Innoversity Blog

Innovate to stay healthy

In this interesting article from New York times Janet Rae-Dupree describes how important it is to keep challenging ourselves and our habits; to stay creative in our mind and daily patterns.

Brain researchers have discovered that when we stay creative and consciously develop new habits, we create new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks. So the article describes how we - if we challenge ourselves to try new things the more inherently creative we become, both in our work and in our private lifes.

Staying creative may be able to keep your mind healthy, so do keep it up ;-D

Open innovation and diversity

Christopher Meyer, who is the CEO of Monitor Network is interviewed in this BusinessWeek podcast, where he talks about social networks, innovation and none the least diversity!

One quote that I particularly liked from the podcast was when Chris was talking about the increasing interest in open innovation:

"I think that the reason why open Innovation goes so deep can be explained by two things: First, new science has shown how diversity in essential to novelty, which also maps how gene-pools work: if you want a new strain of corn, you can't do that with a single clone of corn; you need lots of kinds of corn! If you want new thoughts, you need lots of kinds of thinkers!"

and Christopher Meyer continues....

"There is a second reason why open innovation is growing so rapidly right now (...), we've been through a period of about five years, in which companies got extremely lean and reduced their investments in the new and the innovative! (...) So now we have ended up with companies which are low on diversity and high on efficiency, and not particularly innovative. So suddenly now, growth is more important, innovation is more important, but how are we going to do it? Well, the fastest and best way is to look outside the walls of the organization, for a diverse set of resources that can help."

And I can only agree with Meyers on this! You should definately check out the podcast, Christopher Meyer really presents some interesting ideas and perspectives!

OPEN DIVERSITY: LINKING THE INSIDE WITH THE OUTSIDE
One of the primary challenges in engaging in open innovation activities however is, that to effectively mobilize and tap into diverse networks on the outside or the organization; you also need a certain degree of diversity on the inside, which unfortunately only very few of the organizations which have set off to introduce different open innovation initiatives are actually aware of.

Social networks tend to be demographically aligned due to network homophily, which basically means that we as individuals tend to seek out and learn from similar others (as opposed to diverse others), which results in most of us building networks of people similar to ourselves. Organizations with a relatively homogenuos workforce, will therefore likely, only have access to a relatively small external network, as most employees will tend to know practically the same people (Lazer & André-Clark, 2000; Granovetter, 1971). This definately makes it more difficult for homogenious organisations to identify and none the least, tap into external ideas, knowledge and resource!

One of the primary promoters of open innovation is the conglomerage P&G, with their "connect & develop strategy", which calls for 50 percent of innovation to come from the outside! And P&G knows and understands the importance of internal diversity, for them to succeed in truly mastering OPEN innovation.

I was privileged enough to actually assist P&G draft what we called their "Global Innoversity Strategy" last year, which linked the effort of building a diverse workforce directly to innovation efforts. Something I had previously been attempting to convince many other organizations of the need for doing, but P&G, to my knowledge, is the very first - and only - organisation which has actually done so! Hopefully, once I am done with my Ph.d., I will be able to convince many more organizations of the need for doing so!

WHAT MONITOR NETWORK DOES
What Monitor Network does is to help organizations gain access to exactly such a diversity of external resources, such as business practitioners, scientist, politicians etc, to make use of this external diversity of knowledge and competences in their actual innovation practice! Monitor Network helps organizations tap into such networks either just as a one-day event, or as a standing advisory board, much like they have done with P&G and their Design and Innovation Council.

A highly interesting approach to open innovation, which can serve as great way of tapping into external knowledge diversity. However i would find it important to stress that open innovation requires companies to build and maintain knowledge diversity BOTH on the inside AND on the outside of the organization to succeed with open innovation!

Learning for a small planet

It truly is a small world sometimes. This Friday I was browsing around in the local Wholefoods here in Palo Alto (CA), when I bumped into Etienne Wenger and his family - what a pleasant surprise!

Etiennes Book from 1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity remains one of the most important books I have read, as it provides an extremely important understanding of the role of and none the least the importance of identity in organizational practice. And most importantly, it provides for a domain of knowledge to become the locus of identity contruction and negotiation, and thereby also a great framework for the study of mechanisms of homogenuity and diversity in organisations.

I met Etienne for the first time at a Community of Practice conference San Diego in 2000, and have met both him and his family again on several occasions, last time in Copenhagen, where we had a great couple of days discussing Communities of Practice, and browsing around Copenhagen!

But the biggest learning experience around all of this was definately the week I was fortunate enough to spend in Portugal in the summer of 2002, where 20 community of practice affacinados - including Etienne - from all of the world, gathered in Setubal, Portugal. We spend five intense day in a circle, talking about learning, meaning, and identity in Communities of Practice. A truly amazing and very intense experience, and I learned so much in those five days....

Needless to say therefore, the Etienne and his work has had an incredible influence on my research, and I really look forward to his next visit in Denmark, where I am hoping that I can pick his brains a bit, and discuss my research with him once again!

