In times of uncertainty we search high and low for answers to our overarching question, “How do we dig ourselves out of the deep pile of…stuff we’re in?” If there are qualifications for uncertain times, present economic indicators demonstrate that all criteria are not only met but exceeded. And our search for answers (and perhaps a shovel) continues in haste.

With very few macro-economic levers left for government officials and public policy experts to pull as they try to shift the economy into a growth pattern, our range of vision and influence narrows. We won’t find big fixes no matter how hard we look. Larger businesses have cut costs dramatically and now find themselves with large cash reserves, waiting for the economy to turn around. They patiently await orders for more products and services, before they place any orders or invest in anything themselves. Essentially, each large enterprise is waiting for the next firm to blink.

Instead of waiting for bail-outs or big business-driven economic up-ticks, we must turn to one of the greatest sources of scalable economic activity and innovation, the small to medium enterprise, for our answers. When highly functioning, these smaller enterprises know how to: make scarcity work for them (they live it every day); work closely with their customers to meet their most pressing needs; and make rapid learning the activity that gives them momentum in the marketplace.

More with less
No complaint … is more common than that of a scarcity of money.
- Adam Smith

In the popular press (whatever that might be today!), it’s difficult to get a firm handle on what’s going on, or better yet, what could go on with small businesses. By their nature, small businesses are harder to classify and quantify than their big business brothers and sisters. If we consider the small enterprise to be a business of fewer than 200 people, it still leaves a bulk of the economic activity of most developed countries and nearly every developing country. These are the firms for whom bootstrapping is not something done only during times of economic distress, but all the time. They know how to stretch a dollar, or euro, or peso. But that’s not the only thing they know how to stretch.

Time, not just money, is a malleable resource, too. How you invest your time—and on what—drives a higher return on investment. For small businesses stretching time, doing more in a shorter period, gives them an economic leg up, especially when it comes to embracing and extending technology. Smaller firms have many advantages as innovation sources because they are quick to adopt new and high-risk initiatives; they facilitate structures that value ideas and originality; and they have a better capacity to reap substantial rewards from market share in small niche markets. This first-mover advantage was created by and for the small enterprise. It enabled them to get closer to customers other firms little-realized existed.

Closer to our customers
There’s a lot more business out there in small town America than I ever dreamed of.
- Sam Walton

By decreasing their cycle time, small enterprises can do more for their customers than most large enterprises would commit to. The small enterprise, which usually carries with it a smaller customer base, can remain closer to their customers’ various needs—a distinct advantage over many larger businesses. This means smaller firms can pick and choose where and when to provide innovative products and services. By virtue of their size, the small business can choose to invest a larger proportion of time, energy, and expertise to discover the depth of their customers’ needs, and then pursue those needs by creating innovative solutions.

This closeness to the customer experience is also driven by the need to maximize their share of their customers’ expenditures. By remaining close to the customer, the small enterprise can seize newly arising opportunities to provide value and increase revenues simultaneously. Correspondingly, by seeking to win more business by remaining close to existing customers, the cost-of-sale is driven down, which has a positive benefit to the bottom line: a positive, deep relationship is usually a more profitable relationship. And when there a fewer customers, it’s usually easier to read which ones will be more profitable than not, and that means more effective targeting for higher risk efforts that may yield greater innovation benefits.

Faster mistakes
With any loss, you want to try to regroup and learn from mistakes.
- Elena Leon

Which leads us to another reason why small enterprises are a better bet for long-term economic recovery—they are learning machines. For an employee to add to an innovative process, it may take time for them to understand the research agenda of, and challenges faced by, the firm in which they are employed; in other words, an employee may need to move up the learning curve before adding to the innovative activity of the firm. In a smaller enterprise, that learning curve may be much shorter. Existing processes and systems may be much more fluid. The amount of information to be learned and retained as working knowledge may be smaller. Better yet, the social network through which so much learning and experimentation takes place is smaller and easier to navigate, too.

For the smaller enterprise, the whole employee pool can be geared toward discovery. Each interaction, whether with an internal peer, or an external client or supplier, can be seen as an opportunity to explore possibilities. Within that exploration will be a series of hits and misses. This doesn’t mean that the inherent failures associated with trying something new within a smaller enterprise are less impactful—far from it, but it does mean that the recovery from those missteps may be easier and often shorter.

