Outside Innovation

Best of Our Innovation Articles

This week, we’re celebrating innovation and innovative ways to be innovative. To that end, I’d like to recommend these particular articles:

Why Chaos Is Important for Innovation
How an Organization, Group, or Individual Can Foster Innovation
by Patricia Seybold
Jan. 17, 2014

How to Address “Wicked Problems”
Use Dialogue Mapping to Build a Shared Understanding and Evolve a Group’s Thinking
by Patricia Seybold
May 23, 2013

New Metaphors Spur Innovation
How We Describe Things Impacts How We Think about Using Them
by Peter Horne
Mar. 6, 2013

How to Innovate Business Models
Should You Create a Business Model Innovation Factory?
by Patricia Seybold
May 3, 2012

Bootstrapping Innovation
Leveraging the Collective IQ to Achieve Powerful Results
by Ronni Marshak
June 3, 2010

 

Open Innovation: Combining World-Class Skills with Local Knowledge

One of the most seductive forms of open innovation is to recruit the best minds in the world to work on really tough problems. Often this is done in the form of competitions. And, when the goal of the competition is to make the world a better place by solving a tough social problem, they tend to attract world-class talent as well as considerable press. What’s great is when the people who are attracted to address these challenges have a lot of local knowledge, because without that local knowledge and context, the designs are often fatally flawed.

Two such competitions caught my eye this month:

* Local Motors Goes International: Still Time to Vote on Five Great Vehicle Designs

Shell is sponsoring this competition with Local Motors for the design of appropriate vehicles for five different cities in the world. Each vehicle is supposed to be able to be built from locally sourced materials, be environmentally friendly, and to address a social issue that is specific to the city. It’s really fascinating to look through the entries and to read about both the problems being addressed and the local materials being promoted. It’s also great that in each case, the competitors include designers from the local regions who are familiar with the local traffic and road conditions as well as with the local materials.

Among my favorite designs are:

How NOT to Provide Documentation

Most of the world has become Apple fans, even those who don't use Apple products. I thought about that last night, as I unpacked and provisioned my new Blackberry sent overnight from Verizon Wireless when my old phone died. (No, I can't get decent AT&T service, so I can't use an iPhone, the Android isn't available in a dual-mode GSM version from Verizon, and I am a Crackberry addict). As I pulled all the doodads out of the Blackberry box, and dived into the manual in order to just learn how to put the battery in, get the device activated, and begin to figure out how to use it, I find myself muttering, "this sure isn't from Apple." Apple would have provided a simpler box of goodies and a one-page set of pictures and instructions that would show me the 4 steps I needed to take. Verizon and Blackberry expect me to wade thru the manual and figure out what's in the box. The good news is that I am very happy with my new Blackberry Bold.

The bad news is that very few companies have figured out how to provide "get started" instructions or assembly instructions for the things we need in our lives. Apple does a good, but not perfect job. Their "getting started" documentation is great. But I have still been confused by what they take for granted when I try to use their devices.

The current trend in documentation is to provide picture-rich instructions that are universally understandable no matter what language you speak. This is great in theory. Graphics are attractive and accessible. They save a lot of money and time by preventing needless (and often bad) translations. But as you'll note from reading Ronni Marshak's article, there's a problem with illustration-only instructions. Many of us are verbal, not graphical people. A set of complicated illustrations can be very confusing. Case in point, my husband and I spent 5 hours last Saturday assembling very well made and affordable bunk beds. But the other Amazon reviewers claim to have spent only 2 hours! We had to redo a number of things because there were no words or symbols explaining what you needed to pay particular attention to in doing the assembly. So we had to retrace our steps a couple of times. My brother loves video instructions. But he, too, complained bitterly when he and a buddy were trying to assemble his Endless Pool (indoor swimming lane) and the assembly instructions were in the form of a video. Imagine that you're doing a plumbing job and you need to climb out of the enclosure and go rewatch that section of the video. (I guess that's what iPads are for, but I don't think you'd want to risk the potential damage by using it during your home fix-it project.) How do YOU like your instructions?? And how do you test them before you ship products to customers?

