Are You an Innovator? (Part 4)

By Rasul Sha'ir, 15, July, 2008
 

THE BUILDING PERSONAS

The four remaining personas are building roles that apply insights from the learning roles and channel the empowerment from the organizing roles to make innovation happen.  When people adopt the building personas, they stamp their mark on your organization.  People in these roles are highly visible, so you'll often find them right at the heart of the action.  

7.  The Experience Architect designs compelling experiences that go beyond mere funtionality to connect at a deeper level with customers' latent or expressed needs.  When an ice cream shop turns the preparation of a frozen dessert into a fun, dramatic performance, it is designing a successful new customer experience.  The premium prices and marketing buzz that follow are rewards associated with playing the role of an Experience Architect.

8. The Set Designer creates  a stage  on which innovation team members can do their best work, transforming physical environments into powerful tools to influence behavior and attitude.  Companies like Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic recognized that the right office environments can help nourish and sustain a creative culture.  When a business team doubles its usable output after reinventing its space and a sports team discovers a renewed winning ability in a brand-new stadium, they are demonstrating the value of the Set Designer sometimes discover remarkable performance improvements that make all the space changes worthwhile. 

9. The Caregiver builds on the metaphor of a health care professional to deliver customer care in a manner that goes beyond mere service. Good Caregivers anticipate customer needs and are ready to look after them.  When you see a service that's really in demand, there's usually a Caregiver at the heart of it.  A Manhattan wine shop that teachers its customers how to enjoy the pleasures of wine without ever talking down to them is demonstrating the Caregiver role - while earning a solid profit at the same time. 

10. The Storyteller builds both internal morale and eternal awareness through compelling narratives that communicate a fundamental human value or reinforce a specific cultural trait.  Companies from Dell to Starbucks have lots of corporate legends that support their brands and build camaraderie within their teams.  Medtronic, celebrated for its product innovation and consistently high growth, reinforces its culture with straight-from-the-heart storytelling from patients' firsthand narratives of how the products changed - or even saved - their lives. 

Are You an Innovator? (Part 3)

By Rasul Sha'ir, 7, July, 2008
                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

THE ORGANIZING PERSONAS

The next three personas are organizing roles, played by individuals who are savvy about the counterintuitive process of how to move ideas forward. In an ideal world a great idea should speak for itself, but even the greatest concepts will continuously compete for time, attention ad resources - and no one knows this better than the Hurdler, the Collaborator and the Director. Those who  adopt these organizing roles don't dismiss the realities of budgets and resource allocations as 'politics' or 'red tape' but they recognize it as a complex game of chess and their endgame is to win.

4. The Hurdler knows the path to innovation is strewn with obstacles and develops a knack for outsmarting those roadblocks.  When bad news or a problem arises the hurdler doesn't become frustrated but sees the situation as a challenge and an opportunity to be creative in solving the problem he/she is now facing.  The end result could be a new solution for an ongoing problem with the company.

5. The Collaborator helps bring eclectic groups together, and often leads from the middle of the pack to create new combinations and multidisciplinary solutions.  Whether it is an entrepreneur building a team of sustainability innovators to begin creating business strategies for industries that will decrease your carbon footprint by 15%, or you are a customer service manager who wins over a skeptical corporate buyer to the idea of brainstorming new forms of cooperation, and the new program doubles their sales, the role of collaborator is being played successfully.

 6. The Director not only gathers together a talented cast and crew but also helps to display their creative talents. When a creative Swedish entrepreneur assembles a block of businesses in Northern Sweden which included a car dealership, a McDonalds restaurant, and a gas station (selling both gasoline and biofuel) to begin creating a "Geen Zone", an industrial region free of fossil fuels, you have a an example of a role model for Directors everywhere - directing, organizing and assembling all the necessary moving pieces to makes sure the initiative is a success. 

Are You an Innovator? (Part 2)

By Rasul Sha'ir, 3, July, 2008

THE LEARNING PERSONAS

Individuals and organizations need to constantly gather new sources of information in order to expand their knowledge and grow, so the first three personas are learning roles. These personas are driven by the idea that no matter how successful a company currently is, no one can afford to be complacent.  The world is changing at an accelerated pace, and today's great idea may be tomorrow's anachronism.  The learning roles help keep your team from becoming to internally focused and remind the organization not be so smug about what you "know." People who adopt the learning roles are humble enough to question their own world view, and in doing so they remain open to new insights everyday.

1. The Anthropologist brings new learning and insights into the organization by observing human behavior and developing a deep understanding of how people interact physically and emotionally with products services and spaces. When an IDEO human-factors person camps out in a hospital room for forty hours with an elderly patient undergoing surgery - as described in the first chapter of the book- she is living the life of the Anthropologist and helping to develop new health care services.

2. The Experimenter prototypes new ideas continuously, learning by a process of enlightened trial and error.  The Experimenter takes calculated risks to achieve success through a state of "experimentation as implementation." When BMW bypassed all its traditional advertising channels and created theater quality short films for bmwfilms.com, no one knew whether the experiment would succeed. Their runway success, which underscores the rewards that flow to Experimenters is talked about in greater detail in the second chapter of the book.

3. The Cross-Pollinator explores other industries and cultures, then translates those findings and revelations to fit the unique needs of your enterprise.  When a open minded Japanese businesswoman travels 5,000 miles to find inspiration or a new brand, she finds a concept an ocean away that sparks a billion-dollar retail empire, and demonstrates the leverage of a Cross-Pollinator.  Her full story is captured in Chapter 3 of the book.

Are You an Innovator?

