Posts from the 'corporate' Category

Navigating the Sea of Information: Legitimacy in Content Creation and Detecting Truth on the Internet

In today’s digital age, the internet is awash with information, making it increasingly challenging to discern fact from fiction. With corporate innovators, startup founders, product managers, and future-focused individuals relying on accurate, high-quality content to make informed decisions, the importance of legitimacy in content creation cannot be overstated. In this article, we will explore how…

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Why Remote? Its Better in Almost All Ways.

Remote work, telecommuting, or telework has become increasingly popular recently. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend, as many companies have shifted to remote work to keep employees safe and comply with social distancing guidelines. Remote work has several benefits, such as increased flexibility, reduced commuting time, and lower costs for employers and employees. However,…

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Attempting Amazing Products? You Get What You Promote For

Are you interested in bringing more innovation into your company? Put an end to the celebration of promotions. The world of business is an exciting and fascinating place. It was stuck in a hierarchical system for a very long period, with workers reporting to managers, who reported to directors, who reported to vice presidents, and…

The post Attempting Amazing Products? You Get What You Promote For appeared first on IDEATE AND EXECUTE.

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How To Staff Your Innovation Group

Fill It Full Of Doits, And You’ll Never Be Short Of Ideas

A while back, I wrote a blog post about the two kinds of people in the world, the ShouldWes and the DoIts. You can go back here to read the full post, but in short, the DoIts are the action takers, the ones who see or generate an idea they want to move forward on that idea, no matter if the idea is incremental or disruptive, they want to take the risk and develop the idea, get in in front of customers and see if the idea lives or dies.

They would take ideas which have been considered good by a certain number of people, say possibly voted on or reviewed by a review committee, then apply their gut-feel filter on it (does this ideas seem like it will fly) then figure out some way (if there isn’t already a well-defined process for building and launching these ideas) to get those ideas, in some form, in front of customers. In some cases that means spending a few bucks to build it out (even in a rough form) and launch it to the world (or a small subset of the world). It’s the lean startup model, build an minimum viable product (MVP) and launch it.

Notable examples of some multi-billion dollar businesses which (you may have heard about) started this way – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat – someone had a core idea (a search engine which worked based on link count, an electronic version of a college Facebook, a text-based notification system, a way to share test answers in class) and instead of endlessly discussing the idea and researching the idea and thinking out all possible permutations of developing the idea, including figuring out a business model for the idea, they just built it and launched it.

Whoa, pretty scary idea, eh?

Those ideas could have failed miserably (and I’m sure that there are other versions of those ideas which were launched and did fail miserably) but they didn’t, and they are proof that ideas, when handled by the DoIts, can sometimes generate billion-dollar businesses.

On the other hand, you have the ShouldWes, who when confronted by a new idea (and yes, for some reason they seem to feel like they are confronted by them, right – they feel that reviewing and discussing the idea is a burden) its “oh here we go again – another idea with a ill-defined business model”. Or they may love discussing and researching the idea, endlessly thinking about the idea, all of the possible permutations of the idea.

They dwell in the realm of thought and ideas, never venturing into action or execution at all. They prefer to continuously mull an idea over and over, looking for ways to halt the progress of the idea towards an initial product (or any product for that matter) which could be introduced to their customers. They take the idea and compare it to the culture of the organization (this idea will never fly at Company X, its not how we do things here) or the current ethical atmosphere (this is really against the core principles of our industry) or may, God forbid, actually offend someone (oh boy, when Group X hears about this ideas, they’ll be sure to squash it).

They seem to go out of their way to find ways to dump all over the idea – especially if they are really interesting disruptive ideas which could possibly help a lot of people in huge ways, just because they are not business as usual, highly profitable business models we’ve used or are past-proven within the organization (it doesn’t matter if the model has been proven by others, if we’ve never done it, then it probably can’t be done by us).

