One of the take-aways from the 2^nd Annual Open Innovation (OI) Summit was the criticality of communication (see previous post) for success.  Let's think, who ‘owns' internal corporate communications?  Frequently, internal communications falls in the gap between areas of responsiblities, people are not well trained on how to communicate and it becomes ad hoc.  Yet, we hear, and know, that communication is key.  Ok, let's add innovation to the equation.

For many companies creating a culture of innovation means getting some people who are passionate about some ‘thing' together and letting them go for it.  There probably isn't a reward or recognition system, they may not even be freed up from their ‘day-job' - they do it because they want to, have a passion to.  Even when successful, the group's work will probably be unknown in most of the business, which impedes replicating that passion/excitement/success throughout the company.

So, we have a paradox:

• Open innovation wants traditionally internally focused innovation to look outside
• Marketing wants traditionally externally focused communication to look inside!

Marketing, or internal communications, needs to be a concerted part of the innovation initiatives.  Jeff Boehm, Chief Marketing Officer of Invention Machine discussed the best ways to, and not to, create an internal marketing program at the OI Summit.  Tell your people what's happening, use appropriate means of communication (LCD/TV displays around buildings, break rooms, etc., posters, email, internal wikis, internal tweets, newsletters, etc.).  None of this is rocket science, yet it's rarely done. As with so many things, make innovation relevant - help your people understand how this can help them at work, how they can contribute, how it makes a difference.  Promote what you're doing - just as you create a plan for external communications, do the same internally, perhaps around regular events like quarterly reports, monthly employee meetings etc.  Make it easy to get involved - provide some form of recognition, don't add layers of bureaucracy.  Lastly, be consistent and continuous - keep communicating about opportunities, training, projects, successes and failures so it becomes a constant part of the culture.

Quick - what company do you think of when you hear "Open Innovation"? Many think of P&G - they were, and are, at the forefront of Open Innovation (OI) and the results are now case studies at business schools around the world and benchmarks for many.  I had the chance to talk with Chris Thoen, P&G's OI guru, at the 2^nd Annual OI Summit.  It seems that everyone has interviewed him and if you google him, you'll find a lot of great learnings on how P&G has grown their OI initiatives and made it a part of their culture.  Of course I wanted to ask him something original, so, being interesting in how we learn, and apply, from failure, I asked Chris what he thought was one of their key failures and what they learned from it. The answer surprised me. 

When P&G was setting up the Connect + Develop website around the world, it was originally in English because English is the global language.  After a while, they noticed that China was not generating the same level of activity they were getting from other countries.  After studying the problem, they learned the website really needed to be in Chinese.  So, it was converted to Chinese from English, yet still activity lagged.  After further study, they learned that it wasn't just a linguistic translation issue, it was a style/format...yes, cultural issue.  Websites in China are more dynamic, more active, than western websites where the content and graphics tend to be more static.  In China, the graphics and images are moving constantly.  Again, the website was re-designed to be more culturally in sync with the target audiences in China and the results have shown the success...activity levels are more comparable to elsewhere.

Lesson? Even for a big successful company like P&G, what you think is being ‘local' may not be local at all.  You need to understand the culture of the audience in both substance and form.  We usually think of ‘localizing' in terms of the product or service - e.g., the package, size, colors, consistency, other features/functions.  How often do we consider how we convey the message? How we engage them? How do we get them involved? This is an important part of being a global organization and I thnk one that is often, and easily, neglected.  So, learn from others' mistakes and apply! And be humble, if the big guys make mistakes, have failures, we all do - live and learn!

 

 

 

 

It's been over a week since the 2^nd Annual Open Innovation (OI) Summit ended.  Many who are more eloquent than I have already written about the Summit (see last paragraph), but there are 3 related issues I'd like to share.

