This was the comment from a senior R&D member from a German FMCG company that we delivered a 2-day workshop to last week.
This feedback was, of course, nice to hear. It makes you feel you have done something right, when all the thought and hard work is rewarded with a comment like that.
Even though that was great to hear, the more compelling and satisfying story came from the actions of the delegates in the workshop.
The workshop was focussed on taking and understanding opportunity spaces and taking those into either opportunity or technology scouting tasks within an open innovation framework.
We had to start the workshop by taking the delegates through trends and scenarios, showing them where opportunity spaces come from, so what they are doing has some context in their job roles.
At the moment, all the trends and scenarios come from the senior management team, saying, effectively "work on this".
Now, believe me, there has been nothing wrong with this approach for them, as they are a very successful company, but as markets contract and more competitors come into the space, you do need more than the thoughts of wise people at the top of the company.
Some of the people in this workshop realised this, and rather than complaining they did something about it. They went to this senior team and said "we need to change the way we do this, and this process we have been taught, may be the way forward"
What is happening now is this huge, global FMCG player, with a mega brand that you all know is currently looking to redesign their trend identification process, based on our teachings.
How satisfying is that..?
Friday, 29 March 2013
The Boeing Company | Stories | Innovation Video Series
The Boeing Company | Stories | Innovation Video Series
One of several articles I am going to put up over the coming days. I saw this through my Twitter feed and thought I would share it my audience. The video on the 787 Dreamliner is one of the best (they don't mention the batteries though), but the others will have something for everyone.
Enjoy...
One of several articles I am going to put up over the coming days. I saw this through my Twitter feed and thought I would share it my audience. The video on the 787 Dreamliner is one of the best (they don't mention the batteries though), but the others will have something for everyone.
Enjoy...
Monday, 25 March 2013
Innovation Starts In Your Employees
People think that they are good at sharing information, but in practice they’re not.
Good communication is key in the transfer of ideas and project development and culture change would be impossible without good communication. Extracting tactical knowledge will be very difficult without understanding the different learning styles in their co-workers.
What is a Community of Purpose?
A Community of Purpose (COP) is made up by a group of people that share a common interest which they are actively practising. It can evolve naturally or can be created specifically for a purpose. The aim of a COP is to gain knowledge and expertise related to a specific field. There is no right or wrong in terms of what it is, there is no one size fits all.
A Community of Purpose provides a forum to prioritise and focus on what is relevant and actionable. It is about relationship building and networking. In a COP, group members will go through a process of sharing knowledge and experiences with each other to learn and develop themselves professionally and personally.
It will help to break down communication barriers.
One of the best practices seen across organisations is a formalised approach to build a Community of Purpose (or a Centre of Excellence) to develop Innovation Capability or Capacity across your organisation.
A well defined Community of Purpose (COP) acts as internal ambassadors or change agents representing different parts in the business to maximise and focus impact in your organisation.
Building a COP
A COP will have representation from Corporate Functions as well as from each Business Unit or Category.
Cascading Knowledge Throughout the Organisation
Some customers use their engagement with Pure Insight to build basic capability (or capacity) within their wider Innovation Community across Business Units or Categories. However, it will not be sufficient to understand the external perspective and learnings from other companies on a particular subject matter on its own.
The key will be how to take this external insight and learnings and configure, adopt and embed them in such a way so tangible value is delivered within your business.
As a best practice you might want to consider forming different work groups (a subset of your COP) focusing on a key challenge area that specifically focuses on taking the output of bespoke training and turning that into specific tools and processes that are trialled in the businesses. The process of trialling such methods works best by using them on live projects and initiatives.
Pick members of staff that are volunteering or who are passionate to drive and affect the change of innovation within your business. Ensure their direct line managers are informed of the scope and purpose of the COP and allow them to allocate some of their time to creating and developing the Community.
During the day, participants cover:
Good communication is key in the transfer of ideas and project development and culture change would be impossible without good communication. Extracting tactical knowledge will be very difficult without understanding the different learning styles in their co-workers.
What is a Community of Purpose?
A Community of Purpose (COP) is made up by a group of people that share a common interest which they are actively practising. It can evolve naturally or can be created specifically for a purpose. The aim of a COP is to gain knowledge and expertise related to a specific field. There is no right or wrong in terms of what it is, there is no one size fits all.