There are already tons of ShouldWes in most organizations (interestingly enough, they seem to congregate in the finance areas of many organizations, but can really be found everywhere), but they really have no place in your innovation group. I suggest that if you are building an innovation group from scratch, being a DoIt should be an automatic qualifier, and being a ShouldWe should be an automatic disqualifier. If you’ve already got ShouldWes in your organization, maybe you can find more appropriate places for them elsewhere in the organization? If we are going to “move fast and break things” do we really need someone putting on the brakes and wrapping everything in bubble wrap?

In fact, your entire innovation group should be fully stocked with DoIts, and if possible, you should encourage the hiring of more DoIts beyond the innovation group.

There are already enough ShouldWes out there.

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Ask Not If Your Idea Can Make Money, Ask If It Can Help Humans

A common refrain that I hear from individuals at some of the companies that we’ve worked with in the past (and some prospects who ultimately decide not to work with us) is that we are experts at generating ideas, but most of those ideas simply do not have a business model – which is, of course, a fancy way of saying “we can’t figure out how to make any money with this idea”.

It may be totally groundbreaking, disruptive and even unique enough to be patentable, but right now, we can’t imagine how to monetize it. That’s a normal thought – many organizations today are subject to this malady – applying the business models of today to the ideas of the future. The ideas may be generated based on some assumptions of a predicted future – and you have to think – is this idea going to have a business model in the future – not today. Sometimes its difficult to imagine.

However, if the idea has merit (and you can easily tell this actually – you can do customer focus groups but in many cases, it can be as simple as a gut feel) it may not have a current business model.

The ideas that your employees will generate during our typical program run the gamut from incremental improvements (which can be everything from minor to major improvements to your bottom line – or customer satisfaction – over time) to truly out-there ideas.

In many cases, the reason that those ideas are considered “out-there” is that they currently lack a current business model, or they pre-suppose a predicted sea change in your customers, industry, technology or product/service mix which may or may not occur. Many of the biggest companies of today launched products in just that environment, hoping that once the idea was made real and launched into the world, then the market would find a business model for it.

This is one reason why many firms around here are funded and remain profitless for years until they find the right business model. Notable examples are Twitter (initially developed as a way for podcasters to let their listeners know that there is a new show available) and Snapchat (for kids to share their test answers with each other in the classroom), now valued in the billions – created to address a need, to help humans, not make money.

I doubt that the founders of Twitter and Snapchat ever even imagined that their little skunkworks or side project would ever become what it is today. Many of the ideas generated by our programs may fall into this category, but that does not mean that you shouldn’t pursue them.

If you are looking for truly disruptive innovation, you should be encouraging these sometimes-thought-of-as wild ideas, possibly bereft of profitability, because those are the ones that may not only end up being brand new billion-dollar businesses, they’ll also drive your culture to generate even more of them, eventually turning you into a company with innovation at its core.

So ask not if your idea can make money, ask if your ideas help humans first, then the money will follow.

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How to get the best ideas out of people? Cheat.

Prior to the widespread adoption of the web and the internet, I used to run something called a Bulletin Board System (BBS), where we would use phone lines to communicate on message boards. Every so often, our message boards would call each other and exchange messages, thus allowing us to communicate (this was in a time when long distance calls actually cost money, so the updates sometimes only happened once a day).

My BBS was called BizBase (and its still listed on the official list of bulletin boards in the 416 area code under Bizbase, SCAN Information Services (1990-1992)), and it focused on a discussion between small businesses, how they could help each other etc.

Of course, there was nothing more lonely than an empty message board, so as a tactic to make it look like there was chatter on the board, we’d create a number of fake accounts and just start posting and answering questions ourselves, just to make it look like there were people on the board chatting.

We never thought that we were doing anything wrong, we were just encouraging people to start chatting by giving them the sense that there were others already on the board and they were discussing issues, which led others to open up more.

Any student of group dynamics understands that is how humans operate – the initial members of the group who communicate set the tone for the rest of the group – if the first few people open up and are talkative, then the rest open up. If the first few people don’t participate, then the group stays quiet.

