Near term – Mainstream visual SEARCH technology for anything

Visual Search Technology. This concept is already here and having Google behind it will propel its growth into the future.  As the engineers suggest in the video, “visual search technology is in its infancy.”  Its on its way to greatness as Google indexes user pictures, then connects all of its aggregated information with the picture. We’ve already seen the power of scanning bar codes and images with our phone’s mobile apps to get additional pricing information, reviews, and more, but what if you could take a picture of anything and get additional information and insights.  As our devices continue to get more sophisticated cameras along with standard GPS technology AND as Google crowdsources location-based pictures from us (another example of The Machine is us/ing us), we envision visual search becoming mainstream for anything anywhere… especially as we travel.

Midterm – Smart visual COMPUTING applications and devices

The concepts shared by Pranav Mistry at TED illustrate demos of several new tools that will help bring the physical world and the digital world together, helping us get out of sitting at the desk to get work done and to get information. Creating screens out of anything and enhancing our physical objects with creative digital overlays appears to be breakthrough technology and we envision practical consumer products being on the market in a few years.

Long term – Morphing Nano TECHNOLOGY that adapts to its visual surroundings

This video produced by Nokia illustrates the breakthrough innovation nano technology could have on the way our future technology morphs into its visual surroundings and provides fresh value through morphing.

What binds all of these concepts together is how they ALL interact with your VISUAL surroundings.  Is that random or is their deeper meaning to that?

* Eric Weaver – Account Director and Strategist at Tribal DDB Worldwide
* Dave Hanley – CEO & Principal at Banyan Branch
* Daniel Rasmus – Author of “Listening to the Future”
* Kristen Ruby – CEO, Ruby Media Group
* Dr. Udi Schlessinger – Managing Partner, U Labs
* Darren Williger – President & CEO, Regillo Consulting Group
* Bille Baty – COO & Managing Partner, Phi Concepts
* Jeff Dance – Founder, Fresh Consulting
* Joe Kennedy – Founder of Eastside Entrepreneurs and AKA “The Connector”

Social Media 201 is sponsored by the Microsoft Local Engagement Team and Comcast Business Class. Supporting organizations for Social Media 201 include Fresh Consulting, Eastside Entrepreneurs Social Network, Ruby Media Group, Banyan Branch, Regillo Consulting Group and Tribal DDB Worldwide.

Mike Whitmore, President of Fresh Consulting from Bellevue, Washington explains, “the concept for Social Media 201 stemmed from the Social Media 101 Conference the Eastside Entrepreneurs and Joe Kennedy hosted last September at Microsoft. The 101 Conference helped educate business owners about what social media is and why companies should participate. The new Social Media 201 Conference is designed for those businesses that have begun to delve into social media and want to take it to the next level, find a path to profitability and measure return on investment.”

Registration for the event is available at www.SocialMedia201.com. Use the discount code FRESH to get an additional discount.

Twitter feeds on the event are available from Twitter.com/SM201CONF and you can follow the event tweets via the hashtag #SM201

The Microsoft Conference Center provides free wireless Internet connectivity. A complimentary lunch is provided for attendees thanks to Comcast Business Class.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE VISIT

www.SocialMedia201.com

Our approach to efficiency is outdated
The scientific management movement developed distinct processes to decouple management and labor and break down skills into discrete automated tasks with the goal of removing inefficiencies and implementing measurement and control. It worked. The more efficient you were, the more money saved and subsequently the more profit. As a result of scientific management, manufacturing improved and prospered. In the majority of the 20th century, it represented a huge portion of the world economy. But in the 21st century, manufacturing is on the decline and knowledge workers are growing; they now outnumber manual laborers 4 to 1 (Haag, S., Cummings, M., McCubbrey, D., Pinsonneault, A., & Donovan, R. (2006). Management Information Systems For the Information Age (3rd Canadian Ed.). Canada: McGraw Hill Ryerson).  The worker and the work have changed and so should our approach to efficiency.