Soft Skills - this was a huge theme of the Summit.  Gail Martino of Unilever was the first speaker and truly set the stage on how critical soft skills are to open innovation's success (innovation no matter what).  Some of these skills are teachable, some are not, but all can make or break a relationship with a potential OI partner and OI is based on trust.  In the workshop with Jackie Hutter, Mike Riegsecker, and I the day before, we coined the term "Redundant Trust Relationships".  Partners need to have several trusting relationships with each other at several different levels.  Gail discussed how Unilever's success has been due to the win-win relationships they create with various partners of various sizes, many of whom are much smaller than Unilever.  Unilever's top 7 skills are intrapreneurship, talent for relationship building, strategic influencing, quick study, tolerance for uncertainty, balanced optimism, and passion.  The problem is it's hard to assess and ‘quantify' the soft stuff which is why it's often it is just paid lip-service.  We are conditioned to focus on the tangible and quantifiable.  Some of my compadres and I have been working with the Classic Virtues as a way to help develop the soft skills for innovation.  Stay tuned as we develop this more and be sure I'll be running it by Gail for her input - Unilever has a lot to teach us as they stay on their journey.

Where is HR?  This leads me to a question: Where is HR in this innovation discussion? Not there! In fact, I only heard HR discussed 2 times - in the workshop by Mike Riegsecker, GM at Menasha Packaging and by Moises Norena from Whirlpool.  Mike has innovatively used HR for innovation.  He'll be going into more detail on how HR can be an integral, strategic leading part of innovation  at the Innovation³: Network Building, Culture, and Tools conference in December.  In my entire career, I've never seen HR used as powerfully and strategically as Mike has - leading the innovation effort resulting in profitable solutions for their customers and themselves.  Of course, a lot of this has to do with Sharon, his head of HR and a lot has to do with the culture and environment at Menasha Packaging - a reinforcing virtuous cycle.  Moises discussed how Whirlpool's innovation efforts were mutli-disciplinary, involving many different parts and functions from within Whirlpool with HR taking the lead in talent development.  Most companies use HR tactically - come up with the training, some talent development and many HR folks act tactically too.

Failure - A great untapped source of learning:  This was not discussed that much in the Summit itself but became a hot topic outside the ‘ballroom' and in the twittersphere.  Stefan Lindegaard is compiling a great list of resources for learning from failure and has started a discussion of how to ‘operationalize' this learning.  Call it what you will - failsourcing, smartfailing, whatever, but we need to learn from this in a easy to use, easy to share way.  So contribute to the conversation, please!

As you can probably tell, all 3 of these are very inter-related.  Discovering how to integrate them and how to nurture them so they flourish in your organization can give you an enormous customer and competitive advantage...and give you and your team a lot of fun!

Thoughts? Any other great stories of failure and success to share? Please d0

Worthwhile Insights into Conference: It's very worth your while to read their insights, summaries and probing questions as they will make you think and hopefully engage your people in innovation.  Stefan Lindegaard, regarded by many of us as one of Open Innovation's global gurus discusses the top 3 trends he gleened from the conference.  My friend, Andrea Meyer, points out that great, frequent, communication is vital to open (and closed) innovation, which may seem obvious but is something almost all of us struggle with.  And Robert Brands provides terrific summaries of day 1 and day 2 at his site.

Haven't blogged in a bit, but today I was part of an interactive workshop at the 2^nd Annual Open Innovation (OI) Summit  on "Overcoming Internal Challenges Of Adopting Open Innovation Strategies" with my friend Jackie Hutter and my client, Mike Riegsecker of Menasha Packaging . We discussed a case study (genericized to keep anonymity) of an open innovation situation.

The issues here are very real and come down to how people are incented and rewarded, what they feel they have at risk (personally and professionally) and how you try to overcome the obstacles.  Take a look at the case study and you decide.....don't read further if you haven't figured out your own solution...and there is no "right" or "wrong" answer - it depends on your organization's culture.

