Innovation not necessarily be Invention

Innovation is fairly misunderstood at times, and people who misunderstand it spend a fair share of development and Idea storming time. Not to mention they take organizations far behind in the history. Innovation is not something brand new, something original, something unique... Innovation can be what already exists.... When a company sees that twitter is good for general, however it still needs something constrained to a particular organization and make Yammer out of it.. it is enough to be called as Innovation.

When MP3 players that are heavy to carry, do not store huge amount of data and are not very classy to look are replaced by a white fruit like logo holding gadget, built by a company with the name of the fruit Apple... is Innovation.

You dont need to find unique original ideas for Innovation... you just need to find things that run in present and fail to satisfy the needs of customers.... improvising on those processes and tools and making them more effective and cheaper in all senses.. is Innovation.

The quality of your Innovation and the acceptance to it, will be determined by the fact of how many users like it, appreciate it, criticize it and oppose it... Remember your Innovation is not successful until you have enough criticism and opposition to it ;). Its the critics that will help you evolve your Innovations more.

So now dont wait to Invent... dont just wait so that you can think of something no one has thought.. just pick your brain in the shower, think of what are the things that are blocking people and are expensive to them in sense of time, effort, money and use.... and find a better way to do it....

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Will products ever outdate Online Help and be Innovative?

Huh? From Management to Online help, never an easy journey... I speak because I am completely pissed off setting up my machine with a developer environment and do some pair development with my kids.. (Thanks to @rishanimates for setting up a version of eclipse on my machine that works) . So I use one of the most popular mobile development platform, dump the SDK so i can get a fresher work on some idea and then he gets stuck... we refer various online help manuals and example's available together and believe me.. what we need is what we don't get... so then a manual of 10K pages is in front of me and I have to refer to it to find that one piece which probably is not even listed there... moreover I also have to find the right word in context so I can get to the relatively closer contextual page... The whole process takes me ages and I am still left with no answer...

While doing this I am constantly reminded of Google's early year acquisition [Vark.com], a bot , a service that lets me ask questions and get answers socially. Now imagine if your users asks questions within your product and get answers to them from within your product users??? well you don't need to build a unused piece of constantly maintenance needing element.

Well the day is not far... when I was reviewing a Harvard Business Archive article on How to Stop trying to delight your customers I came across Virtuoz .. a virtual agent that answers basic questions and reduces the load of your Customer Services... of course increases your loyalty points with your customers... but then why not take a step further... instead of maintaining a data of support queries... why not let the community build this data and questions? of course with a view of moderated answers?

Here is how I think it would work....

1. User adds a bot to his IM or sees a link on your application.

2. He hits it and asks a questions

3. A bit of AI and it sorts a lists of matching questions asks to confirm

4. Meanwhile goes in the back end and fetches a response to some of the answers a preview of which is up to the user to select

5. Both questions and answers are stored.

6. Admin piece to moderate and update the Questions and Answers database

7. 2nd Version to let user select an option of product area or type of question and then guides to appropriate question and answer.. like a IVR that you face on phone when you call your banks, Airline etc

Hmmm sounds yummy... then is it a question of how much time to build? well with the options available it looks to be a sweet deal... Google App Engine of course...

Have a look at XMPP Driven mechanisms I maybe the last one to think that this can work best for several products... but it sounds real and value driven...

Looking for a fresh mind to help me do this... Are you ready?

Now do you think you can enhance your help files and be more interactive with your customers... make them feel like they are getting help real time?

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What is blocking your Innovation Path?

I was questioned by a colleague yesterday, a question I determine to answer through this blog post. The question was "do you remember of any Innovations we did in the last 2 years?". My answer is NOT REALLY. And I have no hesitation in saying this. I think while the whole world is claiming on Developers been Gods - @Scobleizer in his latest post, How Facebook is made by Developers - Techcrunch, And how Google Dev community is the maximum value driver in Innovation. While there are success stories of how developers really make the future of Innovation bright in any organization... I think many of them forget to mention the determination from the Management, The Vision to Innovate, The attitude to learn from failures, and the readiness to accept failures, the faith in developer community and last but not the least the work load on your teams. I believe there are multiple more elements that drive Innovations... many of them written in the posts previously written.

