How to Advance Your Innovation Career

by Stefan Lindegaard

What can you do to advance your innovation career in times like this? Let me present some ideas and hopefully you can add more advice on this in the following discussion.

• Align With Executives. You need to have a better alignment between the innovation strategy and the overall corporate strategy. One way to do this is to make an extra effort of understanding what matters most for the executives right now and deliver on this.
• See What Comes Next. Once you deliver what the executives would like to see right now, you still have to be able to see what comes next and make sure that your company moves in that direction . The small wins gained by aligning with the executives hopefully make them more attentive to your suggestions on how to develop strategies on what comes next.
• Go External, Get Connected. As we move towards open innovation, you need to build better personal as well as corporate networks. Look at the external sources you need to connect with in order to develop the offerings of your company and expand your own career opportunities.
• Become A Digerati. As you work to develop more external ties, you need to gain a better understanding of social tools such as LinkedIn, Twitter and perhaps even Facebook. Facebook has a more private focus but there are industries where you need to understand how Facebook works in order to innovate better. Use these tools to gather and distribute information and knowledge and to build your personal brand if you have set a strategy for this.
• Build Your T-Shape. In short, the T-shape is about having depth as well as breadth. You need to understand how other business functions work and why they are important to the innovation process. One way to do this is to convince your executives that job rotation programs are great vehicles for building a better overall understanding of your company and its offerings.
• Get Noticed. In times like this, you need to make sure you get the proper credit for the work you do. I am not saying that you should just focus on your personal brand and disregard the work of colleagues. Find the right balance remembering that no one likes shameless self-promotion.
• Adjust Your Drive. Working with innovation you most likely have a faster drive and pace of change than that of your colleagues. You need to be careful about launching too many initiatives and pushing too hard as you need to get the support from others to get results. From time to time, you need to stop, look around and ask yourself if you have enough key stakeholders backing your projects.
• Are You A Future Executive? A majority of the innovation leaders I work with aspire to climb the corporate ladder and even become executives. In this case, you not only need to understand other business functions; you need to work in other functions such as sales in order to get the management experience needed to advance to higher positions. One reason is that innovation is carried out in smaller units not giving you the experience of working in – or leading – a larger department.
• I have only heard of a few cases in which innovation leaders advanced directly to executive positions; you need to build further on your resume and especially with sales responsibilities. Perhaps this is the time to develop new skills and competences by taking on new challenges?

Just some thoughts… I look forward to hearing your comments.

Five Ways To Get Smarter On Open Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

I believe the best way to get smarter and acquire new knowledge on innovation is through articles and blog posts rather than reading books. It is just my experience that it works better both in terms of value and time spent.

Let’s say you want to learn about open innovation. I would advice you to follow these five steps in order to understand what open innovation is and decide whether it is relevant for your situation.

1. Get TweetDeck which is a Twitter application that helps you stay in touch with what is happening right now. Use the search function and enter the keywords you want to follow – in this case open innovation and perhaps also words such as crowd-sourcing or co-creation. This will give you plenty of leads on blog posts, articles and other insights worth reading.

2. Your LinkedIn profile is an important part of your digital footprint. Besides telling others who you are, you can also join groups such as Open Innovation And Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation Discussion Group or my own group Leadership+Innovation. The quality of the discussions varies, but it is getting better. You can also use the search tool to identify people working on issues relevant to your situation.

3. Check out conferences and events on open innovation. The next one is CoDev 2010. You can attend and get insights through (hopefully) good presentations, but more importantly you can network and connect with the open innovation community. You can also check the speakers and bloggers of these conferences in order to identity the key influencers in the open innovation community. Don’t be afraid to contact them directly.

4. At this stage, you have identified bloggers you want to follow. A content aggregator tool such as Bloglines.com makes it easier to follow many blogs. Check it out. However, I have experienced that TweetDeck works so well that I no longer have a need for such tools. This will probably also happen to you.

5. This post is actually a sidetrack from a discussion on whether business people still have the time and need for reading books. Too many books are unfortunately not worth the read. Many books seem to be care more about the ego of an author or the wallet of a publisher rather than focusing on the needs of the reader.

Books – the good ones – still have a role to play, but this is not where you should start. Do the other things first and then read the books of authors that you believe can deliver value for the time you plan to spend reading and thinking about it.

Let me hear your comments on this. Perhaps you can also share how your tips on getting smarter and acquiring new knowledge and insights.