See Ronni's perspective:

Use Your Words
Although Pictorial Instructions Avoid Localization Issues, Some of Us Don't Respond Well to Diagrams
By Ronni T. Marshak, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, August 19, 2010

Google App Inventor: Right Idea; Missing “Do What I Do” Feature

I was excited to hear about the advent of Google App Inventor for Android—an environment that makes it easy for non-programmers to create apps for their mobile phones. I'm still waiting to get my hands on it since it's being rolled out for educators and students only.

Since the mid-1970s I've been a fan of application development tools that end-users can use to roll their own applications. I have long contended that if you really want your application environment to take off, you need to empower end-users to invent and create their own applications. I learned this from watching the evolution of early word processing systems in the mid-70s. CPT was one of the first companies to make it easy for users to automate processes by storing a complicated series of keystrokes, recording these as macros, and then letting the user abstract that recorded code into reusable chunks of logic with if/then logic.

Wang Labs and Digital Equipment also implemented similar capabilities in their word processing systems. Power users—the smart people (mostly women) who produced most of the documents for their companies at that time—quickly developed lots of time-saving and ingenious programs that both automated and transformed their work.

Google App Inventor uses a different approach—a set of graphical building blocks, based on the evolution of the work of Seymour Papert's Logo language at MIT. [Another evolution of Papert's work led to the LEGO Mindstorms' NXT User Interface by National Instruments for a child-friendly and scientist-friendly version of LabView—a sophisticated parallel programming environment designed for sensing and controlling inputs and outputs—which I describe in this chapter of Outside Innovation.]

Here's the KittyPurr video demo of App Inventor for Android:

I am bullish about the Android App Inventor—not because I think that it will generate tens of thousands of killer apps that will give the iPhone app ecosystem a run for their money, but because I like the end-user empowerment that it unleashes. What I wish is that someone would also create a "do what I do" keystroke capture/macro creator for Android (and iPhone) apps that you could then edit and refine using either this building block approach and/or a simple scripting language, as with the word processors of yore.

Here's a video from Google's visiting professors who apparently contributed to the genesis of App Inventor for Android with a bit more background on their thinking.

When Customers Take You to Unexpected Places

This week I attended a series of panel discussions at Harvard University at the Education in Africa conference and the Kennedy School Bridge Builders program. There were two great stories that really struck a chord with me.

Girl Entrepreneurs

Viola Vaughn is the executive director of 10,000 Girls, a program she founded in Kaolock, Senegal in West Africa. Here’s the story she told about how that program started. Viola is a black American who grew up in Arkansas. She has a doctorate in education from Columbia and spent her career in education in the US and Africa. In 2001, Viola and her husband, Jazz musician Sam Sanders, emigrated to Senegal with their extended family. She said, “I was just planning to sit back and watch my banana trees grow.” But a little neighbor girl kept showing up at her house and asking Viola to teach her. Viola told her she was retired and didn’t do that anymore. Besides, she said, “I don’t teach, I educate.”

But the girl was persistent. She had heard that Viola’s granddaughter was being home-schooled. She wanted home schooling too. Finally, Viola went to visit the girl’s mom to find out why she wasn’t in school. The mother explained that her daughter was “too dumb to go to school.” Viola’s response was “well, she was smart enough to find me!” She relented and invited the girl to come over for lessons. When she arrived, she brought a bunch of other little girls—all of whom had dropped out of the local schools. (In Senegal, Viola explained, if you fail twice, you’re excluded from the public education system.)

Soon, the home-schooling program was outgrowing Viola’s home and she needed to hire more staff. She told the girls they would need to raise money if they wanted to continue their education. They responded by saying, “in America, girls sell cookies to earn money. Do you know how to bake cookies?” The next thing she knew, the girls had set up a bakery operation and were producing and selling enough cookies to hire a few teachers. Later in the story, she said the bakery led to a tea plantation. The girls found got someone to donate the land, and began planting and growing tea. When they applied for Fair Trade certification, they were originally denied because the Tea Plantation used “child labor” – the girls were working on the plantation after school. Viola explained to the officials that the girls weren’t the labor; they were the owners of the plantation. The money from the plantation went into their bank accounts. In fact, they hired young men to do much of the work. So they got their fair trade certificate.