Knowledge workers are thinkers and creators, not repetitive robots
Many companies try to implement best practices for manufacturing work with their knowledge workers, but the principles of scientific management were for producing tangible products, not intangible ones. Knowledge workers are thinkers and creators, not repetitive robots. Instead of empowering people and finding their talents and encouraging them through incentives that align with company goals, we try to manage people like machinery since most workers sit inside expensive cost centers. The faster they work, the more money saved, right? Wrong.

Efficiency in knowledge work is different than efficiency in manufacturing work
Efficient manufacturing meant that you were able to duplicate products quickly. In knowledge work however, duplication of efforts mean inefficiencies exist. Implementing processes intended to improve repetitive manufacturing efficiency won’t work for knowledge workers.

Rather, knowledge workers need processes and technologies that …

INCREASE

• collaboration with each other
• connections and relationships to get insight from others
• creative efficiency to produce new knowledge and product
• transparency of existing documents to build upon

and DECREASE time spent:

• duplicating work
• searching for documents
• locating others they need to talk to
• finding knowledge that will help them
• re-building something when a template already exists

Duplication is a primarily culprit in inefficient knowledge work
There is a huge amount of duplication occurring in companies and government bodies. Did you know there are 15 government agencies that inspect food? (see source here) It’s not uncommon for global companies to find company workers in other countries doing the exact same work. Reducing duplication is critical in big companies.

When someone starts a new project you lose a lot of productivity if they have to duplicate work that has been completed in another part of the company. For any company that delivers intangibles, giving a worker the ability to locate and access work that has already been completed can deliver huge efficiency gains because centralized documents and forums reduce the need to repeat answers.

Here are some stats that illustrate the problem with inefficient knowledge work (Thanks to a compilation of stats in a Microblogging and Enterprise 2.0 whitepaper from Social Text):

• IDC Research found that “…knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time.
• For the Fortune 500, the cost of the fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs.”
• The Delphi Group found that employees spend 1/4 of their time looking for information. A Butler Group study also found that employees spend 1/4 of their day searching, which accounted for 10% of labor costs.
• Intel and Cisco internal studies independently found their employees spend a day a week searching for people and information.
• A Bersin & Associates study finds that most senior-level executives spend hours each week searching the Internet in frustration for business-related information that will help them stay informed and current.
• “Only 13% of people can find someone with a particular area of expertise in their own company” according to a 2008 IBM study of 400 HR executvies.

Email is the large culprit of our duplicated efforts since knowledge is 1) transferred, 2) purged, and 3) re-created therein

1) Knowledge is often TRANSFERRED through email

• A lot of the knowledge work and knowledge transfer happens in email. In fact, IBM reported that “Email is now estimated to be the platform for as much as 75% of company IP”
• Knowledge is found in conversations and attached documents
• And knowledge often results from conversations. An email chain fits the definition of a conversation since conversations are connected thoughts in a given context; but if we want to share an email conversation, we end up flooding everyone’s inbox.

2) We PURGE our email and thus purge our knowledge

Our corporate inboxes are often limited to a certain size, causing us to purge our individual inbox of the knowledge we have in our conversations, reports, and attached documents.

3) We keep many email conversations and attached documents private when they could be public, requiring RE-CREATION later on

We are asking and answering questions in our email siloes that could be answered automatically if people were connected into each other’s work status, projects and knowledge.

As a result we end up re-creating prior conversations and documents created sometime in the past.

The result: DUPLICATION

If you are like everyone else, People costs are your #1 expense, so efficiently is still vital
Around the globe, people costs are companies’ largest controllable costs. Because people are expensive, it’s important that we make them as efficient as possible to provide the most value to the company they all benefit from. Greater efficiencies save money by:

• freeing people to add value in other areas of the business
• refraining from having to hire new people and contractors and
• reducing the number of staff involved

Enterprise 2.0 technologies have stepped up to the plate recently with a new approach to efficiency
Enterprise 2.0 apps extract the value from the emails into a common platform so that important knowledge is captured and used by everyone given access. Notifications may still reach our email inbox, but important knowledge in emails are not hoarded and forgotten, or purged and lost. Here’s how enterprise 2.0 technologies enable greater efficiencies for knowledge workers:

