What can innovation seeking enterprises DO with LEGO set manuals?

LEGO pieces can be converted into far more variety of structures in addition to what is given in its manual. The outcome is usually unusual, and ranges from having no significant beauty to having an extraordinary beauty which has not been created before; and an originality which could carry a class and a value of its own.

Seems quite obvious. Let’s examine it a little closer and see what goes on to make this obvious - the obvious.

1) The child or a parent needs to think that maybe she should try to build something without referring the manual. (Innovative organizations always have involved leadership who understands the unstructured nature of creativity and facilitate this direction.)

2) The child might behave clueless at first, but show him once even the three piece structure done without the manual and see how she takes it further from there. (Besides providing vision, leaders know the importance of enablement.)

3) You won’t fail to notice the pride in her voice when she finally shows it to you. (It is of utmost importance to encourage and reward the effort, in however small or insignificant ways.)

4) You have kept the manual and she does refer it for the fundamentals like - what fits where, once in a while. (Building innovation culture efforts does not need to change the ways you run your company, however it might need a tweak here and a tweak there.)

Hiding them occasionally is what innovation seeking enterprises can DO with the LEGO set manuals.

ideaken team can help your enterprise in planning & implementing points 2,3 and 4 mentioned above and benefit from the power of co-creation and open innovation.

Concept overview – collaborative innovation

This concept overview in approximately one minute, tries to convey the When, Why and How of collaborative innovation.

We are compiling the top questions  that enterprises frequently ask when embracing collaborative innovation, open innovation or co-creation. If you have a question on the same then please submit as a comment to this post or send it to us at contact@ideaken.com

We will respond individually to each question, and publish our take on some of the questions in subsequent posts here in this blog.

Negative capability

People innovate, a process or a system doesn’t.
People are your positive capability; not enabling your people is your negative capability.

Fortunately enabling your workforce is quite in your control, and can help reduce the negative capability to great extent. Ways to enable your people is only limited to your imagination.

Enable it by giving employees their own time in the area of their interest.
Have on the spot reward at the assembly line
Create an inclusive mindset; flat structure which retains the ideas
This could become a long list ...
But what matters is - your own means of enabling on the ground. To have an enablement plan in place, obvious place to start is to look out for non-enablers, the road-blocks.

a) First and foremost - have you established a channel, a way of reaching out to your talent sources? Sending an email or putting up a blog is an option but this unstructured approach may not get you very far. Pull, in other words self-service and volunteered effort works the best.

b) Have you figured out ways to motivate a potential contributor? Certificates are good, but unfortunately it does not excite the real talent. Most like recognition and nobody says no for dollars. Most importantly map the motivation to the intellectual satisfaction.

c) Have you decentralized innovation? Do you have a team that innovates or do you have a team that innovates & coordinates the innovations of all employees across your enterprise, check out this big difference.

Figuring out your own set of enablers and keeping them fresh fosters your innovation journey.

Give man an assignment to innovate for days. Or Enable your workforce to innovate anytime, anywhere - self served.

“Give man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” - Lao Tzu.

On the cloud, and counting

Today - electricity, enterprise email provider & online CRM are on your service payment list, served from the cloud.

Hiring talent is world’s oldest way of managing innovation. And way back, people figured out that talent could be also hired as-and-when needed & for-the-time it is needed

Moving on from there, a new revolution is taking place. Innovation is now open.

Following is the direction; a typical senior management has started thinking.

1) I do not need the best talent, I need the right talent.
2) I do not need the right talent forever, I need it for now and I don’t know when next.
3) I do not want to go attempt and search the right talent, I want the right one to approach me.
4) I do not want to keep paying for something with a probability of not meeting my expectations.