My answer to the question raised is going to come in a series of blog posts, while this post is going to be focused on the Agileness as a potential blocker to Innovation. Please note that I see Agility as a potential blocker only. So the short and frequent but shippable product takes the precedence, the Team get busy in finishing the tasks planned for Iterations, their visibility to the product and the vision is limited to the set of iterations and releases. Obviously if you are going to have a busy team of developers just working to get a feature right out of the developer machine to the customer, they are going to loose an important element of their attitudes... Innovation.

In my experience agility has all potential reasons to create enough blockages to Innovations... here is why:

1. Multiple short and frequent releases mean that those releases are focused to get small issues / bugs fixed for your customers, maybe some small features that are likely to help your product improve. This means that the focus of your team is on that release and those set of small items. Development or Product teams, both are going to fence themselves into the barriers of those monthly / 2 monthly release cycles.

2. Yes the quality and the speed of development increases with effective agility, but then it also increases the iterations in building requirements, delivering those requirements to a complete set of functional piece. All in all you are working fast and quality, but with no newness.

3. Products may have roadmaps, however the long term features that are going to be a part of your 1-2 years roadmap is not getting resourced. Majority of your discussions are restricted to what is coming in the next release, and many times it is doing something this release to win a deal. Majority of times these items that are big chunky development or Innovation pieces get outdated, Thanks to the market conditions, Technology updates or competitors.

4. If you are catching up, You are not Innovating. A major set of companies/products who tend to catch up with competition have failed to be ahead in the race, as they are always in a mode of catchup.. they are making their Teams to work on those things that the competition has and that is taking the energy out... remember this catching up never ends... I see this race for Myspace... though the new Myspace is really nice.. I believe it is just trying to catch up with Facebook... same thing happening around with Yahoo for instance. So while you are busy catching up with 1 competitor... a whole bunch of competition is busy not catching up with you instead Innovating... Imagine what would happen if you want to catch up with RT like function of Twitter, Like like function of Facebook, A gooogle like search , A Quora like simplicity.... Gosh.. you gonna be One hell of a busy Team.

5. Innovation is not copying. SAP-Oracle is a recent example. If you are busy copying features, you are taking your product years back.. because that is when those products started thinking of it, and did it. In the process of agility many people tend to copy smaller set of features into short releases... this causes Teams to defocus.

6. Innovation is not 1 person telling and other people doing. You cant just free up 1 person to tell you what your product needs... there is a whole lot to do. Agility drives responsibility of Product Innovation on a few less. This is one big trouble... if you dont have 100 ideas every moment, you are going to work on 1 Idea which is probably not well validated or Innovative.

7. Iterative Freeze is needed... One of the problem of been agile is that there is always a backlog... believe me or not.. run an eye on past few releases of your agile team and see the amount of backlogs, Technical debts... many of these are due to the indecisive, iterative feedback sets. One or the other team member will have one or the other change and this change is going to get a lolly in your backlog.

Having said this.... I also want to say that some of these issues can still be tackled to keep the Innovation momentum up in a agile Team. A few of my thoughts...

A. Have streams of development. 1 that focus on short term goals, another that is always working on Innovation items with a longer release plan. This is not catching up though. Had Facebook tried to get into the Phone market, they would have lost focus from the Social Business, the vision of which is to be Social leader and not collaborative struggler.

B. Leave Agile teams with lull releases. Yes everyone wants CUSTOMER DELIGHT. But keep a set of releases empty.. so your teams get time to breathe...this breathing period can really help them Innovate.

C. Small inputs can turn into Big Innovations.. Promote and Provoke your agile team members to Innovate.. Appreciate the items they do on their own... If they are taking you away from your product vision, Guide them but dont reject them hard. Recently a developer bought a cool module for customizable design and formatting. This input was bought down with a statement that it is not needed for the product, Disappointed developer kept another cool Idea of real time previews undisclosed.

D. Make agility your strength, not your weakness... Break up your Innovations into smaller phases, instead of going on a all out war on it. If you are able to get a cool thing for your product increasing the customer UVP.. even if it comes in phases.. Your speed can get things in time, your attitude and quality will give perfection to your Innovation. people will like it. As YT said...Think whatever you do is your Version 1.0 while 2.X is waiting in queue.

