Ideal Innovator

Quoting from FutureThink's Innovation newsletter: 

Define Your Ideal Innovator

As you look to develop and grow your innovation team, take a few moments to define your ideal innovator. There is no one "type" that defines an innovator. Many are creative, flexible, collaborative, entrepreneurial, analytical, strong leaders, etc... However, the specific combination of skills that will make an innovator successful differs in each organization. It's important to identify and prioritize what it takes to be a successful innovator in your own organization. What skills does someone on your innovation team need to have? What experiences? What mindset? 

Open up a blank document, and create a few different headings: Skills, Experience, Mindset, Education, Outlook, Interests, etc. Under each heading, jot down what your ideal innovator looks like. Once you’ve completed this quick exercise, you will have in front of you a wish list for your innovation team.

I think this is a good way to get clarity on the composition of the desired team for Innovation initiatives. It gives you broad parameters that you should have in mind while forming the team and while assessing the gaps in the team. At the next level you can think of at what stages do you need what skill and practically speaking you would need to get certain skills at certain stages of the initiative, and you may not need them always. 

Sharing this framework can also help them assess themselves for the given challenge. 

Think about it. 

Choose the people who surround you

Paul Salone in his article on "Who challenges your thinking?", suggests that you go out and meet as many different type of people as you can and learn from them.

He also advises to be careful of the kind of people you spend most time with as they tend to influence your thoughts and behavior. I totally agree with this.

In fact when I teach / train at corporates, I always ask people who do you go out for lunch and coffee with during your breaks and the answer is invariably the person I work with or the person who sits next to me. I suggest that you go out for lunch on a regular basis with people from other departments, even if you do not have any direct work relationship with them and this would give you insight into how they work and what they do besides building your network within the organization.

Talking to people who are not like you , either by way of culture, ethnicity or by way of profession, age, gender, class, society, location widens your perspective more than anything else. So go out and explore the opportunity that each individual offers you. And choose to surround yourself with the ones who challenge you and help you grow.

Trust & Innovation

Raj Sisodia, the author of Firms of Endearment, talks about the trust in organizations. He mentions examples where organizations have moved from being low trust to high trust and the amount of effort involved in doing so. He makes a very important point when he says that organizations always expect the employees to be trustworthy but they do not always reciprocate the same. He also mentions building of trust as a long term goal as it takes time to build a trust in a large established organization.

I would like to add that Innovation will flourish in a high-trust organization. By its very nature, Innovation is a high risk game and one can never predict the outcome. People would be willing to take more risk if they can trust their teams, their managers and leadership. If they can trust them to share their ideas, if they can trust them to support them and share the credit if the idea take off finally, they will come forth and contribute in a much bigger way to the organization. 

Interestingly, trust is big reciprocal trait. When you trust someone, you invite them to trust you. And unless one of you have hidden agendas, this can be the beginning of a trusting relationship. 

CII Conference on IP and MSME

This week I attended a 2 day conference on IP and Micro, Small and medium enterprises. This was a CII event in collaboration with WIPO. With good representation from various IP Cells across the countries and the other Government agencies involved in promoting and protecting IP, and private players who can potentially play a bigger role in IP in the country, it was a well rounded event.

The no of Govt agencies that have a mandate to promote IP in the country and that too at the grassroots level for smaller setups was a revelation. But at the same time it was disappointing to see that the gross under utilization of services offered by them and the funds available with them. 

I have been thinking about what can bridge this gap and the first thing that comes to my mind is Awareness. The information has to be readily available in the public domain. But a more important one is that Govt officials have to be more responsive and they need to simplify their unnecessarily long processes and an attitude to help rather than to just pass the file to the next table. They all admitted that if you visit our office, be prepared to keep visiting it for at least 6 months, the processes are slow. Since they are aware of the bottlenecks in their processes, I wish hey do something about this now.

