Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 11

Innovating Innovation Strategy: Part 2

[In last week’s part-one installment of this three-part article, I highlighted all the things that make innovation so radically different from all other forms of value creation. The strategies we normally bring to organizational growth aren’t enough when it comes to innovation. We need a new strategy to help us go into uncharted territory.]

How do you make plans in a world where plans were meant to be changed? Innovators are adaptors. They’re flexible leaders who run multiple experiments at once and make adjustments along the way. Rather than create something completely new, they build onto things that already exist.

In this spirit of using what we already have, let’s look at the two current main forms of innovation strategy. While each of these strategies alone won’t be enough to sustain growth, they can both teach us useful lessons about creativity.

The first main innovation approach is a push strategy. This is plan designed to happen in gradual, sequenced phases. We call this stage-gating. In the very beginning, during the speculation and investigation phase, you don’t spend much money. Then, as time goes on and you prove your concept with proto-typing and market-testing, you start investing and spending a great deal of money. The goal of push strategies is to reduce risk and pace an innovation so that it arrives on time. These plans are essentially alignment and efficiency mechanisms.

The problem with push strategies is that they don’t accelerate innovation. Since they require us to connect so many dots and go through so many labored steps, they don’t account for the real-time spontaneity of innovation. They falsely assume continuity over time with the belief that the future will resemble the present.

These plans usually rely on knowledge related to technology development. Sure, we might know when dual-core chips will become quad-core chips and when quad-core chips will become octa-core chips, but we can’t depend on the reliability of these step-by-step improvements. In reality, meaningful innovation happens when that unpredictable, game-changing idea or person arrives on the scene. Think about what Mozart did to classical music or what Einstein did to physics or what Tesla did to electromagnetism. Push strategies miss out on interesting, paradigm-shifting–unexpected–turns like these. And they miss out on the opportunities learned from failed experiments. They’re simply not agile.

There are tons of classic push strategies in the car industry, where companies optimize every aspect of the automobile production process–from how many cars they’ll make to the amenities that customers supposedly want. But by the time the car comes to market, it lacks any new designs or technologies that the company simply didn’t make room for along the way. The manufacturer has developed something that there is no longer a market for.

The opposite of a push strategy is a pull strategy. Where push strategies are driven by technologies and emerging methodologies, pull strategies are driven by customer demands. Analysts categorize and segment consumer populations and build innovations to satisfy their desires. Then, designers build new products where we know there is demand. Financial service organizations do this all the time. This is basically a form of order-fulfillment. It’s not unlike fishing where we know the fish are biting.

Pull strategies give people what they want–but only what they want now, not what they’ll want next. Pull strategies result in product bloat and feature creep: you make too many things that you can’t sustain and end up with legacy products.

The truth is that customer preferences are not consistent or stable. Like every other aspect of innovation, they change over time. Pull strategies fail to understand that demography and belief systems shift. They leave no space to accommodate for new kinds of desires. For example, companies like Uber and Airbnb saw an unfilled need in the overlooked, burgeoning sector of millenials who, unlike their boomer elders, don’t own cars and don’t want to live in big houses and love on-demand service. All the major car-rental companies and hoteliers–with their pull strategies–missed out on this tremendous opening.

Both push and pull strategies will get you stuck in the planning cycle. And while you’re planning, the world is advancing and your opportunities are disappearing. Both of these approaches are simply not sophisticated enough to keep up with the increasing speed and magnitude at which innovation happens in our society.

There are alternative strategies developing in forward-thinking circles. Event-driven strategies are responses to catastrophic occurrences like epidemics or terrorist attacks. They anticipate similar events in the future and plan accordingly. This is how our government prepared for and responded to anthrax threats through the mail following 9/11.

Scenario-planning is a creative strategy that looks at the elements possibly driving the future and then considers all the alternatives and variations to these elements by making stories out of them. In telling these stories, we can start to figure out what these unknown situations might actually look like.