This is not to negate the impact of the larger enterprise on economic recovery, because without them there would be no recovery, as they provide a stable foundation for the broader economy. But it is to the smaller enterprise we should look for more rapid improvements. The smaller enterprise is thrifty by nature, eager to embrace its customers’ experiences, and willing to risk—through innovation—for greater reward. Unlocking the power resident within small enterprises is key to broader economic recovery. We’ll explore some of those methods in future posts.

I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
- Wimpy

The way companies position their investments in research and development (R&D) or capital programs speaks volumes about the kind of innovation culture they possess. Increasingly, large companies stick to their innovation investment programs in the face of broader internal cuts in expenses. According to Booz & Co.’s special report “Profits Down, Spending Steady: The Global Innovation 1000,” by Barry Jaruzelski and Kevin Dehoff, some companies are even increasing their innovation spending in the hope of being better positioned for the longed-for economic upturn. Which would seem to be a sign that things will improve soon, right?

Not so fast.

Big Business does not represent the national economy
An article by Zachary Karabell in Time magazine recently described the divergence of large, market-capitalized companies’ performance from the respective economic performance of their headquarter nation-states, where previously they were linked quite closely:

Stocks are no longer mirrors of national economies; they are not — as is so commonly said — magical forecasting mechanisms. They are small slices of ownership in specific companies, and today, those companies have less connection to any one national economy than ever before.

The key message was that because of their ability to spread both their exposure and investment across multiple geographies, large companies had inoculated themselves against the impact of any single national economy. The ability of USA-based companies to straddle economies, in some cases by deriving more than 50 percent of their revenues overseas, has meant that they’re no longer profoundly impacted by the US economy, nor are they a true indicator of US economic status.

The economic upturn fake-out
While the US economy languishes with unemployment near 10 percent, faces housing foreclosures once again on the rise, and wrestles with a multi-trillion dollar plus-sized deficit, companies live in a different world (or possibly a parallel universe). The majority of publicly traded companies are beating analysts’ earnings estimates (250 beat estimates and 54 disappointed) and sales estimates. The gap between the US economy’s performance and US-based companies’ performance is also reflected to a lesser extent in the dire straits of the European economy and the reasonable success of EU-based companies. They, too, continue to thrive and spend on innovation.

At the heart of our success lies our commitment to innovation.
- Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

Why are companies spending big on innovation when all indications say that we are in this economic mess for the long haul? The problem with a strategy that cuts back on all expenditures during an economic downturn is that you discover unpleasant consequences years later — when you’re lagging behind your competitors. By then it’s too late. It seems today’s companies have learned the lessons of the past. Immediately following the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, companies pulled back so far that their response to the economic upturn was delayed to the extent that competitors gained toeholds, or their enterprises folded, origami-like, in on themselves. They became small, misshapen relics of their former glorious selves.

Consider the examples of Nortel, Corning, and Cisco. Nortel died (its shares trading on their final day at $0.185, down from a high in 2000 when it comprised a third of the S&P/TSX composite index). Corning has taken the better part of a decade to recover (notwithstanding the emergence of its current breakthrough product—Gorilla Glass—discovered in, oh yes, 1962!). And Cisco, once the most valuable company in the world, finally figured out that having all one’s eggs in a single basket wasn’t a safe bet under any economic conditions, and is now built for survival.

Diversification via innovation is now seen as key. Hurray! Which is fine, but what happens if all this innovation takes place but there’s no one willing to buy it? Consumers without jobs don’t consume.

Is innovation really the answer to our economic woes?
Certainly the consumer space in the USA has tightened up remarkably, an indication that things won’t be turning upward any time soon. During this recession, the trend of consumers switching to store-brand labels and other cheaper alternatives has dug into the profits and dominant market shares of brands owned by P&G, the world’s biggest consumer-product maker and seller of many of the most premium-priced household products on store shelves. Of note was the recent news that for many of its core brand staples, P&G has reduced prices by as much as 10 percent. As for its premium-priced brands, the so called “nice-to-haves,” expect those prices to increase to offset the high volume product price drop.