E. Imbibe a Innovation culture... Not a THIS IS NOT YOUR JOB CULTURE. If Facebook is successful it is because it has a great Team to support great Ideas and great vision. Unlike Yahooo whose better technology just cant be met by its product ideas and vision. Unlike Myspaces scalability that just is useless as the product doesnt have a great usability and vision further. Unlike Zoho's apps whose Technology is just not able to catch up the cool features and usability of the product...

Now.. that you are one hell of a Agilist.. take a step back, retrospect how Innovation is going in your Team.. and take a leap to improvise the Innovation process.... Let Agility be your glucose in this short sprint.

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How to take your Idea to the next level?

Since we are doing so much talks around Innovation, Innovation Killers... thought it may make sense to put this one on as well... How to take your Idea to its right destination... Well this blog post is not the bible and may not be really fit it to your Idea or Innovation... but it will definitely give you pointers that will help you to do so....

This also comes with the fact that Raju (one of the dear readers) made the following comment on the blog around Innovation Killers...

When it comes to innovation killers, i would say the individual himself is the first killer. A viable seed will shatter even the hardest rock for survival. Problem is, "Innovation" is not considered as a means of survival unless we are pushed to corners with no options of 'conventional' survival methods.

I certainly agree with this fact.. many times this push to avoid Idea/Innovation comes from the Innovator himself. He waits, He is afraid, He doesn't want to risk, He doesn't care or he doesn't have time... So how does one really take his Idea from an Idea to Innovation? Or simply how do one take the Idea/Innovation to the next level....

1. Ideate / Document

Lot of Ideas die in the journey t takes from the thought itself to paper and then Implementation. The reasons are different... someone during the Adam-Eve era had an Idea of social networking.... it only took 1990's to build a Facebook. Wish those guys had documented the Idea.. they would have build something better by now ;) Not that FB is bad... but by the time it evolves it is going to take a few hundreds of years to make it perfect ;)

Well out of fun part.. the moment you get the Idea.. be it Shower or your bathroom or your bed or while you are doing some shitty work where you don't have ways to document... just pull a reminder and document your idea where you can remember it.

Before you take the next step to promote or share your Idea... make sure that you yourself become passionate about it... Keep the Idea hammer you..

1. have post its and posters around your house and room so you can be reminded.

2. Talk to yourself about it , every time you get time alone.. don't worry what people call you when they see you speaking to yourself.. cause they are going to laugh at you now but later talk about you, when you become an Einstein.

3. Focus , Focus and hammer and hammer your Idea to yourself.

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.- Buddha

2. Share

Your Idea is a dead meat if it is not shared. The first step when you have some Idea in your mind is to share it.. with a small or large forum of people you like , trust. Sharing of Idea is the usual step that gets skipped out in process of Innovation... People fear there Idea will be stolen, or somebody else will take credit for it, or it will be mis used... Ideas are never stolen.. they only evolve....The fear of Idea getting stolen avoids the sharing of Ideas.. hence if you choose a forum that can be your parents, spouse, close friends, Team members that you trust on would be the right way to get feedback...

Every brain that listens to your Idea and speaks a word about it either as a feedback or as a critic is a value add to the Idea..

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats - Howard Aiken

3. Brainstorm

Just sharing the Idea is not enough. It has to be brainstormed. Pros and cons, Issues and uses, UVP(Unique Value Proposition) of the Idea needs to be brainstormed.. Unless this is done the Idea will never take a good shape. This brainstorming can be done with the same group that you shared the Idea or even slightly bigger forum. One or few brainstorming sessions on your Idea can make that Idea one Killer Idea.

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas - George Bernard Shaw

4. Find the right Sponsor

Whats the use of having a great Idea, if you don't find the right sources to get it to its destination. If you have a great Idea find your Manager, Team member, colleague or even Yourself. This person is the person who would help you succeed with the Idea. He is the one who is going to invest in your Idea. If you have an Idea about building a Software , or a Feature in your current software.. discuss it with your Product Owner, Manager and get some resource for it. If it is process driven find your Team , colleagues who would help you implement it.. if it is a individual task find free time for yourself so you can have time to implement what you want to Ideate.

