Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 10

How to Make Time to Work on Your Biggest Ideas [Infographic]

If you feel like you’re overworked, overtired and that no matter how much work you do, nothing really changes, you’re in the same boat as most of the world’s workforce. The activities that will move you or your company forward–and out of just constant execution– are time and labor intensive. You can prioritize these activities all you want, but unless you make time for them, and, by so doing, take time away from something else–it’s a guarantee that you won’t get them done.

For everyone out there who wants to escape this cycle and learn the art of Rebalancing your work, I’ve prepared the below infographic to guide you in taking back your time. Ask yourself, at this moment, do you have the capacity to innovate?

[image error]Remember: Innovation is time- and resource-intensive. It requires the capacity to tinker and tune and test until the novel solution presents itself. By Rebalancing, you can get to the new thing you want to do and let go of the old. This action is a key step in moving forward and a prerequisite for effective leadership.

How Breakthrough Ideas Become Mainstream

Breakthrough innovation typically starts at the edges of the bell curve in the challenge of a crisis or the prospect of an outstanding opportunity. This is because the risk of deviating from the standard way of doing things and the reward of taking a chance on something new is reversed in these extremely negative and positive situations. For example, the Apple we know today was born out of its near collapse in the late 1990’s and the Telsa we currently marvel at can do no wrong because the public adores its haute couture product.

Leading innovation is different than all other forms of governance in that it pulls the exceptions at the edges of the bell curve to the stable center in an attempt to bring useful novelty into the norm. In this way, innovation often incites commercial revolutions: ubiquitous connectivity replaces shopping malls and universities, smart gadgets replace billfolds and magazines, miracle drugs replace invasive surgeries and going to the gym, and the like.

Up until recently, I supposed that innovation was the only domain that worked in this unique way. I was wrong. I now see that politics follows the same trajectory – but in reverse. Instead of the innovation dynamics pulling the outside-in, politics pushes the inside-out where we mistake the edges for the center.

Listen to the bewildering jumble of candidates and try to discern an underlying philosophy, the trajectory of a strategy or the application of a discernable method. How do their ideas hold together to create a solution? Each candidate tries to move the center farther and farther out to distinguish their ideas from the others. Soon perspective is lost and edges are taken to be the center. Marketers call this micro-segmentation. Everyone gets to have their politics their own way but only in their own little world. Collectively, where social contracts bind us in a common purpose, the center can’t hold because it can no longer be seen by all.

Follow the barrage of spin on your favorite social media site and it becomes evident that the various factions have little regard for the issues but a zealous allegiance to their party affiliation. The voices of the most rapacious and opinionated are the loudest and drown out the calm interpretation of the facts by the reasonable. Perhaps the great Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell put it best, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”

I was recently in an airport when a man standing next to me started yelling at the television monitor in the gate area. I looked over expecting to hear some alarming newsflash about yet another tragedy or catastrophe. Instead, what I saw was an interview with a politician who presented himself in professional manner. When I asked the man standing next to me why he found the interview so upsetting, he explained that the politician was his congressman and he had completely changed his position on a key issue. I asked why. The man informed me that his representative had been on a committee to study the issue, and in light of the new facts, had adjusted his position. I was confused. I asked, “Isn’t that what intelligent people do, they get new information and change their minds?” The man released a torrent of obscenities my way and stormed off.

I tell the story because we often assume that our passions are informed by our reason, but for the most part, it’s the other way around. This man believed in something even when the facts suggested otherwise. He became a prisoner to his own limiting beliefs. He is unlikely to find innovative new ways to do things because he is unwilling to look for them.

So what does all of this have to do with innovation? Simple, innovation leadership is a tightrope performance on the bell curve. We need to see possibilities but be grounded in reality. We must demonstrate real conviction for our vision but be willing to change it as experience demands. We need to be open minded in the generation of ideas but critical in our deciding which ones to pursue. We need to believe we can succeed but be prepared to fail. In essence, we must assume a higher point of view and keep our balance if we are to move forward across the high wire.

There can be no variation, deviance or innovation if we do not share a nexus, fulcrum or center by which to gauge and navigate a way forward together. Perhaps the first step is to find our equilibrium by focusing on the center, regaining our perspective and reaching out to save our best ideas before they slide off the edges. The second, allowing the unbalanced to fall away where the slope is steepest.

What the Most Creative Countries in the World Do–and How America Can Learn From Them

At the heart of every major innovation is not just a person or a company but an entire national character. That’s because creative growth–no matter where it happens or who implements it–is a political event.

