What do you think: are innovators born or made? Surely, those who spawn ideas that change the world are special – different than the rest of us. Take one look at an Einstein, a Steve Jobs or a Da Vinci and it seems that they were bequeathed with something unique. Or at least solid knowledge of the 3M innovation business and these 11 innovation principles, don’t you think?
But are we looking in the right direction? I believe the biggest secret of innovation is that anyone can do it. The reason is simple: It’s just not that hard.
It often seems easy to know when the next big thing is upon us. Someone like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk stands on stage and tells us what is being launched next. The business press gets excited, pundits swoon and a thousand imitators are created. Before long an ecosystem develops and the world is forever changed.
In reality, though, things are much murkier than that. Innovation is a process of discovery, engineering, and transformation and it is only the last part that is visible to most of us. The seeds of a revolution started long before, in obscure labs and at conferences with high priests presenting papers written in arcane vernacular.
Since the 1950s, the engine that’s driven new knowledge to, as Vannevar Bush put it, “turn the wheels of private and public enterprise,” has been the US government. Unfortunately, moving new discoveries out of federal labs has often been a slow and cumbersome process, but a new model holds promise for greatly accelerating breakthrough innovation.
Look up the word “innovate” in any dictionary and see what it means, instead of what you think it means. You’ll find something like this:
To innovate is to introduce something new.
That’s it. It doesn’t say you need to be a 3M creative genius or a workaholic. It’s just three little words: introduce something new.
The keyword in the definition is “new.” The common trap about newness is the assumption that new means something the universe has never seen before. This turns out to be a very bad assumption.
Here’s why I conclude this: name any great innovator and I guarantee they borrowed and reused ideas from the past to make whatever it is they are famous for.
See this related article: Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Companies often ask themselves why their innovation principles seem to produce so few truly game-changing ideas. Why are they mostly getting only lukewarm suggestions for incremental improvements rather than radical new concepts for revolutionizing their industries?
How can an organization get dramatically better at generating big, breakthrough ideas? To answer these questions, we first have to understand the principles of innovation. So the essential first step is to clarify how the innovative process works.
What is missing in most large companies are innovation principles that translate ideas into winning ideas.
Given a deeper look, innovation seems more learned than innate and there is surprising consistency about what drives it. Here are 11 3M principles to guide you in your business innovation thinking:
3M innovation business … change where you’re headed
Learn to have a vision of the end state.To push innovation, set goals that are a stretch. Let me share an example: the Rocky Mountain Flatbread Company, worked with Canadian nonprofit
The Natural Step to create their vision of a sustainable restaurant. That vision included deriving 100 percent of their energy from renewable sources, having zero waste and zero carbon impact, and encouraging people to live more sustainably.
Today, Rocky Mountain’s three restaurants are carbon neutral, use local produce for their zero-waste menu and purchase green electricity — efforts that earned the company a big helping of green business awards.
Try using “back-casting,” not forecasting. For radical improvements, start with a vision of the future and work backward to today. This type of goal-setting is called “back-casting” and is the opposite of forecasting.
Forecasting examines what happened in the past to plan for the future, and it delivers only minor incremental improvements.
Try lots of stuff.
3M innovation business …
try lots of stuff
3M sees what works. Emphasize the up on stuff that works quickly. Quickly kill stuff that doesn’t work.
Learn, revel, and repeat.
Start small
Peter Drucker once wrote, “Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose.” He was spot on.
Take a look at any big thing and, inevitably, its modest origins. Microsoft became one of the world’s most valuable companies by focusing on software, an area so inconsequential at the time that IBM was willing to write it off.
Apple made a splash with the Macintosh in large part by capitalizing on innovations that Xerox tossed aside.
The great thing about thinking small is that you can risk failure because failure is sustainable. You can falter, pick yourself up and try again.
Eventually, you’ll get it right, and when you do, there are no limits. If you can survive, you can thrive.
3M innovation business … challenge conventional wisdom
Ask employees for ideas and remember no idea is unworthy of consideration.Your employees see opportunities every day for saving money or doing things better. Ask for their ideas.
At the U.S. Postal Service, 850 employee-led “Green Teams” helped save $52 million related to water, energy, fuel, and waste and generated $24 million in new revenue through recycling.
3M innovation business … push passion and perseverance
The 3M problem with finding good innovative ideas is that finding the right ones takes time. There are many other examples to consider: Larry Page and Sergei Brin combined the system of academic sites with computer technology to develop the world’s greatest search engine.
However, it was years before they stumbled upon Overture’s business model and found the combination that made money.