A sponsor-less Idea is difficult to get through... find the right people who would finally put there bucks on your Idea..

The air is full of ideas. They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through. It was there all the time - Henry Ford

5. Know when to quit

Ideas can be so addictive and mind controlling that they dont let you fail.. the passion towards that Idea never lets you go away from it and the thought that success is next block will keep you going... this is a good sign of passionate behaviour. But if you want to succeed in a right way then you should define on when to stop your effort on your Idea.

A developer wanted to build a framework, he went to the Product Team demanded that he wants to spend his initiative on such framework. The Product team gave him 3 months. Few months post the initial time lines he had planned he was not able to deliver it, he became so passionate and defensive about it that he would not get off it.. Eventually the Team started taking it as a issue and finally decided to call it a quit as similar frameworks in market had already erupted and they would have helped the product without doing any inhouse work.

One has to decide the right time to call it a quit if the Idea is not triggered well... because all things dont end like the Fool's Gold.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along! - Arthur Clarke

6. Keep it Alive

If the mother of the child doesnt trust the child, no one would ever... Trust your Idea. Work on it. Keep it alive if it is getting delayed, Keep it alive , Give it oxygen and blood. No matter what happens no matter even if your Idea fails to launch, Even if you have to stop in the middle , even if it has failed to convince other, even if it has failed... Keep it alive.. Evolve it and make a better launchpad for it.

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You dont have license to Innovate

So while in the past few days we are talking about Innovation and ways to build culture's to Innovate.. we left out one important point "Blocking Innovation". While those passionate souls bring Ideas and are keen to Innovate, there are bunch of evil souls that stop them from doing it... this block doesn't come for a reason.. some times it is for Jealousy, Unawareness, Non Risk taking approach , Willingness, No passion towards goal.. above all self ability...

So lets list down the way people deny Innovation in teams, organizations...

Ask for it, Document it, What next?

A lot of cultures ask people to throw ideas, when these ideas start flowing through.. the Innovation Managers do not know how to manage them. Ofcourse when you get bombarded with 10's and 20's of ideas you would not know how to map it to your Product Vision... then you wiki it and there is no way in future to extract it and implement it.

Many times this goes to another level.. a lot of people do not know how to validate if these ideas are good or not.. When they do.. they do not know how to approach it to a destination.

How to solve this ?
Build a process to list down ideas, form a way to evaluate and validate them. Every idea listed needs to be categorized and find a way to delegate this to the right authorities and people who are empowered to help this goal succeed.

Dig the well when you are thirsty

A lot of times you would see requests for Innovation coming when your product is in bad shape, sales are not doing well or things are not going well all together.. All of a sudden you reach office and you would see that all Sr. Managers standing in the work area with all the office walls loaded with Innovation posters and all of them demanding Innovation from the Team in the next quarter...

A while back a friend worked for a company who was building a Travel portal. The business was dripping down in a span of 1 year.. everyone in the Team was asking the decision makers to reform the model, the decision makers chose however to increase inventory instead of increasing effort on SEO, building semantic web product etc... All of a sudden when the business hit the ground.. the management decided to re-engineer the product and the marketing strategy.. Result it was too late to build it back as other players were already running fast with their models.

How to solve this?
Regular evaluation of Innovation in the Team. Form brainstorming groups, create channels to ideate. Bring decision makers with right stats on Innovation Quotient.

Cant afford to fail now

A big bunch of stake holders and decision makers do not want to risk anything not with the figures, business, product thus the risk analysis Teams are formed and these teams do not let Innovation happen. Risk taking abilities and commitment to succeed drives Innovation away.

Resistance to change

Some people just dont want to change. Any new thing in the process is a threat, a problem, an issue and a potential problem. Hence you would find Innovation dying everyday where people are allergic to change.

If it has to happen, It will Happen

A lot of time people just dont want to initiate it. The thought behind is let things go as they are going .. it will happen. This attitude of lay back causes Innovation to die even before it is born.

Just block it
Why do things when they are working fine? Why introduce new things when every thing is good? Wonder what happens?