Football; Not Roads

Jacqueline Akello, the program director at Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT), talked about the surprises that occur when you follow customers’ lead. Her URDT team went to a village that had invited them to help the community do some development work. As they arrived on site and got a tour of the village, it became obvious to the URDT staff that the thing the villagers really needed the most was an improved road that would let them get produce to market and to gain access to local healthcare. They had mobilized other villagers who wanted to improve their roads, so they were expecting that that would be the project the people in the village wanted. But when everyone started talking about their visions, the idea that popped to the top of everyone’s list was to be able to play football (what Americans call soccer). Their community hadn’t been able to field a team. They didn’t have a place to play. They weren’t participating in the district league. So, the villagers decided they would do what it took to get a football team off the ground. Soon, they had not only cleared a field, organized a team, and gotten uniforms, but they began to win some games.

Jackie reported that, within a season, many of the people in the village were socializing in ways that they hadn’t been before. The football club had created a missing social network. Soon, they began to think about improving the road so that visiting teams would have an easier time getting to their field to play. Sure enough, within a year, they mobilized community members to improve the road leading to the village and to the football field.

But they didn’t stop there, Jacqui reported, within two years, the same group of villagers had worked together to build a school which now houses 1200 students! The moral of the story? Let customers lead. They’ll take you on a surprising and interesting journey!

Use Smart Customization to Recession-Proof Your Business?

 

Ever since I attended the MIT Smart Customization Seminar in November, I've been aware that a switch has flipped inside my gut. For me, this is a sign that there's an important shift in the technology-enabled business strategy landscape that my clients need to act on! It also reminds me of the visionary clients I have who are already way ahead of me in adopting (and probably shaping) the transformation that's upon us. People like Phil Gibson at National Semiconductor, Pat Kerpan at Cohesive FT, and Jonathan Clark at Elsevier are among our clients who have been pioneering in smart customization for years (although they may not have called it that).

My "gut feels" usually occur just before the knee of the adoption curve. Sometimes it's several years before, but, recently I notice that the lag time is decreasing... My instincts are slowing down with the rest of me as I age.  These days (as I near 60!) my inner alarm only blares a few months ahead of the tipping point. So there's even more urgency to pay attention!

Smart Customization is BIG! I now believe that if you don't switch your business operations and processes to embrace this paradigm, you're going to left in the proverbial dust. Smart Customization is when you empower customers and partners to custom-design their own goods, services, experiences, and approaches and you deliver these customized products quickly (within minutes or days) and cost-effectively (at only a small premium above mass-produced or standard products). You can apply smart customization to information, apparel, food, manufacturing—virtually any industry or practice.

Smart Customization is a sustainable approach to practicing customer-led innovation. It's a form of iterative customer co-design that causes you to profoundly rethink your business architecture. To be successful, you need to decompose your offerings into modules. The boundaries (or APIs) of these modules are defined based on the characteristics or attributes that matter most to customers in specific contexts.

Smart Customization is a really shrewd strategy to jumpstart or revive during a recession. You can start small. You can leverage the many platforms and ecosystems that already exist. You make money by streamlining operations, eliminating inventory, and reducing time-to-cash dramatically. You boost and differentiate your brand by injecting excitement and emotion into it. Customers become invested in the experience of customizing and personalizing. They come back to do it again. They tell others.

If you miss the smart customization bus, there may not be another one.

This week, I offer a "Best Practices Report"—Smart Customization Comes of Age—based on the case studies presented at the MIT Smart Customization Seminar. It's a great place to begin your journey.

Tikatok: Kids Create and Publish Books

Smart Customization and Customer Co-Creation in Action

“I was sitting in a bookstore in the children’s book section with my kids, and I realized that all kids’ books are written and illustrated by adults,” said Sharon Kan.

Sharon is the CEO and co-founder of Lexington, MA-based Tikatok. She described her company at the MIT Smart Customization Seminar on November 10, 2008.

Sharon described Tikatok as “the first online creativity platform for kids.” Tikatok helps kids write, illustrate, publish, and print their own books.

Tikatok is a great example of smart customization in action. Each child’s book is custom-created and printed on demand. The mass-customization platform and ecosystem are designed to enable children to produce high-quality picture books that they and others can buy. The books sell for about $15 to $20 (depending on the number of pages) for soft cover or hard cover. Tikatok can produce these individual or short run books at a 40 percent margin. The published kids’ books are available for viewing and for sale on the Tikatok.com site.