The reality is that if you are doing well in this economy, either as a company or an individual, you will continue to do well regardless of a statistical double dip.
- Zachary Karabell, “A Double Dip Recession? Who Cares?” Time Magazine

The challenge with the current economic situation, and its associated strong company performance, is that investment in innovation by large companies will do little to improve the lot of the many people still living in recession conditions. In a report released earlier this month, the US Congress Joint Economic Committee observed fragile and uneven growth for the US manufacturing industry. The report cites 136,000 new jobs that the manufacturing sector created in the first half of 2010, but notes that inventory restocking may be responsible for much of those gains. For the millions of jobs lost, adding a little more than a hundred thousand is but a drop in an ocean. The unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, but that doesn’t begin to cover the enormous chaos on the job front.

The “true” unemployment rate (combining figures for workers who have dropped out of looking for work, to the underemployed working multiple part-time jobs, and those actually counted in the unemployment roster), is figured at closer to 17 percent. Total hours worked and total compensation have both declined. And the easy consumer credit and housing-backed affluence have gone, never to return. Essentially the economy has bifurcated.

Are we cheered up yet? No? There is a way forward.

Each month 400,000 new small and micro-businesses start in the USA. At present, there are 5 million (yes, million) small businesses (100 employees or less) employing far more people than the Fortune 100. If we are going to look to innovation as a transformative tool for unleashing creativity and improving the economic outlook of the majority of the population, it is to small businesses that we must turn. If we help build them, more could come to the table to promote a stronger economic upturn. They could be active participants in energizing an economy that not only helps people survive, it could once again be an economy where many could thrive.

Big business innovation is not the answer. It simply can’t create the number of jobs fast enough to pull us out of this economic funk. What can we build together to unleash the innovation residing in small and mid-sized enterprises?

And next week it looks like we may discuss: cultural problems in an org where ALL is innovative and nothing actually gets done!

#innochat – transcript August 5 2010

Thanks to Renee Hopkins for moderating this great topic – lots

#innochat – transcript July 29 2010

In honor of the recent football (okay, soccer) World Cup—and congratulations to South Africa for pulling off a sterling tournament (Bafana Bafana!) and the Spaniards for their first tournament victory—it seems appropriate to consider the impact of the herd on innovation practices. Not just any herd, though; this is the herd that forms when two opposing packs of 5-year-olds play the glorious game: the herd of Pee Wee Soccer.

Sound and motion with little to show for it
For those of you who don’t have children or have not seen children this age playing soccer, you have missed what certainly is an experience. The rules of soccer seem immaterial. Yes, there is a ball in play. Yes, there are referees and linespeople. Yes, there are goals at each end of the usually shortened field and two equal-numbered teams of players. The basic framework is the same, but the way the game is played is quite…different.

The pervading game objective practiced by both teams is to quite literally “crowd the ball”: where the ball goes, that’s where all players attempt to go, except for those few who become distracted by a parent or sibling on the sideline, or by the color of the sky, or by something bright and shiny, or need to re-enact football hooliganism an so on. You get the picture. What forms is a tight pack around the ball, hiding it from the spectator’s view, and which moves as a herd up and down the field. Occasionally the ball will “escape,” only to be recaptured by one of the team members who, in their inability to run and dribble the ball simultaneously, will stall until the rest of the members from both teams re-form the herd.

No one here but us sheeple
The greatest difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

What of this herd? And what does it have to say about the impact of the herd mentality on innovation? A short explanation can be found here.

Given our complex worlds with their voluminous sensory inputs, we are wired to adopt a series of mental shortcuts (termed heuristics) that enable us to process only the amount of data necessary, in as short a time as possible, to meet our immediate needs. Think of heuristics as experience-based models that help in problem-solving and discovery. They drive much of our daily behavior without us even recognizing it. The reason they are effective is that they relieve us from treating every circumstance as critically important, offering relief from having to think too hard. Is it really necessary to calculate the optimum parking space at the mall, taking into consideration timing, prevailing weather, shopping patterns, etc.? No? Right—open space, here I come!

By employing heuristics, we create a series of short cuts that enable us to focus on more complex issues, more holistically and systemically, as the need arises. Heuristics, however, reinforce situational thinking and action. In recent studies conducted at the University of Leeds in Great Britain, researchers discovered that it takes a minority of just 5 percent to influence a crowd’s direction—and that the other 95 percent follow without realizing it. If we hearken back to the heady days of the dot-com book in the early 2000s, we can see this pattern in the practices of developers, who threw together “me-too” websites; institutional investors, who threw money at anything with a website; and stock market investors, who piled their money into every “sure thing” they heard about from their hairdresser, dog walker, or cab driver. And that herd behavior ended well, didn’t it?