• Knowledge Repository: When you know there is a repository for answers, templates, studies, research, reports, and analytics, you can search for the the aforementioned.
• Connections: When you know how to find the right people to help you, you spend less time looking and less money on outside help.
• Transparency: When you know what people are doing, it requires fewer reports and requires less duplication of something someone else has already done

Enterprise 2.0 adoption will help break the duplication silos and signficantly increase efficiency
I was doing a pricing strategy work for a client. The marketing group did their own analyses, the finance group did their own analysis, and the statistics group did their own analysis. These departments rarely shared their results. Instead, they hoarded their knowledge and used it when supporting their favored position when the three groups disagreed on a plan of action. If they had all shared their analysis, they would have avoided 50% of their work and created an understanding for mutual goals.

Enterprise 2.0 encourages collaboration, sharing, aggregation, and recording. Having knowledge that is accessible, indexed, and searchable in a digital format helps everyone reduce duplication and build on each other’s work. This helps a company come together and work as a collective team, no matter how large the company is.

Whenever you reduce duplicated efforts, you have more time to contribute to value-add contributions. That means more time to be creative, more time to connect, more opportunities for collaboration, and less time looking for information and searching for people.

This is not just a theoretical post; I’ve witnessed the aformentioned problems as a consultant to many other companies and I’ve seen the benefits from implementing collaborative and social Enterprise 2.0 software.  I’ve made my case and emphasized the benefits to help inspire change necessary for upheaving the old and implementing the new.  If you’ve taken the time to read this long rant, do you believe me?  Why or why not?

Web 2.0 is worth it for business

McKinsey Quarterly’s “Global Survey” analyzed responses from 1,700 executives to derive the business benefits gained from using Web 2.0 tools across three areas: internal within the organization; external with customers; and with suppliers, partners and experts. Now in its third year, the study has found that respondents who use Web 2.0 tools most often reported “greater ability to share ideas; improved access to knowledge experts; and reduced costs of communications, travel, and operations,” in addition to decreased time to market for products and improved employee satisfaction – these benefits are nothing to snide at.

Companies who have tasted the benefits are continuing to invest

Now, it is easy to feel confused given the inundation of noise and buzz about Web 2.0 and how it equates or even relates to real, tangible business benefits. After all, we as consumers and personal users of Web 2.0 tools have embraced these technologies adding friends and sharing information on social networks, rating and reviewing restaurants on review sites, writing about life events on blogs … but we are just beginning to see true adoption in the enterprise. However, this study by McKinsey is continued proof at even the executive-level, of some of the largest companies, that full-fledged adoption of the right Web 2.0 tools, at the right time, with the right strategy will indeed bring business benefits. If you don’t start dipping your feet in the water to get on board and become a more networked company now, you could be left behind, trying to surf ahead.

Those who are on board (networked companies) “report that their companies have gained measurable business benefits, including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

And not only are they adopting now but the study found that even in the midst of this current recession, “respondents overwhelmingly say that they will continue to invest in Web 2.0.”

In fact, McKinsey’s study found that the more you use Web 2.0 technologies, the more you network and collaborate with others, the greater the benefits – something John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison of the Deloitte Center for the Edge elaborate on in their Harvard Business School article, “Introducing the Collaboration Curve .”

Three areas are driving benefits

Although networked companies all use a blend of Web 2.0 tools, those that are most often used range from automatic information feeds such as RSS or microblogs, to traditional blogs, wikis, and podcasts – the same tools that are popular among consumers.

So exactly what do networked companies do with the tools to realize benefits across the aforementioned three areas (internal, customer, partner)?

1. Networked companies integrate Web 2.0 tools into the work flows of their people and experience powerful internal benefits. The increased “interactivity promises to bring more employees into daily contact at lower cost. When used effectively, [Web 2.0 tools] also may encourage participation in projects and idea sharing, thus deepening a company’s pool of knowledge”
2. Networked companies look outside the four walls of the firm and experience shared benefits with their customers. The new and tighter relationships created have “increased customers’ awareness and consideration of companies’ products and has improved customer satisfaction.” These companies treat their customers differently and collaborate to “jointly shape and cocreate products using Web 2.0 connections,” resulting in net, new revenue.
3. Networked companies leverage learnings from using Web 2.0 tools internally and with customers to generate better ties with suppliers and partners. These closer ties enable the ability to gain access to expertise from within the new network and they also equate to “lower costs of communication with business partners and lower travel costs.”