Countries get involved in making innovation happen because they have a stake in its outcome. Innovations in technology can give a nation advantages in defense. Breakthrough discoveries also offer governments the opportunity to achieve superior competency. Additionally, these projects increase the number of high-paying jobs and help nations get closer to full employment. Thus, the more innovation initiatives a federal government helps launch, the better the quality of life for its citizens will be.

A country needs three basic things to make innovation happen. The first is investment capital: the basic financial resources crucial to building anything new. Next, they need intellectual and realizable competencies: people who cannot only generate exciting ideas but who can also translate those ideas into concrete things, from machines to medicines to methodologies–whatever the circumstances demand. Third–and most importantly–any nation that wishes to generate radical change needs a pro-innovation culture, a society that encourages its people to deviate from the norm, to take risks, and to fail while doing so.

At its most fundamental level, the innovation process itself transcends national borders. It always follows four core phases. The initial stage–investigation–is the research and development of an idea or issue, and it usually happens at large universities and research labs. The incubation stage is about turning these early findings into a molecule or the germ of a product that might actually function. Then, once we have a working prototype, we move into the acceleration stage, when we ride the momentum of the idea and build start-ups that will realize its full potential. With experiments conducted and a polished product as a result, we transition to the final stage, commercialization, which entails bringing the innovation to scale, building and selling as many units as the industry needs or the consumers want.

Despite these four common phases, each country has its own spin on the process. The U.S. innovation business model is, as you’d expect, a very laissez-faire state model. But that doesn’t mean our government has no involvement in our creative growth. In fact, our country spends an enormous amount of money on innovation, though almost all of it is at the foundational, investigative level. In the federal sector, we do a lot of core science work–through things like the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. This is where the heavy lifting happens, where we make discoveries in physics, molecular biology–developments at the disciplinary level that go beyond these immediate disciplines. On top of these broad national groups are more specialized research hubs like the Stanford Research Institute and Parc and the Rand Institute. Additionally, there are tons of resources and incubators through local and state initiatives, often funded or supported by the Small Business Association (SBA).

The U.S. innovation model looks like a pyramid. At the bottom–in the largest growth area–are these Big Science research centers. The idea is that once we establish this foundation, smaller companies will use those insights and materials to do something more: the government builds the playing field and the competition will develop the applications and technologies that will be played on the field itself. In terms of the four innovation phases, the U.S. focuses on the first and the last–investigation and commercialization–emphasizing early research and taking things to scale.

A classic example of the U.S. innovation model is the Internet. Federal resources built the basic digital infrastructure and then countless companies and entrepreneurs took those resources and created tons of new things. This happens all the time, in all sectors, from energy to aerospace. It’s simply the American way of doing things.

But is the American way of innovating the best way of innovating? According to Bloomberg’s annual ranking of national creativity, the answer is no. The U.S. has most recently come in at number 6 and we’ve been steadily falling for a while now. Take a quick look at which countries are producing the most start-ups and which of these start-ups are having the biggest impact and you’ll see that the common perception of America at the top is a false one.

What are these more innovative countries doing that the U.S. is not? The answer is simple: these governments have an active role in the capitalism of their nations. High-ranked nations like Korea, Finland, and Israel have a welfare state model, where the government itself is an investor in creative initiatives. This is essentially federal match-making: the government gives start-ups capital and connects them with universities and research labs.

Welfare states usually depend on a vertically integrated model of growth. This is precisely what Singapore did in the 1970s when its government took the National University, the Science and Technology Board, and a large fund, which they called Temasek holdings, and put them all together to facilitate and fund start-ups. In this way, Singapore ensured that all new companies would be tapped into the best new scientific knowledge and would have the chance to achieve their maximum growth potential.

Most people think the welfare state model only works for fast start-ups. Israel and Singapore haven’t created an IBM or Boeing–their strength is certainly not in developing big companies. The conventional wisdom tells us that since the welfare state model is not capital-intensive and has low barriers to entry, it should be limited to software development and consumer electronics–markets that require relatively few people and resources to break into.

But that’s not entirely true. Korea and Finland enjoy the welfare state model, yet they have capital-intensive industries with high entry barriers–like car manufacturing and power generation. This large-scale success is made possible through government grants given to individuals who have demonstrated their ability to make things happen and get things done and manage risk. With federal policies that forgive loans to companies that have failed and tax write-offs to innovation investors, there is almost no downside to risk in these high-creative nations.

The welfare state model of innovation encourages an enormous infusion of both capital and entrepreneurship at the middle phases, during the incubation and acceleration stages of growth. This is essentially the reason why these countries are ahead of us in the rankings.

