Innovation notes
From PLN
Innovation notes
Mostly items by Leslie Dillon (Leader's Digest)
Innovation in general
Access not ownership: the new age of innovation
The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks (McGraw Hill), a recent book by University of Michigan professors C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan, revolves around two ideas:
- "Value is based on unique, personalized experiences of consumers"
- Since no organization can satisfy all the varied expectations of its consumers, it must diversify the way it operates. Organizations' "internal focus should be on gaining access to resources, not necessarily owning them."
The book "hammer[s] home the details of this shift from impersonal to customized, vertical to horizontal, with a wealth of examples from an array of industries." For example, UPS' shift from requiring that customers bring parcels to a central location to picking up packages from them is "a significant transformation from a business process focus on the firm to a business process focus on each unique customer experience." Organizations that can rethink their "fundamentals and implement appropriate changes will provide the driver of success..."
The authors make it clear that "this transformation is neither optional nor reversible."
(Today's libraries certainly stress access, but have we really transformed our processes from focusing on the organization to processes that "focus on each unique customer experience?")
(Helen Walters, "C.K. Prahalad: The new age of innovation", BusinessWeek, May 19, 2008.)
Learning to innovate
What's needed for organizations to be able to innovate effectively? According to MIT Sloan Management Review, you must "prepare your organization to be open to innovation by creating a learning organization." Research has shown that the five most important characteristics needed to create a learning organization are: "experimentation, risk taking, interaction with the external environment, dialogue and participative decision-making."
- Experimentation: The degree to which the organization sympathetically deals with new ideas and suggestions. Experimentation enables the organization to search for innovative solutions and "challenge the established order."
- Risk taking: "Tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty and errors." Risk-taking organizations understand "the value of learning from both successes and failures. Risk-averse organizations... fail to see that the nature of innovation requires some uncertainty."
- Interaction with the external environment: "Relationships with factors" beyond the organization's control or influence. An organization's ability to respond to the turbulence in the environment is "the key to learning."
- Dialogue: "Sustained collective inquiry" into everyday "processes, assumptions and certainties." Use dialogue to spread information and create multiple viewpoints.
- Participative decision making: The amount of influence employees have in an organization's decision-making. "Employee involvement, job satisfaction and organizational commitment all increase when stakeholders feel involved in the decision-making process."
Organizations can use surveys and other metrics to measure their "ability to learn and innovate. If an organization measures an improvement in its learning capability, it will very likely see a concurrent increase in innovation."
(David Wagner, "Learning to innovate," MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2007. Free online)
Changing the world from the edge
More than 100 “student-led innovation initiatives…are well under way and illustrate the broad scope of innovation.” John Hagel and John Seely Brown, co-chairman and independent co-chairman of Deloitte LLP's Center for Edge Innovation, believe these successful activist programs can provide some important lessons for executives.
- To transform the core, start at the edge. When fundamental change is needed in an organization, many executives start with a massive reorganization that fails to achieve the desired results. Instead, “start on the edge and move back into the core over time. By engaging the edge first, it is often possible to find innovative leaders with energy and passion to try new approaches.”
- Demographic edges are a deep source of energy and creativity. Today’s organizations have new generations of workers who want to make a difference. This energy and creativity are essential to innovation and change. Senior managers need to find better “mechanisms to connect with the younger generation…and inspire them with the opportunities for achieving change.”
- Innovation is not just about ideas, it is about impact. A “multitude of big ideas” are usually percolating in many areas of large organizations. “The key is how to make these ideas more visible, how to mobilize support for the most promising ideas and how to scale the development and deployment of the ideas.”
- Achieving results requires making connections across multiple edges. Often the resources needed to drive innovation are isolated within “disciplinary and institutional silos.” A common theme of successful student innovation initiatives “has been the need to inventory relevant resources [including those outside the organization] and find creative ways to connect these resources.”
“By bridging the edges that define our daily lives, we may indeed change the world.”
(John Hagel and John Seely Brown, "Changing the world from the edge," BusinessWeek, May 30, 2008.)