Statistics on Patents filing trend in India is last few years is interesting, and so was the data on trademarks specially in the MSME segment. Though the no of filings is increasing, there is a big question on the commercialization of the same. I believe Indian companies are on a patent wave and are filing patents for the sake of announcing a no, rather than actually believing in the commercial value of the patents. 

Incidentally, the conference had no representation from the MSMEs themselves, hope the organizers reach out to them too in the next seasons of this conference.

The other side of Innovation by Vijay Govindarajan

Vijay Govindarajan talks about his new book 'Other side of Innovation' and how it talks about the 99% perspiration that Edison once spoke about. 

I liked his analogy of climbing a mountain, where he equates ideation to climbing the mountain which has challenges and excitement, and execution to coming down the mountain, which has many dangers involved and is not as glamourous as climbing. But the completion of the task depends equally on how well you come down the mountain. 

Gandhian Model for Innovation.

Raghunath Mashelkar, a scholar & scientist talks about the Gandhian Model for Innovation in a Strategy & Business interview , which in one line means getting more from less for more people. It is inspired by Gandhi's belief that Earth provides for everyone's needs but not greed. 

He sites Tata Nano and Arvind Eye care as the leading example of this model. Describing in detail how the technology has helped the fishermen in coastal areas through knowledge of availability of fish and also the buyers of the fish, he talks about the role of technology in changing people's lives. 

The model has now existed for sometime now and well studied and well documented, but associating it with Gandhi's name, gives it a lot more weight. 

Innomantra's Patent Portfolio of Major Indian IT Companies

My partner firm Innomantra Consulting, which specializes in Innovation consulting, has come out with a first ever report on Patent Portfolio of Major Indian IT companies and the report has been quoted in the media.

It talks about the role patents are playing in driving Innovation in Indian IT industry. It also analyses how the major IT companies are performing wrt each other on their patent portfolio and tracks their R&D spends.

There is also a discussion on challenge of filing software related patents and how the IT companies are dealing with it. The report CD comes with a list of patents documents in a bundle.

To get this report, you can get in touch with me or write to the company directly.

Travel and Innovation

Paul Sloane in his recent newsletter says "Recently I visited the beautiful city of Antwerp and while there I filled my car at a fully automated petrol station.  There was no attendant and no shop.  You just put your credit card into the machine and then fill up.  It reminded me of two innovation lessons.  You can always get innovative ideas by traveling because people in other countries solve problems in different ways.  Secondly a good way to innovate is by eliminating things - in this case the attendant and the shop."

Now what this small note tells me is that traveling to a new place can fuel your innovation quotient. You can pick up ideas from the way people in this country live and deal with the inherent problems that they have in their system. For example visitors to India can pick up a tip or two on Jugaad. The moment you are in an environment other than you live in, you start seeing the things that are obviously different from your own. It reminds me that a few years back I was traveling in Bhutan and I realized there not many shops selling clothes or garments. In fact the small number of shops that did have clothes were not the clothes common people were wearing there and were obviously meant for the high end visitors. Upon enquiry I figured out that most people there weave their own clothes, which may seem very primitive to most of us, but it is the way of life there. Now you never know when this brainwave strikes someone and they make this idea of weaving your own cloth popular and it may become a fashion statement to wear self woven clothes. 

Secondly, the difference between how you operate and how they operate can give you the models or small tricks to use while doing a formal idea generation, like the author picked up the idea of elimination which can be and is used popularly in product designs. 

On a lighter note, this tells is that a true professional will always find his subject's angle no matter he or she is, working or on vacation.

Middle Management & Innovation

Paul Sloane in his article "Who is Crushing Creativity in your office?" puts the onus of driving innovation on the leadership of the organization. While it is true that unless there is leadership will in innovation or rather any initiative, it is very difficult for it to be successful, my experience says the work needs to be done on the middle management layer to drive it across the organization.

The lower layers in the organization pyramid are usually young and hence nimble and not rigid. They also do not have the decision making in their hands, and have the mandate to work on what is assigned. Now this assignment can well be on coming out with new ways of doing things. Given a task, and some broad enabling infrastructure, they will give you the best they can.