Discovery-driven planning goes even further than scenario-planning. It comes from the work of Columbia Professor Rita McGrath, who tells us that when things aren’t going exactly as planned, we need to run some tests on your key indicators to try and figure out which ones aren’t performing well and determine the causes of those failures. Then, we must do some fine-tuning in real time so that these events can be avoided or capitalized on, depending on whether they’re a challenge or an opportunity.

These new approaches are certainly part of a solution to the shortcomings of pull and push strategies, but they don’t solve the problems completely. With these methods, there are a lot of moving parts. And it’s just very hard to operationalize the adjustments as they overwhelm us and catch us off guard. So what do we do? How we move forward and account for all the complexity of innovation in a simpler way? Next week, in the final installment of this article, I will offer three new strategies for making the unknown known.

Innovating Innovation Strategy: Part 1

Innovation calls us to do the impossible: to build for a future we can’t yet see. The very notion of innovation is riddled with paradoxes. It asks us to embrace wildly different–even contradictory–ideas at once: creativity and pragmatism, foresight and hindsight, breakthrough visions and incremental change.

In this way, innovation is unlike all the normal things we do on an everyday basis. That’s why the conventional strategies we bring to organizational management are inadequate. Innovation requires its own unique set of skills. It’s not so much thinking outside of the box as it is redefining what that box is.

There are three defining characteristics that differentiate innovation from all other forms of value. The first is its time-based nature. Innovation happens in the future for which we have no data now. We can’t predict the future, but we can prepare for it. The other complication to innovation’s timing is the inevitable expiration date: innovation has a shelf life. It goes sour like milk. Think about all the gear you bought for your kids at the Apple store last Christmas. This year, it will all be outdated. An innovation doesn’t stay an innovation for very long.

The second key quality to innovation is positive deviance. What makes an innovation valuable is the amount of deviance it has from the standard or the norm. In all other situations, when we plan for something, we assume that there will be continuity between today and tomorrow. The opposite is true for innovation, where we seek out and depend on discontinuity. Just take a look at Tesla Motors. Everything about the company is deviant–the way its cars look, the way it sells its cars online without a showroom, the way it makes cars from stock parts you can get from any supplier. The only thing that’s not deviant about Tesla is the individual pieces of technology it uses, which is usually what we think of as the most innovative thing about a cutting-edge organization. So the company is deviant not only in its process but also in the very way it conceives of innovation.

The third element to consider about innovation is that is happens horizontally. Typically, organizations strive for alignment, working to make sure that all the measures, or key performance indicators, line up nicely and that all departments are on the same page. In innovation, things don’t work that way. That’s because innovation cuts across all the boundaries and disciplines of business practice. Sometimes there’s only one element of a product that’s innovative. It could be in the packaging, like it is for Proctor & Gamble. It could be in customer service, like it is for Singapore Airlines. It could be in the distribution process, like it is for Federal Express. The challenge is in bringing out a single innovative aspect of a project while maintaining the contributions from all other sectors.

For this reason, innovation resists alignment but requires synchronization. We don’t want straight lines–we just want everything to go together at the right time. This is not unlike an orchestra, where everyone is playing a different instrument but they’re all playing the same piece of music. Or a football team, where everyone is in a different position, but they all need to be coordinated.

How exactly do we accommodate for all these innovation paradoxes, the challenges that make innovation such a distinct–indeed, strange–way of thinking and creating? This is exactly what I’ll address in next week’s continuation of this three-part article: the concrete steps innovators must take in navigating the thorny, twisty path to the unknown.

Recreating Your Company [Infographic]

It’s an old story–a new company with a new product and a new way of looking at things dislodges established business that can’t keep up. A few years later, this same company that so nimbly entered the market stops growing and starts falling prey to new competitors. Why is sustained growth so elusive? And why do some companies seem immune to this sort of cycle? The answer: the most successful companies understand that they need to continually recreate themselves by building innovation into their business models. I call this process Creativizing.

To illustrate this and provide you with a roadmap for Recreating Your Company, I’ve put together the below infographic.