Leaders, Prepare For A Networked Organization

by Stefan Lindegaard

What a company knows is inside the heads of its people, and distributing this knowledge has always been a challenge. Yet, now more than ever, being able to leverage a company’s collective knowledge and experience through virtual and face-to-face networks and communities is critical to innovation. So why do such efforts fail so frequently? Here are some of the reasons I’ve identified as I’ve worked with companies on this issue:

1. Time and skills

Many of us simply do not have the time or skills to network and build relationships. Leaders, you need to give your people time to acquire networking skills and the time to invest in and maintain relationships.

2. Focus

A community will only work if it connects people who share a common experience, passion, interest, affiliation or goal. Create and/or find a group that’s right for you. You should also keep in mind only to network or build relationships if you have a reason to do so. Random networking rarely results in anything but wasted time.

3. We are too old…

Most people above 30 years old just don’t see the value of tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn. We have a real generation gap here. We, the older and wiser ones, are still in charge, but this will begin to change in five years time as we get the first leaders from the Facebook generation. Ten years on, they will define the rules. Why not try to figure out how it works now instead of waiting?

4. Lack of commitment, structure and culture

As companies embrace open innovation, internal and external networks will explode. This includes peer-to-peer, value or supply chain networks and networks that feed ideas and/or technology. Company leaders must commit to a networked organization and create the structure and culture needed for this to work. 

5. Lack of a dedicated facilitator

Almost any network can benefit from having a dedicated facilitator who really cares about the topic and the participants. Although this might add to the costs of networking, the return on the investment will be higher.

One Cannot Think If One Is Sure To Be Right

by Stefan Lindegaard

The Danish communications agency Mensch runs some interesting and thought-provoking text-based ads. The last one was titled One Cannot Think If One Is Sure To Be Right. It was a great read and since most of you do not speak Danish I translated part of the text.

It goes like this:

“Have you ever wondered why some people insist in hairstyles, eyeglasses or clothing that went out of fashion at least 20 years ago? They do so not because they are indifferent. Or cannot see that the world is moving. They do it because they want to stand still. They want to maintain time and their own appearance from a time when they felt on top.

We all experience a certain period in our lives where we ask our self and others big questions on life. It is a period of time where we think so intensely over everything that it shapes our values and characterizes us for the rest of our lives.

Then our thought process gets more focused. Education and work requires restraint and concentration. All the different thinking becomes a distraction. This is where we begin to decide that the world hangs together in a certain way, and that anyone who believes otherwise is less enlightened.

And suddenly you become an old, hidebound fool. You unconsciously repeat your biases and standard arguments in an attempt to retain you world view. Eventually you only socialize with people who share similar views making the conversations go lightly and eliminating the need to think too much.

But the brain is a muscle that requires varied exercise in order not to degenerate. So if we want to keep moving we must let ourselves become influenced by others. We must leave a door open to thoughts we have not thought of ourselves. Talk with someone who has a completely different education, cultural background, sexual orientation or even skin color. That sounds scary, but otherwise the brain ends up in the same jail as clothing from two decades ago.

Think about it. Unless you are sure that we are not right.”

I am reaching an age where it is getting harder not to just rely on what I already know and do. A read like this challenges my thinking and I am highly appreciative for such inspiration. I do not want to become an old hidebound fool. Do you?

Work Approaches: Rude Or Effective?

by Stefan Lindegaard

Another week just flew by and once again I had several issues that I did not get to attend. One particularly nagging example is the lack of my responses to the many great comments given on my blog last week.

Unfortunately, trips to Las Vegas and New York took away the time needed for this and suddenly I am facing a dilemma. Should I focus on the past and spend quite some time on the many comments on my blog and on LinkedIn? Or should I focus on the new ideas that springs up and hopefully are capable of inspiring others and starting some discussions in the innovation community?

Of course, the right answer is to strike a proper balance. This is most likely also what you need to find when you find yourself flooded by requests to pursue new interesting opportunities while having to just get things done.

Perhaps we can help each other by sharing our insights on how we try to get the most out of our time and efforts? Let me start out by sharing some of my work approaches:

• Know what really makes a difference. In my previous blog post, URGENT: The Box We Live In And Why This Is So, I argued that that 20 % of our efforts create 80 % of our outcomes. Having this in mind, I try to focus on what really matters in terms of reaching my short, mid and long-term goals. For example, thinking about innovation and sharing my insights helps build my “personal brand” and it helps develop my business as a network facilitator and occasionally as a consultant. Furthermore, I really enjoy this work so it also provides a great personal satisfaction. Thus, I spend most of my time on this. Can you indentify what really matters to you?

• Know when to respond and when to ignore. This might come off a bit cynical to some of you, but I hope I can get you to understand the reason behind this. Many of us live in a world where we get so many different kinds of requests that we could spend a significant part of our work week just replying to those. Not good as we also need to get things done. A great example is the many friend requests from LinkedIn and Facebook.