Spending years in the wilderness before becoming a runaway success is not at all uncommon. As Jim Collins noted in Built to Last, Sony started out as a failed rice cooker manufacturer. Hewlett Packard began by making quirky gadgets like automatic toilet flushers and a machine shocked people to help them lose weight.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame emphasized the importance of perseverance in Amazon’s success in a recent interview. He said that “We are stubborn on vision.We are flexible on details. … We don’t give up on things easily.”
A lot of times, what looks like brilliance is just someone who has the balls to stick it out through years of failures.
Do things differently
Put on your thinking cap and rethink your business model.Could your company — or part of it — serve a social purpose? Have you noticed businesses that recondition and refurbish old products? Look closely and you will notice them.
Companies donate the used products of all kinds, which these companies refurbish and sell at reasonable prices. And guess what? Perhaps you could also hire and train young workers struggling to enter the job market and qualify for government assistance.
Here is another example: a niche retail shop in our Finger area decided to sell only products made by independent vendors in the area.
Targeting a customer group that values unique clothes, jewelry, arts and crafts products, and stationery, the company promises customers a shopping experience they can’t find anywhere else.
Can your business replace products with services?Challenge your assumptions about what your business does. You may be able to increase business by focusing less on selling products and more on providing services.
One famous historical example is that of the discovery of genetics. In 1865, when Gregor Mendel published his groundbreaking study of inheritance of characteristics in pea plants, it went nowhere. It had taken nearly a half century before the concept was combined with Darwin’s natural selection to unleash a torrent of innovations in medicine and science.
A more recent example is the Apple ecosystem. There were plenty of digital music players around when Steve Jobs launched the i-Pod, but he combined his player with i-Tunes, which made content both more accessible and palatable to music companies. He then threw new products into the mix – the i-Phone, i-Pad, and Siri – creating more combinations and greater value.
Build collaborative teams
Broaden your thinking on who could join your networks.
Build contacts beyond the usual suspects. In addition to employees, suppliers, investors and customers, broaden your network to include community action groups, lobbyists, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, industry associations and economic development groups.
Work with, rather than against, your most vocal critics to diffuse situations before they hurt your reputation.
Building bridges into unrelated fields and industries spark fresh ideas and opens up new markets.
3M innovation business … build a 70/20/10 portfolio
Of course, beyond all the happy talk, businesses must do more than just innovate. They need to serve customers, pay employees (and sometimes congressmen) and earn money. So prattling on about embracing creativity and failure often gets thrown to the wayside when it’s time to make a budget.
Nevertheless, Professor Kastelle brought a workable scheme to the table with his three horizons model.
Put 70% of your innovation efforts toward taking your competitor’s money
Put 20% of your innovation efforts toward taking somebody else’s money (often a customer or supplier)
Put 10% of you innovation efforts toward creating something very new and out of the box.
The bottom line
So if you want to find a truly great innovator, don’t look for the ones that make the biggest headlines are that are most inspiring on stage. Look for those who spend their time a bit off to the side, sharing ideas, supporting others, and quietly pursuing a path that few others are even aware of.
So there you have it, 11 principles of innovation from 3M. I’m sure I’ve left something important out, so feel free to add to these principles in the comments below.
Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options for innovation workshops to get noticeable results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Thinking about improving the adaptation of your business to the changing elements around you? You have a large innovation continuum that you should consider.
Where is your focus? Invention? Innovation? Creativity? Or maybe somewhere else on the continuum?
More to know: Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision
We are always surprised by the number of our people that don’t make a distinction between these concepts. Do you make the distinction?
A clear distinction and your appropriate action focus will definitely make a difference to your business. Let’s us explain why.
Creativity is your ability to imagine new concepts. It does not require value creation. That is why when we run brainstorming sessions, we do not allow concepts to be screened for merit.
We are being divergent and looking for all possible ideas. Creativity plays an important role in both invention and innovation but is only the front end component of each.
Invention and innovation. They have been so thoroughly misused that it is hard to tell the difference between them. Yet they could not be more different.
Innovation is the process through which value is created and delivered to a community in the form of a new solution. We have purposely chosen to frame the definition as a process. It can also be used to describe a new product or service … the output of the process.
In either case, the key elements of the meaning are valuing delivery and newness.
Invention is very distinct from innovation. When a new idea surfaces or a new patent is filed, that is an invention. It is the classic eureka moment when a person has an idea for the better mousetrap and sets about creating it, putting off concern about who will buy it for another day.