If you closely look at this new mindset, you will find it to be a win-win for both the sides.

a) Global pool of talent – The long tail phenomenon, the right talent you are after may not be the most visible or present is the most obvious place, or part of the best and biggest groups. Innovation intermediaries are now connecting your enterprises with the right talent across the world.
b) Customers – are obviously the best source of intelligence on how they can be served better. And when they are served better, then chances of lot many more customers feeling the same is high, directly affecting your business growth. It is becoming increasingly important to connect with your customers, not as an event, but to stay connected.
c) Research vendors – are opening up for a partnership which is not a fixed price contract for doing research, the outcome based contracts are on the rise. Also enterprises are tying up with multiple research vendors, and research vendors working for more clients simultaneously, as a result both sides increasing the chances of hitting the plum.
d) Academia – Most of the academia are happy to be associated with the enterprises on the relevant subjects. You won’t find an innovative enterprise not having few associations for tapping the talent in academia.

These are the things lined up for your next cloud.

The world never stops, the ones perceived to be the best, give way for better ones.

Tip is – go tap it.

What’s everyday among Apples?

If someone asks you to name 3 innovative companies, the companies you will name will most probably be the ones that go about doing innovations as a continuous process. Less of strategy and more as way of life, they are the ones who have escaped from the trap of planning for the innovation long ago and have got down to doing it.

You will also notice that these companies do not invent big every day, however they make sure they do it continuously. The small innovations get the due acknowledgment which paves the way for big. Innovation does not need to be always radical.

On the other hand some companies are accidental innovators, nothing wrong, except that the probability of unintentional innovation is slim.

The top management has a reason to be not happy with one-off innovations. Try this,

1) Have intention to move towards innovative culture, make it as visible as possible, part of your every communication.
2) Do previous step often
3) And when you do this often, you and others in your team will figure out the how part, yes it just happens!

The most important things are the simplest, just that they are not the most obvious. While you are figuring out the how part, do check out the following

a) Your employees and customers who are NOT part of your R&D team are also well placed to provide the ideas.
b) Find a way to reach outside your enterprise boundary, the latest trend has got all the top companies initiate collaborative innovation in some form or other.
c) Invest in collaboration software which enables innovation management

Process enablement promotes perseverance, perseverance brings sustainability … building sustainable innovation culture itself needs innovation.

Given a choice between a “Picture” and “Thousand words”, choose “Hundred words”!

Collaborative innovation, open innovation or co-creation, one of the frequently asked questions is “how do you go through the heaps of inputs you might end up getting and arrive at a meaningful solution”. In other words “how do you reduce all the noise and reach out to the music?”

Here I am listing two extreme enablers, most “obvious” and most “not so obvious”, there is lot in between, left out for some other time!

1) Most obvious is “Use technology to do part of the job”. Like Bugzilla does it for finding out the probable duplicate bugs, Wikipedia allows team to work on the same page so you don’t need to merge.

2) Most not so obvious, yet the game changer is to be to-the-point and encourage others to be to-the-point.

If you are an idea contributor, a solver, think of a risk that your “very valid” input was buried under your own stories and nobody noticed it. If you are a moderator, a seeker, think of the amount of time you would spend going through haystack to find the needle.

At the same time there is a risk in being too crisp, risk of not being understood. (Sometime the “picture” does not convey!).

So the right balance needs to be found.

• Try stretching & shrinking the articulation of your idea till the right “playback” is reached, similar to the original one in your mind.

• Group and Un-group your thoughts, doing this will remove many duplicates.

• Don’t go beyond one level from the original topic, and if you do then come back quickly.

• What works for me is - write what I want to write and then go back and make it to the point, so scribble endlessly if you need to, but then edit it like a devil.

While ago, I read this wonderful book “Don't Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. Steve says “If you have room in your head for only one usability rule, make this the one ... “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left“. I think this usability principle applies to lot many scenarios than obvious …“a Website and a Visitor”, “an Author and a Reader”, “the Leader and a Team”, “Marketer and a Customer”, “Seeker and a Solver”.

You will be amazed to find that “you can” actually make your point clear in lot less, lesser than you first thought.

When it is about collaboration ... less is more ... to-the-point is huge.