As mentioned in this earlier post, Why Should I Connect With You On LinkedIn?,  I have decided only to use LinkedIn and not Facebook as I do not have the time to manage two active profiles. LinkedIn is much more business-minded so Facebook had to go. On LinkedIn, I have also decided only to connect with people with whom I already have had a certain level of interaction with. If someone I do not know asks whether to connect, I look at the message. Is it just the standard message or does this person express a reason for us to connect? I always ignore the standard messages just as I really try to get back to the others with a reason why I do not want to connect right now.

• Test whether people are serious, relevant and persistent. I initially ignore business proposals that might look interesting at first hand, but do not have a direct match with my current priorities. Why? Simply to test whether the other person is serious about their proposal and shows enough persistence to follow-up.

I have been on the other end many times and I often had to initiate contact three or four times before I got a reply. I learned that many “influential” people often ignore requests simply because they are too busy; not because it might not be of interest to them. In such cases, the “influentials” take a wait-and-see approach trying the judge the person sending the message. Persistence is seen as a good character trait here and it carries you far if you also have a relevant message.

You should understand that in a networked world we almost always reach upwards to someone who can help out on our issues. Unfortunately for us, the people we try to reach up to have their own agendas making them reach higher as well. As time is limited, we often have to ignore those requests from below unless this really fits into our own agenda.

• Prioritize your ways of communicating with others. My prioritized way of communicating with others is 1) email 2) phone 3) meetings. It has surprised some that I did not want to meet with them as I believed—and as it turned out—the task could be done by email or phone. It is not to be rude. It just saves time for all involved and it works fine. Just think of the many meetings you have attended in the last six months. How many of those were to some extent a waste of time? I think this proves my point.

Well, this became a bit personal, but I hope you see my approaches as a way to be effective rather than being rude. As a sort of defensive argument for my chosen approaches, perhaps I should also mention that I am actually a very introvert person.

This might seem strange and counter-intuitive to my work as a network facilitator and speaker, but hopefully it also serves as an example that you do not have to be an extrovert to connect with others. Even introverts can do well on this once we set our goals, apply the proper techniques and understand how social media tools work. More on this in a later post…

URGENT: The Time Box We Live In And Why This Is So

by Stefan Lindegaard

I am pondering on what to do when I get stretched out and run out of time for the many things I would like to get done both on the business as well as the private side of life. I will get into my thoughts on this in a later post this week, but first I would like to share some insights on time management.

I think we can agree that working with innovation you are bound to have time issues. This career is time-consuming. You are being pulled from all directions, and no matter how many items you cross off your to-do list, the number of tasks just seems to keep increasing.

Time—or more likely the lack of it—is something we often get into during my network meetings as all of the members spent most of their time in a little box labelled URGENT. We have a general tendency to assume there’s nothing we can do about it; issues with time just go with the territory, right?

Well, that answer is only partially correct. And the reality is that unless you get control of your time management issues, you stand little chance of reaching the goals you have set. As mentioned, I will get back to this, but first, let’s take a look at at where our time goes. I find two principles to be of particular interest on this.

• Parkinson’s Law. This is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” First put forth by British naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson in an essay in The Economist in 1955 and later in a bestselling book called Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, this principle explains why you—and the people you delegate to—rarely finish a task before its deadline.

Given 30 days to complete a report, we will research, research, and research some more before buckling down to write it in the last few days before the deadline. Yet if given two days to write the same report, we will manage to do all the research and writing within two those days. This also explains why so many people are seen in stores on Christmas Eve doing their shopping at the very last minute. Some of them are there looking for last-minute markdowns, but the majority are probably there because of Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law is responsible for many of the mind-numbing meetings we all find ourselves in each week and explains why your time budget almost undoubtedly shows that you’re spending vast amounts of time on non-priority issues.

• The 80/20 Rule (also known as the Pareto principle) also can be applied to time management. Using this rule, we can say that 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of the causes. In other words, 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts, which means we all spend a lot of our time and energy on doing things that don’t move us closer to our work or personal goals.

Being aware of the effects of Parkinson’s Law and the 80/20 Rule can help you take a fresh look at your time budget to identify ways in which you could better manage your time.

Perhaps you also will find it helpful to ponder on these questions:

• If you had to, could you realistically accomplish in four days what it now takes you five days to do? In other words, are there items on your to-do list that could be delegated or even dropped altogether without the world coming to an end?

• Which 20 percent of your effort produces 80 percent of your results?