Innovation is different from everything you do as a leader in three distinct ways. First, innovation happens in the future for which you currently have no data. In fact, one of the most common forms of resistance to innovation is excessive data collection because it stops your company from taking purposeful action. Second, innovation is a time-based form of value. That is it has a shelf life and goes sour like milk. So innovation has to happen within a specific window of opportunity. Third, innovation happens in cycles; not straight lines. Revolutionary innovations seldom occur in good times because the relative risk is high and the reward low. In a down economy innovation isn’t your best friend…it’s your only friend.

If you want to keep growing, I strongly urge you to make friends with innovation.

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation: professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. You can learn more about his groundbreaking University of Michigan Certified Professional Innovator Certificate Program and Innovatrium Institute for Innovation at www.jeffdegraff.com/cpi and keynote speeches through BigSpeak Speakers Bureau.

How To Create A Creative Leader

My Interview With The Second Stage

An important element of a great business many overlook is assembling a diverse advisory board, committed to developing your organization and exchanging knowledge. The right people bring innovative ideas, create opportunities and help a company move forward faster toward its stated objectives (or ones they didn’t even think possible). In fact, having the right people involved can be more important than having capital, because good ideas and good companies can attract low-cost capital. And it is important to note that an advisory board is different than a board of directors, focused solely on governance. The advisory members bring experience and views not found within the business, who are prepared to challenge the expectations, capabilities and vision of the organization. Jeff rejoins The Second Stage to explore this topic in depth, providing suggestions for attracting those individuals that will push your organization to new heights.

The Greatest Innovations Are the Ones You Don’t See

Cool, shiny, sleek: these are the qualities we associate with top-shelf innovations. That’s because we’re constantly confronted with magazine and Internet lists of the most innovative companies that are essentially just beauty contests. At the top of all these shimmering lists are blustery bands and glitzy gadgets and chic designers.

But take a closer look and you’ll see that these sparkly objects aren’t really the best innovations. If you used these lists as an investment tool, you wouldn’t actually beat a composite growth index like the Russell 3000–you would lose your purse, your swagger, and your assumptions about what makes an innovation valuable.

Innovation can, of course, have a big payout, just not in the way that these lists want you to believe. The most valuable innovations don’t have exciting stories and they’re not cool, shiny, or sleek. They’re plain and understated, they blend in with their surroundings–they’re the inventions that don’t catch our eye. They’re hidden in plain sight.

True innovation happens behind-the-scenes. Sure, new technologies and products and services that we perceive as breakthrough advancements look exciting, but the meaningful innovation is in the larger, more complicated processes that make those things possible.

There’s no new miracle drug without discoveries in chemistry, manufacturing, and control processes. There’s no new animated feature film without a revolution in software-coding practices. There’s no new electric car without developments in material sciences.

The most valuable innovations solve real problems and respond to pressing issues. Consider all the game-changing actions that have facilitated life-saving improvements to everyday existence: de-salianating water to quench drought-stricken regions, de-bottlenecking highways and airport traffic to improve flow and to reduce accidents, re-developing the electrical bridge to radically improve energy efficiency. It’s easy to forget that the Internet and human genomics–both revolutionary platforms–are, in reality, loose federations of technology, software, and stitches.

So the smartest innovators are the ones who look not at lists in magazines but who look at the processes and products that everyone else overlooks. Here are three ways to find and make use of these hidden gems.

Follow the river upstream. Innovators can learn a lot from wilderness guides. Adventurers know to follow the river upstream to the headwaters whenever they’ve lost their way. This is a wonderful analogy for growth and change: take an innovative device, service, or solution, and trace it all the way to its roots–to the basic, foundational parts that make up its whole. Determine which elements make the product innovative, that make this object stand out. Is it lighter? Smaller? Easier to use? By identifying the start of a previous innovation, you just might find the start of your own, newer and better innovation.