Perspectives on innovation
Eric Schnell, Associate Professor and Assistant Director for Technology and Digital Initiatives, Prior Health Sciences Library, Ohio State University, is leading an innovation task force to help the library develop a five-year plan. He has posted some interesting perspectives on innovation. Here they are:
Michael Schrage
- Innovation is more social than personal. It is a byproduct of how well or poorly one plays with others. Behavior--not knowledge, not insight--drives innovation.
- You can’t be a serious innovator unless you are willing and able to play.
Clayton Christensen
- You have to be careful which customers you listen to, and then you need to watch what they do, not listen to what they say.”
- The problem is when you say “listen to your customers,” your customers are only going to lead you in a direction that they want to go in. Generally, that will never lead you to disruptive growth. You’ve got to find that new set of customers, and listen to them and follow them. That’s the trick.
Andrew H. Van De Ven
- People and organizations are largely designed to focus on, harvest, and protect existing practices than pay attention to developing new ideas. The more successful an organization the more difficult this is. (Christensen echoes this theory)
- While the innovation of conception process many be an individual activity, innovation is a collective achievement of pushing and riding those ideas.
- The process of transforming innovation into practice involves so many individuals that those involved may lose sight of the big picture.
- Innovations transform the structure and practices of an organization. The problem is creating an infrastructure conducive to innovation.
(Eric Schnell, The medium is the message, Jun. 10, 2008.)
The next step in open innovation
Typically "innovation is a proprietary activity conducted largely inside the organization in a series of closely managed steps," but according to an article in The McKinsey Quarterly, that's begun to change. The next step toward more open innovation is "distributed cocreation...the model of innovation as a convergence of like-minded parties."
Research by the authors suggests that while it's too early "to draw definitive conclusions" about distributed cocreation, it's time for senior executives to "start seriously examining" its possibilities and identifying its challenges (e.g., ownership of intellectual property).
Benefits of corporations collaborating with their suppliers are obvious, but Wikipedia collaboration is a different ball game. "Wikipedia is created entirely by its users, not by a corporate-development staff... It is a living and continually expanding global reference work," which has expanded 8,000 percent in seven years. Wikipedia's success suggests that other organizations could cede "more control over decisions about the content of products to networks of participants..."
Three ways to win with distributed cocreation:
- Capture value from the cocreated product/service.
- Capture value by providing a complementary product or service (e.g., Red Hat sells services to Linux users).
- "Benefit indirectly from the cocreation process—for example, through an enhanced brand or strategic position."
Cocreation hurdles:
- Attracting and motivating cocreators.
- Structuring problems so contributors can participate effectively.
- Governance that will facilitate cocreation.
- Quality control.
Lessons from successful communities:
- Useful frameworks for successful cocreation will likely emerge in the next few years.
- "User-generated media sites are growing.. by 100 percent a year, traditional sites by perhaps 20 to 30 percent."
- Research indicates that "most cocreators recognize that the brand--not they--will own the resulting intellectual property."
- Research also suggests that incentives will be needed to encourage participation.
- Trust and affinity are important in online communities.
Getting started:
- Look for areas in your organization where cocreation may have already begun.
- Experiment by using existing systems/resources.
- Be flexible.
Organizations "should experiment with this new approach to learn both how to use it successfully and more about its long-term significance. Pioneers may have ideas about opportunities to capture value from distributed cocreation, but fresh ones will appear. To benefit from them, [organizations] should be flexible about all aspects of these experiments."
(Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and Brad Johnson, "The next step in open innovation," The McKinsey Quarterly, June 2008.)
Successful innovation at Pixar
Successful innovators have shown that "great ideas come from unexpected places." Brad Bird, Pixar’s Oscar-winning director, offers some great pointers for fostering creativity. Bird believes in "pushing teams beyond their comfort zones, encouraging dissent and building morale." He also believes in the value of “black sheep”--those restless folks on your staff with unconventional ideas. A few excerpts from the article:
- In making his first movie at Pixar, Bird gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories and changed the way quite a few things were done. The movie was The Incredibles, and it won 2 Oscars.
- Perfectionists on the staff need to be convinced that not "all shots are created equal. Certain shots need to be perfect, others need to be very good, and there are some that only need to be good enough to not break the spell."