How do these countries gain access to Big Science and all the other intellectual advancements made in the investigation stage of innovation? They look to the U.S. They get an American education and look at American research. Although there are important research institutions in these other parts of the world, a great deal of it is going on right here. In this way, we’re providing other nations with many of the basic materials for innovation.

This is not a one-way street. While we give these nations the basic resources to innovate, they provide the U.S. with a trove of commercial-ready innovations that we then purchase and expand. In short, they’re using our research to build stuff, to create these start-ups, and then we’re buying their start-ups and getting them to scale. For this reason, the advantage in the U.S. constantly goes to the same large, multi-national companies that have enjoyed world dominance for years, providing little room for new start-ups at home.

So how do we fix what’s wrong with the American model for innovation and entrepreneurship? We need to integrate the laissez-faire model that favors the investigation and commercialization phases of innovation with the welfare state model that favors the incubation and acceleration phases of innovation. We can do this in two different ways. We can adopt the government-as-investor, federal matchmaking process here. Or we can make our existing policy more explicit, devoting all our resources to buying other nations’ innovations.

It’s time that we loosen our ideology and tighten our strategy for making innovation happen. When most Americans hear welfare state, they roll their eyes and insist it doesn’t work. In reality, though, it does work. If we don’t start using this to our advantage, we’ll simply continue to fall farther and father down the list of innovative countries. Whether or not, come next year, we’re number 1 or number 10 is not a matter of what we innovate but of how we innovate. The first–and hardest–step to change is in changing the way we think about innovation. Are you willing to revise your vision of growth?

Why Crowdsourcing Has Ruined the Art of Innovation

Are all innovators created equally? The open-source innovation movement wants us to believe that they are, that the more voices we hear and the more ideas we share, the greater our creative potential will be. That’s why populism has emerged as the defining force of post-millennial innovation: organizations value collaboration over specialization as they look for the next big idea.

What started in the 1980s as a revolution in software development–when designers shared source code and embraced the notion of free redistribution–has now become the norm in all sectors. No matter where you go, you’ll hear leaders utter the clever, pithy names of these wildly popular approaches: collaborative open innovation networks (COINS), creativity clusters, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, idea markets, innovation jams, and innovation tournaments.

But the truth is that, for all the doors that open-source innovation opens, it closes many more. While these collaborative methods routinely generate an abundance of ideas, there is scarce evidence that they generate innovation of superior quality than those developed by smaller and more elite groups of domain experts. In short, they create more stuff, but the stuff isn’t necessarily more important and it doesn’t always have a major impact on the field. This is what the great polymath Sir Francis Dalton taught us with his concept of regression to the mean: large groups of people tend to average out to the middle–collectively, they produce things that are vanilla.

In reality, innovation is the opposite of this: it is a form of positive deviance that pulls away from the norm. The most valuable innovations are the ones that are the most unique. Consider the game-changing genius of DaVinci or Einstein or Steve Jobs. These are nonconformists–precisely the kind of visionaries who don’t fit into the democratic groups encouraged by open-source innovation.

So how can you embrace the inclusive spirit of collaboration without succumbing to its tendency to eliminate deviance? Here are three strategies to stay original in an egalitarian world.

Drop the “everyone’s opinion is equal” faade. You probably learned in gym, math, or art class that we’re not all equally skilled or expert. While we all have our own strengths (and weaknesses), all those abilities are not relevant in every situation. Once you determine the abilities you need for a particular project, prioritize the contributions of those who have the expertise. Ask all of your social media followers how to install a furnace and you’ll get tons of advice. If you listen to it, though, chances are the fire department will be paying a visit to your house. Rather than eliciting the opinions of non-experts, it’s best to call someone who is actually qualified and experienced to put a furnace in your house. The same is true of the highly specialized tasks and areas of inquiry associated with innovation initiatives.

Identify the real domain experts. Expertise isn’t always proven with an advanced degree. Real-life experience is sometimes more important than knowledge acquired from intellectual study. Remember that insight and experience are two different realms of proficiency. For example, a mother of five bright, well-adjusted kids would be a good person to consult about a new product that teaches children to read. How do we find these domain experts? Pay attention to who talks to whom. Figure out whom others turn to when they need advice on a specific issue. Observe this like an anthropologist and see who’s literally talking or try following the e-mail thread. Whenever someone asks me a question I don’t know the answer to and I forward it to the appropriate expert, I’m always fascinated to retrace the thread at the end, to see how exactly the question got to the person who could actually answer it. The path is often a surprising one.