Wise crowds and the benefit of discomfort
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
- Archibald MacLeish

Unless we take steps to separate ourselves from the crowd and seek to break our ingrained patterns of thinking, we will continue to be drawn to the herd. In James Surowiecki’s bestseller The Wisdom of the Crowds, he noted that there are highly functional types of groups that possess not a herd mentality, but an inherent wisdom. From his perspective, if four basic conditions are met, a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts. Surowiecki says that wisdom will prevail even if members of the crowd don’t know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. “Wise crowds” need 1) diversity of opinion; 2) independence of members from one another; 3) decentralization; and 4) a good method for aggregating opinions. In short, effective groups need guidelines (like heuristics), but ones that are focused on differentiation and not similarity. “Me-too” has to be retired so that “What if” might prevail.

Unfortunately, when wisdom meets the herd, the prevailing outcome is the dumbness of the crowds.

To reach beyond the herd, organizations must embrace difference and the discomfort that comes from not adopting the first, or easiest, answer to a presenting challenge. Clay Shirky, a professor in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, described in his book Here Comes Everybody the benefits of groups breaking out of the herd mentality and moving toward “collaborative production”:

Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound. New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of coordination.
Shirky, pp. 109

Over time, even the Pee Wee Soccer team learns how to play the game. Each player discovers his or her own strengths, and a good coach will recognize those differences and create something greater than a mob out of them. Their efforts become grounded in collaborative production. In our organizations, innovation processes that support our thinking and don’t provide ready answers give us the opportunity to develop solutions that reach beyond the herd. We can choose to stretch past the simple and explore the complex so that our solutions are new and not “me-too.”

We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.
- General George S. Patton

Being in a herd is actually a matter of choice, one that must be made consciously in order for a range of alternatives to be revealed. In a competitive marketplace, would you rather be in the herd, where the view rarely changes, or out front? I thought so.

In a world awash in opportunities there is so much to be explored (and so much time to wasted.) Let’s spread ourselves too thin, shall we? There are so many ways in which energy may be spent, resources consumed, and money burned. For an organization with IADD (Innovation Attention Deficit Disorder) a world with multiple possibilities is not a good thing. Indeed it may be crippling.

How does this affliction manifest itself? (For more go here)

When introducing innovation into existing, stable organizations and systems, you must navigate around authority. Like the tip of an iceberg, the influence of authority across an organization may be quite visible, but that only accounts for a small percentage of the influence it has on the successful introduction of an innovation. The types of authority involved are not only the explicit authority that comes with subject-matter expertise, role definition, and position within a hierarchy, but also the perception of authority, real or imagined. That influence lies hidden from view but is no less profound, especially when you run into it.

Rather than dwell on the explicit authority, we’ll explore three different aspects of perceived authority: directed deference, projection bias, and asymmetric insight. Each bias offers a different slant on the challenge of authority to the viability of innovation. Once again, forewarned is forearmed.

I don’t know much, but I know I love you
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
- Albert Einstein

There is an ongoing infatuation with the idea of the heroic leader in organizations that belies the true extent of their power and capability. Setting aside his tin ear and habit of only opening his mouth to exchange feet, Tony Hayward, the ever-hapless and likely short-term CEO of BP, is a case in point. While serving as a focal point for the ire of a nation looking on in horror at the disaster playing out in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of BP’s oil spill, Mr. Hayward can personally do little more than remain the public face of his company. Our expectations of him as a leader have not been met. For some reason, we actually expected him to correct the damage his company has wrought. A similar pattern exists in the way people appear to perceive President Obama. In both cases, the circumstances these leaders find themselves in overrun the public’s perception of their responsiveness and capabilities.

Each leader has been measured and found wanting. But the reverse is true, too.

We love the myth of the heroic CEO. The man or woman who, through their personal excellence, intestinal fortitude (aka, guts), and general capacity for delivering results saves the ailing enterprise is a tale we love to hear. Much of the reporting of a company’s success refers to the role of a heroic CEO. This too is a false perspective. We ascribe collective success to individuals, especially in circumstances where we have little understanding of the context in which success was achieved.