- Involved people--those with a "restless, probing nature"--make for better innovation. You want them to be both involved and engaged.
- Passive-aggressive people--those who don’t speak their mind in a group but "peck away" behind the scenes--"are poisonous." Weed them out.
- Collaboration means that teams put together their creativity "in a harmonious way."
- Encourage people to disagree with you. They need "to feel safe enough to speak up," and that can take a while, so be patient.
- Morale has the most significant impact on budgets. "If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale."
- The "best leaders are somewhat subversive, because they see something a different way."
- "The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved."
(Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb, "Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird," The McKinsey Quarterly, April 2008.)
Customer-centered innovation with job mapping
The May 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review has an interesting article about how to use customer "job mapping" as a basis for innovation. Instead of "wandering through customer interviews," the idea is to deconstruct a job "from beginning to end" to obtain "a complete view" of each step in a job where a customer might need help. Job mapping isn't process mapping; instead the goal of job mapping "is to identify what customers are trying to get done at every step, not what they are doing currently.. and what must happen at each juncture in order for the job to be carried out successfully."
The process of job mapping involves eight steps:
- Define. What steps does the customer define up front as necessary to get the job done? This is formulating a plan.
- Locate. What tangible or intangible things must the customer locate and/or assemble to do the job?
- Prepare. What must the customer do to prepare the environment to get the job done? How can setup be made less difficult?
- Confirm. What verification is necessary before the customer can proceed with the job? What types of information are needed to confirm readiness?
- Execute. What must the customer do to successfully complete the job? Execution is considered the most important step of the job, and it's also the most visible. Real-time feedback might be helpful here.
- Monitor. What's needed for the customer to ensure that the job is completed successfully ? Customers need to monitor their results or output.
- Modify. What might need to be altered so that the customer can complete the job successfully? Here customers may need help deciding what should be changed or how to make changes.
- Conclude. What does the customer need to do to finish the job? "Complex jobs ... may involve some concluding process steps."
I'm not suggesting that individual libraries map information seekers' jobs, but it would certainly be beneficial if the research were undertaken and then shared by an organization that could do something like this (e.g., OCLC or a library/information science school using grant money).
(Lance A. Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick, "The Customer-centered innovation map", Harvard Business Review, May 2008. The complete issue is available free for a limited time.)
Cultivating a healthy appetite for risk
Employee innovation is key to new strategies and better processes, yet research shows that organizations don’t encourage an appetite for risk. This article discusses how organizations can become more risk friendly:
- Increase the potential gains of taking risks. Employees must feel that gains from speaking up significantly outweigh the costs. Encourage staff to challenge your ideas. Publicly acknowledge employee innovation.
- Reduce individuals’ accountability for risky projects. E.g., create a project review board to make involvement in experimental initiatives less daunting.
- Productively manage failure. A positive, nonpunitive process for dealing with failure is essential. “Make it clear that intelligent, excusable failure won’t be punished.” Help staff learn from failures; e.g., have reviews that examine what went right and wrong.
“By celebrating hard-won failure and framing it as a learning opportunity, you allow it to be a source of pride rather than shame. At the same time, you give the employee who spearheaded the effort license to take further risks in the pursuit of value-adding innovations.”
- (Anne Field, “Cultivating a healthy appetite for risk”, Harvard Management Update, Feb. 1, 2008.)
Succeeding at innovation: Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker
Why bother reading an interview of Mozilla’s former CEO, Mitchell Baker? She (surprise!) has overseen the growth of Firefox to 150 million users--15% of the browser market. Moreover, in 2006, Mozilla’s “revenue-sharing arrangement with Google...delivered revenues three times greater than Mozilla’s expenses, an impressive rate of return.” Mozilla’s success at collaborative innovation can serve as a model for libraries.
- Decentralization. Mozilla lets people participate “in a very decentralized fashion.” Where people are actually touching code, extreme discipline is necessary. But there are lots of areas where that level of discipline isn’t necessary. Forty percent of the Firefox code isn’t from Mozilla employees. “If you took away the volunteers...we would die.”