Asking if you are an innovator is one way of framing the question.  But the better question to ask, which really gets to the crux of the issue is, do you possess the character traits of an innovator?  Well obviously the next question begs to ask, What are the character traits needed to navigate the sea of change towards the shores of innovation?

Well according to Tom Kelley, the general manager of IDEO, the worlds's leading design consultancy specializing in product development and innovation (they are the ones who first brought us the Apple mouse and the Palm hand-held and hundreds of other cutting edge products and services) tells us in their book The Ten Faces of Innovation that there are ten personas necessary for innovation.  Those ten personas are broken up into three categories:

1.  The Learning Personas

2.  The Organizing Personas

3.  The Building Personas.

This approach, as Tom Kelley mentions in his book, highlights ten people-centric tools developed at IDEO for the success of creative problem solving that could eventually lead to groundbreaking ideas. These are personality traits needed by individuals and by teams of people to successfully orient yourself in a way that allows you to see the possibilities with new eyes and with a fresh perspective and allow you the ability to execute with efficiency the desired outcomes you would most like.  

The ideas in the book are not the end all be all in the world of creative problem solving.  What is does do is lay down an excellent foundation for which an entrepreneur, small business, or a large organization can begin to use as an initial guide for developing or seeking out the talent that can help serve as a guide to being leading edge industry thinkers and doers in today's extremely competitive marketplace.

What I personally like about the ideas that Tom Kelley puts forth is that his premise is about how to engage - and do it well.  How to re-imagine and re-define.  And how to disassemble and then reconstruct your "business DNA" so that your perceptions and understandings of the market allow you to have unique insights in your respective fields - which is invaluable.    

As you read over the next few days the 10 personas, it is important to keep in mind that these are not inherent personality traits.  They are able to be studied, learned and acquired - with the potential to lead you down roads of ingenuity, creativity, and hopefully to the endgame of - innovation.

Stay tuned. . .

Innovation vs. Rubik's Cube

Ok.  So at first glance you might say why are these two being mentioned in the same sentence? 

On the one hand one represents groundbreaking ways in which things are done.  The other is a cube shaped game/puzzle/toy with different colored stickers on them. 

What’s the connection?

Well interestingly enough these two things are more similar than you think. Innovation is a puzzle to be solved (how do you do it)?  So is Rubik’s Cube.  Innovation has many faces.  So does Rubik’s Cube.  Innovation requires you to think about the right combination of moves that bring you to the solution you want.  So does Rubik’s cube.  And on every level innovation and Rubik’s Cube requires a hands on approach.  You can’t figure it out by looking at it from a distance.  You have to engross yourself in  it.  Pick it up and turn it around.  Look at it from every angle to figure out the strategy that gets you on the road to the destination called 'solution found' and 'puzzled solved'. 

This is what you need to do to be successful in today’s market.   To understand that in order to be competetive, be that go to person, that problem solving guru or the solution finding expert, you have to think about the multiple facets of the market. You have to be comfortable with the act of engagement, and be aware of how the right combination of ideas and strategies can lead you to new solutions. The key to understanding today’s market is knowing its dynamics and being fully aware of how it can and will be impacted, just as Leslie mentioned in the last post; “you have to think as much about the possible financial, personal, professional, community, environmental, social, and industrial consequences of your endeavors as you do the benefits."

To be on the cutting edge is no longer about excelling in one endeavor – "how much money can I make?" Its about redefining the relationships between ideas, products, services, and industries and shifting paradigms on how we perceive and interpret the world. 

This is why we think that the approach to addressing today’s complexities in the market is not about 'thinking outside the box', as we have previously mentioned, but thinking at the intersection, the place where new ideas, tactics and strategies converge and create new possibilities for innovation. In a discussion with one of my good friends, Tony Nguyen, who runs his own company called BlogPatrol,  he commented on one of our earlier posts and said that “not only is discussion of "the box" outdated, but there is no box . . .the box has collapsed like so many pieces of cardboard. Those on the cutting edge are refolding the pieces like Origami into innovative new shapes”.  I never thought about it that way.  But I liked it.

When we move to the place where convergence happens we are now at the threhshold of new ideas (and ideas already happening).  For us convergence is the intersection of two or more market trends (i.e. social networks, crowdsourcing and cell phones).

Examples include Nike Plus (Nike + iTunes), Eventful (event planning and crowdsourcing), iPhone (cell phone, PDA, MP3 player, camera, computer – and, with the launch of the 3G on July 11th, GPS unit), Netflix (video rental and social networks), eBay (auctions and e-commerce), Zipcar (car rentals and car ownership), Busboys & Poets (restaurant, bookstore, theatre), Tryst (coffeehouse, bar, lounge and workplace), Hollywood (business and movie-making), venture philanthropy (donations and management), corporate social responsibility (executing the triple bottom line , which is a convergence itself), live-work units, PS3 (blu-ray player, game playing) -  and this is only scratching the surface.

Interestingly enough Booz Allen Hamilton just published a book entitled Megacommunities, which begins to lay down an action plan for solving the world’s most complex problems, that identifies convergence (from an organizational perspective) as a critical feature for resolving global issues in the 21st century. 

With the multiple examples of this market trend Vosica and CooltownStudios are in the process of exploring this concept further as well.  Inspired by this idea and by a handful of other shifts in the market  we are developing a Convergence Conference to take place in Washington DC later this year.   

So there you go, innovation and Rubik’s Cube (and throw in the intersection and convergence for good measure); systemized creativity, a six-colored cube and couple of cutting edge market trends .  A few ideas 'on the verge'?  We think so.