A Community of Purpose provides a forum to prioritise and focus on what is relevant and actionable. It is about relationship building and networking. In a COP, group members will go through a process of sharing knowledge and experiences with each other to learn and develop themselves professionally and personally.
It will help to break down communication barriers.
One of the best practices seen across organisations is a formalised approach to build a Community of Purpose (or a Centre of Excellence) to develop Innovation Capability or Capacity across your organisation.
A well defined Community of Purpose (COP) acts as internal ambassadors or change agents representing different parts in the business to maximise and focus impact in your organisation.
Building a COP
A COP will have representation from Corporate Functions as well as from each Business Unit or Category.
 |
| Example of a Community of Practice |
Cascading Knowledge Throughout the Organisation
Some customers use their engagement with Pure Insight to build basic capability (or capacity) within their wider Innovation Community across Business Units or Categories. However, it will not be sufficient to understand the external perspective and learnings from other companies on a particular subject matter on its own.
The key will be how to take this external insight and learnings and configure, adopt and embed them in such a way so tangible value is delivered within your business.
As a best practice you might want to consider forming different work groups (a subset of your COP) focusing on a key challenge area that specifically focuses on taking the output of bespoke training and turning that into specific tools and processes that are trialled in the businesses. The process of trialling such methods works best by using them on live projects and initiatives.
Pick members of staff that are volunteering or who are passionate to drive and affect the change of innovation within your business. Ensure their direct line managers are informed of the scope and purpose of the COP and allow them to allocate some of their time to creating and developing the Community.
During the day, participants cover:
- Understand what a Community of Practice is, and the impact it has in their company.
- Learning from Failure.
- Learning Styles - how to use them to improve their learning.
- Colour Thinking Model - using influential language under pressure.
- How people have different levels of impact in the organisation.
- How to lead change in an organisation.
- Case Studies of Communities of Practice.
Friday, 22 March 2013
Thoughts from FEI Europe
Earlier this month I spent a few days at FEI Europe in Copenhagen. For those who don't know FEI Europe is the annual gathering of practitioners interested in Front-End Innovation, normally held in and around February and always in a different European city. It is organised by the guys from IRR in the USA, who are the people responsible for the much bigger FEI USA.
This European event attracted 220+ delegates from all over Europe and the Middle East, and there were 8 main sponsors, of which Pure Insight was one. I don't have any data to back this up, but I am pretty certain there were more people at the corresponding event, which took place in Zurich in 2012, and I KNOW there were more sponsors last year than this.
Why were we there?
First of all, we were sponsoring the event, and secondly I had a speaking slot at the pre-conference workshops on Monday morning.
I'm sure at some point in time in my working life I will find the right time for a speech at one of these things, but at the moment I am not convinced that Monday morning and before lunch is the best time for one of these things, as you are always battling against people's stomachs!
The actual talk was about Front-End Innovation (surprise, surprise), but it focussed on some work we had been doing with Nedbank in South Africa. They want to develop a new product area for start-up businesses in their market, but the elements that make up this sort of product are offered by every other bank in the region and therefore they are all competing in a red ocean.
We worked with them to help them identify value curves for their products and also who the most important customer is in their value chain. We also taught them how to contextually interview their most important customer, as well as carrying out and analysing six paired interviews for them.
The output from this work was a to be value curve that identified a number of new opportunity spaces they had not previously identified. They are currently working these up in value propositions they will launch to the market later this year - lets's see what happens from there.
I can't share with you the slides from this case study, but I can share the slides from the rest of my presentation. Click HERE if you want to view them.
What else was there to see at FEI Europe?
There was a good presentation from Vince Veron, who is Head of Design at Coca Cola and was formerly one of Jonny Ive's team at Apple. He talked about integration = innovation, and how the design team worked with finance, packaging etc to create designs that excite and delight the consumer. The output is the new Coke Freestyle Vending machine, which you can find on youtube if you search. It was an interesting and engaging presentation, and certainly better than the BMW chap from 2012, who just bought a concept car into the presentation and everyone went "wow". I am sure, though, that if someone from finance had made the same presentation, they would have said they had worked with design and packaging and got the same result. The key insight from the whole presentation is that you cannot innovate in isolation and it is much easier to do it together than apart!
Also at FEI was an interesting presentation from Nicola Millard at BT, who talked about their innovation spaces and how they are using internal crowdsourcing to find better ways of doing things - they encourage their engineers to upload videos of them working on problems to an internal youtube site so other people in the field can see how to solve the same problem, without the need for another manual or training. I have seen the AA do the same thing, a sort of professional internal network sharing system.
