Part two of my thoughts on the Innovation Marketplace based on my visit to the Front End of Innovation Conference… Please read part one here.
Despite the importance of innovation to most companies (and nations), the innovation market suffers maturity and clarity challenges. Innovation is not a new marketplace, but it has many rough edges. And yet, I found amazing stories about clever solutions and insights that were only discovered by thinking differently.
Maybe it’s just me. I was hoping to hear new stories. At one point at the FEI conference, I heard or saw a P&G reference so many times, it almost seemed they sponsored the event. Indeed P&G is an incredibly innovative company. I interviewed them for a report I published last year (along with other smart companies), since they do fantastic work there. I also chuckled when I saw marketing materials from three different vendors and how they helped design something in the new Boeing jet. And yes, Starbucks, Dell, and Best Buy did some great things by tapping into people’s ideas. Oh and IBM does the JAM. I love it and don’t mean to take any credit away from these companies; quite the opposite. I mean to say that if people only hear about the same 6 organizations, they will eventually conclude that they themselves can never be as innovative as these great icons of success. We need to start highlighting new stories too. Let’s also talk about the lesser-known examples of innovation. If you have pointers – please share them in the comments below.
It occurred to me that some of the confusion that I was seeing in the Innovation marketplace was familiar – I had seen this in the KM and Enterprise 2.0 marketplaces too. Each suffers from loose usage of terminology; words that means different things to different people. I even hear analysts from well known firms (who have done much to bring clarity) say things like “Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Social Computing, and all that stuff” and they might be talking about Ajax-based rich internet programming techniques, or document collaboration, or unified collaboration, or marketing via the internet channels. These markets also have a wide range of motivators, barriers, and I dare say arguments steeped in passion. The familiarity drew me to see parallels.
Parallels. Let’s start with a premise: There is an untapped resource that should take advantage of – the object of perceived value. It is usually in the form of tacit knowledge, and we have to make it explicit. We must manage it and develop it. Vendors offer some solutions. Clients struggle with culture and adoption. Etc. So I started to jot down a simplistic table of the parallels:
| Market | Innovation | KM | E2.0 |
| Object of perceived value | Idea | Documented information | Conversation |
| Common pitch, appealing to fear | If you don’t have new products or services your competition will eat your lunch. | You don’t want to be the person who cannot produce the document when the lawyer asks for it | If you don’t provide a secure venue for collaboration, your employees will create their own or use the public internet |
| Clients say they want to | Implement great ideas to stay competitive and meet company goals | Assist onboarding, offshoring, training, records retention, and overall management of information assets. After all, libraries have been doing this for decades. | Enable employees to leverage other employees they don’t yet know. Give them an intranet they find useful. Create project transparency to improve management oversight. |
| Vendors provide |
Consulting insight and “plumbing” platforms |
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| Common concerns |
Mismanagement of intellectual property |
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| Technology issues |
Integration with Line of Business applications |
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| Initial barriers |
I know this is a “good idea”, but what exactly is the ROI? |
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| Analysts |
Talk about the value of leveraging the tacit and making it explicit. They share inspirational examples and warn of serious challenges. Many buyers remain confused about their next steps. |
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Innovation management starts with a premise – there is something of value that you need to tap. And at some level, there is a familiar conversation that takes place in the marketplace. Common arguments about cloud, expertise, ROI, information silos, real drivers, cultural barriers, etc.
Convergence. It seems to me that as any one of these marketplaces finds a path to success, all will follow suit. And in so doing, I believe these markets will begin to converge – at least some of the underlying technology support will have to.
I found that some of the innovation vendors now offer tools that have user profiles, tags, ratings, comments, and discussion forums on portal-lite web sites — stuff you see with the E2.0 vendors. And some E2.0 vendors are now suggesting that clients should use them to support idea generation and refinement. When you get into the details you find that KM, E2.0, and Innovation management are different. But if you are a CIO faced with a limited budget, and similar product pitches, you might wonder if there was a way to leverage the overlap. What if you only needed one really effective, integrated platform?
Much like the E2.0 community, you have outlier voices in the Innovation community who see the world differently than the rest of the community. And this is exciting – because they challenge conventional wisdom. It is amazing to see how people set out to transform companies via initiatives dressed in words like “innovation” and “2.0 thinking”, but these very people get all defensive when you challenge their premises or suggest a new approach.
Thoughts. I’m pretty excited to see the virility (oh, what a word) in the innovation marketplace. I found that a lot of great work going on, and I was impressed with the people I met at the conference. What this means to me is that there must be more great work ahead. Eventually we close gaps between the client needs and the vendor products. Eventually we leverage the adjacencies between these marketplaces so that organizations can invest coherently in their ideas, their knowledge, and their communities and find their paths to success.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Gil, I really enjoyed the post, particularly the comparisons between innovation, KM, and E2.0. When you talk about the ‘innovation’ vendors, what functionality do these solutions typically provide, beyond ways to capture ideas and suggestions and a way to vote or rate them?
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Steve, I’m not going to be able to summarize the market in a comment. Perhaps some of the vendors might choose to add information here to help. At a very simplistic level, there are “front-end” processes of capture and refinement and “back-end” or stage-gate processes that support implementation. In addition to capture and vote (which you can do with a decent forum server), some have features that aid in dealing with duplication of ideas, or with getting additional information that help qualify an idea, etc. And there’s more.
Keep watch of this blog, I may be spending more time talking about innovation in the coming months. And then I’ll be able to dive deeper into this topic.
Readers — would you want to see this?