Talk to the locals. In the world of innovation, suppliers, distributors, and service providers are the locals who can give you insider expertise that you won’t get anywhere else. Bring these locals into your project as early as possible, preferably before the design and development stages. Ask them how they’d improve your product or service. Encourage them to integrate their capabilities into your innovation goals. Be kind and generous to these suppliers, distributors, and service providers. If they have reason to believe that you’ll take advantage of them, they’ll inevitably be reluctant to share their local knowledge. Give them the freedom to work their magic.

Forage and fish. Once you find these hidden innovators, go on an expedition together to co-create your future project. Search for the low-hanging fruit that others before you missed because they didn’t have the help of locals. Gather the nuts near your camp, the berries that turn out to be not only edible but also full of nutrients. Without the knowledge and experience of locals, you won’t know what you can actually use and how to use it. Go fishing and put out your lines in new markets. Make it worthwhile for the suppliers, distributors, and service providers helping you by bringing additional value to their innovation. The more lines you put out, the more likely you’ll pull in a big catch.

Curiously, the only time we see these invisible innovations and innovators is when they fail. Think about blackouts and food recalls and natural disasters. It is at these moments of crisis when we realize how valuable these technologies are. So instead of waiting for them to fail, embrace the gifts of these hidden wonders by discovering them now. Where will you look for the ghosts of innovation’s future?

The Question Is The Answer

An innovation answer is a seductive illusion. We all want to come up with quick, easy solutions to our complicated problems, but answers don’t actually provide resolution. That’s because, in the world of innovation, there will always be another question–a new urgency or need waiting to be met. Instead of being distracted by the convenience of an orderly solution, we need to learn to embrace the knottiness of big questions.

This is exactly what I’ve learned in my thirty-year experience judging case competitions at business schools and organizations around the globe: the question isthe answer. At these events, teams are given case studies with a dilemma and asked to brainstorm the best game plan for the fictional company. The best responses are always the ones that spend the most time with the question itself, making sense of its nuances and implications.

Sense-making is the fundamental skill of innovation. Leaders judge cases every day. Interpreting stories is how we make sense of our world. Making sense of a story requires two main things: cognitive mobility and inquiry strategies. Cognitive mobility is the capacity to see something from many different perspectives and to connect the dots between a variety of interrelated elements. Inquiry strategies are the questions we ask to penetrate an issue. The ideal questions will be both analytical and generative, simultaneously sparking critical and creative thinking.

In order to be great questioners, we need to be flexible, willing to look at the same thing through multiple points of view and cultural lenses. Most important, though, are our patience and tolerance. Questioning is often frustrating, confusing–even maddening–because questions lead to more questions. They sometimes bring us to things that make no sense or even dead ends. So be prepared to put in a lot of time and effort and to get your hands dirty. Here are three strategies to consider as you navigate your way through your innovation questions.

Locate the boundaries of your biases. Everything you see is necessarily determined by your unique position: your culture, your education, your discipline. The problem is that most people have trouble seeing past their own experiences and histories. You need to become aware of your own biases. Consider, for example, the common mistake made by companies who think that the same process and improvement techniques that work in their own modern country will work in a developing country. This misconception has destroyed the careers of so many leaders who can’t gain an outside viewpoint on their industry. Develop self-awareness by asking these questions: how would this case be different if it were interpreted by a character from a different point of view? What is my emotional reaction to this case and how does it affect how I make sense of it?

Move the players around the board. Stories are interactions of setting, character, action, and motivations. In order to make sense of these complex dynamics, philologists, folklorists, and critical theorists borrow a technique from biologists called morphologies–which is essentially deconstructing and reconstructing things. It involves determining the 5 W’s plus H–who, what, where, why, when, and how–and then taking those things and moving them around. So, for example, at a car manufacturer, a marketing director might be in charge of making a decision about the features of a new automobile. But when it actually comes to building the vehicle and evaluating its safety, it becomes clear that the decision should really be made by the design engineers. This crucial insight is merely based on switching around the roles. Practice your morphological thinking by asking these questions: who isn’t in the case that should be? What if the sequence of events were changed? The answers might just surprise you.