There was also some interesting stuff from the former CEO of 3M, who talked about their innovation story so far and how "Six sigma nearly killed their innovation process", well surprise, surprise!!!
Overall FEI is one of those conferences you need to be at if you work in innovation. I think it is declining and it has always been the poor relation of it's sister event in the USA. It would be great if not all the stories were not "good news stories"and if a practitioner stood up and said "we messed up big time and this is what we learnt from it", but I guess that never really happens at these sorts of events.
This European event attracted 220+ delegates from all over Europe and the Middle East, and there were 8 main sponsors, of which Pure Insight was one. I don't have any data to back this up, but I am pretty certain there were more people at the corresponding event, which took place in Zurich in 2012, and I KNOW there were more sponsors last year than this.
Why were we there?
First of all, we were sponsoring the event, and secondly I had a speaking slot at the pre-conference workshops on Monday morning.
I'm sure at some point in time in my working life I will find the right time for a speech at one of these things, but at the moment I am not convinced that Monday morning and before lunch is the best time for one of these things, as you are always battling against people's stomachs!
The actual talk was about Front-End Innovation (surprise, surprise), but it focussed on some work we had been doing with Nedbank in South Africa. They want to develop a new product area for start-up businesses in their market, but the elements that make up this sort of product are offered by every other bank in the region and therefore they are all competing in a red ocean.
We worked with them to help them identify value curves for their products and also who the most important customer is in their value chain. We also taught them how to contextually interview their most important customer, as well as carrying out and analysing six paired interviews for them.
The output from this work was a to be value curve that identified a number of new opportunity spaces they had not previously identified. They are currently working these up in value propositions they will launch to the market later this year - lets's see what happens from there.
I can't share with you the slides from this case study, but I can share the slides from the rest of my presentation. Click HERE if you want to view them.
What else was there to see at FEI Europe?
There was a good presentation from Vince Veron, who is Head of Design at Coca Cola and was formerly one of Jonny Ive's team at Apple. He talked about integration = innovation, and how the design team worked with finance, packaging etc to create designs that excite and delight the consumer. The output is the new Coke Freestyle Vending machine, which you can find on youtube if you search. It was an interesting and engaging presentation, and certainly better than the BMW chap from 2012, who just bought a concept car into the presentation and everyone went "wow". I am sure, though, that if someone from finance had made the same presentation, they would have said they had worked with design and packaging and got the same result. The key insight from the whole presentation is that you cannot innovate in isolation and it is much easier to do it together than apart!
Also at FEI was an interesting presentation from Nicola Millard at BT, who talked about their innovation spaces and how they are using internal crowdsourcing to find better ways of doing things - they encourage their engineers to upload videos of them working on problems to an internal youtube site so other people in the field can see how to solve the same problem, without the need for another manual or training. I have seen the AA do the same thing, a sort of professional internal network sharing system.
There was also some interesting stuff from the former CEO of 3M, who talked about their innovation story so far and how "Six sigma nearly killed their innovation process", well surprise, surprise!!!
Overall FEI is one of those conferences you need to be at if you work in innovation. I think it is declining and it has always been the poor relation of it's sister event in the USA. It would be great if not all the stories were not "good news stories"and if a practitioner stood up and said "we messed up big time and this is what we learnt from it", but I guess that never really happens at these sorts of events.
Delivering Exceptional Value to Your Most Important Customer
The other week I delivered a high-tempo Value Innovation workshop to forty R&D Associates from an international retailer in the heart of London.
An introduction to Value Innovation based on the origins of Blue Ocean strategy was presented to set the scene and to illustrate where the methodology evolved from. To get the delegates minds in gear, I kick-started the workshop with a group activity based around a product that was outside of their sector: without knowing any customer insights or an idea of who the Most Important Customer (MIC) is, the challenge was to think of all the elements of the catheter replacement kit that should be changed to enhance the value delivered to the MIC.
The groups came up with a number of ways to improve the product offering. After a short period of time, I asked three of them to present their ideas. Interestingly; the groups had very similar ideas of how to improve the offering. I then proceeded to give more background to the Value Innovation process and illustrated how the ten key steps of the methodology linked with the organisation’s current gated process of New Product Development.