- User power. “Firefox has about 150 million users worldwide.” It doesn’t come installed on new machines, so that means that there have been “150 million individual decisions to use it...and you cannot buy that.”
- Commitment to open internet. A “desire to maintain an open and participatory internet” has been an important motivator for Firefox contributors. “The internet is hidden to human beings except for this piece of software we call the browser.”
- Community. Firefox contributors take ownership of the product, and they see themselves as part of a community. “The community is reinforcing once you get started. We can’t ship Firefox or get it onto people’s machines without that community. So that means it’s very much a two-way street, and if we start to think of ourselves as the center, we will fail.”
- Enabling innovation. Just “giving people permission does wonders.”
- Motivated staff. People whose motivations align strongly with Mozilla’s mission and “people who can handle large amounts of their work being public” do well as Mozilla employees.
- Collegial management style. “You can try to tell an employee what to do, but if the two of you disagree the employee may be right. There’s much more negotiation here...Our decision-making process is highly distributed and unrelated to employment status…”
What can leaders learn about innovation from the Mozilla model?
- “Turning people loose is really valuable.”
- Decide “where you want input. There are different varieties of input and user-generated content. Figuring out what you really want is very important... But if you’re doing one thing and sending out a message that you’re doing another, I think you’re dead.”
- Look for “areas where you can give up some control, because the returns are great.”
(Lenny T. Mendonca and Robert Sutton, "Succeeding at open-source innovation: An interview with Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker," The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2008.)
Jumpstarting innovation: Using disruption to your advantage
Disruptive change, a force that can threaten established organizations, can also be a source of salvation.
“Innovation is not an option today.” A 2006 IBM study confirmed the importance of innovation. In a survey of over 750 CEOs, 65% “said they were planning significant change over the next 2 years” and another 22% planned moderate change. But, more importantly, only 15% said they had been “very successful” at previous attempts to manage significant change and another 15% had had “little or no success.”
This innovation imperative “is being spurred by radical change and disruption” in today’s environment. These disruptions allow forward-thinking organizations “to introduce innovations...that transform the way companies do business and consumers behave.”
Disruptors that innovators exploit to create value include:
- Technology: What are the key emerging technologies, and how are they being used inside and outside your industry?
- Business Models: What new business models are emerging? Can you expand your market share by adding any of these new business models?
- Industry Dynamics: Are there opportunities to deliver significant value through consolidation?
- Globalization: What’s happening elsewhere in the world that you could adopt in your environment?
- Outsourcing: Are there opportunities to create value by outsourcing?
These disruptive changes can be viewed as opportunities or threats. Innovators who view them as opportunities ask how they can leverage these changes to create value. “They look for disruptors that will ‘unfreeze’ a stable industry and...for business models that...can be adapted.” They realize that they must listen to customers and also educate them to new approaches. And they identify new ideas “by raising their head above day-to-day operations and expanding their vision.”
(Lynda M. Applegate, “Jumpstarting innovation: Using disruption to your advantage,” Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, Sept. 4, 2007.)
How to kill innovation
There are six kinds of innovation. One of them is bottom-up innovation, where fresh ideas bubble up from the shop floor or front-line troops. It happens in companies like Toyota, where they encourage and empower employees to come up with better ways of doing things. Amazon gives a prize to people whose ideas were well thought out, even if they fail to encourage people to share their ideas. The person who came up with the idea must have implemented it without asking permission, emphasizing that ideas require action.
The reason more organizations don't adopt this approach may lie in an obscure creativity study called "Strategy for Creation," in which two Japanese researchers found that only 5% of the people in most organizations are idea creators, 10% are idea supporters and promoters and a full 85% are idea killers. What squelches ideas most often is the corporate culture itself. But the biggest obstacle may be the stigma of failure and the punishment that too often results from failure. "In organizations where failure is punished, innovation is inevitably the casualty, for what is the process of innovation but the process of taking risk?" (Innovation Weekly, May 9, 2007, from Real Innovation.)
The business of innovation
Organizations that consistently emphasize "delivering value" over creativity are significantly more effective at innovating! (According to the 2007 futurethink Innovation Tracker, a survey conducted by innovation research, tools, and service firm futurethink.)