Pull a string. Questions make us improvise since we don’t know where they’re going to take us. We have to be ready to do things that we might not yet realize we’ll need to do. This involves dialogical learning–which simply means making sense out of things by talking about them with other people. Dialogical learning leads us in a million different directions. In all cases and stories, there is a high degree of ambiguity. And each time we consider the question, we will come up with new interpretations and connections–not unlike the way we respond to religious parables. For example, an inexperienced leader may fire someone for repeated tardiness, but the more experienced leader may inquire as to what is making that employee late. Perhaps this person is a stellar employee who’s working two jobs to make ends meet, and, with a small raise, he or she will be able to drop the other job. The more experienced leader is willing to pull the string and can see that it is, in fact, the opposite of firing that needs to be done. Figure out where and how you can pull a string by asking these questions: what does this mean? What do we do? These are the most important–and most intertwined–of all the innovation questions you can ask.

Innovation is a perpetual work-in-progress. It’s an ongoing learning experience that’s more cyclical than linear. You start–and end–with a question. If you’re looking for answers, then you’re missing out on unexpected opportunities. The people who think they’ve found the final answer or the right solution are the ones who are too late for the next case, the new challenge that’s already here.

Culture Creates the Economics of Innovation

Independent thinkers have a way of upsetting people. Economics Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps is a good example. Progressives take issue with his scrupulous analysis of government stimulus spending while conservatives are offended by the way he characterizes their political ethos as having created the corporatist value system. Independent thinkers are often innovative thinkers who are not easy to situate in traditional terms or corral in conventional boundaries. They travel in the undiscovered country of the new.

In a recent Op-ed piece in the Financial Times, “Europe is a continent that has run out of ideas,” Phelps hangs the near collapse of one of the world’s largest economies on a failure of the collective culture to produce real innovators. While the recent dynamics in East Asia have raised similar concerns from other voices, Phelps is getting many of us to wonder if America too is losing its innovative prowess: reliance on government incentives, business school training and monstrous financial institutions for capital. He espouses that innovation competency is forged in the fiery furnace of experience and laments that American’s have grown soft.

Professor Phelps’ raises important issues about the role culture plays in producing economic growth. In his bestseller Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change he lays out a sweeping approach for restoring our culture for innovation. Curiously, for a man who eschews the current spotlight on human capital development, for example he believes the educational focus on STEM is wrongheaded, he espouses a uniquely humanist view. The reading of inspirational literature, the exploration of the unknown and the persistence that comes from overcoming grievous challenges are all seen as key to developing an entrepreneurial spirit. In essence, Dr. Phelps suggests that ambition and courage are prerequisites to personal, artistic and economic growth.

Culture is the knowledge and characteristics of a group that are made manifest in its language, arts and social habits. It is the beliefs we identify with and value. An innovation culture comes from the desire for something better and new: both evolutionary and revolutionary.

Building on Dr. Phelps propositions, here are some ideas for reestablishing an innovation culture in your organization:

Make Creativity a Cornerstone of the Curriculum: Support workshops and course work in the visual and performing arts, as well as literature, crafts and all manner of artistic endeavor. Though these subject areas do little to directly create value, they provide the underlying capability and quality of mind necessary to produce valuable innovation. The arts require the type of hands-on creativity and problem solving skills that Professor Phelps sees as essential to establishing an innovative culture. Perhaps it’s time to integrate the action learning methodologies of Montessori, Dewey and Steiner into your workplace to fully engage your people in the creative process.

Follow the Juilliard School Model of Talent Development: It is notoriously difficult to gain acceptance to the Juilliard. It is a true meritocracy that focuses on refining the skills of their most talented prospects. Students start by mastering difficult pieces and move on to their own compositions which are critiqued by most celebrated teachers and accomplished artists. A high level of ambition is required to support such lofty aspirations.

Why not bring together your best artisans, practitioners and scholars to establish something akin to the Juilliard in your organization? Better yet, combine forces with other organizations in your location or sector. Pay attention to individuals that demonstrate talent, drive and persistence and offer them special forms of support.