This mindset is termed directed deference, and it represents the tendency to value an ambiguous stimulus (e.g., a company’s financial performance) according to the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic. For those who seek to innovate, it means that what is and is not possible may be impacted by our perspective of those who lead us. If we fail to question our perspectives, we may kill an innovation before giving it an opportunity to grow into something meaningful.

I’m feeling you
All authority belongs to the people.
- Thomas Jefferson

Another aspect of the way our perspective on leadership can influence innovation choices is found in projection bias, the tendency to unconsciously assume that others (or one’s future selves) share one’s current emotional states, thoughts, and values. The weight of our own perspective means we may color our choices based on personal experience rather than the facts on the ground.

The impact of projection bias on innovation is one of homogeneity. The inclination to look across the organization and see only ourselves, or slight variations of ourselves, limits what we can conceive. Our leaders, and their motivations, look like our own (or what they would be if we were in the same position). This means that our attempts at innovation may suffer from small ambitions and a limited will to see them to success. Or we may misread what the organization can tolerate and over-commit resources to fruitless endeavors.

Knowledge and understanding are essential to avoid the pitfalls inherent in this slanted perspective.

I know you are, but what am I?

Rather than having a twisted perspective of a leader’s motivations and attributes, what if we think we know others better than they know us? A reversal of the directed deference perceptional bias is the illusion of asymmetric insight, which occurs when people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers’ knowledge of them. Instead of seeing an authority figure external to us, we find one in ourselves. Falling into asymmetric insight bias means we believe our keen powers of insight and remarkable personal ability to assess the mannerisms and patterns of behavior in others enables us to stay one step ahead of the experience curve. At an extreme, we consider ourselves flawless prediction engines.

The only problem with this is that in the absence of data, our predictions are not rooted in any basis of reason, and our successes come from pure luck rather than wisdom.

From an innovation perspective, we are mentally running through the childhood taunt, “I know you are, but what am I?” a never-ending response to all perceived or actual slights or criticisms. Whether ignoring the evidence of a particular situation or ascribing our innovation success to our ability to second-guess others’ motivations, we are playing a foolish game.

How do we address these biases? How do we contend, in the absence of any meaningful information, with the over-reliance on position or status as a signifier for comprehension, wisdom, or insight? The answer comes through observation and engagement. By taking the time to assess the ways in which our innovation efforts are perceived and understood, we can gain more data that will inform our decision-making and design practices. But unless we seek to close the gaps in our ignorance with data gathered through inquiry instead of our own biases, our innovation efforts will struggle to be realized.

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Image credit: the only one

One of the great challenges for those focused on improving their organization’s innovation culture is the desire, at the end of the day, to be able to point to something and say, “that’s better than it was before.” That desire, to measure our performance against an agreed upon set of measures, is not a bad thing. The way that need is acted out in the organization is where it comes undone. This is most problematic when the push is to measure in purely financial terms.

The drive to see some kind of return on innovation investment has a strong pull. In a time when every penny, cent, fen, or kopek is being counted with scrupulous accuracy, the notion of not counting the programmatic contribution of innovation in monetary terms seems ludicrous. Unfortunately, if you were going to spend money on a program that offered fast return on your investment, spending on changing your innovation culture would not be the wisest investment. Investing on your innovation culture is a long-term play, as they say. Yet, it should be a focus for investment and it should be measured.

The key initial measures to watch for when building an improved innovation culture are:

Overall we are talking about a process that reduces cycle time.

In fact, the Boston Consulting Group’s 2009 Annual Innovation Report highlighted the fact that cycle time, specifically “time to market,” was one of the most “chronically underutilized metrics” in their survey of companies. Which they also saw as being highly ironic given that many companies identified a lack of speed as their greatest weakness.

I’ll know it when I see it
Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example?
- Dennis Prager

Cycle time reduction is a great first measure because it can be applied across all aspects of the innovation processes at play in your organization. From decision-making, to selection of team members, applying the measure of cycle time reduction sharpens the way all innovation is approached. It has a distillation effect. In helping you to focus on speeding up the process of concentrating the right resources on the most beneficial projects, cycle time reduction also demands attention on quality, too.

Poor quality actually results in a systemic drag later in your innovation process. That initial poor quality may also have a knock-on effect, causing an escalation of poor quality further down the line as corners are cut in order to meet the initial cycle time reduction. By managing all cycle times and aligning them with quality practices your organization becomes more robust and resilient. The outcome is not only better performance but faster performance which can be seen across the whole organization.