But, bumping into him at Wholefoods, was truly a coincidence, they were heading back north (the live app. 3 hours away from here), so what are the chances of that? And the truly great thing about this was, that Etienne told me that his research project "Learning for a small planet" has now been granted the official non-profit status, which is an important first step in this truly amazing and very ambitius research project.

THE LEARNING FOR A SMALL PLANET RESEARCH PROJECT
Quoting from the project description: "Learning for a small planet is a unique project to develop new learning models for the 21st century. Many of the challenges we face today can be understood as learning challenges: economic development, the creation of a world culture that is both global and diverse, the environment, health, regional conflicts—to name a few. Increasing our learning capability is therefore an urgent imperative. But in order to do so, we need new models about how to proceed and new visions of what is possible"

Learn more at Etiennes website

Researching innovation journalism

Turo Uskali is another scholar here at Stanford who is doing some truly interesting research on innovation, and I therefore decided to do a mini-interview with Turo to ask him to share his innovation research in the making:

Tell me about your research project?
My current research project, which has just started, focus on innovation journalism. This work can be divided at least into two different themes or sections.

1) History of innovation journalism in comparative perspective. The objective here is to draw from existing, lively work on evolution of innovation journalism (business, technology, science journalism) in many parts of North America and Europe to identify relevant insights about theinterface of business, economy, technology, science and media.

2) Journalism as organized work.  The social organization of journalism as work and occupation, relevant to how issues get ‘covered’  The objective here is to focus on the issues how journalism work (and careers) are embedded in complex organizations and other career paths, and how this affects journalistic coverage of innovation processes and ecosystems.

What are the primary findings?
It is too early to tell about the primary findings, but I hope that afterwards it is possible to understand better the evolution of innovation journalism, and also define what is good innovation journalism.

Where can I find more information about your research?
You can find more information about innovation journalism from our web site: www.innovationjournalism.org.

Presenting my research

Innovation Center Denmark in Silicon Valley has invited me to talk about my research project while I am here at Stanford, and I look very much forward to doing so on September 7th.

I will be presenting some of my preliminary findings, and if you are anywhere near Palo Alto or Silicon Valley, please join us for this event, which is also the very first networking event by the Innovation Center. See invitation by clicking at image below.
 
You sign up by via email  - and if you want to learn more about  Innovation Center Denmark - Silicon Valley, please have a look at their website. Hope to see you there!

Researching open source innovation

Sladjana Vujovic is a visiting scholar here at Scancor / Stanford University, and because I find her research into open innovation to be both interesting and none the least important, I asked her for a mini-interview about her research.

Course why is it that we only learn about interesting research projects when they are all over and done with?  In the future I will therefore keep you informed about interesting research in the making  that I come across on my own innovation research journey.... And I am proud to hereby present my first innovation research in the making interview with Sladjana Vujovic:

Tell me about your research project?
My PhD thesis is about user-driven product development and innovation. The case I am studying is an Open Source Software (OSS) project. The purpose of my study is to offer insight into Open Source phenomenon through enhanced understanding of Open Source cooperation and product development seen from an organizational perspective – and to provide a meaningful guide to action for managers based on this study.

What are the primary findings?
I am only at the beginning of the data analysis. Hence, I do not have any concrete results yet, but I have made some interesting observations so far. One of them is the issue of recruiting the right people. Since OSS projects are based on voluntary participation, the challenge consists in how to attract the right people for the teams and how to fill out different roles.

Another thing I find both relevant and interesting has to do with the role of computer-mediated communication. There are some indications that some forms of online communication (which are actually used a lot by OSS communities) may not be best suited for an effective cooperation, decision making, discussions, execution and coordination of tasks. Furthermore, the world of virtuality creates an environment from which it is easy to disappear, when needed.

This thus has consequences for a person’s feeling of commitment compared to a traditional work place, where face-to-face communication and physical contact are present. Those are only a few of my observations… but more on them when I finish the analysis. 

What are the potential implications of those findings?
Managers need to realize that embarking on the open innovation journey implies different strategic choices between different strategies, and that it will mean increasingly having to balance the need for secrecy with the need for openness, as well as reconsidering the role and potential of their competitors and customers, who, in an open-source innovation context, may prove to be important partners.

From a strategic point of view, the OS-based alternative points to a need for a redefinition of the business model to take account of the fact that the focus of value creation has two loci of interest. One is related to the product itself. However, the associated incentive here is not directly financial (as in the traditional business model) but is indirectly of financial value, in the form of education and training (for the developer) and a higher degree of customer satisfaction (inasmuch as there will be no features the user has not asked for). Moreover, the direct financial focus of such a different business model will have to move further down the value chain to embrace new supporting consultancy and/or support services.