Mix and match until you find your winning team. Collaboration works best when we find the right combination of thinkers and doers. Put the highly experienced alongside the inexperienced. Experience brings the wisdom of caution–seasoned veterans won’t do things that they know, from having done them before, won’t work. Inexperience brings heightened ambition. These novices will push the veterans to bring their knowledge into new areas. Join domain experts with out-of-domain experts. The domain experts have deep insight when it comes to things that are possible. Out-of-domain experts have equally deep insight it comes to things that are transferrable. A wonderful example of this is the way Google pairs Math Ph.D.’s with software developers. When someone who knows a lot about one domain partners with someone who knows a lot about another, the result is an unstoppable team.

The upside of democratization is that it promotes a can-do culture, a universal feeling of involvement and belonging. Most importantly, it creates the momentum needed to get new projects started. But open-source innovation performed without taking into account expertise, talent, or merit is of very limited value. In the spirit of bringing things, ideas, and people together, it’s the blending of the two that we should all strive for. Combined, meritocracy and democracy build the combustion of growth that makes innovation happen. Who will you enroll in your deviant team of the future?

The Graduation Speech I Didn’t Give [Infographic]

In the depths of winter, my thoughts often turn to warm visions of summer: barbeques, the beach, and graduations. As we run up to the New Year, I share a little commencement advice to those who hope to graduate or at least advance a grade in the curriculum of life:

Happy New Year to you and yours, and may it be filled with health, happiness and prosperity.

How to Play the Innovation Game [Infographic]

Whether you know it or not, you’re playing the Innovation Game. You and your organization will either win or lose in this high-stakes competition for the future, so you’d better learn how the game is played. You’re about to have one advantage over most players in the game: most leaders and most workers just don’t understand how to play the game.

So what exactly is it about the innovation game that even the best leaders get wrong? Find out in this infographic:

Innovation is never fully realized; it’s a perpetual work in progress: What if there is no there? That is, what if the real goal is to keep playing the game? In James P. Carse’s classic Finite and Infinite Games, he posits that finite games have a definite beginning and ending, clear boundaries and rules, and winners and losers of the contest. In essence, these games are engaging because all the elements of competition are known and nothing new needed to be discovered.

Conversely, infinite games do not have a knowable beginning or ending; they are played with the intent to keep playing, discovering and learning new things, and including more players in the game. The game is an ends in itself. While innovations have many finite game moments fixed in time, someone always plays on. Maybe that someone is you. The game’s afoot.

INFOGRAPHIC: How to Play the Innovation Game

Whether you know it or not, you’re playing the Innovation Game. You and your organization will either win or lose in this high-stakes competition for the future, so you’d better learn how the game is played. You’re about to have one advantage over most players in the game: most leaders and most workers just don’t understand how to play the game.

So what exactly is it about the innovation game that even the best leaders get wrong? Find out in this infographic:

Innovation is never fully realized; it’s a perpetual work in progress: What if there is no there? That is, what if the real goal is to keep playing the game? In James P. Carse’s classic Finite and Infinite Games, he posits that finite games have a definite beginning and ending, clear boundaries and rules, and winners and losers of the contest. In essence, these games are engaging because all the elements of competition are known and nothing new needed to be discovered.

Conversely, infinite games do not have a knowable beginning or ending; they are played with the intent to keep playing, discovering and learning new things, and including more players in the game. The game is an ends in itself. While innovations have many finite game moments fixed in time, someone always plays on. Maybe that someone is you. The game’s afoot.

Innovating Innovation Strategy: Part 3

[In the part-two installment of this three-part article, I showed how the two major growth strategies–push and pull strategies–both fall short when it comes to meeting the demands of innovation. Here are three approaches to effectively confront the unique obstacles that innovation throws our way.]

Play some wildcards. Wildcards are unexpected events that actually happen with regularity. These are big occurrences with wide-reaching implications: scientific discoveries, emerging technologies, environmental changes, social trends, political and economic developments, weather calamities, disease outbreaks, and large-scale conflicts. When these things arise, most people are caught off guard.

But, in reality, we can foresee and prepare to take advantage of wildcards before they arrive. That’s because, despite their remarkability, they happen quite often. Be on the lookout. Get several briefing reports–environmental, political, economic–monthly. Understanding these larger issues will help you not only anticipate wildcards but also make use of them when they appear.

First, list all the possible wildcards that might affect your organization and consider the probability that they’ll happen. Then, evaluate the impact that they might have on your innovation initiatives. Develop warning signs–benchmark points that you can use to make sense of the future. For example, you might determine that if the price of oil goes under $40 a barrel, it will trigger a great loss of revenue in certain Middle Eastern countries and a gain in Central African countries, which will, in turn, spark changes in currencies or create conflicts. Eliminate the unpredictability of wildcards by incorporating them into your everyday planning cycle.