Budgets, Figures
Extra investment is what gets your profits down. If it can be done by the same people who are already in or even less, then Innovate. I am sure this is something you have been hearing very often. Budgets, dollars and figures always put Innovation on back seat.

Ownership?
Idea created, assigned to someone in Technology further there is nothing. Innovation dies if no ownership exists. I worked in the company where the Sales Manager would bring several small ideas every day to the Team, however there was no ownership in guidance on how , what , when and where... Taj Mahal was never built by the labourers... there was a vision and ownership.

Excessive Pressure

Excessive pressure to deliver always cause Innovation to fail. If your teams are in tremendous pressure to achieve the routine goals of the Team.. Innovation cannot happen when the mind is full with thoughts of survival.

Innovation Teams?

Managements form Innovation teams , dedicated teams to handle Innovations in the organization.. this is a good thought theoretically, but practically it can turn a killer in way to Innovate... Either these teams take monopoly on Innovation.. thus removing the group part of Innovation Or the others in the company start relying ONLY on these Innovation teams.

Now if you are coming across such lame excuses , reasons that stop Innovation in your Teams... wake up, Invest and Build the Culture to Innovate!!!

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Innovation and confusion models

While All my blogs are driven today Innovation and I get queries about confusions around Innovations.. I thought let me explain the different models different companies use to drive there Innovations... Well these are my definitions of it.. but I am sure you would understand that a lot of companies follow there Innovation models in these 3 categories at a higher level...

The Revenue Model :
The model where Innovation is directly linked to Revenue.. here the innovations are made to accelerate the companies growth and Innovation is purely driven by revenue model. E.g. Apple Innovations are driven always by a revenue model.. the Innovation comes on sale immediately after it is out.. Most of the time they are General.

In this model there is less scope of mistakes.. hence u see miniature bugs in Apple products (ignore the iPhone4) when they are launched.. of course no customer wants to pay for bugs..

The Trial and Error Model :
This model gives the Innovation to the word usually for free, initially maybe.. it is left to people for feedback and then once it matures based on community inputs and feedback it takes a better shapes.. I find most of the Open Source projects or even Google fitting into this model. See the examples of Google Wave , Orkut new UI , Buzz?


The Close to Object Model :
This model really drives company that Innovate only for there needs.. These innovations are more driven by internal needs than customer demands.. they are thoughts of 1 or more people who bring it to ease up jobs, they are no pure innovations but instead replicas to cater different needs.. Though these innovations have a certain value they don't have scope to become ultimate Innovations. I feel Yaawhoo falls under these category.. e.g is when Yaawhoo meme was introduced i feel it was a copy and not a Innovation. Yaawhoo Maps, Shopping etc

So what model does your company follow?

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Innovation Teams and Internal credibility

Working with various organizations I have realized that there are 2 types of organizations with reference to Innovations....

1. Organizations that value Innovation and support the objective

2. Organizations that think Innovation is a superstitious concept.

I worked for both type of organizations, eventually there were people in organizations that believed in Innovations, but people within who dont realize what Innovation spans upto. And I worked for organizations which didnt believe in Innovation at all yet had people who were born Innovators. All of these experiences have added a great deal of value to my minimal viable version of awareness about Innovation. When I analysed more on why Organizations that dont believe in Innovations really dont believe in Innovations and why organizations that believe in Innovations fail.. I get through one important fact of life...

Internal Credibility

The trust of your own people. Believe me or not but most of the Innovation teams are challenged by Internal credibility.. to a fact that some Innovation teams do not even take off because there is lack of support from Internal people on it. When you hear statements like "I dont think this will work out", "What's the use of Innovation when the output is not in time?" and so and so.... believe me your Innovation sector is weak.... its time to reform the objective and expectations. A few months ago I sent a email to my team asking them to nominate themselves or Team members for what I called "Innovation Time off" a time off every week or part of every day to work on a project that can bring some Innovation to the Product we work on. In response I got 2 people who initiated thoughtful work on 2 important things...

1. A framework to change delegation model on UI.

2. A snippet that will remove client side dependencies of the application, to access client side data.

Both items rendered and ideate d in a different way for different things. Then came a time when support was needed... weeks of effort when doesn't show any tangible work value questions arise. This is the time when Internal credibility comes into question...