I can count it but I can’t count on it
The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
- George Bernard Shaw

In a world of constraints, meting out investments may be a matter of short-term economic survival, but it will not build a foundation for long-term success. To create and improve and innovation culture – a culture that fosters economic expansion and delivers to the top and bottom lines – organizations need to invest in those processes and practices that change behavior. In the post, Working The Processes of Innovation – Learning to Love & Live Failure, we explored the power that comes from building a tolerance for appropriate failure. Recently this was reinforced in Megan McArdle’s piece in Time magazine, In Defense of Failure,

It sounds like a dubious aspiration, but one of the more pressing priorities for America this decade is to preserve our cherished freedom to fail in this country…America allows its citizens room to fail — and if they don’t succeed, to try, try again. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all Americans report that they have considered starting their own business, whereas in Europe that number is only 40%.

Here McArdle talks about the power of this freedom:
McArdle on America\'s Need to Support Failure

How do we measure failure and the power of failure in moving us toward a better, brighter, more abundant future? It should be interesting to note that measuring innovation is also top of mind of one of the world’s most active philanthropists, Bill Gates. His concern is not that we aren’t measuring innovation failure, although he did popularize the concept of “fail forward fast” during his time leading Microsoft, his concern is that most people are failing to measure innovation at all.

When all is said and done – have the right satisfaction measures improved?
Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.
- Winston Churchill

Once again the Boston Consulting Group’s 2009 Annual Innovation Report offers another key insight into the dynamic tension that exists in measuring innovation performance in terms of outcomes. The top measure employed by companies seeking to assess their innovation performance was customer satisfaction but the second highest measure was overall revenue growth. The expense of increasing the former measure would seem to have a direct negative effect on the latter and yet there they are parked beside each other at the top of list of robust measures for innovation performance.

The performance of any innovation truly is measured in the eyes of the customer, be they an internal customer or a market-based customer. Customer satisfaction is the end-of-the-line measure for all innovation. If an innovation cannot drive the performance of that measure then what purpose does it serve? One of the most powerful tools for revealing the impact of an innovation is the Net Promoter® Score (NPS). This concept was first widely made known through the work of Fred Reichheld in his book, The Ultimate Question.

The NPS is both a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to directly influence behavior within an organization. One company using NPS to measure its innovation effectiveness is Logitech, the computer peripheral manufacturer, which uses it as the final consumer acceptance testing measure. By using this score Logitech can tweak late-stage products to maximize their effectiveness on release to market. They test. They measure. They tweak. They hold or go to market. It should be noted that the best performing products, with the highest NPS, are also the products with the highest revenue on release.

So, it would seem you can serve one goal with two measures, after all!

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.
- Enrico Fermi

What have you discovered as you attempt to measure your innovation?

This doesn’t mean to say that there is still not a wealth of information to be gleaned from cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, and social psychology as they relate to the way in which people learn. Neuroscience will simply afford us another window into the way our minds work. And what will we do with that knowledge?

What both the behavioral observation of learning and the physical understanding of learning agree on is that for learning to be lasting it must be practiced. In fact, the best learners not only practice, they study – hard. Malcolm Gladwell proposes that for true excellence to emerge the magic number of hours required to dedicated practice and ever-increased proficiency is 10,000. Less than that and the learning may be substantial but will not result in elevated performance. The same can be said of innovation. Unpracticed innovators make fewer cognitive leaps, fewer bold choices, have fewer insights and their innovations are poorer for it.

The approach of IDEO, the design shop headquartered in Palo Alto, takes the concept of the learner even further and describes “T-shaped” people. These are learners who have not only gone deep into an understanding of a particular field of interest (the perpendicular stroke in the “T”), they have also developed a broad awareness and understanding of many subjects (the horizontal stroke in the “T”). A consistent attention to both types of learning increases the utility of these people in the design and innovation domain. Perhaps the Gladwell number needs to be an equation, i.e., 10,000 x 1000 x n? Where “n” is the number of separate domains of learning pursued?