Where can I find more information about your research?
You can find more information on the Århus Business School Website:  or by contacting me via email

Why prototyping is SO important

One of the things that I am becoming increasingly aware of in my research project is the importance of prototyping, as prototypes serve as excellent boundary spanners, in settings characterized by diversity. Prototypes can activate different forms of knowledge, especially in cross-disciplinary groups, where it can be difficult to combine and exchange knowledge pertaining to different knowledge domains.

It was therefore with great enthusiasm that I read through this Japanese book from 1995 picturing an incredibly funny selection of totally unuseless Japanese inventions. The author has named this phenomenon CHINDOGU, which in Japanese means “unuseless tool” invented to solve everyday problems and needs. The author has turned chindogu into an art form, celebrating the art of the unuseless idea. Or as the book describes: “bizarre and logic-defying gadgets and gizmos, which must work (to be classified as chindogu), but are actually entirely impractical”.

Flipping through the book is amazingly funny, its like watching the Invention Channel on a really good day - but to an innovation affacinado like myself, the book also serves as an important reminder of the need for prototyping, as described above, and especially in documenting the importance of quick and dirty prototyping. Course the interesting thing about these chindogus is, that they seem to be EXCELLENT ideas, when you think about them, and talk about them - each and everyone actually. And it is only when they are prototyped, turned into action, that the inventor (and the rest of us), realize to TOTAL unuselessness of the idea.

So beware, is the idea you are working on right now truly an innovation or is it a CHINDOGU? The only way to find out is to either look in by prototyping.....

The book mentioned here Kenji Kawakami: “The Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions” (1995). There are a few websites on Chindogu, unfortunately they do not seem to have been updated for a long time.

Great new book on innovation

On August 18th, I had the pleasure of attending a book-signing in Menlo Park with Curtis Carlson, CEO for SRI International, who co-author a new book: “Innovation - The 5 Disciplines to give your customers what they want”, with William Wilmot. I bought the book right away, and I read it within the week, and can only encourage you to do the same!

Many of you are probably already familiar with the incredible track record of Stanford Research International when it comes to innovation. And with this new book we get a peak inside SRI International, to see how they go about innovation, and the 5 disciplines they have identified as necessary if wanting to give customers what they want. 

I am of course especially pleased by the fact that they have dedicated nothing less than four, actually five, chapters to the importance of putting together the right innovation (management) team.

This book is simply a must read for any innovation affacinado! Enjoy!

Dangers of prototypical leaders

I am going through quite a lot of articles at the moment, and the difference between how I read articles now compared to how I did it in the beginning of my phd-project is significant. Because now I know what I am looking for, my data presents me with interesting patterns, and I look into theory for theory to aid my understanding and interpretation of those very patterns.

One of the articles I read today was different though, even if it was not exactly was I was looking for, the article had me reading it from beginning to finish, and their research will definitely be referenced in my dissertation, somehow. It was an article from Academy of Management Review by Hogg & Terry (2000) entitled: “Social Identity and Self-Categorization Processes in Organizational Contexts”. There were several interesting points to pull from that article, but one paragraph was particularly interesting, and this is what I thought that I would share with you: Their discussion of the social construction of leadership in groups:

From a social identity perspective, leadership is, according to Hogg & Terry from University of Queensland, a “structural feature of ingroups (i.e. leaders and followers), which is produced by the processes of self-categorization and prototype-based depersonalization. Therefore (...) being a prototypical group member may be at least as important for leadership as having characteristics that are widely believed to be associated with a particular type of leader” (Hogg & Terry, 2000:128).

What this means is, that leaders often become leaders exactly because they embody “the aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors of the group”(Hogg & Terry, 2000:128), and not necessarily because they possess leadership qualities and competences. This is as such not interesting per se, we see that everywhere, the socalled Peters Principle or Law, where people are promoted until they no longer excel in what they do. The interesting thing in this article is their description of how groups tend to form such leaders themselves, through dynamic processes of social identity construction in groups with a high degree of group cohesiveness.

The danger to innovation then is that cohesive organizations (which we see everywhere in or branded and teambuilded organisations) then, according to Hogg & Terry (2000:129) often end op producing leaders who are selected as leaders exactly because they reproduce the present and therefore are less likely to produce the future (and even less likely to produce innovation). Such organizations:

1. Produce leaders who are prototypical but do not possess task-appropriate leadership skills (and end up producing groupthink instead of good management)
2. Consolidate organizational prototypes that reflect dominant rather than minority cultural attributes, and thus, exclude non-prototypical others from gaining influence, and obtaining managerial roles, and therefore
3. Produce an environment that is conducive to the exercise, and perhaps abuse, of power by leaders.

However, as Hogg & Terry explain (2000:130): “This rigidly hierarchical leadership scenario is most likely to emerge when conditions encourage groups (and organisations) to be cohesive and homogeneous, with extremitixed and clearly delimited prototypes that are tightly consensual”.....

Hmmmmm, something to think about......

