Innovation course. Innovative course

With this post, I would like to make some comments about the present course. In my view, there are many positive aspects differentiating it from all the other courses. In first place, I found it extremely interesting that an innovation course is applying innovation within the same course. In other words, the methodology is highly innovative and to be honest, it was not in my expectations at the very beginning of it. I think I can speak for all that we all had innovation courses before, but never experienced how the topic we were studying could actually be implemented in all aspects of life, including the course itself! It was innovative in a way that the learning process is much more effective by interaction, mobility, new technologies, practice, entertainment and diversity among others. In that manner it was possible to make all our classmates involved in the course, solely driven by intrinsic motivation. Something very important in my opinion is the entertainment factor. In our case, during the course, I think we experienced what employees at Omicron seem to live in their daily lives: having blurry borders between work and fun. No doubt that it leads to higher productivity, just like in our case. Finally, I would like to encourage my classmates to put in practice all we got from the course for our professional and personal lives in the future. Also, I would like to tell the professors that they did a great job, but that is however not a reason to stop here. With an ongoing innovation process lectures will most likely be as successful as this one!

daniel

Class reflections or something similar…

I was just wondering whether I should sit here and blog about what I liked and didn’t like about our class. Of course, I could go on creating my own likes and dislikes, lot’s of them imaginary too, to keep it exciting! But then I decide to read through the blog. Ultimately, I came up with ‘The Hot Quotes’. One thing I noticed is that, most of our ‘intriguing’ class discourse was on creativity! (by the way if you don’t agree with your work/words being recycled, let me know and I will remove the content).

“Little moments like that.” Brad Paisley

Omicron and Hilti Trip

The visit to Omicron was absolutely surprising. I had never imagined that a model like theirs could work so well. It is amazing how you can motivate your employees with this philosophy of giving them so much freedom.
I really had the feeling that the guy who was guiding us was totally into it and loves his work and the company, as he stated, “I don’t really care if I’m home or here, both feels so comfortable.
The growth rate of Omicron is impressing.
At the beginning I though that the Stage Gate doesn’t really fit into this concept, but when he explained, that they are not really convinced by this approach and they adapted it with the overlapping stages, it made sense. It is right now the best possible and available innovation management process for them, but they are looking for something better suiting.
It was interesting, that they open a new department, when the employee rate exceeds 200.

Hilti in contrary are totally sure about the strict Stage Gate Model how Cooper developed it, where each stage is separated by a gate, which is monitored pretty rigorous. They are convinced that this is the approach to follow. There comes a critique point of myself in to play. I’m not quiet sure if they could be open-minded enough to look for other solutions, so to say an innovation of the innovation monitoring and managing process. It did not occur, at least to me, that they are looking for something other.
The presentation was informative and I liked it that the two presenter kind of interacted with each other.
The tour through the factory on the other hand was not that interesting for me. It was more suited for engineers, than for marketing and strategy students. It was interesting for some minutes but in the end too long.

It is obvious that the difference of employees and company size plays an important role how innovation processes could be managed and that the bigger a company is, the more stricter this approach has to be executed.

IBM Trip

The Trip to IBM in Munich was pretty interesting, organized and handled very professionally, way better than BMW in December. I really had the impression that we as students are important for them and they did some effort to make our trip as valuable as possible.
Mister Erwin Jung was a great presenter and host trough out the whole day. It was interesting to get an overview, what IBM is actually doing and some more details, for example numbers. It was totally new to me, that IBM is the world’s biggest Service & Consulting company.
The presentation of Jürgen Nestele had some good points but sometimes it was hard to follow him because of his monotone tiring voice. But he could give a good overview about how innovation and innovation processes are handled and organized at IBM.
The tour through the IBM Lab was interesting because there were so many new things and you could see how they developed over time (e.g. this car check machine). The only critique point was the woman who guided us. She was competent and knew a lot, but could often not really express herself to say, what she actually wanted to say. If the tour is in German I’m pretty sure it will be much better and informative.
The presentation of Thomas Kasemir about how IBM used Second Life gave good insights about how Second Life works in general and what the problems are for handling business there. For me it was the first time that I heard about OpenSim and that here could be the potential to build a secure platform for businesses.

Imitation as an innovation tool? I think so.

every time ibenzi – entangled within a web of confused thoughts – ponders over innovation, (s)he makes it clear that innovation is merely a new way of doing something, which should accrue value for the producer or consumer and maybe even for chimps. this tickles ibenzi a bit. so as his/her thoughts begin to stray far from reality – eroding his/her share of intelligence or whatever is left of it- ibenzi starts to think about innovation tools.

but what is a tool, ibenzi asks. and the Cambridge online dictionary responds “a tool is something that helps you to do a particular activity” – by the way, this is one decent answer you get from Cambridge, if you wanna know about the rest, just look it up there.

imitation helps you to innovate. unlike chimps that learn through observation and limit behavior to what’s been cultured (e.g. boesch 1993), through imitation, companies can transit further into the creation of something new (woojea et al. 2004).

(woojea et al. (2004) identify four stages involved in this, of which two of them seem central as back up for ibenzi’s view: first, external learning, which denotes support from the outside such as product or process based technology, e.g. when you see a technology, copy it and bring it into the company. and second, internal learning and generation, that is, producing new knowledge from what has been gained externally, and generating the technology to improve its capabilities (woojea et al. 2004).

the other two stages include dependent external performance and independent external performance. unfortunately, woojea et al. (2004) do not appear to precisely explain what those two mean (and ibenzi wishfully hopes that they track citations, and they will land on this blog to provide more insights).

with that said, it seems ok not to feel bad about copying someone, and improving what he/she does better. because imitation can be a tool for innovation.