"The free flow of ideas and creativity is very important, but they're only a means to an end, not the end result," says Lisa Bodell, CEO of futurethink. "Innovation is not about creating ideas, it is about consistently creating value." Three key hurdles to innovation are:
- lack of leadership
- lack of time to work on innovation
- organizational aversion to risk
"Respondents provided a clear message," futurethink said in a statement, "that business growth through innovation begins with effective leadership." (Inside Training Newsletter, Mar. 22, 2007.)
Disruptive innovation for social change
Why do aggressive, expensive efforts to solve social problems often fail? The primary reason is misdirected investment--groups that could be served by simple solutions aren't reached. The way to reach them, according to the authors of this article in December's Harvard Business Review, is through "catalytic innovation." Based on Clayton Christensen's disruptive-innovation model, catalytic innovations focus on creating social change and offer "simpler, good-enough solutions aimed at underserved groups." Catalytic innovators:
- Create social change through scaling and replication.
- Meet a need that is either overserved (i.e., the existing solution is more complex than necessary) or not served at all.
- Offer products and services that are simpler and cheaper than alternatives, but good enough.
- Introduce resources that may seem initially unattractive.
- Are often ignored or put down by those who don't see these as viable solutions.
Examples of successful catalytic innovations include online classes in public high schools, the community college model in higher ed and the fast, affordable, walk-in Minute Clinics at CVS drugstores. (Have you been to one? They're great! And they sort of remind me of a what a library kiosk might be like in a shopping mall.) This is one article you might want to read in its entirety--it's worth your time! (Clayton Christensen et al., "Disruptive innovation for social change", Harvard Business Review, December 2006, Vol. 84, No.12.)
Innovation in libraries and library literature
The information experience
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest June 2008
Michael Stephens' conversation with Darien Public Library's John Blyberg elicited some great food for thought. Here are a few choice nuggets:
- While Library 2.0 features are important, "if a change in library services, technology-based or otherwise, isn’t well grounded in our core values and mission, it just looks funny."
- Technnology use should be "transparent, intuitive and a natural extension of the patron experience."
- Libraries are "charged with a deeper significance" than just distribution of popular materials and provision of internet access. Libraries "exist within the context of the communities we serve," which is now a global context.
- Information use has become an expression of self-- that’s the “information experience.” And libraries are ill-equipped to respond to this.
- The skills needed "for creating an info experience" are different from traditional library school offerings. "The art of making a library successful" isn't the same as the "mechanics of making a library run."
- Danny Meyer, restaurateur and author of Setting the Table, believes "that every position he hires can be split 49% and 51%. The 49% represents the skills necessary to do the job--etiquette, procedure, etc. The conspicuous 51% is hospitality and an intrinsic desire to serve other people and make them feel good about themselves. The 51%ers take pride in the fact that they help provide a fulfilling experience to someone." Libraries need 51%ers to "imagine a different type of library that engages patrons collaboratively."
- Libraries can package "authoritative knowledge" "in ways that are not so paternalistic and present ourselves as partners in discovery. None of this requires technology, but technology has become the nexus of collaboration."
(Michael Stephens, "On the information experience: an ALA TechSource conversation with John Blyberg," ALA TechSource, Jun. 18, 2008.)
British Library CEO Lynne Brindley on business innovation
Over the past seven years, the British Library has made a major shift in its mission and culture. Its mission today is to “foster innovation and build future knowledge on top of past knowledge.” That’s helped the library become “more forward-looking and customer focused.” The library’s public spaces are now full of entrepreneurs, researchers, and students taking advantage of the collection and the free wireless network.
BL’s Chief Executive, Lynn Brindley, discusses how those changes were brought about.
Market research helped reveal the reasons people used the libraries and the barriers to use. Meanwhile, the British government “was encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation as key to the country’s future economic success.” The library developed plans to serve small businesses and creative industries and to change people’s perception of the library.
To make this happen, the library focused on networking. When they designed the Business and IP Centre, they provided space for “brown-bag lunches, networking events, seminars and free access to databases.” They’ve also hosted “high-profile events” where a well-known business leader speaks to a group of entrepreneurs.