Think differently for different results
Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.
- Chinese Proverb
Innovation fosters new thinking, including the way we learn to think. The way we create the promoters (activities or environmental factors) that support learning is a key component to improving learning and development outcomes. Did you know that there are five key promoters to consider? They are:
1. Innate learning programs (the things we just know, you know?) (Gallistel, 2002)
2. Repetition of information. (Repetition of information – get it?!) (Squire and Kandel, 2000)
3. Excitement at the time of learning (Woo Hoo!) (Cahill & Gorski, 2003; LeDoux, 2002)
4. Eating carbohydrates at time of learning (A personal favorite) (Korol, 2002)
5. 8-9 hours of sleep after learning (To sleep perchance to dream) (Kuriyama, Stickgold, & Walker, 2004)

Very few learning programs actually consciously accommodate one or two of these promoters, let alone all five. Is it any wonder that the process of learning may seem draining and even futile at times? To maximize the learning and development outcomes change the nature of the learning environment, change the perspectives of the participants, and change the delivery mechanism. All can be achieved in simple ways. Use a rapid prototyping method – what can you change in under an hour for less than $100 (or less than $10)?

When considering learning and development focused on innovation practices the inclusion of elements that actually promote learning might be worthwhile, might it not? Take two innate learning programs for example; the first allows us to rapidly associate words and labels to objects within situations, and a second enables us to compute social status and insults to social status. If we acknowledge and fold into our learning and development activities these innate learning programs we can structure experiences that capitalize on them. Improvisational activities, like improv theatre games, could help us unlock the influence resident within these learning programs so that the experience fosters increased innovative behaviors (resilience, risk-taking, generosity, etc.)

Letting go and leaving justification behind
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
- Benjamin Franklin
Lessons learned are not necessarily procedural or systemic, they are predominately behavioral and social. One of the key learned behaviors is that with success comes praise and possibly adulation. Well, the process of innovation actually requires that we be less-than-successful at times. Yes, we sometimes have the glorious opportunity to fail (perhaps not the first time, bust certainly more publicly than we would like.)

There are two essential behaviors to learn and develop in order to “make it” as an innovator. The first is the ability to let go of an idea. The concept of ownership within corporate organizational life is one that people learn early. The people with the best ideas not only “win” they also receive the reward of advancement. That may mean access to things previously unavailable, i.e., the offer of increased responsibility, or even greater compensation, perks and benefits.

A successful innovator needs to understand that her idea may actually find greater success when used by another or in conjunction with another person’s idea. They also need to understand that while their idea might be a great idea, if there is no passion for it among the people who need to capitalize on it and bring it to market then it is as good as dead and useless to all. Letting go is an essential learning that is counter to so much we have learned in order to survive in organizations. But letting go is not the hardest lesson to learn for many.

Perhaps a more damnable habit to break is that of justification.

Justification is the hard-earned ability to defend your position in the face of withering opposition. It brooks no alternate view, nor does it easily accommodate modifications to its core or demarcated essential truth. The power of justification is that it makes ideas unassailable (especially when carried out by a master or mistress of the art.) The only problem with justification is that as a practice it allows no room for the new, the additive, or the tangential. Justification creates cul-de-sacs in which innovation goes to die.

Learning how to combat holding onto an idea too tightly and justifying an idea to the point of lunacy are essential practices. Which leads us to the role of exactly that in innovation – practicing what we have learned.

Practice makes permanent – practice with feedback makes perfect
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
- Douglas Adams
Most have heard of that old aphorism, “practice makes perfect.” My experience, and the firm word of a former business associate, Tom Doyle, is that practice does not make perfect, “practice makes permanent; only practice with feedback makes perfect.”

In order to become better at the art and substance of innovation it is necessary to work on it. In working on this skill set it is also critical to receive feedback and coaching. The application of observational assessment and associated feedback to an innovator enables them to see their mental models reflected in the words of others as well as the way a life time of habits influences how they not only see the world, but seek to change it in the present.

Having a subject matter expert observe and provide feedback, even if they are not a practiced innovator, may be of great benefit to those seeking to innovate. The critical eye is an essential ingredient in improvement. To borrow another Gladwell-popularized concept, that of the maven – a trusted specialist or subject matter expert connected to other like-minded practitioners across a community – it is a given that mavens make the best mentors. Their deep expertise, and the authority with which they can observe, mean that the feedback that they provide can not only provide clear opportunities for growth but may also provide ways to create a step-change in our approach to innovation and the challenges at hand.

After all, while it has been said that those who can – do, and that those who cannot – teach, it is preferable to think on Seneca:

While we teach, we learn.