Before they decide to ‘Research’

We recently presented at a colloquium at Philips Innovation Campus. One of the topics of interest was the life cycle of a challenge. Questions which were asked inspired me to write a bit more about the management of challenges, way before someone starts logging time against them. Or in case of collaborative innovation, well before the challenge starts showing up all over the place.

In short - it’s good to know the directions, especially before getting onto a free way.

So what do the best organizations do before they start putting in their time and resources on research?

They start with a “Challenge Inventory” and few good practices around it.

1)  Does your organization have a place, people and process to log a challenge? If not, you need to start here.  It could be a simple form with set of people as owners. The mode could be via your intranet website or even email.

2)  Now the best way to make your employees know that such an inventory exists, is to ask your employees to submit a challenge, the best challenge wins a prize. You must also tell what they should do when they think of a challenge in future.

Note that   it’s all about challenges and some more challenges, here we are not taking about the solutions.

It is best not to.

A challenge could be anywhere from very complex to not so complex and could be on high end technology, to just a process hiccup.

Examples are ...

• Our competition’s turnaround time for a repair call is 3 days while ours is 7 days, and we don’t have additional budget for our services division.

• Our current adhesive on the belt takes 2 hours to dry, but the print on the package fades a bit when exposed to the heat used for drying adhesive.

• For a re-launch, we want to replace our yogurt’s artificial flavor with a natural ingredient.

Never strike off an impossible looking challenge like “Our hybrid should accelerate similar to our best sports model”

 
Also when you store them in central place, all can access and leverage the previous efforts on the similar challenges.

3)  Prioritize the challenge inventory list with a set of relevant filters at that point of time. Never fix these filters upfront. The example of the filters could be ‘Natural ingredient’ (for the new launch). When you apply such a filter, all the challenges which have natural ingredient in it will go up the list and help you attack the problem from multiple directions.

Even open up a completely new possibility.

Above steps should be aimed at identifying your top X challenges and top Y domains at this point of time.  Once you do, you are armed with the information you need for initiating collaborative innovation and make an impact.

ideaken helps organizations draw up collaborative innovation strategy, benefit from open innovation and leverage co-creation.

This workshop had a single point agenda - define the challenge for open innovation

We recently participated in a 2 day workshop organized by one of our clients. This client is a consortium of agencies funded by United Nations, working towards providing solutions for sanitation and clean water in India. Approximately 50 delegates participated from France, Netherlands and fifteen different states of India.

Here we share some of the best practices followed during the workshop in formulating a challenge for open innovation.

First the no brainer, Schedule a long listening session – Put forward a guideline that only challenges and issues faced are being discussed and not the solution. Make sure to have involvement and participation from all stake holders. The best ingredient to have a right problem is to listen up from a diverse forum with respect to age, geographies, departments, designations or social status, whichever is applicable.

Conquer challenge articulation by dividing it in logical groups – This will help you express the challenge in a way which is much easier to understand by the individual who is likely  to solve it for you. Some of the examples of logical grouping for this workshop were related to culture and mindset, raw material availability and cost. Also this could help you divide the challenge into multiple smaller challenges to be solved independent of each other.

Try not telling the truth! – Telling what you need solved is the best way to get to solutions, but see if you can abstract it from the domain of your challenge. For example if your  sole interest is in reducing the cost of sanitation by reducing the cost of toilet roof then instead of calling it a sanitation challenge call it a “how to reduce the cost of roof” challenge. This way you are keeping it open for the people from construction domain as well, who otherwise, on seeing it as sanitation challenge could end up not considering it.

Simulate the outcome - Know your evaluation criteria well and convert them into specific expectations. Further categorize your expectations as ‘must meet’ and ‘good if met’.

Allocate Reward only after formulating the challenges – Having overall budget for the solution is ok, but put the exact reward only after you have the complete challenge in front of you. The only rule which should be applied while deciding on the reward is making it proportionate to the effort and skill required and the benefit it will deliver to you once obtained. There is no right or wrong answer for this one, but needs a bit of deliberation at the minimum.

Don’t overload the challenge – Don’t add up all the expectation into the challenge such that solvers are confused by too many requirements, perceive it to be too complicated, and don’t take it up for solving. At the same time make sure it has a good enough stretch factor and highlights all your must have expectations.

Do share if there are any additional best practices that worked for you while formulating a challenge for open innovation.

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.