Author / Roger Dennis

Posts by Roger Dennis

Innovation without the jargon to give clear tangible results.
by Roger Dennis

Technology Futures

Just back from a week in the UK working on a Technology Futures programme for Innovaro. We assembled a wide range of world experts from around the globe to build a picture of what the world might look like in twenty years time from a technology perspective. In the same room we had people that had just come back from Davos, TED presenters, geneticists, Koyoto negotiators, cold fusion experts and ex-Presidential Advisors.

It generated a range of fascinating and jaw-dropping insights.

I’ll blog these as I churn through my notes over the next few days. In the meantime, here’s one to get you started. It comes from an expert in foresight who is working for one of the worlds largest architectural firms (I cannot name people as we ran the event under Chatham House rules to ensure the discussion was as open as possible).

“We are already constructing buildings that have been designed as Faraday cages.”

Oh, and in the same vein, he also noted that on any average day, “there is two and a half miles of smog over Shanghai.”

by Roger Dennis

Innovation and tantric sex

Update : Bruce Nussbaum (of BusinessWeek) commented that it’s hard to find humour in the field of innovation. I agree. That’s the motivation behind this post. Enjoy…

Over the last few months it’s become apparent that innovation is finding it’s way into all sorts of odd nooks and business crannies. However there’s very few people who actually know what it is and how to effectively do it.

And that’s why it seems remarkably similar to tantric sex, at least to an ‘outsider’ like me.

Here’s ten reasons why innovation is like tantric sex :

1. You can read lots about it, but there’s no substitute for doing it.

2. Lots of people talk about it, but few people know actually know how it works.

3. You can attend conferences about innovation, but when you leave your innovation methods/culture won’t change a whole lot.

4. People can make a lot of noise about innovation, but things stay the same.

5. The people on the top generally make the least amount of effort. It’s the people underneath who really want it to work.

6. With innovation efforts, there’s usually a whole lot of noise over a long period of time before anything happens. If it happens at all.

7. There’s nothing quick and easy about innovation. It takes a while to get good results.

8. Innovation is a bit mystical.

9. It makes for interesting conversations at dinner parties : “Innovation, oh yes – we’re the most innovative company in clerical administration. Why, just the other day we decided to use yellow paper for duplicates instead of white…”

10. There’s lots of trial and error.

Innovation consultants also look a bit different. Kind of like tantric sex consultants, but in a different way...

by Roger Dennis

Penguin books feature DIY covers

The excellent trend watching site PSFK points out that Penguin books in the UK is now leaving some of it’s book covers blank so that people can create their own. This is an interesting extension of crowd sourcing, and has parallels with the Japanese trend for unique book covers I wrote about previously.

It also is a perfect example of type of thing that this HBS article refers to :

For user innovation to be a force, the cost of creating a new design must be within the reach of a single user, whose reward is solely the improvement of his or her own experience.

Have a look at the gallery that Penguin has created so that people can upload their own cover art. I’ve copied an example below :

Budding artists eat your heart out

by Roger Dennis

In car GPS – still bleeding edge?

On my last trip I needed to spend a day in Auckland. Although a New Zealander, I have not spent much time in Auckland working out driving routes as I’ve always relied on taxis. However this time I had a whole day of meetings all over town, and taxi fares were going to mount up fast.

I decided to get a rental car with a GPS unit. It worked out to be a fraction of the cost of the combined taxi fares and guided me perfectly to the first four meetings.

The magic device

However even as a technophile I found it to be very science fiction. The device would tell me – in a perfectly legible and very human voice – exactly when to turn, and how far away the turn was. When people asked me which route I took to their office, I honestly had no idea. That, in itself, I found unsettling.

It reminded me of the Arthur C Clarke quote :

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.

But then things went horribly wrong. For my last – and most important meeting – the device could not find the address. Nor could it find the address of streets close by (I stashed a paper street map as a backup). A twenty minute journey morphed into a forty five minute nightmare as I struggled to navigate motorways with a street map on my lap, pulling off when I needed to re-check directions.

It was a graphic demonstration of the state of cutting edge technology, especially when the cutting edge is so sharp it causes bleeding.