You need a reform when statements/questions like the one below are asked:

1. Is there a timeline to this deliverable?

2. How can we make sure that you get this done?

3. Can we do X instead of Y? Our customers need Y desperately.

4. Its hard for me to justify what you guys are doing, can you tell me what?

5. We failed doing Innovations last time, How sure are we about this time?

6. We have a Innovation team that cares of this. Ask them.

These are the things that takes the blood and oxygen out of your Innovators... If these questions come from customers its fine as they are expecting you to do something, however they dont come from customers.. when it comes from your internal staff... its a killer.

What can you do instead to support your Innovation teams?

1. Ask them on how is it going? Do you want brainstorming sessions to discuss more on your ideas?

2. Hand them a cup of coffee and take them on a Innovation stroll(I will write on this soon)

3. Offer help to support.

4. Innovation leaders should be made to present their progress in various internal meetings.

So what do you do when your Team tries to build a Innovation team? You standup with it or face your back?

How do you support your Innovators?

Do you think you have Innovators within?

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Innovation - Unsold Truth

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. — Henry Ford

You may have read this a million times, almost every time you have read an Innovation related post. Then you have a whole lot of lobby that speaks about Innovation, everywhere. Then there is a whole big lobby that is there to cut the topic off and it asks you to stop talking about Innovations. Eventually the word innovation is a bit unclear to several of those individuals that work together as an organization. A few facts that are usually lost when we speak about Innovation are:

1. Who for?
2. What Problem it solves?
3. What is the solution?

Who do we Innovate for?

Now the question comes. Who do we innovate for? Ask this question to a group and they will say “Our Customers” reality is the statement Henry Ford made above… Your customers are not really looking for Innovations. They are more interested in finding solutions to the problems they face when working on your product. Now if you can convert your thought of Innovation to something like “I will bring X ways to solve Y problem that my customer faces doing Z without me being a Mr. Fixit”. Innovation is nothing but an Idea that has been put to implementation for a reason that it solves a problem. Innovation is not affordable if done for luxury as the target audience is limited to a very specific group that wants to extract values out of those innovations.

Now thinking in that lines If Innovations don’t come out of real need, then those innovations are hard to get a platform. If Innovations don’t come with passion they go in dust bins. Innovations come through source of Ideas by one or more people who are thrived to take them to reality. Just Ideas don’t make great Innovations… because if that was the case then the world would have been a great place? Yes… God had an Idea to create a beautiful thing called Human being, he failed to implement it. Innovation is about making one’s job easy it results in making several other people’s job easier.

Think of Innovating for yourself, your customers will get a value out of it. A friend of mine working for a electronics company mentioned that a group of engineers in his company innovated something called as a Coffee Drill where a robotic component would visit desks and supply coffee, saving the Teams frequent visits to the Coffee house that wasted a lot of there time and of course the effort of the administration staff that had to keep a track of coffee used. The component was done as a part of training assignment for the new joinees and was developed in a month… Win Win… only later they patented it to be sold to other companies…
Now… think of the problems your want to solve… Innovation is on its way

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What is your most innovative thought, One that we cant find on Google

If the answer in your mind is "I dont know" Or "not yet" then its time for you to get your innovation cells activated and do some serious thinking. Yes... Today I had a chat with a graduate student from the University campus session I did last week. He asked me on how he can find a job that would keep him inspiring..

I asked "What do you think would inspire you?"

He said "New Challenges and New things to implement"

I asked "New? what new?"

He replied "New, like twitter, maybe a twitter based startup"

I told him... Think of the Idea and the UVP associated, Yes the value proposition that the users of what you would develop would derive... Think of something that we wont find on Google or Bing or Techcrunch and then define what value it would bring to people, community and user base. An Idea that is just new wont help... an Idea that can bring a high degree of Unique value proposition would, An Idea that is new and brings a high degree of UVP will definitely. Yes we would call it value driven Innovation!

The guy went back... and I am waiting for him to come back with several ideas of his, that he thinks can bring a difference. I assume the thought of innovating the thoughts to innovate is motivating....

So what has being your most innovative thought? The thought that we dont see on Google yet!!!!

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