Outcome-driven innovation

I just spent most of my weekend reading Anthony Ulwick’s latest book What Customers Want (2005) in which he elaborates on his approach to user-driven, or as he calls it, outcome-driven innovation (which he claims is all about moving beyond customer-driven innovation. The book is a quick read and offers some easy-read tools and methodologies for working strategically with customer input in the innovation process.

I first learned of Ulwick and his approach to innovation in 2002, in the Harvard Business Review article: “Turn Customer Input into Innovation”, where he criticized the ways in which many companies failed in their attempts to capture valuable customer input, and how they made use of that input to direct innovation efforts... According to Ulwick, too many companies simply collect the wrong input from their customers, as he explains:

“Customers should not be trusted to come up with solutions; they aren't expert or informed enough for that part of the innovation process. That's what your R&D team is for. Rather, customers should be asked only for outcomes - that is, what they want a new product or service to do for them. Maybe they want to feel a closer bond to people when talking on the phone or to spend less time traveling to and from the grocery store. What form the solutions take should be up to you, and you alone (Ulwick, 2002:92)”

But this does not mean that one should not be listening to customers, it only means that the way in which customer input is collected, used and applied should be carefully structured, not around solutions, needs and benefits, but rather focus on the outcome customers want a given product or service to have, and none the least, to focus on the ‘jobs’ and ‘tasks’ that customers are actually seeking to achieve.

The book which came out last year is an elaboration of the 2002-article, which has been developed a bit further to also include the innovation process, which he describes in these steps:

1. Plan outcome--based customer interviews (requires field observation to understand product use)
2. Capture desired outcomes (Ulwick states that most products have between 50-150 outcome metrics)
3. Organize the outcomes
4. Rate outcomes for importance and satisfaction (using the opportunity algorithm described below)
5. Use the outcomes to jump-start innovation (this is where his message becomes a little toooooo simple...)

The opportunity algorithm basically captures the relationship between the importance customers attach to each of the identified outcomes, or as described by Ulwick:

“The formula [Importance - {Importance-Satisfaction) = Opportunity] yields highly accurate results. Companies ask their customers to quantify on a scale of one to ten the importance of each desired outcome and the degree to which it is currently satisfied. Those rankings are inserted into the formula, resulting in an overall opportunity score” (Ulwick, 2002: 96)

What then emerges is an overall score, identifying where the opportunities for innovation seem to be most interesting, namely the outcomes with the highest scores on importance and lowest scores of satisfaction. Other innovation opportunities exist in terms of cost-cutting, which becomes an evident path to pursue when certain outcomes score high on satisfaction and low on importance.

The way in which this is all presented by Ulwick is rather simplistic, which can be quite annoying at times during the reading, but none the less, he really offers some interesting insights regarding user-driven innovation, and in his book he describes the need for us to move beyond the customer-driven paradigm, which he describes in this way:

“Using the customer-driven approach, companies began to conduct customer interviews and act on the feedback they received. They performed ethnographic and anthropological research. They began to test product concepts with users. Indeed, over the past two decades qualitative and quantitative research methods have become corporate staples. (...) Customer-driven thinking is well entrenched and has become the mantra of the corporate world. But after twenty years of customer-driven thinking, U.S. companies still find that 50 to 90 percent of their product and service initiatives are failures, collectively costing them more than $100 billion each year” (Ulwick, 2005:xiv).

Innovating the Internet: REMIX

This morning I once again attended the Stanford Breakfast Briefing, this time featuring Lawrence Lessig, probably one of the best talks I’ve ever seen. He truly managed to capture his audience with a show packed with thought-provoking points and messages, stressed by images, graphics, amazing video-clips, all resulting in a very vivid  depiction of “How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity”.

What he described was the transition taking place in the internet, where we are moving away from the socalled: ‘Read-Only’ culture, heading towards the ‘Read-Write’ culture, which he also labelled the re-mixing culture, because it very much is about manipulating or altering existing content, and in that process generating new content.

The problem however, according to Lessig, is the way in which this transition is being fought by existing media. Lessig, a laywer himself, points to the problems arising from this war between the Read-Write and the Read-Only, what he labels the copyright war, led by lawyers and big media, and which may end up killing off the Read-Write culture entirely. According to Lessig, we need to recognize that copyright is old-fashioned, and we need to reform the law to prevent our children from being raised as criminals, being the loosers in the proclaimed war on ‘piracy’.

Lessig described the process as a process of ‘copy and change’, which is an important and inherent part of being human, that is how we learn. And we have always been used to using text in this way, as something we could use to make quotes, something that I - as a researcher - make extensive use of. that is part of how I build new theory (if I will eventually succeed in that ,-D). But how come we cannot quite music, images and graphic in the same way?

Lessing presented some fascinating examples of this up-and coming re-mixing culture, which is illegal according to existing copyright law, but which make some powerful statements. For instance the way in which children compose their own AMVs (Anime music videos), by re-mixing music with animation to create both funny and highly impressive new music videos. A trend that started in Japan, but which is now spreading to the rest of the world at an accelerating speed.