 ------------------------------SPOILER-----------------------------------------

 

The group decided not to proceed with an OI agreement with this company for 2 key reasons:

1. The financials were not compelling enough to do license the technology given an ROI of 3yrs and 18 months of losing money.  The investment of $4.5 M (for each plant + training) combined with the $15M capex to support the licensed technology might be better used to speed up internal development of a similar technology (knowing that achieving commercialization of the ‘in-the-labs' technology within 3 yrs was ‘iffy').
2. The technology company was owned by a competitor, but more so, has a history of litigiousness.  This was a big showstopper for the underlying reason for being litigious - TRUST!  OI is all about relationships which are based upon trust.  If this company has a history of suing, that says a lot about the ability to trust them and build a strong working relationship.

Bottom line? Trust is key to OI!  And the need isn't just for a one-2-one trusting relationship (e.g., the 2 marketing folks like each other) but what we called "Redundant Trust Relationships" - a new term we coined in the meeting.

As we've discussed in previous posts , you can learn and use all the tools, you can have the greatest ideas, you can have marvelous markets...but at a fundamental level, open innovation is about relationships between companies which means between people - and these must be based on, founded on Trust...the key ‘ingredient'

Thoughts?

MaryAnn Stump feels her years as a cardiac critical care nurse prepared her well for her ‘vocation' as Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota: your focus is on the most desirable outcome, you're dealing with tremendous ambiguity, you have to read the environment to know what to do and you have seconds to respond (at least in most innovation situations you have a bit longer).  Her clinical experience has made her passionate about really reforming and transforming health care delivery to patients.  MaryAnn sums it up well: the model has to change to "bring care to you instead of you to care".

MaryAnn recognized early on that retail clinics were a disruptive innovation with all the elements of Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation model, and she was instrumental in supporting retail clinics in her region.  She believes one of the problems with America's health care system is an ‘organic' problem-the existing immune (health care) system is so incredibly strong that it fights off even good ‘intruders' (e.g., transformation).  It tends to fight anything that threatens the status quo.  What an apt analogy! Retail clinics were one model that radicalized traditional care delivery because it is an advanced practice nursing model, not a physician model.  For MaryAnn, this new model that can be a more significant part of how care can be successfully delivered-through a team that includes physicians, nurses, pharmacists-each team member practicing fully within their training- addressing key patient needs of affordability and accessibility.

MaryAnn believes retail clinics may receive challenge from yet another transformation-online care which it encompasses three keys to success in transforming delivery of care: 1) cost control; 2) effective use of health IT (administrative, electronic medical records, etc.) and 3) fundamental care model change, bringing care to the patient.  In November 2009, she helped launch "Online Care Anywhere" for Blue Cross of Minnesota's 10,000 employees and families providing every day access to online care via web camera, text message or telephone..  MaryAnn is working with American Well, a developer of a national online care service providing patients with access to physicians through the Internet, secure chat, telephone or their company's online care rooms equipped with webcams..

And this is where MaryAnn posits that what she's doing as not unique to health care.  She is prototyping!  She is taking ideas, adapting them to her company's culture, and doing a proof of concept-a pilot-a prototype.  She then takes the learning and applies that-an iterative process.  This is no different from what any innovator must do: create, prototype, get customer feedback, learn, apply, prototype, get customer feedback and so on.  In fact, that is how she got to where she is.  She created her own job-the title followed.

So what drives MaryAnn's innovation? Passion and purpose.  She is passionately committed to the mission of health care and transforming how patients receive it.  I noted she seemed to view this as a journey of fun and frustration.  Exactly, she concurred-which are her key personal traits: optimism (fun) and resilience (frustration).  That is the reason for her success in getting others to buy-in to innovation.  Yet again, it's all in the ‘soft stuff', which is not most people's comfort zone.  The challenge for our quantitative society is that often what counts is not countable. After all, it's all about relationships-that is the gist of health care isn't it? So it's not surprising that it is also the gist of innovation!

Come hear MaryAnn talk about how to handle this ambiguous, competitive world at the Open Innovation Summit, August 11-13^th in Chicago.  And be a part of a discussion on how to overcome the internal issues around OI .