Nov 9, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“Skunk works” is a term most are familiar with, indeed, so familiar that the pros and cons, and the do’s and don’ts are debated endlessly. Weather a Skunk team separated from the main operations of an enterprise “delivers” or not is generally a function of the leadership, culture and resource allocation processes of the parent, not just of the excitement and freedom of the works.
Sometimes it is useful to go back to the original. The term “skunk works” emerged when the Allied war effort needed a very quick response to the threat posed by the German development of jet fighters in the latter stages of the second war, and Lockheed Martin won a contract to do the work against what was considered an impossible timetable.
To meet the demands, LM created a separate development unit, rapidly taking on the now familiar nomenclature, originally an in-joke where members of the team considered themselves as popular as a skunk in the halls of the existing parent company.
Creating skunk works is only one of many strategies that can be employed to rev up the innovation effort, and it is no more or less successful than others, it is all a matter of the context.
Nov 8, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Social Media
A community of practice used to mean a small group of specialists who engaged in face to face consideration of issues of mutual interest, resulting in innovative solutions to issues concerning their area of speciaisation.
Interaction between “connectors” with similar interests who inhabited other communities occurred in a limited manner, often at gatherings such as industry conferences.
The application of the term now has been substantially widened by the use of social networking tools in ways that are completely new, to the point where we now have communities of interest in areas that would never have supported a community of practice.
Sites like Flikr are a great example, ranging from broad communities of interest to very narrow communities of practice in highly specific techniques where the chance of a pre-net community of practice forming would have been virtually zero.
Nov 1, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
The communication alternatives are mind-boggling today, but sometimes someone comes up with an innovative way to combine them. Imagine Social Responsibility Marketing linked with social networking and the broadcast media, backed by comment around the world, for what must be a pretty modest outlay compared to, say, a 30 second ad spot in the superbowl that few remember. Pretty cool!.
“Chalkbot” did it brilliantly for Nike during the recent Tour de France, just how you measure the impact is a tricky question, but the value must be huge, and it is going viral, so will multiply for Nike and cancer awareness over time. Next year will be “huger”
Nike is a consistently brilliant marketer, they may have plenty of $ to splash around, but they just go to the essence of brand-building by grabbing people by the heart, not the wallet, and not letting go.
Oct 24, 2010 | Collaboration, Customers, Innovation, Leadership, Social Media, Strategy
Creating and managing a development portfolio is a critical factor in the success of most commercial enterprises, but one that is done poorly in many I have seen. Some recent with a client struggling with the challenge for his organization served to clarify my thoughts, and assisted his organisation to develop a portfolio discipline that appears to be working well.
Success is much more than just using a few tools, of which there are many, it is about how the enterprise at its core deals with ambiguity, trade-offs, and the challenge of being frustrated and wrong a lot of the time, whilst being sufficiently resilient to keep on batting, and batting hard. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind” and nothing creates chance like persistence tempered with learning from each experience.
Below are some of the things that appear to me to be of importance
- Have a clear strategy. Without a clearly articulated business strategy that has commitment from those responsible for implementation, how can you possibly have a Product development and commercialization portfolio with any hope of success?
- Self awareness. Know what you do not know as well as what you do know, and where the knowledge about what you do not know may reside, particularly if it is with a competitor.
- Externalities. Understand the forces driving developments that may create opportunities in the industries you target, and the commercial and competitive imperatives that drive the decision making of individual customers and potential customers in those industries.
- People. Have access to great people, both internal and external in a variety of ways to extract a range of informed views and data upon which to build a case. Use the emerging communication tools to link these people and leverage their knowledge and experience
- Sponsorship. Ensure there is a senior level executive sponsor for each project that emerges from the pack. This person should have the passion, knowledge and position to carry the case for resource allocation, risk management, and strategic fit to the senior decision maker in the enterprise.
- Endless polishing. Keep polishing the portfolio, it will never be a completed exercise, it is a live entity always, and needs TLC. Part of the polishing is creation of a “carpark” which captures ideas, issues, technologies, and all the sometimes random stuff that can create that “Eureka” moment when things suddenly come together in a new way. Revisit the carpark regularly.
- PDCA. Be prepared to experiment, trial, look for insights, learn by doing, but be aggressive about performance, and relegation and promotion to and from the carpark, and further through the development process, and learn from all that experience.
- Customers. Engage customers as early and as often as possible, after all, they are the ones whose problems your product is supposed to solve, and they are usually full of problems and improvement ideas, some of which may be of value to you.
- Dare to be different. No successful new product did the job just the same as something that already exists, that is just a price-fight, differentiation is fundamental to success.
- NPD is everybody’s job. Product development and idea evolution happens holistically, not by functional line, and it must be a priority for every stakeholder in and around the enterprise, not just something that requires attendance by the marketing personnel at a meeting every second Tuesday at 10am .
There you go, sounds pretty easy!
Oct 17, 2010 | Innovation, Operations
Usually discussion about innovation focuses on the new stuff, the things that have, or need to change to deliver a changed outcome.
During a discussion recently about “green electricity” in Australia, specifically solar power, it struck me that the costs of the Photo Voltaic panels was dropping rapidly, and is the focus of most of the activity, and certainly all the publicity. By contrast, all the surrounding elements of the value chain necessary to deliver the innovative technology, the processes to source parts, deliver, maintain and install the cells, and link them to the existing grid, were all going up in price, more than offsetting the benefits of the drop in price of the core technology.
Innovation is only of any value when it is delivered, when the benefits flow, and usually the “delivery” is a forgotten element of the whole process during the hype.
Oct 14, 2010 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is the driver of everything that contributes to improvement. Doesn’t matter if it is improvement in a factory, using the “5 why” tool, or some question, the answer to which advances our knowledge of space. The driver is curiosity, and the result, the potential to be better, to know more, to deliver benefit.
For a marketer, being curious should be second nature, but how long since you sat one-on-one with a customer and sought direct feedback on how your product performs Vs the competition?, why they bought it?, how could it be improved?, what job was it really doing? And so on.
It is one thing to absorb research reports, dig through the numbers, engage in esoteric conversations about innovation, and understand at a macro level the things that contribute to success, but it is something entirely different to get down in the weeds with your customers.