Tagging the Physical World

When I was a young French teacher, I used to put big signs on all the objects in our classroom (which was actually an old farmhouse) with their French names—la table, le cahier, la chaise, le mur, la peinture, le chat (the cat didn’t like it very much!). I was reminded of this practice when I stumbled upon a similar real-world tagging phenomenon that is cropping up in odd places around the world. It’s a form of mobile tagging, using Semapedia and QR Codes. Semapedia is a research site that lets people create two-dimensional bar codes for physical objects, paste a label with the code on the objects, and link those objects to a Wikipedia article. QR codes (which stands for Quick Response) are the specific 2D bar codes that people seem to have gravitated towards. A QR Code is a matrix code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. While the patent is held by Denso-Wave, the company encourages broad usage. QR codes were originally used in Japan for tracking automobile parts. But they soon began to be used by advertisers who placed them on posters and products in order to provide a quick link to a specific promotion via customers’ mobile phones.

Citizen-Tagging for Fun and Edification

Now, all over the world, people are pasting labels with 2-dimensional bar codes on them onto buildings and objects of all kinds. The purpose of these tags is to provide a link to a relevant Wikipedia article. It’s a citizen-led, guerrilla approach to linking objects in the physical world to useful context and information in the virtual world.

These tags are turning up on stores, museums, paintings, ATM machines, bridges, street corners, parks, records, books, and other types of merchandise. (I found a tag on a carton of San Pelligrino bottled water and another tag on a shelf with Perrier.) If you have a mobile phone with the right software installed, you can point your phone’s camera at the bar code, and the code will be converted into a mobile-URL link to the Wikipedia article about that object. If you take a photograph of the object and upload it to Flickr and add your geographic coordinates, it will also appear on a map which is maintained at Semapedia.org.

What Low-Cost Customer Experience Improvements Should You Be Making RIGHT NOW?

A slowing economy is an ideal time to be focusing on making it easy for your customers and prospects to do business with you and on making it easy for your customers to reach their goals. Yet most organizations are so busy trying to cut costs and to convince cash-strapped customers to buy that they neglect investing in the most customer-critical things. Some of the things your customers need to make their lives easier may be low-hanging fruit that has been ignored.

I remember talking to a client in the customer support group at Cisco during the last big tech downturn. She was happy to report that as times got tough, the company had stopped throwing more people into customer support, and turned its attention, instead, to empowering customers and customer-service agents with better information and better tools—the things that she had been advocating. Cisco also changed the compensation structure for customer service agents at the time, to reward them for solving tough problems and turning those solutions into self-service wizards, rather than rewarding customer service personnel on the number of cases they resolved per day. Downturns bring opportunities. Make sure you’re taking advantage of yours!

So here’s my top 5 list of customer experience tactics you should be doing right now. The first three are Web-related because, for most of us, the Web is our customers’ first port of call:

1. Improve the Findability and Quality of Information on Your Web Site(s). This is a continuous improvement project. It starts with analytics. What search terms are people using? What navigation paths are they taking? What results are they getting? How accurate and up-to-date are those results?

Are customers seeing what they need to see in order to buy something and/or to solve a problem? If you don’t have a fancy tool to analyze what people are doing on your Web site, use the free tools from Google Analytics.

National Instruments Takes the Next Step in Capturing Hearts and Minds of Budding Scientists and Engineers

Those of you who have read Outside Innovation will recall the story about the partnership between LEGO and National Instruments (brokered by Dr. Chris Rogers who promotes engineering in elementary/primary school curricula, catalyzed by a kids’ robotics competition in Austin, Texas, and cemented during a rain-soaked soccer game). As a result, Dr. Truchard, (“Dr. T”), National Instruments’ founder and chairman, authorized an innovative partnership to embed NI’s $2,000 LabVIEW software platform into the software that would be sold as part of a $200 Mindstorms NXT kit to kids and teachers.

Photo by: usfirst.org

On April 17th, National Instruments took a further leap in extending its market to the younger set. They announced a partnership with FIRST to provide the robotics controllers (hardware and firmware) to be used in the robotics kits for the FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC)—the robotics league for High School kids. This is a multimillion dollar in-kind donation.

So now National Instruments is providing hardware as well as software, and it is extending its reach from 8-year-old engineers through to high school age kids.

The benefit to the kids is that this new platform will be less expensive, reducing the cost of the kits from approximately $15,000 down to closer to $2,000. (Each team has to raise the money to purchase the robotics’ kit they’ll need each year.)