Get out of sync. For most people, planning cycles are like trips to the dentist: semi-annual obligations that are just part of your operating rhythms. The problem is that when they become so routine, we fall asleep at that wheel. We stop being creative. We lose our adaptability and flexibility.

That’s why, when we’re going through our planning cycles, we need to actively look for dislocating events–things that take us out of our normal ways of thinking. In his famous article, “Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” Peter Drucker tells leaders to seek out incongruities–the inconsistencies that other people don’t see. Be aware of new processes, shifting industries and markets, and changes in demographics and popular perceptions.

Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliff wrote an influential book, Managing the Unexpected, that advises innovators to do precisely this: develop built-in mechanisms for events that create discontinuities. They offer the great example of flight operators on aircraft carriers. As they come in to land on these incredibly small landing decks, pilots have a tendency to overshoot their destination. This is an enormous problem that the Air Force and Navy have struggled with for many years. What air traffic control centers gradually learned is that pilots needed to give up their own authority, that the landing signals officers are the ones who actually know what to do during these landings. By studying failure and by taking those failures into account, air controllers came up with a new-and-improved method to safely manage these precarious situations.

The key is paying attention to who actually has the most knowledge. It’s a mistake to assume that the most senior person at the highest point knows the most. Disregard conventional hierarchies and instead reflect on the things that don’t fit. By embracing the asymmetries, you will learn along the way and, with each iteration of your strategy, you’ll get smarter, finding power in your mistakes.

Sail against the wind. Sir Francis Galton developed the game-changing concept we know today as regression to the mean: the more people do something, the more likely it will be that everyone, when taken together, will be correct. He discovered this at a fair in Victorian England, when he gave butchers and farmers slips of paper and asked them to guess the weight of a cow. All the farmers guessed a heavier weight–since they make more money on heavier cows–and all the butchers guessed a lighter weight–since they make more money by buying leaner cows. Galton noticed that, when compiled collectively, all the farmers and butchers actually guessed the proper weight of the cow. The point was this: as we get more and more data, the highs and lows are eliminated so we get a stable norm.

There is a dark side to this notion of regression to the mean: as soon as everything gets pulled to the middle, we lose the kind of useful novelty and positive deviance that is so crucial to innovation. This is the danger of all these new forms of collaborative innovation: the more voices we consider, the more likely that they’ll average out to something uninteresting. Emerging forms like creativity clusters, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, idea markets, innovation jams, and open source innovation all aim to get everyone on the same page. As a result, they stop us from finding the outliers.

Avoid the banality of conformity by sailing against the wind. Be a contrarian. See what the crowd is doing and then dare to do the opposite.

These three innovation strategies might seem improvisational, risky, and erratic. But that’s what innovation asks us to do: to make things up as we go along. Forget what you’ve heard about coming up with a plan and sticking with it. The only given in innovation is uncertainty, so it’s time to make uncertainty work for us. What Kierkegaard said of everyday existence, we can also say of innovation: it can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards. In the face of the unknown, all we can do is move forth. Are you ready to take the leap ahead?

Why Innovation Is So Hard [Infographic]

Everyone wants to make innovation an everyday, everywhere capability of their company. But, just about everyone, and leaders especially, don’t know how innovation really works or how to actually support innovation.

I’ve worked with some of the biggest, and most dynamic companies in the world to build the innovation process into their businesses. Below, I’m pleased to share my five truths about innovation that most of us get wrong–and how to get them right.

If you really want to innovate, you need to make it a deliberate part of your process. You can’t start at the moment innovation happens, but you can create an environment of constructive conflict where risks are taken, and efforts are honestly evaluated. If you deliberately allow room for innovation in your process, you’ll get results and grow. If you don’t, you’ll just be one of the many who wants innovation but can never seem to get it.

Infographic: Why Innovation Is So Hard

Everyone wants to make innovation an everyday, everywhere capability of their company. But, just about everyone, and leaders especially, don’t know how innovation really works or how to actually support innovation.

I’ve worked with some of the biggest, and most dynamic companies in the world to build the innovation process into their businesses. Below, I’m pleased to share my five truths about innovation that most of us get wrong–and how to get them right.

If you really want to innovate, you need to make it a deliberate part of your process. You can’t start at the moment innovation happens, but you can create an environment of constructive conflict where risks are taken, and efforts are honestly evaluated. If you deliberately allow room for innovation in your process, you’ll get results and grow. If you don’t, you’ll just be one of the many who wants innovation but can never seem to get it.