• Example of GREAT Anime Music Video: Eye of the Tiger
• Great satiric Political music videos, such as The Blair/Bush Love-affair, Sadam Hussein, Berlusconi etc
• Sim Sadler’s great Bush re-mix (an easy target ;-D)

Make sure you have a look, this is really interesting stuff and none the least good examples of how the Internet is a chaning, being democratized and moving away from just a means for buying and consumption, to instead being a palce for collaration, creation and sharing.

In his battle against the copyright conservatives, a few years back he established the non-profit organisation: Creative Commons, which provide artists with licenses allowing others to make use of the material. A GREAT initiative, and right then and there I therefore decided to see what I can to obtain a CC license for my dissertation, once it is done ;.D. Please visit their website, they have important stuff to convey.....

Open innovation - learning from the best!

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in an innovation session facilitated by IDEO, one of the most admired (especially by me) design and innovation companies in the world. I knew quite a lot about IDEO before this session, through books, journals and the media in general. Just as I had the pleasure of featuring Paul Bennett from IDEO at the INNOVATING WITH DIVERSITY conference last year.

But I had never seen IDEO in action, so of course this was an opportunity I had been looking forward to attend, with great anticipation. And I was not to be disappointed!

I was invited to the workshop by Ron Volpe, Director of Global Supply Chain Innovation at Kraft Food, so that I could observe in the workshop, and make use of these observations in my  ph.d. work. I met Ron last year at INNOVATING WITH DIVERSITY in Copenhagen, and even had the pleasure of organizing an event at Copenhagen Business School where Ron presented his Kraft Food approach to supply chain innovation, a truly great case in February.

The innovation session at IDEO was organized by Ron Volpe together with Target, in order to explore how Kraft and Target might find new ways to work together and improve their supply chain collaboration; through the identification and development of collaborative strategies and initiatives to engage in an open innovation process between Kraft Food and Target. The 35 people - most of them executives - from Kraft and Target had 2 days to do so. And boy, they truly did!

I can of course not share with you the results of the innovation session, but what I can share is some of the fascinating analogous observations we were sent out to do on the first day of the workshop. After having identified the primary opportunities for innovation at the intersection between Kraft and Target, we  were split up into smaller teams, who were each sent off to different places and sights around the Bay Area, to see what we could learn through analogous observations of people and organisations facing different, yet similar, supply chain challenges.

My group went off to a small private zoo in San Jose, where we met the woman in charge of all purchases of food and medicine supplies for the zoo animals, to learn first hand how she dealt with the logistics around that. We spent two hours at the zoo, learning everything from the use of dietary cards for each animal, to looking at storage facilities, to the preparation of food, to the shopping at the local Vietnamese market for vegetables and greens, and to the ordering or supplies and medication. It really was a fascinating peak into a totally different world, but the surprising thing was how much we could actually could benefit directly from the observations and insights in our own process, and how the learnings could be used and applied in the remainder of the workshop.

The other groups went to totally different places, one went to a Levis store in San Francisco, to learn from their approach to customization, where they were each to buy their own pair of jeans to experience the customization themselves. Another group visited Stanford Blood Bank, to learn from how they deal with freshness. Another group went to visit Sephora, for the ultimate shopping experience. Yet another group went to visit and interview a housewife about how she manages to store food worth 9 months of supply for her entire family. And many more interesting experiences. So as you can probably imagine, hearing about - and seeing - what each group brought home in terms of learnings and insights from their observation, was quite an interesting mental journey.

But so was the rest of the two days...... am still not through my 32 pages of observation notes from workshop yet ;-D

Did you ever hear about TED?

If not, you should definately have a peak into the world of TED, and it truely is a world of its own, which comes to life four days every year in Monterey, California. At the last even in February 2006, they had 800 attendees, and next year they are inviting 1000 people, and most of them have already been sold out. I truely hope to some day to get a chance to participate in TED sometimes, but in the meantime, I am just thrilled to be able to watch the many pocasts that they make available trough their website, and through the TEDblog.

They guy you see in the picture is Cameron Sinclair, who presented at TED 2006, and I just had the pleasure of watching his presentation on video podcast yesterday. And he truely had a great story to tell.  Sinclair co-founded the non-profit organization Architecture for Humanity in 1999, which started off in response to the housing-crisis for returning refugees in Kosovo - they basically wanted to use architecture to  make the world a better place to live in.

Cameron Sinclair and his partner started off by making a website (www.architectureforhumanity.org) where he and his partner basically just posted a call asking architects to come up with potential solutions which could be used to help out in Kosovo. And to his big surprise, within a couple of months they received more than 200 ideas, which led to a series of prototypes being built in Kosovo within a short period of time.