It’s not just new technology, there’s more to it

Obviously technology alone will not give you all those benefits. Management practices, a Web 2.0 strategy, and organization and cultural characteristics contribute significantly. McKinsey in particular found that: “three aspects of management were particularly critical to superior performance: a lack of internal barriers to Web 2.0, a culture favoring open collaboration (a factor confirmed in the 2009 survey), and early adoption of Web 2.0 technologies”

The study goes on to elaborate on adoption reporting that informal incentives such as ratings by peers and recognition of status have been most effective in addition to modeling active Web 2.0 use by executives.

Simply speaking, Web 2.0 delivers benefits by multiplying the opportunities for collaboration and by freeing up knowledge to spread more effectively.

Since the term Web 2.0 was coined back in 1999 and then made popular in 2004 by O’Reilly, what Web 2.0 really means has been debated over and over across the blogosphere while adoption and use of “Web 2.0 technologies” have continued to evolve at an increasingly rapid pace. The question we’ve all been asking is, is it worth it? Three years of analysis later, McKinsey says yes. And we would agree – call it what you will, Web 2.0 is worth it for business.

• 1. Fresh Technology: the left circuit board side of the logo that represents our core focus on emerging web technology
• 2. Fresh Thinking: the right brain side of the logo which represents the right creative side of our brain and our core focus on innovation and creativity (all that is fresh)
• 3. Fresh Talent: the stem leaf that brings together both the left side and right side and represents our focus on fresh talent that is both tech/web savvy and creative

A logo shouldn’t need an explanation, but we created a short animation to highlight the significance of our sophisticated side.  The video animation is a whopping 14 seconds!  I think if it would have been over 15 seconds, then our logo explanation would be complicated rather than sophisticated, but the 14 second animation packs it in.

Look forward to your thoughts/feedback on our logo if you think it can be improved. If you like what we’ve done with our logo or animation, let us know if you need help designing a logo or producing some video animation.

• We spend our whole life trying to buy security from the unknown, to ensure KNOWN outcomes so that we are protected from everything that might be UNKNOWN…such as a death, a car accident, a fire.
• We got life insurance, healthcare insurance, car insurance, disability insurance, homeowners insurance, personal property insurance, casualty insurance, state and federal unemployment insurance, income insurance via social security and retirement savings …the list goes on and these are just basic insurance types.  You can see many more types here. Businesses have their own class of insurances and derivatives to ensure earnings.
• Becuase of our interest in KNOWN outcomes, we spend a large amount of our income insuring ourselves and our businesses to reduce our risk. (My wife and I are fascinated at the cost to just live and breath with basic insurance, even if it is a very simple life)  But it can feel very re-assuring to have insurance even though we all seem to pay an arm and leg for it.  For those that worry, it helps them worry less.
• For many of us, we work for big companies that provide us with a comfort of job insurance.  The larger the company, often the more insured you might be from termination.  And even if you do get the axe, you will likely end up with a very nice severance package.

The Rollercoaster Ride of Risk

• Now lets examine entrepreneurial innovation.  Entrepreneurial innovation is all about taking big risks! Big risks that can have completely UNKNOWN outcomes.  What a radical opposite from all of the insurance that we surround ourselves with.   Moreover, being an entrepreneur can also mean lower quality insurance plans.  So, with our enormous interest in insurance, it seems counterintuitive to be an entrepreur and take on so much risk and forgoe so much security.

