Good Ideas?

Steven Johnson in this TED Talk talks about the emergence of ideas and the three things that he emphasizes are:

You need to have a informal environment for the ideas to come. Not many ideas have been generated in the labs.

Ideas take a lot of time to develop in your sub-concious, though they may appear to you in a Eureka moment. Incidentally we get to hear only about the Eureka moment and not the thought process that may have floated in the mind for years before becoming that idea leading to Eureka moment. But it is important to understand that Eureka moments do not happen out of air. 

Your ideas need to connect with other ideas. Ideas come by interacting with other ideas. In fact he says Idea is a network in itself.

I agree with all of this. And would like to add, have an open mind...keep your conditionings in check and you would find many more ideas coming your way. Like Steven says 'Chance favors the connected mind'.

Why Innovations Fail

Frederick E. Allen in his Forbes article Why Innovations Fail: It's All in the Ecosystem sites many examples of Innovations that were first movers in their categories were failed as a commercial product. He  looks deeper into each of these cases and says they failed because though the product was great, but the team failed to take care of all those in the ecosystem. For example a technology tyre did not think about the repair shops who will have to upgrade themselves to cater to these new type of tyre. He then compares Sony e-book reader with Amazon Kindle, which was launched later but had all the right tie ups with the publishers. He of course talks about Apple products that always seem to get everything right despite being a closed system to an extent. 

I think when you commercialize an innovation, you do not to take a very critical look at all your links in the supply chain and see who all would need to change what all. What are the costs involved for them versus the returns that they can expect from the new product. Most products lie at the middle of the supply chain with some suppliers involved and some service providers at one end and customers or consumers at the other end. You need to fine tune both the ends so that the product can be a success. 

So look for those weak links and strengthen them before hitting the market.

Current Innovation Practices

My friend Dr Vinay Dabholkar talks about the Current practices being followed for Innovation in his blog post. Vinay is somone I really respect for his knowledge and his openness to hear the contrary views. In fact he sometimes seeks those views to validate or fine tune his own.

This what I think of his views in this particular post:

• You need to be very clear of the objective of the innovation initiative in the organization: Is it to make people participate? Is it to get some focussed results / ideas that organization can use? Is it to prepare ground for the future innovations? It is t create a culture of Innovation? While you may say all of them, but I think you need to choose the focus.
• A lot of organizations that I worked or interacted with were good at creating buzz and getting people to give ideas. I found that they were sitting of thousands of ideas, most of which were irrelevant. No organization has a process, resources or bandwidth to do justified evaluation of all these ideas. And if you think of the softer part of the process, it is more harmful to take an idea and not logically conclude it than not taking an idea at all. 
• A big gap that I see is the enabling gap - people are asked to give ideas, without being enabled to do so. They are not made to think ideas that are relevant to business, not trained on how to present your ideas, how to do business evaluation of their own ideas. Most people, specially in the IT industry need to be trained on business thinking, as being technocrats it is not required to do so in their regular jobs. Addressing these issues is a part of creating a nurturing environment where if I have an idea, there are systems, processes and resources available to me to take it to a level where organization can actually use it. 

Define Strategy

This S&B article intends to explains Strategy in as simple terms as possible. Simply loved reading it.

It says Strategy is different from vision, mission, goals, priorities, and plans. It is the result of choices executives make, on where to play and how to win, to maximize long-term value

If you can answer these 3 questions for your business, you have your strategy in place:

1. Who is the target customer?

2. What is the value proposition to that customer?

3. What are the essential capabilities needed to deliver that value proposition?

Now I wish business managers could think so simply and ask themselves and their teams to think with simplicity. 

How to know what customer wants

Scott Anthony's HBR article on A.G. Lafley vs. Steve Jobs talks about two contrasting approaches to finding out the ultimate question 'What do the customers want?'. P&G indulges in many studies and research projects to find it out what its customers want while Apple goes on to give the customers what they possibly do not even imagine. 

I think each product type needs to choose its own way to peep into the hearts and minds of their customers. These may be the two extreme ends of the spectrum that is available to you for connecting with your customers. You need to choose or if possible invent your own method to find out what your customer wants and more importantly what he needs. How much surprises are they willing to take from you? An Apple user is now mentally prepared to see some magical surprises from the company while that may not be true for the same customer for a washing powder as they expect some predictability there. 

Think of it, a customer is a consumer for both P&G and Apple, but what they expect from both these companies in different, because they touch very different parts of his life. So choose the method to suit the touchpoint that you have with your customer and consumer.