This is what  they do and have done ever since. At their website, you can see Architecture for Humanity also helped out after Hurricane Katrina, after the Tsunami, and in countries all over the world in response to humanitarian crisis. Wauw, a great initiative - is there anything better than a great innovation story? And especially when it is a humanitarian one as this most certainly is. This is a link to the TED video postcast with Cameron Sinclair

But there are many other great video podcasts on the TED website, I personally especially enjoyed the presentations of Sir Ken Robinson (about education and creativity), Al Gore (our global environmentalist), Larry Brilliant (epidemologist accounting for the eradication of smallpox), Nicholas Negroponte (about the $100 laptop), and non the least Jeff Han, who demonstrated the interface-free computer of the future. But there are many many more, and I look forward to seeing the ones that I have still not seen - there is so much more to learn .....

Find all of this and more at the TED website

Serial Innovation (Sopranos II)

I already made one post about serial innovation, but thought that I wanted to develop that trail of thought a little further, with a look into the processes employed by the Sopranos crew, and how they benefit from the differences in the group in their serial innovation.

have been watching a few of the behind the scenes featurettes, as well as looking into interviews with both the executive producer David Chase, as well as audio commentaries by both producers, directors and screenwriters, in order to better understand the process they go though in the development of each of the Sopranos episodes. And it actually is quite an interesting picture emerging from these leisure-time studies of mine (some would call it procastrination, but since I do it for the blog, is most certainly is not ;.D)-

In the development of each of the episodes, the overall story-line, it seems that the team of writers, producers and directors meet on a regular basis, where they use collective ‘sit-downs’ (as Tony Soprano would call them), where the together will discuss and develop on the stories and episodes, and what they want to happen to whom, as a group.

After this initial brainstorming, they will decide who of the writers should then continue working on the storyboard, and then one of the staff writers will go off and write up a first draft of the episode and then come back and present it to the team. Based on what the team then decides, changes will then be made by the whole team, and sometimes another writer will be asked to re-do it or alter the whole episode script.

Once the script then has been approved, it will be given to a director. The directors of the show cannot pick and choose the episodes they would like to direct, but are given an episode based on whom the group finds to be the best director of that particular episode, and then they take over from there.

Often the director is someone from the outside, not part of the staff, who will then be working with the cast in creating each episode. Some of the directors have directed more than one episode, but many of them are newcomers. I have not yet been able to find out very much about how this use of director-as-newcomer is perceived by the cast. I have heard several of the directors mention that it feels quite strange to be ‘in charge’ at the set, whilst at the same time being the newcomer. But it most certainly provides for a continuous addition of new perspectives, and the director has to build on the talent working with him, he/she will never get away with a “my way only-approach”.

I would however like to find out what the cast thinks of the fact that they are continually confronted with a new director. They will usually spend between 8-12 days shooting each episode, and with each season consisting of app. 10 episodes, they are likely to be instructed by a new director ever other week or so.

Imagine working on an innovation project where the project manager is replaced every two weeks?

Innovative Wines at Bonny Doons

In Santa Cruz Mountains about an  hour drive from Palo Alto reigns the vineyard Bonny Doon, established by the controversial Randahll Grahm, who is doing what he can to challenge the rules, norms and dogmas of winemaking, and who calls himself “the champion of the strange and heterodox”, whilst at the same time celebrating and cherishing the classical wine paradigms.

Bonny Doom in a strange way seems to be able to balance the thing sword of between classic and modern winemaking. Provoking and challenging the rules of the game, WHILST at the same time pushing the envelope in terms of what you can do with classical and natural production methods. An interesting case for innovation!

And let me admit right away, I am a wine enthusiast, with a strong preference for the classical wines of the Rhone Valley, and must therefore admit to being extremely sceptical when I first heard about Randall Grahm the proprietor and guiding spirit behind Bonny Doon. Famous for challenging most all the rules of winemaking, whilst at the same time being one of the most radical of the Rhone Rangers (Winemakers dedicated to advancing the Knowledge of Rhone Grapes grown in America and the enjoyment of the Wines Produced from those Grapes).

But in spite of my conservatism when it comes to the merits of a good wine, I also appreciate when rules are being broken and something new and innovative emerges. And this is exactly what Randall Grahm and the Bonny Doon Vineyard seems to offer. After tasting his Rhone inspired signature wine Cigare Volante, his Zinfandel-based Cardinal Zin, and especially now that his tablewines Big House Red and Big House White , I had to both respect and appreciate his work.

Randall Grahm and Bonny Doon really provide for a great case for innovation. He  has made his winery a major power in the California wine industry by exploring demented ideas, by breaking all the accepted rules of marketing and by making wines that are equally as interesting to talk about as they are to drink.There seems to be nothing that he is not ready to do. He freezes grapes to make ice wine, he uses wild labels with exotic names, he collaborates with winemakers in Europe, he is dedicated to riesling in California, Ranger on the cover of the Wine Spectator in his role as the leader of the Rhone Rangers.