• Ronald J. Baker, in his book Pricing on Purpose, sums it up well:
  “The history of business is the history of dreamers, and entrepreneurs, those rare individuals who cast aside the security of a paycheck, mortgage everything they have, and chase a dream that ends up creating our futures. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to this process as the ‘perennial gale of creative destruction.’ The tempo of business is not one of stability, order, and a level playing field, but rather of disequilibrium and instability. Stability and equality only exist in the graveyards.“

The Reality: it’s not for everyone

• Entrepreneural innovation isn’t for everyone.  A start-up is often a rollercoaster ride with highs and lows and unexpected drops.  It takes quite a bit of energy and ethusiasm to bear the UNKNOWNS and quite a bit of committment and dedication to forgoe some of the insurances that come from working for a big company.  Trying to create something new that no-one else has done before takes guts.  And it gets more difficult the longer you wait…the spouse, kids, car, mortgage, savings, retirement exponentially contribute to tying you to a needed KNOWN paycheck.
• That’s why one of the most common attributes in successful entrpreneurs is Enthusiasm among the UNKOWNS.  They often have a well of hope and energy that helps push the team forward and forgoe things now in hope of better things to come.

The comfort of taking this risk

• If you do decide to take the entrepreneur leap, take comfort in the fact that millions have gone before you.  Every small to big business you see in your community started with some person in their “garage” following their vision who decided to step outside the comfort level of KNOWN outcomes and explore the UNKNOWN–trying to create something new that has value to others.

Feedback

Let me know if you agree with my contrast between insurance and entrepreneurial innovation?

PS: Innovative idea for an insurance entrepreneur

Hey, maybe someone will be clever enough to come up with an entrepreneur insurance, where you pay a premium to insure yourself if you fail and ease up the ride while you search for someone else to pay for all of your good insurance.  Good idea/bad idea?

1. Associations
2. Speed
3. Connections
4. Energy &
5. Implementation

First, collaboration increases the chances of ASSOCIATIONS between ideas that result in an innovative combination.

In the European Journal for High Ability, it references the Scientific Genius by Dean Keith Simonton, where he says “gifted products involve productions

of a large number of associations, more or less randomly or blindly, and the chance occurrence of ‘configurations’–happy combinations that represent just what is needed to solve the problem in question.  The gifted achiever is especially good not only at producing associations, but also at recognizing that a configuration has occurred, and grasping that it offers a solution.” While the above quote references a gifted acheiver, it is relevant to groups because the more people involved, the larger number of associations will be made from different perspectives.  The inventor may not even originate the idea, but he might combine his half idea with an another’s idea to realize an innovative “configuration”.  To say it in other words, our half ideas associated with other’s half ideas can make whole innovative ideas.

Second, collaborative feedback SPEEDs up the necessary iterations
An innovative solution is often a combination of ideas, from conception to delivery. Robert Weisberg, Creativity expert and author of Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts studied famous creators and suggested that creative production results from “chains” of connected ideas that flesh out the original thinking.  Collaboration with others can speed up the chains of connected ideas that result in something innovative.  Speed is the last great competitive advantage, so if you want to deliver something fresh, speed is crucial to delivering innovation before others do.  Having open-minded people around you can quickly validate whether the idea will have merit and help build upon that idea…and alternatively, they can help you save time by burning through bad ideas.

Third, Collaboration results in more CONNECTIONS to people that can help push a good idea forward.
Successful innovation involves more than a great idea.  Even if it’s ground breaking, you need to promote the idea so that others adopt or buy into it.  You might need capital.  You might need partners.  You need great people to help execute the idea. Collaboration with others expands your social circle of connections to make things happen.

Fourth, Teams provide ENERGY and help overcome the expected resistance
New ideas are often borne into a hostile environment and a team of people can provide the support to push through the hierarchies of inertia.  If you are employed, good ideas not invented by management can be seen as a threat, thus, having a group helps push through the expected resistance and doubt.  Team feedback can also provide energy to keep the each other going through periods of unknown outcomes.

Finally, collaboration helps ideas reach IMPLEMENTATION
Innovation results from implementation of a complete solution or idea.  There are a million good ideas floating around in the creative genius of the world that will never get implemented because most people are tied to to their paychecks and family obligations and can’t afford the risk.  All of the aforementioned reasons contribute to helping an innovative solution reach implementation.

While collaboration is key to innovation, convergent thinking is still a risk.  The best way to overcome this is to incorporate diversity into the group and to let individuals do a combination of individual and group work.