To illustrate one of the key tools within Value Innovation, Value Curves, I presented the story of Novamin. Novamin, originally used in bone regeneration technology, is now used in GlaxoSmithKline’s successful Sensodyne Repair and Protect toothpaste product. The case study presented the journey of how Novamin used Value Curves to illustrate that their technology is worth investing in in order to move toothpaste from a Red to a Blue Ocean (an arena of uncontested market space). The Value Curves instantly visualise the proposed increase in value delivered to the GlaxoSmithKline and the delegates were able to see how this tool can be utilised for their in-house projects.
The day then moved into a company-specific project, which focused on Value Curves and Value Chains and was delivered by a senior practitioner, sourced from our unique Open Intelligence Network. By focusing on a particular food based Supply Chain, the delegates ran through an activity that involved them identifying the MIC in the Value Chain using Value Innovation tools. The senior scientist then presented the Value Curve that was formed as a result of identifying the MIC in the Value Chain, which clearly illustrated where the Blue Ocean opportunity sat within that particular Supply Chain.
The final session centred on the catheter replacement kit (Aplicare), which the delegates had explored at the beginning of the workshop. I gave a detailed presentation on the story of Aplicare, including identifying their MIC, Value Curves and the Contextual Interviews. The Contextual Interview section presented the most important step in the Value Innovation process and highlighted the significance of selecting an appropriate lead interviewer (an extrovert with a passion to delve deeper into the MIC’s wants, needs and problem spaces).
This interactive workshop was very energetic and very engaging, with all delegates deeply involved in the workshop to gain the most out of the content and the activities.
An introduction to Value Innovation based on the origins of Blue Ocean strategy was presented to set the scene and to illustrate where the methodology evolved from. To get the delegates minds in gear, I kick-started the workshop with a group activity based around a product that was outside of their sector: without knowing any customer insights or an idea of who the Most Important Customer (MIC) is, the challenge was to think of all the elements of the catheter replacement kit that should be changed to enhance the value delivered to the MIC.
The groups came up with a number of ways to improve the product offering. After a short period of time, I asked three of them to present their ideas. Interestingly; the groups had very similar ideas of how to improve the offering. I then proceeded to give more background to the Value Innovation process and illustrated how the ten key steps of the methodology linked with the organisation’s current gated process of New Product Development.
To illustrate one of the key tools within Value Innovation, Value Curves, I presented the story of Novamin. Novamin, originally used in bone regeneration technology, is now used in GlaxoSmithKline’s successful Sensodyne Repair and Protect toothpaste product. The case study presented the journey of how Novamin used Value Curves to illustrate that their technology is worth investing in in order to move toothpaste from a Red to a Blue Ocean (an arena of uncontested market space). The Value Curves instantly visualise the proposed increase in value delivered to the GlaxoSmithKline and the delegates were able to see how this tool can be utilised for their in-house projects.
The day then moved into a company-specific project, which focused on Value Curves and Value Chains and was delivered by a senior practitioner, sourced from our unique Open Intelligence Network. By focusing on a particular food based Supply Chain, the delegates ran through an activity that involved them identifying the MIC in the Value Chain using Value Innovation tools. The senior scientist then presented the Value Curve that was formed as a result of identifying the MIC in the Value Chain, which clearly illustrated where the Blue Ocean opportunity sat within that particular Supply Chain.
The final session centred on the catheter replacement kit (Aplicare), which the delegates had explored at the beginning of the workshop. I gave a detailed presentation on the story of Aplicare, including identifying their MIC, Value Curves and the Contextual Interviews. The Contextual Interview section presented the most important step in the Value Innovation process and highlighted the significance of selecting an appropriate lead interviewer (an extrovert with a passion to delve deeper into the MIC’s wants, needs and problem spaces).
The outcome of the Contextual Interviews is an analytical process of highlighting all the relevant interview comments and linking them to the identified Elements of Performance when creating the Value Curves. From the presented story, delegates were able to prototype the new product offering that saw the product drive into a Blue Ocean opportunity space. All delegates fully engaged in this activity and each did a two minute presentation of their prototypes in front of the group – the winning prototype accolade was awarded to the group that incorporated the most changes needed to the product offering to ensure that it was now operating in a Blue Ocean (this was a hard decision, as all groups did an excellent job).
This interactive workshop was very energetic and very engaging, with all delegates deeply involved in the workshop to gain the most out of the content and the activities.