From an outside observers view GPS is a mature technology adopted by manufacturers globally.

From a users point of view GPS navigation devices can instantly transform themselves from the magic navigator into the most useless thing they ever laid eyes upon.

In this respect it is similar to many technologies that are still being adopted by the majority of users, but which analysts and observers view as ‘old’.

I too viewed GPS as an old technology – until I used it in anger.

by Roger Dennis

Malcom Gladwell on the fringes

Malcom Gladwell comments on the fringes that exist within an organisation in his article for the New Yorker about workplace design.

More precisely, as one study after another has demonstrated ,the best ideas in any workplace arise out of casual contacts among different groups within the same company. If you are designing widgets for Acme.com, for instance, it is unlikely that a breakthrough idea is going to come from someone else on the widget team: after all, the other team members are as blinkered by the day-to-day demands of dealing with the existing product as you are.

by Roger Dennis

Interview with Tony Ulwick – author of “What Customers Want” (final part)

(continued from Part Three…)

8. I think there is a lot written about innovation, but very little about actually how to do it successfully, and in a repeatable fashion. What are your thoughts on this?

I agree, a lot has been written – most of it about over arching innovation theory, not much on the practical science of innovation. That is what makes us different. Uncovering these “truths” about innovation – and writing about them in books such as What Customers Want – has been a difficult and time-consuming process. Not many people have had the laboratory environment we have enjoyed to make these discoveries, nor have they had the desire to reveal what is in the black box.

We have made public our 8-step innovation process and we explain (in a great level of detail) how innovation works and how to execute the process. Our goal is to make outcome-driven innovation the new design for six-sigma standard for innovation. Our programs for innovation provide serious practitioners with the detailed knowledge and tools they need to achieve success within their company.

9. Do you think that as the area of innovation matures, there is a trend for companies to move away from blue-sky type work and into a process led innovation style?

Absolutely – it must become process orientated to ensure predictable results. In fact all types of innovation initiatives – growing core markets, capitalizing on adjacent opportunities, disrupting existing markets and discovering new markets – are becoming process led. Once companies integrate this thinking wholly into their structure, they will experience a dramatic return on their innovation investments.

The transformation has already begun. With the acceptance of the StageGate process to guide product development efforts, companies are placing greater importance on ensuring only winning products enter the development pipeline. Applying outcome-driven thinking to the “discovery phase” (phase 0 in the StageGate process) enables companies to achieve this goal. I believe our thinking will proliferate once this connection point is well understood.

10. What’s the online resource you use the most in your work?

Other than our own Tool Library portal and IMSnet – our web-based data analysis and reporting tool, I use Google to conduct research and CEO Express to help with productivity.

by Roger Dennis

HBS interview on Time Pressure and Creativity

The insights have just started...

Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile is in the midst of a ten-year study looking at, among other things, how time pressure in a corporate setting affects employee creativity. Interviewed here she talks about how her study is the first to empirically study creativity in the wild.

By stripping out assumptions and myths about creativity with solid research, she has uncovered some interesting things about creativity, which, in turn, has serious implications for innovation.

Overall, very high levels of time pressure should be avoided if you want to foster creativity on a consistent basis. However, if a time crunch is absolutely unavoidable, managers can try to preserve creativity by protecting people from fragmentation of their work and distractions; they should also give people a sense of being “on a mission,” doing something difficult but important.

Her study has also uncovered insights into how to encourage creativity. Amabile goes on to say that

…our research suggests that managers should try to avoid or reduce the “obstacles to creativity” (time pressure and organizational impediments like political problems, harsh criticism of new ideas, and emphasis on the status quo) and enhance the “stimulants to creativity” (freedom, positive challenge in the work)

On a slightly different – but still relevant note – she talks about a study she did a while back about creativity and motivations. Amabile found that artists were significantly more creative when intrinsically motivated (e.g. by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself) as opposed to when given large sums of cash and being told to produce something creative.