Its almost a tribal effect – you see it when groups of people order food at a restaurant, whoever orders first sets the tone for the rest of the table – if the first person orders a heavy, fattening meal, the rest mostly follow suit – if they order a healthy salad, then the rest tend to follow suit. It’s not that they are all hungry for the same thing, its almost an unconscious expression of alliance with the group – its a signal of fealty to the group.

It works in a very similar way in brainstorming sessions – if you start the group off with extroverted people with ideas that push the envelope, then you are more likely to get ideas like that from the rest of the group. Therefore, you must have “ringers” in the group, those creative, outspoken (but not those outspoken enough to be considered intimidating) folks who are willing to express disruptive and edgy ideas.

Just like seeding the message board with discussion, seeding your brainstorming session by first telling everyone that “usually in these sessions we have an open and free exchange of sometimes radical ideas”, and then proving that by having specific individuals attend and kickoff the meeting with those disruptive ideas, will trigger the group into thinking those same kind of disruptive thoughts when they are generating ideas.

To get the most interesting, innovative and disruptive ideas out there, you may need to cheat a little – but in the end, you might end up teasing out your next billion dollar idea.

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Timing Is Everything. Get That Right and You Win.

Everything that we’ve come up with will happen. We just don’t know when.

I’ve said before many times that the biggest issue with being a futurist is that you are a lot like a weatherperson – usually right, but at the wrong time. Another corollary to that is that everything that has been imagined happening, within reason, will happen, and the only question is when.

Basically, if it is physically possible to do something, then it will probably happen at some point. It may be soon, it may be 5-10 years, or it may be even further out. The trick is trying to figure out when.

In our futurist programs, we ask our clients to imagine what the world will be like 10 years out. We ask them to imagine what they will be like, what their customers will be like, what their products and services will be like, as well. We get them to project into this, for some people, far future (remember that many people can hardly think even a quarter or two out, concerned that there are massive technological and cultural shifts just around the corner.

In these exercises, we usually get many excellent ideas which are natural extensions or combinations of current thinking. We get many incremental ideas. Sometimes, we really get some groundbreaking ideas, and for those, depending on if they can be currently implemented, we take them to a proof-of-concept (which is much more easily done these days due to the frameworks, systems, and tools available), then present them directly to small subsets of users. If they like the idea, we then move it to the next step.

Some of these ideas are interesting but not radical, and still, others are so radical and out-of-the-box, they are a tough sell to move forward on. Think of it this way – if it’s a good idea, then it will eventually be built by someone. Even if there is no current business model or infrastructure to support building the concept, that will change in the future, when new business models and technologies make it possible.

For example, imagine someone, several years ago, seeing their car sitting on the driveway and thinking “why am I paying a monthly fee for my car to just sit there 80% of the time”, and then thinking, “what if I could give people rides for a fee to help cover my costs, in my spare time”. Without smartphones, Google Maps, inexpensive data plans and GPS, Uber, Lyft, and its counterparts would never have been invented.  I would not be surprised if there were several people who came up with the exact same concept, just lacking the technology, the drive, or the funding to make it happen.

It’s much the same with other ideas. If they are physically possible, they will happen. They just need the right timing: for both the technology, the business model, and the culture to line up at the same time, and boom – you have a billion-dollar business.

How do you determine what will strike? That’s beside the point – because we don’t. The output of a typical ideation session could generate 20-1000’s of concepts, and you may have no idea which will become the big ideas. Or if there even is one in there. Once the idea is created and captured, however, this will trigger “implementation thinking” – now that it’s out there and formed, then someone, most likely the inventor, will drive to see that idea become reality. In this way, all ideas, unless they are fantasy, will happen, the trick is to guess when.

To guess when we need to be highly cognizant of the world. To actively seek signals which match up as precursors to this idea. Things that, when taken to a next logical (or even illogical step) will show us an embryonic version of the idea. Once we see that, it is the best time to start looking at building the capability to deliver that idea, or if that capability is available, then the ability to build those combinations and get to that idea.

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