not so complex that your legal team cannot sort it out. All it needs is a firm understanding on how these issues are going to be handled and these needs to be agreed with the solver community upfront.

From your perspective, this solution ensures that your innovation project gets the best possible boost by involving experts in their domain on a need basis.

Of course, there is one other huge factor which needs to be worked out which is the reward mechanism to entice the experts to work on this. There are no rules around this but you will be able to find the “sweet spot” with some experience along with some googling around as well.

OK. Assuming you have reached so far, you must be wondering what next? Well couple of important steps which you need to be doing:

1. Ensure that you have the necessary buy in and sponsorship from the top management for your initiative.
2. Ensure that your team is geared up and receptive to new ideas which will come from the outside world.

So why are these two important?

Well, the first point is very important since you may well receive some disruptive ideas/solutions on the way forward. Unless you have the top management buy-in and support, you will find that you are not able to implement the ideas or solutions.

The second is equally important since the team which are evaluating these ideas/solutions from outside need to have an “open” mind. Otherwise they will be quick to find holes and throw all the ideas/solutions out of the window. Now, I am not saying that we should not view any idea/solution from outside critically. In fact, I would say, it is quite the opposite. We should review it multiple times. But what is important is that they should be viewed with an approach of “making it work” or a “can do” attitude. Of course many of these solutions may need to be tweaked to suit the organisational needs. However it is far easier to reject it upfront without even thinking through. Hence we should avoid this mindset and embrace the “open innovation” mindset instead.

So in summary, we briefly looked at how “open innovation” could happen in innovation projects and some of the important factors required for these projects to succeed.

Please feel free to write in with your thoughts and experiences. I would love to hear your thoughts on the same topic.