These principles have helped me gain a better understanding of time management issues. Perhaps you can add more to this?

Are Engineers Really That Good For Innovation?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I have been pondering on this since I had some comments on my The Faces Of Open Innovation post where I expressed some concern that most of the profiles working with open innovation had an engineering background.

In the blog post, I mentioned that engineers do add value to innovation, but we need to get a broader focus in the overall innovation process by giving room to other functions and competences as well. Innovation should be about much more than just technology and products for which many engineers have a tendency to over-focus on.

Two comments in particular caught my interest. The first one went like this:

“Why so surprised at the preponderance of engineers in the open innovation community? Good engineers are, by necessity, innovative. This is not so obvious with other professions. Engineers are prone to share, to seek out other engineers when they face a mental block.”

Wow! Are good engineers by necessity innovative? My response is whether you really can be innovative when the next sentence mentions this is not so obvious with other professions. This is borderline arrogance and to some extent hubris.

In today’s innovation environment, I believe you need a T-shape in which you bring strong depth to the table. Engineers often do this, but to me this is worthless unless you also have an understanding and empathy for how other business functions and competences work and add value to the products and services to be created.

You could also raise the question whether the limited thinking displayed in the comment is not exactly the reason that have caused so many products to be brought to market that were filled with all sorts of doodads and capabilities that the engineers thought were just fantastic, but that real consumers had no use for. I think it is fair to say that how this guy defines innovation is skewed toward the ability to solve technical challenges, which is only part of innovation.

The second comment went like this: “The natural place for open innovation to start is in the technical function, in my view because it can be neatly defined and encapsulated without excessive risk.”

What is actually being said here is that open innovation should be defined from an engineer’s perspective. Hmm, I would argue that we should define and embrace innovation from the customer’s and/or end-user’s perspective as they will end up paying for what we do. It is important we understand this and it is my experience that engineers as a profession often do not get this. Other professions and business functions better understand this making them just as important and valuable – if not more – in the innovation process.

Engineers, of course most of you are good for innovation. You should be proud of what you bring to the table, but you also need to wake up. The way we innovate is changing fast and engineers need to adapt to this just as everyone else. This is especially true as we open up our innovation processes to external partners rather than doing almost everything internally.

Perhaps you should try one simple approach next time you face a mental block; seek out non-engineers. This might broaden your horizon which I am sure will benefit all of us.

I look forward to your comments on this.

Startups Are Overrated: Intrapreneurs Are Better Bets

by Stefan Lindegaard

Startups are great because they create growth and lots of jobs so let’s pour lots of private and government money into programs that create more startups. Entrepreneurs and startups kick ass!

This is the common wisdom in most countries. Does it hold? I do not think so and an article in Borsen, a leading business daily in Denmark provided some interesting facts that support my view on this.

In short, the article argued that gazelle companies – defined as companies that have created growth each of the last four years and in total have more than doubled their revenues in that time span – create more jobs than other company categories. This is not much of a surprise as growth companies almost per definition need people to create growth.

The article showed a list of 50 companies that during 2005 to 2008 each had grown from 102 % to 2172 % in terms of revenues and created from about 20 to 900 jobs. More interestingly, only 5 companies had less than 5 employees in 2005 indicating they were pure startups. 45 of the 50 growth companies already had a platform to grow from leading to my point; established companies create more revenue, more profit and more jobs than pure startups.

What I really would like to see is that private and government funds currently used on startups are diverted to established companies setting up intrapreneurship programs. I am not saying that we should give giants such as Hewlett-Packard, BASF or Lego a lot of money and support to set up such programs. The big companies can – or should be able to – do this by themselves.

But the innovation community as well as governement people should take a better look on how we can help small to medium-sized companies develop a better understanding of intrapreneurship and help them set up programs aimed at identifying and developing not only ideas, but also intrapreneurs; the people driving innovation.

As some of you might not have heard of intrapreneurship before I have inserted this definition from Wikipedia:

“Intrapreneurship is the practice of using entrepreneurial skills without taking on the risks or accountability associated with entrepreneurial activities. It is practiced by employees within an established organization using a business model.

Employees, perhaps engaged in a special project within a larger firm are supposed to behave as entrepreneurs, even though they have the resources and capabilities of the larger firm to draw upon.

Capturing the dynamic nature of entrepreneurial management (trying things until successful, learning from failures, attempting to conserve resources, etc.) adds to the potential of an otherwise static organization without exposing those employees or self employed people to the risks or accountability normally associated with entrepreneurial failure.”

Imagine all the jobs and thus growth and prosperity we can create if not only the large, multinational companies, but also the smaller, mid-sized and yet established companies really knew how to develop and nurture intrapreneurship.