Senior management has the birds's eye view of the organization and they understand the need to innovate to survive in the marketplace. They may or may not know the 'How' part of Innovation, but they understand the 'Why' of it. And with this understanding they usually launch the fancy innovation initiatives in the organization. 

Given the perspective of above two layers, the actual responsibility of making innovation happen lies on the shoulders of middle management. They have to figure out the 'How' of innovation and then put in a process to make it happen. The important point is that more often than not, they have to do this while managing the regular operational business responsibilities. Given our productivity drives using all possible management methods and models, all middle managers often have more on their plates than they can chew. Lost on operations, they either ignore these initiatives or at least put them on a low priority. The importance of initiative never tickles downs to the layers below them, and this is where the initiatives die. 

Leaders need to enable this layer to not become the bottleneck in the innovation drives, by picking up the  set of people who believe in these initiatives and have the inherent drive to run with them. Leaders need to provide these frontrunners a very solid support for them to be able to bring in the expected changes in the organization.

Innovation : An experiment

Organizations tend to look at Innovation as a process that is based on a theory which in turn in based on experiments done elsewhere in different environments. And what they expect at the end of it is a well defined result which can be in terms of a business benefit, generating a better top line or bottom line.

I think Innovation needs to be treated as an experiment or a series of experiment, that are done in  well defined boundaries and are conducted freely within these broad boundaries. An experiment lets you play on the go. It does not have to follow the set process to the T, rather it improvises as it goes and has a better probability of both leveraging creativity and delivering better suited results for the business.

Over the last 100 years or so since the time management was born and adopted as a discipline, our minds have been so well tuned to the process, that no sooner we want to do something, the first thing that we do is put in a process in place. Experiment with your creativity at the cost of processes and you may be amazed at the results. 

Ideas n Innovation

Vijay Govindarajan in his HBR article Innovation is not creativity tries to convey the difference between the two and the impact they have on the business. 

One of my potential clients during a discussion said that he and his team believe that every idea is a good idea and must be treated well. They ran a 'Give an Idea' campaign and are now sitting on 7000+ ideas. I asked him ' What are you going to with so many ideas? Do you have the bandwidth to even look at so many ideas?"He obviously did not have an answer. This is a common scenario in many organizations. 

Businesses, as of today focus more on Idea generation. I think this can be counter productive if not well balanced with proper execution and demonstrated results. You may gather a lot of ideas in first go, but if people do not see their ideas being respected, they will never again oblige you. From a business perspective also, an idea is useless is put into action, tested and taken to market. 

There are two things that you need to do while asking for Ideas: Ask for ideas that you can use and then use them. This will improve the credibility of Innovation process and the people running it. If you keep doing this repeatedly, the process will create a pull factor for the next generation of ideas.

Rewarding Failed Efforts

I was reading the book Tata - The evolution of a corporate brand by Morgen Witzel and read about this concept that the group follows called 'Dare to Try'. This is an award that is given to innovations done by the teams anywhere in the group, which are pathbreaking but did not take off in the marketplace. Couple of  examples mentioned in the book are:

1. Plastic doors for cars
2. Flavor capsule for tea, that you can carry with you. Imagine having a Ginger capsule that you can carry in your pocket, and use as and when you want. I know there used to be drops that I bought from Kerala sometime back, but then being liquid it was difficult to carry them. 

Interestingly, an article by Sam Swaminathan in Mckinsey's MIX ( Management Innovation Exchange), also mentions creating a space for employees to share their mistakes and rewarding few of them based on some criteria. 

Now what happens is, essentially employees get a message that failing in an attempt is fine and will not work against them in the organization. I am not sure if people would really want to be rewarded for mistakes, but it does give confidence to everyone to try and explore the ideas in their heads. It can create an environment of openness as ideas can get evaluated from various angles by various people and in a modified form, idea may still see the light of the day or cross-pollinate other ideas. 

Do you know any other examples of the organizations doing this formally?