“There is only one thing to do with a person as impossible as she” Jane Austen’s Emma.

Upcoming guest speakers

We have two guestspeakers coming up:

26.1., 18:00

Dan Zellner,
Northwestern University, Improvisation in theatre and its future

Location: Arts building on the NMC Campus, SLURL
To gain access you need to join the NMC group. Join here.

27.1., 16:00

John Shibley, Director of Organizational Learning at EmcArts

Location: Ui2 campus

Required reading: Lessons from the field: Reflections from the front lines of innovation in the arts – Prepare at least one question!

Some pics from our last presentation with Orin Loring. Thanks again to Orin!

See you there!

The Collaborative Innovation (CI) Process

The Collaborative Innovation (CI) process is an integrated collection of best-practice design methods (including TRIZ), enhanced and simplified to support Integrated Product Development (IPD) teams during conceptual design.  The CI process can be applied to a wide range of  innovation efforts, from cost-reduction of mature products to clean-sheet design of new types of products & processes.  The CI process enables an IPD team to: a) focus their innovation efforts on opportunities that have the greatest potential of adding stakeholder value, b) use stakeholder value to guide concept evaluation and selection, and c) create a development plan that will reduce risk as quickly as possible.

The CI Process Steps:

CI consists of the 5 steps shown in the figure below:

1. Value Modeling: Create a weighted stakeholder-value model. Based on input from stakeholder representatives, translate stakeholder needs into a value-based gauge that can be used to evaluate and select concepts.
2. Innovation Focus: Identify where to focus innovation effort to add the most value for stakeholders.
3. Innovation: Innovate in the focus areas, generating a wide variety of concepts that span the design space, minimizing the risk of being “blind-sided” by competitors’ products and processes.
4. Concept Evaluation & Selection: Evaluate concepts, using the value-based gauge, and select those that can add the most value for stakeholders.
5. Risk-Reduced Development Planning (RRDP): Create a development plan to reduce risk as quickly as possible, reducing cost and time for rework.

They key takeaways of CI are:

• CI enables team members to rapidly engage and contribute their background and skills. Al information is accessible to the core team and those who support it.
• CI explicitly captures the team’s assumptions and decisions and with this supports organizational learning.
• CI leads to action by presenting a clear business case for its proposed concepts, along with a logically organized wealth of supporting information so that individual assumptions and decisions can be readily substantiated.

For further information you can inform yourself here http://www.triz-journal.com/archives/2000/06/a/index.htm.

If you are interested to see how IBM uses the CI you can download following pdf file.

-georg

Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT)

SIT is a technique developed with the aim of making of innovation a systematic process. Initially used by the company with the same name, it is a method that seems to be gaining popularity, since it is repeatedly found on the internet applied by different organizations.

 

In short in can be said that SIT’s method involves five major elements:

	Thinking Tools allow users to think in truly new and innovative ways.
	Principles help users to make the most of the tools, by overcoming mental obstacles to innovative thinking.
	Facilitation Skills enhance SIT facilitators’ skills and abilities in leading innovation projects.
	Project Management ensures that innovative ideas are actually implemented.
	Organizational Innovation – comprehensive programs that help: 1) Specific innovative outcomes to be generated and executed; 2) People acquire the ability and inclination to think differently on demand; and 3) Structures to be put in place to support and sustain the new innovation culture and practice.

 For a detailed description of each of the elements, I invite you to visit the website http://www.sitsite.com/app/methodGeneral.asp

 

 

Finally I would like to show some interesting tips by Peter Drucker from his book “Managing for Results”.

DOs

·         Analyze the opportunities

·         Go out to look, to ask, to listen

·         Keep it simple (like Doris), keep it focused

·         Start small – try to do one specific thing

·         Think big – aim at market leadership

DON’Ts

·         Don’t try to be too clever

·         Don’t diversify, don’t splinter, don’t try to do too many things at once

·         Don’t undershoot, or you will simply create an opportunity for competition

·         Don’t try to innovate for the future

 

daniel

Another comment on Stage-Gate Process

As, Doris said “Keep it short and simple”.  In this discussion most of the pro and cons of the Stage-Gate Process have been mentioned.  But I found also some points, on which I disagree:

I don’t think that  the Stage-Gate process does increase the likelihood of a product success. Here we need to distinguish between incremental and radical innovations. As the new product success or failure is largely decided in the first few plays of the game, some ideas will never get through some stages and gates, because the gate-holder can not imagine the potential of the idea or how to realize it. Thus, radical innovations could be stopped in an early stage.

On the other hand, I also think that it is important to have some kind of formal innovation process. Doing so companies can cut down costs, by standardizing the process and give some requirements for products at a given stage.

I think that the concept of Stage-Gate process should not be viewed that rigid, but rather should be some guideline for companies on how innovations can be managed.

Cu

concurrent engineering

As Doris already mentioned, one of the disadvantages of the stage-gate-process is it sequential approach. In order to overcome delays in the innovation process, parallel activities are considered as a powerful way to reduce the development time. A widespread approach is the so called concurrent engineering or integrated product development. The core of the concurrent engineering is the simultaneous design and development of all the processes and information needed in NPD. Improving product manufacturability and quality while reducing development cycle time and cost is in the main target. This is done by resolving product, process, and organizational matters at earlier stages. In Hilti‘s case, their process designers would start developing manufacturing processes in close contact with product designers even before the product specifications are completed. Hence the project phases overlap and the TTM decreases.

Nevertheless the approach of concurrent engineering has to be adjusted to the company in order to get a efficient solution. The simultaneously running activities need to be chosen and program priorities set. Also the level of innovation and technical risk have an influence on the design of the program. To successfully implement it, the top management‘s involvement is considered as the key factor – Good luck!

-tim