The mantra of Bonny Doon goes as follows:

• Have as much fun with wine as the relevant governmental agencies will allow
• Produce wines and wine labels that will scintillate the sensibilities of the most jaded imbiber (to see labels click here)
• Retain as much of the natural qualities of the grapes (especially fragrance) through careful handling and minimal cellar treatment
• Pay close attention to the chestnut that wine is produced in the vineyard

I am – as a wine traditionalist – not much of a fan of Micro-oxygenation and the freezing of grapes, but I can bear with much when the wine is both good and non-expensive, while at the same time challenging and innovative in its approach.

Like the labels for instance, Bonny Doon lables are not the ususal gold-edged, black italics on a white background with a nicely drawn chauteau as most other wine labels. No. Bonny Doon labels feature tattooed ladies, flying saucers, and monkeys in fezes. Some of them are even provocative enough to be banned in Ohio and Washington. Every label want’s you to laugh, to feel, to think. They make use of artists like Ralph Stedman to design their labels.

Randall Grahm truely is a rebel with a cause. For over 20 years this California winemaker has resisted the “bigger is better” ethic practiced by most American wineries. Instead of making palate-numbing powerhouses, Grahm favors wines with finesse. Instead of choosing Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, he favors the likes of Mourvedre, Marsanne, and Malvasia Bianca—grapes that he believes are better suited to California’s climate. Grahm seeks, in short, diversity in the vineyard and deliciousness in the glass.

Managing serial innovation....

Over the last couple of weeks I have become increasingly fascinated with the hugely popular and most talked-about TV series “Sopranos”. The mobster series features the life of depressive mafia boss Tony Soprano and the life of his two families. Apparently, no American show on cable has ever been more successful with both critics and fans - and with good reason. I love it!

Watching The Sopranos on DVD is a great evening get-away from my writing, reading, thinking and analysis work done during daytime at Stanford. But even while watching Sopranos, innovation (the focus of my Ph.D.) never completely leaves my mind. And so I started wondering how on earth the Sopranos and other successful TV series manage to keep innovating - to capture their audience show after show, year after year?

How do the successful TV series crew and cast manage this? How do they manage what one might appropriately call ‘serial innovation?’

I realize that I do not have the answer to this question, but yet I started wondering - and began looking at the team behind the success of Sopranos - the cast, the crew - and I was soon to discover one interesting thing; namely that the managerial team (producer and co-producers, screenwriter and director) is NEVER the same from one episode to the next. NEVER! Is that not interesting?

For every episode of the Sopranos, either a new director or a new screenwriter will be added to the managerial team and someone else will exit; only the chief producer (Sopranos creator David Chase) has been constant over the six year production period. Everyone else is in and out - constantly. To illustrate this ever changing managerial team, I have made a list of the writers and directors for each of the 13 episodes of the first season, sourced from Wikipedia (click image to enlarge).

                                                                                                                                                              Could one of the explaining factors behind the ‘art of serial innovation’ be this constant constant mix and re-mix (many of the names appear several times) of the managerial team?

It does most certainly make sense in that it would provide for the continuous re-creation and re-negotiation of the set, the series itself, the story-lines, the cast etc. Different people constantly not only ‘manage’ the story, the crew, the cast and the series, but also prevent ‘the way things are done around here’ from being introduced to the set.

Such managerial flux forces the crew to continuously negotiate and re-negotiate their individual part, both with the newcomers, and with the existing cast and crew - which maintains a sort of permeable boundary around the ‘innovation group’, preventing them from becoming too settled in their roles too quickly, one of the primary barriers to successful innovation.

Imagine if organizational innovation was managed in the same way? Imagine if you brought in a new ‘screenwriter’ (content manager) for every innovation project? Or a new director (process manager) for every new episode (innovation project)?

This was just one thing we could learn from the production and innovation of successful TV series, but I know that there are many many more and I already look forward to exploring them further ..... so if this has you interest, please stay tuned for another episode of the innoversity  blog ;-D

Researching innovation + diversity

It is nothing new that very little research has been done over the years, into the role of diversity in innovation - it has been my concern for several years, and was the major reason for me embarking on my current Ph.D. project, even though I really do not think of my self as a researcher. But several years as a consultant with Innoversity (my own company), where I was working with diversity as a way to leverage innovation in multinational organisations, only confirmed this.

And now as I am doing my analysis work for my Ph.D. I thought I should back this claim of mine with a little data, by looking at the number of research articles published over the last 20 years, which mention both the word diversity and the word innovation. This is still a work in progress, but if you take a closer look at the graph above, you will see that the total number of articles published since 1986 is only 112, whereas the total number of articles about innovation in the same period was as impressive as 6215 articles. The role of diversity therefore seems to attract very little attention by innovation scholars, and has been neglected by innovation scholars and researchers over the last two decades; albeit the graph indicates a small increase in the number of articles over the period in question.

Moreover, the articles published about innovation + diversity over the last 20 years were published in nothing less than 77 different academic journals, which is an unusually high amount of different journals from a range of highly different fields, disciplines and industries.