This reminds me of the story about the Motorola team that developed the Razr phone. They were given all sorts of perks based on the success of the design, but in an interview one of the team said that the greatest reward was the most unexpected. Out of the blue, the key members of the team were asked to attend a meeting which they had no knowledge of. One by one they were bought in. They walked in to face the board of Motorola, who then rose as one to give them a sustained standing ovation.

Now that’s what I call a reward.

by Roger Dennis

McKinsey article : Reinventing innovation at consumer goods companies

The latest issue of The McKinsey Quarterly has an article titled “Reinventing innovation at consumer goods companies.” If you’re in this sector, it’s a relevant and insightful read. If you’re in a product design company, it’s old news.

Nevertheless, the highlights are worth digesting :

On predicting the success rate of new products :

“Consumers are notoriously poor at articulating needs or benefits beyond those they have already experienced: when asking them to imagine true innovations, companies get mixed results at best”

On innovation outside the core :

“…a recent analysis across major consumer goods categories demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of US patents arose outside the top seven global consumer goods companies. In the laundry and home care category, for example, 95 percent of the patents filed from 2002 to 2005 did not originate within them. Indeed, the leading companies constitute only a tiny fraction of the world’s consumer goods innovators.”

On sourcing new ideas and the requirement for peripheral vision :

“…our research suggests that few companies look beyond their advertising agencies, to the many alternative external sources of insights: suppliers, venture capital firms, entrepreneurs, and inventors. This oversight may prove costly, since external partners can spot trends, create competition for complacent in-house teams, share technologies and manufacturing processes (in some cases developed for other purposes), and even craft fully developed product concepts. […] Given the power of outside ideas, companies should experiment with various approaches for sourcing, jointly creating, and commercializing intellectual property with external partners.”

The article concludes by saying something that will ring true with many industrial design companies :

Such approaches [to success] might, for example, include iterative rapid prototyping, which uses product concepts to create an ongoing dialogue with consumers whose comments shape the design throughout the development process.

by Roger Dennis

Interview with Tony Ulwick – author of “What Customers Want” (part 3)

(…continued from part two)

5. Since your book came out, what has been the reaction to the idea?

Generally, once people understand the fundamentals of what we are describing here, they love it – it has logical appeal. After all, we are simply saying that companies must uncover and prioritize their customers’ needs and use that knowledge to drive innovation. This has been accepted thinking for decades. Outcome-driven innovation is different in that it incorporates new ideas about just what a “need” is and how they are captured, prioritized and used to drive innovation. It brings needed precision to the process of innovation, transforming it from an art to a rules-based discipline.


6. Is there a particular sector/area where outcome based innovation is best applied?

For a theory to be sound, it must apply in all situations and circumstances. From our experience, outcome-driven innovation theory can be applied in all circumstances and situations as it is focused on the very fundamentals of innovation. We have achieved success in B2B and B2C environments, small medium and larger businesses and in nearly every industry you can image – from heart defibrillators and consumer products to bananas and insurance services – from enterprise software and printers to chemicals and ware washing equipment – the applications are endless. The thinking can be applied to any situation in which a person or a company is trying to figure out the best solution to satisfy a set of customer outcomes.


7. Some people I have talked to about the concept think that it’s Marketing 101
– understanding the customer. How have marketing teams reacted to the process?

Understanding the customer is Marketing 101 – but companies continue to fail to get it right. Why? Because most innovation processes lack standards and precision and instead breed variability – the enemy of predictable innovation. For example, to this day companies unknowingly collect several types of inputs as part of their VOC efforts, e.g., a mix of solutions, product specifications, needs, wants, must haves, exciters, latent needs, delighters, benefit statements, etc. In reality, these are all different types of inputs with different purposes, structure, content and format – and it is this inconsistency in customer inputs that breeds variability and failure throughout the innovation process. As a result, companies are not effectively addressing customer needs as evidenced by the dismal rate of new product successes.

Marketing teams that realize they can get more out of their innovations programs love our model – it addresses many of the challenges they have faced for years. If you look at our client portfolio you will see that it is the more sophisticated companies that realize that the process is broken and precision is the key to success. Many companies, however, still think that any customer input is a good input – this old thinking will change as the more sophisticated companies pull away.