Make Apprenticeship a Condition of Funding: The perceived failures of the public education system and the cost of higher education appear to have renewed an interest in apprenticeships. For centuries this was the proven road to craftsmanship and invention. Sometimes these apprenticeships are associated with intuitions but historically the most successful ones are lose federations of individuals who share an interest.

Anyone familiar with the back stories of Thomas Edison or George Washington Carver will note that their labs were not only places of great invention but also of great learning. “See one, do one, teach one” is ancient manta of the craft guilds. This approach still prevails in the training of doctors, master electricians and design engineers. Give funding preference to apprenticed entrepreneurs.

Dr. Phelps might be on to something. Culture may be far more important than politics or economics when it comes to making innovation happen. Maybe it’s time you focused on creating a sense of destiny in your organization and help develop the fortitude to achieve it.

Skeptics Create True Believers in Your Innovation

Your most loyal followers of the future just might be the skeptics who doubt you today. The story of disbelief turned into belief is one that happens all the time, in every discipline. Consider the path of great Nobel Laureate Max Planck who started off as a fervent skeptic, who didn’t even believe that atoms existed. But once he accepted atomic theory, he became such an ardent disciple of the field that he went on to found quantum physics and act as a mentor to Albert Einstein.

The people putting up the biggest fight against your innovation are actually the ones most poised to accept it later on. The problem is that we leave our doubters in a reactive position, where they judge what’s wrong with our idea without offering an alternative. That’s because they have no stake in our project. We need to bring our opponents inside the thinking process, make them co-creators of the very thing that they think they don’t believe.

Innovations scare people because they represent the unknown and the disruption of the status quo. It’s easy for your skeptics to dismiss your innovation: they say they don’t have the money or the time or that it’s not their responsibility–or that they like your idea and will wait to see how it pans out, hoping that nothing will come of it.

According to the law, silence is consent. But according to innovation, silence is dissent. When people get quiet or say nothing, they’re not agreeing. They are stalling your creative project.

There are very few things we can do with our skeptics. We can fight them, which rarely ends well. We can try to out-navigate them, which proves near-impossible given how cunning and clever they usually are. We can ignore them, which gets us nowhere.

Or we can try to understand our skeptics. This is best option–and the only way to really make our adversaries into allies. Remember that skeptics are not bad people. They simply believe that by opting out of our ideas, they’re protecting something sacred. The hope is that we can make our projects as important to them as the things they’re unwilling to lose.

So how do you move the skeptics from a reactive position to an interactive position? Here are three strategies for transforming your non-believers into believers who will help make your innovation initiative a reality.

Conversation. People often resist ideas because they can’t understand them. That’s why clear, direct, and personal communication is so important when it comes to recruiting supporters for your innovation. This is something much more than a PowerPoint presentation or a one-directional e-mail message. Engage in face-to-face conversations as you build a rapport with your skeptics. Spend time with your skeptics, get to know them–gain their trust.

Generation. There is one simple question that is sure to take any skeptic out of the reactive position: what would you do? Ask your skeptics how they would approach your challenge or problem and they’re likely to come up with things you’ve already said. The only difference is that when it comes from their mouths, in their words, they’re much more likely to accept it. Make sure to give them credit for ideas, even–especially–if they’re your own. Now they’ll feel involved in the same initiative that they once wanted no part of.

Compensation. With every innovation comes a substantial cost–a series of things we all need to give up. It’s likely that people won’t back your innovation because they stand to lose something by supporting it. Find out what your skeptics want. Do they want something financial? Something social, like status? Or maybe they’re concerned about security, which means you’ll have to de-risk the project. Know that we live in an inherently political world where everyone, to some extent, is self-interested. Sweeten the pot and make it worthwhile for your dissenters. What are you willing to give up to get your nonbelievers on board?