Furthermore, it was actually only 20 out of the 77 journals which had more than one article about innovation and diversity; the remainder of journals, e.g. 57 journals, featured only one single article about innovation and diversity. The highest number of articles about innovation and diversity published in one single journal was 6 (se table below), which was not in one of the innovation journals as one could expect, but in the European journal: ”Research Policy”.

With 77 different academic journals dealing with this topic, the issue does not seem to get very much attention in any particular journal or academic discipline. This seems to indicate two different sets of problems: first of all the lack of knowledge about the role of diversity in innovation, revealed by the very low number of articles published about the field, and secondly, it is relatively difficult for each of the innovation scholars in the field to build on each others research, because they represent highly different academic disciplines and industries, while at the same time allowing researchers to benefit from their own academic diversity, in furthering the overall research into the role of diversity in innovation.

It will be interesting to see which one of the two will prevail.....

Can organizations be built to change?

This morning I had the pleasure of attending the monthly Stanford Breakfast Briefing at Stanford Faculty Club, where Edward E. Lawler and Christopher G. Worley were giving a talk about their new book called: “Built to change: How to achieve sustained organizational effectiveness”, which came out a couple of months ago!

In their talk they described how the world of business is becoming increasingly unstable, which poses a demand on our organisations that they should be able to adapt and change to this unstable world. Unfortunately however, most organisations seem to be built to last, rather than being built to change.

Lawler & Worley started out their talk by describing how the pace of change is increasing. Industries are changing, wealth and none the least the distribution of wealth is chaning, our organizational structures are changing. Very little in the business world is what it used to be.

One of the signs of change outlined by Ed Lawler was that in 1985, the 400 richest Americans were worth an average of $600 million, whilst the 400 richest Americans 20 years later in 2005 were worth an average of $2.8 billion. In 1985 165 of them were self made, a number which rose to 255 in 2005. And finally, to illustrate the transformation of industries, 103 of these billionaries were in manufacturing in 1985, which was only 22 of them in 2005.

One of the many warnings issued by Lawler and Worley to organisations wanting to orchestrate a ‘built to change organisation’ was to avoid the “search for excellence” trap. In their research they found that many companies seem to focus a little too much on looking at other companies, scanning for ‘best practices’, where they should instead be looking at their customers and primary stakeholders, to understand what they need, instead of what others ‘have’. Drawing too heavily on best practices inevitably ends up in organisations institutionalising yesterday’s success stories.

So, all in all - the setting at Stanford Faculty Club was impressive, the breakfast was excellent and the people I talked to were great, we had some inspiring morning conversations at my table - to kick off the day. But I have to admit that I did not really take home any new insights from this talk, which seemed to be more of a general talk about change management, which did not, as far as I could tell,  bring anything new to the table. I am afraid I will not be rushing down to the bookstore to get hold of their book.

What I will do however, is to sign up for the next Stanford Breakfast Briefing right away.

Team based innovation

According to an article by Kratzer, Leenders & Engelen (2004) approximately 80% of companies today make use of a team-based approach to innovation, where teams are become the locus of most organisational innovation activities. This is probably hardly a surprise to anyone!

The big surprise however, consists in the extreme lack of knowledge about the functioning and management of such innovation teams. We tend to know quite a lot about the functioning of project teams, about project management - the literature and research on the topic of teams and how to manage teams is both vast and abundant. But when it comes to the management of innovation teams, we know surprisingly little about the conditions that may enhance or obstruct their performance, which is why - I guess - that so many innovation teams end out being managed as if they were project teams.

But there IS a huge different between managing a project team and managing an innovation team. When you manage an innovation team you do not know where you are heading - which is why the project management approach applied to so many innovation teams and innovation projects - bring about both poor and relatively non-innovative results.

We most definitely need more research in this field; we need to know more about how to manage innovation teams!

In my Ph.D. project I am focusing on the practice of such innovation teams, and while I primarily take an interest in the construction of homogeneity and diversity in such teams, I of course also focus on how such teams are managed! And in doing literature searches  for my project on the topic of team-based innovation or the management of innovation teams, I still come across very little research - which is kind of surprising as this must be a key concern and a highly important topic to app. 80% of organisations today (!!).

NBB: The picture is from a Wine Festival in Cairanne in the Rhone Valley, taken last summer - where I was quite amazed by the ability of this band. The members seemed to excel in collaboration and improvisation, even though they were walking around among the people playing their music, and some of them even managing to be sipping red wine at the same time.

Stanford Innovation Summit

Arrgh, how unfortunate is that? The innovation summit of the year in California is taking place at Stanford during my 3-month stay here as a visiting scholar, and I cannot go - I cannot believe it..... (have an event with Kraft Food and IDEO which I definately cannot miss either)!

I am however trusting that they will be webcasting the event like they did last year, and hopefully I can catch up on the most important points of the conference through that..... But if you are in the area and have a chance - make sure that you do not miss out - or do as me: return to their website for the webcasting on July 25-27th

Learn more about the event here: Stanford Innovation Summit