Lynne Brindley also hired “a more corporate-style senior team, which included a senior marketing function for the first time.” At the same time Brindley worked to fit communications to BL’s organizational “wants and needs” to get buy-in. “People wanted to learn about the changes from the horse’s mouth.”
Brindley added a note on the importance of protecting one’s physical health. “You must learn what drains you and plan accordingly.”
(Sarah Cliffe, “British Library CEO Lynne Brindley on helping to spur business innovation,” Harvard Business Review, Nov. 2007. The article’s free from Harvard Business Review.)
Finding your innovation orientation
Here's more from Jill Stover, again in Designing Better Libraries!
How do you foster an environment conducive to producing innovations? This is the subject of an article by Dr. Christopher Brooke Dobni that "offers an innovation model for financial services firms" but that could "be applied successfully to libraries with some modifications."
Innovative organizations share four common characteristics:
- Employees recognize that innovation is a group effort.
- The organizational cultures are marked by creativity, excitement, and desire to succeed.
- Competition drives companies to learn and do more.
- Organizations purposely weave innovation into their daily operations.
However, research finds that while many organizations want to be innovative, few report that they've achieved it
Dobni’s innovation model has three components:
- Context--What management does to support innovation.
- Culture--Employees’ collective thoughts and actions.
- Execution--Making innovation happen.
Each component has sub-parts, and Jill has outlined the major points from each in her post. (Jill Stover, Designing Better Libraries, Mar. 26, 2007.)
Libraries thinking differently--what a year!
2006 has seen some mighty exciting new library developments! First it was North Carolina State's Endeca catalog (McMaster University in Canada has also adopted Endeca), then OCLC's WorldCat.org. And just last week, Casey Bisson of Plymouth State University won $50,000 from the Mellon Foundation for WPopac, an interactive OPAC built on WordPress, the hugely popular blogging tool. WPopac turns the library's bibliographic records (they're an Innovative customer, by the way) into a blog page where users can post content. WPopac doesn't try to eliminate the OPAC; instead it "complements and extends it." Here's a sample WPopac record; take a look and then try a search of your own. It's gorgeous!!
Plymouth State will use the $50,000 to purchase catalog records from the Library of Congress and redistribute them free under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU. WPopac will be offered as a free download, "likely in the form of sample records plus WordPress with WP-OPAC included."
Jessamyn West is right when she says: "Think how having that sort of data available to you (or your library, or your open source OPAC) could really, seriously change things."
Other initiatives bear watching as well:
- MIT's beta on WordPress, the Virtual Browsery, includes a few titles from the Humanities Library.
- Hennepin County Library's OPAC permits patron reviews, loads Amazon reviews with bib records and offers RSS feeds.
- Ann Arbor District Library is experimenting with a virtual library catalog to which patrons can add marginal notes.
- PennTags at the University of Pennsylvania lets students bookmark records.
But while these are all interesting projects, the real seeds of revolution lie in Casey Bisson's WPopac with its freely available records!
And you might want to make a note of this: Casey Bisson will be authoring the May/June 2007 issue of Library Technology Reports, "Open-Source Software for Libraries."
(ALA TechSource, Dec. 5, 2006; The Shifted Librarian, Dec. 4, 2006; MaissonBisson, Dec. 4, 2006; Open Libraries, Bookism.org, Dec. 4, 2006; librarian.net, Dec. 8, 2006; Atomic Lemur, Dec. 6, 2006; WalkingPaper.org, Nov. 18, 2006; ALA TechSource, Jan. 30, 2006)
Related articles
One driver for innovation within libraries is open source--and one area ripe for innovation is the library catalog.
- Why look at open source now? helps you get up to speed on open source as a key to future library innovation
- From open stacks to open source - Joe Lucia offers insight on why open source is important for libraries, here and in part of Open source plans, a PLN Challenge.
- Innovation and control - Steven Bell on barriers to library innovation.
- Future catalogs: food for thought offers a visionary set of future possibilities for the "catalog."
- Gary Hamel on management innovation - Notes from a recent book on the future of management and the need for innovative management.