Thursday, 21 March 2013
The importance of Trends in a structured Front-End process
Research in the innovation field has shown that organisations running Front End Innovation (FEI) programmes should strive to have a structured and systematic approach to ensure the ideas that are generated are relevant to the business and provide value to a targeted customer segment. Based on best practice research from a wide range of industry sector practitioners, Pure Insight has designed a FEI Competency Development Programme (CDP) to facilitate organisations to reach this goal. The first phase of our Front End Innovation process is based on trends, which runs through a four step methodology (Trend Process) that has a combination of both divergent and convergent activities based on discovered trends.
The first step of the Trend Process is based on trends that have been discovered using key resources, such as Trend Watching and PSFK. Taking these discoveries, teams categorise the trends into Mega Trends (a large social, economic, political, environmental or technical change that is slow to form, but will fundamentally effect everything else) and Trends (an observable change that is moving in a specific direction). From our knowledge of trends and the outputs from a number of trend workshops that we have ran for large international organisations, the following categorisation illustrates a snapshot of key trends and mega trends that are impacting on the current business landscape:
- Mega Trends
- Global Warming
- Sub Cultures
- Access to Information
- Rising Aspirations
- Trends
- Lease Everything
- Newism
- Asset Sharing Schemes
- Second Hand Markets
Our FEI CDP has been created to enable organisations to implement new FEI tools and techniques, such as the Trend Process with conviction based on a structured and managed approach
Wednesday, 20 March 2013
A trend becoming reality
One of the areas I talk about when working with companies on Front-End Innovation are trends.
Trends are change agents in your business and they can take place quickly or slowly, but they will change your business. For example, I talk to companies about a trend called urbanisation, which is the growth of mega-cities and people starting to live in large, dense communities across the world.
One of the outcomes from this trend is the lack of space that people will have in their homes under this trend. They might not have a parking space, integrated public transport means they won't need a car or bicycle unless they leave the boundaries of the city, and the lack of space in their homes means they may not be able to store things they only use once or twice a year.
We can already see people and companies reacting to this trend with the growth of cars you can rent for an hour in major cities across the world and the incredible popularity of the Barclays rent-a-bike system in London.
I came across this article on the BBC website the other day. An entrepreneur is opening a cafe in London, where apart from the normal skinny latte, cappuccinos and muffins, you can also rent a cat to pet for an hour or so.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-20958687
It may, initially, seem bizarre and odd, but it is in fact, in part, a reaction to this trend. People living in London (and other cities) either do not have the space to keep a pet, or they are not allowed to keep a pet under the terms of their leasing agreement, and so this is a move to rent one and return it when you are finished, satisfying your need, just in the same way that Barclays bikes do.
Of course, cats being cats, may not be entirely compliant in this arrangement, but it will be very interesting to see how this new business develops over time.
At Pure Insight we have a dental surgery in the floor below us, and I am now wondering if there is a business opportunity for us (and cats) to soothe patients nerves as they wait for their appointment.
I wonder...
Trends are change agents in your business and they can take place quickly or slowly, but they will change your business. For example, I talk to companies about a trend called urbanisation, which is the growth of mega-cities and people starting to live in large, dense communities across the world.
One of the outcomes from this trend is the lack of space that people will have in their homes under this trend. They might not have a parking space, integrated public transport means they won't need a car or bicycle unless they leave the boundaries of the city, and the lack of space in their homes means they may not be able to store things they only use once or twice a year.
We can already see people and companies reacting to this trend with the growth of cars you can rent for an hour in major cities across the world and the incredible popularity of the Barclays rent-a-bike system in London.
I came across this article on the BBC website the other day. An entrepreneur is opening a cafe in London, where apart from the normal skinny latte, cappuccinos and muffins, you can also rent a cat to pet for an hour or so.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-20958687
It may, initially, seem bizarre and odd, but it is in fact, in part, a reaction to this trend. People living in London (and other cities) either do not have the space to keep a pet, or they are not allowed to keep a pet under the terms of their leasing agreement, and so this is a move to rent one and return it when you are finished, satisfying your need, just in the same way that Barclays bikes do.
Of course, cats being cats, may not be entirely compliant in this arrangement, but it will be very interesting to see how this new business develops over time.
At Pure Insight we have a dental surgery in the floor below us, and I am now wondering if there is a business opportunity for us (and cats) to soothe patients nerves as they wait for their appointment.
I wonder...
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