A new idea is relatively easy to come by, but a devoted supporter–that’s much harder to win. It takes a considerable amount of time and energy to bring skeptics around, but it’s an effort with a big payout. Once the skeptics stop doubting, they don’t just start believing–they begin to preach along with you. How will you engage and enlighten your skeptics so that they may illuminate other nonbelievers?

Assembling Your Innovation Advisory Board

A genius is only as great as his brain trust: the circle of mentors and consultants who nurture and enhance his ideas. That all great innovators have great collaborators is no new insight. In 1937, when Napoleon Hill interviewed the richest, most successful men in the world for his wildly popular book, Think and Grow Rich, the one thing they all had in common was their dependence on alliances. These pioneering leaders all relied on a board of advisors.

Nearly eighty years later, we can still learn a lot from this model of advisory innovation. Assemble a group of bright, energetic thinkers you can trust. Use them to brainstorm and bounce off ideas. Make these co-creators your confidants–advisors who you can go to before you go to the other people in your organization.

Unlike a board of directors, which is subject to influence by outside financial interests like investors, a board of advisors has no vested interest in your company. Rather, they are committed solely to developing ideas and sharing and exchanging knowledge. The advisory board does the work that the organization can’t.

Seek out people with extensive experience in their fields. Experience can come in many forms–from the theoretical knowledge of a researcher to the practical mastery of an engineer. Remember that experience does not necessarily mean age. In fact, if you were building a project around an emerging trend or a new market, youth would be an asset on your advisory board.

The goal is to assemble a diversity of perspectives and expertise. Recruit individuals who have different visions of your company–some who see it as a radical organization moving toward the future, others who see it as a highly efficient operational machine, and yet others who see its internal culture.

By gathering all these varying–even contradictory–visions, you can established a shared vision that you would’ve never otherwise seen. Here are the four major viewpoints necessary for your board of advisors. Together, these seemingly conflicting forces will create the momentum crucial for any innovation initiative.

Customers and community: These compassionate, socially-minded thinkers thrive on bringing together groups of people and working toward consensus. They are excellent teachers, mentors, facilitators, and team builders–skilled communicators who are sensitive to the needs of others. Jack Ma, the CEO of fast-growing Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, exemplifies this point of view. Rather than trying to please shareholders, Ma is most concerned with the experience of customers and of the people who work in his organization. He believes that if he has happy customers and happy employees, then the shareholder value will also increase. With this approach, he’s seen vast success.

Competitors and investors: These assertive, often cutthroat strategists understand the competitive landscape of their industry and know what shareholders and investors expect. They are fast-acting workhorses driven by measurable gains: they will make sure you meet the numbers and they are always looking for a better deal. PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi is the embodiment of this worldview. She has rewritten PepsiCo’s playbook, eliminating products and divisions that weren’t immediate payouts, focusing the company’s resources on the most profitable opportunities right now. In doing so, she has greatly increased the value of the organization.

Regulations and standards: These analysts are specialists in their field with top technical expertise. They work on a straight, reliable path to make sure everything is correct. They’re committed to the principles and procedures of their discipline, with advanced training and board certification, and are data-driven. Consider, for example, former Mayor of New York City, Mike Bloomberg. He studied the data on things like obesity and crime, and based his decisions on those figures–not on popular opinion. In this way, he represents the analytical approach to problem solving.

Trends and breakthroughs: These visionary revolutionaries inspire breakthrough changes. They’re very creative and value radical originality. They’re almost always dissatisfied with the way things are now and are looking to make things better and new. Larry Page, CEO of Google, epitomizes this viewpoint. He ensures that the company–from its investments in green energy to its plan to deliver Internet access to sub-Saharan Africa through balloons–is always reinventing itself.

Conflict is inevitable when you put such a wide variety of perspectives on one advisory board–and that’s a good thing. Harmony is overrated. Simple accord won’t yield any new or unexpected ideas. It is, after all, in the white spaces between disciplines where innovation happens. The object is to achieve a positive tension–a constructive conflict that leads to hybrid solutions. Who will be the productively dissenting voices on your innovation advisory board?