Because being on the edge of innovation can bring rejection from the populous and loneliness, you need to collaborate with others that are open minded or share a similar vision.  Entrepreneurship should no longer mean that you have to “go it alone.”  Collaborating with others is easy in the 21st century (you can start today online) and it is key to your innovation success by providing the associations, speed, connections, and energy necessary for implementation.  If there is no implementation, there is no innovation.

Feedback
What are other reasons why collaboration contributes to innovation?  Do you agree with my reasoning above?  Why or why not?

Studies have shown that highly creative people are highly intelligent but highly intelligent people are not always creative.  The fact that highly creative people have a higher correlation with intelligence than vice versa suggests creativity is simply a higher form of intelligence.  (see Handbook of Creativity, page 261 for support)

Beyond the studies, consider the following simple supporting examples:

Regarded highly intelligent people were also creative: Highly intelligent individuals such as Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Beethoven were highly imaginative, curious, and creative–all creating new concepts and ideas that have value.  For example, Einstein’s  famous “thought experiments” were the key to coming up with the Theory of Relativity.  Einstein imagined what it would be like to ride a light beam and from thenceforth sprung his insight and understanding of the nature of light and time.  This is not to suggest that Einstein didn’t also have a deep understanding of quantum physics and mathematics (measures of his IQ) but his breakthroughs started with his creative imagination.  That’s probably why he said “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”  Ultimately, our high regard for these intelligent individuals comes from their innovations that only their creative intelligence could aspire.

The creation by the Supreme Creator: Life on this planet is so diverse and so imaginative.  Just watch one of the six Planet Earth DVDs created by the BBC.  The abundance of creative life is astounding.  If you believe in God, you most likely consider him Omniscient and the most intelligent person on this earth.  No wonder the Supreme Creator is sooo creative!  He gets to exercise his intelligence by creating life and being imaginative.  If you already know everything, this seems like a great way to pass time.  If creativity weren’t the highest form of intelligence, we would probably have a couple species instead of millions.

Creativity is the highest level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Once we get beyond survival mode, we have the capability to exercise more fully our intellectual powers to create.  Creativity, spontaneity, and problem-solving (often an innovation trigger) are in the upper most triangle of maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  That is because the upper tier called self actualization represents our need for knowledge where we have enough time to exercise our intelligence and be creative as we strive to improve ourselves.  We can think bigger picture rather than focus on putting food on the table.  I submit that this is the primary reason why the pace of change has been so dramatic in the past 100 years.  Everything has finally aligned so that we have more time to exercise our highest form of intelligence.

Our historical innovation and quest for more innovation: From cave man to renaissance man to modern man, our imaginative thinking has led us to create continual incremental and breakthrough innovation that has accumulated into the luxurious life we enjoy today.  As human beings, we all love to create in some form or fashion.  What other species is continually creating new things?  Why do homosapiens do this?  Well…we ARE the highest form of intelligence on this planet and that’s why we are more creative than the other 1.6 million known species.  We aren’t comfortable with the status quo.  We repeatedly like to make stuff better, faster, cheaper, stronger, easier…  The continual creation of new stuff is an expression of our intelligence just as the ongoing changes in the universe could be an expression of God’s intelligence.

The emotional satisfaction that comes from creativity: Music, fine arts, dance, drama, writing and more all involve creation of something tangible or intangible (i.e. knowledge work).  From young age to old age, we find deep satisfaction in creation.  Why do we like to color, to draw, to play legos when young and later on to create new products, new companies, and new music?  We are a highly intelligent species and our our highest form of expression brings satisfaction to the soul!  Some would call this emotional, some would call it intuition, and some would call it spiritual.

Unfortunately, our highest form of intelligence is not well measured, well recruited, or well known.  We are well-trained in our schools to suppress creative thinking as we are most often measured on knowledge recall rather than knowledge creation.  As a society, we often look for safer forms of measurement and recruiting using historical knowledge and tested methodologies.  (And that is the irony–because creativity is always risky).  Its no wonder some of the brightest minds ever known have been school and social rejects.  And it is going to take many risk takers to get our systems and methodologies to step up to higher ground and find more balanced ways to measure our intelligence and recruit for success.  Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, is one of those influential risk takers looking to make big changes to our educational system.  Here is one of his inspirational speeches on the matter…

Do you agree that Creativity is the highest form of intelligence?  Why or why not?