Everyone working with intrapreneurship – including myself – have an interesting business case as well as a worthwhile cause to pursue. Let’s go for it…

Why Is The Front End Of Innovation Such A Challenge?

by Stefan Lindegaard

In a recent meeting in one of my network groups, we focused on the front end of innovation as a couple of the members have current challenges on how to identify and develop ideas in the very early stages.

I remember attending my first Front End Of Innovation conference in Boston five years ago. Hundreds of people participated and there was a great energy. At that time, front end of innovation was the talk of the town in the innovation community just as open innovation is today. Interestingly enough, the front end of innovation is still one of the key challenges for innovation leaders and The Front End of Innovation conferences continue to attract hundreds of participants.

I wonder why this is the case. Has the innovation community failed on developing models that provide answers to this? Are innovation leaders not good enough at learning from other’s experiences on this?

In my talks with innovation leaders on this, the issues evolve around the funnel system and stage-gate like models; how to identify the ideas and get them from one stage to the next. Another key issue is how you organize for this. It is my experience that companies often make a couple of mistakes on this. They are:

• Too much focus on internal sources. Many innovation leaders mostly talk about internal and employee-driven ideas. There is not enough focus on how to involve external sources in the front end of innovation. This will change as open innovation moves ahead, but why not try to get a head start on this.

• Too much focus on ideas and too little on processes and people. I have always said that getting ideas is not an issue. There are plenty of them. If you do not find them internally, it is because you do not look in the right places or because you need to include external sources to a higher degree. The real issue on ideas is how you filter and later on mature them.

So a lot of ideas do not necessarily equal success. This only occurs when you have the proper processes in place and more importantly when you have the right people at the right time. Check this post: People First, Processes Next, Then Ideas

• No filtering process in place. The “everything goes” process does not work. You need to set up filters to make sure the early ideas fit the strategic intent you are working towards. You can get an idea of what it looks like when this is not the case in this blog post: When Open Innovation Becomes A Gimmick: Lessons From Campbell Soup

• Processes are too complex. I have seen several cases where companies created processes that attended every issue related to getting ideas through the funnel and their stage gate processes. It looked very good on paper, but it did not work in the real world. Sometimes you need to keep things simple and leave room for “learn-as-you-go” development.

These are just some quick thoughts on this. It would be great to hear your perspectives on why the front end of innovation continues to be such a big challenge.

You can also check out this group at LinkedIn if you want to get an idea of the issues people discuss on this topic:  Front End Of Innovation

Good Reads On Innovation #5

by Stefan Lindegaard

Here comes a list of reads, videos and podcasts on innovation that I have enjoyed and re-tweeted in the last couple of weeks. I hope you will enjoy this as well.

You can follow me on Twitter: @lindegaard

GREAT READ Making the Change to “Proudly Found Elsewhere” – interview with Chris Thoen of P&G
http://bit.ly/467gv

GREAT READ The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap And Simpe Is Just Good Fine – Wired
http://bit.ly/2TqkZH

Opening communication for open innovation: Should you share your strategy? – PARC blog
http://bit.ly/2lLcIn

Big Blue’s Global Lab: How Big Blue is forging cutting-edge partnerships – article and interview in BusinessWeek
http://twshot.com/?VTG

Seven Reasons Your Business Should Be On Twitter- blog post by Matt HeinzI
http://bit.ly/DJUVb

How To Manage Outside Innovation
http://ow.ly/nyxx

To Be More Innovative, Think Like A Venture Capitalist – Paul Sloane argues why the venture capital approach could also work in corporations
http://ow.ly/nyuf

Getting beyond the breakthrough – John Hagel tell corporations need to stop looking for the silver bullet –and to start listening to outsiders
http://bit.ly/2WWjpV

Design Driven Innovation – Jeffrey Phillips looks into the design of innovation processes
http://bit.ly/LPUEL

Forget Design Thinking and Try Hybrid Thinking – insights on P&G from Dev Patnaik
http://bit.ly/3UkG1l

IP slows down innovation in clean tech industry
http://bit.ly/YiVww

McKinsey Top 10 T and what they mean for IT – globalization under fire?
http://tinyurl.com/mldyf3

Innovation strategy in India – lessons from Tata
http://bit.ly/17uakm

HP Bets on Open Innovation – focus on academics
http://bit.ly/nxQTa

Good article on writing tweets by Jakob Nielsen
http://bit.ly/MUtC9

Sealed Air Corp. finds success, value in open innovation
http://ow.ly/llEx

Enjoy!