Business model innovation is a source of competitive advantage that few companies proactively pursue. It, however, is not necessary to entirely replace a business model or radically reinvent the business in order to capture value from innovation.
Business activity can be viewed as a continuum from incremental improvement to the invention of an entirely new business Between these extremes are three additional levels of innovation, distinguished by the degree to which they redefine the existing business model.
Focuses on re-engineering the existing business model—doing what we already do, only better, faster or cheaper.
Although important to the ongoing success of the business, these efforts create fewer consumer and competitive benefits than innovative activities, and they have little to no disruptive effect in the market.
Single-dimension innovation
This represents a pioneering change in an existing business model. It is designed to deliver substantially enhanced consumer benefits and financial performance. This level of innovation causes some degree of disturbance in the market (for example Amazon’s e-commerce process innovations).
Examples of innovation … serial innovation
Serial innovation builds on the success of an initial business innovation by expanding the scope of what is considered for future innovation.
Through continuous adaptation of the business model, the company harvests progressively more of the benefit of the original innovation (e.g., the expansion of Amazon’s move from books and music to other products and services).
Multi-dimensioninnovation
Multi-dimensional innovation creates a substantially new way of doing business in order to optimize the market opportunity. Innovation at this level is essentially building something completely new from scratch.
It affects change in multiple components of the business model simultaneously. Business model innovation often propels a company beyond the boundaries of its original marketplace through the offer of products and services previously unavailable to customers.
It typically requires new processes, organizational structures, and distribution channels. Business model innovation disrupts existing patterns of consumption and competition (for example, Dell’s direct-to-consumer customer selected design business model).
The business invention refers to a revolutionary change or strategic breakthroughs that create entirely new businesses. Such inventions represent “white space” in the market.
They transcend customer desires by serving needs and wants that have not yet been articulated.
They change the basis of competition by creating value where none existed before (for example, Apple’s pioneering the i-phone).
The greater the degree of innovation (i.e., the farther right on the continuum), the greater the competitive disruptions and the higher the potential rewards for consumers and stakeholders.
For most companies, however, applying innovative thinking to the company’s entire business model is too difficult to conceive, too risky to undertake and too hard to implement on a recurring basis. Innovations that truly revolutionize an industry come along only about once a decade.
Most of us, therefore, primarily focus on those business application innovations that provide customer benefits based on the company’s existing competitive advantages. These innovations do not require recreating the wheel or predicting the future.
They do require a genuine focus on the customer and a commitment to more effectively meeting customer requirements.
Here are the key assumptions we use in characterizing business application innovations:
Innovations are driven by the market
As we have discussed, shifts in demographics, social, economic and/or technological conditions often precede or accompany innovation in an industry.
True innovation represents an advance for consumers
Great business innovators improve the quality of life for their customers. As a result, they also have an impact on competitors and the structure and performance of the whole industry.
For example, “category killers” and supercenters forever changed consumers’ expectations about selection and price and as a result, shopping behavior and store preferences.
Inventors often aren’t the winners
An innovative idea doesn’t necessarily have to originate with you. Often, it is a new application of an existing idea. As the above retail innovation examples illustrate, inventors often aren’t the winners in the end.
Innovation in often means being a fast follower rather than the originator of a new way of doing business. Walmart’s supercenter format was not an original idea—the basic concept had been operating successfully for 25 years in Europe.
But it represented an innovation for Walmart as used in the context of its own business and its own market. Innovators teach us that to succeed wedon’t need genius as much as curiosity and determination.
Innovation continuum … all strategies eventually run out of gas
In an environment characterized by frequent and significant shifts in resource and consumption markets, just doing better what you do today is not enough.
A focus on matching and beating your rivals results in strategies that are all too similar and competition that is based on incremental improvements rather than breakthrough ideas. Competing head-to-head is intense.
Innovative companies break from the competitive pack by staking out fundamentally new market space. Successful innovation can expand the market, build new markets, as well as increase market share for the innovator.
Continuous business innovation is the key not only to value creation for consumers but also to wealth creation for stakeholders and the true long-term success of the firm.
The bottom line
The truth is that innovation is never a single event. It requires the discovery of new insights, the engineering of solutions around those insights, and then the transformation of an industry or field. Technology does not produce progress by itself, we need to find important problems for it to solve and then must change how we work in order to take advantage of it.
What about your abilities to innovate to shape your future? What position on the innovation continuum do you use? What key experiences can you share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add below?
It’s up to you to keep improving attention to your innovation.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy in each of these steps to improving your leadership?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks
Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
The Secrets to Building an Innovative Culture
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