• fresh marketing approach that helps grow our customer base (value)
• fresh process that saves us time (value)
• fresh products that help us grow revenue (value)
• fresh line of services that customers appreciate (value)
• fresh way to collaborate that saves time and helps us communicate better (value)
• fresh technology to help us be more productive and organized (value)

• fresh thinking that that challenges the status quo and helps us think of new profit potentials (value)
• fresh talent that comes up with new and valuable ideas more often than those comfortable with the status quo.

The reality is that innovation is broad and it must be narrowed to have meaningful action.

Leadership often expresses the need to innovate becuase they are interested in new value creation.  When they express the need to innovate, it’s important to delve into specifics and translate their feelings associated with innovation into something tangible.  Otherwise, using the word innovation may sound good, but it can be interpreted as… jibberish.

Feedback

What other examples can you share?

Berkun’s well written argument published here at Harvard Business Review suggests that we use the word innovation to simply mean something “great”.  He cites things like the Apple iPhone, Google search engine, and Pixar’s films as examples of output we all herald as innovative…not b/c they were the first ones, but because they produced great output many of us love.  He also suggests that people classed as innovative are not thinking about innovation or trying to be innovative, rather, they are just focused on great output…and innovation is the perception of successful output by the masses.  Berkun has good reasoning here–because something perceived as “Great” by common consent could mean that we all value something that has impacted us.  This is one key ingredient to the definition of innovation.

While I believe Berkun’s explanation helps simplify the implied meanings that go along with using the over-used “innovation” verbiage, I believe its still missing something…because “great” things are not always innovative.  There are great products that we all love… reliable barbeques, cars, planes, microwaves, music players that are not innovative.  Great may mean reliable, safe, or quality.  Things may be coined “great” by simply meeting a standard/expectation.  A microwave may be “great” because it never breaks down or a car may be “great” because it gets good gas mileage.  Clearly, “great”, like “innovation”, can also be very vague and ambiguous.

All great products may have at one time been innovative when they were first out (i.e. the first car, the first barbeque, the first plane, the first microwave), but as Berkun illustrates in his article, being first is not a requisite for being innovative. Those that are first in a category are by default new, but being new isn’t the sole qualifier for innovation nor is it required to be innovative.

Its also no easy task to create something great valued by masses, so kudos must be given to Apple, Google, and Pixar for creating sophisticated stuff yet so elegantly simple for the masses to understand, appreciate, and use, but we label these companies as “innovative” for something MORE than just “great” products. So if being “great” does not wholly mean innovative and if being “first” does not wholly mean innovative, what does?  I believe its the combination of the two.

The other missing meaning associated with “innovation” is that it must also be fresh.  This may mean that only part of the item is new.  The Apple iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone and the iPod wasn’t the first music player, but they were completely fresh approaches and many intuitive elements were new. The Pixar films also took on fresh imaginative approaches that were valued by users/watchers and Google built something elegantly simple and intuitive for us to use, yet extremely complex under the hood.

My colleague from Deloitte Consulting’s strategy practice, Brent Dance (and cousin), corroborated, with this paraphrased explanation:

“Fresh is different, intuitive, and imaginative….like when we see something like the iPhone and it just feels like it should have always worked like this, as if everything to date has failed to perk our imagination until this “fresh” concept came along.  It’s more than great because it MEETS our imagination.  In short, I believe the word “innovative” is a human attempt at explaining a phenomenon that we feel but can’t explain in words … but we do know it is something not only great that impacted us, but also something imaginative, different, pragmatic, and elegantly simple.”

If innovation is also associated with our human feelings, as Brent suggest, it’s no wonder it is used so differently, and yet, this does not mean it doesn’t deserve definition.  Innovation should be defined–and “fresh” + “great” (something we value) makes our intended meaning of innovation whole.  While that may still be ambiguous, it may further clarify our usage and help us better understand our intended meaning.

Feedback

Do you agree that innovation must also be “fresh” and “great”?  What does innovation mean to you?