Tim Brown is an industrial designer by training, and has won numerous design awards.  His team even appeared on a news show, demonstrating how to create a new and improved shopping cart in just 4 days.  His passion is finding ways design can be used to promote the well being of people living in emerging economies. [In fact, many innovative ideas are being created by focusing on these emerging economies].

 He says one of the keys to great ideation is great preparation.  And great preparation begins with a design brief.  Here he captures the power in his own words:

“The difference between a design brief with just the right level of constraint and one that is overly vague or overly restrictive can be the difference between a team on fire with breakthrough ideas and one that delivers a tired reworking of existing ones.”

And I have found this to be true in my work facilitating innovation sessions, though it may seem counter-intuitive.  Often, the clients I work with say they want the brainstorming session to be very broad because they want to “empower” the participants.  In fact the opposite tends to happen.   When the “creativity canvas” is too wide, it actually either leads to too many ideas that are off the mark and not actionable or too many ideas that do not address the most critical challenges. 

As Brown says above, with just the right ending to the sentence – “How might we…” – you too can catch your team on fire with creativty aimed in the right direction!

Now research also shows that employee engagement is a powerful factor in catalyzing “outside-the-box” thinking to improve management and business processes as well as customer service.  This Gallup survey of US workers showed:

• 59% of engaged employees strongly agreed with the statement that their current job “brings out their most creative ideas” – vs only 3% of actively disengaged employees

• Engaged workers are much more likely (6 out of 10) to react positively to creative ideas offered by fellow team members.  Thus, higher levels of employee engagement not only increases the likelihood individual employees will generate new ideas, but also that idea generation among engaged employees can be amplified when it occurs in a team setting. 

What are you doing today to drive employee engagement in your organization?  What if you simply took 20 minutes from your routine staff meeting and used that for brainstorming time?  What tough business challenges is your team facing today that couldn’t be improved by tapping into the creativity of your team members?

Next post…great brainstorming tips and tools!

Okay, from the Accenture survey we know execs think innovation is important.  Below is the Daily Stat email I receive from Harvard Business Review (a very valuable resource that I strongly encourage you to check out).  From this Ernst and Young survey, we can see that only half of the senior executives see their companies as more innovative than their competition – and 17% even say their less innovative than peers.   

There are several reasons cited for this.  For example, while many companies are investing more in innovation, only a few have a rigorous approach for managing the process.  As a result even innovative companies often fail to realize the benefits that their new ideas could produce.

Interestingly, almost half of them blame the lack of appropriate personnel as a major contributor to their lack of innovation.  You know as well as I do that you can’t just go getting rid of everyone you don’t think is creative – and in fact you don’t have to.  There are ways – which I will share with you in later blog posts – for discovering and tapping into the creativity in each of us. 

And this is where you come in.  Strategic, progressive leaders have an incredible role to play in boosting the innovation occurring within their companies – and it all begins with employee engagement.   Next post – some proven ideas for how to engage your top talent.

Apple – Be very clear on your innovation philosophy.   Apple has a clear focus on the customer experience; design takes priority.  Whenever I ask audiences to share what comes to mind when they hear the word “innovation”, Apple is always named.  We can also see Apple as a cautionary tale – if innovation is too wrapped up in one person. You saw the stock price dip (not only for Apple, but for the tech sector in general) when the world learned Steve Jobs had cancer – because he is seen as the creative genius behind all their new product development.  In fact, I have it on very good authority that he is the leader of a 10-person creative team that is the sole inspiration behind all their incredible new products.

Google – Make time for employee innovation.  Very different than the perceived “lone creative genius model” of Apple, Google believes in making innovation everyone’s responsibility.  You have likely heard they allow their employees to spend 20% of their time away from their “real jobs” to focus on their pet projects. You might have just marked that up to their being one of those “weird, California, bring-your-dog-to-work and get-a-back-massage” kind of companies.  But you want to know the real reason Google does it?  The founders tracked the progress of of ideas they had backed versus ones executed in the ranks without support from above.  What did they find? There is a higher success rate with ideas that came from lower in the ranks.  Maybe the ideas were better or maybe it’s just because the commitment to execute was higher.

Proctor & Gamble – High-tech companies aren’t the only innovators.  Very different from these other companies, P&G is an old company with (in many cases) “old” brands and products.  This company has to find new ways to make money in mature markets.   They have an incredible success rate for their new product introductions – but it wasn’t always that way.  It went from 1 in every 6 new product introductions having a positive ROI when AG Lafley took over as CEO in 2000 (about standard for the consumer packaged goods industry) to 1 out of every 2 new product introductions today.  How?  Like Jobs, Lafley had a laser-sharp focus on understanding the consumer needs & he established disciplined, repeatable, and scalable innovation processes.  He also moved the responsibility and source for innovation outside the walls of R&D, and even outside the walls of their own company. Innovation is now completely embedded in their organization.  It is the way they do business.

Starbucks – There is room in the innovation tent for both left-brain and right-brain thinking.  CEO  Howard Shultz had always run the business based on intuition.  Now with the tougher marketplace, he’s having to gather more data.   During one such deep dive into the data, he discovered they were wasting millions in milk since they don’t resteam milk for product safety reasons.  Did they go with a high-tech solution?  No – one of the employees suggested they simply etch a line on the inside of measuring pitchers versus having the barista’s wing it.  According to an interview with Shultz, this became an incredible internal succcess story – and led to more small changes with huge impacts.

Summary:

• Be very clear on your innovation philosophy. 
• Make time for employee innovation. 
• High-tech companies aren’t the only innovators.
• There is room in the innovation tent for both left-brain and right-brain thinking.  

Have you ever been around a “volcanic coworker”—a person prone to angry outbursts? If so, then you know the damage such a person poses to the work environment. When they erupt, they spew out toxic emotions on everyone else and cause irreparable damage to team dynamics.

How do you defuse a coworker who appears to be on the verge of a destructive eruption?

1) Give them safe outlets to vent negative feelings.

Volcanoes erupt because of the building pressure of toxic gases trapped beneath the earth’s surface. If the gases have an escape valve, then no eruption occurs.

2) Keep them away from combustible situations.

Volcanic eruptions are fueled when fresh inflows of molten rock add volume to the caldron of magma boiling under the earth’s crust. Absent of the added inflows, a volcano lacks sufficient energy to erupt.

3) Turn down their temperature by removing stressful assignments.

Volcanoes are triggered by intense heat that can liquefy rock. Reduce the hotness, and your remove the threat of an eruption.